However, the actual argument many Republicans make is completely different, namely that these government programs actually hurt people.
Of course that's the argument they make, because if they explicitly voiced their real argument ("poor people don't deserve our help, they deserve to be poor"), they'd be rightly seen as uncaring bastards.
If you objectively look at the kinds of government programs progressives and Democrats have sunk huge amounts of money into, they have generally not been effective at accomplishing what they were designed to accomplish.
The constructive response would be to find ways to make those programs more effective. It's telling, then, that the Republican proposals always focus solely on decreasing costs, with absolutely no consideration of program effectiveness. If anything, they deliberately try to make the programs less effective, so that they can then better campaign against them as "a waste of taxpayer money".
The point of C is that it gives you almost as much control but makes it easier to build and maintain large systems without you being some kind of semirobotic idiot savant.
I think the other real point of C is that it allows you to write portable code. With assembly, if you wanted to port from one CPU architecture to another, the only option was to throw all the code away and rewrite from scratch.
I really wish I had the ability to make a more subdued honk sometimes, for alerting a pedestrian, or whatever. It seems like an obvious enhancement, and yet AFAIK such a thing has never been standard or even available, except maybe as an aftermarket item.
There will be people diving in front of driverless cars attempting to empty the deep pockets of the manufacturers.
I don't think that's going to work too well -- the car will have a complete record of its sensor inputs at the time of the incident, from which it should be pretty obvious what actually happened.
(Not that that won't stop a few opportunists from trying, of course -- it will be interesting to see how a self-driving car handles deliberately dangerous behavior)
Electric cars could eliminate noise pollution. What did our bright lawmaker mavens did? Legislate it so electric cars must play artificial noise, because someone might be jaywalking with a nose in their smartphone.
Or they might be blind, and really have no way to know that a silent car is approaching them. Or they might just be used to the idea that they can hear cars approaching, having never encountered a "ninja Prius" before.
The noise doesn't have to be loud, it only needs to be projected in front of the car, not everywhere, and it only has to operate when the car is going slow enough that its road noise isn't inaudible. This particular noise isn't going to bother anyone any more than the traditional engine noises it's meant to replace, and it's going to save lives. In this case our bright lawmaker mavens did the right thing.
I'm coming out with an application called "Solitary Confinement". Required hardware will be a VR headset, noise-cancelling headphones, and a typical closet or shower (shower/tubs will not work).
I think this would be really popular with parents of small children.
how many backdoors can you hide in something that is open source?
Quite a few, if you're clever (although of course you only need one). Code that introduces a vulnerability can be very subtle -- so subtle that even if someone discovers it, they are likely to think it is a bug rather than something that was placed there deliberately.
Since it sounds like we are near the point where everybody's credit card will need replacing anywayâ¦. how about this?
Under the current credit card system, when I want to purchase something from Target (or from anybody else), I send them my name, credit card number, billing address, and security code. Anyone who has this information is able to bill any number of charges to my account, in any amount, for as long as they want to (or until I catch on and cancel the card).
That seems like a bit too much power. What I'd like instead is the ability to send information that the holder of that information can only use once, to initiate a single transaction, for a specified amount, and (ideally) only to a specified destination account. That way if (okay, when) some miscreant gets ahold of the data I sent, the damage they can do is limited to the amount specified in that one transaction -- I won't have to replace my credit card, and I won't have to fight the credit company to get thousands of dollars in charges reversed.
Given that it's 2014 already (the future!), surely a system like this (or better) is possible? Build it around BitCoin if you have to, they seem to manage it just fine.
Again, going back to Fox, they're still wondering why people are so enamored with this story.
If the goal of the story is wrestle Fox into submission with the power of sweet reason, I think people are going to be disappointed. If Fox was susceptible to rational analysis, they wouldn't be Fox.
Can you screw your abstractions and forget to call them later? Do you have to use Gates condoms or will sheepskin work? What if your abstractions become pregnant? Is the offspring concrete?
I think you have the genders switched -- in this analogy, you're the woman. In particular, the abstraction is the boyfriend who can walk away scot-free if things don't work out, and you're the one who is stuck with an 18-year support obligation.
Why can't they do it the way that satellites do - all control operations are sent encrypted.
Or put in a data diode -- insecure machines (including the entire Internet if that's what you want) can monitor the system, but only a secure/air-gapped machine can send data to the SCADA system.
Normally the SCADA systems **ARE** air-gapped from the corporate backbone, but until we start breeding better managers some idiot will occasionally pull a cable across that gap in order to produce a report or something.
This suggests a product idea -- triangular (or otherwise oddly shaped) Ethernet jacks, for use in computers that are not supposed to ever connect to the Internet. All your SCADA machines would have these, and it would be very difficult for the idiot to connect a cable to them that also connects to a non-SCADA machine.
(Until the inevitable RJ45-to-triangle adapter cable becomes widely available, anyway)
If for some reason they do end up with a black hole at LHC, then Mars itself will get a one-way trip to Earth...
My understanding is that if someone did somehow create a black hole that gobbled up the Earth, the resulting object would be in the same location as Earth and would have the same mass as Earth; it would just be much, much smaller.
So not only would Mars not be effected, even Earth's moon would not notice any difference.
That sounds like an adequate description of pretty much all software development these days, roll it out on schedule, we'll deal with bugs (or deny there are any) later on.
The reason that companies can get away with this is because the Internet has made software distribution essentially free.
In the good/bad old days, releasing software meant pressing a few thousand (or a few hundred thousand) CDs and shipping them to stores. If there was a serious bug in the software, you'd probably have to do that process all over again, at a cost of thousands of dollars.
Now if you have a bug in your software, you just fix it and push the new version out to the customers via the software's self-update mechanism.
The advantage to the user is that they get to use the software sooner, and cheaper, and they get the (inevitable) bugs fixes quicker.
Yes, let's just give up and go back to checks -- nobody ever committed fraud with those!
I like a reductio ad absurdum as much as the next guy, but I think a better response would be to forward to something more secure. I'm sure you or any other Slashdotter could think of something clever, but at the very least we could do what every other country does and put security chips in the credit cards.
Slashdot Mirror
But NG is peaking and dispatchable as hell, unlike solar.
Or you could combine the two
However, the actual argument many Republicans make is completely different, namely that these government programs actually hurt people.
Of course that's the argument they make, because if they explicitly voiced their real argument ("poor people don't deserve our help, they deserve to be poor"), they'd be rightly seen as uncaring bastards.
If you objectively look at the kinds of government programs progressives and Democrats have sunk huge amounts of money into, they have generally not been effective at accomplishing what they were designed to accomplish.
The constructive response would be to find ways to make those programs more effective. It's telling, then, that the Republican proposals always focus solely on decreasing costs, with absolutely no consideration of program effectiveness. If anything, they deliberately try to make the programs less effective, so that they can then better campaign against them as "a waste of taxpayer money".
The point of C is that it gives you almost as much control but makes it easier to build and maintain large systems without you being some kind of semirobotic idiot savant.
I think the other real point of C is that it allows you to write portable code. With assembly, if you wanted to port from one CPU architecture to another, the only option was to throw all the code away and rewrite from scratch.
Maybe this facility is useless, maybe it's not.
NASA thinks it's useless, and I think they are the ones most likely to know.
I really wish I had the ability to make a more subdued honk sometimes, for alerting a pedestrian, or whatever. It seems like an obvious enhancement, and yet AFAIK such a thing has never been standard or even available, except maybe as an aftermarket item.
FWIW the Chevy Volt comes with just that.
You're imagining a car with no user inputs at all? No steering wheel, no manual override, not even any way to program a new route?
Also, this car won't be smart enough to factor in the amount of gas remaining in the tank when making its routing calculations?
I'm guessing that wouldn't be the most popular model.
There will be people diving in front of driverless cars attempting to empty the deep pockets of the manufacturers.
I don't think that's going to work too well -- the car will have a complete record of its sensor inputs at the time of the incident, from which it should be pretty obvious what actually happened.
(Not that that won't stop a few opportunists from trying, of course -- it will be interesting to see how a self-driving car handles deliberately dangerous behavior)
Electric cars could eliminate noise pollution. What did our bright lawmaker mavens did? Legislate it so electric cars must play artificial noise, because someone might be jaywalking with a nose in their smartphone.
Or they might be blind, and really have no way to know that a silent car is approaching them. Or they might just be used to the idea that they can hear cars approaching, having never encountered a "ninja Prius" before.
The noise doesn't have to be loud, it only needs to be projected in front of the car, not everywhere, and it only has to operate when the car is going slow enough that its road noise isn't inaudible. This particular noise isn't going to bother anyone any more than the traditional engine noises it's meant to replace, and it's going to save lives. In this case our bright lawmaker mavens did the right thing.
My cell phone has been doing this for years.
I'm coming out with an application called "Solitary Confinement". Required hardware will be a VR headset, noise-cancelling headphones, and a typical closet or shower (shower/tubs will not work).
I think this would be really popular with parents of small children.
Unless programmed into the computer it wouldn't feel curiosity, anger, happiness etc.
To be fair, in the movie they say the AI wasn't programmed, but instead was created by averaging together several thousand scanned human minds.
It's not green, so it doesn't have people in it yet.
I'm pretty sure the people-based version would taste better.
So what secret will we discover is the ingredient in Soylent Grey?
I'm not sure, but I think this is the stuff they were eating aboard ship in 'The Matrix'.
Most "lifetime warranties" are defined as "lifetime of the device", once you get into the fine print.
What is the definition of "lifetime of the device"?
(If it's defined as "until the device stops working", then I don't think the warranty will be very useful... ;))
how many backdoors can you hide in something that is open source?
Quite a few, if you're clever (although of course you only need one). Code that introduces a vulnerability can be very subtle -- so subtle that even if someone discovers it, they are likely to think it is a bug rather than something that was placed there deliberately.
the asshats in DC seem dead set on running our own economy into the dirt.
And they're so incompetent that they're failing even at that.
Since it sounds like we are near the point where everybody's credit card will need replacing anywayâ¦. how about this?
Under the current credit card system, when I want to purchase something from Target (or from anybody else), I send them my name, credit card number, billing address, and security code. Anyone who has this information is able to bill any number of charges to my account, in any amount, for as long as they want to (or until I catch on and cancel the card).
That seems like a bit too much power. What I'd like instead is the ability to send information that the holder of that information can only use once, to initiate a single transaction, for a specified amount, and (ideally) only to a specified destination account. That way if (okay, when) some miscreant gets ahold of the data I sent, the damage they can do is limited to the amount specified in that one transaction -- I won't have to replace my credit card, and I won't have to fight the credit company to get thousands of dollars in charges reversed.
Given that it's 2014 already (the future!), surely a system like this (or better) is possible? Build it around BitCoin if you have to, they seem to manage it just fine.
Again, going back to Fox, they're still wondering why people are so enamored with this story.
If the goal of the story is wrestle Fox into submission with the power of sweet reason, I think people are going to be disappointed. If Fox was susceptible to rational analysis, they wouldn't be Fox.
Can you screw your abstractions and forget to call them later? Do you have to use Gates condoms or will sheepskin work? What if your abstractions become pregnant? Is the offspring concrete?
I think you have the genders switched -- in this analogy, you're the woman. In particular, the abstraction is the boyfriend who can walk away scot-free if things don't work out, and you're the one who is stuck with an 18-year support obligation.
Why can't they do it the way that satellites do - all control operations are sent encrypted.
Or put in a data diode -- insecure machines (including the entire Internet if that's what you want) can monitor the system, but only a secure/air-gapped machine can send data to the SCADA system.
And do not allow USB-sticks or other media to be inserted into these systems.
That's going to make installing bug-fixes interesting... perhaps they send a new computer from the factory and swap out the existing one?
Normally the SCADA systems **ARE** air-gapped from the corporate backbone, but until we start breeding better managers some idiot will occasionally pull a cable across that gap in order to produce a report or something.
This suggests a product idea -- triangular (or otherwise oddly shaped) Ethernet jacks, for use in computers that are not supposed to ever connect to the Internet. All your SCADA machines would have these, and it would be very difficult for the idiot to connect a cable to them that also connects to a non-SCADA machine.
(Until the inevitable RJ45-to-triangle adapter cable becomes widely available, anyway)
Now can we stop bitching about global warming? See, it's not all bad.
Can we stop bitching about cancer? See, it's not all bad -- now I can smoke cigarettes through the hole in my neck!
If for some reason they do end up with a black hole at LHC, then Mars itself will get a one-way trip to Earth...
My understanding is that if someone did somehow create a black hole that gobbled up the Earth, the resulting object would be in the same location as Earth and would have the same mass as Earth; it would just be much, much smaller.
So not only would Mars not be effected, even Earth's moon would not notice any difference.
That sounds like an adequate description of pretty much all software development these days, roll it out on schedule, we'll deal with bugs (or deny there are any) later on.
The reason that companies can get away with this is because the Internet has made software distribution essentially free.
In the good/bad old days, releasing software meant pressing a few thousand (or a few hundred thousand) CDs and shipping them to stores. If there was a serious bug in the software, you'd probably have to do that process all over again, at a cost of thousands of dollars.
Now if you have a bug in your software, you just fix it and push the new version out to the customers via the software's self-update mechanism.
The advantage to the user is that they get to use the software sooner, and cheaper, and they get the (inevitable) bugs fixes quicker.
Yes, let's just give up and go back to checks -- nobody ever committed fraud with those!
I like a reductio ad absurdum as much as the next guy, but I think a better response would be to forward to something more secure. I'm sure you or any other Slashdotter could think of something clever, but at the very least we could do what every other country does and put security chips in the credit cards.