Come on, Slashdot. This "news" is so old. When you've been scooped by Leo Laporte and John C. Dvorak on This Week In Tech TWO WEEKS AGO, you know you suck. Stay out of the rumor business. You're not any good at it. Stick to the cool tech stories that made you who you are today.
That said, this topic is kind of interesting for Apple fans. If Apple does put out a product like this, its probably going to have some pretty interesting functionality. Usually when Steve Jobs embarks on a product that he's criticized in the past, it'll have a pretty unique spin on it (not just marketing spin). For example, the iPhone was a pretty large departure in terms of user interface philosophy from previous phones and brought some new ideas to the table. So, stories like this are kind of exciting. Maybe they have some good ideas. Then again, Apple's released some real boners too. In the end, if they release a tablet-like thing, it will almost certainly be interesting, and may or may not be useful/good.
I guess my point is I mostly pretend to ignore stories like this because in the end there really isn't much point in speculating over what any company is going to do unless you have a dog in the fight somehow. If it comes out, and its useful, and worth the price, I'll buy it. If not, I won't. No sense in getting all worked up about it now.
A friend of mine lost his house over RSUs, he did not unload them when he received them. In the 2001 crash, they went from $70 to $13, and the tax bill was 70% of $70, so he had a tax bill of $49 on an asset worth $13. Multiply this by a few thousand RSUs.
With a normal stock you can write this off as a loss by closing the position. Can you not do this with an RSU?
Under normal federal income tax rules, an employee receiving Restricted Stock Units is not taxed at the time of the grant. Instead, the employee is taxed at vesting (when the restrictions lapse) unless the employee chooses to defer receipt of the cash or shares. In these circumstances, the employee must pay statutory minimum taxes as determined by their employer at vesting, but payment of all other taxes can be deferred until the time of distribution, when the employee actually takes receipt of the shares or cash equivalent (depending on the company's plan rules). The amount of income subject to tax is the difference between the fair market value of the grant at the time of vesting or distribution, minus the amount paid for the grant (if any).
It seems that you can... And 70% seems like an awfully high statutory minimum! Yikes!
He also tells the story of a berserk robot explosives gun that killed nine people in South Africa due to a 'software glitch.'
"You call that a GLITCH?!"
Heh. Yeah. This is really one huge problem with most software, and with FPGA and other programmable logic devices, the disease is spreading to hardware as well. Something which out of context seems like a "glitch" ends up killing people, because there was no way to analyze for it and prevent it from happening. The amount of complexity someone can introduce into software using modern programming languages such as C++ and VHDL is astounding. Testing it all is almost impossible. There are ways to try to bound the complexity, such as creating functional requirements for software that are "provably" correct, but in a lot of ways this just moves the problem to the requirements. For high-risk systems, like airplanes, nuclear reactors, x-ray machines, and I guess now killing machines, many experts have decided to abolish the use of software altogether for certain critical functions. In this case a critical function would be one that would result in a sufficiently high cost of failure.
One of the more recent treatments of this problem has been done by Nancy Levenson, who has studied this problem across many disciplines and evaluated the various solutions that industry and government have come up with. She makes a compelling case to have a "hardware backup" to any software system because of the undetectable common-mode failures that can occur in software. These kinds of failures invalidate any kind of probablistic analysis, and eliminate the benefit of multiple redundant channels, when they happen to contain the same software. Or surprisingly, even DIFFERENT software written to the same functional requirements. It turns out if you hand two people in different clean rooms the same functional requirements, they tend to come up with solutions with similar vulnerabilities.
Note that there is a big gaping hole in the concept of a "hardware backup" where a ton of hardware is created by writing VHDL code (a language that is more or less like C with threads). Government agencies that regulate this stuff are playing catch-up where vendors will eschew software safety requirements by embedding them in programmable logic devices and calling it hardware.
I'm not a Slackware user. It has been many years. I think 2004 was when my server finally stopped running Slack. It was a time thing. I wanted to have the same distro on my desktop and server so I only had to keep track of one way of doin things. That said, I really do like that Slackware is still around. Slackware is basically a story about one guy and his distro. And its nice to know something like that still exists in the Linux world. Its a statement of individualism and simplicity that is sometimes lost in a world of sophisticated integrated products.
And to be honest, the simplicity of Slackware has its definite payouts. It means the system you end up with has a simple and relatively easy to maintain architecture, without much fluff. If you want a machine to do one thing, and do it well... I think Slack is a very excellent choice and still worth considering. Congrats on going 64 bit!
As the article points out, these trojans/viruses that use Google and other search engines are becoming more common. My mother got one that replaced all of the major search engine results with fake spyware and antivirus software links. I imagine its popular because its a bit subtle and pernicious. How much malware is out there that is undiscovered because the affects are more subtle? Maybe reordering search results? Replacing ads with different ones?
For my mom, I ended up using http://www.scroogle.org/ to download AV software to fix it. Seeing it for the first time, it was surprising to me that search engine results could be corrupted in this way. (I guess not that surprising...) And, I must admint I don't know if these programs are latching on to the browser applications somehow or if they are doing it somewhere else in the OS layer. It would be interesting to find ways to prevent these symptoms in a more sophisticated way than using Scroogle (i.e., finding a search engine they hadn't considered). If these viruses are using the underlying OS, would the search engines using SSL by default be a way to do it? Or would a man in the middle attack negate that? And I'd imagine there had to be a way to lock down the browsers themselves, or at least make it difficult, from this kind of attack if that's their point of entry.
When I was a kid, a friend of mine and I made two anti-virus viruses. (We didn't spread them around, just did them for research purposes.) The first one modified COMMAND.COM to expect.EXX,.MOC, and.TAB files instead of the standard ones, and then renamed all of the files on the system this way. This broke some programs, requiring a hex editor now and again, but it basically made my friend's system immune to viruses. The other one attached on a little self-CRC checker to every executable which would print a warning if another program had altered the file. Fun times. I wonder if these ideas are patented now.
As the article points out, these trojans/viruses that use Google and other search engines are becoming more common. My mother got one that replaced all of the major search engine results with fake spyware and antivirus software links. I imagine its popular because its a bit subtle and pernicious. How much malware is out there that is undiscovered because the affects are more subtle? Maybe reordering search results? Replacing ads with different ones?
For my mom, I ended up using http://www.scroogle.com/ to download AV software to fix it. Seeing it for the first time, it was surprising to me that search engine results could be corrupted in this way. (I guess not that surprising...) And, I must admint I don't know if these programs are latching on to the browser applications somehow or if they are doing it somewhere else in the OS layer. It would be interesting to find ways to prevent these symptoms in a more sophisticated way than using Scroogle (i.e., finding a search engine they hadn't considered). If these viruses are using the underlying OS, would the search engines using SSL by default be a way to do it? Or would a man in the middle attack negate that? And I'd imagine there had to be a way to lock down the browsers themselves, or at least make it difficult, from this kind of attack if that's their point of entry.
<offtopic> When I was a kid, a friend of mine and I made two anti-virus viruses. (We didn't spread them around, just did them for research purposes.) The first one modified COMMAND.COM to expect.EXX,.MOC, and.TAB files instead of the standard ones, and then renamed all of the files on the system this way. This broke some programs, requiring a hex editor now and again, but it basically made my friend's system immune to viruses. The other one attached on a little self-CRC checker to every executable which would print a warning if another program had altered the file. Fun times. I wonder if these ideas are patented now. </offtopic>
The one you are citing is the EIGHTH one down. The others have religious or other connotations.
At any rate, a ritual has a connotation of ceremony, not one of a process, which is established for reasons other than tradition or religion.
To me, the point at which a process becomes a ritual, in that eighth definition context, is probably the moment a software engineering process probably stops working very effectively, because people have lost sight of why they are doing it. (Not always true of course and usage is pretty flexible.) Still, I think to call some of the OP's acts ritualistic sells them short, because there are good reasons for many of them, that wouldn't warrant weird stares from people.
Sure, some of what the article talks about is a ritual, but the planning process isn't a ritual at all. Its a process. One that usually works pretty well, I must add. The less time you spend coding, the better your product is usually going to be. That said, knowing when to put down the whiteboard is sometimes important too.
Where is the OpenWRT/DD-WRT hack to autodetect baby monitors and transmit attention-getting sounds across them to ensure they are quickly turned off? Any suggestions? A few below:
- The sound of a baby reciting the Satanic Verses backwards
- Various baby-stealing sounds
- Periodic pinging (think submarine movies)
- Herb Alpert Techno Remixes.
Tards keep thinking C# is J++ of infamy, while in reality it is not. The CLR is a VM written from scratch just as C# is. Leveling the accusation the C# is stolen from Java has as much merit as accusing Java of stealing, I dunno, C++.
Having learned both C++, Java, and C#, I'd have to reaffirm my belief that C# is a relatively uninspired improvement of Java.** This is a subjective thing. J++ was much worse, and a failure. C# is a more thoughtful reattempt which admitedly brings more to the table. I don't disagree that many of the refinements are useful. As are the refinements on the VM concept that didn't orginate, but certainly was popularized by, Java. Specifically, they did a very good job of doing a similar thing that GCC has been doing--unifying their intermediate languages.
My question was in earnest. I really did want to know how much this new MS language brought to the table, Given their spotty history in language development.
** A bit off-topic but since you brought up C++, I think C++ is so general purpose that its really hard to talk about anything being stolen from C++ other than maybe syntax. C++ is kind of this giant homunculus of paradigms and languages and features representing, oh I don't know, Bjarne Stroustup's mental model of how all the language paradigms should fit together, or something. In other words, kinda weird, and its own beast in and of itself.
Ok, so C# is a pretty good language. (Despite its severe limitations. Seriously, thank god for C# if you've had to work with VB at all. Ugh!) Of course most of it they stole from Java, with an attempt to add refinements here and there. (Possible nefarious motives aside...)
So from what language did this one come from? Erlang?
Or did Microsoft actually create something relatively unique this time?
The fact is that it has singlehandedly revived the franchise, and people who have no interest in Star Trek went to go see it. As long as Abrams can keep the storylines less fanboyish (he said he never was a fan, which is a good thing), it seems like he can keep getting people to go see it.
And all he had to do was take all of the Star Trek out and follow a tired action movie formula with good CGI. Yay.
And Trek was really quite good - ESPECIALLY for a Trek film. There was enough there that new audiences could get into it and enjoy it as a film, and it was well done enough that fanboys have to grudgingly admit it was not the worst. movie. ever.
It may not be the worst movie ever, but it is kinda like releasing a Sherlock Holmes movie where he runs around with a giant gun killing people until he solves the crime. Yeah, it might be a good action movie or whatever, but is hardly consistent with the philosophical underpinnings of the original work. That so few Star Trek fans "get" this is a bit unnerving.
Star trek will get the loyal fans from the earlier movies, Wolverine had less of a fan base
I don't know. Maybe I am in the minority, but I feel as though this movie really is a drastic departure from the Star Trek concept. I'm not going to see it until it comes out on DVD. From the previews, it just doesn't look like Star Trek anymore. They've finally removed the last little bit from the original concept and its just another action movie. The only reason I'm interested in it at all is because it seems to be a pretty good action movie. Might have even seen it in the theater if I wasn't a bit upset about the use of the Star Trek franchise to market this kind of movie.
Then again, it is better then having them try to be faithful to the Star Trek philosophy and failing, which is what most of the Star Trek movies have been lately. Its too bad. They really had something there with TNG and it just petered out.
The impetus behind Dijkstra's original essay was not that GOTO itself was a fundamentally bad language construct. It was that this construct was overused and abused.
Since a number of years I am familiar with the observation that the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of go to statements in the programs they produce. Later I discovered why the use of the go to statement has such disasterous effects and did I become convinced that the go to statement should be abolished from all "higher level" programming langauges (i.e. everything except -perhaps- plain machine code). At that time I did not attach too much importance to that discovery; I now submit my considerations for publication because in very recent discussions in which the subject turned up, I have been urged to do so."
Seems pretty clear to me that his intent was that goto statements be eliminated. The paper goes on to explain why in more detail.
The end of the article starts to get to the heart of the problem, which really happened after he was involved. It was when they started doing this with all debt that it got really bad. And even then its only half the picture without looking at the other piece of this the Credit Default Swap. Another thing he alluded to when he talked about default models. The problem was much more complicated than this one guy.
The current spec doesn't cover spreadsheet formulas: it has a big whole and basically says "Do what OpenOffice.org does for now".
The problem with MS's specs saying "Do what Word 97 does" is that no one other than MS knows what Word 97 does. But OpenOffice's source code is... open. Anyone can know what OpenOffice does, and if MS is afraid of GPL, they're big enough for proper cleanroom approach.
Really? REALLY?
Now how exactly would they cleanroom this implementation if compliance required access to the source code? But regardless, the fact is that if the specification allow this, its the SPECIFICATION that's broken. Time to suck it up and have some introspection, guys. The world is a busy place and if you write an incomplete specification, don't expect people to bend over backwards to implement "what you meant to say" And certainly don't depend on them to follow "suggestions" in the spec to achieve the specification's core mission: interoperability.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I'll probably get modded down for this.
Come on, Slashdot. This "news" is so old. When you've been scooped by Leo Laporte and John C. Dvorak on This Week In Tech TWO WEEKS AGO, you know you suck. Stay out of the rumor business. You're not any good at it. Stick to the cool tech stories that made you who you are today.
That said, this topic is kind of interesting for Apple fans. If Apple does put out a product like this, its probably going to have some pretty interesting functionality. Usually when Steve Jobs embarks on a product that he's criticized in the past, it'll have a pretty unique spin on it (not just marketing spin). For example, the iPhone was a pretty large departure in terms of user interface philosophy from previous phones and brought some new ideas to the table. So, stories like this are kind of exciting. Maybe they have some good ideas. Then again, Apple's released some real boners too. In the end, if they release a tablet-like thing, it will almost certainly be interesting, and may or may not be useful/good.
I guess my point is I mostly pretend to ignore stories like this because in the end there really isn't much point in speculating over what any company is going to do unless you have a dog in the fight somehow. If it comes out, and its useful, and worth the price, I'll buy it. If not, I won't. No sense in getting all worked up about it now.
"Additives? Whats in the toilet are additives."
Um... POO comes to mind.
Only on slashdot does a comment that says "Poo is in toilets" get moderated Informative.
A friend of mine lost his house over RSUs, he did not unload them when he received them. In the 2001 crash, they went from $70 to $13, and the tax bill was 70% of $70, so he had a tax bill of $49 on an asset worth $13. Multiply this by a few thousand RSUs.
With a normal stock you can write this off as a loss by closing the position. Can you not do this with an RSU?
Under normal federal income tax rules, an employee receiving Restricted Stock Units is not taxed at the time of the grant. Instead, the employee is taxed at vesting (when the restrictions lapse) unless the employee chooses to defer receipt of the cash or shares. In these circumstances, the employee must pay statutory minimum taxes as determined by their employer at vesting, but payment of all other taxes can be deferred until the time of distribution, when the employee actually takes receipt of the shares or cash equivalent (depending on the company's plan rules). The amount of income subject to tax is the difference between the fair market value of the grant at the time of vesting or distribution, minus the amount paid for the grant (if any).
It seems that you can... And 70% seems like an awfully high statutory minimum! Yikes!
He also tells the story of a berserk robot explosives gun that killed nine people in South Africa due to a 'software glitch.'
"You call that a GLITCH?!"
Heh. Yeah. This is really one huge problem with most software, and with FPGA and other programmable logic devices, the disease is spreading to hardware as well. Something which out of context seems like a "glitch" ends up killing people, because there was no way to analyze for it and prevent it from happening. The amount of complexity someone can introduce into software using modern programming languages such as C++ and VHDL is astounding. Testing it all is almost impossible. There are ways to try to bound the complexity, such as creating functional requirements for software that are "provably" correct, but in a lot of ways this just moves the problem to the requirements. For high-risk systems, like airplanes, nuclear reactors, x-ray machines, and I guess now killing machines, many experts have decided to abolish the use of software altogether for certain critical functions. In this case a critical function would be one that would result in a sufficiently high cost of failure.
One of the more recent treatments of this problem has been done by Nancy Levenson, who has studied this problem across many disciplines and evaluated the various solutions that industry and government have come up with. She makes a compelling case to have a "hardware backup" to any software system because of the undetectable common-mode failures that can occur in software. These kinds of failures invalidate any kind of probablistic analysis, and eliminate the benefit of multiple redundant channels, when they happen to contain the same software. Or surprisingly, even DIFFERENT software written to the same functional requirements. It turns out if you hand two people in different clean rooms the same functional requirements, they tend to come up with solutions with similar vulnerabilities.
Note that there is a big gaping hole in the concept of a "hardware backup" where a ton of hardware is created by writing VHDL code (a language that is more or less like C with threads). Government agencies that regulate this stuff are playing catch-up where vendors will eschew software safety requirements by embedding them in programmable logic devices and calling it hardware.
I'm not a Slackware user. It has been many years. I think 2004 was when my server finally stopped running Slack. It was a time thing. I wanted to have the same distro on my desktop and server so I only had to keep track of one way of doin things. That said, I really do like that Slackware is still around. Slackware is basically a story about one guy and his distro. And its nice to know something like that still exists in the Linux world. Its a statement of individualism and simplicity that is sometimes lost in a world of sophisticated integrated products.
And to be honest, the simplicity of Slackware has its definite payouts. It means the system you end up with has a simple and relatively easy to maintain architecture, without much fluff. If you want a machine to do one thing, and do it well... I think Slack is a very excellent choice and still worth considering. Congrats on going 64 bit!
Just drive down I-85 or I-95 and see how many nudie bars are advertising on billboards all the way down the corridor.
The hypocracy of this guy is illuminated in Buckmaster's request for an apology, summarized by Cnet:
The attorney general, Buckmaster said, "has persisted with his threats despite the fact that craigslist:
http://blog.craigslist.org/2009/05/an-apology-is-in-order/
For the record, there was a whole part of my post following the Asimov criteria. It followed the statement, "More importantly,..."
Weird. So this fails the Asimov criteria.
More importantly, would also necessarily fail the Golden Rule and Kant's Categorical Imperative.
If this is ethics, its a pretty limited version of it, and to be honest sounds more like rules of engagement than actual ethics.
(Reposted with Correct Link)
As the article points out, these trojans/viruses that use Google and other search engines are becoming more common. My mother got one that replaced all of the major search engine results with fake spyware and antivirus software links. I imagine its popular because its a bit subtle and pernicious. How much malware is out there that is undiscovered because the affects are more subtle? Maybe reordering search results? Replacing ads with different ones?
For my mom, I ended up using http://www.scroogle.org/ to download AV software to fix it. Seeing it for the first time, it was surprising to me that search engine results could be corrupted in this way. (I guess not that surprising...) And, I must admint I don't know if these programs are latching on to the browser applications somehow or if they are doing it somewhere else in the OS layer. It would be interesting to find ways to prevent these symptoms in a more sophisticated way than using Scroogle (i.e., finding a search engine they hadn't considered). If these viruses are using the underlying OS, would the search engines using SSL by default be a way to do it? Or would a man in the middle attack negate that? And I'd imagine there had to be a way to lock down the browsers themselves, or at least make it difficult, from this kind of attack if that's their point of entry.
When I was a kid, a friend of mine and I made two anti-virus viruses. (We didn't spread them around, just did them for research purposes.) The first one modified COMMAND.COM to expect .EXX, .MOC, and .TAB files instead of the standard ones, and then renamed all of the files on the system this way. This broke some programs, requiring a hex editor now and again, but it basically made my friend's system immune to viruses. The other one attached on a little self-CRC checker to every executable which would print a warning if another program had altered the file. Fun times. I wonder if these ideas are patented now.
Ack!
Whoops!
Sorry about that!
As the article points out, these trojans/viruses that use Google and other search engines are becoming more common. My mother got one that replaced all of the major search engine results with fake spyware and antivirus software links. I imagine its popular because its a bit subtle and pernicious. How much malware is out there that is undiscovered because the affects are more subtle? Maybe reordering search results? Replacing ads with different ones?
For my mom, I ended up using http://www.scroogle.com/ to download AV software to fix it. Seeing it for the first time, it was surprising to me that search engine results could be corrupted in this way. (I guess not that surprising...) And, I must admint I don't know if these programs are latching on to the browser applications somehow or if they are doing it somewhere else in the OS layer. It would be interesting to find ways to prevent these symptoms in a more sophisticated way than using Scroogle (i.e., finding a search engine they hadn't considered). If these viruses are using the underlying OS, would the search engines using SSL by default be a way to do it? Or would a man in the middle attack negate that? And I'd imagine there had to be a way to lock down the browsers themselves, or at least make it difficult, from this kind of attack if that's their point of entry.
<offtopic> When I was a kid, a friend of mine and I made two anti-virus viruses. (We didn't spread them around, just did them for research purposes.) The first one modified COMMAND.COM to expect .EXX, .MOC, and .TAB files instead of the standard ones, and then renamed all of the files on the system this way. This broke some programs, requiring a hex editor now and again, but it basically made my friend's system immune to viruses. The other one attached on a little self-CRC checker to every executable which would print a warning if another program had altered the file. Fun times. I wonder if these ideas are patented now. </offtopic>
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/ritual
The one you are citing is the EIGHTH one down. The others have religious or other connotations.
At any rate, a ritual has a connotation of ceremony, not one of a process, which is established for reasons other than tradition or religion.
To me, the point at which a process becomes a ritual, in that eighth definition context, is probably the moment a software engineering process probably stops working very effectively, because people have lost sight of why they are doing it. (Not always true of course and usage is pretty flexible.) Still, I think to call some of the OP's acts ritualistic sells them short, because there are good reasons for many of them, that wouldn't warrant weird stares from people.
Sure, some of what the article talks about is a ritual, but the planning process isn't a ritual at all. Its a process. One that usually works pretty well, I must add. The less time you spend coding, the better your product is usually going to be. That said, knowing when to put down the whiteboard is sometimes important too.
I for one look forward to the drastic improvements this change will effect.
</sarcasm>
So...
Where is the OpenWRT/DD-WRT hack to autodetect baby monitors and transmit attention-getting sounds across them to ensure they are quickly turned off? Any suggestions? A few below:
- The sound of a baby reciting the Satanic Verses backwards
- Various baby-stealing sounds
- Periodic pinging (think submarine movies)
- Herb Alpert Techno Remixes.
Tards keep thinking C# is J++ of infamy, while in reality it is not. The CLR is a VM written from scratch just as C# is. Leveling the accusation the C# is stolen from Java has as much merit as accusing Java of stealing, I dunno, C++.
Having learned both C++, Java, and C#, I'd have to reaffirm my belief that C# is a relatively uninspired improvement of Java.** This is a subjective thing. J++ was much worse, and a failure. C# is a more thoughtful reattempt which admitedly brings more to the table. I don't disagree that many of the refinements are useful. As are the refinements on the VM concept that didn't orginate, but certainly was popularized by, Java. Specifically, they did a very good job of doing a similar thing that GCC has been doing--unifying their intermediate languages.
My question was in earnest. I really did want to know how much this new MS language brought to the table, Given their spotty history in language development.
** A bit off-topic but since you brought up C++, I think C++ is so general purpose that its really hard to talk about anything being stolen from C++ other than maybe syntax. C++ is kind of this giant homunculus of paradigms and languages and features representing, oh I don't know, Bjarne Stroustup's mental model of how all the language paradigms should fit together, or something. In other words, kinda weird, and its own beast in and of itself.
Ok, so C# is a pretty good language. (Despite its severe limitations. Seriously, thank god for C# if you've had to work with VB at all. Ugh!) Of course most of it they stole from Java, with an attempt to add refinements here and there. (Possible nefarious motives aside...)
So from what language did this one come from? Erlang?
Or did Microsoft actually create something relatively unique this time?
The fact is that it has singlehandedly revived the franchise, and people who have no interest in Star Trek went to go see it. As long as Abrams can keep the storylines less fanboyish (he said he never was a fan, which is a good thing), it seems like he can keep getting people to go see it.
And all he had to do was take all of the Star Trek out and follow a tired action movie formula with good CGI. Yay.
And Trek was really quite good - ESPECIALLY for a Trek film. There was enough there that new audiences could get into it and enjoy it as a film, and it was well done enough that fanboys have to grudgingly admit it was not the worst. movie. ever.
It may not be the worst movie ever, but it is kinda like releasing a Sherlock Holmes movie where he runs around with a giant gun killing people until he solves the crime. Yeah, it might be a good action movie or whatever, but is hardly consistent with the philosophical underpinnings of the original work. That so few Star Trek fans "get" this is a bit unnerving.
Star trek will get the loyal fans from the earlier movies, Wolverine had less of a fan base
I don't know. Maybe I am in the minority, but I feel as though this movie really is a drastic departure from the Star Trek concept. I'm not going to see it until it comes out on DVD. From the previews, it just doesn't look like Star Trek anymore. They've finally removed the last little bit from the original concept and its just another action movie. The only reason I'm interested in it at all is because it seems to be a pretty good action movie. Might have even seen it in the theater if I wasn't a bit upset about the use of the Star Trek franchise to market this kind of movie.
Then again, it is better then having them try to be faithful to the Star Trek philosophy and failing, which is what most of the Star Trek movies have been lately. Its too bad. They really had something there with TNG and it just petered out.
The impetus behind Dijkstra's original essay was not that GOTO itself was a fundamentally bad language construct. It was that this construct was overused and abused.
Have you even read Dijkstra's paper?
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd02xx/EWD215.PDF
Just to quote the beginning, a bit:
Since a number of years I am familiar with the observation that the quality of programmers is a decreasing function of the density of go to statements in the programs they produce. Later I discovered why the use of the go to statement has such disasterous effects and did I become convinced that the go to statement should be abolished from all "higher level" programming langauges (i.e. everything except -perhaps- plain machine code). At that time I did not attach too much importance to that discovery; I now submit my considerations for publication because in very recent discussions in which the subject turned up, I have been urged to do so."
Seems pretty clear to me that his intent was that goto statements be eliminated. The paper goes on to explain why in more detail.
The end of the article starts to get to the heart of the problem, which really happened after he was involved. It was when they started doing this with all debt that it got really bad. And even then its only half the picture without looking at the other piece of this the Credit Default Swap. Another thing he alluded to when he talked about default models. The problem was much more complicated than this one guy.
The goats, however, do use magic to get there.
Really? REALLY?
Now how exactly would they cleanroom this implementation if compliance required access to the source code? But regardless, the fact is that if the specification allow this, its the SPECIFICATION that's broken. Time to suck it up and have some introspection, guys. The world is a busy place and if you write an incomplete specification, don't expect people to bend over backwards to implement "what you meant to say" And certainly don't depend on them to follow "suggestions" in the spec to achieve the specification's core mission: interoperability.
Sheesh.
Since most options involve one party in a long position and another in a short position, no.