Users can now be confident of always receiving a stable operating system, because of the multiple testing and QA passes each change continually receives. Updates come in monthly, two-weekly or dailyish batches depending where in the main series they chose to run.
I've heard this before, the alleged continuous testing and QA won't happen. Things that are in change aren't stable, that's why we end up in release cycles to begin with so we can have development periods where we're flexible and testing periods where we stabilize it. The "be everything, all the time" development method doesn't work.
In theory, this doesn't sound so bad - it sounds like Agile on a 4 week sprint. But in such a project you should have damn good control over your production environment. When you have tons of people using it on tons of configurations then you will break things this way.
In a distro, the whole thing about gradual changes is a lie anyway. Chances are that every month some package or the other will decide now's the time to make radical changes. It's completely unintuitive to the users what packages made major changes the last month, you just have to test everything each month instead of twice a year.
If this goes though, then I think by far most people will stick with the LTS releases. Which probably means they'll get too little testing and it'll all go crap. The only point I really agree with if true, is that Ubuntu developers should get a better way to run a project that's not for the next release, but for the one after that.
A couple of things they can't do is entice you to commit a crime (entrapment)
Depends on whether you consider presenting you with a golden opportunity as enticing or not. They can go rather far in presenting them, as long as you've shown the slightest bit of initiative or interest. Particularly they're allowed to alleviate all your fears, nobody will ever know and they're ready and willing. It's not entrapment if it's a secret desire you had, a tiny spark they've kindled into action. You may have even never played it out in real life before but you thought this time I'm getting away with it, I should really take the chance because there'll never come a better one than this. To prove entrapment you have to convince the judge or jury that they planted the idea in your head, that they weren't just presenting opportunities but pushing them, persuading you into doing something out of character. Very, very few entrapment defenses succeed.
I guess the MSRP value of what the software/digital media is being sold for at the time of creation? i.e. ebooks, songs, DVDs, blu-rays, etc.
So since the RIAA/MPAA/BSA like to ask for $150000 per infringement, I guess the lawsuit will be in the billions. That's one man certain to be a starving artist for the rest of his life....
Well and, I'm not a lawyer, but her legal representation spelled it out nicely. If what the TSA employee did can't be called rape, what she said would still be a matter of free speech. The word "rape" can be used (as illustrated by cases they provide) as rhetorical hyperbole. As in, "The state just raped me on my vehicle registration." or "Paying $8 for a coffee is a raping."
None of that has a literal meaning. To claim someone raped you is a very concrete accusation that I imagine practically everyone would take literally. If you told people I had beat you half to death and all I did was give you a pat on the back I'd say that was pretty clear case of libel and not a rhetorical hyperbole. If I was her, I think a better defense would be that she perceived it as rape and so her statement was honest from her point of view, even if the law were to disagree.
In Sweden after IPRED it was 30%, after half a year they were essentially back on the same curve as before. Everybody fears a token crackdown, like people speed everywhere but right after they've reduced speed on some road it's very wise to stick to the limit a while because it's always followed up by a bunch of controls on that road. It won't last since everybody knows they don't have the resources to go after everyone, it's just temporary.
The reason why it is not made public because the average Joe doesn't understand the concept of a good compromise where at the end both sides are equally unhappy. So they will make these small viewed complaints (Swedish make copyright policy just so we can get the latest American Blue Rays films) While the complexity of international trade is ignored, not realizing this effects shipment of more then just Films, but software, books, and other sources of information. If a company doesn't see your country as a profitable place to sell goods they won't sell to you.
Haven't we all learned that the marginal cost of reproducing information is ~0? What are they going to do, not sell Hollywood films and software and books and other sources of information? For one TPB would grow tenfold, secondly domestic printing presses and whatnot would go wild printing out of copyright books. This is an empty bluff and we know it, in the choice between small profit and no profit they'll take the small profit. But they will of course howl and scream that they must have large profits or the world will collapse.
Politicians have been struggling with this since the dawn of the Internet, it's like extending the "If I stand on Canada's side of the border and fire a gun into the US, whose laws apply?" except with the Internet youtube.com sends bits and bytes into the homes of millions of Russians. Essentially they have three options:
1. Ignore it, which is de facto accepting that they've lost all ability to enforce the law and that anything that's legal outside the country is as good as legal inside the country. This is practically anarchy where you can't forbid anything unless you get all the other ~200 countries to agree.
2. Block it at the border, which brings most slashdotters to talk about slippery slopes, the foundations of censorship and the Great Firewall of China. Yet it's the only one that actually tries to enforce the idea that our laws are our laws and the rest of the world's laws are theirs.
3. By all sorts of technical, legal, economic, political or other means try to shut down the foreign sites, typically causing a big fuzz about interfering with the sovereignty and democratic process of other nations, accusations of making a coup of the DNS system and so on.
Near as I can tell, they have a lose-lose-lose situation. No matter what they do, they're going to catch flak for either doing something or not doing something. Then there's the US that wants everyone else to follow their laws, but can't see any reason they should follow everyone else's laws. And they can't seemingly phantom why other countries are giving them the finger...
What he's saying only makes sense if we didn't want things that take human time. It matters very little if Bill Gates is a billionaire or zillionaire, it's still a huge difference if I make $100k and you $30k or the other way around because then I can hire you for work. That we're both less than petty change to Bill Gates doesn't matter as long as our relative wealth goes in my favor. The people who've been doing research find that happiness is only correlated with wealth up to a certain point, but that point is well above the median income - around $75k/year compared to a median of $43k/year for the whole US, I believe. Exactly because being above the median lets you hire those below the median, no matter how wages develop I think it would still be true.
No lock-in is deeper than the cost of migrating to another tool, and I've run in proprietary software that has extremely good documentation of the database and all the functions and settings. Of course there's no other software that is a drop-in replacement working on the same database but I'd estimate the migration cost to be <1% of the cost of making any open source package do the same thing, since I'm not aware of anything even remotely close and it's a huge, advanced niche tool. Of course they're a commercial company and charges whatever the market will bear for it, but they're not locking you in. You're free to go wherever you want, they're confident you'll come crawling back after trying something else. Sometimes here on slashdot I get the impression people think the only reason closed source companies survive is because of dirty tricks. If so you've read too many "$company is doing $evil" stories and forgotten that a damn many companies make most their money on delivering well and having happy customers who come back for more.
I guess a dead solider only costs $5K to bury but a blinded soldier will rack up millions of dollars of costs over his lifetime. I can't think of another reason to prefer killing.
Dead people don't suffer. In short, you can incapacitate someone or kill them, but the conventions ban weapons designed to permanently maim or cripple the enemy forces. The primary reason is humanitarian, not economic. The irony of claiming some ways to injure people are ethical and some aren't is not lost on me, neither was in on the people making the conventions. But it's the idea that even if we are at war, there are acceptable and less acceptable ways to wage war. Like for example slaughtering civilians, prisoners of wars, rape, torture, land mines, weapons to kill rescue workers and so on. That even if there's no war without suffering, that there is an obligation for everyone to minimize it - even among the enemy.
Also in any but the two cases where you're either exterminating or being exterminated, you will have to live with these people afterwards. That kind of memories can burn bright and long, should ever the opportunity for revenge come.
It's obviously not a question of whether we can support 7 billion people, since we basically are
Sustainable? That's the big question, if we start running out of various non-renewable resources - oil just being one of them - can we? Deforestation, topsoil erosion, overfishing, lots of resources can maximize production for a short while but afterwards they go into sharp decline. And if you start running into famine conditions, don't think anyone is willing to die to let nature recover. Don't be surprised if this is the cause of war in the late 21st century...
Well, they would have to be pretty crazy to say that we're going for open source no matter how poorly it fits the requirements or the estimated costs. I don't know how people are thinking, but some of it sounds a little like RMS - it doesn't matter what software is good or bad as long as one is open and the other closed, open wins. I'd rather software win on merits, neither ideology nor FUD and kickbacks.
Ups and downs of being a regulated business, if you are then generally you don't get to do everything else because of illegal cross-subsidies. You'd have to get a change of mandate and long before that was over they'd be too late to the party. As for packages, there's competition on those as far as I know (FedEx, UPC being a few) so the most profitable areas are served by the lowest bidder, they can't just roll out everywhere without considering cost..
Personally, yes I do buy quite a few things online and I'm picking up a package today. But I also remember the world before e-mail and various other e-forms and e-services you get now. There were a *lot* of letters going, paperwork here and there. More and more are now offering me electronic bills, I would say 95% of what I get in my physical mailbox today is advertising. Particularly since packages don't fit. It's getting to that level that I'd be happy to not have mail delivery at all, getting any useful letters is so rare I could pick them up at the post office, like the parcels.
So how many people do you really trust to certify that your bank is really your bank? PGP is no better than the gullibility of the people signing and the security of the certificate and signing keys is no better than your average desktop. Revocations are a huge mess in a system with that many actors. What happens when one of those you've signed with level 3 has their certificate compromised? You're not likely to hear about it and even if you do you're not likely to get a revocation out there. And with people losing their keys all the time (backups? what backups?) there'll be a constant flow of new keys.
Maybe it'd improve security for the 2% of the people who actually can, want and understand how to use it right. The other 98% would just put their trust in some organization to verify that hey, this is the real company. Just like most people expect the phone book to give the right phone number, they don't verify in a PGP web of trust that yes, that number really is their number. The tools have been there for ages now, but it's like scalpels have been there forever. It's not going to turn everyone into a surgeon.
The thing is that even if you could replace C with something everyone could agree on is better, then this new language wouldn't automatically unlock anything magical that C couldn't do, Turing completeness and all that. I think the latest estimates would be approximately 3500 man-years to write Linux the kernel from scratch. And there would be old and new bugs until you reach parity. Even with a better language, there will be bugs because nobody can stop a developer for shooting himself in the foot no matter how many safeties you build in.
Honestly, I'm more concerned with the application language and is content to leave the lowest parts in the stack as C. Pretty much every Microsoft shop has moved to C#, but apart from that C (Gtk), C++ (Qt, Wx), Java (jack of all trades, king of none) and Mono (no ECMA or ISO/IEC standard for C# 3.0 or 4.0) are hardly ideal. Personally I vastly prefer C++/Qt, but I see that there are fundamental issues with C++ even Qt can't wrap. I just don't see who'll pick up the glove, there's Java I guess but Oracle... well, it doesn't exactly inspire faith.
Well, mainly because human beings cannot survive at 5000m without oxygen masks, while 3000m is bearable.
Dude, people have climbed mount Everest without supplemental oxygen. The highest city in the world is at 5100 meters with 30,000 inhabitants with individuals living much, much higher.
What kids really need now is someone to tell them to sit down, shut up, and listen. If a disruptive student doesn't want to be there then they should be able to leave.
Depends on what age you're talking, but when you say "kids" I would think that's probably not so good an idea. First off you're not thinking much about the future as a kid, it's all about the here and now. Secondly you'll have much more social pressure to skip class. Finally you'll have plenty premature optimization like "I want to be a firefighter so I don't need all those other subjects, I'll just run around outside and pretend to be a firefighter." And if there's anything work life doesn't need it's more princesses who think everything should be elective, that only want to do the fun and interesting bits of the job.
Learning is often a struggling experience, mastering something is a good feeling but the process is often frustrating. Honestly I think your parents and school has to push you a little before you mature enough to challenge yourself, your solution sounds a bit like "let the kid choose if he wants sweets or vegetables". Then again, the slimness hysteria have now reached even little girls so maybe they won't take the sweets anyway, but for all the wrong reasons. Now teenagers are a different matter, I'm pretty sure the forced learning helped them get more normal lives but it sure didn't help all the rest of us that were there.
Honestly my biggest problem with school is that there was no ability to excel, no ability to progress, everybody is pacing along at the same level that matches the bottom 20% or so, even then some managed to fall behind. I wish there were tests that said yes, I know fifth grade math so that I could "legally" ignore the teacher that for the third time is trying to explain something I understood months or years ago. I'm chronically lazy and I think school had a lot to do with it, there I learned working hard gets you "busy work" and nothing else.
On top of that, Intel is a node ahead in terms of fabrication. All Sandy Bridge chips, and many older ones, are on 32nm. AMD is 45nm at best currently.
No, the Llano chips are shipping and 32nm SOI. However only the low power Bobcat cores are made on that process, they need the high power Bulldozer cores to compete with Intel on performance. But yes, AMD ships very many 45nm chips still.
When you had to get the data and key together that require time, and some computer skills
Not really, the file was on TPB (among many other places) and the password was being relayed all over the net. Millions of people - and I mean that literally - have the required access and skill if they have the slightest bit of interest then they'll be able to get the decrypted information. Very shortly - if not alreadty - there'd be torrents with the unencrypted information. And it'd be no hard than starting any other torrent, which I consider a rather basic task today.
The difference is that it's a bathyscaphe, not a submarine. A bathyscaphe is basically loaded down with weights to reach the bottom, then drops the weights to rise back up. It can't control its buoyancy by adjusting pressure tanks - it's simply straight down, straight up. So yeah, they're way too late to set any records for first people to go that deep but it's still something not done before.
Well to be fair with win2K you really needed to wait until SP2 before it was nice and stable
Personally I used it from the RTM version two months before release, and it was a godsend compared to 98se and ME, which was bad and much worse respectively. I had a few application incompatibilities to sort out but the stability and pretty much everything else was revolutionary from day one IMO. I'm sure it got better up to SP2 but 2k was already ahead of the competition from the start.
I'm not aware of many IT employees that turn down free alcohol
In short, it's not many people. There's a few practical declines (designated driver, pregnancy), a few muslims who don't drink out of religious convictions and a few others, but the vast majority of people in all walks of like will have a few free beers or glasses of wine. Not everyone is looking to get drunk on the company's bill though, but there's usually someone who does. They don't all try to flirt, and most do it in a way that's not sexual harassment. But does it happen? Yes, probably.
The problem is that everything the company touches, that's the company's problem. If they'd all gone to a local club and she was sexually harassed there, it wouldn't normally be the club's problem. But if it's a company party, even if it's not more than providing a place for people to socialize then it almost certainly will be the company's problem. Next thing you know lawsuits are flying and everybody must stay at arm's length from members of the opposite sex (and these days, probably the same sex).
Okay, so maybe some companies have a really horrible attitude to this but I've not run into one. Most of the time the problem is with that one employee that doesn't know boundaries and probably doesn't know boundaries in other places either. But in those places you can't sue the company for millions.
Having a "doomsday" file out there in case Wikileaks is taken down, everyone arrested and whatnot is a good precaution. Reusing a password that many people in many organizations they've shared it with know is insanely stupid, no matter what. They should have used a password they and only they knew. Because as this case proves, that means they've lost control of their doomsday device. They don't have control over the file and they don't have control over the password.
They should have used a different file for partners, that they controlled tightly with very limited risk even if the password was exposed. Of course they couldn't ultimately have stopped the Guardian if they had revealed both that file and the password, but at least you didn't hand over the keys to your doomsday device. That is just epic fail on the side of Wikileaks, no matter if the Guardian acted stupid or not.
To ground this principle firmly in the software space, the GPL forbids you from running the code on hardware that requires mandatory code signing.
Only the GPLv3 and only if the user can't sign an altered binary himself. They could print a signing key valid for your device and your device only on a glossy piece of paper and it'd be fine even under the GPLv3. The user doesn't ever have to use it. The user can throw it in the trash, if he feels like. The GPL would never force a person into installing a self-signed binary, you can have all this security under the GPLv3. You could perfectly well have a device that'd only run software approved and signed by Apple.
The difference is that under the GPL Apple and the apps developers can't be sure that all their devices will only run approved software. You would have the choice to run modified software or completely unapproved software, you could trust other signing keys from other stores. It's a freedom you could choose to use or not. So your whole logic is massively misleading, if the door is locked or not you can stay indoors all day. The difference is that if you have a key it's a choice, if you don't it's a prison.
Slashdot Mirror
Users can now be confident of always receiving a stable operating system, because of the multiple testing and QA passes each change continually receives. Updates come in monthly, two-weekly or dailyish batches depending where in the main series they chose to run.
I've heard this before, the alleged continuous testing and QA won't happen. Things that are in change aren't stable, that's why we end up in release cycles to begin with so we can have development periods where we're flexible and testing periods where we stabilize it. The "be everything, all the time" development method doesn't work.
In theory, this doesn't sound so bad - it sounds like Agile on a 4 week sprint. But in such a project you should have damn good control over your production environment. When you have tons of people using it on tons of configurations then you will break things this way.
In a distro, the whole thing about gradual changes is a lie anyway. Chances are that every month some package or the other will decide now's the time to make radical changes. It's completely unintuitive to the users what packages made major changes the last month, you just have to test everything each month instead of twice a year.
If this goes though, then I think by far most people will stick with the LTS releases. Which probably means they'll get too little testing and it'll all go crap. The only point I really agree with if true, is that Ubuntu developers should get a better way to run a project that's not for the next release, but for the one after that.
A couple of things they can't do is entice you to commit a crime (entrapment)
Depends on whether you consider presenting you with a golden opportunity as enticing or not. They can go rather far in presenting them, as long as you've shown the slightest bit of initiative or interest. Particularly they're allowed to alleviate all your fears, nobody will ever know and they're ready and willing. It's not entrapment if it's a secret desire you had, a tiny spark they've kindled into action. You may have even never played it out in real life before but you thought this time I'm getting away with it, I should really take the chance because there'll never come a better one than this. To prove entrapment you have to convince the judge or jury that they planted the idea in your head, that they weren't just presenting opportunities but pushing them, persuading you into doing something out of character. Very, very few entrapment defenses succeed.
I guess the MSRP value of what the software/digital media is being sold for at the time of creation? i.e. ebooks, songs, DVDs, blu-rays, etc.
So since the RIAA/MPAA/BSA like to ask for $150000 per infringement, I guess the lawsuit will be in the billions. That's one man certain to be a starving artist for the rest of his life....
Well and, I'm not a lawyer, but her legal representation spelled it out nicely. If what the TSA employee did can't be called rape, what she said would still be a matter of free speech. The word "rape" can be used (as illustrated by cases they provide) as rhetorical hyperbole. As in, "The state just raped me on my vehicle registration." or "Paying $8 for a coffee is a raping."
None of that has a literal meaning. To claim someone raped you is a very concrete accusation that I imagine practically everyone would take literally. If you told people I had beat you half to death and all I did was give you a pat on the back I'd say that was pretty clear case of libel and not a rhetorical hyperbole. If I was her, I think a better defense would be that she perceived it as rape and so her statement was honest from her point of view, even if the law were to disagree.
In Sweden after IPRED it was 30%, after half a year they were essentially back on the same curve as before. Everybody fears a token crackdown, like people speed everywhere but right after they've reduced speed on some road it's very wise to stick to the limit a while because it's always followed up by a bunch of controls on that road. It won't last since everybody knows they don't have the resources to go after everyone, it's just temporary.
The reason why it is not made public because the average Joe doesn't understand the concept of a good compromise where at the end both sides are equally unhappy. So they will make these small viewed complaints (Swedish make copyright policy just so we can get the latest American Blue Rays films) While the complexity of international trade is ignored, not realizing this effects shipment of more then just Films, but software, books, and other sources of information. If a company doesn't see your country as a profitable place to sell goods they won't sell to you.
Haven't we all learned that the marginal cost of reproducing information is ~0? What are they going to do, not sell Hollywood films and software and books and other sources of information? For one TPB would grow tenfold, secondly domestic printing presses and whatnot would go wild printing out of copyright books. This is an empty bluff and we know it, in the choice between small profit and no profit they'll take the small profit. But they will of course howl and scream that they must have large profits or the world will collapse.
Politicians have been struggling with this since the dawn of the Internet, it's like extending the "If I stand on Canada's side of the border and fire a gun into the US, whose laws apply?" except with the Internet youtube.com sends bits and bytes into the homes of millions of Russians. Essentially they have three options:
1. Ignore it, which is de facto accepting that they've lost all ability to enforce the law and that anything that's legal outside the country is as good as legal inside the country. This is practically anarchy where you can't forbid anything unless you get all the other ~200 countries to agree.
2. Block it at the border, which brings most slashdotters to talk about slippery slopes, the foundations of censorship and the Great Firewall of China. Yet it's the only one that actually tries to enforce the idea that our laws are our laws and the rest of the world's laws are theirs.
3. By all sorts of technical, legal, economic, political or other means try to shut down the foreign sites, typically causing a big fuzz about interfering with the sovereignty and democratic process of other nations, accusations of making a coup of the DNS system and so on.
Near as I can tell, they have a lose-lose-lose situation. No matter what they do, they're going to catch flak for either doing something or not doing something. Then there's the US that wants everyone else to follow their laws, but can't see any reason they should follow everyone else's laws. And they can't seemingly phantom why other countries are giving them the finger...
What he's saying only makes sense if we didn't want things that take human time. It matters very little if Bill Gates is a billionaire or zillionaire, it's still a huge difference if I make $100k and you $30k or the other way around because then I can hire you for work. That we're both less than petty change to Bill Gates doesn't matter as long as our relative wealth goes in my favor. The people who've been doing research find that happiness is only correlated with wealth up to a certain point, but that point is well above the median income - around $75k/year compared to a median of $43k/year for the whole US, I believe. Exactly because being above the median lets you hire those below the median, no matter how wages develop I think it would still be true.
No lock-in is deeper than the cost of migrating to another tool, and I've run in proprietary software that has extremely good documentation of the database and all the functions and settings. Of course there's no other software that is a drop-in replacement working on the same database but I'd estimate the migration cost to be <1% of the cost of making any open source package do the same thing, since I'm not aware of anything even remotely close and it's a huge, advanced niche tool. Of course they're a commercial company and charges whatever the market will bear for it, but they're not locking you in. You're free to go wherever you want, they're confident you'll come crawling back after trying something else. Sometimes here on slashdot I get the impression people think the only reason closed source companies survive is because of dirty tricks. If so you've read too many "$company is doing $evil" stories and forgotten that a damn many companies make most their money on delivering well and having happy customers who come back for more.
I guess a dead solider only costs $5K to bury but a blinded soldier will rack up millions of dollars of costs over his lifetime. I can't think of another reason to prefer killing.
Dead people don't suffer. In short, you can incapacitate someone or kill them, but the conventions ban weapons designed to permanently maim or cripple the enemy forces. The primary reason is humanitarian, not economic. The irony of claiming some ways to injure people are ethical and some aren't is not lost on me, neither was in on the people making the conventions. But it's the idea that even if we are at war, there are acceptable and less acceptable ways to wage war. Like for example slaughtering civilians, prisoners of wars, rape, torture, land mines, weapons to kill rescue workers and so on. That even if there's no war without suffering, that there is an obligation for everyone to minimize it - even among the enemy.
Also in any but the two cases where you're either exterminating or being exterminated, you will have to live with these people afterwards. That kind of memories can burn bright and long, should ever the opportunity for revenge come.
It's obviously not a question of whether we can support 7 billion people, since we basically are
Sustainable? That's the big question, if we start running out of various non-renewable resources - oil just being one of them - can we? Deforestation, topsoil erosion, overfishing, lots of resources can maximize production for a short while but afterwards they go into sharp decline. And if you start running into famine conditions, don't think anyone is willing to die to let nature recover. Don't be surprised if this is the cause of war in the late 21st century...
Well, they would have to be pretty crazy to say that we're going for open source no matter how poorly it fits the requirements or the estimated costs. I don't know how people are thinking, but some of it sounds a little like RMS - it doesn't matter what software is good or bad as long as one is open and the other closed, open wins. I'd rather software win on merits, neither ideology nor FUD and kickbacks.
Ups and downs of being a regulated business, if you are then generally you don't get to do everything else because of illegal cross-subsidies. You'd have to get a change of mandate and long before that was over they'd be too late to the party. As for packages, there's competition on those as far as I know (FedEx, UPC being a few) so the most profitable areas are served by the lowest bidder, they can't just roll out everywhere without considering cost..
Personally, yes I do buy quite a few things online and I'm picking up a package today. But I also remember the world before e-mail and various other e-forms and e-services you get now. There were a *lot* of letters going, paperwork here and there. More and more are now offering me electronic bills, I would say 95% of what I get in my physical mailbox today is advertising. Particularly since packages don't fit. It's getting to that level that I'd be happy to not have mail delivery at all, getting any useful letters is so rare I could pick them up at the post office, like the parcels.
So how many people do you really trust to certify that your bank is really your bank? PGP is no better than the gullibility of the people signing and the security of the certificate and signing keys is no better than your average desktop. Revocations are a huge mess in a system with that many actors. What happens when one of those you've signed with level 3 has their certificate compromised? You're not likely to hear about it and even if you do you're not likely to get a revocation out there. And with people losing their keys all the time (backups? what backups?) there'll be a constant flow of new keys.
Maybe it'd improve security for the 2% of the people who actually can, want and understand how to use it right. The other 98% would just put their trust in some organization to verify that hey, this is the real company. Just like most people expect the phone book to give the right phone number, they don't verify in a PGP web of trust that yes, that number really is their number. The tools have been there for ages now, but it's like scalpels have been there forever. It's not going to turn everyone into a surgeon.
The thing is that even if you could replace C with something everyone could agree on is better, then this new language wouldn't automatically unlock anything magical that C couldn't do, Turing completeness and all that. I think the latest estimates would be approximately 3500 man-years to write Linux the kernel from scratch. And there would be old and new bugs until you reach parity. Even with a better language, there will be bugs because nobody can stop a developer for shooting himself in the foot no matter how many safeties you build in.
Honestly, I'm more concerned with the application language and is content to leave the lowest parts in the stack as C. Pretty much every Microsoft shop has moved to C#, but apart from that C (Gtk), C++ (Qt, Wx), Java (jack of all trades, king of none) and Mono (no ECMA or ISO/IEC standard for C# 3.0 or 4.0) are hardly ideal. Personally I vastly prefer C++/Qt, but I see that there are fundamental issues with C++ even Qt can't wrap. I just don't see who'll pick up the glove, there's Java I guess but Oracle... well, it doesn't exactly inspire faith.
Well, mainly because human beings cannot survive at 5000m without oxygen masks, while 3000m is bearable.
Dude, people have climbed mount Everest without supplemental oxygen. The highest city in the world is at 5100 meters with 30,000 inhabitants with individuals living much, much higher.
What kids really need now is someone to tell them to sit down, shut up, and listen. If a disruptive student doesn't want to be there then they should be able to leave.
Depends on what age you're talking, but when you say "kids" I would think that's probably not so good an idea. First off you're not thinking much about the future as a kid, it's all about the here and now. Secondly you'll have much more social pressure to skip class. Finally you'll have plenty premature optimization like "I want to be a firefighter so I don't need all those other subjects, I'll just run around outside and pretend to be a firefighter." And if there's anything work life doesn't need it's more princesses who think everything should be elective, that only want to do the fun and interesting bits of the job.
Learning is often a struggling experience, mastering something is a good feeling but the process is often frustrating. Honestly I think your parents and school has to push you a little before you mature enough to challenge yourself, your solution sounds a bit like "let the kid choose if he wants sweets or vegetables". Then again, the slimness hysteria have now reached even little girls so maybe they won't take the sweets anyway, but for all the wrong reasons. Now teenagers are a different matter, I'm pretty sure the forced learning helped them get more normal lives but it sure didn't help all the rest of us that were there.
Honestly my biggest problem with school is that there was no ability to excel, no ability to progress, everybody is pacing along at the same level that matches the bottom 20% or so, even then some managed to fall behind. I wish there were tests that said yes, I know fifth grade math so that I could "legally" ignore the teacher that for the third time is trying to explain something I understood months or years ago. I'm chronically lazy and I think school had a lot to do with it, there I learned working hard gets you "busy work" and nothing else.
On top of that, Intel is a node ahead in terms of fabrication. All Sandy Bridge chips, and many older ones, are on 32nm. AMD is 45nm at best currently.
No, the Llano chips are shipping and 32nm SOI. However only the low power Bobcat cores are made on that process, they need the high power Bulldozer cores to compete with Intel on performance. But yes, AMD ships very many 45nm chips still.
When you had to get the data and key together that require time, and some computer skills
Not really, the file was on TPB (among many other places) and the password was being relayed all over the net. Millions of people - and I mean that literally - have the required access and skill if they have the slightest bit of interest then they'll be able to get the decrypted information. Very shortly - if not alreadty - there'd be torrents with the unencrypted information. And it'd be no hard than starting any other torrent, which I consider a rather basic task today.
The difference is that it's a bathyscaphe, not a submarine. A bathyscaphe is basically loaded down with weights to reach the bottom, then drops the weights to rise back up. It can't control its buoyancy by adjusting pressure tanks - it's simply straight down, straight up. So yeah, they're way too late to set any records for first people to go that deep but it's still something not done before.
Well to be fair with win2K you really needed to wait until SP2 before it was nice and stable
Personally I used it from the RTM version two months before release, and it was a godsend compared to 98se and ME, which was bad and much worse respectively. I had a few application incompatibilities to sort out but the stability and pretty much everything else was revolutionary from day one IMO. I'm sure it got better up to SP2 but 2k was already ahead of the competition from the start.
The TLAs and Corporate Lackeys are at war with the people of the US
That TLA is taken by another TLA, try again.
I'm not aware of many IT employees that turn down free alcohol
In short, it's not many people. There's a few practical declines (designated driver, pregnancy), a few muslims who don't drink out of religious convictions and a few others, but the vast majority of people in all walks of like will have a few free beers or glasses of wine. Not everyone is looking to get drunk on the company's bill though, but there's usually someone who does. They don't all try to flirt, and most do it in a way that's not sexual harassment. But does it happen? Yes, probably.
The problem is that everything the company touches, that's the company's problem. If they'd all gone to a local club and she was sexually harassed there, it wouldn't normally be the club's problem. But if it's a company party, even if it's not more than providing a place for people to socialize then it almost certainly will be the company's problem. Next thing you know lawsuits are flying and everybody must stay at arm's length from members of the opposite sex (and these days, probably the same sex).
Okay, so maybe some companies have a really horrible attitude to this but I've not run into one. Most of the time the problem is with that one employee that doesn't know boundaries and probably doesn't know boundaries in other places either. But in those places you can't sue the company for millions.
Having a "doomsday" file out there in case Wikileaks is taken down, everyone arrested and whatnot is a good precaution. Reusing a password that many people in many organizations they've shared it with know is insanely stupid, no matter what. They should have used a password they and only they knew. Because as this case proves, that means they've lost control of their doomsday device. They don't have control over the file and they don't have control over the password.
They should have used a different file for partners, that they controlled tightly with very limited risk even if the password was exposed. Of course they couldn't ultimately have stopped the Guardian if they had revealed both that file and the password, but at least you didn't hand over the keys to your doomsday device. That is just epic fail on the side of Wikileaks, no matter if the Guardian acted stupid or not.
To ground this principle firmly in the software space, the GPL forbids you from running the code on hardware that requires mandatory code signing.
Only the GPLv3 and only if the user can't sign an altered binary himself. They could print a signing key valid for your device and your device only on a glossy piece of paper and it'd be fine even under the GPLv3. The user doesn't ever have to use it. The user can throw it in the trash, if he feels like. The GPL would never force a person into installing a self-signed binary, you can have all this security under the GPLv3. You could perfectly well have a device that'd only run software approved and signed by Apple.
The difference is that under the GPL Apple and the apps developers can't be sure that all their devices will only run approved software. You would have the choice to run modified software or completely unapproved software, you could trust other signing keys from other stores. It's a freedom you could choose to use or not. So your whole logic is massively misleading, if the door is locked or not you can stay indoors all day. The difference is that if you have a key it's a choice, if you don't it's a prison.