I do work in the industry, and you're right that must bugs are caused by sloppiness and inattentiveness. Those bugs are easy to solve and show up in early testing and code reviews. It's the complexity ones that make you spend a whole week with something like "tried to fix bug #104: still 0% percent complete" as your team's current tasking. Or worse, show up a week after delivery. Those bugs are usually complexity related and half of the time deal with unpublished limitations of 3rd party libraries.
I've also done some amateur carpentry: I suck at it, but the nice thing is that usually you can look at something later and say, "That panel is crooked, why don't I pull it off and redo it?" You don't usually have to spend days testing and debating about which panel might be crooked and call vendors to find out whether your tools are working like they are supposed to.
Can you seriously think of any movie where you'd want to experience every smell?
Anything on the food network.
Actually, as a rather smell oriented person, it would greatly increase my immersion in pretty much any movie and I would be all over this if it was cheaper. I'm sure I'm not alone on this either.
I think parent is right, the only way to detect which songs you ripped and which songs someone else ripped is to figure out what is unique about your ripped collection, and there, we can't help you.
Keep in mind that if you can't tell the difference then your not really perjurying yourself with any EULA that you accept if you honestly thought the music was your own. And if you can't tell the difference, how will they?
I was thinking along the lines of management coming in and saying: "Either we hang some colored lights around that will make you feel like taking the stairs or we put: 'Take the stairs rather than the elevator whenever possible' on your list of yearly goals." I would really prefer the former. Just because I don't think that colored lights encourage me to take the stairs doesn't mean its unethical for them to do so. Balls that light up depending on whether or not I'm being green or not are preferable to most of the creepy posters companies already put up in order to influence my behavior.
Personally I think the employees are right. I don't think the color of an art piece would make me change whether I take the stairs or not, but the reminder that I'm making a choice about it would definitely make consciously choose, rather than defaulting to the more convenient elevator. Also the implication that management prefers the stairs over the elevator would be a strong influence on me.
it's more likely that the kind of person who'll pick up a phone...
Will be the average guy/gal in your area. I don't know where your from, but in my area I'd say 80% would return it if it was easy and a small fraction of the remaining 20% would be criminal enough to do anything more than attempt to e-bay it.
Your confusing people who will find a dropped phone with people who would steal a phone.
Yes, this information could have been dug up on you before, but consider your example of your wife used to have to hire someone to follow you. To get to that point she had to have enough suspicions to lay down a few hundred in order to have them confirmed. Now she'll just plug your iphone into her computer while your in the shower and find out where you've been.
Although that was another article, the situation and fears are the same. The easier it gets to know information about people, the less your enemies, friends, potential employers, advertisers, government, etc have to work to dig up the information, the less they'll weigh whether they are invading your privacy or if it is really worth the effort.
It's funny how you can be expected to put forth all this excitement, commitment and seeming loyalty towards companies that would just as soon lay you off if it was amiable for them.
Well, we put up seeming loyalty because we will just as soon quit when it is amicable to us.
Managers are people too, they like to see happy employees that like them and like what they are doing, just as we like managers like us and what we do.
Well, I don't have a password on my wireless router, because I'm too lazy, but if swat busts through my door and drags me out and yells at me for awhile about "This was a 500k raid, the pedo we've been after for months has surely disappeared already and the taxpayers and future victims need to know why you did this to them!"
Like hell I'm saying, "Well officers, I'm lazy." No, I'd say "I tried! Oh GOD I tried!!! I tried so hard I bled! Next time I'll try to my death!!!!"
I do see your point, but you also have to consider GP's point:
If you lock your wireless down and a pedo moves in next door, but your neighbor on the other side of the pedo didn't, you won't even have to be held at gunpoint or show the authorities and maybe the local media your perfectly legal collection of porn. The guy on the other side has to.
If the pedo is a hacker: well that sucks for you, but even though authorities have a little more evidence against you they'll still find that all your porn is legit and whatever you are accused of doing is not from a mac address of a computer you own, and there are no records of the activities in your house.
If they REALLY have it in for you, then encrypted or not they'll drive for that conviction and ruin your reputation in the process, in which case, you really want to reduce your chance of any such encounter. The only way I see is by hoping the pedo is not a hacker or is lazy enough to use the other guys wireless.
If people can't see this: http://msgboard.snopes.com/politics/graphics/birth.jpg, realize that birth announcements were made in the local papers, and notice that multiple agencies have put investigating it's legitimacy and found it real, then no amount of convincing that trustedID is trustable is going to convince them.
If I have to bring at least two newspaper articles, several sworn officials, several in depth investigations and court rulings in support of my identity to prove myself for an amazon purchase and it is still not enough, I don't think I am going to adopt that system.
What's the problem with writing a TI-BASIC program to solve a formula?
I did the same. The "show your work part is easy to defeat too: have the program print out it's intermediate steps. Of course I've done the xkcd trick too.
The reason teachers should hate this, is because you distribute it to all the other students (maybe this is just what we did at my high school), or if you have a few smart people, you can cut the study time by having each smart student write one portion of the program. Then everyone aces all of the quizzes, with shockingly similar work for some time. The teacher is delighted, until one day she tests a little deeper for understanding and realizes only a few kids grasped the concept.
Actually, at my school, our teachers hated the calculators mainly because we played or made games on them all class. They were dimly aware of the programs that did problems for the students, but usually never noticed enough to be upset. Oh, except when we made an English glossary to defeat our vocabulary building assignment that upset the teachers since there was no argument for understanding there.
Do cicadas come every 17 years, or do they come every year? Answer: Depends on the species. Better Answer: Catch cicadas for 13 years and have them all identified. Even Better: Raise a brood from each year's species and see how long they take to come out and mate.
I understand his desire to make backgrounds look large and random with a minimum of downloading images, but in a game; what's wrong with just using random numbers for critter generation?
Especially considering that no matter how violent the video game players are, they are on average much smaller and scrawnier than say football players.
There is a reason one of those groups has a reputation for dominating the other with physical force.
if you can prove prior art then the patent is worthless.
Big companies often like to take the counter suit approach, where if you sue me for violating your patents I'll sue you for violating mine. (like http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/11/motorola_countersues_microsoft/) The mutually assured destruction is the deterrent to a lawsuit in the first place. Otherwise, the prosecuted company may have to spend hundreds of thousands on researchers and lawyers to try to prove prior art on the possibly dozens of frivolous patents they are accused of violating. So companies have to stockpile patents like missiles in the cold war. "For defense."
We had an article here recently from an employee of Sun about it, but I can't find it right now.
Everything was not patented, but not open source. People were motivated to keep stuff closed source (well you know what I mean). Patents were invented to stop the problems that this caused: people developed some awesome new way to do something cheaper and better, but then kept it a secret (closed source) so only they could profit from the final product. And if the info wasn't shared before such person kicked it, the knowledge was lost.
I hate patents as much as the next guy, they just didn't end open source. In fact patents force you to publish your methods in detail. In a time where mechanical-workings=source: become open source.
They are clearly just looking for random people or maybe friends of his who might just happen to know a code like that, or purposely hoping the public doesn't embarrass their code breakers. The article talks about how he has been using encryption schemes for years but provides no additional material or any personal information amateurs could use to help decode the notes. We don't even know what the notes might be, yet somehow some random guys, with no knowledge of the notes are going to out do man-years of trained cryptographers?
Uh oh, if he was a computer guy, like me, then we are totally stuck. The handwritten coded notes I keep in my pocket, are 90% of the time just encrypted passwords. There are a huge amount of similarities between words since I use a variation of the same password mixed with the website name for most sites which look kinda like the similarities here.
Though my symbol system is easy to remember and apply quickly, the decrypted text is as messy as the encrypted text. There is a good possibility these notes would be something similar, and may never be decrypted.
"Show me your papers, citizen!" is one of slashdot's accepted equivalents of "Think of the children!" It's just another thought terminating cliche.
If you'd like to argue that drunk driving is your right, or is part of a slippery slope into a police state, give us an argument for that like an adult, rather than throwing out catch phrases of a rebellious youth.
I never thought the porn was a moral judgment (is it? I might be totally wrong in that assumption). I thought it was about: give your kids one of these, download him whatever he wants, and we promise to do our best not to show him something non kid friendly.
But a gay cure app...I'm imagining parents in shock realizing that the son they planned to be gay has sneaked a download of that and oh are they mad with apple! I assume gay curing involves some interaction on the users part, so you couldn't accidentally glance at the app and have your life turned upside down. So I'm really having trouble finding a scenario where this app would cause harm or offense.
I feel censoring images one might find objectionable for your child to see makes sense, given that apple has always marketed itself towards the young crowd, but getting into the realm of censoring unpopular ideas crosses the line on what I think is acceptable use of their policies.
I think the crucial difference here is that transparent photovoltaic cells are going to be placed where glass used to be. Nobody would notice if their roof was covered in photovoltaic cells (or for that matter a vegetable garden or textiles factory as you suggested), but when you convert a used space to attempt to produce something you originally traded for, you have to do some extra cost benefit analysis.
Actually, that's what I do. except on linux, the command is locate. If it happens that the file didn't follow your naming conventions, I can usually find it in a few variations of : locate | grep | grep
With the entire world thinking that whatever geeks do to make programs is trivial, should be faster and according to most of the other posts in this thread, is way too expensive for most contractors, maybe you could give teachers the benefit of a doubt, that maybe their job is more than you think it is.
Also, my mom teaches elementary school, and I know for a fact, there is a hideous amount of keeping-up, planning and assisting kids out of hours to do.
Slashdot Mirror
I do work in the industry, and you're right that must bugs are caused by sloppiness and inattentiveness. Those bugs are easy to solve and show up in early testing and code reviews. It's the complexity ones that make you spend a whole week with something like "tried to fix bug #104: still 0% percent complete" as your team's current tasking. Or worse, show up a week after delivery. Those bugs are usually complexity related and half of the time deal with unpublished limitations of 3rd party libraries.
I've also done some amateur carpentry: I suck at it, but the nice thing is that usually you can look at something later and say, "That panel is crooked, why don't I pull it off and redo it?" You don't usually have to spend days testing and debating about which panel might be crooked and call vendors to find out whether your tools are working like they are supposed to.
Can you seriously think of any movie where you'd want to experience every smell?
Anything on the food network.
Actually, as a rather smell oriented person, it would greatly increase my immersion in pretty much any movie and I would be all over this if it was cheaper. I'm sure I'm not alone on this either.
I think parent is right, the only way to detect which songs you ripped and which songs someone else ripped is to figure out what is unique about your ripped collection, and there, we can't help you.
Keep in mind that if you can't tell the difference then your not really perjurying yourself with any EULA that you accept if you honestly thought the music was your own. And if you can't tell the difference, how will they?
Don't you think this might incorrectly flag people who send out lots of chain emails to all their friends?
I, for one, hope so.
I was thinking along the lines of management coming in and saying:
"Either we hang some colored lights around that will make you feel like taking the stairs or we put: 'Take the stairs rather than the elevator whenever possible' on your list of yearly goals."
I would really prefer the former. Just because I don't think that colored lights encourage me to take the stairs doesn't mean its unethical for them to do so. Balls that light up depending on whether or not I'm being green or not are preferable to most of the creepy posters companies already put up in order to influence my behavior.
Personally I think the employees are right. I don't think the color of an art piece would make me change whether I take the stairs or not, but the reminder that I'm making a choice about it would definitely make consciously choose, rather than defaulting to the more convenient elevator. Also the implication that management prefers the stairs over the elevator would be a strong influence on me.
it's more likely that the kind of person who'll pick up a phone...
Will be the average guy/gal in your area. I don't know where your from, but in my area I'd say 80% would return it if it was easy and a small fraction of the remaining 20% would be criminal enough to do anything more than attempt to e-bay it.
Your confusing people who will find a dropped phone with people who would steal a phone.
Yes, this information could have been dug up on you before, but consider your example of your wife used to have to hire someone to follow you. To get to that point she had to have enough suspicions to lay down a few hundred in order to have them confirmed. Now she'll just plug your iphone into her computer while your in the shower and find out where you've been.
Although that was another article, the situation and fears are the same. The easier it gets to know information about people, the less your enemies, friends, potential employers, advertisers, government, etc have to work to dig up the information, the less they'll weigh whether they are invading your privacy or if it is really worth the effort.
It's funny how you can be expected to put forth all this excitement, commitment and seeming loyalty towards companies that would just as soon lay you off if it was amiable for them.
Well, we put up seeming loyalty because we will just as soon quit when it is amicable to us.
Managers are people too, they like to see happy employees that like them and like what they are doing, just as we like managers like us and what we do.
Oh, officers, you have it all wrong! Those terabytes of k1ddy pr0n on my hard drive prove my innocence!
Well, I don't have a password on my wireless router, because I'm too lazy, but if swat busts through my door and drags me out and yells at me for awhile about "This was a 500k raid, the pedo we've been after for months has surely disappeared already and the taxpayers and future victims need to know why you did this to them!"
Like hell I'm saying, "Well officers, I'm lazy." No, I'd say "I tried! Oh GOD I tried!!! I tried so hard I bled! Next time I'll try to my death!!!!"
I do see your point, but you also have to consider GP's point:
If you lock your wireless down and a pedo moves in next door, but your neighbor on the other side of the pedo didn't, you won't even have to be held at gunpoint or show the authorities and maybe the local media your perfectly legal collection of porn. The guy on the other side has to.
If the pedo is a hacker: well that sucks for you, but even though authorities have a little more evidence against you they'll still find that all your porn is legit and whatever you are accused of doing is not from a mac address of a computer you own, and there are no records of the activities in your house.
If they REALLY have it in for you, then encrypted or not they'll drive for that conviction and ruin your reputation in the process, in which case, you really want to reduce your chance of any such encounter. The only way I see is by hoping the pedo is not a hacker or is lazy enough to use the other guys wireless.
If people can't see this: http://msgboard.snopes.com/politics/graphics/birth.jpg, realize that birth announcements were made in the local papers, and notice that multiple agencies have put investigating it's legitimacy and found it real, then no amount of convincing that trustedID is trustable is going to convince them.
If I have to bring at least two newspaper articles, several sworn officials, several in depth investigations and court rulings in support of my identity to prove myself for an amazon purchase and it is still not enough, I don't think I am going to adopt that system.
What's the problem with writing a TI-BASIC program to solve a formula?
I did the same. The "show your work part is easy to defeat too: have the program print out it's intermediate steps. Of course I've done the xkcd trick too.
The reason teachers should hate this, is because you distribute it to all the other students (maybe this is just what we did at my high school), or if you have a few smart people, you can cut the study time by having each smart student write one portion of the program. Then everyone aces all of the quizzes, with shockingly similar work for some time. The teacher is delighted, until one day she tests a little deeper for understanding and realizes only a few kids grasped the concept.
Actually, at my school, our teachers hated the calculators mainly because we played or made games on them all class. They were dimly aware of the programs that did problems for the students, but usually never noticed enough to be upset. Oh, except when we made an English glossary to defeat our vocabulary building assignment that upset the teachers since there was no argument for understanding there.
Do cicadas come every 17 years, or do they come every year?
Answer: Depends on the species.
Better Answer: Catch cicadas for 13 years and have them all identified.
Even Better: Raise a brood from each year's species and see how long they take to come out and mate.
I understand his desire to make backgrounds look large and random with a minimum of downloading images, but in a game; what's wrong with just using random numbers for critter generation?
Especially considering that no matter how violent the video game players are, they are on average much smaller and scrawnier than say football players.
There is a reason one of those groups has a reputation for dominating the other with physical force.
patents are both offensive and defensive tools
if you can prove prior art then the patent is worthless.
Big companies often like to take the counter suit approach, where if you sue me for violating your patents I'll sue you for violating mine. (like http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/11/11/motorola_countersues_microsoft/) The mutually assured destruction is the deterrent to a lawsuit in the first place. Otherwise, the prosecuted company may have to spend hundreds of thousands on researchers and lawyers to try to prove prior art on the possibly dozens of frivolous patents they are accused of violating. So companies have to stockpile patents like missiles in the cold war. "For defense."
We had an article here recently from an employee of Sun about it, but I can't find it right now.
Everything was open source before patents.
Everything was not patented, but not open source. People were motivated to keep stuff closed source (well you know what I mean). Patents were invented to stop the problems that this caused: people developed some awesome new way to do something cheaper and better, but then kept it a secret (closed source) so only they could profit from the final product. And if the info wasn't shared before such person kicked it, the knowledge was lost.
I hate patents as much as the next guy, they just didn't end open source. In fact patents force you to publish your methods in detail. In a time where mechanical-workings=source: become open source.
They are clearly just looking for random people or maybe friends of his who might just happen to know a code like that, or purposely hoping the public doesn't embarrass their code breakers. The article talks about how he has been using encryption schemes for years but provides no additional material or any personal information amateurs could use to help decode the notes. We don't even know what the notes might be, yet somehow some random guys, with no knowledge of the notes are going to out do man-years of trained cryptographers?
it was handwritten. Probably not a computer guy
Uh oh, if he was a computer guy, like me, then we are totally stuck. The handwritten coded notes I keep in my pocket, are 90% of the time just encrypted passwords. There are a huge amount of similarities between words since I use a variation of the same password mixed with the website name for most sites which look kinda like the similarities here.
Though my symbol system is easy to remember and apply quickly, the decrypted text is as messy as the encrypted text. There is a good possibility these notes would be something similar, and may never be decrypted.
"Show me your papers, citizen!" is one of slashdot's accepted equivalents of "Think of the children!" It's just another thought terminating cliche.
If you'd like to argue that drunk driving is your right, or is part of a slippery slope into a police state, give us an argument for that like an adult, rather than throwing out catch phrases of a rebellious youth.
I never thought the porn was a moral judgment (is it? I might be totally wrong in that assumption). I thought it was about: give your kids one of these, download him whatever he wants, and we promise to do our best not to show him something non kid friendly.
But a gay cure app...I'm imagining parents in shock realizing that the son they planned to be gay has sneaked a download of that and oh are they mad with apple! I assume gay curing involves some interaction on the users part, so you couldn't accidentally glance at the app and have your life turned upside down. So I'm really having trouble finding a scenario where this app would cause harm or offense.
I feel censoring images one might find objectionable for your child to see makes sense, given that apple has always marketed itself towards the young crowd, but getting into the realm of censoring unpopular ideas crosses the line on what I think is acceptable use of their policies.
I think the crucial difference here is that transparent photovoltaic cells are going to be placed where glass used to be. Nobody would notice if their roof was covered in photovoltaic cells (or for that matter a vegetable garden or textiles factory as you suggested), but when you convert a used space to attempt to produce something you originally traded for, you have to do some extra cost benefit analysis.
Actually, that's what I do. except on linux, the command is locate. If it happens that the file didn't follow your naming conventions, I can usually find it in a few variations of : locate | grep | grep
Where is 'Good Omens'
$ locate -i "good omens"
$ locate -i good | grep -i omens
/external_1/ebooks/pdfs/TerryPratchet/Good-Omens.pdf
Didn't need any soft links or databases or anything fancy.
With the entire world thinking that whatever geeks do to make programs is trivial, should be faster and according to most of the other posts in this thread, is way too expensive for most contractors, maybe you could give teachers the benefit of a doubt, that maybe their job is more than you think it is.
Also, my mom teaches elementary school, and I know for a fact, there is a hideous amount of keeping-up, planning and assisting kids out of hours to do.