Maybe a more secure OS from the get-go might help? Although Win 7 seems to be a step in the right direction....
As long as people want to download warez and "free" applications from random places on the Internet, you'll have a virus problem. And if it was used in a sensible way like "Hey, the sources you're getting software from has viruses, we don't catch them all but we caught this one!" and not "The virus checker didn't find a virus, so it must be clean!" it'd do more good. Ultimately there's only that many safeties you can have against people shooting themselves in the foot. Anti-virus helps a few and the rest, well they mostly can't be helped.
It's not a secret that the commission has been ripe for lobbyists, particularly before the parliament got their veto right with the Lisbon treaty in 2009. But it really comes down to the EU being in a half-state between a trade alliance and a federation. Is it an alliance of nations or does it want a European parliament like Congress and a federal government, with federal law, federal taxes, and federal economic policy? Let me tell you there's a vast opposition to that, not just in the UK and France. Even though the EU is expanding to cover more and more areas, for the most part it has to work through the national governments. If there's a top level meeting on education, it's the 27 ministers of education not an EU Department of Education. Despite the talk of an EU military force, there are 27 national militaries. There are 27 ministers on foreign policy who each keep their own ties to other nations and so on. And that is also why the EU passes directives, while the 27 national assemblies passes laws.
I mean, yes they could do away with that and pretty much become the United States of Europe. One parliament that makes law directly from Brussels on their own. It'd be democratic, as the EU parliament is democratically chosen. Some say all the important things are already decided there, but there's a difference between keeping the appearance of national governance and openly admitting that the EU is running the whole show. That is why most directives have optional components, so the national governments can pretend to have a say even though all the essential parts are required. And I say this coming from Norway, a non-EU member that's passed every EU directive since 1994 and is now maybe considering veto'ing our first. And of all the crappy directives they could have picked they chose a poor one, but at this point I just want to know what happens if we don't just bend over and take it.
I have an Atom netbook, and it was way ahead of AMD at the time. But after AMD launched Brazos in January this year, the Atom has looked old. It's still a bit lower power but for a lot lower performance. CedarTrail-M is supposed to be out this month, which may breathe a little more life into it but neither that nor Saltwell out next year seem very impressive. The first really major architecture upgrade isn't until Silvermont in 2013, until then AMD is more than a match for the Atom.
Re:Why so much disbelief in aliens among scientist
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Exoplanet Count Tops 700
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· Score: 4, Informative
Not to mention objects with really short orbits, which means much more rapid observations. Any planet will only pass between the star and us once per cycle (assuming it's in the plane) which makes it much easier to find orbits measures in weeks or months instead of years and decades. Like for example our Jupiter has an orbit of almost 12 years. They need two measurements to get a period and want three for confirmation, that's 36 years. How long have we been searching for exoplanets again? Oh right, we wouldn't have found our own solar system yet.
Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States Never Published, Never Registered Works Unpublished works: Life of the author + 70 years Unpublished anonymous and pseudonymous works, and works made for hire (corporate authorship): 120 years from date of creation Unpublished works when the death date of the author is not known: 120 years from date of creation.
Among many things absurdly wrong with that statement, it would make pirating an about-to-be-published movie/book/software/whatever legal since it's not yet covered by copyright.
Has it occurred to you that some people don't share your view that everyone should be forced to use their code in a way consistent with Stallman's ideologies?
Who said anything about force? Apple is using their freedom to make OS X out of BSD. Users are using their freedom to choose OS X over BSD. Everybody is free to contribute to or use BSD, I'm just saying most don't. That even if you take away Linux and the GPL, most would continue to use their freedom to not contribute back to do just that. That the market share currently held by Linux would belong to proprietary alternatives, not BSD. It's my opinion of how an alternative timeline would look.
(As an aside: Apple has actually done a fair bit -- but since you're borderline trolling I wouldn't expect you to mention that.)
Because BSD is so far away from being a competitor it doesn't matter. If they saw competition from BSD, they'd probably keep a proprietary fork. But why bother when 99.9%+ of the people using that code will be OS X users anyway? It is really just another indication that BSD is completely harmless and no substitute at all, a library more than an alternative.
The BSD license allows people to use code for pretty much whatever purpose, provided that they don't claim to have written it. The GPL allows people to use code for whatever purpose -- provided they conform to the GPL ideology, license their code under the GPL, and don't use it in certain ways that Stallman et al. think are unacceptable.
Actually just conform to the license. Like Linus has shown many times, there's no need to take everything RMS says as gospel. So the code is free but almost only Apple uses BSD code, users use OS X. Through that they use the code, as every BSD fan likes to point out, but they have no access to it or freedom from it. The only free form, the pure BSD form, is a form almost nobody uses on its own.
You tell me which embodies the spirit of freedom more.
What I refuse to agree with are the BSD pundits that pretends it is more popular and more free at the same time. You can either say you have a 5%+ market share of users with no freedoms, or a <0.01% market share with freedoms. But when they try to pretend they have 5%+ of the market enjoying those freedoms as if they were OSS users, it's being intellectually dishonest. <troll>It's almost as bad hearing RIAA math where you take the number of pirated copies and multiply it with the retail price, you reach a completely imaginary number.</troll>
Linux does run every component of the kernel in the same address space, which has its downsides (a buggy video driver can theoretically affect your network driver), but I haven't seen these downsides come up in practice. Truth be told, if one of your drivers crashes, there's little hope of maintaining a useful system and you'll likely want to reboot anyway.
Not just theoretically, I've used some development kernels and what keeps Linux running is a damn good set of reviewers and a quality nazi (in the most positive sense) on top. One buggy line of kernel code and poof comes a kernel panic. That is why Linux has user space drivers too, like for example just the basic USB I/O is in the kernel, the actual driver is in user space. As long as the hardware isn't borked beyond a software reset, I'd much rather see my network card reset itself - obviously breaking all connections but still, rather than taking the whole kernel down. Actually I feel Linux is extremely stable in practice, so if less abstraction makes it easier to validate then maybe in practice the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. That is also why the kernel developers don't really want bug reports with "tainted" kernel modules loaded, anything they see can just be random trash written by proprietary code. Checking that your code doesn't overwrite other kernel memory is one of the absolutely top priorities that reviewers check.
So the HP guy comes up to me (at the Melbourne conference) and he says, 'If you say nasty things like that to vendors you're not going to get anything'. I said 'no, in eight years of saying nothing, we've got nothing, and I'm going to start saying nasty things, in the hope that some of these vendors will start giving me money so I'll shut up'.
Hardware donations do not come from vendors who use OpenSSH on parts of their stuff. They come from individuals. The hardware vendors who use OpenSSH on all of their products have given us a total of one laptop since we developed OpenSSH five years ago. And asking them for that laptop took a year. That was IBM.
Yes, people have mentioned a million times how much BSD has done for OS X. What has OS X done for BSD? On the desktop it's fallen off the map, it used to be listed at 0.01% at hitslink now it's nothing. Nobody uses just BSD and I strongly doubt anyone using OS X contributes much to BSD so that the next version of OS X will be better. That I think would have happened with or without Linux. At least on the server side there's a few using BSD as-is, perhaps we'd have a BAMP stack instead of a LAMP stack. But without all the corporate contributions I'd probably be more of a Win/Unix market with BSD as a simplistic, free server.
BSD depends on people and corporations that are willing to give, give and then give some more. Would Linux be where it is if everybody has constantly grabbed features to put in AIX, SCO (before they turned troll), Solaris, OS/2, MacOS, Windows and so on? No. The BSD license lacks the self-preservation to exist as an independent product, sure the code won't go away but all the users disappear on proprietary spin-offs and so too in essence all the potential developers. With or without Linux it'd end up just as libraries for products people actually use. Then you can pound your chest and say our BSD code is in the TCP/IP stack of Windows, while Microsoft laughs all the way to the bank.
Well, pretty soon DRM will come to the rescue because Hollywood has been afraid of tools that will read their encryption keys directly from memory. Pretty sure we'll see fully encrypted RAM before they're happy. Until then, you might want a sensor that cuts power when they enter the house/apartment.
The reason the legal system frowns on jury nullification is that it also gives the jury full freedom to decide based on who is on trial, what their motive was and who the victim is, not just the law or the evidence. If someone gets beat up for waving a Muhammad cartoon around, I don't want an Islamist on the jury to be able to say "serves him right for insulting the great prophet, I refuse to convict". Nor would I like a jury that can nullify rape charges because they feel the victim behaved slutty. Or as is one of historic reasons it's frowned on, when a bunch of white men refuse to convict a white man for killing a black man. Now there are some mostly victimless crimes where this may not be that important, but many crimes do have victims and it is important that justice is served. Also it would make convictions a matter of probabilistics, I don't think many would feel it is much like justice if people are convicted 70% of the time at random. Ideally you want all juries, given the same evidence, to reach the same conclusion. Nullification is anything but that.
Full Autonomy is extremely hard. If earth goes down the toilet, you can't rely on yearly shipments of equipment and technology. You'd have to build *everything* in your colony, which would require a huge colony indeed (so that you have a factory that makes the robots that manufacturers your mp3 players and *everything else you rely on nowadays*) and thus an even greater effort.
F*ck MP3 players, how about the fact that the only reason a space colony could function at all is because of high tech. This isn't Earth were you can have some sort of cataclysmic event and practically go back to a primitive agrarian society. You want that space suit to function? That airlock to work? The solar panels to produce heat so you don't freeze to death? If they break down and you can't fix them or replace them you're dead.
Full autonomy is so far outside the scope of anything that's even been considered, we can send a radiation hardened CPU to Mars but a factory to build one? And all the tools required to maintain and repair that factory? And everything required to build those tools? It's easy to forget how extremely specialized we've become and how many steps there are between raw ore in the ground and working product. We'd need either an army of robots or many, many thousand people to be anything like autonomous.
And that's one of the issues here, the more people you add the bigger the resource demands will be. I don't know exactly at what size the tide will turn and each person makes the colony more self-sufficient, but I'm thinking big. Like, really really big.
If it truly is a significant innovation, it should sail through the standards approval process as a recognized extension.
Which is not actually that helpful, because then you have tons of PNG-capable applications that can't read PNGs. TIFF used to be this way, where TIFF actually means it can be compressed like ten different ways and support was very mixed. If you have a significant new non-backwards compatible format, just releasing it as a new format is maybe just as easy.
Which would seem to imply that if there's an effect here, it should probably be related to neutrinos-through-matter vs neutrinos-through-vacuum. That skepticism is well advised, but it doesn't make it impossible.
If government has a legitimate role here, it is educating kids. Reading, writing, math, history, civics, science, and so on. Not "sports." Kids should be done with school early and then, if they want sport, they should go to a private club or other entity that does the sport in question. School sports -- from taxpayer funded playing fields to the huge busses that carry the teams around -- are a huge misuse of tax money, and clear-headed parents don't support them in any way.
Trust me, you will want the government funding physical education unless you want to choke on the health costs later, it's a damn good investment compared to many of the other subjects. That said:
1) American football or any other heavy contact sport was never on the program. The closest was soccer and they didn't allow very rough tackles. 2) There was no "competing against other schools" or anything like an audience. Split the class in half, balance the teams out and that was it.
If anything, with the current generation spending more time on IM and computers games it's even more important than before they get some minimum of exercise. If you say it's the parents' job, well many in the US say the same for their whole education. I disagree on both points, the government has a responsibility for both their physical and mental well-being.
Hypnosis 102: Barring severe brain injuries (temporary or permanent), EVERYTHING that you have ever seen, heard, tasted, smelled, felt, thought, read,... is in there. ALL of it. Forever. Perfectly stored, ready for recall at a moment's notice.
I doubt that, just taking the massive raw amount of data we process from the nervous system it'd be completely absurd to store it all, even for the brain. We're doing a massive amount of fuzzy deduplication, like if you tell a person under hypnosis to say how that apple pie tasted like I think you're getting a generic memory of apple pies, not really that unique pie. Unless there was something particularly good/bad amount it, in which case it could have modifiers. Just because the brain doesn't throw a NullPointerException it's not that accurate.
The trick is recalling it. The subconscious mind manages recall, and, if, for whatever reason, he doesn't want to serve that memory up, he won't. He may believe/know that remembering this would cause you extreme pain. Or he may be ticked off at you for some reason, sulking because you've been ignoring his best efforts to help you. (That's his job, that and to protect you, he takes it seriously and he does the very best he knows how at it.)
I think you over-anthropomorphize the subconscious, I think the brain is more of a parallel search algorithm and each thread is actually rather unreliable. It's just that most of the time you've got plenty of associations so that one or more of them get there anyway. Like if you're trying to recall face -> name, you might trigger face -> nickname -> name, face -> person with same first name -> name or face -> event where he was present -> introduction -> name. Too few links and you have a real chance of failing, without any "need" to protect you - even things you know really well.
That's one part, the other is when everything gets flooded. Like when you forget something that'll be embarrassing you start like a flash flood of thoughts and a wild search for any clue you can find. The result is usually just noise, your brain can't process the searches that makes sense because it's flooded with junk and "no match" returns. People in a panic can't remember shit, they need to be led by the nose to an emergency exit. Too bad you don't have one in conversations.
As for hidden/repressed memories, I think it's part of the brain's natural learning/self defense mechanisms. There's a Norwegian idiom that translated means "A burnt child fears the fire." which relates to physical injury and I think the logic is the same for painful memories, just like you no longer want to touch the fire you no longer want to touch those memories, before it reaches actual pain. That matches well to how some "trigger" memories, like they found an association that wasn't blocked off and so through it all the other memories came back.
The only problems with an apt-get framework is that it means you have to add repos for any pool of the downloadables and there is NO management for who gets to download the title.
Well, that was what I was saying you could build.
Do keep in mind that the titles are not all FOSS or free as in beer, for that matter.
What part of "after purchase" didn't you read?
Right now the package managers for the distributions really, really don't have the framework in place for this sort of thing.
That I agree, but the package managers wouldn't have to do anything special. Nor would the packagers.
If it did, I'd be all for it and I'd be helping it grow that way- and this only gets into distributions that do packaging like this. What about Gentoo, etc. that don't have a packaging system, per se, in the same sense as Debian and Red Hat have developed?
If you want to download a binary game, it has to work on some binary interface. I don't see how it can work any other way.
Maybe I'll try explaining it to you slooooowly: 1. You set up a website foo.com. There you have a store to purchase games. 2. Users register at foo.com like user "svartalf" with some password. 3. Users add repository hxxps://svartalf:[password]@foo.com 4. When the user calls apt-get update, the server knows who the user is. Instead of returning a static file, it does something like "SELECT * FROM packages JOIN sales WHERE buyer = 'svartalf' " and generates a package list on the fly which would be empty. Use some apache mod for this. 5. You buy "Angry Birds" in web shop. The server does an "INSERT sales WHERE package = 'angrybirds' AND buyer = 'svartalf' " and does a "pw usermod svartalf -G angrybirdowners" where angrybirdowners is a user group that has read access to angrybirds.deb - or just use that apache mod again to refuse backdoor wget attempts. 6. You call apt-get update again, same query as #4 but now it finds your purchase. It's exactly like a new package appeared on any repository. 7. Now you can apt-get install angrybirds, it's just a regular package download to apt-get.
Apt-get doesn't realize it's hitting a paywall, it's just like a normal repository. But if you haven't paid the repository is empty, if you have paid the repository has the package. To set up a new machine, you simply add the repository with your username and password and apt-get away. You can of course integrate the webshop and the apt-get calling into an app to make it a bit more user friendly, but it'd be just as described. You buy and "magically" the file is now there in the repository. Someone skilled could probably prototype this in a few hours.
In my book there are only three ways to measure code:
For speed For size For readability
But not for correctness? Security? Robustness? Scalability? Flexibility? I think a test class I took suggested something like 15-20 separate criteria. There's a reason you can write whole books on what "good code" really is. And none of those really cover if your architecture is borked, even if the code in isolation is pretty well done.
Yes we've tried entirely subjective management, that's why we're trying to find objective criteria. Nothing like a manager that can set pretty much any performance rating he likes, that would surely not be gamed or abused. Combine that with most everybody thinking they're above average software developers and you got the scene set for feeling unjustly passed up. Not to mention the total lack of transparency, ability to compare with other teams or to measure the performance of the managers. Neither side is exactly total bliss.
Package management is an excellent thing, but apt-get doesn't work so well with non-free (as in money) software
Somehow I don't see this being more difficult than having a HTTP(S) user:pass for your paid "steam-like" repository. Generate the package list on the fly - the packages are the same, just which appear to be available. Use file permissions to make sure nobody wget anything they shouldn't and it'll be almost like steam. Throw in your standard webshop interface, on purchase you add the package to your user set and file permissions on the server, call apt-get update, apt-get install $game. Patches come via apt-get upgrade/dist-upgrade as usual. Expansions as separate packages with dependencies. There's no DRM but you can check IP logs if an account is being used by many and go after unauthorized mirrors.
To be honest I completely hate ASSERT-style checks, particularly in multi-user systems. One single logic mistake and boom goes the whole server. With exceptions you can at least have a gradual panic. But when you so often resort to pointer-magic and any unterminated string is a recipe for chaos, well... Though it would be nice if exceptions actually worked, which they don't in C++. Try/catching into some third party code and it'll still segfault on you, completely ignoring your attempt to catch any and all exceptions. Sigh.
The only reason for the change is that more socially skilled persons have started using computers at an young age, and continued doing so (and even started programming) while still maintaining their social skills. Don't worry - if you were socially awkward before, you're still as uncool as you even were.
The computer is the introvert's best friend. With it, you can almost avoid talking to a live person. You buy things online, you don't have to deal with shop staff. Or bank staff in your online bank. And any other self-service solution. With check-in machines, bag drops and ticket scanners you can now go on a flight without talking to anyone, unless you're halted in the security control. At work, you can be a "productive enough to be left alone" worker having as little contact with your boss or colleagues (or rather PHB and cow-orkers) as possible. Or at least limited it to technical work things. At home you can game away pretending to have a life, least your avatar has one. I mean you always had shut-ins but they were also extremely bound by it. Today you can almost be a Sheldon and not clash with society, which used to force you into dealing with other people. If anything it's easier than ever to be a hermit in the middle of the city.
Well, you could equally well say we've found life on 1/9 (or 1/8, depending on Pluto) planets in the solar system with a few satellites as bonus chances. It's not exactly like we've studied all that many. If we say those planets are a random sampling - which is an approximation - there should be more than a billion planets in the Milky Way alone that are closer to Earth than any non-Earth environment in this solar system. So even if we conclusively find there's no life here, that doesn't really say much for the universe. It's also a game of big numbers, if we find one in a trillion planets have life there's still more than a billion planets with life. They're just spread across a mindbogglingly large universe.
Well, consider if the patent is the "prize" and compare it to the X-prize foundation. You can't assume that just because multiple competitors came up with nearly the same solution but one nabbed the prize slightly before the others that this was just about to happen anyway. Maybe not Carmack himself, but I'm pretty sure someone over there values their IP portfolio and that's part of the reason they get paid. That's what patents do, create a scramble to invent as fast as possible and run to the patent office. The downside is of course that the innovation is locked up in a patent the next 20 years. You can argue that this is wrong but that's roughly the way it's worked since Edison and Bell, there's nothing special related to software here.
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Maybe a more secure OS from the get-go might help? Although Win 7 seems to be a step in the right direction....
As long as people want to download warez and "free" applications from random places on the Internet, you'll have a virus problem. And if it was used in a sensible way like "Hey, the sources you're getting software from has viruses, we don't catch them all but we caught this one!" and not "The virus checker didn't find a virus, so it must be clean!" it'd do more good. Ultimately there's only that many safeties you can have against people shooting themselves in the foot. Anti-virus helps a few and the rest, well they mostly can't be helped.
It's not a secret that the commission has been ripe for lobbyists, particularly before the parliament got their veto right with the Lisbon treaty in 2009. But it really comes down to the EU being in a half-state between a trade alliance and a federation. Is it an alliance of nations or does it want a European parliament like Congress and a federal government, with federal law, federal taxes, and federal economic policy? Let me tell you there's a vast opposition to that, not just in the UK and France. Even though the EU is expanding to cover more and more areas, for the most part it has to work through the national governments. If there's a top level meeting on education, it's the 27 ministers of education not an EU Department of Education. Despite the talk of an EU military force, there are 27 national militaries. There are 27 ministers on foreign policy who each keep their own ties to other nations and so on. And that is also why the EU passes directives, while the 27 national assemblies passes laws.
I mean, yes they could do away with that and pretty much become the United States of Europe. One parliament that makes law directly from Brussels on their own. It'd be democratic, as the EU parliament is democratically chosen. Some say all the important things are already decided there, but there's a difference between keeping the appearance of national governance and openly admitting that the EU is running the whole show. That is why most directives have optional components, so the national governments can pretend to have a say even though all the essential parts are required. And I say this coming from Norway, a non-EU member that's passed every EU directive since 1994 and is now maybe considering veto'ing our first. And of all the crappy directives they could have picked they chose a poor one, but at this point I just want to know what happens if we don't just bend over and take it.
I have an Atom netbook, and it was way ahead of AMD at the time. But after AMD launched Brazos in January this year, the Atom has looked old. It's still a bit lower power but for a lot lower performance. CedarTrail-M is supposed to be out this month, which may breathe a little more life into it but neither that nor Saltwell out next year seem very impressive. The first really major architecture upgrade isn't until Silvermont in 2013, until then AMD is more than a match for the Atom.
Not to mention objects with really short orbits, which means much more rapid observations. Any planet will only pass between the star and us once per cycle (assuming it's in the plane) which makes it much easier to find orbits measures in weeks or months instead of years and decades. Like for example our Jupiter has an orbit of almost 12 years. They need two measurements to get a period and want three for confirmation, that's 36 years. How long have we been searching for exoplanets again? Oh right, we wouldn't have found our own solar system yet.
Yes it does. That is why copyright starts at the date of publication.
You are wrong.
Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States
Never Published, Never Registered Works
Unpublished works: Life of the author + 70 years
Unpublished anonymous and pseudonymous works, and works made for hire (corporate authorship): 120 years from date of creation
Unpublished works when the death date of the author is not known: 120 years from date of creation.
Among many things absurdly wrong with that statement, it would make pirating an about-to-be-published movie/book/software/whatever legal since it's not yet covered by copyright.
Has it occurred to you that some people don't share your view that everyone should be forced to use their code in a way consistent with Stallman's ideologies?
Who said anything about force? Apple is using their freedom to make OS X out of BSD. Users are using their freedom to choose OS X over BSD. Everybody is free to contribute to or use BSD, I'm just saying most don't. That even if you take away Linux and the GPL, most would continue to use their freedom to not contribute back to do just that. That the market share currently held by Linux would belong to proprietary alternatives, not BSD. It's my opinion of how an alternative timeline would look.
(As an aside: Apple has actually done a fair bit -- but since you're borderline trolling I wouldn't expect you to mention that.)
Because BSD is so far away from being a competitor it doesn't matter. If they saw competition from BSD, they'd probably keep a proprietary fork. But why bother when 99.9%+ of the people using that code will be OS X users anyway? It is really just another indication that BSD is completely harmless and no substitute at all, a library more than an alternative.
The BSD license allows people to use code for pretty much whatever purpose, provided that they don't claim to have written it. The GPL allows people to use code for whatever purpose -- provided they conform to the GPL ideology, license their code under the GPL, and don't use it in certain ways that Stallman et al. think are unacceptable.
Actually just conform to the license. Like Linus has shown many times, there's no need to take everything RMS says as gospel. So the code is free but almost only Apple uses BSD code, users use OS X. Through that they use the code, as every BSD fan likes to point out, but they have no access to it or freedom from it. The only free form, the pure BSD form, is a form almost nobody uses on its own.
You tell me which embodies the spirit of freedom more.
What I refuse to agree with are the BSD pundits that pretends it is more popular and more free at the same time. You can either say you have a 5%+ market share of users with no freedoms, or a <0.01% market share with freedoms. But when they try to pretend they have 5%+ of the market enjoying those freedoms as if they were OSS users, it's being intellectually dishonest. <troll>It's almost as bad hearing RIAA math where you take the number of pirated copies and multiply it with the retail price, you reach a completely imaginary number.</troll>
Linux does run every component of the kernel in the same address space, which has its downsides (a buggy video driver can theoretically affect your network driver), but I haven't seen these downsides come up in practice. Truth be told, if one of your drivers crashes, there's little hope of maintaining a useful system and you'll likely want to reboot anyway.
Not just theoretically, I've used some development kernels and what keeps Linux running is a damn good set of reviewers and a quality nazi (in the most positive sense) on top. One buggy line of kernel code and poof comes a kernel panic. That is why Linux has user space drivers too, like for example just the basic USB I/O is in the kernel, the actual driver is in user space. As long as the hardware isn't borked beyond a software reset, I'd much rather see my network card reset itself - obviously breaking all connections but still, rather than taking the whole kernel down. Actually I feel Linux is extremely stable in practice, so if less abstraction makes it easier to validate then maybe in practice the benefits outweigh the disadvantages. That is also why the kernel developers don't really want bug reports with "tainted" kernel modules loaded, anything they see can just be random trash written by proprietary code. Checking that your code doesn't overwrite other kernel memory is one of the absolutely top priorities that reviewers check.
So the HP guy comes up to me (at the Melbourne conference) and he says, 'If you say nasty things like that to vendors you're not going to get anything'. I said 'no, in eight years of saying nothing, we've got nothing, and I'm going to start saying nasty things, in the hope that some of these vendors will start giving me money so I'll shut up'.
Hardware donations do not come from vendors who use OpenSSH on parts of their stuff. They come from individuals. The hardware vendors who use OpenSSH on all of their products have given us a total of one laptop since we developed OpenSSH five years ago. And asking them for that laptop took a year. That was IBM.
Yes, people have mentioned a million times how much BSD has done for OS X. What has OS X done for BSD? On the desktop it's fallen off the map, it used to be listed at 0.01% at hitslink now it's nothing. Nobody uses just BSD and I strongly doubt anyone using OS X contributes much to BSD so that the next version of OS X will be better. That I think would have happened with or without Linux. At least on the server side there's a few using BSD as-is, perhaps we'd have a BAMP stack instead of a LAMP stack. But without all the corporate contributions I'd probably be more of a Win/Unix market with BSD as a simplistic, free server.
BSD depends on people and corporations that are willing to give, give and then give some more. Would Linux be where it is if everybody has constantly grabbed features to put in AIX, SCO (before they turned troll), Solaris, OS/2, MacOS, Windows and so on? No. The BSD license lacks the self-preservation to exist as an independent product, sure the code won't go away but all the users disappear on proprietary spin-offs and so too in essence all the potential developers. With or without Linux it'd end up just as libraries for products people actually use. Then you can pound your chest and say our BSD code is in the TCP/IP stack of Windows, while Microsoft laughs all the way to the bank.
Well, pretty soon DRM will come to the rescue because Hollywood has been afraid of tools that will read their encryption keys directly from memory. Pretty sure we'll see fully encrypted RAM before they're happy. Until then, you might want a sensor that cuts power when they enter the house/apartment.
The reason the legal system frowns on jury nullification is that it also gives the jury full freedom to decide based on who is on trial, what their motive was and who the victim is, not just the law or the evidence. If someone gets beat up for waving a Muhammad cartoon around, I don't want an Islamist on the jury to be able to say "serves him right for insulting the great prophet, I refuse to convict". Nor would I like a jury that can nullify rape charges because they feel the victim behaved slutty. Or as is one of historic reasons it's frowned on, when a bunch of white men refuse to convict a white man for killing a black man. Now there are some mostly victimless crimes where this may not be that important, but many crimes do have victims and it is important that justice is served. Also it would make convictions a matter of probabilistics, I don't think many would feel it is much like justice if people are convicted 70% of the time at random. Ideally you want all juries, given the same evidence, to reach the same conclusion. Nullification is anything but that.
Full Autonomy is extremely hard. If earth goes down the toilet, you can't rely on yearly shipments of equipment and technology. You'd have to build *everything* in your colony, which would require a huge colony indeed (so that you have a factory that makes the robots that manufacturers your mp3 players and *everything else you rely on nowadays*) and thus an even greater effort.
F*ck MP3 players, how about the fact that the only reason a space colony could function at all is because of high tech. This isn't Earth were you can have some sort of cataclysmic event and practically go back to a primitive agrarian society. You want that space suit to function? That airlock to work? The solar panels to produce heat so you don't freeze to death? If they break down and you can't fix them or replace them you're dead.
Full autonomy is so far outside the scope of anything that's even been considered, we can send a radiation hardened CPU to Mars but a factory to build one? And all the tools required to maintain and repair that factory? And everything required to build those tools? It's easy to forget how extremely specialized we've become and how many steps there are between raw ore in the ground and working product. We'd need either an army of robots or many, many thousand people to be anything like autonomous.
And that's one of the issues here, the more people you add the bigger the resource demands will be. I don't know exactly at what size the tide will turn and each person makes the colony more self-sufficient, but I'm thinking big. Like, really really big.
If it truly is a significant innovation, it should sail through the standards approval process as a recognized extension.
Which is not actually that helpful, because then you have tons of PNG-capable applications that can't read PNGs. TIFF used to be this way, where TIFF actually means it can be compressed like ten different ways and support was very mixed. If you have a significant new non-backwards compatible format, just releasing it as a new format is maybe just as easy.
Which would seem to imply that if there's an effect here, it should probably be related to neutrinos-through-matter vs neutrinos-through-vacuum. That skepticism is well advised, but it doesn't make it impossible.
If government has a legitimate role here, it is educating kids. Reading, writing, math, history, civics, science, and so on. Not "sports." Kids should be done with school early and then, if they want sport, they should go to a private club or other entity that does the sport in question. School sports -- from taxpayer funded playing fields to the huge busses that carry the teams around -- are a huge misuse of tax money, and clear-headed parents don't support them in any way.
Trust me, you will want the government funding physical education unless you want to choke on the health costs later, it's a damn good investment compared to many of the other subjects. That said:
1) American football or any other heavy contact sport was never on the program. The closest was soccer and they didn't allow very rough tackles.
2) There was no "competing against other schools" or anything like an audience. Split the class in half, balance the teams out and that was it.
If anything, with the current generation spending more time on IM and computers games it's even more important than before they get some minimum of exercise. If you say it's the parents' job, well many in the US say the same for their whole education. I disagree on both points, the government has a responsibility for both their physical and mental well-being.
Hypnosis 102: Barring severe brain injuries (temporary or permanent), EVERYTHING that you have ever seen, heard, tasted, smelled, felt, thought, read, ... is in there. ALL of it. Forever. Perfectly stored, ready for recall at a moment's notice.
I doubt that, just taking the massive raw amount of data we process from the nervous system it'd be completely absurd to store it all, even for the brain. We're doing a massive amount of fuzzy deduplication, like if you tell a person under hypnosis to say how that apple pie tasted like I think you're getting a generic memory of apple pies, not really that unique pie. Unless there was something particularly good/bad amount it, in which case it could have modifiers. Just because the brain doesn't throw a NullPointerException it's not that accurate.
The trick is recalling it. The subconscious mind manages recall, and, if, for whatever reason, he doesn't want to serve that memory up, he won't. He may believe/know that remembering this would cause you extreme pain. Or he may be ticked off at you for some reason, sulking because you've been ignoring his best efforts to help you. (That's his job, that and to protect you, he takes it seriously and he does the very best he knows how at it.)
I think you over-anthropomorphize the subconscious, I think the brain is more of a parallel search algorithm and each thread is actually rather unreliable. It's just that most of the time you've got plenty of associations so that one or more of them get there anyway. Like if you're trying to recall face -> name, you might trigger face -> nickname -> name, face -> person with same first name -> name or face -> event where he was present -> introduction -> name. Too few links and you have a real chance of failing, without any "need" to protect you - even things you know really well.
That's one part, the other is when everything gets flooded. Like when you forget something that'll be embarrassing you start like a flash flood of thoughts and a wild search for any clue you can find. The result is usually just noise, your brain can't process the searches that makes sense because it's flooded with junk and "no match" returns. People in a panic can't remember shit, they need to be led by the nose to an emergency exit. Too bad you don't have one in conversations.
As for hidden/repressed memories, I think it's part of the brain's natural learning/self defense mechanisms. There's a Norwegian idiom that translated means "A burnt child fears the fire." which relates to physical injury and I think the logic is the same for painful memories, just like you no longer want to touch the fire you no longer want to touch those memories, before it reaches actual pain. That matches well to how some "trigger" memories, like they found an association that wasn't blocked off and so through it all the other memories came back.
The only problems with an apt-get framework is that it means you have to add repos for any pool of the downloadables and there is NO management for who gets to download the title.
Well, that was what I was saying you could build.
Do keep in mind that the titles are not all FOSS or free as in beer, for that matter.
What part of "after purchase" didn't you read?
Right now the package managers for the distributions really, really don't have the framework in place for this sort of thing.
That I agree, but the package managers wouldn't have to do anything special. Nor would the packagers.
If it did, I'd be all for it and I'd be helping it grow that way- and this only gets into distributions that do packaging like this. What about Gentoo, etc. that don't have a packaging system, per se, in the same sense as Debian and Red Hat have developed?
If you want to download a binary game, it has to work on some binary interface. I don't see how it can work any other way.
Maybe I'll try explaining it to you slooooowly:
1. You set up a website foo.com. There you have a store to purchase games.
2. Users register at foo.com like user "svartalf" with some password.
3. Users add repository hxxps://svartalf:[password]@foo.com
4. When the user calls apt-get update, the server knows who the user is. Instead of returning a static file, it does something like "SELECT * FROM packages JOIN sales WHERE buyer = 'svartalf' " and generates a package list on the fly which would be empty. Use some apache mod for this.
5. You buy "Angry Birds" in web shop. The server does an "INSERT sales WHERE package = 'angrybirds' AND buyer = 'svartalf' " and does a "pw usermod svartalf -G angrybirdowners" where angrybirdowners is a user group that has read access to angrybirds.deb - or just use that apache mod again to refuse backdoor wget attempts.
6. You call apt-get update again, same query as #4 but now it finds your purchase. It's exactly like a new package appeared on any repository.
7. Now you can apt-get install angrybirds, it's just a regular package download to apt-get.
Apt-get doesn't realize it's hitting a paywall, it's just like a normal repository. But if you haven't paid the repository is empty, if you have paid the repository has the package. To set up a new machine, you simply add the repository with your username and password and apt-get away. You can of course integrate the webshop and the apt-get calling into an app to make it a bit more user friendly, but it'd be just as described. You buy and "magically" the file is now there in the repository. Someone skilled could probably prototype this in a few hours.
In my book there are only three ways to measure code:
For speed
For size
For readability
But not for correctness? Security? Robustness? Scalability? Flexibility? I think a test class I took suggested something like 15-20 separate criteria. There's a reason you can write whole books on what "good code" really is. And none of those really cover if your architecture is borked, even if the code in isolation is pretty well done.
Yes we've tried entirely subjective management, that's why we're trying to find objective criteria. Nothing like a manager that can set pretty much any performance rating he likes, that would surely not be gamed or abused. Combine that with most everybody thinking they're above average software developers and you got the scene set for feeling unjustly passed up. Not to mention the total lack of transparency, ability to compare with other teams or to measure the performance of the managers. Neither side is exactly total bliss.
Package management is an excellent thing, but apt-get doesn't work so well with non-free (as in money) software
Somehow I don't see this being more difficult than having a HTTP(S) user:pass for your paid "steam-like" repository. Generate the package list on the fly - the packages are the same, just which appear to be available. Use file permissions to make sure nobody wget anything they shouldn't and it'll be almost like steam. Throw in your standard webshop interface, on purchase you add the package to your user set and file permissions on the server, call apt-get update, apt-get install $game. Patches come via apt-get upgrade/dist-upgrade as usual. Expansions as separate packages with dependencies. There's no DRM but you can check IP logs if an account is being used by many and go after unauthorized mirrors.
To be honest I completely hate ASSERT-style checks, particularly in multi-user systems. One single logic mistake and boom goes the whole server. With exceptions you can at least have a gradual panic. But when you so often resort to pointer-magic and any unterminated string is a recipe for chaos, well... Though it would be nice if exceptions actually worked, which they don't in C++. Try/catching into some third party code and it'll still segfault on you, completely ignoring your attempt to catch any and all exceptions. Sigh.
The only reason for the change is that more socially skilled persons have started using computers at an young age, and continued doing so (and even started programming) while still maintaining their social skills. Don't worry - if you were socially awkward before, you're still as uncool as you even were.
The computer is the introvert's best friend. With it, you can almost avoid talking to a live person. You buy things online, you don't have to deal with shop staff. Or bank staff in your online bank. And any other self-service solution. With check-in machines, bag drops and ticket scanners you can now go on a flight without talking to anyone, unless you're halted in the security control. At work, you can be a "productive enough to be left alone" worker having as little contact with your boss or colleagues (or rather PHB and cow-orkers) as possible. Or at least limited it to technical work things. At home you can game away pretending to have a life, least your avatar has one. I mean you always had shut-ins but they were also extremely bound by it. Today you can almost be a Sheldon and not clash with society, which used to force you into dealing with other people. If anything it's easier than ever to be a hermit in the middle of the city.
Steven Moffat, is that you?
Well, you could equally well say we've found life on 1/9 (or 1/8, depending on Pluto) planets in the solar system with a few satellites as bonus chances. It's not exactly like we've studied all that many. If we say those planets are a random sampling - which is an approximation - there should be
more than a billion planets in the Milky Way alone that are closer to Earth than any non-Earth environment in this solar system. So even if we conclusively find there's no life here, that doesn't really say much for the universe. It's also a game of big numbers, if we find one in a trillion planets have life there's still more than a billion planets with life. They're just spread across a mindbogglingly large universe.
I'm guessing 5x10, if you look at their Intel Core i7 3960X the cores are about twice as wide as they are high.
Well, consider if the patent is the "prize" and compare it to the X-prize foundation. You can't assume that just because multiple competitors came up with nearly the same solution but one nabbed the prize slightly before the others that this was just about to happen anyway. Maybe not Carmack himself, but I'm pretty sure someone over there values their IP portfolio and that's part of the reason they get paid. That's what patents do, create a scramble to invent as fast as possible and run to the patent office. The downside is of course that the innovation is locked up in a patent the next 20 years. You can argue that this is wrong but that's roughly the way it's worked since Edison and Bell, there's nothing special related to software here.