Now with over 80% of the content we promised at launch...
It's one of the developer's classic blunders: telling the marketing department what you imagine the product will be able do, eventually. No matter how many disclaimers you include, they will hear "eventually" as "guaranteed to be complete, polished, and bug-free in time for the v1.0 release", and will tell the world that.
The kind of thought that needs to connect the word 'free' to the word 'update' is so damaged by the current gaming environment that any logical output will be at best a matter of chance, akin a monkey randomly typing a copy of Shakespeare.
You'd think so; I wish someone would tell VMWare that, as their product (Fusion) keeps urging me to update to the new version, then when I click OK they ask me to enter a credit card number to pay the $50 upgrade fee. Since all I want is a program just like the version I have now except without the crashing, $50 seems a bit steep.
We might want to determine who was behind the attack first, rather than simply assuming it was the Cuban government. For one thing, I can't imagine what motive the Cuban government would have for attacking American diplomats at a time when Cuba is trying to normalize relations with the USA. (I can imagine other parties wanting to sabotage that relationship, though)
<Prototype electric semi's batteries run low, and it struggles to make it up the hill>
Elon Musk: Are you quitting on me? Well, are you? Then quit, you underpowered fucking smart-car-looking piece of shit! Get the fuck off of my highway! Get the fuck down off of my highway! NOW! MOVE IT! Or I'm going to rip your lug nuts off, so you cannot contaminate the rest of the world! I will motivate you, Prototype A, IF IT SHORT-DICKS EVERY CANNIBAL ON THE CONGO!
What do they know about climate change? If they are so concerned about it, how about invest in projects to combat it.
... and then people will accuse them of having an ulterior motive, hyping climate change in order to boost their investments. You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
Of course people can (and sometimes do) take photos of other people without their consent (e.g. with hidden cameras in the showers at the gym, and similar pervy maneuvering).
As cameras get smaller, cheaper, and less noticeable, this will become easier and easier to get away with. At some point we might end up with something like David Brin's smart dust, where the cameras are literally too small to see with the naked eye.
Of course, well before then we will no doubt have software takes a photograph of a clothed person and generates from it a convincing simulation of what the person would look like naked.
TL;DR: we're doomed. Technical/mechanical measures will not stop the perverts; legal measures might.
Nope, they just wasted a lot of space. Probably the best way to solve it is with a filesystem with deduplication, because just bundling the libraries with the apps every time really does solve several problems.
Agreed; in fact Apple could take the deduplication idea even further since they have full control of both the App Store and the iOS device's filesystem -- Apple could maintain a database of secure hashcodes/checksums for every file in every app that has ever been uploaded to the App Store, so it could replace its download-the-whole-bundle install process with one that only downloads the files that the phone doesn't already have have stored locally, and (of course) only stores exactly one copy of each file, using hardlinks or etc.
That way if the user installs 30 different iOS apps, each of which bundles the same Swift library, the user would still only have to wait for that library to download exactly once; the subsequent 29 times, the already-downloaded copy of the library would be transparently reused.
This could be done securely by using a secure hashing algorithm, and could be made 100% transparent to both the app developer and the user.
Say, for the sake of argument, that bureaucratic red tape makes building a Hyperloop impractical in the USA.
The solution? Build it somewhere else first. Once it has been up and running for a few years in, say, China, it would be more of a known entity and therefore easier to convince people to support it in the USA. (Or perhaps it would crash and burn in China for whatever reason, in which case we'd know that not allowing it in the USA was in fact the right thing to do)
And since fluctuating wind cannot be a baseload power source,
Any power source can be a baseload power source, provided you pair it with enough storage capacity to smooth out the fluctuations.
(Whether supplying sufficient storage capacity is practical using today's technology is a separate argument, but there's nothing fundamental preventing it, only the usual engineering problems, which are in the process of being solved)
Anyone with an ounce of humility would realize that the behavior of a giant distributed system like BitCoin will be impossible to predict, particularly since nothing very much like it has ever been attempted before at this scale. The only wise thing to do is shut up, sit back, stop trying to make foolish predictions about what "obviously will happen", and watch what actually does happen (and don't invest any money in it that you aren't willing to lose suddenly).
Maybe in another 50-100 years we'll understand the technical and social dynamics of blockchain currencies well enough to make solid predictions about their behaviors. Then again, we've had traditional currencies for several thousand years already and we still can't predict those markets with solid accuracy, so perhaps not.
This fork is only demonstrating that bitcoin are created out of thin air in the first place and have no value beyond hype
If the hype is believed, then hype is enough. The only thing that makes any currency valuable is peoples' general willingness to provide you with goods or services in return for you giving them some amount of that currency. So as long as people believe bitcoins (or dollars, or gold, or pokemon cards) are worth something, then they are worth something. That's all money ever was -- a collective agreement that some token is (at a particular time) exchangeable for some amount of goods/services.
You have a technical theory that any poorly written contract can be freely abused, that's not how the real world works
Agreed that that is not how the real world works, but perhaps that is how Ethereum works?
Ethereum programs ("contracts") are supposed to be "self-executing", after all -- does that mean that whatever the Ethereum code actually does is by definition the contract, or do we need lawyers and judges to decide what a given piece of Ethereum code was intended to do, and punish people who manipulate it to behave in ways that its authors didn't intend?
My gut feeling is that the former is more in line with the intentions of the Ethereum project, but I freely admit that I don't really know.
You want some evidence that killing thieves is a bad idea? Market a cell phone with the ability to kill its user and see how many people are inclined to buy one from you.
It is none of our business and would be ineffective and unenforceable. America is not going to "fix" China. That is up to the Chinese people.
Agreed; OTOH where should we draw the line regarding American companies assisting the Chinese government's abuse of their citizens? e.g. If China had a law on the books demanding that Apple immediately report any private message that mentioned democracy, so that the sender and receiver could be jailed and tortured, would it be morally acceptable for Apple to comply with that law?
IIRC IBM willingly assisted the Nazis with the IT tasks necessary for their roundup and attempted genocide of European Jews and other minorities, and IBM was rightfully criticized afterwards for having done so. How can we avoid a repeat of that sort of thing?
Its a fact of life that you have a progressive stack from hardware to microcode to machine code to assembly code to C and to a VM. C has to be there and yes its hard to write securely. CPython is written in C. Whats the alternative?
There was a time before C existed, and people were able to make their computers function even then. The ubiquity of C is a historical accident, not an inevitable conclusion; the layers of functionality we currently implement in C could just as easily have been implemented in ADA or Pascal FORTRAN or some other language, had history gone down a slightly different path.
C is definitely useful, but not uniquely so. If Rust can give us the benefits of C (low-overhead computation and low-level control of the hardware when necessary) without the drawbacks (undefined behavior, programs that are insecure-by-default), and overcome C's huge installed-base inertia, then more power to it.
Why use the new language of the month when C has been around for decades, is welll understood and does exactly what we want?
If C did exactly what we want, there wouldn't be buffer-overflow exploits in any C code. The fact that we receive security advisories on a regular basis regarding C-based software shows that our C code often does rather more than we intended it to.
Supporting Microsoft Office and Skype are a nightmare on the mac.
I'm not sure it's MacOS/X's fault if Microsoft's application software is lousy. (although FWIW Skype runs great on my Mac, and I while I rarely use Microsoft Office on my Mac, the few times I have used it, it didn't cause me any trouble)
Does anyone know why activating the iPhone's GPS receiver causes such a significant battery drain?
(In my naive imagining, it shouldn't take a lot of power to simply receive a GPS signal -- rendering an animated map could be expensive, of course, but Google Maps doesn't need to do that if it's running in the background)
No, this is exactly what I'm talking about. If you as a present-day Democrat had been in charge of things during the Depression, you would have given bartenders in Boulder City veto power over Hoover Dam. Except that before the dam, Boulder City didn't exist.
What you're really talking about is the difference between unrestricted green-field development and development in populated areas where there are already established interests.
When it's the wild frontier and the only people out there are you and the buffalo, then there's nobody to stop you from doing whatever you want.
When people live in an area and have an interest in preserving their way of life, you either have to steamroller over them or you have to negotiate and make compromises with them.
Yes, large-scale engineering is much more difficult when you have to consider other peoples' needs and not only your own.
No, that's not their problem, it's your problem. The fact that contemporary companies and government are less able to unilaterally destroy peoples' local environments in pursuit of their "larger goals" (read: profit, mostly) is a good thing.
As a bicycling lefty, I don't mind a bit. I spend $15 a week on lattes alone (as required by our stereotype-fulfillment contract), and a new bike is likely going to run me somewhere between $1000 and $4000 anyway, so if adding another $15 to the price tag of a once-every-10-years purchase gets me safer and more pleasant bike routes to ride on, I'm all for it.
So why is it fair that non-cyclists have to pay for bike paths they can't use?
There are literally thousands of things that your taxes pay for that you will never personally use. Is that unfair? Perhaps, but on the plus side you get to be part of a functioning first-world society and not some third-world hellhole. Take comfort in the fact that there are other people paying taxes to provide you with the particular public services you need, even if they never use them.
Slashdot Mirror
Now with over 80% of the content we promised at launch...
It's one of the developer's classic blunders: telling the marketing department what you imagine the product will be able do, eventually. No matter how many disclaimers you include, they will hear "eventually" as "guaranteed to be complete, polished, and bug-free in time for the v1.0 release", and will tell the world that.
The kind of thought that needs to connect the word 'free' to the word 'update' is so damaged by the current gaming environment that any logical output will be at best a matter of chance, akin a monkey randomly typing a copy of Shakespeare.
You'd think so; I wish someone would tell VMWare that, as their product (Fusion) keeps urging me to update to the new version, then when I click OK they ask me to enter a credit card number to pay the $50 upgrade fee. Since all I want is a program just like the version I have now except without the crashing, $50 seems a bit steep.
We might want to determine who was behind the attack first, rather than simply assuming it was the Cuban government. For one thing, I can't imagine what motive the Cuban government would have for attacking American diplomats at a time when Cuba is trying to normalize relations with the USA. (I can imagine other parties wanting to sabotage that relationship, though)
<Prototype electric semi's batteries run low, and it struggles to make it up the hill>
Elon Musk: Are you quitting on me? Well, are you? Then quit, you underpowered fucking smart-car-looking piece of shit! Get the fuck off of my highway! Get the fuck down off of my highway! NOW! MOVE IT! Or I'm going to rip your lug nuts off, so you cannot contaminate the rest of the world! I will motivate you, Prototype A, IF IT SHORT-DICKS EVERY CANNIBAL ON THE CONGO!
What do they know about climate change? If they are so concerned about it, how about invest in projects to combat it.
... and then people will accuse them of having an ulterior motive, hyping climate change in order to boost their investments. You're damned if you do, and damned if you don't.
Of course people can (and sometimes do) take photos of other people without their consent (e.g. with hidden cameras in the showers at the gym, and similar pervy maneuvering).
As cameras get smaller, cheaper, and less noticeable, this will become easier and easier to get away with. At some point we might end up with something like David Brin's smart dust, where the cameras are literally too small to see with the naked eye.
Of course, well before then we will no doubt have software takes a photograph of a clothed person and generates from it a convincing simulation of what the person would look like naked.
TL;DR: we're doomed. Technical/mechanical measures will not stop the perverts; legal measures might.
Nope, they just wasted a lot of space. Probably the best way to solve it is with a filesystem with deduplication, because just bundling the libraries with the apps every time really does solve several problems.
Agreed; in fact Apple could take the deduplication idea even further since they have full control of both the App Store and the iOS device's filesystem -- Apple could maintain a database of secure hashcodes/checksums for every file in every app that has ever been uploaded to the App Store, so it could replace its download-the-whole-bundle install process with one that only downloads the files that the phone doesn't already have have stored locally, and (of course) only stores exactly one copy of each file, using hardlinks or etc.
That way if the user installs 30 different iOS apps, each of which bundles the same Swift library, the user would still only have to wait for that library to download exactly once; the subsequent 29 times, the already-downloaded copy of the library would be transparently reused.
This could be done securely by using a secure hashing algorithm, and could be made 100% transparent to both the app developer and the user.
We shouldn't even be HAVING this discussion, as this issue should have been dealt with sometime over the last eight years at least.
Err, how?
Say, for the sake of argument, that bureaucratic red tape makes building a Hyperloop impractical in the USA.
The solution? Build it somewhere else first. Once it has been up and running for a few years in, say, China, it would be more of a known entity and therefore easier to convince people to support it in the USA. (Or perhaps it would crash and burn in China for whatever reason, in which case we'd know that not allowing it in the USA was in fact the right thing to do)
I guess they've given up on fixing the billion other things that are wrong with Windows 10.
When every bug you fix introduces two new problems, the only way to win the game is not to play. :(
And since fluctuating wind cannot be a baseload power source,
Any power source can be a baseload power source, provided you pair it with enough storage capacity to smooth out the fluctuations.
(Whether supplying sufficient storage capacity is practical using today's technology is a separate argument, but there's nothing fundamental preventing it, only the usual engineering problems, which are in the process of being solved)
Anyone with an ounce of humility would realize that the behavior of a giant distributed system like BitCoin will be impossible to predict, particularly since nothing very much like it has ever been attempted before at this scale. The only wise thing to do is shut up, sit back, stop trying to make foolish predictions about what "obviously will happen", and watch what actually does happen (and don't invest any money in it that you aren't willing to lose suddenly).
Maybe in another 50-100 years we'll understand the technical and social dynamics of blockchain currencies well enough to make solid predictions about their behaviors. Then again, we've had traditional currencies for several thousand years already and we still can't predict those markets with solid accuracy, so perhaps not.
This fork is only demonstrating that bitcoin are created out of thin air in the first place and have no value beyond hype
If the hype is believed, then hype is enough. The only thing that makes any currency valuable is peoples' general willingness to provide you with goods or services in return for you giving them some amount of that currency. So as long as people believe bitcoins (or dollars, or gold, or pokemon cards) are worth something, then they are worth something. That's all money ever was -- a collective agreement that some token is (at a particular time) exchangeable for some amount of goods/services.
You have a technical theory that any poorly written contract can be freely abused, that's not how the real world works
Agreed that that is not how the real world works, but perhaps that is how Ethereum works?
Ethereum programs ("contracts") are supposed to be "self-executing", after all -- does that mean that whatever the Ethereum code actually does is by definition the contract, or do we need lawyers and judges to decide what a given piece of Ethereum code was intended to do, and punish people who manipulate it to behave in ways that its authors didn't intend?
My gut feeling is that the former is more in line with the intentions of the Ethereum project, but I freely admit that I don't really know.
You want some evidence that killing thieves is a bad idea? Market a cell phone with the ability to kill its user and see how many people are inclined to buy one from you.
It is none of our business and would be ineffective and unenforceable. America is not going to "fix" China. That is up to the Chinese people.
Agreed; OTOH where should we draw the line regarding American companies assisting the Chinese government's abuse of their citizens? e.g. If China had a law on the books demanding that Apple immediately report any private message that mentioned democracy, so that the sender and receiver could be jailed and tortured, would it be morally acceptable for Apple to comply with that law?
IIRC IBM willingly assisted the Nazis with the IT tasks necessary for their roundup and attempted genocide of European Jews and other minorities, and IBM was rightfully criticized afterwards for having done so. How can we avoid a repeat of that sort of thing?
Its a fact of life that you have a progressive stack from hardware to microcode to machine code to assembly code to C and to a VM. C has to be there and yes its hard to write securely. CPython is written in C. Whats the alternative?
There was a time before C existed, and people were able to make their computers function even then. The ubiquity of C is a historical accident, not an inevitable conclusion; the layers of functionality we currently implement in C could just as easily have been implemented in ADA or Pascal FORTRAN or some other language, had history gone down a slightly different path.
C is definitely useful, but not uniquely so. If Rust can give us the benefits of C (low-overhead computation and low-level control of the hardware when necessary) without the drawbacks (undefined behavior, programs that are insecure-by-default), and overcome C's huge installed-base inertia, then more power to it.
Why use the new language of the month when C has been around for decades, is welll understood and does exactly what we want?
If C did exactly what we want, there wouldn't be buffer-overflow exploits in any C code. The fact that we receive security advisories on a regular basis regarding C-based software shows that our C code often does rather more than we intended it to.
Supporting Microsoft Office and Skype are a nightmare on the mac.
I'm not sure it's MacOS/X's fault if Microsoft's application software is lousy. (although FWIW Skype runs great on my Mac, and I while I rarely use Microsoft Office on my Mac, the few times I have used it, it didn't cause me any trouble)
Does anyone know why activating the iPhone's GPS receiver causes such a significant battery drain?
(In my naive imagining, it shouldn't take a lot of power to simply receive a GPS signal -- rendering an animated map could be expensive, of course, but Google Maps doesn't need to do that if it's running in the background)
I was going to press control-alt-delete to bring it up, but I couldn't figure out how to plug in a keyboard... ;)
No, this is exactly what I'm talking about. If you as a present-day Democrat had been in charge of things during the Depression, you would have given bartenders in Boulder City veto power over Hoover Dam. Except that before the dam, Boulder City didn't exist.
What you're really talking about is the difference between unrestricted green-field development and development in populated areas where there are already established interests.
When it's the wild frontier and the only people out there are you and the buffalo, then there's nobody to stop you from doing whatever you want.
When people live in an area and have an interest in preserving their way of life, you either have to steamroller over them or you have to negotiate and make compromises with them.
Yes, large-scale engineering is much more difficult when you have to consider other peoples' needs and not only your own.
No, that's not their problem, it's your problem. The fact that contemporary companies and government are less able to unilaterally destroy peoples' local environments in pursuit of their "larger goals" (read: profit, mostly) is a good thing.
Hawaiians will have to get power from the rapid rotation of FDR in his grave
With all due respect to FDR, Hawaii will be getting its power directly from the sun. There's more than one way to skin a cat.
Take that lefties. What goes around comes around.
As a bicycling lefty, I don't mind a bit. I spend $15 a week on lattes alone (as required by our stereotype-fulfillment contract), and a new bike is likely going to run me somewhere between $1000 and $4000 anyway, so if adding another $15 to the price tag of a once-every-10-years purchase gets me safer and more pleasant bike routes to ride on, I'm all for it.
So why is it fair that non-cyclists have to pay for bike paths they can't use?
There are literally thousands of things that your taxes pay for that you will never personally use. Is that unfair? Perhaps, but on the plus side you get to be part of a functioning first-world society and not some third-world hellhole. Take comfort in the fact that there are other people paying taxes to provide you with the particular public services you need, even if they never use them.