Instead of making the police into judge, jury and executioner, what the UK (and the world) needs is simply more competent judges. Fine the criminals to fund educating, training, investigating and managing lots more judges.
Tax the corporations that generate the majority of civil and much of criminal cases heard by judges (that they consider a "cost of doing business" paid by the people). The vast increase in court load, especially cases like the one in this story, is due to the business being transacted both legally and illegally by corporations. They should pay at least their fair share.
I like having an "end of statement" mark. Because as an English writer, I'm skilled in statements that end. And that vary the formula, as I have in these last two sentences - that use grammar and statement ends to add more meaning with fewer writing. Writing that doesn't have to resemble line noise like Perl or obfuscated C can.
Of course I do. Why else would I care? And if it weren't valid, how could it have made it into K&R?
Though they do the same thing in the context I mentioned, but in a semantically annoyingly different way. It's style, and the style of var++ suggests something NOP that ++var does not.
And in that decade tAoCP influenced many. But K&R influenced many more. tAoCP influences people at the highest levels of programming; its influence on the masses is diluted - and felt more after its influence passes through K&R. K&R influences many, and influences them more.
If tAoCP influenced more programming, programming would be better. K&R just influenced programming to make more programs.
More influential is CJ Date's An Introduction to Database Systems. Many C and other structured programs have used numerical recipes or inspiration from NRiC, but all database systems written or revised since 1977 are directly (and indirectly) influenced by aItDS.
The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie (popularly known as "K&R") is certainly, objectively (puns intended), and probably demonstrably, the most influential programming book. It was a strong, probably primary, influence on every one of the titles suggested in this story. Indeed, it is something like the "ur-text" of modern programming - the vast majority of all programming, since it was first published in 1978. It has influenced programs, programmers and programming books. The influence dependency tree of programming books revolves around K&R.
I say this despite (or perhaps as demonstrated by) the K&R block brace style, which I abhor. It saves a line to destroy column coherence. And despite popularizing the unitary "var++" (eg. in for() loops), rather than the semantically more consistent "++var". And a hundred other quirks Kernighan and Ritchie infected into programming (and programming books, and thereby programmers). The persistence of which is just part of the ample proof of K&R's paramount influence.
Three days those sites can't operate. The whole point is that standard procedure should have backup CAs for precisely this risk. Or what if Diginotar just went out of business?
The vetting process should be operated beforehand, and ongoing if necessary. That's what single points of failure are about. The Dutch people deserver better. But if the Dutch government agrees with your post, they'll be stuck with the crap they've got. For the next time - maybe next week, maybe next month. but sooner than later.
These instructions should be on every Dutch government website, and on many others besides (community spirit). The browsers themselves (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc) should release upgrades with the root cert deleted.
And all of this should be automatic. Diginotar should pay the cost, or their insurer should. Or the Dutch government should, if it's going to create the exposure to this risk by elevating Diginotar to this critical role.
And of course the Dutch government should extract the cost of the damages from the damagers. If it can't actually catch the people who did it, because their foreign government doesn't support that kind of criminal prosecution, the Dutch government should tax all trade with that country until it's paid - including the cost of damages from implementing the criminal prosecutions and administering the tax. If the foreign government is directly out of reach, tax the trade with other countries that do trade with the "safe harbor" foreign government.
You can't just attack a significant global political/commercial power like this and not pay the price. The Dutch government's response should be severely punitive of the culprits and their associates, while aggressively proactive in removing the damage from everyone's critical path. A private corporation acting like crap when it's attacked is to be expected (even if to be punished), but a national government must act in the public interest, especially when it's created a threat to the public interest. An interest that stretches globally, not just for benefits during "normal business", but for damages at times like these.
Since the Dutch government has been using only Diginotar-supplied certificates, this will leave all government websites with invalid certificates while a new supplier is being searched for.
The government should never have had a single point of failure waiting to fail. There should have been at least a second, and probably also a third (instead of creating a new SPF at #2) , source of certificates, at least ready to replace Diginotard (not a typo:P) when it failed. There should now absolutely be a backup source of certificates available (and a #2, and a #3), hotswappable. I'd like to think the Dutch government (and all governments) learned this lesson from this failure, but I expect we'll see the SPF architecture reinstalled with the new certificates.
Something we didn’t realize is that Raspberry Pi not only intend to make this PC work through a HDMI and DVI connection, they also want it plugged into old analog TVs just like kids managed with in the 80s.
That's probably OK for the next couple of years, while the digital TV switch is recent enough that people are still giving/throwing away their analog TVs. But by 2014-15, the cost of adding the analog TV interface to every motherboard just for the tiny few which will find new cheap analog TVs will not be worth it. Cheaper would be work on a cheap HDMI/analog downconverter. Which sounds like an excellent project from the HW community using a cheap motherboard like this one. By 2015 HDMI TVs will be cheap enough, and enough getting given/thrown away, that they'll probably be more plentiful and cheaper than the antique analog TVs still passing through the hands of collectors and luddites.
Where has all this quantum computing development brought the writing devices to now? Is there cheap (<$500) tech that can set the quantum spin value of electrons, photons, or of any other particle? Is there any spin-setting device that consumes less than the amount of energy differential between spin states it sets in order to set the state (in addition to the states' energy differential)?
My question makes no sense because it's your response applied to your post. So here are some less complex ones for you:
Yes. Have you ever heard of ethics? They're an organized way to know whether an action's benefits might not be worth the cost, even without doing the action and incurring the cost.
Also: what alternative science are you trying to use instead of the scientific method? Experiments aren't totally unpredictable invocations. There are almost always reliable expectations of the range of outcomes of the experiment.
And: how have you avoided common sense? Both your posts in this thread show it's a stranger to you. Everyone who's at least moderately adult knows that some possible benefits are not worth some costs. Common sense also tells us that some costs, like the charge for unlimited cruelty, are the highest possible.
Or just the simplest: is there any limit you recognize on cruelty to animals, regardless of the reasonable maximum benefit? Give an example to give some proportion to the estimated max benefit you postulate.
It wasn't really clear to me from the article (or the abstract of the paper it reported) whether the embryo was dead before they removed the pigment, or if removing the pigment killed it. If it was alive, the feeling of having all pigments removed would probably be one of the worst feelings to happen to a living animal, though I'm sure we could always do worse.
There's a difference between the process of not generating pigments, determined by billions of years of one's own evolved DNA, and a bleaching in a lab.
I don't think the cheapness of cruelty is a good way to determine whether the cruelty exacts a higher price from us than the price at the store.
No. Are you volunteering to never agree with anything because you don't agree with me in this specific instance? Of course not. The question is whether there is a limit of cruelty that's not worth what we get from the research that requires the cruelty.
I understand the value of experimenting on mice and other animals. But that's the benefit, that gets weighed against the cost.
Where is the limit to what we can do to an animal before it is unacceptably cruel? Against which no actual benefit can justify the cruelty? How does it feel to be as mutated as these transparent mice would be if they survived gestation? If they survive past the point where there are functioning nerve networks to feel how it is, how cruel is that?
Vast microthin collector sheets spinning in their plane for the win. 50W:m^2 into 1000Km^2 is 50GW. Even at 1% efficiency that's 500MW.
But indeed it's probably better to float a dozen biggish collectors in a tight Solar orbit, beaming lasers around a network of mirrors/regenerators and remote secondary PV collectors arrayed in larger Solar orbits, to planetary orbits, to planetary/lunar/asteroidal surfaces.
It's the vastness of interplanetary space. Time to think big.
And 180 degrees opposite you have the same, but on when the other is off. And there are the poles, where you can put a couple of collectors and use 98%+98% for nearly full power all of the time, and nearly double full power nearly all of the time.
Then you network them in a microwave network via satellite reflectors. Presto: a solar network with no downtime, that can reach nearly anywhere on the Moon. Pretty cheap, too, especially if you make the collectors out of pressed moondust.
You're stupid. No one's against "just about anything other than rubbing two sticks together". Some people are against taking ever more excessive risks with nukes. They get into the hands of bad guys (Pakistan, N Korea, the Soviets, who knows who else), cause lots of serious pollution even when being "responsibly and peacefully" industrialized, and occasionally poison a quarter of Japan or Europe. The same people you admit are stupid are the people who will continue to deliver the nukes for this mission, and for nuke power or weapons around the world.
I'm not going to bother shooting down each of your tired, trite nuke fetish talking points. I'll just point out that you're stupid, and that you should shut the fuck up.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of making the police into judge, jury and executioner, what the UK (and the world) needs is simply more competent judges. Fine the criminals to fund educating, training, investigating and managing lots more judges.
Tax the corporations that generate the majority of civil and much of criminal cases heard by judges (that they consider a "cost of doing business" paid by the people). The vast increase in court load, especially cases like the one in this story, is due to the business being transacted both legally and illegally by corporations. They should pay at least their fair share.
Use your imagination. You know what columns are, and what coherence is. And what K&R does to columns when you use braces their way, saving a line.
Or are you a compiler?
I like having an "end of statement" mark. Because as an English writer, I'm skilled in statements that end. And that vary the formula, as I have in these last two sentences - that use grammar and statement ends to add more meaning with fewer writing. Writing that doesn't have to resemble line noise like Perl or obfuscated C can.
Of course I do. Why else would I care? And if it weren't valid, how could it have made it into K&R?
Though they do the same thing in the context I mentioned, but in a semantically annoyingly different way. It's style, and the style of var++ suggests something NOP that ++var does not.
In spoken conversation, did they speak as succinctly as they wrote C? Or did they say articles and occasional runon sentences :)?
Did you ever hear them defend their braces style? Why not
foo()
{
bar();
}
? And why semicolons instead of periods? If only I had a time machine...
And in that decade tAoCP influenced many. But K&R influenced many more. tAoCP influences people at the highest levels of programming; its influence on the masses is diluted - and felt more after its influence passes through K&R. K&R influences many, and influences them more.
If tAoCP influenced more programming, programming would be better. K&R just influenced programming to make more programs.
More influential is CJ Date's An Introduction to Database Systems. Many C and other structured programs have used numerical recipes or inspiration from NRiC, but all database systems written or revised since 1977 are directly (and indirectly) influenced by aItDS.
Though the most influential programming book overall is K&R.
You misspelled "dummies", dummy. You said it, all right.
The C Programming Language by Kernighan and Ritchie (popularly known as "K&R") is certainly, objectively (puns intended), and probably demonstrably, the most influential programming book. It was a strong, probably primary, influence on every one of the titles suggested in this story. Indeed, it is something like the "ur-text" of modern programming - the vast majority of all programming, since it was first published in 1978. It has influenced programs, programmers and programming books. The influence dependency tree of programming books revolves around K&R.
I say this despite (or perhaps as demonstrated by) the K&R block brace style, which I abhor. It saves a line to destroy column coherence. And despite popularizing the unitary "var++" (eg. in for() loops), rather than the semantically more consistent "++var". And a hundred other quirks Kernighan and Ritchie infected into programming (and programming books, and thereby programmers). The persistence of which is just part of the ample proof of K&R's paramount influence.
Three days those sites can't operate. The whole point is that standard procedure should have backup CAs for precisely this risk. Or what if Diginotar just went out of business?
The vetting process should be operated beforehand, and ongoing if necessary. That's what single points of failure are about. The Dutch people deserver better. But if the Dutch government agrees with your post, they'll be stuck with the crap they've got. For the next time - maybe next week, maybe next month. but sooner than later.
Thank you very much.
What test result shows the cert is successfully revoked? What test result shows fail?
What about in Ubuntu? MacOS? Android for mobiles?
These instructions should be on every Dutch government website, and on many others besides (community spirit). The browsers themselves (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc) should release upgrades with the root cert deleted.
And all of this should be automatic. Diginotar should pay the cost, or their insurer should. Or the Dutch government should, if it's going to create the exposure to this risk by elevating Diginotar to this critical role.
And of course the Dutch government should extract the cost of the damages from the damagers. If it can't actually catch the people who did it, because their foreign government doesn't support that kind of criminal prosecution, the Dutch government should tax all trade with that country until it's paid - including the cost of damages from implementing the criminal prosecutions and administering the tax. If the foreign government is directly out of reach, tax the trade with other countries that do trade with the "safe harbor" foreign government.
You can't just attack a significant global political/commercial power like this and not pay the price. The Dutch government's response should be severely punitive of the culprits and their associates, while aggressively proactive in removing the damage from everyone's critical path. A private corporation acting like crap when it's attacked is to be expected (even if to be punished), but a national government must act in the public interest, especially when it's created a threat to the public interest. An interest that stretches globally, not just for benefits during "normal business", but for damages at times like these.
The government should never have had a single point of failure waiting to fail. There should have been at least a second, and probably also a third (instead of creating a new SPF at #2) , source of certificates, at least ready to replace Diginotard (not a typo :P) when it failed. There should now absolutely be a backup source of certificates available (and a #2, and a #3), hotswappable. I'd like to think the Dutch government (and all governments) learned this lesson from this failure, but I expect we'll see the SPF architecture reinstalled with the new certificates.
That's probably OK for the next couple of years, while the digital TV switch is recent enough that people are still giving/throwing away their analog TVs. But by 2014-15, the cost of adding the analog TV interface to every motherboard just for the tiny few which will find new cheap analog TVs will not be worth it. Cheaper would be work on a cheap HDMI/analog downconverter. Which sounds like an excellent project from the HW community using a cheap motherboard like this one. By 2015 HDMI TVs will be cheap enough, and enough getting given/thrown away, that they'll probably be more plentiful and cheaper than the antique analog TVs still passing through the hands of collectors and luddites.
Where has all this quantum computing development brought the writing devices to now? Is there cheap (<$500) tech that can set the quantum spin value of electrons, photons, or of any other particle? Is there any spin-setting device that consumes less than the amount of energy differential between spin states it sets in order to set the state (in addition to the states' energy differential)?
My question makes no sense because it's your response applied to your post. So here are some less complex ones for you:
Yes. Have you ever heard of ethics? They're an organized way to know whether an action's benefits might not be worth the cost, even without doing the action and incurring the cost.
Also: what alternative science are you trying to use instead of the scientific method? Experiments aren't totally unpredictable invocations. There are almost always reliable expectations of the range of outcomes of the experiment.
And: how have you avoided common sense? Both your posts in this thread show it's a stranger to you. Everyone who's at least moderately adult knows that some possible benefits are not worth some costs. Common sense also tells us that some costs, like the charge for unlimited cruelty, are the highest possible.
Or just the simplest: is there any limit you recognize on cruelty to animals, regardless of the reasonable maximum benefit? Give an example to give some proportion to the estimated max benefit you postulate.
That point is inside the limit. The limit is where we ask ourselves to stop, because our victim cannot.
It wasn't really clear to me from the article (or the abstract of the paper it reported) whether the embryo was dead before they removed the pigment, or if removing the pigment killed it. If it was alive, the feeling of having all pigments removed would probably be one of the worst feelings to happen to a living animal, though I'm sure we could always do worse.
There's a difference between the process of not generating pigments, determined by billions of years of one's own evolved DNA, and a bleaching in a lab.
I don't think the cheapness of cruelty is a good way to determine whether the cruelty exacts a higher price from us than the price at the store.
But we're not cats.
No. Are you volunteering to never agree with anything because you don't agree with me in this specific instance? Of course not. The question is whether there is a limit of cruelty that's not worth what we get from the research that requires the cruelty.
I understand the value of experimenting on mice and other animals. But that's the benefit, that gets weighed against the cost.
Where is the limit to what we can do to an animal before it is unacceptably cruel? Against which no actual benefit can justify the cruelty? How does it feel to be as mutated as these transparent mice would be if they survived gestation? If they survive past the point where there are functioning nerve networks to feel how it is, how cruel is that?
Vast microthin collector sheets spinning in their plane for the win. 50W:m^2 into 1000Km^2 is 50GW. Even at 1% efficiency that's 500MW.
But indeed it's probably better to float a dozen biggish collectors in a tight Solar orbit, beaming lasers around a network of mirrors/regenerators and remote secondary PV collectors arrayed in larger Solar orbits, to planetary orbits, to planetary/lunar/asteroidal surfaces.
It's the vastness of interplanetary space. Time to think big.
And 180 degrees opposite you have the same, but on when the other is off. And there are the poles, where you can put a couple of collectors and use 98%+98% for nearly full power all of the time, and nearly double full power nearly all of the time.
Then you network them in a microwave network via satellite reflectors. Presto: a solar network with no downtime, that can reach nearly anywhere on the Moon. Pretty cheap, too, especially if you make the collectors out of pressed moondust.
You're stupid. No one's against "just about anything other than rubbing two sticks together". Some people are against taking ever more excessive risks with nukes. They get into the hands of bad guys (Pakistan, N Korea, the Soviets, who knows who else), cause lots of serious pollution even when being "responsibly and peacefully" industrialized, and occasionally poison a quarter of Japan or Europe. The same people you admit are stupid are the people who will continue to deliver the nukes for this mission, and for nuke power or weapons around the world.
I'm not going to bother shooting down each of your tired, trite nuke fetish talking points. I'll just point out that you're stupid, and that you should shut the fuck up.