Really, there aren't very many good reasons anymore to use C or Assembly over C++. Aside from a few situations that you can avoid if you code smart, C++ gets as good or better performance than C using fewer lines of code, and very rarely are you actually going to beat the C++ compiler at generating efficient assembly. There are maybe a few niche cases where you'd still gain something, but the smart move would probably be to use C++ for writing your VM.
Don't be ridiculous. As far as your average American voter is concerned, any budgeting beyond oh, the next two years or so might as well not exist. If you can't translate this into either increased services or decreased taxes for somebody right now, they are going to be against it. Oh, and the services have to be so easily understandable that some media talking head can't spin it easily into a negative and so obvious that the beneficiaries can't easily ignore it. For your average mouth breather spouting off about the issue, increasing the deficit over the next 10 years is the same thing as saying you are increasing the deficit for the rest of eternity.
Apples and oranges. We're upset that net neutrality regulation has no teeth and completely excludes the mobile market. That is a completely different animal from it being used as a stepping stone towards a completely separate and unrelated policy regarding content policing.
Yes, some dude barely related to the whole issue made a later renounced claim nearly a decade ago that we should regulate the internet in some way that you and I agree is bad. The problem isn't even that Beck and Limbaugh are citing the slippery slope like you are (although I think that is asinine for a different set of reasons). The problem is that they are trying to pull a bait and switch and claim that Net Neutrality IS the idea Sunstein talked about in 2002, which is an outright lie. It doesn't matter if they are trying to get what they think is best for our country; it should be a problem for any of their viewers/listeners that they are willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get there.
I'm not sure how anybody gets left out of CNN. It is largely sensationalist drivel with very little real value, but also therefore very little in the way of political leanings. I think most people that claim that are just following along with the conservative radio show narrative of the big, bad liberal media that's been put out for the last couple of decades.
I could at least see the argument for MSNBC (although I still think it is silly to claim that it is anywhere near as far left as Fox is to the right), but calling CNN "pretty far left" doesn't jive with anything I've ever seen on the network.
I'm confused. Was there never much compelling reason for child labor laws because you don't think children were being forced to work in factories or because you think it is okay that children were forced to work in factories?
If it is the former, I'm going to laugh at you. My favorite argument against regulation is that it is unnecessary because the nice people/corporations are already not doing the bad thing. It's like somehow every possible transgression has to be committed a couple of times before we make a law against it. If nobody had ever committed murder in cold blood in this country, would you argue that homocide laws are not necessary and that we shouldn't have them?
If it is the latter, then I'm going to cry for you. The free market has become your one and only measure for morality, and the little bit of evil you advocate for all in some ways is worse than the large amount of evil a violent criminal does to a few.
You almost always agree with another individual, unless you are suffering from schizophrenia or some other disease of the mind (and probably frequently even then). Very few people get to be the one to synthesize any truly new thought, and there is no shame in giving credit to a fellow human who has already spoken what you were thinking in at least as eloquent a manner as you were likely to come up with.
In fact, I'd wager to say dozens of people have replied to Obligatory xkcd comments with more or less exactly what you have written here just during the course of the relatively short history of slashdotting.
First, the way current Quantum Encryption works is just for a key exchange. In reality, a Quantum Key Exchange is a way to collaborate and cooperatively generate a key, not a way to transmit arbitrary bits. It relies on the fact that if Alice and Bob are exchanging a key, half of the bits Bob gets are going to be wrong, and he won't know which ones until they talk about it afterwards. An intermediary can't intercept the key and still make sure it gets to Bob, because he or she would have to try to regenerate the intercepted bits, and because there has been no exchange yet to determine which bits were "wrong", it can't tell how the particle was actually supposed to be polarized. This is a gross oversimplification (none of the bits are actually wrong, Bob is actually just guessing at which polarization to use to interpret them), but the net result is that the exchange can only be used to exchange keys, at which point classical cryptography schemes are used (and at that point have any weaknesses that the encryption scheme has).
Second, math can say whatever it wants about the security of quantum key exchanges, but there is still always the possibility that we got some portion of the observational physics wrong and the world doesn't work quite like we think it does. At that point, the math would be describing a universe that is not ours and does not do you any good, no matter how well it proves the encryption unbreakable.
We can't stop our investigation at "Microsoft paid for it. Ergo its flawed."
We can and should stop our investigation there. I think you are missing a fundamental distinction here. I'd agree with statement that Microsoft paying for it makes it flawed, but not just because there has to be inherently some flaw in the methodology as such. The fact that Microsoft paid for it is the flaw. The inherent conflict of interest taints the study to the point where it will never be possible clear it of enough doubt to make the data useful.
Additionally Google's statements about the study should set off the VERY SAME red flags about googles statements.
No, Google's complaints don't set off the same red flags at all. Microsoft citing a third party study is an appeal to an external authority. The claim is that Microsoft is trying to get their opinion on their own browser credibility by having it come from a mouthpiece that isn't first party. There is no analogous complaint to be made about Google, because they aren't trying to complain about the study by hiring an external firm to make the complaint.
However, it is completely unrelated to who paid for it, now isn't it?
Exactly the opposite. The study arguably has that particular problem because Microsoft paid for it, for a couple different reasons. Either there is a flaw in their methodology that they are hiding because they are being paid for a specific result, or it was an unintentionally flawed study that was alone among dozens of other studies that Microsoft ordered at the time in arriving at a pro-Microsoft conclusion, or Microsoft got to pick the study targets to their benefit, or any number of other things that I can't think of off-hand. Either way, it is a conflict of interest and we should throw out the result regardless of how valid it might appear because there is no other foolproof way of making sure we avoid accepting corrupted study results.
And the response from google criticizing it was by someone right on google's payroll representing google's interests. I guess we can ignore their criticism then too?
Or perhaps we should let the work stand for itself, evaluate the methodology, strip away the marketing spin, and come away with some nugget of truth, regardless of who funded it. Of course that's "work".
How did this get modded +5 Insightful? Just because Google's criticism of the study's claim isn't coming from a neutral third party doesn't mean Microsoft paying for a study that praises its own browser shouldn't set off all sorts of red flags concerning the validity of the study, especially when "[...]the list of actual URLs used for testing was not made available to the vendors or to the public, so there's no way to independently verify the results."
In an unrelated note, I just got the results from this study I paid for indicating that I am much more manly, attractive, and intelligent than vux984. Please don't listen to any of his complaints about the study, though, because he has every bit as much a vested interest in the results as I do. No, you may not have full access to the testing methodology. Please just make the best call you can about the validity with the subset of parameters that were carefully selected to exclude any factors that would throw the results into question. I also promise that I didn't order 12 other studies indicating that vux984 was actually more intelligent than I am and then throw them away.
Please use me for all your needs in the future. Remember, I'm smarter and sexier.
To continue your analogy, if a white guy was a dick to you as well and you didn't punch him, we'd suddenly have a problem. Only you might really have just been in a better mood that day (and by you, I mean a gigantic organization where any number of dozens of players could have been in a good mood). The fact it would be so hard to prove whether or not you were racist when you punched the black guy is exactly why it is so hard to watchdog this sort of thing.
Exactly. There are very few people who are actually for cutting taxes and spending. Almost all of them are for cutting taxes that they think they are going to pay and cutting spending on programs that benefit other people. The tragic part is that somehow the incredibly rich have convinced large portions of the middle class that the taxes they are going to have to pay equates to taxes on people in the top half of one percent of income brackets in the country because somehow the entire bottom four income quintiles hope they are all going to make it there someday.
I'm really just playing the devil's advocate here, but here goes.
Isn't that exactly why you have separation of church and state? So that you don't give benefits to religious establishment only as long as they are on the whitelist of religions that the backwoods bigots have decided are generally okay, or at least not so bad as to get them out to protest? The entire idea is to preclude the government being used as a tool of religious discrimination, which is exactly what you are saying might happen, no matter what the reasons are.
The only safe way to set this up would be to codify rules such that one could secure the tax breaks without a human having to make a decision on the issue. Set it up so that if you meet x requirements, you get the funding no matter what the purpose. (That obviously has its own stinky pile of problems, and thus my reluctance to get behind the ideas I am arguing).
That is a terrible analogy. Netflix is paying their direct bandwidth provider for bandwidth. You can't form an analogy that doesn't involve a peering agreement between two networks, because that is the entire issue at hand, not bandwidth usage at either endpoint.
My scenario makes corporations into subjects and not citizens. I am perfectly fine with that. Or did you want to somehow imply that preventing Comcast from blocking my third party VoIP solution to help sell their own somehow equates to taking away my civil liberties?
I also don't know why you'd bring up lobbyists. Lobbyists are the result of a lack of regulation preventing our country's overly powerful upper class and corporations from buying power they shouldn't have from the government. Campaign finance reform is the only thing that will ever turn is back from a system of one vote per dollar rather than one vote per person.
The real question is whether they would give the same funding to a theme park promoting another religious denomination, not one that is secular. If you could provide the same cost/benefit analysis of a Muslim theme park, do you think it would get the tax break?
You don't really need a hidden 1x1 pixel someplace to generate information when you can just imbed the information in the get request for one of the big images, then, do you?
Of course you can use the fact that some regulation isn't doing the job to justify lots more regulation, provided nobody has a compelling argument that you'll either be worse off with the additional regulation or that changing the regulation in another manner is the better course of action. See, for those of us that did not go to the School of Free Market Brainwashing(tm), market-driven capitalism is merely a tool rather than a goal in itself. You are every bit as obligated to describe to me why using regulation to prevent anti-competitive bandwidth throttling is bad as I am to specify why it is good.
Besides, Net Neutrality isn't "lots" more regulation. It is a relatively simple set of rules that precludes my internet provider from giving me less than full access to the internet. If my ISP was never going to do that anyway due to fear of losing customers over it, as you seem to think, then it hasn't actually affected he market at all.
I think it is awesome that you list the fact that the government has regulated phone companies by making them common carriers as a reason we don't need regulation. I guess that's "facism" hard at work for you.
The free market is what people do when some guy isn't holding a gun to their head to force them to do something else. Obviously it 'works' because otherwise we'd still be living in caves and fighting over yak bones.
When you get down to it, the reason a completely free market elevated us beyond "fighting over yak bones" as you put it is that it allowed individuals to consolidate power and exert control to get a group of people to work together. The problem is, the consolidation continued for hundreds of years and led to all of the old hereditary dictatorships and the like that have been responsible for everything from virtual enslavement of the lower class to outright genocide. It worked in the sense that it helped us get out of caves, but we're not a bunch of individuals living in caves trying to invent civilization anymore, so it is no longer the right tool for the job.
You are listing sources of monopoly power, not types of monopolies. To be a monopoly, you just have to have enough control of a market to unilaterally set the terms and price of a sold good or service.
Or in other words, if there is a single player in a market that gets to dictate market prices, even if it was not government ordained and you personally can't figure out why no competition has popped up, it is still a monopoly. In this specific instance, it is actually a little of column A and a little of column B; while current telcos aren't government sanctioned monopolistic powers as such, they have gotten all sorts of easement rights for free from the government, which precludes fair entrance to the market for a newcomer. Even if a new entity could get the same rights, it is economically inefficient to run dozens of physical lines so anyone can compete.
The result is that we have a oligopoly that we can't break easily by just letting more people do the same thing. Which really leaves us with only a couple of sane options: we can either heavily regulate the industry to protect the consumer, because there is no free market to do so, or we can unify the system and turn it into a public utility. There is no option to let the market try to solve the problem because there isn't a real market to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, there aren't very many good reasons anymore to use C or Assembly over C++. Aside from a few situations that you can avoid if you code smart, C++ gets as good or better performance than C using fewer lines of code, and very rarely are you actually going to beat the C++ compiler at generating efficient assembly. There are maybe a few niche cases where you'd still gain something, but the smart move would probably be to use C++ for writing your VM.
Don't be ridiculous. As far as your average American voter is concerned, any budgeting beyond oh, the next two years or so might as well not exist. If you can't translate this into either increased services or decreased taxes for somebody right now, they are going to be against it. Oh, and the services have to be so easily understandable that some media talking head can't spin it easily into a negative and so obvious that the beneficiaries can't easily ignore it. For your average mouth breather spouting off about the issue, increasing the deficit over the next 10 years is the same thing as saying you are increasing the deficit for the rest of eternity.
Apples and oranges. We're upset that net neutrality regulation has no teeth and completely excludes the mobile market. That is a completely different animal from it being used as a stepping stone towards a completely separate and unrelated policy regarding content policing.
Yes, some dude barely related to the whole issue made a later renounced claim nearly a decade ago that we should regulate the internet in some way that you and I agree is bad. The problem isn't even that Beck and Limbaugh are citing the slippery slope like you are (although I think that is asinine for a different set of reasons). The problem is that they are trying to pull a bait and switch and claim that Net Neutrality IS the idea Sunstein talked about in 2002, which is an outright lie. It doesn't matter if they are trying to get what they think is best for our country; it should be a problem for any of their viewers/listeners that they are willing to lie, cheat, and steal to get there.
I'm not sure how anybody gets left out of CNN. It is largely sensationalist drivel with very little real value, but also therefore very little in the way of political leanings. I think most people that claim that are just following along with the conservative radio show narrative of the big, bad liberal media that's been put out for the last couple of decades.
I could at least see the argument for MSNBC (although I still think it is silly to claim that it is anywhere near as far left as Fox is to the right), but calling CNN "pretty far left" doesn't jive with anything I've ever seen on the network.
I'm confused. Was there never much compelling reason for child labor laws because you don't think children were being forced to work in factories or because you think it is okay that children were forced to work in factories? If it is the former, I'm going to laugh at you. My favorite argument against regulation is that it is unnecessary because the nice people/corporations are already not doing the bad thing. It's like somehow every possible transgression has to be committed a couple of times before we make a law against it. If nobody had ever committed murder in cold blood in this country, would you argue that homocide laws are not necessary and that we shouldn't have them? If it is the latter, then I'm going to cry for you. The free market has become your one and only measure for morality, and the little bit of evil you advocate for all in some ways is worse than the large amount of evil a violent criminal does to a few.
You almost always agree with another individual, unless you are suffering from schizophrenia or some other disease of the mind (and probably frequently even then). Very few people get to be the one to synthesize any truly new thought, and there is no shame in giving credit to a fellow human who has already spoken what you were thinking in at least as eloquent a manner as you were likely to come up with.
In fact, I'd wager to say dozens of people have replied to Obligatory xkcd comments with more or less exactly what you have written here just during the course of the relatively short history of slashdotting.
There are two problems with your statement.
First, the way current Quantum Encryption works is just for a key exchange. In reality, a Quantum Key Exchange is a way to collaborate and cooperatively generate a key, not a way to transmit arbitrary bits. It relies on the fact that if Alice and Bob are exchanging a key, half of the bits Bob gets are going to be wrong, and he won't know which ones until they talk about it afterwards. An intermediary can't intercept the key and still make sure it gets to Bob, because he or she would have to try to regenerate the intercepted bits, and because there has been no exchange yet to determine which bits were "wrong", it can't tell how the particle was actually supposed to be polarized. This is a gross oversimplification (none of the bits are actually wrong, Bob is actually just guessing at which polarization to use to interpret them), but the net result is that the exchange can only be used to exchange keys, at which point classical cryptography schemes are used (and at that point have any weaknesses that the encryption scheme has).
Second, math can say whatever it wants about the security of quantum key exchanges, but there is still always the possibility that we got some portion of the observational physics wrong and the world doesn't work quite like we think it does. At that point, the math would be describing a universe that is not ours and does not do you any good, no matter how well it proves the encryption unbreakable.
The tragedy isn't that people believe that the Daily Show is a legitimate source of news, it is that statistics show that its viewers actually are more informed than those that watch "news" networks. Apparently being a comedy show with no claim to journalistic integrity is less harmful than being a pro wrestling show that claims it is a news source. Citation: http://people-press.org/report/319/public-knowledge-of-current-affairs-little-changed-by-news-and-information-revolutions
We can't stop our investigation at "Microsoft paid for it. Ergo its flawed."
We can and should stop our investigation there. I think you are missing a fundamental distinction here. I'd agree with statement that Microsoft paying for it makes it flawed, but not just because there has to be inherently some flaw in the methodology as such. The fact that Microsoft paid for it is the flaw. The inherent conflict of interest taints the study to the point where it will never be possible clear it of enough doubt to make the data useful.
Additionally Google's statements about the study should set off the VERY SAME red flags about googles statements.
No, Google's complaints don't set off the same red flags at all. Microsoft citing a third party study is an appeal to an external authority. The claim is that Microsoft is trying to get their opinion on their own browser credibility by having it come from a mouthpiece that isn't first party. There is no analogous complaint to be made about Google, because they aren't trying to complain about the study by hiring an external firm to make the complaint.
However, it is completely unrelated to who paid for it, now isn't it?
Exactly the opposite. The study arguably has that particular problem because Microsoft paid for it, for a couple different reasons. Either there is a flaw in their methodology that they are hiding because they are being paid for a specific result, or it was an unintentionally flawed study that was alone among dozens of other studies that Microsoft ordered at the time in arriving at a pro-Microsoft conclusion, or Microsoft got to pick the study targets to their benefit, or any number of other things that I can't think of off-hand. Either way, it is a conflict of interest and we should throw out the result regardless of how valid it might appear because there is no other foolproof way of making sure we avoid accepting corrupted study results.
The test, funded by Microsoft
That says it all.
And the response from google criticizing it was by someone right on google's payroll representing google's interests. I guess we can ignore their criticism then too?
Or perhaps we should let the work stand for itself, evaluate the methodology, strip away the marketing spin, and come away with some nugget of truth, regardless of who funded it. Of course that's "work".
How did this get modded +5 Insightful? Just because Google's criticism of the study's claim isn't coming from a neutral third party doesn't mean Microsoft paying for a study that praises its own browser shouldn't set off all sorts of red flags concerning the validity of the study, especially when "[...]the list of actual URLs used for testing was not made available to the vendors or to the public, so there's no way to independently verify the results."
In an unrelated note, I just got the results from this study I paid for indicating that I am much more manly, attractive, and intelligent than vux984. Please don't listen to any of his complaints about the study, though, because he has every bit as much a vested interest in the results as I do. No, you may not have full access to the testing methodology. Please just make the best call you can about the validity with the subset of parameters that were carefully selected to exclude any factors that would throw the results into question. I also promise that I didn't order 12 other studies indicating that vux984 was actually more intelligent than I am and then throw them away.
Please use me for all your needs in the future. Remember, I'm smarter and sexier.
Anybody else notice and enjoy that @notch is currently the single biggest current contributer at $2000?
To continue your analogy, if a white guy was a dick to you as well and you didn't punch him, we'd suddenly have a problem. Only you might really have just been in a better mood that day (and by you, I mean a gigantic organization where any number of dozens of players could have been in a good mood). The fact it would be so hard to prove whether or not you were racist when you punched the black guy is exactly why it is so hard to watchdog this sort of thing.
Exactly. There are very few people who are actually for cutting taxes and spending. Almost all of them are for cutting taxes that they think they are going to pay and cutting spending on programs that benefit other people. The tragic part is that somehow the incredibly rich have convinced large portions of the middle class that the taxes they are going to have to pay equates to taxes on people in the top half of one percent of income brackets in the country because somehow the entire bottom four income quintiles hope they are all going to make it there someday.
I'm really just playing the devil's advocate here, but here goes.
Isn't that exactly why you have separation of church and state? So that you don't give benefits to religious establishment only as long as they are on the whitelist of religions that the backwoods bigots have decided are generally okay, or at least not so bad as to get them out to protest? The entire idea is to preclude the government being used as a tool of religious discrimination, which is exactly what you are saying might happen, no matter what the reasons are.
The only safe way to set this up would be to codify rules such that one could secure the tax breaks without a human having to make a decision on the issue. Set it up so that if you meet x requirements, you get the funding no matter what the purpose. (That obviously has its own stinky pile of problems, and thus my reluctance to get behind the ideas I am arguing).
That is a terrible analogy. Netflix is paying their direct bandwidth provider for bandwidth. You can't form an analogy that doesn't involve a peering agreement between two networks, because that is the entire issue at hand, not bandwidth usage at either endpoint.
My scenario makes corporations into subjects and not citizens. I am perfectly fine with that. Or did you want to somehow imply that preventing Comcast from blocking my third party VoIP solution to help sell their own somehow equates to taking away my civil liberties?
I also don't know why you'd bring up lobbyists. Lobbyists are the result of a lack of regulation preventing our country's overly powerful upper class and corporations from buying power they shouldn't have from the government. Campaign finance reform is the only thing that will ever turn is back from a system of one vote per dollar rather than one vote per person.
The real question is whether they would give the same funding to a theme park promoting another religious denomination, not one that is secular. If you could provide the same cost/benefit analysis of a Muslim theme park, do you think it would get the tax break?
You don't really need a hidden 1x1 pixel someplace to generate information when you can just imbed the information in the get request for one of the big images, then, do you?
Of course you can use the fact that some regulation isn't doing the job to justify lots more regulation, provided nobody has a compelling argument that you'll either be worse off with the additional regulation or that changing the regulation in another manner is the better course of action. See, for those of us that did not go to the School of Free Market Brainwashing(tm), market-driven capitalism is merely a tool rather than a goal in itself. You are every bit as obligated to describe to me why using regulation to prevent anti-competitive bandwidth throttling is bad as I am to specify why it is good. Besides, Net Neutrality isn't "lots" more regulation. It is a relatively simple set of rules that precludes my internet provider from giving me less than full access to the internet. If my ISP was never going to do that anyway due to fear of losing customers over it, as you seem to think, then it hasn't actually affected he market at all.
I think it is awesome that you list the fact that the government has regulated phone companies by making them common carriers as a reason we don't need regulation. I guess that's "facism" hard at work for you.
The free market is what people do when some guy isn't holding a gun to their head to force them to do something else. Obviously it 'works' because otherwise we'd still be living in caves and fighting over yak bones.
When you get down to it, the reason a completely free market elevated us beyond "fighting over yak bones" as you put it is that it allowed individuals to consolidate power and exert control to get a group of people to work together. The problem is, the consolidation continued for hundreds of years and led to all of the old hereditary dictatorships and the like that have been responsible for everything from virtual enslavement of the lower class to outright genocide. It worked in the sense that it helped us get out of caves, but we're not a bunch of individuals living in caves trying to invent civilization anymore, so it is no longer the right tool for the job.
You are listing sources of monopoly power, not types of monopolies. To be a monopoly, you just have to have enough control of a market to unilaterally set the terms and price of a sold good or service.
Or in other words, if there is a single player in a market that gets to dictate market prices, even if it was not government ordained and you personally can't figure out why no competition has popped up, it is still a monopoly. In this specific instance, it is actually a little of column A and a little of column B; while current telcos aren't government sanctioned monopolistic powers as such, they have gotten all sorts of easement rights for free from the government, which precludes fair entrance to the market for a newcomer. Even if a new entity could get the same rights, it is economically inefficient to run dozens of physical lines so anyone can compete.
The result is that we have a oligopoly that we can't break easily by just letting more people do the same thing. Which really leaves us with only a couple of sane options: we can either heavily regulate the industry to protect the consumer, because there is no free market to do so, or we can unify the system and turn it into a public utility. There is no option to let the market try to solve the problem because there isn't a real market to do it.
Actually, that has no relation at all to the definition of a monopoly. Maybe you should take an economics class.