The laser bandwidth is going to be an awesome boon, much needed before any amount of populous can correspond interplanetarily in a practical manner.
The closest planet would be Mars and it's 4-20 light minutes away, which means 8-40 minutes round trip. At that rate, you'll be playing postal chess no matter what. The moon is somewhat more practical with 1.3 light seconds so 2.6 seconds round trip but it's probably still way too high for FPS, RTS, car races (did we crash?), fighting games (did the kick hit?) or MMORPGs (did you slay that monster?), you're probably looking at turn-based games of various sorts from chess to TBS. At least it's not intersteller, that 8.4 year round trip means you wouldn't finish one chess game in your life time (unless it's the fool's mate).
Well, if you're in Norway then 800-900,000 people use it daily and 2.9 million occasionally to access their bank and various other public services through BankID. They are moving away from Java now after all the security issues, it was announced in April but hasn't happened yet so with this I expect Firefox usage here will drop like a rock.
A free market solution would be to offer more options. Automatic, universal encryption or digital signatures applied to everything genuine would be a legitimate solution to spam, and everything else gets dropped by your server.
And how exactly would encryption and signatures make sure the content is not spam? As long as email costs nothing but the electrons they'll continue to carpet bomb us with spam.
The solution must be some form of whitelisting, not blacklisting system. Mailing lists and outgoing mail addresses are trivial, the question is incoming mail from previously unknown sources. Personally I'd suggest doing a hash collision to burn CPU time, implemented like this:
1) Server auto-replies with a mail that says you aren't whitelisted, sending the requirements both as email headers (for automated calculation) and in the body as well as a link to a hash calculator.
Example using "user@fromdomain.com" to "user@todomain.com":
2) You either a) Go to a website that uses javascript to calculate the answer b) Use a local application to calculate the answer c) Have a email client that does this for you c) Have a webmail provider who does this for you
3) Hash is verified to be a 25 bit crash with 00000000000000000000, message is delivered and sender is whitelisted.
Some nice things: 1) No protocols need to change, one server can start 2) The sender only needs a CPU to do the work 3) Difficulty is adjustable based on server/account settings. 4) It could eventually become entirely standard and automated. 5) The sender must exist and receive the response 6) You can do it even for non-existing email addresses 7) One base per sender/receiver pair, no easy way to cheat 8) The whitelisting is only valid for that sender, not all the spammer's friends
The obvious downsides: 1) Some people won't figure this out or won't do it, you might have to use a regular email if you absolutely can't afford to not miss any mail. However, the market for "semi-public" email addresses to use in forums and mailing lists should be huge to get it off the ground and eventually it should become something your email client does in the background. 2) Lots of unnecessary burned CPU time (but less than SPAM filters today? maybe not)
Of course I can see this creating a whole new set of problems as trolls impersonate official responses. Wikipedia would have to manage official accounts and on which pages they have permission to act in that capacity and given the ever changing nature of Wikipedia that might not be so easy. Okay so Sony can make official responses on the Sony page, what when someone makes a page called Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal, does Sony get to make an official response there? What if they're unfavorably mentioned in a list of items, does everyone involved get to make their official responses on that page? It's one of those ideas that sound nice in theory but I think would get messy and unmaintainable in practice.
Just because you have two different set of incentives that lead to different inefficiencies don't make them equal. It's hardly news that capitalism rewards cutting corners, anything that makes 99 managers look good and one fail utterly and catastrophically will happen because taking the slightly slower and safe road is punished as is hurts the department's bottom line while averted catastrophic risk is "invisible". The same translates down to employees, getting results here and now is rewarded over doing it the "right way" Meanwhile in the public sector you're not rewarded for cutting any corners but you are punished for lack of proper process, so the safest bet is for everyone in a position of authority to bury it in bureaucracy and for employees to follow the process without taking any shortcuts. They're more like extremes on each side.
Just to take one example, reorganizations in the private and public sector. The private sector was "Here's your new department, here's your new boss and here's your new goals". If you don't like it, tough. Granted my actual work duties didn't change much, but still it came rolling out like a steamroller and I don't recall us being involved at all. In the public sector? The process has taken months with employee representatives, union representatives, all-hands meetings, lots of formalism and honestly at this point I'd just like someone to decide something so I could get back to doing real work, which I suspect will hardly be affected by this at all. Because it's more important that nobody can complain about the process later than getting the actual reorganization done and maybe taking some flak for a quick and dirty solution.
Now I picked an example where my employer would probably agree with that description and say they do want it that way, but I have others which I won't badmouth in public where it seem the production of the documents proving the process was followed are more important than the actual qualitative execution of that process or making the promised deliverables or keeping the set deadlines. In contrast the private sector was always flying by the seat of one's pants, oh there were plenty corporate rules but they rarely let them get in the way of business. If you can deliver on quality, schedule and budget ask for permission now or forgiveness later. At the end of the day they tend to just look at the bottom line, unless shit hits the fan. In which case duck and try to get another middle manager job at another company.
Psychology. A lot of people will stay on the base model and pat themselves on the back for $100 well saved. The people who want more space will by sold up to the 64/128 GB model and pat themselves on the back for getting so many more GB/$. I think the subset of people who are:
a) certain 16GB won't be enough b) certain 32GB will be enough c) willing to pay $100 extra for the privilege
is in an extreme minority. People have no idea what NAND prices are, they just need to feel good about their own choice and the easiest way is to give them a bad choice to make it look good against. So raise your hand everyone with a 32GB model;)
Still it's a pretty big stretch, if they subpoena his computer the normal way then he would be in for some pretty serious criminal charges for tampering with or destruction of evidence if forensics finds any trace of that source code on his computer. The same applies if he removed or replaced drives or sent in the wrong computer, once it's subpoenaed you're on the hook for providing it. I mean if the court subpoenas documents it's hardly like most people can't operate a shredder or find a fireplace. That's on the "destruction of evidence" side, on the "irreparable harm" side I'll just quote this:
Irreparable harm is a legal concept whch argues that the type of harm threatened cannot be corrected through monetary compensation or conditions cannot be put back the way they were. Examples of such irreparable harm may arise in cutting down shade trees, polluting a stream, not giving a child needed medication, not supporting an excavation which may cause collapse of a building, tearing down a structure, among other actions or omissions.
Gramted, you can't put the source code back in the bottle if it's leaked online but it's clearly the sort of harm money can fix.
To brand it as 'pushback' is condescending and offensive as it implies im somehow inappropriately stubborn, or creating an inconvenience or disservice to others in the pursuit of things like consumer capitalism.
Among the people who are hooked on social media, all of the above. At least in my little corner of the world Facebook has become the de facto way to tell your friends what's happening or what you're doing, I've heard many times now "Well, I/he/she/they posted it on Facebook..." and implying that if you're not there, not reading their Facebook feed perhaps you don't care about your friends. Likewise, nobody expects to have a conversation to know the news anymore they expect it to come delivered to them in their Facebook stream. Last year one of my top five friends had a son, and I found about it because others were congratulating him which I backtracked to a Facebook post. He posted it and expected everybody to know, at least my best friend texted me when he had his baby girl.
At least I know there's one other in my social circles that have given up his Facebook account, so I'm not totally alone. Personally I've kept a shell account that people can send me invites (because they also use it as their RSVP system), but I'm not sure if that's better or worse because technically I'm on Facebook which means they might think I read their feeds. Either way there's a huge amount of peer pressure and if I was younger and more impressionable (sounds better than less stubborn) I'd not pick this battle and go with the Facebook flow. It's not really about the pros and cons of "social media", it's that if you exclude yourself from the ways people socialize then you'll have a really hard time making friends and it's easily confused with being ignorant, arrogant, anti-social or weird.
If it is a public place that I spend money, I will be polite and ask, "Please put that camera away.", if they refuse, I will go straight to the business owner, tell that that I am leaving and will no longer spend my money in their establishment as long as they allow those things, and leave.
Of course it's probably not a choice of losing your business or losing no business. If those people don't want to put their Google Glass away and will find some other place to eat lunch next time, that's money lost too. By all means vote with your wallet, but if this becomes another fad in our increasingly more always-online society I doubt your pockets are deep enough. It's not obviously disruptive to other people so I think general apathy will win. Yeah, there's a bunch of people there with Google Glass and they might record me eating a burger but so what. It's not like you have an expectation of privacy for eating a burger in public and if you really wanted to do covert surveillance you probably could anyway.
Should I prioritize the guy's views of a football team over an e-mail from my wife concerning our family?
If your wife is sending you urgent e-mails about your family that you need to deal with right now and not in ten minutes, maybe that's the problem? If it's urgent you call. Twice if need be, to let you know voice mail is not quick enough. If your excuse for checking your email every time a message pops in is that it might possibly be urgent, it's a bloody poor one. Not to mention you'll probably spend most of your life checking email, but that's not anyone else's problem.
I remember someone telling me once, he was one of the very first people who got a earplug/microphone for his cell phone and even cell phones were fairly rare. So he was apparently talking straight into thin air to someone who wasn't there, holding a conversation with them. Unless they spotted the earpiece and realized what it was, people thought he was certifiably insane. Today nobody would blink twice at that.
Ah yes but he was sending the wrong rude message, it was "I'm so bored listening to you it seems time is standing still and I keep checking my watch praying this will soon be over" instead of the "I'm far too busy and important to devote all my attention and energy to interacting with you, so I'll casually show it by doing other things at the same time" rude.
To compete for "the fastest" title they're constantly pushing the limits of what could reasonably be considered a phone. At 5.2 inches it's getting close to a 7 inch tablet, next time around I'll have to get a "mini" phone for it to be anywhere close to my current iPhone 4.
So then what is the purpose of the EU? And why does it grow more and more powerful and centralized (e.g. the adoption of the euro) as time progresses?
Mostly equal access to markets, capital, labor and resources. The main reason to start a war (outside racial/religious wars) is because the other side has something you want and can't have. If you can run the same business in the same market under the same rules from Germany as you can from France, what's there to have a war about? While there's quite a few intra-EU foreign workers when you look at it from a grand picture most people want to stay where they are if the job market and wages are decent there. Despite the freedom to travel and take jobs elsewhere most want to stay in their own country.
When I talked about a US of Europe I thought mainly about culture, language and identity. I'm sure there's differences between California and New York but they're nothing compared to Portugal and Bulgaria. Totally different people but if you want to sell Portuguese goods in Bulgaria or Bulgarian goods in Portugal the same inner market rules apply. As for the euro, the idea was to lower trade barriers because if you live somewhere like in the BeNeLux countries you have like five countries inside an hour's drive. No currency exchange means cross-border trade and shopping is easy as pie. The downside is that it was like having a joint checking account without ever agreeing on the rules for using it.
Yes, there's a lot of proverbial saber rattling but in the grand scheme of things it's very far from actual saber rattling. Worst case I think the EU will have to shed a few countries down south that have mismanaged their economy too horribly from the euro, but I think the union would stand and they'd return to a position like the UK, Denmark and Sweden which are in the EU and outside the euro. The rest is a lot of scare mongering to make them realize the seriousness of the situation, they both stand to lose on a collapse and as long as they don't play chicken on who takes the bill there will be a solution.
I doubt DIY metal working will ever come down to the prices of mass production, it'll be like how you could print our own book on your own ink printer but why would you do that? There's no money in it, it only matters the law says you can't have it. Which means guns and.... well, what's the rest really? Make my own knives, forks, spoons, door handles, belt buckles and so on? I think most people here too easily confuse the real world with the digital world where bits are perfectly duplicated at home with only fractions of a cent in electricity. If it exists at your local hardware store it'll be way cheaper to get it from there, just like Amazon can ship you any dead tree book you like for less than it costs to print it yourself. And if you want to talk self-sufficiency then depending on an advanced 3D printing robot manufacturer isn't really it.
You're generally shielded from the burden of unskilled migration by your geographical location, shielded from invasion by your southern and eastern neighbors who recently joined NATO, you are far out enough in the periphery of world affairs to not attract the ire of regional powers, but near enough that everyone wants to woo you to their side. You have few people, yet have a claim to large swathes of ocean energy and mineral resources. While you have some exposure to the world and to racial diversity, you still remain one of the most ethnically homogeneous regions in the West, sparing you much of the social strife that other countries experience. Plus, most people have forgotten your country's contributions to murder, slavery, rape, and pillage, or they'd rather focus on someone else's. Pretty comfortable place to be. Though, not quite a place from which to judge.
Quite a lot of fair points there, though I'd disagree on the last one. While the people who lived through WWII is quickly dwindling, we're very aware of our not-so-distant history when most of northern Europe was in flames and we considered ourselves all but ethnically homogeneous with über- and untermenschen. An awfully lot has happened since then though and we've probably done more to mend our wounds in the last 70 years than many other conflicts that have gone on for centuries. But I think I speak for most of Europe when I say we don't want to become a United States of Europe, the English want to be English, the French French, the Germans German and so on. We've found a peaceful way to coexist with "the other side" ceasing to exist and if it sounds a bit like we're saying "we did it, you can do it too" then that's probably true.
My horse and buggy is not broken, why are you trying to replace it?
Yes, the alarm bells go off in my head as well when someone says "rewrite", does this person know WTF he's talking about? I know most battle tested code isn't all that pretty and that many people like to rewrite what they don't understand, don't follow their ideas of good code, aren't following their design patterns or isn't generic or flexible enough. Worst are those that take a look at a convoluted mess and decide it's too complex to understand so they start a new "clean" design, because then they're probably missing half the intricacies of what the code does. And you must put a lot of trust in the ones who will do the rewrite, that they're people who can actually pull it off because nothing is more worthless than a half-done, abandoned rewrite. Except maybe pushing it to production anyway, because you're in too deep.
When all that is said, few things give me as much job satisfaction as ripping out a convoluted mess of spaghetti code and replacing it with something far simpler to understand and have it work much better than before, easier to understand, higher performing, cleaner to extend and more often than not the comparison testing shows the supposedly working code was actually fairly buggy but nobody had realized it. I guess you can call it the "extreme makeover" version of refactoring, which is supposedly a good thing if you're Agile. But usually the it's not the project that once was, it's the accumulation of maintenance work and feature drift that have extended and altered it through patches upon patches upon patches that make it harder and harder to add a new patch to the system and keep it working. In short, overburdening technical debt.
Another really good reason to consider a rewrite is because a code refactoring tends to only look at doing what the code is doing today better, which may or may no longer be what the users want - if it ever was. At least for internal solutions it's pretty easy to ask the users what is and isn't working so well for them, of course in theory this should be in some prioritized product backlog with a system owner also for running systems but I haven't seen one yet. In practice it's a perishable and it's easier to go out, get a snapshot of what people feel and work from that rather than believe there'll be a continuously updated and relevant list. If you can make something that still works and the users feel is slightly more streamlined and that looks better on the inside you can manage to pull of a win-win for everybody. It's not a zero-sum game just because both "work".
All malware today uses ports 80 and 443. Port-based firewalling is a meaningless ritual from the previous century.
I think you're confusing cause and effect, if we didn't have port based firewalls we'd still have Blaster-style worms spreading like wildfire. Because we've locked things down to a few approved ports, naturally that's where they try getting in.
And they're down to 1.1% of all web servers, all FreeBSD. From the list of "Popular websites using FreeBSD" only one is in Alexa's top 500 and that's php.net. The Alexa rankings:
It is literally less than a handful (the top four) that means BSD even still has a presence and 80% of that is probably just one site. I guess BSD code is lots of places like in OS X and embedded and routers and whatnot but BSD is practically dead as a server (cue and queue the Netcraft and Monty Python jokes, please take a number). Who, at this point, would be interested in building a new network stack for BSD? I guess Juniper would since they use it for Junos, but honestly not that many others...
What amazes me is the amount of trouble seemingly trivial user interface issues seem to generate. I mean if you look at Gnome (2 and 3), KDE, Unity, XFCE and we can throw Windows and OS X in for good measure, how many ways are there to organize windows? Launching apps, see running apps, switching between apps and so on. Not that freaking many. It seems to me this should be trivially implemented in the same desktop environment using profiles, if you like the Gnome 2 look here's a Gnome 2 profile and stuff will pop up in all the places you expect it to. You happy with the Windows 7 paradigm and don't want to learn a new one? Here's a profile for you. It'd result in too little drama I guess...
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I liked having my own room as a kid, now I have my own apartment and I guess eventually I will have my own house. I've had housemates in the past and with no offense to those I was living with I always wanted my own living space, even if it's a lot of arguably unnecessary cost. If you don't think it's a big deal, good for you. Heck some just like that lifestyle and only move out to live with someone as a couple, never having nor wanting a place all to themselves. Personally I'd take living by myself and my current 10+ year old okay-but-impresses-no-one car over housemates and a Ferrari any day of the week. Except the days with lots of leisure time and cruising weather at least.
They already do that here in Norway on long charter trips, if you want to sit a) less cramped or with b) more legroom or c) the full space near the emergency exists you will pay extra. But for the typical 45-90 minute flight time I honestly don't care. I could sit on a bicycle seat in almost standing position if it'd pass safety regulations and brought decent savings.
My thoughts exactly. Isn't 'flow based programming' just a renaming of 'procedural programming'? I still think that your average business application that mainly updates a db and has pretty vanilla looking maintenance screen is easier to code using the old style procedural approach, rather than trying to treat an invoice / customer / complaint as an object.
Well to each his own, but to me it sounds like a near ideal case for OOP... every object is steward for a data row. Particularly if you're doing a MDI interface where you're reviewing a complaint and is looking through the customer profile, invoices etc. to see if the complaint looks genuine. There's no fixed order, there's no nesting level, there's no lifespan so the call of procedures might go like
It's fine if you have a big task and is breaking it down into many managable and reusable sub-procedures but when you have many independent forms (screen objects, to avoid the OOP object) with individual life spans then it feels like trying to put a square peg into a round hole. Plus it's a simple way to "bundle" related procedures like for example if they add a new field to a "Complaint" you have to find and edit viewComplaint() and submitAndCloseComplaintAnswer() and maybe there's a bunch of others like escalateComplaint() and did you catch them all? In OOP they should all be in the Complaint class, in procedural programming you're hoping they all have sane naming so you can find them. And sanity is in short supply in most large business applications.
Yes. Did you ever stop to wonder why people left KaZaA, eDonkey, Gnutella and so on for Suprnova and The Pirate Bay? We tried it 10-15 years ago and it was vastly inferior to torrent sites, what's new? Except that torrent sites have now gone torrentless and trackerless to mostly carry magnet links.
How exactly would a decentralized searched engine have to cope with worse problems than the traditional ones struggle with?
Statistics. Google has tons and tons of statistics on what links are actually relevant to the search terms, your decentralized crawler will find some random shit and return it as a hit. Search any of the networks above and you get tons of crap. Perhaps you get better results with a decentralized search engine on the web, but only because you rely on sites like TPB and other popular torrent sites to weed out most of the crap. Searching a fairly centralized resource in a decentralized way isn't exactly being decentralized.
Slashdot Mirror
The laser bandwidth is going to be an awesome boon, much needed before any amount of populous can correspond interplanetarily in a practical manner.
The closest planet would be Mars and it's 4-20 light minutes away, which means 8-40 minutes round trip. At that rate, you'll be playing postal chess no matter what. The moon is somewhat more practical with 1.3 light seconds so 2.6 seconds round trip but it's probably still way too high for FPS, RTS, car races (did we crash?), fighting games (did the kick hit?) or MMORPGs (did you slay that monster?), you're probably looking at turn-based games of various sorts from chess to TBS. At least it's not intersteller, that 8.4 year round trip means you wouldn't finish one chess game in your life time (unless it's the fool's mate).
Well, if you're in Norway then 800-900,000 people use it daily and 2.9 million occasionally to access their bank and various other public services through BankID. They are moving away from Java now after all the security issues, it was announced in April but hasn't happened yet so with this I expect Firefox usage here will drop like a rock.
A free market solution would be to offer more options. Automatic, universal encryption or digital signatures applied to everything genuine would be a legitimate solution to spam, and everything else gets dropped by your server.
And how exactly would encryption and signatures make sure the content is not spam? As long as email costs nothing but the electrons they'll continue to carpet bomb us with spam.
The solution must be some form of whitelisting, not blacklisting system. Mailing lists and outgoing mail addresses are trivial, the question is incoming mail from previously unknown sources. Personally I'd suggest doing a hash collision to burn CPU time, implemented like this:
1) Server auto-replies with a mail that says you aren't whitelisted, sending the requirements both as email headers (for automated calculation) and in the body as well as a link to a hash calculator.
Example using "user@fromdomain.com" to "user@todomain.com":
Hash-algorithm: SHA1
Hash-collision-strength: 25
Hash-base: user@fromdomain.com->user@todomain.com
2) You either
a) Go to a website that uses javascript to calculate the answer
b) Use a local application to calculate the answer
c) Have a email client that does this for you
c) Have a webmail provider who does this for you
Hash-solution: user@fromdomain.com->user@todomain.comA3BHG
Hash-value: 007afcd67d58c76d786c
3) Hash is verified to be a 25 bit crash with 00000000000000000000, message is delivered and sender is whitelisted.
Some nice things:
1) No protocols need to change, one server can start
2) The sender only needs a CPU to do the work
3) Difficulty is adjustable based on server/account settings.
4) It could eventually become entirely standard and automated.
5) The sender must exist and receive the response
6) You can do it even for non-existing email addresses
7) One base per sender/receiver pair, no easy way to cheat
8) The whitelisting is only valid for that sender, not all the spammer's friends
The obvious downsides:
1) Some people won't figure this out or won't do it, you might have to use a regular email if you absolutely can't afford to not miss any mail. However, the market for "semi-public" email addresses to use in forums and mailing lists should be huge to get it off the ground and eventually it should become something your email client does in the background.
2) Lots of unnecessary burned CPU time (but less than SPAM filters today? maybe not)
Of course I can see this creating a whole new set of problems as trolls impersonate official responses. Wikipedia would have to manage official accounts and on which pages they have permission to act in that capacity and given the ever changing nature of Wikipedia that might not be so easy. Okay so Sony can make official responses on the Sony page, what when someone makes a page called Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal, does Sony get to make an official response there? What if they're unfavorably mentioned in a list of items, does everyone involved get to make their official responses on that page? It's one of those ideas that sound nice in theory but I think would get messy and unmaintainable in practice.
Just because you have two different set of incentives that lead to different inefficiencies don't make them equal. It's hardly news that capitalism rewards cutting corners, anything that makes 99 managers look good and one fail utterly and catastrophically will happen because taking the slightly slower and safe road is punished as is hurts the department's bottom line while averted catastrophic risk is "invisible". The same translates down to employees, getting results here and now is rewarded over doing it the "right way" Meanwhile in the public sector you're not rewarded for cutting any corners but you are punished for lack of proper process, so the safest bet is for everyone in a position of authority to bury it in bureaucracy and for employees to follow the process without taking any shortcuts. They're more like extremes on each side.
Just to take one example, reorganizations in the private and public sector. The private sector was "Here's your new department, here's your new boss and here's your new goals". If you don't like it, tough. Granted my actual work duties didn't change much, but still it came rolling out like a steamroller and I don't recall us being involved at all. In the public sector? The process has taken months with employee representatives, union representatives, all-hands meetings, lots of formalism and honestly at this point I'd just like someone to decide something so I could get back to doing real work, which I suspect will hardly be affected by this at all. Because it's more important that nobody can complain about the process later than getting the actual reorganization done and maybe taking some flak for a quick and dirty solution.
Now I picked an example where my employer would probably agree with that description and say they do want it that way, but I have others which I won't badmouth in public where it seem the production of the documents proving the process was followed are more important than the actual qualitative execution of that process or making the promised deliverables or keeping the set deadlines. In contrast the private sector was always flying by the seat of one's pants, oh there were plenty corporate rules but they rarely let them get in the way of business. If you can deliver on quality, schedule and budget ask for permission now or forgiveness later. At the end of the day they tend to just look at the bottom line, unless shit hits the fan. In which case duck and try to get another middle manager job at another company.
Psychology. A lot of people will stay on the base model and pat themselves on the back for $100 well saved. The people who want more space will by sold up to the 64/128 GB model and pat themselves on the back for getting so many more GB/$. I think the subset of people who are:
a) certain 16GB won't be enough
b) certain 32GB will be enough
c) willing to pay $100 extra for the privilege
is in an extreme minority. People have no idea what NAND prices are, they just need to feel good about their own choice and the easiest way is to give them a bad choice to make it look good against. So raise your hand everyone with a 32GB model ;)
Still it's a pretty big stretch, if they subpoena his computer the normal way then he would be in for some pretty serious criminal charges for tampering with or destruction of evidence if forensics finds any trace of that source code on his computer. The same applies if he removed or replaced drives or sent in the wrong computer, once it's subpoenaed you're on the hook for providing it. I mean if the court subpoenas documents it's hardly like most people can't operate a shredder or find a fireplace. That's on the "destruction of evidence" side, on the "irreparable harm" side I'll just quote this:
Irreparable harm is a legal concept whch argues that the type of harm threatened cannot be corrected through monetary compensation or conditions cannot be put back the way they were. Examples of such irreparable harm may arise in cutting down shade trees, polluting a stream, not giving a child needed medication, not supporting an excavation which may cause collapse of a building, tearing down a structure, among other actions or omissions.
Gramted, you can't put the source code back in the bottle if it's leaked online but it's clearly the sort of harm money can fix.
To brand it as 'pushback' is condescending and offensive as it implies im somehow inappropriately stubborn, or creating an inconvenience or disservice to others in the pursuit of things like consumer capitalism.
Among the people who are hooked on social media, all of the above. At least in my little corner of the world Facebook has become the de facto way to tell your friends what's happening or what you're doing, I've heard many times now "Well, I/he/she/they posted it on Facebook..." and implying that if you're not there, not reading their Facebook feed perhaps you don't care about your friends. Likewise, nobody expects to have a conversation to know the news anymore they expect it to come delivered to them in their Facebook stream. Last year one of my top five friends had a son, and I found about it because others were congratulating him which I backtracked to a Facebook post. He posted it and expected everybody to know, at least my best friend texted me when he had his baby girl.
At least I know there's one other in my social circles that have given up his Facebook account, so I'm not totally alone. Personally I've kept a shell account that people can send me invites (because they also use it as their RSVP system), but I'm not sure if that's better or worse because technically I'm on Facebook which means they might think I read their feeds. Either way there's a huge amount of peer pressure and if I was younger and more impressionable (sounds better than less stubborn) I'd not pick this battle and go with the Facebook flow. It's not really about the pros and cons of "social media", it's that if you exclude yourself from the ways people socialize then you'll have a really hard time making friends and it's easily confused with being ignorant, arrogant, anti-social or weird.
If it is a public place that I spend money, I will be polite and ask, "Please put that camera away.", if they refuse, I will go straight to the business owner, tell that that I am leaving and will no longer spend my money in their establishment as long as they allow those things, and leave.
Of course it's probably not a choice of losing your business or losing no business. If those people don't want to put their Google Glass away and will find some other place to eat lunch next time, that's money lost too. By all means vote with your wallet, but if this becomes another fad in our increasingly more always-online society I doubt your pockets are deep enough. It's not obviously disruptive to other people so I think general apathy will win. Yeah, there's a bunch of people there with Google Glass and they might record me eating a burger but so what. It's not like you have an expectation of privacy for eating a burger in public and if you really wanted to do covert surveillance you probably could anyway.
Should I prioritize the guy's views of a football team over an e-mail from my wife concerning our family?
If your wife is sending you urgent e-mails about your family that you need to deal with right now and not in ten minutes, maybe that's the problem? If it's urgent you call. Twice if need be, to let you know voice mail is not quick enough. If your excuse for checking your email every time a message pops in is that it might possibly be urgent, it's a bloody poor one. Not to mention you'll probably spend most of your life checking email, but that's not anyone else's problem.
I remember someone telling me once, he was one of the very first people who got a earplug/microphone for his cell phone and even cell phones were fairly rare. So he was apparently talking straight into thin air to someone who wasn't there, holding a conversation with them. Unless they spotted the earpiece and realized what it was, people thought he was certifiably insane. Today nobody would blink twice at that.
Ah yes but he was sending the wrong rude message, it was "I'm so bored listening to you it seems time is standing still and I keep checking my watch praying this will soon be over" instead of the "I'm far too busy and important to devote all my attention and energy to interacting with you, so I'll casually show it by doing other things at the same time" rude.
To compete for "the fastest" title they're constantly pushing the limits of what could reasonably be considered a phone. At 5.2 inches it's getting close to a 7 inch tablet, next time around I'll have to get a "mini" phone for it to be anywhere close to my current iPhone 4.
So then what is the purpose of the EU? And why does it grow more and more powerful and centralized (e.g. the adoption of the euro) as time progresses?
Mostly equal access to markets, capital, labor and resources. The main reason to start a war (outside racial/religious wars) is because the other side has something you want and can't have. If you can run the same business in the same market under the same rules from Germany as you can from France, what's there to have a war about? While there's quite a few intra-EU foreign workers when you look at it from a grand picture most people want to stay where they are if the job market and wages are decent there. Despite the freedom to travel and take jobs elsewhere most want to stay in their own country.
When I talked about a US of Europe I thought mainly about culture, language and identity. I'm sure there's differences between California and New York but they're nothing compared to Portugal and Bulgaria. Totally different people but if you want to sell Portuguese goods in Bulgaria or Bulgarian goods in Portugal the same inner market rules apply. As for the euro, the idea was to lower trade barriers because if you live somewhere like in the BeNeLux countries you have like five countries inside an hour's drive. No currency exchange means cross-border trade and shopping is easy as pie. The downside is that it was like having a joint checking account without ever agreeing on the rules for using it.
Yes, there's a lot of proverbial saber rattling but in the grand scheme of things it's very far from actual saber rattling. Worst case I think the EU will have to shed a few countries down south that have mismanaged their economy too horribly from the euro, but I think the union would stand and they'd return to a position like the UK, Denmark and Sweden which are in the EU and outside the euro. The rest is a lot of scare mongering to make them realize the seriousness of the situation, they both stand to lose on a collapse and as long as they don't play chicken on who takes the bill there will be a solution.
I doubt DIY metal working will ever come down to the prices of mass production, it'll be like how you could print our own book on your own ink printer but why would you do that? There's no money in it, it only matters the law says you can't have it. Which means guns and.... well, what's the rest really? Make my own knives, forks, spoons, door handles, belt buckles and so on? I think most people here too easily confuse the real world with the digital world where bits are perfectly duplicated at home with only fractions of a cent in electricity. If it exists at your local hardware store it'll be way cheaper to get it from there, just like Amazon can ship you any dead tree book you like for less than it costs to print it yourself. And if you want to talk self-sufficiency then depending on an advanced 3D printing robot manufacturer isn't really it.
You're generally shielded from the burden of unskilled migration by your geographical location, shielded from invasion by your southern and eastern neighbors who recently joined NATO, you are far out enough in the periphery of world affairs to not attract the ire of regional powers, but near enough that everyone wants to woo you to their side. You have few people, yet have a claim to large swathes of ocean energy and mineral resources. While you have some exposure to the world and to racial diversity, you still remain one of the most ethnically homogeneous regions in the West, sparing you much of the social strife that other countries experience. Plus, most people have forgotten your country's contributions to murder, slavery, rape, and pillage, or they'd rather focus on someone else's. Pretty comfortable place to be. Though, not quite a place from which to judge.
Quite a lot of fair points there, though I'd disagree on the last one. While the people who lived through WWII is quickly dwindling, we're very aware of our not-so-distant history when most of northern Europe was in flames and we considered ourselves all but ethnically homogeneous with über- and untermenschen. An awfully lot has happened since then though and we've probably done more to mend our wounds in the last 70 years than many other conflicts that have gone on for centuries. But I think I speak for most of Europe when I say we don't want to become a United States of Europe, the English want to be English, the French French, the Germans German and so on. We've found a peaceful way to coexist with "the other side" ceasing to exist and if it sounds a bit like we're saying "we did it, you can do it too" then that's probably true.
Troll: Presenting facts the moderators don't like.
My horse and buggy is not broken, why are you trying to replace it?
Yes, the alarm bells go off in my head as well when someone says "rewrite", does this person know WTF he's talking about? I know most battle tested code isn't all that pretty and that many people like to rewrite what they don't understand, don't follow their ideas of good code, aren't following their design patterns or isn't generic or flexible enough. Worst are those that take a look at a convoluted mess and decide it's too complex to understand so they start a new "clean" design, because then they're probably missing half the intricacies of what the code does. And you must put a lot of trust in the ones who will do the rewrite, that they're people who can actually pull it off because nothing is more worthless than a half-done, abandoned rewrite. Except maybe pushing it to production anyway, because you're in too deep.
When all that is said, few things give me as much job satisfaction as ripping out a convoluted mess of spaghetti code and replacing it with something far simpler to understand and have it work much better than before, easier to understand, higher performing, cleaner to extend and more often than not the comparison testing shows the supposedly working code was actually fairly buggy but nobody had realized it. I guess you can call it the "extreme makeover" version of refactoring, which is supposedly a good thing if you're Agile. But usually the it's not the project that once was, it's the accumulation of maintenance work and feature drift that have extended and altered it through patches upon patches upon patches that make it harder and harder to add a new patch to the system and keep it working. In short, overburdening technical debt.
Another really good reason to consider a rewrite is because a code refactoring tends to only look at doing what the code is doing today better, which may or may no longer be what the users want - if it ever was. At least for internal solutions it's pretty easy to ask the users what is and isn't working so well for them, of course in theory this should be in some prioritized product backlog with a system owner also for running systems but I haven't seen one yet. In practice it's a perishable and it's easier to go out, get a snapshot of what people feel and work from that rather than believe there'll be a continuously updated and relevant list. If you can make something that still works and the users feel is slightly more streamlined and that looks better on the inside you can manage to pull of a win-win for everybody. It's not a zero-sum game just because both "work".
All malware today uses ports 80 and 443. Port-based firewalling is a meaningless ritual from the previous century.
I think you're confusing cause and effect, if we didn't have port based firewalls we'd still have Blaster-style worms spreading like wildfire. Because we've locked things down to a few approved ports, naturally that's where they try getting in.
And they're down to 1.1% of all web servers, all FreeBSD. From the list of "Popular websites using FreeBSD" only one is in Alexa's top 500 and that's php.net. The Alexa rankings:
php.net: 229
turbobit.net: 557
jvzoo.com: 771
cpanel.net: 1096
neoseeker.com: 5488
starpulse.co: 5818
salespider.com: 4710
weblancer.net: 5125
extranetinvestment.com: 5834
msi.com: 6702
It is literally less than a handful (the top four) that means BSD even still has a presence and 80% of that is probably just one site. I guess BSD code is lots of places like in OS X and embedded and routers and whatnot but BSD is practically dead as a server (cue and queue the Netcraft and Monty Python jokes, please take a number). Who, at this point, would be interested in building a new network stack for BSD? I guess Juniper would since they use it for Junos, but honestly not that many others...
What amazes me is the amount of trouble seemingly trivial user interface issues seem to generate. I mean if you look at Gnome (2 and 3), KDE, Unity, XFCE and we can throw Windows and OS X in for good measure, how many ways are there to organize windows? Launching apps, see running apps, switching between apps and so on. Not that freaking many. It seems to me this should be trivially implemented in the same desktop environment using profiles, if you like the Gnome 2 look here's a Gnome 2 profile and stuff will pop up in all the places you expect it to. You happy with the Windows 7 paradigm and don't want to learn a new one? Here's a profile for you. It'd result in too little drama I guess...
Different strokes for different folks, I guess. I liked having my own room as a kid, now I have my own apartment and I guess eventually I will have my own house. I've had housemates in the past and with no offense to those I was living with I always wanted my own living space, even if it's a lot of arguably unnecessary cost. If you don't think it's a big deal, good for you. Heck some just like that lifestyle and only move out to live with someone as a couple, never having nor wanting a place all to themselves. Personally I'd take living by myself and my current 10+ year old okay-but-impresses-no-one car over housemates and a Ferrari any day of the week. Except the days with lots of leisure time and cruising weather at least.
They already do that here in Norway on long charter trips, if you want to sit a) less cramped or with b) more legroom or c) the full space near the emergency exists you will pay extra. But for the typical 45-90 minute flight time I honestly don't care. I could sit on a bicycle seat in almost standing position if it'd pass safety regulations and brought decent savings.
My thoughts exactly. Isn't 'flow based programming' just a renaming of 'procedural programming'? I still think that your average business application that mainly updates a db and has pretty vanilla looking maintenance screen is easier to code using the old style procedural approach, rather than trying to treat an invoice / customer / complaint as an object.
Well to each his own, but to me it sounds like a near ideal case for OOP... every object is steward for a data row. Particularly if you're doing a MDI interface where you're reviewing a complaint and is looking through the customer profile, invoices etc. to see if the complaint looks genuine. There's no fixed order, there's no nesting level, there's no lifespan so the call of procedures might go like
viewComplaint()
viewCustomerHistory()
viewInvoice()
closeCustomerHistory()
submitAndCloseComplaintAnswer()
closeInvoice()
It's fine if you have a big task and is breaking it down into many managable and reusable sub-procedures but when you have many independent forms (screen objects, to avoid the OOP object) with individual life spans then it feels like trying to put a square peg into a round hole. Plus it's a simple way to "bundle" related procedures like for example if they add a new field to a "Complaint" you have to find and edit viewComplaint() and submitAndCloseComplaintAnswer() and maybe there's a bunch of others like escalateComplaint() and did you catch them all? In OOP they should all be in the Complaint class, in procedural programming you're hoping they all have sane naming so you can find them. And sanity is in short supply in most large business applications.
As opposed to the general BitTorrent world?
Yes. Did you ever stop to wonder why people left KaZaA, eDonkey, Gnutella and so on for Suprnova and The Pirate Bay? We tried it 10-15 years ago and it was vastly inferior to torrent sites, what's new? Except that torrent sites have now gone torrentless and trackerless to mostly carry magnet links.
How exactly would a decentralized searched engine have to cope with worse problems than the traditional ones struggle with?
Statistics. Google has tons and tons of statistics on what links are actually relevant to the search terms, your decentralized crawler will find some random shit and return it as a hit. Search any of the networks above and you get tons of crap. Perhaps you get better results with a decentralized search engine on the web, but only because you rely on sites like TPB and other popular torrent sites to weed out most of the crap. Searching a fairly centralized resource in a decentralized way isn't exactly being decentralized.