Privacy isn't dead - it just costs more than nearly anyone has. Perhaps this will evolve into a new class system in which one's status depends on the control one has over personal data.
Ever since I started programming on the Mac in C/C++, I've wanted a modification to the language to multiply-dereference structure elements by adding greater-than signs. This is (or was) really important on the Macintosh, since a double-pointer was a stable system convention (called handles). I don't need this as much, now, but it'd still be nice for a few pointer-manipulation tricks.
With the language the way it was, I had to do something like:
(**myControl).cntrlRect
or
(*myControl)->cntrlRect
both of which are insanely ugly. I think it would be far better to have something like:
myControl->>cntrlRect
I post this in hopes that someone on the committee will read this!
However nobly intended, revolutions begin when masses of people share particular, idealistic interests
Heh. In The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, it is observed that revolutions occur because of self-hatred, self-doubt, and insecurity among the nature of the participants. A passionate obsession with "revolutionizing" the outside world is merely a craven attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one's own life.
It is also noted that people tend to get more dissatisfied when their living conditions begin to improve, not under continuous repression.
It should be fairly easy to add binary encryption capability to GNU/Linux or FreeBSD. Maybe a password prompt when you begin executing. If you added it to LILO, you could encrypt the kernel. If the binaries are copyrighted (and most of them are) then you're in the clear.
Of course, who wants to type in a password every time you start a process?
I read somewhere that Bill Gates's worth increases by $500 every second. In context, it made the point that if he dropped a $100 bill on the ground, it literally wasn't worth his time to pick it up.
That works to 115 days, anyway. A little more than a business quarter.
I dont care how ergonomically correct you are, typing on a regular keyboard is going to mess up your hands, people just werent meant to have their hands facing downward for that long during the day.
On an interesting note, my grandmother said that she worked at an insurance firm in the 1930s, typing eight hours a day, every day, non-stop (except to get something else to type). She never had any sort of hand or wrist problems, despite that both were under much more stress due to the purely mechanical nature of the typewriters.
She then mentioned that when she tried to type on conventional modern keyboards, it was intensely uncomfortable because she had to spread her fingers too far apart - she was used to having her fingers almost pressed together.
Is there a connection? It seems to me that it could be decided pretty decisively by polling laptop users.
Old method still isn't good enough
on
eLection '04
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· Score: 2
But there is a gray area in punching twice. The mere fact that it's possible discredits the interface design. With a nod to human nature, you can't "unpunch" a card if you make a mistake.
I agree with timothy on this one - the interface to current voting machines needs to go.
What caused the software revolution that gave us real world software? That somethig was the copyright.
Er, no. What caused the software revolution was the decreasing number of hardware configurations out there. Before Intel and Motorola's dominance of the microprocessor market, there were hundreds of machine languages, I/O specifications, etc., etc. For the business world, portability wasn't even a joke - it hadn't reached that state of existence, while us C.S. guys played with P-Code. The mere fact that we have standards like PCI and SCSI is still amazing to me.
Also contributing to this was the increase in cheap hardware resources, opening the way to video
I/O (a necessity for user-friendliness then and now), enough memory to store the video, and finally the processor power to drive the video.
Copyrights and patents discourage the formation of standards by making protocols enforcably closed.
Interesting that a couple of shires in a swamp is shaking the world right now. I wonder if they're going to hold the presidency for ransom.
Or if both Gore and Bush will both go there and make multi-million dollar deals with the citizenry.
In any case, this entire event seems staged like a bad sitcom. It's like "they"'re trying to give us a cliffhanger of an election for our entertainment. Are they trying to appease the peasants or what?
Huh? Last I checked, to draw a perfect circle in Photoshop, you had to make a circular selection (with the circular selection tool, hidden away behind the default rectangular selection tool), go to the Edit menu and select 'stroke'
or...
In the Gimp, you make a circular selection (with the circular selection tool, right there on the main palette), right click to get to the edit menu, and select stroke.
Gimp uses the current brush, too, instead of throwing up a dialog.
Me, I was a die-hard Gimp hater until sometime between this January and May. I tried it in January, it sucked. I tried it in May, it rocked. Kudos to the really cool guy that joined the team and fixed the godawful interface annoyances (although I still hate having to right click all the time - menu bar, people!).
In that case, why not write a compiler which takes the english specification for the DeCSS code and outputs an executable? It shouldn't be too hard to write a natural language compiler when the text itself is fixed.
Looks to me as though the judge just passed up the responsibility for making any sort of decision. "Don't blame me! Congress makes the laws!" Never mind that one of the functions of the Judiciary system in America is to judge the constitutionality of a particular law.
With your super-duper-replication device, you've now pretty much destroyed the market on fruit. Farmer Fred rapidly goes out of business (along with all the other fruit farmers) and begins to look for other areas of employment. Once he retires, he goes back to what he loved to do, which was grow fine fruit for his own pleasure.
For the rest of us, though, that enjoyed Fine Fruit by Farmer Fred, we'll have to learn to live with the exact same Fine Fruit every time. We'll live with it until the Fine Fruit becomes not-so-fine anymore, because we're tired of it. Then we'll go to Farmer Fred in his private garden and beg him to let us have some of his new, different Fine Fruit.
Farmer Fred will put up with this for a while, and then he'll kick us out, and we'll be without Fine Fruit ever again, except for those of us who are farmers.
The objectivist philosophy is attractive to the tech crowd for the simple reason that techs respect little except competance. A system that uniformly rewards competance and punishes incompetance will tend to be lauded by those assured of their own skill.
The libertarian political leaning is a wish to employ that skill without indirect consequence. If one writes a program, and it formats someone's hard drive, one usually takes responsibility for it. However, if one writes a program, and other people decide that it's "wrong," unrelated to the operation of the actual program, then that skill is thwarted and the programmer will make the usual claim that s/he wasn't responsible.
One can make the same argument in other arenas of life, though. Such as the only "wrong" sex, is bad sex. And bad sex can only be bad because of various factors not taken into consideration (lack of emotional attachment, bad rhythm, etc)
The relation between the two is skill. One seeks to provide reward for it, the other makes it freely employable without indirect negative consequence.
A friend and I were trying to figure out how to trace the DoS attacks ourselves, so I came up with an idea - why not use some of the unused space in an IP header to store the ip address of the edge router? With that system, the evil Cruft couldn't send a single packet without having a real ip attached to a geographic location.
We were going to write an RFC and become famous.
Then we found that it was already covered in an RFC, already in the IP protocol as the "Loose Source and Record Route."
Force router companies and ISPs to use that particular header option, and the whole accountability problem is solved while preserving anonymity.
The guy in the front in the picture looks like Gordan Freeman.
Re:Real Challenge is turning CLI graphical :P
on
Who's Afraid Of C++?
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· Score: 1
There is one. It's called Prograph and was released many years ago for the Macintosh. It was both compiled and interpreted, was completely object oriented, and focused on data paths instead of execution flow. The compiler/interpreter took care of what needed to happen when.
It was not easy at all. I was a pretty experienced programmer when I began to play around with it, and it was nearly as hard to wrap my mind around it as LISP used to be. LISP has the excuse that it is perfectly suited to certain classes of problems, but Prograph was intended to be a general purpose language. I doubt that any less technically inclined consciousness would find it any easier to learn.
It's the old tradeoff between flexibility and simplicity. Make it simple enough for the average user, and you don't have a language, or even a script. You have an application.
Oh, no... I can just see hundreds of people frying themselves on the monitor anode... and hundreds of iMac motherboards fried from inadequate anti-static measures. Eugggh....
Slashdot Mirror
Privacy isn't dead - it just costs more than nearly anyone has. Perhaps this will evolve into a new class system in which one's status depends on the control one has over personal data.
With the language the way it was, I had to do something like:
or both of which are insanely ugly. I think it would be far better to have something like:I post this in hopes that someone on the committee will read this!
How's that for feel-good politics?
Heh. In The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, it is observed that revolutions occur because of self-hatred, self-doubt, and insecurity among the nature of the participants. A passionate obsession with "revolutionizing" the outside world is merely a craven attempt to compensate for a lack of meaning in one's own life.
It is also noted that people tend to get more dissatisfied when their living conditions begin to improve, not under continuous repression.
Of course, who wants to type in a password every time you start a process?
osh
When spoken, it's even phonetically shorter than ssh.
Like something seriously worth hacking into and putting in a real computer.
Maybe someone should patent one-click hacking, and then sue everyone who used the apps.
That works to 115 days, anyway. A little more than a business quarter.
And to top it off, the assholes didn't even look up the word ornithopter!!!!!!
I give it a five billion thumbs down
On an interesting note, my grandmother said that she worked at an insurance firm in the 1930s, typing eight hours a day, every day, non-stop (except to get something else to type). She never had any sort of hand or wrist problems, despite that both were under much more stress due to the purely mechanical nature of the typewriters.
She then mentioned that when she tried to type on conventional modern keyboards, it was intensely uncomfortable because she had to spread her fingers too far apart - she was used to having her fingers almost pressed together.
Is there a connection? It seems to me that it could be decided pretty decisively by polling laptop users.
I agree with timothy on this one - the interface to current voting machines needs to go.
Er, no. What caused the software revolution was the decreasing number of hardware configurations out there. Before Intel and Motorola's dominance of the microprocessor market, there were hundreds of machine languages, I/O specifications, etc., etc. For the business world, portability wasn't even a joke - it hadn't reached that state of existence, while us C.S. guys played with P-Code. The mere fact that we have standards like PCI and SCSI is still amazing to me.
Also contributing to this was the increase in cheap hardware resources, opening the way to video I/O (a necessity for user-friendliness then and now), enough memory to store the video, and finally the processor power to drive the video.
Copyrights and patents discourage the formation of standards by making protocols enforcably closed.
Or if both Gore and Bush will both go there and make multi-million dollar deals with the citizenry.
In any case, this entire event seems staged like a bad sitcom. It's like "they"'re trying to give us a cliffhanger of an election for our entertainment. Are they trying to appease the peasants or what?
or...
In the Gimp, you make a circular selection (with the circular selection tool, right there on the main palette), right click to get to the edit menu, and select stroke.
Gimp uses the current brush, too, instead of throwing up a dialog.
Me, I was a die-hard Gimp hater until sometime between this January and May. I tried it in January, it sucked. I tried it in May, it rocked. Kudos to the really cool guy that joined the team and fixed the godawful interface annoyances (although I still hate having to right click all the time - menu bar, people!).
In that case, why not write a compiler which takes the english specification for the DeCSS code and outputs an executable? It shouldn't be too hard to write a natural language compiler when the text itself is fixed.
Looks to me as though the judge just passed up the responsibility for making any sort of decision. "Don't blame me! Congress makes the laws!" Never mind that one of the functions of the Judiciary system in America is to judge the constitutionality of a particular law.
With your super-duper-replication device, you've now pretty much destroyed the market on fruit. Farmer Fred rapidly goes out of business (along with all the other fruit farmers) and begins to look for other areas of employment. Once he retires, he goes back to what he loved to do, which was grow fine fruit for his own pleasure.
For the rest of us, though, that enjoyed Fine Fruit by Farmer Fred, we'll have to learn to live with the exact same Fine Fruit every time. We'll live with it until the Fine Fruit becomes not-so-fine anymore, because we're tired of it. Then we'll go to Farmer Fred in his private garden and beg him to let us have some of his new, different Fine Fruit.
Farmer Fred will put up with this for a while, and then he'll kick us out, and we'll be without Fine Fruit ever again, except for those of us who are farmers.
Good metaphor, by the way.
The libertarian political leaning is a wish to employ that skill without indirect consequence. If one writes a program, and it formats someone's hard drive, one usually takes responsibility for it. However, if one writes a program, and other people decide that it's "wrong," unrelated to the operation of the actual program, then that skill is thwarted and the programmer will make the usual claim that s/he wasn't responsible.
One can make the same argument in other arenas of life, though. Such as the only "wrong" sex, is bad sex. And bad sex can only be bad because of various factors not taken into consideration (lack of emotional attachment, bad rhythm, etc)
The relation between the two is skill. One seeks to provide reward for it, the other makes it freely employable without indirect negative consequence.
That's a seriously amusing typo. I wonder if it was intentional.
Make sure you don't use your word processor, either. It was "tainted by an evil patent" long ago.
We were going to write an RFC and become famous.
Then we found that it was already covered in an RFC, already in the IP protocol as the "Loose Source and Record Route."
Force router companies and ISPs to use that particular header option, and the whole accountability problem is solved while preserving anonymity.The guy in the front in the picture looks like Gordan Freeman.
It was not easy at all. I was a pretty experienced programmer when I began to play around with it, and it was nearly as hard to wrap my mind around it as LISP used to be. LISP has the excuse that it is perfectly suited to certain classes of problems, but Prograph was intended to be a general purpose language. I doubt that any less technically inclined consciousness would find it any easier to learn.
It's the old tradeoff between flexibility and simplicity. Make it simple enough for the average user, and you don't have a language, or even a script. You have an application.
---
Avoid gunfire in the bathroom tonight.
Oh, no... I can just see hundreds of people frying themselves on the monitor anode... and hundreds of iMac motherboards fried from inadequate anti-static measures. Eugggh....