Just seems ironic considering all the mathematicians and scientists and such that laugh at the unwashed masses who play the actual lottery, and call it an idiot tax.
That's because so many people (you included, apparently) don't realize it's a negative-sum game. People buy lottery tickets, the lottery takes a piece of the pool for operating costs, profit and/or charity and return the remaining as prizes and unlike for example poker there's nothing you can do to improve your odds. Particularly if you play for small sums of money (say less than a month's salary) it is extremely unlikely you'll be cash positive even if you occasionally win. I guess there's the dream of winning the big prize, but it's more about hope and less about reality, statistics or rationality. Research and development on the other hand can be a positive-sum game like turning silicon into a CPU, of course many projects fail but many also give a huge pay-off which didn't come from the other people playing.
It's more like this, there are two main ways a government raises money. One is by taking part of your money directly through taxes the other is by devaluing your money through printing more money. The latter is the basis of many fairly functional economies, inflation is much higher but it's less obvious, less of an effort than collecting taxes and not so affected by a black economy as the money in circulation there is devalued too. And because people know the money will lose value, the interest rates are high. With the euro the Greeks got a Admiral Ackbar-class trap, they got tons of cheap credit while their primary means to pay it back was crippled. So when the eurozone with Germany in the lead said you're not devaluing our money, they were stuck with a huge debt and non-functioning tax system. And when everyone else is cheating on their taxes, why not you?
While you make many good points, the fact that the moderation is capped at -1 and +5 changes the dynamic considerably, you don't have the uncatchable +368 up-votes and irredeemable -78 down-votes. "Disputed" votes tend to get a voted down then ignored, then a few positive votes bring them back into view of the masses where get voted down again but this cycle keeps it close to the "surface" and many people still see the disputed arguments. Same with knocking a highly rated post down a notch, it really makes a difference and shows it's disputed. It's not a perfect system but there are many systems that are considerably worse at showing the minority opinion.
So how do you go about securely communicating one part of the throwaway keys to the other side so that the session key can be transferred?
Static RSA using the main keys. It won't have PFS, but it will only contain the public keys of the throwaway pair so recovering it later won't do you any good.
As a step process: 1. Static RSA with main keys, swap public throwaway keys. 2. Static RSA with throwaway keys 3. Negotiate session key 4. Throw away private key used in 2. immediately 5. Server is compromised, main key stolen 6. Traffic in 1. is decrypted, public keys found 7. Private keys for 2. is gone, session key can't be decrypted = perfect forward security
I would like to remind people that the idea of "intelligent" machines has been around for almost 100 years now. AND we still don't have any solid evidence of being close to achieving such a thing. Sure, computers can do a lot, and what they DO accomplish, they tend to do very fast. But what they accomplish is not "AI". Even Watson is not "intelligence", it is only the illusion of it.
The goal posts keep moving, no matter what they do we still say they're not really intelligent whether it's win at chess (Deep Blue) or win Jeopardy (Watson) or drive cars (Google) or act as your personal secretary (Siri). Not that I liked the tripe called "Her", but does it really matter if it's true intelligence or just a sufficiently advanced impersonation of intelligence? Do we really need true AI in order to pass a Turing test, particularly if you aren't trying to break the illusion? If it can keep a decent dinner conversation and be "fully functional" in bed can it be a substitute for a companion in the same way you can play chess against a computer instead of a person? Because I think that's what most people want to know, they don't care if the robot is "truly" intelligent or not, they want to know if it'll take their jobs and girlfriends, do their chores or give free blow jobs.
Well if you count number of hours then yes: 1) Playing single player/multiplayer with strangers 2) Playing multiplayer online with friends and headset 3) Actually getting together in front of the same screen
The value is pretty much inverse though, playing alone is for the game. Playing online with friends is mainly because they can do that while the kids are asleep, it's a good way to chat and have fun while doing things "together". Actually meeting is best, but happens quite rarely and when we have the chance it's often a party or cabin trip or something else not a game night. The good news though is that we're adults and money is not really the limiting factor. I want to play "The Walking Dead" by myself? I buy it. We want to play "Payday 2" online together? We buy it. We want to play "Wii Party U" together in real life? We buy it. We've had some hysterically fun game nights (okay the beer helps) so in bang for the buck it works out just fine. But by that reasoning the winner is probably Angry Birds whenever I got five minutes to kill.
I think it depends on the type of person you are, if you're usually a dutiful and reliable employee who made one mistake and it's a huge one that's different than your hotshot wonder boy who always does things the quick and dirty way and has caused minor outages and bugs before but gets away with it because the quick turnaround time is making him popular. Then I'd be a lot more inclined to say your reckless behavior finally blew up in everyone's face, there's the door. Admitting to your own screw-up is also a lot better than someone else finding out or worse trying to cover it up or pin the blame on someone else, many people won't say anything until shit hits the fan or hope that by some miracle nobody will notice or find out it's you. Everybody makes mistakes, but some quite a few more and with higher consequences than others.
and opinions are like assholes: everyone's asshole is a product of the culture it grew up in.
Did you grow up with NAMBLA or something?;)
it's going to implement a system of ethics that already exists, whether it's utilitarianism, virtue ethics, Christianity, Taoism, whatever.
And it'll be the PR mode, used for fighting "just wars" against vastly inferior military forces. In an actual major conflict a software update would quickly patch them to "total war" mode where the goal is victory at all costs. No matter what you do they'll never have morality as such, just restrictions on their actions that can be lifted at any moment.
Of course, the main problem with replacing DH is that we don't really have anything better on hand.
Actually there is no need for DH, you can create a new throwaway RSA private/public key pair on both sides, sign it with your main key, use the throwaway keys to transfer the session key then wipe the throwaway keys. The problem with this approach is that generating a new RSA key pair for every session + transferring new key + extra round trips is a really slow process compared to DH.
Practically I suspect it will be more like a chess engine, you give everything a number of points and the robot tries to maximize "score". How do you assign points? Well you can start with current combat medic guidelines, then run some simulations asking real medics what they'd do in such a situation. You don't need the one true answer, you're just looking for "in this situation, 70% of combat medics would do A and 30% B, let's go with A". I suspect combat simulations will be the same, you assess the risk of collateral damage and ask real officers what they'd do and tweak it until it responds mostly the same way. Don't expect it to make any independent moral judgments on the real value of anything.
I think part of it is realizing what comes in addition to and what is instead of, personally I work primarily with databases. Traditional, ACID-compliant monolithic databases where the primary concern is integrity and availability not scalability. Could I jump on the NoSQL bandwagon? Probably, I'd hardly call what Google and Facebook are doing a "fad". I think it's a fair bet to say that there'll plenty work for me anyway though, sure a few positively ancient languages like COBOL are mostly gone but I doubt the Linux kernel will be rewritten in Java any time soon. So if you want to code in C there'll be jobs for that. They have to fit the domain though, you probably won't be writing new GUI apps in C unless GTK+ is your choice of poison.
I once left a job mainly because I felt it was heading down a too narrow corridor, it was almost like becoming a SAP consultant only smaller and more obscure. That's the only thing people will hire you for, that's the one thing you're an expert in and can get a high hourly rate but if it dries up or you want to work with something else your CV is too specialized. So yes it's important to not end up in a dead end, but I don't feel I have to jump off a bridge just because everyone else is doing it. My concern is whether there'll be enough work for me, if those skills will be in demand and the supply/demand is such that they'll pay a premium for it. That's the pros and cons of being a specialist, if you're in demand it pays very well if you're not in demand you have a tough time finding other work.
There are many other methods to send info, one time pads (number stations), steganography (lots of side channels for noise to be tampered with), couriers, stuff...
OTP needs a secure side channel the same size as the data meaning you can't just call/text/mail someone and verify a fingerprint, which makes it extremely impractical, steganography with no or weak encryption is just security by obscurity, couriers depend on the security of the courier which is just like trusting the Internet - it too is a third party courier. Without regular PKI it wouldn't be practically feasible, fortunately the basic building blocks like RSA for signing/verifying in certificates and PGP messages, Diffie-Hellman for ephemeral keys and any symmetric cipher like AES for bulk transport still seem pretty unthreatened. The problem is the implementation, which is far from trivial to do right.
There's no doubt that Intel and ARM will clash and the winner will be looking at billions of dollars in profit. That does not mean that AMD's best choice is to get caught in the crossfire, when giants clash they're more likely to be stomped on than anything else. Their strength is that they're the only other one except Intel that can produce x86 chips and can compete with Core/Xeon for running "normal" desktop/workstation software and and a lot of closed source server software. In the ARM market, AMD is nothing special. They don't have their own fabs, they don't have particularly much experience with ultra-low power designs. In fact I was impressed with their Mullins performance but they're together with Intel on the wrong side of the ARM/x86 divide when it comes to tablets. Either x86 tablets take off which is mostly a win for Intel or x86 tablets flop and AMD loses.
AMD won the current generation of consoles, but we all know they won't be designing the next generation until 2020+ and the sales will fall long before that. It gives them a reprieve but it's not a permanent solution and their "traditional" CPU/APU business is failing fast, but I'm not sure how you'd fix it. I mean they could go all in against Intel again but that's been a tough nut to crack. Or they could aim for ARM's territory just like all the established players and with Intel gunning for the same too. Or they could try going sideways into some kind of specialized computing, but really all that have tried have been crushed by commodity hardware. I don't think AMD has many good options left, they've got enemies closing in from all sides.
While Intel did a lot of shady things, part of it was also that AMD didn't have nearly enough fab capacity to supply the market. Those kinds of decisions are made years in advance, you don't just pop up a sub-100nm processing plant on demand. So AMD got a huge winner, they surely produced everything they could and got a nice premium on their products but the remaining demand had to go with Intel. It's just not the sort of market battle you can win quickly.
I'm pretty sure any new startup can simply remove anything they are asked to, which is also what Google etc will do any way;)
That's what worries me, what's in it for Google to fight it? Nothing. And giving the site owner the ability to dispute it usually also means nothing, what's in it for/. to fight something posted in a comment? Nothing. This is then opening shot in a war on information, where anybody can complain to any site about anything they feel is written about them by other people that they don't like. I think the ECHR totally screwed up, to enforce this they'd have to take away even more fundamental rights, like the right to free speech and the right to remember. It's basically a gag order where if you can't block my speech, you block Google from pointing anyone to my speech.
Except the Internet usually has lots and lots of secondary links. Even if you can't go directly from Google to the censored page chances are you'll get a ton of related hits that'll link you to the source. This is for example often the case with copyrighted files, you can find the same download links in tens or hundreds of forums and unless the file is down at the source - the file host - it's almost impossible to keep people from finding it and it'd be pretty obvious that Google is refusing to give you a direct link. And if they start banning all links to sites that link to the censored file well they're going to break the Internet - plus I'd probably serve GoogleBot a link-less page and everyone else the link. Then they have to start forging user agents to discover it and it all goes downhill from there.
I guess the root of the problem is the submitter then. The charity needs to replace them with a less-biased person so the best decision can be made, whether that be OSS or a free-or-cheap charity license for Access.
Charities are usually much like open source, it's the guy who volunteers or nobody. Doubly so when it's a charity for children in Senegal, I doubt he's hired at market rates...
P.S. I assume that no words or names in his fantasy world have any accents or any characters not in the basic ASCII set.
Correct, the Lannisters, the Starks, the Targaryens, the Tyrells, the Greyjoys all plain English names... honestly it's a refreshing break from the high fantasy ThÃloündyir. (Oh right... neither does/.) In fact one of the main characters is named John Snow...
True, but you always have the ultimate threat which is to yank the offending machines/networks/ISPs/countries off the Internet. That we don't seems to indicate we don't really care that much that, no matter how virus infested and trojan-laden we keep them online.
You may be a good 9/10 however you may achieve 2/10 in your job because you are not given the time/resources to do any better.
Quick and dirty hacks don't ever score a 2/10 simply because they're short and straightfoward despite being ugly, Assuming it's a 1-10 scale then 1/10 is what you get if you outsource it to the cheapest monkeys you can find, 2/10 is just one step up and probably a Rube Goldberg machine of bizarre copy-pasta. I'd give 3/10 for code that's not only crap but deceptive with ugly hidden side effects. A straight up "hack" is never below a 4/10, even if it's ugly as sin. Then again I'm probably on a game review scale, 5/10 is bad, 6/10 poor, 7/10 decent, 8/10 good, 9/10 excellent and 10/10 outstanding. Like the lower half should never make it through to actual production code, unless you just skipped all that review, testing and QA hogwash. Then again, I've seen that happen...
You honestly think telcos don't know how many subscribers they have? Everybody I know from age 10 and up has one and personally I've got two phones, one for home and one for work. In my case it's because my employer's policy is very strict on mixing work related records with random apps that could compromise the phone. So does a friend of mine so he can hand the "work phone" to someone else when he's away, because that's the number many people call. It doesn't take many of us to add up to >100% of the population.
The situation with the graphics markers are like the ISPs with broadband or the major telecoms when picking a cell phone. Not a monopoloy but an oligopoly run by a few. Boy I miss PowerVR, S3, 3DFX Vodoo, and Matrox.
Ask the people stuck with Poulsbo how they feel about PowerVR graphics, they are one of the few who suck worse than nVidia for driver support. 3DFX with their Glide API was king of proprietary solutions. S3 was the patent champion, even today their patented S3 Texture Compression causes trouble for open source. And Matrox made Intel's 3D performance look stellar. YMMV but I feel the competition in the graphics market is still working fairly well, at least a lot better than on the CPU side. It's just that the primary focus is who can push the most FPS in the latest games using the most bleeding edge drivers, that's what drives sales. But if you think it was any different back then, it's time to take off those rose colored glasses. The only thing that used to be really stable was Intel's server drivers, practically zero performance but it didn't bring your server down.
Most lectures I've been to were lectures because it's practically one of the very few ways one professor can address hundreds of people, of course with smaller groups you could do more but then you need lots of assistants and there are study groups that are essentially students learning on their own. Their main purpose is because having regularly scheduled events drags the undisciplined through the curriculum and because socially it doesn't feel like you've been stuck with your nose in a book all day. Personally I felt the most productive way was just crunching through the book until it made sense, but I think that's very individual.
Now if you were a kamikaze pilot and everybody was sleeping on the job and you went for a final dive against a modern battleship or aircraft carrier, wouldn't you already be blased to bits by an autonomous defense system? I imagine the same goes for tanks, planes, helicopters and even indivdual robot-soldiers, you'll never wait until you're blasted to bits to say "yup, that was an enemy". Even if they don't go on their own search & destroy missions I doubt they'll avoid being used as sentries, convoy escort and other defensive purposes. Or even "defensive on the offensive" weapons like if you point an RPG at a tank. Not to mention self-defense backups if the communication to the mothership is jammed, nobody will leave high tech military equipment stranded and defenseless by a simple communcations jammer. Not going to happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Just seems ironic considering all the mathematicians and scientists and such that laugh at the unwashed masses who play the actual lottery, and call it an idiot tax.
That's because so many people (you included, apparently) don't realize it's a negative-sum game. People buy lottery tickets, the lottery takes a piece of the pool for operating costs, profit and/or charity and return the remaining as prizes and unlike for example poker there's nothing you can do to improve your odds. Particularly if you play for small sums of money (say less than a month's salary) it is extremely unlikely you'll be cash positive even if you occasionally win. I guess there's the dream of winning the big prize, but it's more about hope and less about reality, statistics or rationality. Research and development on the other hand can be a positive-sum game like turning silicon into a CPU, of course many projects fail but many also give a huge pay-off which didn't come from the other people playing.
It's more like this, there are two main ways a government raises money. One is by taking part of your money directly through taxes the other is by devaluing your money through printing more money. The latter is the basis of many fairly functional economies, inflation is much higher but it's less obvious, less of an effort than collecting taxes and not so affected by a black economy as the money in circulation there is devalued too. And because people know the money will lose value, the interest rates are high. With the euro the Greeks got a Admiral Ackbar-class trap, they got tons of cheap credit while their primary means to pay it back was crippled. So when the eurozone with Germany in the lead said you're not devaluing our money, they were stuck with a huge debt and non-functioning tax system. And when everyone else is cheating on their taxes, why not you?
While you make many good points, the fact that the moderation is capped at -1 and +5 changes the dynamic considerably, you don't have the uncatchable +368 up-votes and irredeemable -78 down-votes. "Disputed" votes tend to get a voted down then ignored, then a few positive votes bring them back into view of the masses where get voted down again but this cycle keeps it close to the "surface" and many people still see the disputed arguments. Same with knocking a highly rated post down a notch, it really makes a difference and shows it's disputed. It's not a perfect system but there are many systems that are considerably worse at showing the minority opinion.
So how do you go about securely communicating one part of the throwaway keys to the other side so that the session key can be transferred?
Static RSA using the main keys. It won't have PFS, but it will only contain the public keys of the throwaway pair so recovering it later won't do you any good.
As a step process:
1. Static RSA with main keys, swap public throwaway keys.
2. Static RSA with throwaway keys
3. Negotiate session key
4. Throw away private key used in 2. immediately
5. Server is compromised, main key stolen
6. Traffic in 1. is decrypted, public keys found
7. Private keys for 2. is gone, session key can't be decrypted = perfect forward security
I would like to remind people that the idea of "intelligent" machines has been around for almost 100 years now. AND we still don't have any solid evidence of being close to achieving such a thing. Sure, computers can do a lot, and what they DO accomplish, they tend to do very fast. But what they accomplish is not "AI". Even Watson is not "intelligence", it is only the illusion of it.
The goal posts keep moving, no matter what they do we still say they're not really intelligent whether it's win at chess (Deep Blue) or win Jeopardy (Watson) or drive cars (Google) or act as your personal secretary (Siri). Not that I liked the tripe called "Her", but does it really matter if it's true intelligence or just a sufficiently advanced impersonation of intelligence? Do we really need true AI in order to pass a Turing test, particularly if you aren't trying to break the illusion? If it can keep a decent dinner conversation and be "fully functional" in bed can it be a substitute for a companion in the same way you can play chess against a computer instead of a person? Because I think that's what most people want to know, they don't care if the robot is "truly" intelligent or not, they want to know if it'll take their jobs and girlfriends, do their chores or give free blow jobs.
Well if you count number of hours then yes:
1) Playing single player/multiplayer with strangers
2) Playing multiplayer online with friends and headset
3) Actually getting together in front of the same screen
The value is pretty much inverse though, playing alone is for the game. Playing online with friends is mainly because they can do that while the kids are asleep, it's a good way to chat and have fun while doing things "together". Actually meeting is best, but happens quite rarely and when we have the chance it's often a party or cabin trip or something else not a game night. The good news though is that we're adults and money is not really the limiting factor. I want to play "The Walking Dead" by myself? I buy it. We want to play "Payday 2" online together? We buy it. We want to play "Wii Party U" together in real life? We buy it. We've had some hysterically fun game nights (okay the beer helps) so in bang for the buck it works out just fine. But by that reasoning the winner is probably Angry Birds whenever I got five minutes to kill.
I think it depends on the type of person you are, if you're usually a dutiful and reliable employee who made one mistake and it's a huge one that's different than your hotshot wonder boy who always does things the quick and dirty way and has caused minor outages and bugs before but gets away with it because the quick turnaround time is making him popular. Then I'd be a lot more inclined to say your reckless behavior finally blew up in everyone's face, there's the door. Admitting to your own screw-up is also a lot better than someone else finding out or worse trying to cover it up or pin the blame on someone else, many people won't say anything until shit hits the fan or hope that by some miracle nobody will notice or find out it's you. Everybody makes mistakes, but some quite a few more and with higher consequences than others.
and opinions are like assholes: everyone's asshole is a product of the culture it grew up in.
Did you grow up with NAMBLA or something? ;)
it's going to implement a system of ethics that already exists, whether it's utilitarianism, virtue ethics, Christianity, Taoism, whatever.
And it'll be the PR mode, used for fighting "just wars" against vastly inferior military forces. In an actual major conflict a software update would quickly patch them to "total war" mode where the goal is victory at all costs. No matter what you do they'll never have morality as such, just restrictions on their actions that can be lifted at any moment.
Of course, the main problem with replacing DH is that we don't really have anything better on hand.
Actually there is no need for DH, you can create a new throwaway RSA private/public key pair on both sides, sign it with your main key, use the throwaway keys to transfer the session key then wipe the throwaway keys. The problem with this approach is that generating a new RSA key pair for every session + transferring new key + extra round trips is a really slow process compared to DH.
Practically I suspect it will be more like a chess engine, you give everything a number of points and the robot tries to maximize "score". How do you assign points? Well you can start with current combat medic guidelines, then run some simulations asking real medics what they'd do in such a situation. You don't need the one true answer, you're just looking for "in this situation, 70% of combat medics would do A and 30% B, let's go with A". I suspect combat simulations will be the same, you assess the risk of collateral damage and ask real officers what they'd do and tweak it until it responds mostly the same way. Don't expect it to make any independent moral judgments on the real value of anything.
I think part of it is realizing what comes in addition to and what is instead of, personally I work primarily with databases. Traditional, ACID-compliant monolithic databases where the primary concern is integrity and availability not scalability. Could I jump on the NoSQL bandwagon? Probably, I'd hardly call what Google and Facebook are doing a "fad". I think it's a fair bet to say that there'll plenty work for me anyway though, sure a few positively ancient languages like COBOL are mostly gone but I doubt the Linux kernel will be rewritten in Java any time soon. So if you want to code in C there'll be jobs for that. They have to fit the domain though, you probably won't be writing new GUI apps in C unless GTK+ is your choice of poison.
I once left a job mainly because I felt it was heading down a too narrow corridor, it was almost like becoming a SAP consultant only smaller and more obscure. That's the only thing people will hire you for, that's the one thing you're an expert in and can get a high hourly rate but if it dries up or you want to work with something else your CV is too specialized. So yes it's important to not end up in a dead end, but I don't feel I have to jump off a bridge just because everyone else is doing it. My concern is whether there'll be enough work for me, if those skills will be in demand and the supply/demand is such that they'll pay a premium for it. That's the pros and cons of being a specialist, if you're in demand it pays very well if you're not in demand you have a tough time finding other work.
There are many other methods to send info, one time pads (number stations), steganography (lots of side channels for noise to be tampered with), couriers, stuff...
OTP needs a secure side channel the same size as the data meaning you can't just call/text/mail someone and verify a fingerprint, which makes it extremely impractical, steganography with no or weak encryption is just security by obscurity, couriers depend on the security of the courier which is just like trusting the Internet - it too is a third party courier. Without regular PKI it wouldn't be practically feasible, fortunately the basic building blocks like RSA for signing/verifying in certificates and PGP messages, Diffie-Hellman for ephemeral keys and any symmetric cipher like AES for bulk transport still seem pretty unthreatened. The problem is the implementation, which is far from trivial to do right.
There's no doubt that Intel and ARM will clash and the winner will be looking at billions of dollars in profit. That does not mean that AMD's best choice is to get caught in the crossfire, when giants clash they're more likely to be stomped on than anything else. Their strength is that they're the only other one except Intel that can produce x86 chips and can compete with Core/Xeon for running "normal" desktop/workstation software and and a lot of closed source server software. In the ARM market, AMD is nothing special. They don't have their own fabs, they don't have particularly much experience with ultra-low power designs. In fact I was impressed with their Mullins performance but they're together with Intel on the wrong side of the ARM/x86 divide when it comes to tablets. Either x86 tablets take off which is mostly a win for Intel or x86 tablets flop and AMD loses.
AMD won the current generation of consoles, but we all know they won't be designing the next generation until 2020+ and the sales will fall long before that. It gives them a reprieve but it's not a permanent solution and their "traditional" CPU/APU business is failing fast, but I'm not sure how you'd fix it. I mean they could go all in against Intel again but that's been a tough nut to crack. Or they could aim for ARM's territory just like all the established players and with Intel gunning for the same too. Or they could try going sideways into some kind of specialized computing, but really all that have tried have been crushed by commodity hardware. I don't think AMD has many good options left, they've got enemies closing in from all sides.
While Intel did a lot of shady things, part of it was also that AMD didn't have nearly enough fab capacity to supply the market. Those kinds of decisions are made years in advance, you don't just pop up a sub-100nm processing plant on demand. So AMD got a huge winner, they surely produced everything they could and got a nice premium on their products but the remaining demand had to go with Intel. It's just not the sort of market battle you can win quickly.
I'm pretty sure any new startup can simply remove anything they are asked to, which is also what Google etc will do any way ;)
That's what worries me, what's in it for Google to fight it? Nothing. And giving the site owner the ability to dispute it usually also means nothing, what's in it for /. to fight something posted in a comment? Nothing. This is then opening shot in a war on information, where anybody can complain to any site about anything they feel is written about them by other people that they don't like. I think the ECHR totally screwed up, to enforce this they'd have to take away even more fundamental rights, like the right to free speech and the right to remember. It's basically a gag order where if you can't block my speech, you block Google from pointing anyone to my speech.
Except the Internet usually has lots and lots of secondary links. Even if you can't go directly from Google to the censored page chances are you'll get a ton of related hits that'll link you to the source. This is for example often the case with copyrighted files, you can find the same download links in tens or hundreds of forums and unless the file is down at the source - the file host - it's almost impossible to keep people from finding it and it'd be pretty obvious that Google is refusing to give you a direct link. And if they start banning all links to sites that link to the censored file well they're going to break the Internet - plus I'd probably serve GoogleBot a link-less page and everyone else the link. Then they have to start forging user agents to discover it and it all goes downhill from there.
I guess the root of the problem is the submitter then. The charity needs to replace them with a less-biased person so the best decision can be made, whether that be OSS or a free-or-cheap charity license for Access.
Charities are usually much like open source, it's the guy who volunteers or nobody. Doubly so when it's a charity for children in Senegal, I doubt he's hired at market rates...
P.S. I assume that no words or names in his fantasy world have any accents or any characters not in the basic ASCII set.
Correct, the Lannisters, the Starks, the Targaryens, the Tyrells, the Greyjoys all plain English names... honestly it's a refreshing break from the high fantasy ThÃloündyir. (Oh right... neither does /.) In fact one of the main characters is named John Snow...
Every time someone complains about how long he takes to write a book he kills another Stark!
So that's how we got the Red Wedding...
True, but you always have the ultimate threat which is to yank the offending machines/networks/ISPs/countries off the Internet. That we don't seems to indicate we don't really care that much that, no matter how virus infested and trojan-laden we keep them online.
You may be a good 9/10 however you may achieve 2/10 in your job because you are not given the time/resources to do any better.
Quick and dirty hacks don't ever score a 2/10 simply because they're short and straightfoward despite being ugly, Assuming it's a 1-10 scale then 1/10 is what you get if you outsource it to the cheapest monkeys you can find, 2/10 is just one step up and probably a Rube Goldberg machine of bizarre copy-pasta. I'd give 3/10 for code that's not only crap but deceptive with ugly hidden side effects. A straight up "hack" is never below a 4/10, even if it's ugly as sin. Then again I'm probably on a game review scale, 5/10 is bad, 6/10 poor, 7/10 decent, 8/10 good, 9/10 excellent and 10/10 outstanding. Like the lower half should never make it through to actual production code, unless you just skipped all that review, testing and QA hogwash. Then again, I've seen that happen...
You honestly think telcos don't know how many subscribers they have? Everybody I know from age 10 and up has one and personally I've got two phones, one for home and one for work. In my case it's because my employer's policy is very strict on mixing work related records with random apps that could compromise the phone. So does a friend of mine so he can hand the "work phone" to someone else when he's away, because that's the number many people call. It doesn't take many of us to add up to >100% of the population.
The situation with the graphics markers are like the ISPs with broadband or the major telecoms when picking a cell phone. Not a monopoloy but an oligopoly run by a few. Boy I miss PowerVR, S3, 3DFX Vodoo, and Matrox.
Ask the people stuck with Poulsbo how they feel about PowerVR graphics, they are one of the few who suck worse than nVidia for driver support. 3DFX with their Glide API was king of proprietary solutions. S3 was the patent champion, even today their patented S3 Texture Compression causes trouble for open source. And Matrox made Intel's 3D performance look stellar. YMMV but I feel the competition in the graphics market is still working fairly well, at least a lot better than on the CPU side. It's just that the primary focus is who can push the most FPS in the latest games using the most bleeding edge drivers, that's what drives sales. But if you think it was any different back then, it's time to take off those rose colored glasses. The only thing that used to be really stable was Intel's server drivers, practically zero performance but it didn't bring your server down.
Most lectures I've been to were lectures because it's practically one of the very few ways one professor can address hundreds of people, of course with smaller groups you could do more but then you need lots of assistants and there are study groups that are essentially students learning on their own. Their main purpose is because having regularly scheduled events drags the undisciplined through the curriculum and because socially it doesn't feel like you've been stuck with your nose in a book all day. Personally I felt the most productive way was just crunching through the book until it made sense, but I think that's very individual.
Now if you were a kamikaze pilot and everybody was sleeping on the job and you went for a final dive against a modern battleship or aircraft carrier, wouldn't you already be blased to bits by an autonomous defense system? I imagine the same goes for tanks, planes, helicopters and even indivdual robot-soldiers, you'll never wait until you're blasted to bits to say "yup, that was an enemy". Even if they don't go on their own search & destroy missions I doubt they'll avoid being used as sentries, convoy escort and other defensive purposes. Or even "defensive on the offensive" weapons like if you point an RPG at a tank. Not to mention self-defense backups if the communication to the mothership is jammed, nobody will leave high tech military equipment stranded and defenseless by a simple communcations jammer. Not going to happen.