Except it hasn't been "released" to public news organizations. It was LEAKED. There is a formal release process, and it was NOT followed. The documents remain classified until formally declassified, at which point they MAY be released to the news or the public, at the discretion of the document owner. ..
"Leaked" or "released" is a matter of semantics and it depends which side of the fence you're on, but the end result is the same. Whether the president of the united states himself handed over the information or a low level analyst handed it over, the information is out in the public for all to read. Well, all except for the military and others in the government with security clearance, they still aren't allowed to read it and can be prosecuted for reading the news on their home computer.
Of course, if they were really trying to protect their people, they could say that "Previously classified information that has been released to public news organizations and made publicly available may be accessed by military personnel with no repercussions.".
Of course, that means that anyone can declassify information by anonymously leaking it to the press.
Yeah, that's kind of the point behind anonymously leaking it to the press -- making the information public. And once it's public, keeping it out of the hands of military personnel is inane - if our enemies can read the information in the newspaper, why can't our soldiers?
Then whoever classified the information and had such little control over it that a low level analyst contractor could walk out the door with thousands of pages of classified information should be saying it.
This would make a great DoS attack against the military:
Campos wrote if an employee accidentally downloaded classified information, it would result in "labor intensive" work, such as the wipe or destruction of the computer's hard drive
All a hacker needs to do is hack some website commonly used by the military (army.mil?) and post some leaked classified information on it, or send an email blast to army.mil email addresses with the classified information, and the Army will be forced to wipe thousands of computers, and maybe discipline soldiers for having classified information on their insecure computer (rules, are rules, right?)
Classified information is not declassified just because it is made public! It still carries whatever classification was originally assigned to it until its classification is formally changed. If you work in an industry where classified information is present (ANY industry in the US, not just the military) and you access leaked classified information on an unclassified network (your phone, your home computer, etc.) then you are in violation of the rules. End of story. The Army isn't being stupid or trying to hide things, they are trying to protect their own people.
Of course, if they were really trying to protect their people, they could say that "Previously classified information that has been released to public news organizations and made publicly available may be accessed by military personnel with no repercussions." Do they really want their own personnel to be less informed than the general public? It's not like preventing soldiers from reading the information is going to keep it out of the hands of the "enemy".
This isn't about preventing employees from knowing. It's about keeping classified information off of unclassified networks.
Once it's made public, then what's the point of keeping it designated as "classified"? If it's already known to be in the hands of the public and the "bad guys", what possible justification is there for keeping it out of the hands of the "good guys"?
It seems a little overly sensationalist to aggregate the devices together when determining the storage size to make such a dramatic 2 mile high tower of DVD's... If you look at them individually, it's not that much data:
(15 x 10^15 bytes/device) / (2000 devices) / (1 x 10e9 bytes/gb) = 7500GB, or 7.5TB
That's a stack of 4TB hard drives 2 inches high. Or if you must use DVD's, that's a stack of 1600 DVD's 2 meters high.
Where is the/. user that supports the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling? Before the ruling, I as an individual was not allowed by buy a TV ad for my favorite politician within 90 days of an election. After the ruling I can.
I have seen nothing but hatred for that ruling, which increased freedom, here on/.
Truth - If the regulation oppresses those against government it is good here, period.
Can you post a link to the Slashdot story that discussed the ruling?
Regulation is good when it forces other people to do what I want/support... Regulation is bad when it lets other people force me to do things I don't want/support.
I do love the hypocrisy of Slashdot.
I've found that in general, slashdot users tend to support regulation that leads to more freedom, and are against regulation that suppresses freedom especially when it comes to the rights of companies to impose their will on individuals. For example: supporting reform of the patent system to stop patent trolls, being against regulation that supports DRM or limits the ability of consumers to use content they own, being for regulation to enforce net neutrality, being for regulation that prevents a state from restricting where people can buy a car, etc.
This raises more question than it answers. If I sell a Superman Collectible action figure on eBay to someone on Exoplanet Kepler-74 b, will I earn any interest on the money during the 4300 years it will take for his payment to reach me? Will Paypal freeze the funds for the 4300+ years it will take for me to ship it to him (it could even be a few days longer if I don't use express shipping). What kind of transaction fees will there be for interstellar payments?
These are the questions I want to see answered before I get excited about this... this has the potential to really open up the interstellar market since securing payment has been the biggest stumbling block.
I'd say that you should look for work at a military contractor (or work as a civilian for the military itself) where they will value your military and flight experience (and security clearances). If I interviewed you for an engineering position at my civilian company, your military/flight experience would mean little aside from some interesting (for me) chitchat while waiting for the elevator, and you'd lose some points because you've been out of EE for a decade. It's no different than if you spent 10 years as a commercial pilot or even truck driver, you've been out of the field for a decade, so unless your military or flight experience was a plus for the position, I'd probably go with the guy that's been doing engineering work for the past 10 years.
it's just plain wrong and will likely cause problems with every function that accepts varargs Yes it is everywhere. Let me flip that around a little and demonstrate.
long long xyz = 256*256*256*256*256; printf("%d", xyz);
What does that print? Depends on the version of printf you are using. I have seen it break in at least 3 different crts out there both closed and open source. Then act differently depending on which version of compiler you are using.
Since the behavior when printing a long long with the %d conversion specifier is undefined, I'm not sure how it can be said to break when there's no definition for what should happen... it could print the "right" value, an incorrect value, core dump, or the computer could lift itself off the desk and smack the developer on the head, and any of those would be valid behavior since there's no definition of what "should" happen. The %d format specifier is documented to work with int's, not long longs, you want %lld for a long long. That's a little like passing a URL to fopen() and saying that it failed because it didn't open a stream to the URL. Mavbe you're working on a platform where stdio works differently and you can print a long long with %d, but don't expect that to work everywhere.
It gets even more squirly when you use scanf. I spent many days fixing many many a printf/scanf. Both valgrind and boundschecker found the errors. Match your types or you will suffer. There are some types that do not map to printf on one platform and will on another.
My point was not to have an argument about a bug (a common easy one too). But to show how easy it is to get something so simple wrong. The designers of printf/scanf assumed people read the docs completely and understand every % type that goes into it.
If a programmer doesn't understand the API for a particular function, he really shouldn't be using it, and he shouldn't be surprised that undefined behavior is inconsistent across compilers and architectures, since that's pretty much what "undefined" means. You may say that the comments to 'use a more modern language' were snarky, but one advantage of some of those languages is that they can help the programmer from accidentally running into this type of mistake. C has its place and sometimes it's the only real choice, but it's going to do less to help the developer play within the rules than some other languages.
I picked the printf example deliberately because it is usually taught early on in many C classes. Even some of the people who responded to me gave me snark such as 'use a more modern language'. Yeah, like I have that choice all the time in my projects.
Also even you made the same mistake I did "Aren't short's in a vararg supposed to be automatically promoted to int's by the compiler" . The answer is yes it should. The real world is maybe or maybe not. Depends on the compiler. When targeting 10 different compilers you do not play 'it should'. You check. I found ARM/MIPS compilers tend to get it right. x86 compilers tend to vary as the platform is more forgiving with memory alignment issues.
Any C compiler that doesn't promote shorts to ints doesn't comply with the C standard, so it's not really a C compiler (of course, on some platforms, an int may be the same a short, so you should always be explicit if you're writing cross platform code). So yeah, if you're using a compiler that is almost, but not quite, a C compiler, you'll run into a variety of problems, and it adds to code complexity because you can't count on the undocumented non-standard behavior remaining there across newer (or older) versions of the compiler so you'll have to allow for different behavior across different compilers.
what value would there be in the government sharing my travel data with Visa/Mastercard?
What makes you think that the commerical entities ask first? Most government databases appear to leak like sieves. In all probability. the data is freely available on servers in Afganistan/NIgeria/Russia for anyone who wants it.
Even if that were true and stolen government databases were available in Afganistan/NIgeria/Russia, why would Visa/Mastercard download a freely available database of dubious origin and validity for use in fraud prevention? Why wouldn't the criminals that steal card numbers to go on spending sprees just alter the database to hide their activity before making it available to the banks?
That one simple statement actually does a LOT of stuff.
Not really, it just passes a pointer to a string as vararg to a function named "printf". There's not much complexity in that statement. The printf function may be complex, but that's why it's in a standard library -- so programmers don't need to reinvent the wheel every time they need to do some common task.
The % operators are hellish to get just right (unless you do not mind memory over/under runs). Many implementations get something as simple as
short xyz = 1; printf("%d", xyz);
Results in a memory overrun in many versions of printf.
right way is printf("%h", xyz);
That is but one example of something complex that is simple to write that is hard to get right.
Aren't short's in a vararg supposed to be automatically promoted to int's by the compiler (and floats to doubles)? If this is true, then sounds like this case isn't "hard to get right", it's just plain wrong and will likely cause problems with every function that accepts varargs.
Ever wonder why your purchases via credit card three states removed from home after a day full of driving aren't flagged for a fraud alert? This is why.
Sorry, I'm not willing to subscribe to that level of paranoia, while I can believe that the government sweeps up a *lot* of data from all of us, I don't believe it's a two way street, what value would there be in the government sharing my travel data with Visa/Mastercard? It's not like they have to do it to get cooperation from the banks since a secret national security letter can make private companies hand over any data the government wants.
When my girlfriend and I made a cross country trip a few years back (in my car), her credit card worked fine at our destination thousands of miles from home, even though she last used it before we left home at a Starbucks. Conversely, my credit card was recently flagged for fraud at a home depot 5 miles from my house when I was purchasing several hundred dollars of painting supplies -- I had to call them to verify that it was me making the purchase.
This quote from TFA seems to argue *against* complexity:
"I had incorporated some sophisticated regular expression pattern-matching technology into AWK Brian Kernighan once took a look at the pattern-matching module that I had written and his only addition was putting a comment, 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.' As a consequence, neither Kernighan nor Weinberger would touch that part of the code. I was the one who always had to make the bug fixes to that module" (from Masterminds of Programming, p. 103). Complex problems require complex code.
So he wrote some code that was so complicated that no one besides himself is able maintain it. That sounds like more of an argument *against* complicated code than for it.
Note that it's not Al Aho that said "Complex problems require complex code". Is awk still using the same code today, or has it been rewritten to be more maintainable?
Is monochromatic as far back as you can remember? It was probably ASCII porn downloaded at 300 or 1200 baud, so it could be time to reach for the tissues before the picture even finished downloading.
Tissues? How do you wipe off the ceiling with tissues?
Mom gets upset when I leave stains on the ceiling so I have to stand on the bed and wipe it off.
Matthew Broderick's used load of tissues is included, he left them after looking at monochromatic porn of your mom.
Is monochromatic as far back as you can remember? It was probably ASCII porn downloaded at 300 or 1200 baud, so it could be time to reach for the tissues before the picture even finished downloading.
The funny thing is that amateur radios often make better business / public service radios than most commercial units. I can control the output on my Yaesu (Standard / Vertex) 2M rigs much better than the Fire department can do on their super expensive Motorola bricks.
I think it's because the average public service radio user doesn't *want* that level of control. They want to turn the dial to the talk group or person they want to talk to, then push "talk" and have the appropriate people hear what he has to say. He doesn't want to think "Hmm....Bob's on the other side of the parking lot, I think I can turn down to 1W simplex and he'll hear me. Oh wait, but Jim is across town, so now I better switch over to the repeater frequency and increase power to 5W so I can hit the mountaintop repeater". Instead, he wants to switch his trunking radio dial to "dispatch", or "batallion commander" or whatever and talk without worrying about frequencies or power or any other settings.
For one thing, I don't need a $20,000 (actual cost, complete with high quality Chinese dongle) box to change bandwidth and power parameters. I can do it from the front panel*. The power spectrum looks much cleaner than the Motorola rigs.
If it weren't blatantly illegal I would rig my HT to broadcast on Fire / Rescue channels and not have to take the overweight FT5000 POS that they dumped on me. **
Most public services have moved to trunking systems. How would you set up the trunk on your ham radio?
Well they already allow proprietary protocols like DSTAR (you can decode the packets and see what's there, but you have to pay a company for the privilege to do so - not quite in the spirit of ham radio).
Why not allow encrypted packets with a cleartext callsign wrapper? Then you can verify the source of the packets and have access to modern uses of the spectrum. Frankly, I think digital modes are more interesting that ragchewing with the oldtimers anyway, and some of the old FCC rules and bandplans are causing amateur radio to seriously stagnate.
Because the callsign wrapper doesn't help you find abuse - why would a business pay for an expensive business radio system if they can just issue "cheap" ham radios to their employees and encrypt their data so no one knows they are using it for business?
DSTAR has the same problem (though mitigated because any ham can buy a DSTAR receiver), proprietary codecs shouldn't run on ham bands.
It is ok if God knows your evil thoughts but not ok for your neighbors or government to know about the other real you? Whatever...
I'm ok with God, Unicorns, The Tooth Fairy and other imaginary beings knowing all of my thoughts and activities. The stuffed teddy bear in my bedroom watches everything I do and I'm ok with that too.
It's only when surveillance crosses over to the real world that I have a problem with it.
Does this mean the alleged NSA taps on major internet links that monitor all traffic would have to be reported as breaches too if an EU ISP discovers (or knowingly installs) one?
I believe the newer designs are safer, but the rub is that any reactor will still be operated by the same model of humans that brought us Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Can you honestly tell me that any new reactor will be built and operated by companies that have any different set of priorities than the ones that currently run nuclear plants? Keep it cheap, repay the investors, keep the profits coming in, whatever it takes.I would like to see dozens of new reactors in the U.S., but as long as the clueless and the greedy continue to own the techs who build and operate them, we're going to see more "accidents".
I thought the whole point behind newer designs like the thorium reactor is that they fail safe - they are inherently safe so even if you do nothing to an overheating reactor, it will moderate on its own.
Here's a quote from an article on the plant; "One reason the bluff was lowered was so that the base of the reactors could be constructed on solid bedrock to mitigate the threat posed by earthquakes. Another reason was the lowered height would keep the running costs of the seawater pumps low."
They lowered the height of the plant because they wanted to save money - regardless of the design, this is the kind of decision that will be made by people who are looking to profits and not safety. You CANNOT engineer out the risks attributable to the profit motive, and I wish we could recognize that."
So they lowered the plant for better seismic safety at the expense of Tsunami safety and still kept it within design limits. The assumptions for the biggest Tsunami they could experience were not correct, but the company shouldn't be determining design limits, that's the work of a regulatory board.
Every power plant (and industrial plant) has a profit motive that limits its environmental safety, otherwise instead of emitting millions of tons of carbon dioxide and radioactive fly-ash, every coal plant would be doing carbon sequestration and filtering out ash and other emissions, concentrating the radioactive contaminants in the waste, and treating it as radioactive waste. Nuclear may not be perfect, but it is likely to be better than the alternatives (assuming that you care about CO2 and radioactive emissions from coal plants).
your refrigerator compressor will be doing more work when the evaporator coils are cooled by 95 degree outside air instead of 70 degree air conditioned air.
That air-conditioned air doesn't just appear from nowhere though. It also took power to create that. You've just offloaded the refrigerator compressor's work to the AC unit.
Right, so your refrigerator is using less energy, your AC is using more (minus some efficiency loss).
a modern energy efficient refrigerator uses around $60 of electricity/year (500KWh * 12 cents/KWh)
Again, you're not calculating in the impact the refrigerator has on the HVAC system. What does it cost to remove the waste heat generated by 500KWh from the house?
Since a heat pump is greater than 100% efficient at moving heat, much less than 500KWh. Maybe 100Kwh to move 500Kwh of heat - or $12/year if you run your AC all year round, if you use AC 4 months/year, then it's $4.
And what about other heat sources within the home? Stove, microwave, dryer all come to mind. They could also be integrated into the same system.
It probably wouldn't be economical to integrate all these systems as they're currently designed though - but that's the discussion at hand. If these devices were designed to work with the HVAC system as well as each-other there could be significant efficiency savings.
Again, lots of changes for little gain - two 2000W stove elements turned on for 30 minutes/day yields 730KWh/year of heat, so maybe 200KWh to remove it from the house or around $24/year (or $8/year if you run the AC 4 months/year). And for that you want to build a sealed hood around my stove and vent the heat outside? My time is worth something too and opening up the vent hood every time I want to stir a pot (and losing the ability to smell food as it's cooking as a way to check doneness, seasoning, etc) will quickly cost me more than $8/year. And adding $1000 to a kitchen remodel to build new ductwork won't make it any more appealing to me.
A better design would be to simply make the refrigerator an additional zone on the HVAC.
I think the costs you estimate are unrealistic - I doubt the incremental cost to add a zone to an HVAC is nearly that high (aside from the typical markup of multi-zone as a luxury item - which this would not be). Sure, retro-fitting an existing house would be expensive, but for those traditional refrigerators would be fine, just as people tend to use window units on older homes that lack an integrated HVAC.
Consider that cost-wise nothing needs to go into the HVAC to support a refrigerator than what would need to otherwise go into the refrigerator itself, aside from a few more feet of ductwork, or lines, or whatever technology is used to transfer heat.
The reason things are done the way they are is tradition.
Why would you add on the refrigerator as a new zone on existing HVAC? I thought the intention was to vent the heat outside, not into the current HVAC system (since if you want to do that, you can just keep it as is, and let the head convect naturally from the refrigerator into the room).
While I may have overestimated the cost to add enough duct work to vent the refrigerator heat outside in new construction (assuming that the refrigerator is near an outside wall, otherwise you may need to run dual ducts 20 feet or more to get the heat outside), I dramatically overestimated the savings - a more realistic savings would probably be around 20% (and only during the times of the year and times of the day when you're running the air conditioning). So during summer months you're looking at saving $2/month. Still sounds like an awful lot of complexity to save a couple dollars a month.
Slashdot Mirror
Except it hasn't been "released" to public news organizations. It was LEAKED. There is a formal release process, and it was NOT followed. The documents remain classified until formally declassified, at which point they MAY be released to the news or the public, at the discretion of the document owner. . .
"Leaked" or "released" is a matter of semantics and it depends which side of the fence you're on, but the end result is the same. Whether the president of the united states himself handed over the information or a low level analyst handed it over, the information is out in the public for all to read. Well, all except for the military and others in the government with security clearance, they still aren't allowed to read it and can be prosecuted for reading the news on their home computer.
Of course, if they were really trying to protect their people, they could say that "Previously classified information that has been released to public news organizations and made publicly available may be accessed by military personnel with no repercussions.".
Of course, that means that anyone can declassify information by anonymously leaking it to the press.
Yeah, that's kind of the point behind anonymously leaking it to the press -- making the information public. And once it's public, keeping it out of the hands of military personnel is inane - if our enemies can read the information in the newspaper, why can't our soldiers?
The Army doesn't have the authority to say that.
Then whoever classified the information and had such little control over it that a low level analyst contractor could walk out the door with thousands of pages of classified information should be saying it.
This would make a great DoS attack against the military:
Campos wrote if an employee accidentally downloaded classified information, it would result in "labor intensive" work, such as the wipe or destruction of the computer's hard drive
All a hacker needs to do is hack some website commonly used by the military (army.mil?) and post some leaked classified information on it, or send an email blast to army.mil email addresses with the classified information, and the Army will be forced to wipe thousands of computers, and maybe discipline soldiers for having classified information on their insecure computer (rules, are rules, right?)
Classified information is not declassified just because it is made public! It still carries whatever classification was originally assigned to it until its classification is formally changed. If you work in an industry where classified information is present (ANY industry in the US, not just the military) and you access leaked classified information on an unclassified network (your phone, your home computer, etc.) then you are in violation of the rules. End of story. The Army isn't being stupid or trying to hide things, they are trying to protect their own people.
Of course, if they were really trying to protect their people, they could say that "Previously classified information that has been released to public news organizations and made publicly available may be accessed by military personnel with no repercussions." Do they really want their own personnel to be less informed than the general public? It's not like preventing soldiers from reading the information is going to keep it out of the hands of the "enemy".
This isn't about preventing employees from knowing. It's about keeping classified information off of unclassified networks.
Once it's made public, then what's the point of keeping it designated as "classified"? If it's already known to be in the hands of the public and the "bad guys", what possible justification is there for keeping it out of the hands of the "good guys"?
It seems a little overly sensationalist to aggregate the devices together when determining the storage size to make such a dramatic 2 mile high tower of DVD's... If you look at them individually, it's not that much data:
(15 x 10^15 bytes/device) / (2000 devices) / (1 x 10e9 bytes/gb) = 7500GB, or 7.5TB
That's a stack of 4TB hard drives 2 inches high. Or if you must use DVD's, that's a stack of 1600 DVD's 2 meters high.
Where is the /. user that supports the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling?
Before the ruling, I as an individual was not allowed by buy a TV ad for my favorite politician within 90 days of an election.
After the ruling I can.
I have seen nothing but hatred for that ruling, which increased freedom, here on /.
Truth - If the regulation oppresses those against government it is good here, period.
Can you post a link to the Slashdot story that discussed the ruling?
Regulation is good when it forces other people to do what I want/support... Regulation is bad when it lets other people force me to do things I don't want/support.
I do love the hypocrisy of Slashdot.
I've found that in general, slashdot users tend to support regulation that leads to more freedom, and are against regulation that suppresses freedom especially when it comes to the rights of companies to impose their will on individuals. For example: supporting reform of the patent system to stop patent trolls, being against regulation that supports DRM or limits the ability of consumers to use content they own, being for regulation to enforce net neutrality, being for regulation that prevents a state from restricting where people can buy a car, etc.
Is that really being hypocritical?
This raises more question than it answers. If I sell a Superman Collectible action figure on eBay to someone on Exoplanet Kepler-74 b, will I earn any interest on the money during the 4300 years it will take for his payment to reach me? Will Paypal freeze the funds for the 4300+ years it will take for me to ship it to him (it could even be a few days longer if I don't use express shipping). What kind of transaction fees will there be for interstellar payments?
These are the questions I want to see answered before I get excited about this... this has the potential to really open up the interstellar market since securing payment has been the biggest stumbling block.
I'd say that you should look for work at a military contractor (or work as a civilian for the military itself) where they will value your military and flight experience (and security clearances). If I interviewed you for an engineering position at my civilian company, your military/flight experience would mean little aside from some interesting (for me) chitchat while waiting for the elevator, and you'd lose some points because you've been out of EE for a decade. It's no different than if you spent 10 years as a commercial pilot or even truck driver, you've been out of the field for a decade, so unless your military or flight experience was a plus for the position, I'd probably go with the guy that's been doing engineering work for the past 10 years.
it's just plain wrong and will likely cause problems with every function that accepts varargs
Yes it is everywhere. Let me flip that around a little and demonstrate.
long long xyz = 256*256*256*256*256;
printf("%d", xyz);
What does that print? Depends on the version of printf you are using. I have seen it break in at least 3 different crts out there both closed and open source. Then act differently depending on which version of compiler you are using.
Since the behavior when printing a long long with the %d conversion specifier is undefined, I'm not sure how it can be said to break when there's no definition for what should happen... it could print the "right" value, an incorrect value, core dump, or the computer could lift itself off the desk and smack the developer on the head, and any of those would be valid behavior since there's no definition of what "should" happen. The %d format specifier is documented to work with int's, not long longs, you want %lld for a long long. That's a little like passing a URL to fopen() and saying that it failed because it didn't open a stream to the URL. Mavbe you're working on a platform where stdio works differently and you can print a long long with %d, but don't expect that to work everywhere.
It gets even more squirly when you use scanf. I spent many days fixing many many a printf/scanf. Both valgrind and boundschecker found the errors. Match your types or you will suffer. There are some types that do not map to printf on one platform and will on another.
My point was not to have an argument about a bug (a common easy one too). But to show how easy it is to get something so simple wrong. The designers of printf/scanf assumed people read the docs completely and understand every % type that goes into it.
If a programmer doesn't understand the API for a particular function, he really shouldn't be using it, and he shouldn't be surprised that undefined behavior is inconsistent across compilers and architectures, since that's pretty much what "undefined" means. You may say that the comments to 'use a more modern language' were snarky, but one advantage of some of those languages is that they can help the programmer from accidentally running into this type of mistake. C has its place and sometimes it's the only real choice, but it's going to do less to help the developer play within the rules than some other languages.
I picked the printf example deliberately because it is usually taught early on in many C classes. Even some of the people who responded to me gave me snark such as 'use a more modern language'. Yeah, like I have that choice all the time in my projects.
Also even you made the same mistake I did "Aren't short's in a vararg supposed to be automatically promoted to int's by the compiler" . The answer is yes it should. The real world is maybe or maybe not. Depends on the compiler. When targeting 10 different compilers you do not play 'it should'. You check. I found ARM/MIPS compilers tend to get it right. x86 compilers tend to vary as the platform is more forgiving with memory alignment issues.
Any C compiler that doesn't promote shorts to ints doesn't comply with the C standard, so it's not really a C compiler (of course, on some platforms, an int may be the same a short, so you should always be explicit if you're writing cross platform code). So yeah, if you're using a compiler that is almost, but not quite, a C compiler, you'll run into a variety of problems, and it adds to code complexity because you can't count on the undocumented non-standard behavior remaining there across newer (or older) versions of the compiler so you'll have to allow for different behavior across different compilers.
what value would there be in the government sharing my travel data with Visa/Mastercard?
What makes you think that the commerical entities ask first? Most government databases appear to leak like sieves. In all probability. the data is freely available on servers in Afganistan/NIgeria/Russia for anyone who wants it.
Even if that were true and stolen government databases were available in Afganistan/NIgeria/Russia, why would Visa/Mastercard download a freely available database of dubious origin and validity for use in fraud prevention? Why wouldn't the criminals that steal card numbers to go on spending sprees just alter the database to hide their activity before making it available to the banks?
printf("yes");
That one simple statement actually does a LOT of stuff.
Not really, it just passes a pointer to a string as vararg to a function named "printf". There's not much complexity in that statement. The printf function may be complex, but that's why it's in a standard library -- so programmers don't need to reinvent the wheel every time they need to do some common task.
The % operators are hellish to get just right (unless you do not mind memory over/under runs). Many implementations get something as simple as
short xyz = 1;
printf("%d", xyz);
Results in a memory overrun in many versions of printf.
right way is
printf("%h", xyz);
That is but one example of something complex that is simple to write that is hard to get right.
Aren't short's in a vararg supposed to be automatically promoted to int's by the compiler (and floats to doubles)? If this is true, then sounds like this case isn't "hard to get right", it's just plain wrong and will likely cause problems with every function that accepts varargs.
Ever wonder why your purchases via credit card three states removed from home after a day full of driving aren't flagged for a fraud alert? This is why.
Sorry, I'm not willing to subscribe to that level of paranoia, while I can believe that the government sweeps up a *lot* of data from all of us, I don't believe it's a two way street, what value would there be in the government sharing my travel data with Visa/Mastercard? It's not like they have to do it to get cooperation from the banks since a secret national security letter can make private companies hand over any data the government wants.
When my girlfriend and I made a cross country trip a few years back (in my car), her credit card worked fine at our destination thousands of miles from home, even though she last used it before we left home at a Starbucks. Conversely, my credit card was recently flagged for fraud at a home depot 5 miles from my house when I was purchasing several hundred dollars of painting supplies -- I had to call them to verify that it was me making the purchase.
This quote from TFA seems to argue *against* complexity:
"I had incorporated some sophisticated regular expression pattern-matching technology into AWK Brian Kernighan once took a look at the pattern-matching module that I had written and his only addition was putting a comment, 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.' As a consequence, neither Kernighan nor Weinberger would touch that part of the code. I was the one who always had to make the bug fixes to that module" (from Masterminds of Programming, p. 103). Complex problems require complex code.
So he wrote some code that was so complicated that no one besides himself is able maintain it. That sounds like more of an argument *against* complicated code than for it.
Note that it's not Al Aho that said "Complex problems require complex code". Is awk still using the same code today, or has it been rewritten to be more maintainable?
Is monochromatic as far back as you can remember? It was probably ASCII porn downloaded at 300 or 1200 baud, so it could be time to reach for the tissues before the picture even finished downloading.
Tissues? How do you wipe off the ceiling with tissues?
Mom gets upset when I leave stains on the ceiling so I have to stand on the bed and wipe it off.
Matthew Broderick's used load of tissues is included, he left them after looking at monochromatic porn of your mom.
Is monochromatic as far back as you can remember? It was probably ASCII porn downloaded at 300 or 1200 baud, so it could be time to reach for the tissues before the picture even finished downloading.
The funny thing is that amateur radios often make better business / public service radios than most commercial units. I can control the output on my Yaesu (Standard / Vertex) 2M rigs much better than the Fire department can do on their super expensive
Motorola bricks.
I think it's because the average public service radio user doesn't *want* that level of control. They want to turn the dial to the talk group or person they want to talk to, then push "talk" and have the appropriate people hear what he has to say. He doesn't want to think "Hmm....Bob's on the other side of the parking lot, I think I can turn down to 1W simplex and he'll hear me. Oh wait, but Jim is across town, so now I better switch over to the repeater frequency and increase power to 5W so I can hit the mountaintop repeater". Instead, he wants to switch his trunking radio dial to "dispatch", or "batallion commander" or whatever and talk without worrying about frequencies or power or any other settings.
For one thing, I don't need a $20,000 (actual cost, complete with high quality Chinese dongle) box to change bandwidth and power parameters. I can do it from the front panel*. The power spectrum looks much cleaner than the Motorola rigs.
If it weren't blatantly illegal I would rig my HT to broadcast on Fire / Rescue channels and not have to take the overweight FT5000 POS that they dumped on me. **
Most public services have moved to trunking systems. How would you set up the trunk on your ham radio?
Well they already allow proprietary protocols like DSTAR (you can decode the packets and see what's there, but you have to pay a company for the privilege to do so - not quite in the spirit of ham radio).
Why not allow encrypted packets with a cleartext callsign wrapper? Then you can verify the source of the packets and have access to modern uses of the spectrum. Frankly, I think digital modes are more interesting that ragchewing with the oldtimers anyway, and some of the old FCC rules and bandplans are causing amateur radio to seriously stagnate.
Because the callsign wrapper doesn't help you find abuse - why would a business pay for an expensive business radio system if they can just issue "cheap" ham radios to their employees and encrypt their data so no one knows they are using it for business?
DSTAR has the same problem (though mitigated because any ham can buy a DSTAR receiver), proprietary codecs shouldn't run on ham bands.
It is ok if God knows your evil thoughts but not ok for your neighbors or government to know about the other real you? Whatever...
I'm ok with God, Unicorns, The Tooth Fairy and other imaginary beings knowing all of my thoughts and activities. The stuffed teddy bear in my bedroom watches everything I do and I'm ok with that too.
It's only when surveillance crosses over to the real world that I have a problem with it.
Does this mean the alleged NSA taps on major internet links that monitor all traffic would have to be reported as breaches too if an EU ISP discovers (or knowingly installs) one?
I believe the newer designs are safer, but the rub is that any reactor will still be operated by the same model of humans that brought us Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. Can you honestly tell me that any new reactor will be built and operated by companies that have any different set of priorities than the ones that currently run nuclear plants? Keep it cheap, repay the investors, keep the profits coming in, whatever it takes.I would like to see dozens of new reactors in the U.S., but as long as the clueless and the greedy continue to own the techs who build and operate them, we're going to see more "accidents".
I thought the whole point behind newer designs like the thorium reactor is that they fail safe - they are inherently safe so even if you do nothing to an overheating reactor, it will moderate on its own.
Here's a quote from an article on the plant; "One reason the bluff was lowered was so that the base of the reactors could be constructed on solid bedrock to mitigate the threat posed by earthquakes. Another reason was the lowered height would keep the running costs of the seawater pumps low."
They lowered the height of the plant because they wanted to save money - regardless of the design, this is the kind of decision that will be made by people who are looking to profits and not safety. You CANNOT engineer out the risks attributable to the profit motive, and I wish we could recognize that."
So they lowered the plant for better seismic safety at the expense of Tsunami safety and still kept it within design limits. The assumptions for the biggest Tsunami they could experience were not correct, but the company shouldn't be determining design limits, that's the work of a regulatory board.
Every power plant (and industrial plant) has a profit motive that limits its environmental safety, otherwise instead of emitting millions of tons of carbon dioxide and radioactive fly-ash, every coal plant would be doing carbon sequestration and filtering out ash and other emissions, concentrating the radioactive contaminants in the waste, and treating it as radioactive waste. Nuclear may not be perfect, but it is likely to be better than the alternatives (assuming that you care about CO2 and radioactive emissions from coal plants).
your refrigerator compressor will be doing more work when the evaporator coils are cooled by 95 degree outside air instead of 70 degree air conditioned air.
That air-conditioned air doesn't just appear from nowhere though. It also took power to create that.
You've just offloaded the refrigerator compressor's work to the AC unit.
Right, so your refrigerator is using less energy, your AC is using more (minus some efficiency loss).
a modern energy efficient refrigerator uses around $60 of electricity/year (500KWh * 12 cents/KWh)
Again, you're not calculating in the impact the refrigerator has on the HVAC system.
What does it cost to remove the waste heat generated by 500KWh from the house?
Since a heat pump is greater than 100% efficient at moving heat, much less than 500KWh. Maybe 100Kwh to move 500Kwh of heat - or $12/year if you run your AC all year round, if you use AC 4 months/year, then it's $4.
And what about other heat sources within the home?
Stove, microwave, dryer all come to mind. They could also be integrated into the same system.
It probably wouldn't be economical to integrate all these systems as they're currently designed though - but that's the discussion at hand.
If these devices were designed to work with the HVAC system as well as each-other there could be significant efficiency savings.
Again, lots of changes for little gain - two 2000W stove elements turned on for 30 minutes/day yields 730KWh/year of heat, so maybe 200KWh to remove it from the house or around $24/year (or $8/year if you run the AC 4 months/year). And for that you want to build a sealed hood around my stove and vent the heat outside? My time is worth something too and opening up the vent hood every time I want to stir a pot (and losing the ability to smell food as it's cooking as a way to check doneness, seasoning, etc) will quickly cost me more than $8/year. And adding $1000 to a kitchen remodel to build new ductwork won't make it any more appealing to me.
A better design would be to simply make the refrigerator an additional zone on the HVAC.
I think the costs you estimate are unrealistic - I doubt the incremental cost to add a zone to an HVAC is nearly that high (aside from the typical markup of multi-zone as a luxury item - which this would not be). Sure, retro-fitting an existing house would be expensive, but for those traditional refrigerators would be fine, just as people tend to use window units on older homes that lack an integrated HVAC.
Consider that cost-wise nothing needs to go into the HVAC to support a refrigerator than what would need to otherwise go into the refrigerator itself, aside from a few more feet of ductwork, or lines, or whatever technology is used to transfer heat.
The reason things are done the way they are is tradition.
Why would you add on the refrigerator as a new zone on existing HVAC? I thought the intention was to vent the heat outside, not into the current HVAC system (since if you want to do that, you can just keep it as is, and let the head convect naturally from the refrigerator into the room).
While I may have overestimated the cost to add enough duct work to vent the refrigerator heat outside in new construction (assuming that the refrigerator is near an outside wall, otherwise you may need to run dual ducts 20 feet or more to get the heat outside), I dramatically overestimated the savings - a more realistic savings would probably be around 20% (and only during the times of the year and times of the day when you're running the air conditioning). So during summer months you're looking at saving $2/month. Still sounds like an awful lot of complexity to save a couple dollars a month.