You don't need to wait for gcc to include the latest version of gnat. It's available for download from AdaCore http://libre.adacore.com/ in either GPL or commercially supported forms. (Commercial support is intended for companies, though, not for developers. It's a slightly different version, but pretty much the same. And it comes with official support. But it's just a mite expensive. )
Sorry, but work on gcj was slow for a long time before Java was partially GPL'd. My take is that the people who write compilers for native code aren't really interested in languages designed for an interpreter. (Yes, they call it a virtual machine, but to me that's one flavor of interpreter.)
My (current) biggest complaint about Java is that it doesn't implement structs, i.e., non-object containers for non-object data. Perhaps I just don't know the language, but it appears to be that I need to copy data three times on the way to writing it to a fixed-block random access file. And another three times to read it back in.
A secondary complaint is the way it handles unicode. I can see the reason and justification for either utf-8 or utf-32, but I can't see utf-16 (UCC2?) (N.B.: I'm not very happy with how C/C++ handles that either, but saying "use a library" is at least understandable. I much prefer Vala's approach...now if it would just get documented...)
FWIW, I much prefer Python, Ruby, or D to any of the gcc languages. but if I had to choose one of them I'd choose Ada (which is also being upgraded). Ada's a bit overcontrolling, which makes handling character string of differing lengths a problem, but it avoids a lot of the problems inherent in the basic design of C that were inherited by C++. (Sanitizing undefined behavior helps a lot, but it's not sufficient. Some things, like pointer arithmetic, are well defined, but just dangerous. And stupid when there's any compiler optimization happening at all. [Yeah, it used to be a way to do variable length arrays. And that was a bad idea at the time. Allocate the largest array that you're going to allow, and only write what you need. You need to keep track of the size anyway.])
P.S.: While I understand that much C/C++ syntax is driven by prior choices, much of this new syntax is UGLY. That's been a problem ever since templates started appearing, but it's gotten worse with every addition. At some point they need to do a de novo redefinition of syntax, and define an isomorphism between the two syntaxes. Then a compiler switch can alternate between syntaxes until the current version can be deprecated. I'm starting to think that APL had a better design than modern C++, and that was BAD. Now, in addition to << >> they've got [[ ]], and I guess next will be (( )) (unless that's already in use somewhere).
P.P.S.: Please note that all of my favorite languages are like Java in that they have built-in garbage collectors. This implies some design choices for the language, especially that integers and pointers are NOT interconvertable. I know that there is (at least one) C garbage collector, but because of language design it needs to work rediculously hard. But garbage collectors make it easy to deal with strings of variable and unknown length. This is important. (Yes, there are ways to deal with them without a garbage collector, but they are clumsy and ad hoc.) Language design is strongly influenced by the presence or absence of a garbage collector. It's not, however, a requirement that the garbage collector always be active. And for most programs in well designed languages, having the garbage collector active does not slow things down markedly. (Naturally, real-time applications won't want to have an active garbage collector most of the time, but even many of them can benefit from a garbage collector that can be invoked at predefined times.)
You say "asshats who resor to violence", and they do exist. But an interesting (and unanswerable) question is "What proportion of those 'asshats' were agent provocateurs?". There is good evidence that some of them were. There is also good evidence that not all of them were. But what proportion? Perhaps much of the "blame" for the excuse for suppressing the petitioning for redress comes from those doing, or profiting from, the suppression.
It's not that it's smarter, it's that it has arrived at this point through a different history. Internal violence has rarely been necessary. But when the police organizations can act on their own autority (and I'm counting the executive arm of the feds as a police organization, though that's only partially true) then you have a police state. So far only small chunks of the executive have become truly independent, and even they pretend that they are obedient to the legislature. That's not a real police state. And while the CIA has at times shown total independence of Congress, no other segment of the executive has been quite that blatant.
I'd say "teetering on the brink" is a correct description. Not quite as close to the brink as the GP suggested, but still only in a quasit-stable position. And the most likely direction of collapse is further into a police state, though likely on the Roman model (with technical refinements) rather than on the Soviet model. I doubt that there will be internal violence even on the level of Marius vs. Sulla. And there probably won't be an internal episode of the drama of Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon ("Alea iacta est", etc.). OTOH, that may have been a publicists creation anyway. And I really doubt that some future "president" will be stabbed to death in the Senate by the Senators. Parallels don't run that close. Booth's "Sic semper tyrannis!" is a more likely future scenario...and even that's quite unlikely.
P.S.: There is a reasonable argument that Lincoln deserved to be shot for treason. He trampled all over the Constitution during the Civil War, and most of recent history is the result of it, including the drastic centralization of power in the federal gvoernment. OTOH, if it weren't for that the US might have continued to be "these United States" rather than "the United States". But ever since Lincoln the presidents have been more powerful, and allowed much greater latitude in the impositon of central power. This isn't all bad, but it sure isn't all good. And it doesn't appear to be what the Consitution allowed as interpreted at any prior time. One may argue that this was the inevitable result of improvements in transportation and communication, and this is certainly true in part. But that should have been accomplished through ammending the Constitution rather than by twisting what the words meant. That it was done the way it was done was largely due to powerful groups insisting that it be done NOW in a way that they could never have gotten 2/3 of the Senate to agree to, much less 3/4 of the States. So it was done via a power play, i.e., "We're doing it and you can't stop us." And the extension of that method is how the US is turning into a police state.
I think you take an incredibly naive and optomistic view of this endeavor. Either that, or you're a shill.
Or, of course, you don't care how others will be hurt, as long as you get the benefits, in which case you deserve to be lumped in with "predatory, and deserve to be razed to the ground".
You have demonstrated deeper mechanical insight to the process than I carry in ready memory. I anthromorphize (to a limited extent) to have a simpler model to use. For the purpose of "can you be identified by cell tower triangulation" it works sufficiently. Your answer was, however, obviously more technically correct...but it doesn't change the assertion.
OTOH, whether they DO locate you by your phone is another matter. I suspect that (for most people) they don't, to avoid drowning in information. OTOH, I never would have guessed that they were tracking everyone's email, so I don't have a great deal of certainty about that.
Did I even SUGGEST that I considered selfishness a virtue? I don't. But it's a predictable feature. Even the most moral of people turn selfish if they aren't watching themselves.
The reason that a criminal organization is used as a simple model of a state is because it's another organization that claims the right to use force to achieve it's ends. Are there any other groups in this category? Mobs don't qualify as a good analogy, because they are too disorganized (even though the instigators are often quite organized...so I suppose you could include political groups in rebellion...though I tend to consder them, to the extent that they are effective, as a cross between a criminal organization and a state).
Come up with another decent analogy and I'll consider it.
I'm sure there are some costs. But I really doubt that they are that high. It's quite likely that there is some need for additional power stabilization at some point on the network. (Well, it's also quite likely that there was ALREADY a need, but that additional fluctuating sources of power increases the need.)
OTOH, I don't trust any accounting provided by the power company. Especially not when they have an obvious gain in saying the costs are higher.
Sorry, but you need a correction: Debian rarely introduces regressions when (dist)upgrading the stable tree,
There are not-infrequent regressions when upgrading testing. I expect sid is worse. Serious regressions are much less common, but I used to figure that at least once during a cycle of testing the machine would get so borked that I'd need to switch to using stable for a week or so. OTOH, that didn't happen during the last cycle, and hasn't so far this time. But smaller regressions happen on nearly a weekly basis. (And I no longer EVER autoremove on a testing distribution. It's usually safe, but it's occasionally required a total reinstall.)
Actually, it *IS* providing them with useful information, your location. The only thing it, they could already get that if you're carrying a phone. All recent models have GPS tracking, and even my antique can be located via cell tower triangulation.
P.S.: The cell towers NEED to know roughly where the phone is if it is to be able to be used. If you don't want that, just put it in some sort of Faraday cage. (Metalized plastic envelopes should work, but I don't remember whether you need to ground them.)
You are misunderstanding. The state, like the smarter criminal organizations, tries to arrange things so that it is the best available option to adhere to it's guidance. Sometimes this is the carrot, sometimes it's the stick, but money is the accounting system of the protection racket side.
Do I have any better option? No. But don't pretend things are better than they are. My basic feeling is that humans in groups tend to be selfish and exclusive towards outsiders, however defined. I believe this is true for every satisfactorially documented human group in history without exception. Political dogma is only a false front over this reality. And this isn't saying that humans in small groups cannot be extremely caring for each other. Christianity was an attempt to overcome this, which only escalted the violence. (There are arguments that the actual escalation was because of technological improvements, and that Christianity was just window dressing, and that may be true in most instances, but it also accelerated the development of large organizations which could be violent towards outsiders that one would otherwise never even have heard of. E.g., Albigensians, Monophysites, etc. And that's not even mentioning it's offshoots such as Muslims. For some reason the Buddhists haven't had this same effect, nor have the Taoists. The Confuscists get right in there, but seem to mainly be acting as the voice of the conservative political party of whatever time, so I'm going to consider them as window dressing justifiying the power-mad, who woud be doing the same thing anyway.)
But I'm definitely not a rugged individualist. I know that a world without large governments would cause over a 90% dieoff in humans, and quite possibly more.
I really doubt that there's just one thing happening. There's usually more than one.
When you decide between two manufacturers, you consider several things. One of them is how secure you feel using the equipment, but that's only one. Sometimes it's a very important reason, sometimes it's less important. (If you're publishing GPL code, do you really care if the NSA reads it?)
For some people this will be an important reason. For some people this will be trivial. For some people this will be the weight of a feather that tips the scales.
More to the point, a citation wouldn't suffice. Lots of people will say one thing while they are doing another. You need something verifiable.
OTOH, most of the things I heard asserted don't actually require that the root certs be compromised. (Yeah, I've heard they have been compromised before in several different places. In no case do I know that the person making the assertion had actual knowledge, or was telling the truth. So, until I see something that requires cert compromise, I'm going to call that "plausible", but not proven.)
The thing is, if one is concerned about security, if something is only plausibly compromised, do you trust it? I'll trust it with my scrabble score. I'll trust it with information of trivial value. But beyond that? You make a tradeoff. You decide: Who is likely to intercept this information? Could they decode it? If they did, what would the result be?
FWIW, I don't bank over the internet. This doesn't make me feel really secure, because I think my bank does. And I know that credit card purchases at stores are transmitted over the internet. Consider this when you decide whether to use a credit card or pay cash.
P.S.: The NSA isn't the only player snooping on those channels. This is one of the benefits of weak encryption and sloppy standards for implementation. And it doesn't only affect US transactions.
That's a silly way to think of it, when money is only a promise made by the state.
If someone breaks a promise to you, that doesn't make him a thief. It makes him an untrustworthy bastard that you should try to avoid dealing with again.
Taxes are the protection money paid to the extortion racket called the state. If it's leaning harder on you than on someone else, because you are weaker, it's because either it like picking on an easy target, or because the other guy bribed them to let them alone.
But *do* notice that the state's protection racket is the only thing that gives money any value. They promise to "protect" you if you pay them off in... promises that they have made.
The US uses a lot more oil than does Iran. The last I checked it was a net importer. Gold is only one of many precious metals. Platinum is actually more important, even though gold is quite valuable of coating fine electrodes, etc. Lithium isn't something that we're going to stop needing. Yes, someone claims that some particular desposit could meet all the US demand. For how long? What about Tungsten? Indium? Titanium? Etc.
FWIW, as a US citizen I'm in favor of having a high tax on local resources, so that they will be saved for later, when they will probably be more valuable. This means trading to import them from elsewhere (and manufacturing fancy things from them that others will buy at a premium). We haven't been being good stewards of the land for at least the last several decades. To the extent that I can trust the history I was taught, the poor stewardship extends much farther back than that.
It is certainly appropriate for you to assert that you will not believe in the Easter Bunny without additional evidence. This, however, does no impose any obligation on the person making the claim to provide you with the evidence, unless his goal is to convince you.
Were I to consider the claim that the NSA had been a contributory factor to identity theft to be dubious, then I might doubt an assertion as to it's truth. This, however, would not impose any obligation on the asserting party to provide the proof, unless his goal was to convince me. If, instead, his goal was to convince those other folk over there who found his assertions convincing, then he would have scant reason to provide me with evidence.
So I find your claims invalid. You are assuming a motive that has not been demonstrated.
Well, to be truthful, even from a programmer's point of view they are all lacking.
I want a language with a built-in B+Tree (stored to a file), where structs are directly accessed, where classes are handles to the heap, where there is built-in support for sorted arrays AND for hash tables, where it's serialization of stucts that don't contain pointers is trivial (i.e., I want such things to be able to be the data items of the B+Tree without additional work), etc.
And I want object, struct, and array persistence to be a built-in run-time option. Analogous to the way Java has you inherit serializeable, but instead of "able to be serialized" I want to it say "Serialize this type".
Yes, these things are available as library add-ons in lots of languages. And the syntax for using them is always exceedingly ugly. (Not as bad as SQL, but still very bad.)
And the abyssmal thing is that many of these things have been available in isolated instances in the past. E.g., Pick Basic had a built-in B+Tree.
Well, it's also true that every single feature I've mentioned (bar, possibly, SQL) is available in Squeak, a Smalltalk dialect. But it won't handle large persistent memory images. Whoops! And it also has the reputation for being slow.
OTOH, if Wolfram's language can even just automate parallel execution, it would be a tremendous blessing.
You don't understand the real problem with visual programming systems. They can be extremely powerful, but they tend to use so much screen space to do anything that you can't see very much of what's going on. So you need to hold too much in memory.
I remember Prograf on the Mac (before it died trying to transition to MSWind95). It was an excellent dataflow language, and if it were alive now, it would be a natural for multi-CPU platforms. But it was too visual, which made it nearly impossible to have a program large enough to do anything without getting lost. Their real mistake was in not having a textual representation. It wasn't that the language wasn't otherwise well designed, or powerful. It was. And it implemented high level abstractions quite well. but the details still took up enough screen space to show a graphic. So nothing that did much would fit without rolling off the screen...where you couldn't see it.
I also used another such tool which was much weaker. It was a relational database access language. It wasn't any weaker than SQL, or not much, but SQL wasn't available on the system I was using. And it suffered the exact same problem. (Actually, I think it may have been a bit more "powerful" than SQL, because it was a full programming language specialized for database access.) But whenever you tried to do anything complex you couldn't hold everything on the screen. At least this one let you print out the program, but then you had to take some tape and tape the layout together....even if you were using pin-feed paper, because it was wider, as well as longer, than the sheets.
Text is superior to visual because it's more compact. Icons are a way around this in limited situations, but it's difficult to attach a constant value to a small icon. If you want to say "if (x > y) then..." in a visual language it takes a LOT more space.
But don't think all visual languages are toy languages. That's not true. I haven't run into a language since that's as "powerful" as was Prograf...except, of course, APL, which had different problems. Dataflow languages are the most reasonable answer to "How do you use multiple processors?", but they're difficult to write, and they're difficult to design. Prograf was a very well designed language for such. The implementation as graphics, however, was a mistake, or should at least have been only one optional representation.
The things being observed are evidence of huge collections of small events (atoms, etc.) So their not being in the predicted distribution is very good evidence that something unexpected is happening. As to WHAT unexpected...that's less clear, which is part of what makes this interesting.
Even at normal human scales, random processes are rare. (Chaotic are less so, and it's often difficult to tell them apart. E.g., I suspect dice throws of being mainly chaotic rather than random.) If a die is thrown several times, and an unexpected sequence appears, people tend to suspect that something is interfering with the expected "random" sequence. And a die is a LOT smaller than a quasar. (I.e., it has a lot fewer apparently random, as opposed to chaotic, elements.)
They have. That's why they're all doing it at once. That way nobody in particular is noticed. And, yes, copies will be made and kept, but they won't be found by search engines, and they can be plausibly denied.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need to wait for gcc to include the latest version of gnat. It's available for download from AdaCore http://libre.adacore.com/ in either GPL or commercially supported forms. (Commercial support is intended for companies, though, not for developers. It's a slightly different version, but pretty much the same. And it comes with official support. But it's just a mite expensive. )
Sorry, but work on gcj was slow for a long time before Java was partially GPL'd. My take is that the people who write compilers for native code aren't really interested in languages designed for an interpreter. (Yes, they call it a virtual machine, but to me that's one flavor of interpreter.)
My (current) biggest complaint about Java is that it doesn't implement structs, i.e., non-object containers for non-object data. Perhaps I just don't know the language, but it appears to be that I need to copy data three times on the way to writing it to a fixed-block random access file. And another three times to read it back in.
A secondary complaint is the way it handles unicode. I can see the reason and justification for either utf-8 or utf-32, but I can't see utf-16 (UCC2?) (N.B.: I'm not very happy with how C/C++ handles that either, but saying "use a library" is at least understandable. I much prefer Vala's approach...now if it would just get documented...)
FWIW, I much prefer Python, Ruby, or D to any of the gcc languages. but if I had to choose one of them I'd choose Ada (which is also being upgraded). Ada's a bit overcontrolling, which makes handling character string of differing lengths a problem, but it avoids a lot of the problems inherent in the basic design of C that were inherited by C++. (Sanitizing undefined behavior helps a lot, but it's not sufficient. Some things, like pointer arithmetic, are well defined, but just dangerous. And stupid when there's any compiler optimization happening at all. [Yeah, it used to be a way to do variable length arrays. And that was a bad idea at the time. Allocate the largest array that you're going to allow, and only write what you need. You need to keep track of the size anyway.])
P.S.: While I understand that much C/C++ syntax is driven by prior choices, much of this new syntax is UGLY. That's been a problem ever since templates started appearing, but it's gotten worse with every addition. At some point they need to do a de novo redefinition of syntax, and define an isomorphism between the two syntaxes. Then a compiler switch can alternate between syntaxes until the current version can be deprecated. I'm starting to think that APL had a better design than modern C++, and that was BAD. Now, in addition to << >> they've got [[ ]], and I guess next will be (( )) (unless that's already in use somewhere).
P.P.S.: Please note that all of my favorite languages are like Java in that they have built-in garbage collectors. This implies some design choices for the language, especially that integers and pointers are NOT interconvertable. I know that there is (at least one) C garbage collector, but because of language design it needs to work rediculously hard. But garbage collectors make it easy to deal with strings of variable and unknown length. This is important. (Yes, there are ways to deal with them without a garbage collector, but they are clumsy and ad hoc.) Language design is strongly influenced by the presence or absence of a garbage collector. It's not, however, a requirement that the garbage collector always be active. And for most programs in well designed languages, having the garbage collector active does not slow things down markedly. (Naturally, real-time applications won't want to have an active garbage collector most of the time, but even many of them can benefit from a garbage collector that can be invoked at predefined times.)
You say "asshats who resor to violence", and they do exist. But an interesting (and unanswerable) question is "What proportion of those 'asshats' were agent provocateurs?". There is good evidence that some of them were. There is also good evidence that not all of them were. But what proportion? Perhaps much of the "blame" for the excuse for suppressing the petitioning for redress comes from those doing, or profiting from, the suppression.
It's not that it's smarter, it's that it has arrived at this point through a different history. Internal violence has rarely been necessary. But when the police organizations can act on their own autority (and I'm counting the executive arm of the feds as a police organization, though that's only partially true) then you have a police state. So far only small chunks of the executive have become truly independent, and even they pretend that they are obedient to the legislature. That's not a real police state. And while the CIA has at times shown total independence of Congress, no other segment of the executive has been quite that blatant.
I'd say "teetering on the brink" is a correct description. Not quite as close to the brink as the GP suggested, but still only in a quasit-stable position. And the most likely direction of collapse is further into a police state, though likely on the Roman model (with technical refinements) rather than on the Soviet model. I doubt that there will be internal violence even on the level of Marius vs. Sulla. And there probably won't be an internal episode of the drama of Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon ("Alea iacta est", etc.). OTOH, that may have been a publicists creation anyway. And I really doubt that some future "president" will be stabbed to death in the Senate by the Senators. Parallels don't run that close. Booth's "Sic semper tyrannis!" is a more likely future scenario...and even that's quite unlikely.
P.S.: There is a reasonable argument that Lincoln deserved to be shot for treason. He trampled all over the Constitution during the Civil War, and most of recent history is the result of it, including the drastic centralization of power in the federal gvoernment. OTOH, if it weren't for that the US might have continued to be "these United States" rather than "the United States". But ever since Lincoln the presidents have been more powerful, and allowed much greater latitude in the impositon of central power. This isn't all bad, but it sure isn't all good. And it doesn't appear to be what the Consitution allowed as interpreted at any prior time. One may argue that this was the inevitable result of improvements in transportation and communication, and this is certainly true in part. But that should have been accomplished through ammending the Constitution rather than by twisting what the words meant. That it was done the way it was done was largely due to powerful groups insisting that it be done NOW in a way that they could never have gotten 2/3 of the Senate to agree to, much less 3/4 of the States. So it was done via a power play, i.e., "We're doing it and you can't stop us." And the extension of that method is how the US is turning into a police state.
I think you take an incredibly naive and optomistic view of this endeavor. Either that, or you're a shill.
Or, of course, you don't care how others will be hurt, as long as you get the benefits, in which case you deserve to be lumped in with "predatory, and deserve to be razed to the ground".
You can't, I won't. Nearly the same, though I admit refusing to respond to calls I don't recognize is annoying. SMS is easier to ignore.
You have demonstrated deeper mechanical insight to the process than I carry in ready memory. I anthromorphize (to a limited extent) to have a simpler model to use. For the purpose of "can you be identified by cell tower triangulation" it works sufficiently. Your answer was, however, obviously more technically correct...but it doesn't change the assertion.
OTOH, whether they DO locate you by your phone is another matter. I suspect that (for most people) they don't, to avoid drowning in information. OTOH, I never would have guessed that they were tracking everyone's email, so I don't have a great deal of certainty about that.
Did I even SUGGEST that I considered selfishness a virtue? I don't. But it's a predictable feature. Even the most moral of people turn selfish if they aren't watching themselves.
The reason that a criminal organization is used as a simple model of a state is because it's another organization that claims the right to use force to achieve it's ends. Are there any other groups in this category? Mobs don't qualify as a good analogy, because they are too disorganized (even though the instigators are often quite organized...so I suppose you could include political groups in rebellion...though I tend to consder them, to the extent that they are effective, as a cross between a criminal organization and a state).
Come up with another decent analogy and I'll consider it.
I'm sure there are some costs. But I really doubt that they are that high. It's quite likely that there is some need for additional power stabilization at some point on the network. (Well, it's also quite likely that there was ALREADY a need, but that additional fluctuating sources of power increases the need.)
OTOH, I don't trust any accounting provided by the power company. Especially not when they have an obvious gain in saying the costs are higher.
Sorry, but you need a correction:
Debian rarely introduces regressions when (dist)upgrading the stable tree,
There are not-infrequent regressions when upgrading testing. I expect sid is worse. Serious regressions are much less common, but I used to figure that at least once during a cycle of testing the machine would get so borked that I'd need to switch to using stable for a week or so. OTOH, that didn't happen during the last cycle, and hasn't so far this time. But smaller regressions happen on nearly a weekly basis. (And I no longer EVER autoremove on a testing distribution. It's usually safe, but it's occasionally required a total reinstall.)
Stable, however, is, as it should be, stable.
You think Lithium is any better?
Actually, it *IS* providing them with useful information, your location. The only thing it, they could already get that if you're carrying a phone. All recent models have GPS tracking, and even my antique can be located via cell tower triangulation.
P.S.: The cell towers NEED to know roughly where the phone is if it is to be able to be used. If you don't want that, just put it in some sort of Faraday cage. (Metalized plastic envelopes should work, but I don't remember whether you need to ground them.)
You are misunderstanding. The state, like the smarter criminal organizations, tries to arrange things so that it is the best available option to adhere to it's guidance. Sometimes this is the carrot, sometimes it's the stick, but money is the accounting system of the protection racket side.
Do I have any better option? No. But don't pretend things are better than they are. My basic feeling is that humans in groups tend to be selfish and exclusive towards outsiders, however defined. I believe this is true for every satisfactorially documented human group in history without exception. Political dogma is only a false front over this reality. And this isn't saying that humans in small groups cannot be extremely caring for each other. Christianity was an attempt to overcome this, which only escalted the violence. (There are arguments that the actual escalation was because of technological improvements, and that Christianity was just window dressing, and that may be true in most instances, but it also accelerated the development of large organizations which could be violent towards outsiders that one would otherwise never even have heard of. E.g., Albigensians, Monophysites, etc. And that's not even mentioning it's offshoots such as Muslims. For some reason the Buddhists haven't had this same effect, nor have the Taoists. The Confuscists get right in there, but seem to mainly be acting as the voice of the conservative political party of whatever time, so I'm going to consider them as window dressing justifiying the power-mad, who woud be doing the same thing anyway.)
But I'm definitely not a rugged individualist. I know that a world without large governments would cause over a 90% dieoff in humans, and quite possibly more.
I really doubt that there's just one thing happening. There's usually more than one.
When you decide between two manufacturers, you consider several things. One of them is how secure you feel using the equipment, but that's only one. Sometimes it's a very important reason, sometimes it's less important. (If you're publishing GPL code, do you really care if the NSA reads it?)
For some people this will be an important reason.
For some people this will be trivial.
For some people this will be the weight of a feather that tips the scales.
More to the point, a citation wouldn't suffice. Lots of people will say one thing while they are doing another. You need something verifiable.
OTOH, most of the things I heard asserted don't actually require that the root certs be compromised. (Yeah, I've heard they have been compromised before in several different places. In no case do I know that the person making the assertion had actual knowledge, or was telling the truth. So, until I see something that requires cert compromise, I'm going to call that "plausible", but not proven.)
The thing is, if one is concerned about security, if something is only plausibly compromised, do you trust it? I'll trust it with my scrabble score. I'll trust it with information of trivial value. But beyond that? You make a tradeoff. You decide: Who is likely to intercept this information? Could they decode it? If they did, what would the result be?
FWIW, I don't bank over the internet. This doesn't make me feel really secure, because I think my bank does. And I know that credit card purchases at stores are transmitted over the internet. Consider this when you decide whether to use a credit card or pay cash.
P.S.: The NSA isn't the only player snooping on those channels. This is one of the benefits of weak encryption and sloppy standards for implementation. And it doesn't only affect US transactions.
Believe him if you want to. He might be telling the truth.
That's a silly way to think of it, when money is only a promise made by the state.
If someone breaks a promise to you, that doesn't make him a thief. It makes him an untrustworthy bastard that you should try to avoid dealing with again.
Taxes are the protection money paid to the extortion racket called the state. If it's leaning harder on you than on someone else, because you are weaker, it's because either it like picking on an easy target, or because the other guy bribed them to let them alone.
But *do* notice that the state's protection racket is the only thing that gives money any value. They promise to "protect" you if you pay them off in ... promises that they have made.
Well, your signature is accurate.
The US uses a lot more oil than does Iran. The last I checked it was a net importer.
Gold is only one of many precious metals. Platinum is actually more important, even though gold is quite valuable of coating fine electrodes, etc.
Lithium isn't something that we're going to stop needing. Yes, someone claims that some particular desposit could meet all the US demand. For how long? What about Tungsten? Indium? Titanium? Etc.
FWIW, as a US citizen I'm in favor of having a high tax on local resources, so that they will be saved for later, when they will probably be more valuable. This means trading to import them from elsewhere (and manufacturing fancy things from them that others will buy at a premium). We haven't been being good stewards of the land for at least the last several decades. To the extent that I can trust the history I was taught, the poor stewardship extends much farther back than that.
It is certainly appropriate for you to assert that you will not believe in the Easter Bunny without additional evidence. This, however, does no impose any obligation on the person making the claim to provide you with the evidence, unless his goal is to convince you.
Were I to consider the claim that the NSA had been a contributory factor to identity theft to be dubious, then I might doubt an assertion as to it's truth. This, however, would not impose any obligation on the asserting party to provide the proof, unless his goal was to convince me. If, instead, his goal was to convince those other folk over there who found his assertions convincing, then he would have scant reason to provide me with evidence.
So I find your claims invalid. You are assuming a motive that has not been demonstrated.
While it is appropriate for US citizens to focus on US wrongdoing, you should not, therefore, conclude that other countries are innocent.
OTOH, it may well be reasonable to conclude that they are less dangerous *to you*.
Well, to be truthful, even from a programmer's point of view they are all lacking.
I want a language with a built-in B+Tree (stored to a file), where structs are directly accessed, where classes are handles to the heap, where there is built-in support for sorted arrays AND for hash tables, where it's serialization of stucts that don't contain pointers is trivial (i.e., I want such things to be able to be the data items of the B+Tree without additional work), etc.
And I want object, struct, and array persistence to be a built-in run-time option. Analogous to the way Java has you inherit serializeable, but instead of "able to be serialized" I want to it say "Serialize this type".
Yes, these things are available as library add-ons in lots of languages. And the syntax for using them is always exceedingly ugly. (Not as bad as SQL, but still very bad.)
And the abyssmal thing is that many of these things have been available in isolated instances in the past. E.g., Pick Basic had a built-in B+Tree.
Well, it's also true that every single feature I've mentioned (bar, possibly, SQL) is available in Squeak, a Smalltalk dialect. But it won't handle large persistent memory images. Whoops! And it also has the reputation for being slow.
OTOH, if Wolfram's language can even just automate parallel execution, it would be a tremendous blessing.
You don't understand the real problem with visual programming systems. They can be extremely powerful, but they tend to use so much screen space to do anything that you can't see very much of what's going on. So you need to hold too much in memory.
I remember Prograf on the Mac (before it died trying to transition to MSWind95). It was an excellent dataflow language, and if it were alive now, it would be a natural for multi-CPU platforms. But it was too visual, which made it nearly impossible to have a program large enough to do anything without getting lost. Their real mistake was in not having a textual representation. It wasn't that the language wasn't otherwise well designed, or powerful. It was. And it implemented high level abstractions quite well. but the details still took up enough screen space to show a graphic. So nothing that did much would fit without rolling off the screen...where you couldn't see it.
I also used another such tool which was much weaker. It was a relational database access language. It wasn't any weaker than SQL, or not much, but SQL wasn't available on the system I was using. And it suffered the exact same problem. (Actually, I think it may have been a bit more "powerful" than SQL, because it was a full programming language specialized for database access.) But whenever you tried to do anything complex you couldn't hold everything on the screen. At least this one let you print out the program, but then you had to take some tape and tape the layout together....even if you were using pin-feed paper, because it was wider, as well as longer, than the sheets.
Text is superior to visual because it's more compact. Icons are a way around this in limited situations, but it's difficult to attach a constant value to a small icon. If you want to say "if (x > y) then..." in a visual language it takes a LOT more space.
But don't think all visual languages are toy languages. That's not true. I haven't run into a language since that's as "powerful" as was Prograf...except, of course, APL, which had different problems. Dataflow languages are the most reasonable answer to "How do you use multiple processors?", but they're difficult to write, and they're difficult to design. Prograf was a very well designed language for such. The implementation as graphics, however, was a mistake, or should at least have been only one optional representation.
I think you're serious, so I'll try to answer.
The things being observed are evidence of huge collections of small events (atoms, etc.) So their not being in the predicted distribution is very good evidence that something unexpected is happening. As to WHAT unexpected...that's less clear, which is part of what makes this interesting.
Even at normal human scales, random processes are rare. (Chaotic are less so, and it's often difficult to tell them apart. E.g., I suspect dice throws of being mainly chaotic rather than random.) If a die is thrown several times, and an unexpected sequence appears, people tend to suspect that something is interfering with the expected "random" sequence. And a die is a LOT smaller than a quasar. (I.e., it has a lot fewer apparently random, as opposed to chaotic, elements.)
It's making *me* wonder what alternative sites exist. At some point I'm just likely to decide that Slashdot has gotten too irritating to use.
They have. That's why they're all doing it at once. That way nobody in particular is noticed. And, yes, copies will be made and kept, but they won't be found by search engines, and they can be plausibly denied.