Fixing a bug in C++ is orders of magnitude harder than Java, despite what the nerdly Java bashers would have you believe.
Nerdly Java basher here to say you're absolutely right. C++ gives you plenty of room to shoot yourself in the head, and if you don't know what you're doing you can spend weeks or months trying to track down memory corruption bugs due to bad dynamic allocation handling, or memory leaks, or memory corruption. Most of those errors are much harder (or even impossible) to make in Java.
The upside of C++ is that if you do know what you are doing, you can make programs that would not be possible to write in Java.
We should make kink-springs out of this stuff, since gene-hacked algae can be dangerous if the tanks are contaminated.
IIRC the real hazard was the overworked wooly mammoths running amok and trampling people. Why nobody bothered to simply set up some solar panels instead, I'll never know.
Many, many technical issues aside, the risk is too damn high.
The risk of what, exactly?
If you mean the risk of such a structure being impossible to ever build in real life, then I agree. But still we can dream...:)
If you mean the risk of the cable breaking, sure that's a risk, and a break would probably cost you your expensive space elevator... but that's hardly different from current technology, where a malfunction will cost you your expensive rocket.
Or if you mean the risk of the cable breaking and causing mass destruction on the ground... then you are wrong. A broken cable will not cause much (if any) damage to the ground, because it has so little mass and such a low terminal velocity.
It all depends on the security of the authority that issued you your generator - much the same as your mobile number. If they hand out your generator seed willy-nilly - the way telcos appear to do for mobile number porting requests - you're just as vulnerable.
Sure, but since a cell number was never intended to be a secure ID, there are various scenarios where a cell company needs to hand out information about it... hence the problem. I can't think of any scenario where a token-generator company would need to hand out your token-fob's seed. In fact it would be best if they don't even keep a record of it. One would hope that a company whose sole purpose was security would be aware of the security implications of doing either of those things. (whereas a cell phone company's primary focus is on keeping its customers connected, not on keeping their cell numbers unknown)
I would therefore infer that a piano falling on someone when that person his over it's life expectancy is on average inconsequential as long as that type of event stays infrequent.
The "average consequence to society" doesn't enter into it. It's *very* consequential for that person, and to the people who knew and loved that person.
Be careful, too much abstract thought can cause you to lose sight of your humanity.:^P
Change that 65 for a 83 and I think I effectively could argue that position in a competitive debate setting and win the round if it was in my mother tongue.
By all means! Maybe you could drive home your argument with a live demonstration involving your grandmother and a Steinway.:^)
So, the phone call saved the lives of the Greenpeace protesters, which hardly shows that security of the plants was lax....
Seems to me that adequate security would have ensured that the protesters never got to the building in the first place. Then the issue of how to handle protestors climbing the building would never have come up. Don't they have fences in France?
I think that France requires some massive upgrades. However, job #1 MUST BE SECRUITY.
Agreed. Also, we need to keep in mind that when nuclear advocates talk about how cheap nuclear power is, they usually aren't considering the security costs necessary to safeguard the nuclear materials. I suspect that at some point the ancillary costs push the costs of fission up high enough that it becomes cheaper to just "solve" the security and waste problems by doing something else instead.
Greenpeace "activists" tend to be spoiled little rich kids who have no qualms about taking the benefits of an industrial society while still condemning how "evil" it is.... perhaps so they don't feel as bad about living off of mommy and daddy.
Whereas poster to Internet comments sections tend to think the stereotypes they've formed through years of reading web sites and watching movies are an accurate reflection of real life.
Oh wait, coal plants put out more radiation in one day than a nuke plant would be allowed to put out in one year. Also a nuke reactor kicks out ZERO in the terms of green house gasses.
Yes, coal sucks worse than fission. That doesn't necessarily mean that fission is acceptable. It could well be that both of those technologies are too problematic to use.
I'd also like to point out that radiation is not the instant killer a fireball from an exploding gas* tank is!
Quite right -- but at least when a gas tank explodes, it's obvious what happened and why. What really creeps people out about radiation is that it's undetectable to anyone who isn't carrying around a geiger counter. If radioactive materials are about, anything you eat, breathe, or touch could conceivably doom your to a slow, painful cancerous death, and (again short of carrying around a geiger counter for the rest of your life) there's no way to tell what is harmless and what's radioactive. I think it is the Philip K. Dick style paranoia engendered by this that really sets people off against nuclear power, more than the actual effects themselves (which I agree are generally less harmful than those of coal... but psychologically they loom larger). Nobody wants to spend their entire life wondering if their next meal or walk in the park might be the one that silently poisons them.
It's funny how stupid they are.... I have no real life idea about the situation, but this is what I learned from SimCity
Ah, a person who thinks playing SimCity is a valid substitute for actual real-world knowledge gets modded +5 Insightful for calling other people stupid. Way to go, Slashdot!
You are wrong about the certitude of the shortened life expectancy. Marie-Curie who worked without any protection with Radium, Polonium and Uranium, died at 66. She was 1 years older than the US female average life expectancy at that time.
Okay, the first problem is that you are trying to make an argument based on an anecdote. A single case does not a trend make, one way or the other. But even if we ignore that, you're still doing it wrong: to do it right, you'd have to compare Marie Curie's actual lifespan against the lifespan Marie Curie would have attained had she not suffered from radiation poisoning. Comparing her lifespan against the average woman's lifespan is meaningless because Mme Curie was not the average woman -- no woman is. You might as well argue that getting a piano dropped on your head is harmless as long as you are 65 or older when it happens.
even though Laffer was right in the past, maybe the lawsof economics have changes and reenue will go up, it could happen! But that sort of thinking is why he $150K in debt already!
Or perhaps the Bush tax cuts have pushed us well to the left-hand side of the Laffer curve. So yes, let's get realistic -- let's cut spending AND rescind the Bush tax cuts, and position ourselves at the optimal spot on the curve. The constant Republican mantra -- that no sacrifice is too great to ask of the poor, but any sacrifice is too much to ask of the rich -- is a bit hard to take.
As I'm sure you know: Without complete corresponding source code to all of the software running on a phone, you'll never know the answer to those questions.
It's worse than that.... even with complete source code you won't know the answer, because (a) you're not smart enough and/or you don't have enough time to analyze the thousands of pages of source code of all the software you run, and (b) even if you did, you have no way to guarantee that the source code you analyzed is the same as what is actually running on the phone, and (c) even if you had a way to guarantee that, you have no way to guarantee that there isn't other software running on the phone that you aren't aware of. And even if you had complete knowledge of your cell phone, it still wouldn't guarantee you anything, because your cell provider still has full access to their network and servers, and you do not. So even if your cell phone is 100% trustworthy, they could still install spyware at any other point in their infrastructure.
So it really boils down to trust -- at some point you have to either trust your cell phone provider not to screw you, or stop using a cell phone. Access to source code is a bit of a red herring.
You seriously want to argue that Sam's spending isn't the problem right here and now because is a just world he'd earn
One difference between your uncle and the US government: the government can (to some extent) increase its income by raising taxes. Your uncle (presumably) is not in a position to give himself a raise to help meet his expenses... but if he was, that would be an obvious thing to do (alongside cutting down on spending).
People who still use Commodores in 2011 are many things, but cheap is not one of them. Keeping an antiquated computer running and doing useful work is going to cost them much more than buying a new low-end PC from Walmart would. (and that's not even counting the airfare to Toronto)
Slashdot Mirror
Fixing a bug in C++ is orders of magnitude harder than Java, despite what the nerdly Java bashers would have you believe.
Nerdly Java basher here to say you're absolutely right. C++ gives you plenty of room to shoot yourself in the head, and if you don't know what you're doing you can spend weeks or months trying to track down memory corruption bugs due to bad dynamic allocation handling, or memory leaks, or memory corruption. Most of those errors are much harder (or even impossible) to make in Java.
The upside of C++ is that if you do know what you are doing, you can make programs that would not be possible to write in Java.
The bad code of today is a far higher percentage of the code than it was in the '70s and '80s. All you have to do is read The Daily WTF to see that.
Yes, it's amazing that almost all of the code posted The Daily WTF is bad code. Who would have guessed?
In today's agile world, who gets time to maintain technical debt.
No time to fix our bugs, Dr. Jones... all our time is taken up helping our users work around the damage caused by our bugs!
I mean think of the Three Stooges, that at times was just brutal but thought the height of comedy.
The height of comedy? By who? 6-year-old boys?
Why do you keep putting quotes around the word scientists?
We should make kink-springs out of this stuff, since gene-hacked algae can be dangerous if the tanks are contaminated.
IIRC the real hazard was the overworked wooly mammoths running amok and trampling people. Why nobody bothered to simply set up some solar panels instead, I'll never know.
Many, many technical issues aside, the risk is too damn high.
The risk of what, exactly?
If you mean the risk of such a structure being impossible to ever build in real life, then I agree. But still we can dream... :)
If you mean the risk of the cable breaking, sure that's a risk, and a break would probably cost you your expensive space elevator... but that's hardly different from current technology, where a malfunction will cost you your expensive rocket.
Or if you mean the risk of the cable breaking and causing mass destruction on the ground... then you are wrong. A broken cable will not cause much (if any) damage to the ground, because it has so little mass and such a low terminal velocity.
It all depends on the security of the authority that issued you your generator - much the same as your mobile number. If they hand out your generator seed willy-nilly - the way telcos appear to do for mobile number porting requests - you're just as vulnerable.
Sure, but since a cell number was never intended to be a secure ID, there are various scenarios where a cell company needs to hand out information about it... hence the problem. I can't think of any scenario where a token-generator company would need to hand out your token-fob's seed. In fact it would be best if they don't even keep a record of it. One would hope that a company whose sole purpose was security would be aware of the security implications of doing either of those things. (whereas a cell phone company's primary focus is on keeping its customers connected, not on keeping their cell numbers unknown)
The seed for your token generator isn't something you have - it's something anybody could have.
Err, how? (Besides physically stealing your token generator, I mean)
I would therefore infer that a piano falling on someone when that person his over it's life expectancy is on average inconsequential as long as that type of event stays infrequent.
The "average consequence to society" doesn't enter into it. It's *very* consequential for that person, and to the people who knew and loved that person.
Be careful, too much abstract thought can cause you to lose sight of your humanity. :^P
Change that 65 for a 83 and I think I effectively could argue that position in a competitive debate setting and win the round if it was in my mother tongue.
By all means! Maybe you could drive home your argument with a live demonstration involving your grandmother and a Steinway. :^)
So, the phone call saved the lives of the Greenpeace protesters, which hardly shows that security of the plants was lax....
Seems to me that adequate security would have ensured that the protesters never got to the building in the first place. Then the issue of how to handle protestors climbing the building would never have come up. Don't they have fences in France?
I think that France requires some massive upgrades. However, job #1 MUST BE SECRUITY.
Agreed. Also, we need to keep in mind that when nuclear advocates talk about how cheap nuclear power is, they usually aren't considering the security costs necessary to safeguard the nuclear materials. I suspect that at some point the ancillary costs push the costs of fission up high enough that it becomes cheaper to just "solve" the security and waste problems by doing something else instead.
Greenpeace "activists" tend to be spoiled little rich kids who have no qualms about taking the benefits of an industrial society while still condemning how "evil" it is.... perhaps so they don't feel as bad about living off of mommy and daddy.
Whereas poster to Internet comments sections tend to think the stereotypes they've formed through years of reading web sites and watching movies are an accurate reflection of real life.
Oh wait, coal plants put out more radiation in one day than a nuke plant would be allowed to put out in one year. Also a nuke reactor kicks out ZERO in the terms of green house gasses.
Yes, coal sucks worse than fission. That doesn't necessarily mean that fission is acceptable. It could well be that both of those technologies are too problematic to use.
I'd also like to point out that radiation is not the instant killer a fireball from an exploding gas* tank is!
Quite right -- but at least when a gas tank explodes, it's obvious what happened and why. What really creeps people out about radiation is that it's undetectable to anyone who isn't carrying around a geiger counter. If radioactive materials are about, anything you eat, breathe, or touch could conceivably doom your to a slow, painful cancerous death, and (again short of carrying around a geiger counter for the rest of your life) there's no way to tell what is harmless and what's radioactive. I think it is the Philip K. Dick style paranoia engendered by this that really sets people off against nuclear power, more than the actual effects themselves (which I agree are generally less harmful than those of coal... but psychologically they loom larger). Nobody wants to spend their entire life wondering if their next meal or walk in the park might be the one that silently poisons them.
It's funny how stupid they are .... I have no real life idea about the situation, but this is what I learned from SimCity
Ah, a person who thinks playing SimCity is a valid substitute for actual real-world knowledge gets modded +5 Insightful for calling other people stupid. Way to go, Slashdot!
You are wrong about the certitude of the shortened life expectancy. Marie-Curie who worked without any protection with Radium, Polonium and Uranium, died at 66. She was 1 years older than the US female average life expectancy at that time.
Okay, the first problem is that you are trying to make an argument based on an anecdote. A single case does not a trend make, one way or the other. But even if we ignore that, you're still doing it wrong: to do it right, you'd have to compare Marie Curie's actual lifespan against the lifespan Marie Curie would have attained had she not suffered from radiation poisoning. Comparing her lifespan against the average woman's lifespan is meaningless because Mme Curie was not the average woman -- no woman is. You might as well argue that getting a piano dropped on your head is harmless as long as you are 65 or older when it happens.
even though Laffer was right in the past, maybe the lawsof economics have changes and reenue will go up, it could happen! But that sort of thinking is why he $150K in debt already!
Or perhaps the Bush tax cuts have pushed us well to the left-hand side of the Laffer curve. So yes, let's get realistic -- let's cut spending AND rescind the Bush tax cuts, and position ourselves at the optimal spot on the curve. The constant Republican mantra -- that no sacrifice is too great to ask of the poor, but any sacrifice is too much to ask of the rich -- is a bit hard to take.
If the chevy volt looked 100% identical to a $15,000 car it would have sold nothing at all because there is no "LOOK AT ME!!1!1!" factor.
I don't know, the Volt and the Civic look pretty similar to me.
As I'm sure you know: Without complete corresponding source code to all of the software running on a phone, you'll never know the answer to those questions.
It's worse than that.... even with complete source code you won't know the answer, because (a) you're not smart enough and/or you don't have enough time to analyze the thousands of pages of source code of all the software you run, and (b) even if you did, you have no way to guarantee that the source code you analyzed is the same as what is actually running on the phone, and (c) even if you had a way to guarantee that, you have no way to guarantee that there isn't other software running on the phone that you aren't aware of. And even if you had complete knowledge of your cell phone, it still wouldn't guarantee you anything, because your cell provider still has full access to their network and servers, and you do not. So even if your cell phone is 100% trustworthy, they could still install spyware at any other point in their infrastructure.
So it really boils down to trust -- at some point you have to either trust your cell phone provider not to screw you, or stop using a cell phone. Access to source code is a bit of a red herring.
You seriously want to argue that Sam's spending isn't the problem right here and now because is a just world he'd earn
One difference between your uncle and the US government: the government can (to some extent) increase its income by raising taxes. Your uncle (presumably) is not in a position to give himself a raise to help meet his expenses... but if he was, that would be an obvious thing to do (alongside cutting down on spending).
Why does the hacker have to be a "he"?
Do you know of any female hackers? (The girl with the dragon tattoo doesn't count!)
Just dont do anything to make them wanna fire/investigate you and you will be fine.
Isn't this another way of saying, "do whatever your government tells you to, without objection"?
I'm not sure that attitude is compatible with democracy. Sometimes the boat needs to be rocked.
Get a real computer you cheap assholes.
People who still use Commodores in 2011 are many things, but cheap is not one of them. Keeping an antiquated computer running and doing useful work is going to cost them much more than buying a new low-end PC from Walmart would. (and that's not even counting the airfare to Toronto)
Google may say Don't Be Evil, but how do such unrepentant Liberals define Evil to start with?
I'm pretty sure "Don't be evil" in this case was short for "Don't behave like 1990's Microsoft".