I assume the question is limited to things within the realms of reality, rather than science-fiction (the only known environment where geeks get laid). Of course, a totally evil hacker might upload a suitable hot coffee mod.
Regarding the rape cases, I was proud of the British judicial system when a judge refused to let a layer pull that particular stunt. The lawyer was basically told he was beneath contempt, and should decide between apologising or spending time cooling off in prison. It shows there are civilized judges and therefore some hope for the legal system.
By sheer chance (and blind luck), the pointer that overflowed was now writing into the padding. As the padding wasn't used for anything, it didn't result in data being overwritten or a segfault. The object files contain all of the static allocations, so it was obvious from the start that this was a static array that was causing the problems. Since no other variable got corrupted, it also had to be the last static array in the static space being allocated in an object file. (By "static", I merely mean not allocated off the heap, I do not mean variables prefixed as static and retained after exiting the function. In fact, it was also obvious it could not be a retained value as retained values are placed at the top of the static allocation because you'll otherwise risk overwriting them or fragmenting variables. Variables that exist at the time of calling a function but are still not considered dynamic grow down from the top of unused static space towards heap space.)
Well, they use lab monkeys - err, laboratory assistents with limited training in many of the genealogy DNA testing centres - it's sufficiently automated you don't really need more than that. There are also kits which allow someone who knows what they're doing to field-test DNA in a matter of hours. And finally there are kits which allow you to accurately process contaminated DNA samples (used by forensics experts and by archaeo-biologists).
Using the ten-year rule (it takes about 10 years for technology to move from one domain to the next) and given that a lot of the explosion in DNA testing options came about 2 years ago now, especially in the ability to scan quickly and cheaply for inherited disease markers (over a thousand are known, including for 7 different forms of chronic fatigue), we've 8 years before comprehensive home testing is possible, 18 years before it is essentially universal and maybe 38 before you can map your entire genome from start to finish in the comfort of your own home. However, we've probably got only 2-3 years before extremely elementary "garage-developer" genetic testing of some sort is available.
Early home-brew genetic testing would not be the same as going to a professional centre, the same way an Apple I was not the same as going to a regional computing centre's CDC, and the same way the GNU software radio isn't the same as going to Jodrel Bank telescope. However, some genetic conditions aren't a matter of minor variations in a genetic marker in some obscure part of a chromosome, but are in fact entire chromosomes that shouldn't be there at all. These were some of the earliest things that could be tested for, and are the least complicated to look for, so should be the earliest to appear in home-brew testing kits. Within a decade, though, I would expect it to be possible to read the values of many well-known genetic markers.
Restrictions on genetic testing, therefore, make very little sense. Restrictions on the use of genetic testing (eugenics is a no-no) is arguable, but very hard to detect or enforce. Politicians should be focussing now on figuring out what to do when the next stage in technology is available, because that's when the shit will hit the fan IF it is going to. The only restriction they need right now is to ban the trade in personal information, the same way Europe (theoretically) has. That alone would solve not only all immediate genetic problems but also all far bigger information theft problems.
You can't possibly fit Duke Nuken Forever onto a high-end Unix server. Everyone knows the minimum spec is now one of those Intel 80-core wafers and 640 terabytes of RAM. And that's for the title screen. They've not written the rest yet.
Java isn't the language for highly compact code, either. The original could have been any one of a hundred business languages, but most archaic business languages are fairly compact. That they could get such a high level of compression does show bad coding.
ObOwnExperience: One time, I had to do some maintenance work on a very large piece of badly-written and cruft-ridden code, ended up rewriting large tracts of it, reduced its source size by an order of magnitude and the binary size by three orders of magnitude. Also found some buffer overflow Heisenbugs which the previous maintenance guys had known about but bypassed by padding the object files. There's something... bothersome about corrupting a file in order to make a bug not be visible.
The thing is, 5,000 engineers horsing around isn't the same thing as a 5,000 horsepower engine.
Re:If you can't secure it, don't store it
on
Bone-Headed IT Mistakes
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This is why you have mandatory access controls, so that copying within the confines of what is needed to perform the job is permitted, whilst copying outside the confines of what is needed for work OR copying onto devices less secure than required for that type of data is not.
The problem with MAC is that it is time-consuming to set up and very difficult to get absolutely right. If it isn't absolutely right, it ends up needing to be hacked to bypass unnecessary limitations, which will have al kinds of unpredictable side-effects.
Really what's needed is to get rid of humanity and replace it with intelligent computers that don't do stupid things.
Well, the reports all say apparent heart attack. If I remember correctly from when my father had a heart attack, they were able to very quickly establish exactly what it was from the blood chemistry. Again if I remember correctly, real heart attacks leave scarring on the heart tissue, though that one would be arguably harder to look for.
It probably was a perfectly natural heart attack, but we are in a time of political uncertainty, what with a very close election race, a President all but at war with the Supreme Court, and the economy flying south for the winter^H^H^H^H^H^Hsummer. There are very likely a lot of people, right now, who would be just as happy with any and all well-known highly vocal skeptics suffering accidents. Again, I seriously doubt it's anything sinister, but even a stopped clock is going to be right eventually.
The Constitution applies to the Government, and defines what is lawful for the Government to do. This would imply that the Constitution impacts what the Government can do to any individual, regardless of nation, colour or creed. Even if I am incorrect on that, I do not recall a single ammendement which specifies that it is exclusive. (A foreign visitor to the US has - or damn well should have - the right to haebus corpus, the right to free speech, the right to not self-incriminate, the right to drink beer - hey, prohibition was "fixed" by a constitutional ammendment, so if the constitution doesn't apply to non-US citizens, they should still be subject to it.)
Because Casio watches were being used to build IEDs, people owning such watches were routinely turned over to the US forces for bounty. I couldn't tell you how many of them are at Gitmo today, but I fail to see how allowing them to explain the circumstances to civilian judge would endanger anyone. Although it might boost Casio's reputation for building highly reliable watches.
To be ISO9000 compliant, ISO must have written documentation outlining the procedures for being bought off. If no such documentation exists, it violates the standard.
Europe does a lot of stupid things, but it also does some amazingly brilliant things. This speech is brilliant, let's hope the follow-up isn't stupid. It's definitely a jab at Microsoft, but it's also a jab at ISO in the comments about not rushing things. I think Europe is most displeased with what is going on, or at least some senior figures within it. This does need to translate to action. Possibly on more than one front. If the European Courts are presented with evidence that Microsoft hijacked the ISO standards procedure in an effort to "comply" with prior rulings in a dishonest way, I imagine the court would not be pleased. Could it be considered contempt of court to attempt to mislead the court over compliance? Does the EU court system even have such a concept? If not, can/will the judges increase the fines to reflect the seriousness of the situation? Or given Microsoft's continual appeals and non-payment, are there any other penalties they can exact, such as suspending the business license for Microsoft's European branch?
All you need is an extremely high energy density - about the same as the total output from a hydrogen bomb in one cubic centimetre - and you will trigger the "inflation" effect where that region will expand faster than light, generating vast amounts of extra matter by a similar process to Hawking radiation (ie: ripping the quantum foam apart, preventing it from having an average state of zero).
If bubble universes exist, you will survive the experiment. The inflationary effect will simply form a new bubble universe, attached to this one via a miniature black hole which will fairly rapidly evaporate. From your standpoint, the energy is destroyed, in violation of the law of conservation of energy, and disorder has been reduced (matter is more ordered than energy and more energy has been lost than matter) in violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
Of course, in the system as a whole, neither law has been violated, it only appears such because you cannot see the whole system, only the part that exists in your bubble.
If bubble universes do not exist, then the inflationary effect must take place in this universe, wiping out a good few thousand light-years radius at least.
This would seem to make the whole idea extremely provable. If you, and every civilization in the local cluster of galaxies, perish in a faster-than-light fireball of unimaginable ferocity, bubble universes do not exist. Otherwise, they do.
Never mind artificial black holes destroying the planet, THIS is the experiment all mad scientists should dream of. Especially if they can figure out a way to thread a wormhole through the black hole linking the two universes. But even if they can't, the prospect of obliterating the entire local cluster of galaxies is every mad scientist's dream!
Tycho Brahms was murdered by Kepler by means of mercury poisoning. Yet we use Kepler's equations for planetary motions, calculating how get space probes exactly where they need to be, etc. It is very unlikely he was the first or last to kill in order to move up the scientific totem pole.
I agree with the principle of having some means of evaluating whether a product is suitable, but a ratings system is flawed and inherently biased by the loudest groups and not by the genuine needs or concerns of the individuals. This is why graphic bloodbaths in movies and television are acceptable, whereas a 1/2 topless shot of a rather ugly wannabe for a couple of seconds can cause a major uprising and massive fines. In America. In Britain, they wouldn't show a sporting event so boring that people only tune in for the adverts, but they probably wouldn't have even noticed the so-called wardrobe malfunction.
Clearly, however, if you accept the need of a parent to evaluate a product legitimately, you cannot exclude all of the significant and potentially disturbing material from that evaluation.
Ergo, you need multiple scales. Perhaps a pair of values for violence (degree and realism), same for sexual content, and so on for whatever other factors child psychologists in general (not just the ones on the payroll of a pressure group) consider areas of genuine concern that can also be reliably quantified in a game setting.
These would replace the ratings system entirely. Parents who go by biological age ignore the individuality of needs, thereby not really evaluating but chickening out of their responsibility by blaming time. Evaluation has no place for blame and no time for those who betray their responsibilities. But what responsibility is there if elapsed cell divisions is not considered worthy of notice? The responsibility of understanding the person they are supposedly evaluating for. If a parent does not understand their child, their child's own specific needs and vulnerabilities, then the parent is far less mature and adult than the child themselves, and the child should be provided with a rational means of determining their limits and their comfort.
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Hmmmmm. I wonder what would happen if someone totally evil patched the code so you had to win at minesweeper to get the coffee?
This is what happens when coffee pots go on the Internet, albeit in a different way. A similar effect was probably intended, though.
I assume the question is limited to things within the realms of reality, rather than science-fiction (the only known environment where geeks get laid). Of course, a totally evil hacker might upload a suitable hot coffee mod.
That should be lawyer, but given his comments in court, I refuse to declare it a typo.
Regarding the rape cases, I was proud of the British judicial system when a judge refused to let a layer pull that particular stunt. The lawyer was basically told he was beneath contempt, and should decide between apologising or spending time cooling off in prison. It shows there are civilized judges and therefore some hope for the legal system.
By sheer chance (and blind luck), the pointer that overflowed was now writing into the padding. As the padding wasn't used for anything, it didn't result in data being overwritten or a segfault. The object files contain all of the static allocations, so it was obvious from the start that this was a static array that was causing the problems. Since no other variable got corrupted, it also had to be the last static array in the static space being allocated in an object file. (By "static", I merely mean not allocated off the heap, I do not mean variables prefixed as static and retained after exiting the function. In fact, it was also obvious it could not be a retained value as retained values are placed at the top of the static allocation because you'll otherwise risk overwriting them or fragmenting variables. Variables that exist at the time of calling a function but are still not considered dynamic grow down from the top of unused static space towards heap space.)
Using the ten-year rule (it takes about 10 years for technology to move from one domain to the next) and given that a lot of the explosion in DNA testing options came about 2 years ago now, especially in the ability to scan quickly and cheaply for inherited disease markers (over a thousand are known, including for 7 different forms of chronic fatigue), we've 8 years before comprehensive home testing is possible, 18 years before it is essentially universal and maybe 38 before you can map your entire genome from start to finish in the comfort of your own home. However, we've probably got only 2-3 years before extremely elementary "garage-developer" genetic testing of some sort is available.
Early home-brew genetic testing would not be the same as going to a professional centre, the same way an Apple I was not the same as going to a regional computing centre's CDC, and the same way the GNU software radio isn't the same as going to Jodrel Bank telescope. However, some genetic conditions aren't a matter of minor variations in a genetic marker in some obscure part of a chromosome, but are in fact entire chromosomes that shouldn't be there at all. These were some of the earliest things that could be tested for, and are the least complicated to look for, so should be the earliest to appear in home-brew testing kits. Within a decade, though, I would expect it to be possible to read the values of many well-known genetic markers.
Restrictions on genetic testing, therefore, make very little sense. Restrictions on the use of genetic testing (eugenics is a no-no) is arguable, but very hard to detect or enforce. Politicians should be focussing now on figuring out what to do when the next stage in technology is available, because that's when the shit will hit the fan IF it is going to. The only restriction they need right now is to ban the trade in personal information, the same way Europe (theoretically) has. That alone would solve not only all immediate genetic problems but also all far bigger information theft problems.
All good geeks make heavy use of recursion.
You can't possibly fit Duke Nuken Forever onto a high-end Unix server. Everyone knows the minimum spec is now one of those Intel 80-core wafers and 640 terabytes of RAM. And that's for the title screen. They've not written the rest yet.
ObOwnExperience: One time, I had to do some maintenance work on a very large piece of badly-written and cruft-ridden code, ended up rewriting large tracts of it, reduced its source size by an order of magnitude and the binary size by three orders of magnitude. Also found some buffer overflow Heisenbugs which the previous maintenance guys had known about but bypassed by padding the object files. There's something... bothersome about corrupting a file in order to make a bug not be visible.
The thing is, 5,000 engineers horsing around isn't the same thing as a 5,000 horsepower engine.
The problem with MAC is that it is time-consuming to set up and very difficult to get absolutely right. If it isn't absolutely right, it ends up needing to be hacked to bypass unnecessary limitations, which will have al kinds of unpredictable side-effects.
Really what's needed is to get rid of humanity and replace it with intelligent computers that don't do stupid things.
It probably was a perfectly natural heart attack, but we are in a time of political uncertainty, what with a very close election race, a President all but at war with the Supreme Court, and the economy flying south for the winter^H^H^H^H^H^Hsummer. There are very likely a lot of people, right now, who would be just as happy with any and all well-known highly vocal skeptics suffering accidents. Again, I seriously doubt it's anything sinister, but even a stopped clock is going to be right eventually.
Because Casio watches were being used to build IEDs, people owning such watches were routinely turned over to the US forces for bounty. I couldn't tell you how many of them are at Gitmo today, but I fail to see how allowing them to explain the circumstances to civilian judge would endanger anyone. Although it might boost Casio's reputation for building highly reliable watches.
That is to ensure the developers are completely armless and that the implementations don't have a leg to stand on.
To be ISO9000 compliant, ISO must have written documentation outlining the procedures for being bought off. If no such documentation exists, it violates the standard.
Europe does a lot of stupid things, but it also does some amazingly brilliant things. This speech is brilliant, let's hope the follow-up isn't stupid. It's definitely a jab at Microsoft, but it's also a jab at ISO in the comments about not rushing things. I think Europe is most displeased with what is going on, or at least some senior figures within it. This does need to translate to action. Possibly on more than one front. If the European Courts are presented with evidence that Microsoft hijacked the ISO standards procedure in an effort to "comply" with prior rulings in a dishonest way, I imagine the court would not be pleased. Could it be considered contempt of court to attempt to mislead the court over compliance? Does the EU court system even have such a concept? If not, can/will the judges increase the fines to reflect the seriousness of the situation? Or given Microsoft's continual appeals and non-payment, are there any other penalties they can exact, such as suspending the business license for Microsoft's European branch?
If bubble universes exist, you will survive the experiment. The inflationary effect will simply form a new bubble universe, attached to this one via a miniature black hole which will fairly rapidly evaporate. From your standpoint, the energy is destroyed, in violation of the law of conservation of energy, and disorder has been reduced (matter is more ordered than energy and more energy has been lost than matter) in violation of the second law of thermodynamics.
Of course, in the system as a whole, neither law has been violated, it only appears such because you cannot see the whole system, only the part that exists in your bubble.
If bubble universes do not exist, then the inflationary effect must take place in this universe, wiping out a good few thousand light-years radius at least.
This would seem to make the whole idea extremely provable. If you, and every civilization in the local cluster of galaxies, perish in a faster-than-light fireball of unimaginable ferocity, bubble universes do not exist. Otherwise, they do.
Never mind artificial black holes destroying the planet, THIS is the experiment all mad scientists should dream of. Especially if they can figure out a way to thread a wormhole through the black hole linking the two universes. But even if they can't, the prospect of obliterating the entire local cluster of galaxies is every mad scientist's dream!
This goes to show that typos are sheer murder.
Tycho Brahms was murdered by Kepler by means of mercury poisoning. Yet we use Kepler's equations for planetary motions, calculating how get space probes exactly where they need to be, etc. It is very unlikely he was the first or last to kill in order to move up the scientific totem pole.
The application proves they have no brain, which means they have no proof of concept, which may make the patent invalid.
...is a recursive mechanism, so that we can have a post self-referentially make itself funnier.
Prior generations have already tried for better punk through chemistry.
British Nuclear Fuels Limited used to do that all the time, during lawsuits over dangerous levels of contamination in the environment.
Clearly, however, if you accept the need of a parent to evaluate a product legitimately, you cannot exclude all of the significant and potentially disturbing material from that evaluation.
Ergo, you need multiple scales. Perhaps a pair of values for violence (degree and realism), same for sexual content, and so on for whatever other factors child psychologists in general (not just the ones on the payroll of a pressure group) consider areas of genuine concern that can also be reliably quantified in a game setting.
These would replace the ratings system entirely. Parents who go by biological age ignore the individuality of needs, thereby not really evaluating but chickening out of their responsibility by blaming time. Evaluation has no place for blame and no time for those who betray their responsibilities. But what responsibility is there if elapsed cell divisions is not considered worthy of notice? The responsibility of understanding the person they are supposedly evaluating for. If a parent does not understand their child, their child's own specific needs and vulnerabilities, then the parent is far less mature and adult than the child themselves, and the child should be provided with a rational means of determining their limits and their comfort.