OK. Let's review the score here. So the post topic was embedding backdoors. The thread that was progressing was on destructive backdoors. A comment was made comparing this activity to destroying a building.
I then make a comment (the parent of this one) about how this scenario has in fact been examined in one of Ayn Rand's books. I do this because it might be interesting to some folks to examine how Rand approached the ethics of the situation. Then I also mention some differences in the situation.
And some crack smoking moderator comes and labels this offtopic?!!? Bah.
I think there's an Ayn Rand novel with exactly this event as a plot device.
It's not strictly comparable, though. A software application can be destroyed with no loss of materials or labor, and restored in a matter of minutes. A building can't.
And this is almost symbiotic and worthwhile. If you *really* like a product, I don't see why it would be anything but worthwhile to everybody accept compensation for endorsing it.
Think of your favorite computing language/OS/Environment, for an example. I'll happily go on and on about Mac OS X, for example. If Apple gave me free stuff for evangelizing, it wouldn't change that.
The only real concern I can think of: I will also grumpilly go on and on about OS X as well. Perhaps they wouldn't like that. Perhaps no free stuff anymore if I did that. But that really wouldn't be all that different than what's happening today.:)
Having types work their way into names isn't entirely brain damaged. The hungarian way may be -- I tried it for a while, and couldn't make it stick. However, some data types lend themselves to it. Ever notice how often file pointers have the name fptr? That's because the naming convention serves the programmer -- programmers have an abstract convention of a file pointer in their head, and they work with it. Similarly, every once in a while I'll find myself giving a name like "HostList" -- a list (linked list, perl list, doesn't matter) of hosts.
And Code Complete really isn't a bad book at all. It may give you some false starts and misdirections, but it will definitely make you think about aspects of software development methodology.
If we limit ourselves to terrestrial industry it is literally impossible to build a car for every person in China due to a lack of energy and raw materials.
I think it's hard to argue that building a car for every person in China would be desireable. Aside from raw material considerations, there's pollution output, but aside from that, there's the school of thought that widespread automobile use has had a particularly negative impact on U.S. communities/culture.
Finally, can you imagine the uholy mess of traffic?
I'm bitter. I've applied for jobs that ask for 8+ years of experience implementing J2EE solutions. Even 3 years of experience is asking quite a bit, since Java 1.2/2 was barely released in 1999. And that's just the specific examples. In general, I find that HR departments are often my biggest obstacles to getting a job. Most of my interviews (and occasional contract work) over the last 8-10 months have either been with smaller organizations like the one he's describing, or with larger orgs where I knew someone who could get past the wall of flaming cow dung that is HR.
The group estimates that piracy costs the U.S. motion picture industry $3.0 billion annually in lost sales.
Followup calculation:
3 billion
number of people in U.S. about 300 million
Assuming an average cost of $10 per DVD, their calculation seems to assume an average drop of 1 DVD purchase per year per person.
Maybe it gets different when you start considering marketing groups and everything (I know I hardly ever pirate nor purchase any kind of video entertainment, so I'm probably not in the focus group) but I don't see how an average drop of 1 DVD purchase per person has any significance whatsoever, let alone from "piracy".
Finally, I don't see how this factoid (or any facts about piracy) could have any relevancy to Jon's case. Piracy is possibly without what Jon wrote, and the primary purpose of Jon's work was viewing DVDs -- a capability without which I can guarantee anyone that DVD sales will go down.
The UN is nothing, and has done very little to deal with dictators. The UN considers dictators and tryant's it's #1 allies.
Against whom? What evidence do you have to back up the claim that the U.N. likes dictators best?
The U.N. is still a fledgling organization. You could even argue it has only started to really perform during the 1990s, once the general political (as well as military) detente of the cold war ended. It has had projects longer, certainly, but even if you take it from its inception, it's been around a relatively short time in history. And it takes time to give any organization structure (unless there's a single central authority doing it with $$ or a gun -- not what you want for the world).
Rational consideration of the U.N.'s place in the world leaves room for the question "How do we balance sovereignty with a commitment to cooperation?"
Irrational responses include "The U.N. is all evil! They hate freedom! Just get us out!"
Or as Parker Palmer would have said "Involvement has its problems, but is detachment always the solution?"
Thanks much. I assume S+ is the same package that's often referred to as SPLUS or S-PLUS? Either way, R sounds interesting, and I'll be happy to try it out!
Every time this is discussed, I see matlab, mathematica, C, fortran, Maple, etc come up. That's great if you're working primarily in modeling or mathematical research.
However, I'm looking into policy research, and in that area, statistics focused software is king. I've managed to learn the barest bit of SAS, which may or may not do me any good. I'm told I should get STATA down. I'm wondering if there are any comparable open source apps with this statistical focus.
Re:Am I the only geek who HATES Nethack?
on
Nethack 3.4.1 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The thing that really gets me is monsters that attack faster than you can, because they can outrun you and attack you and there's nothing you can do. (Or is there?)
If you have the misfortune to run into an air elemental, leacrotta, or even rothe before you're prepared, about the only thing you can do is use the E-word (Elbereth) or some other repeatable method to try and scare them away repeatedly. It's a bit tedious, but it can work. I've used it to keep a crowd of 8 orcs, 2 rothes, a mean kitten, and an iguana off of an inexperienced healer's back -- and eventually chop them all up.
Otherwise:
(1) Get speed intrinsic (wand of speed monster, some corpses). Get speed boots if at all possible (right after magic resistance).
(2) Wand of Teleport. Best, because you can use it on you, or on the monster.
(3) Scroll of teleportation.
(4) Wand of digging. Fast escape through the floor.
And of course, a good AC and good weapon. But everybody wants that.
Maybe my view is just tainted because I'm finding myself leaning more toward the pro-War campaign...
I'm against the Iraq war as it looks like it would be currently conducted and justified, but I agree. Not letting your code be licensed for that use would do little good -- it would simply increase defense budgets and decrease auditability as closed source code was used.
I'm not saying you have to begin work on device drivers for a tank right now, or release IraqSim to the world. I'm saying that the idea that not releasing code to the world will make a difference is probably not particularly sound.
The only exception I can thinkg of is if you've come up with something truly unique. And if it's that unique and dangerous, you shouldn't release the idea at all, because one way or another, someone powerful will get their hands on/mind around it and use it with or without your permission.
Sinks? Scroll readings have different effects when confused? Large number of player classes, each with own quest? Prayer?
I haven't played Diablo/2, but it's pretty easy for me to suspect that even if the basic item classes and combat are roughly the same, the rest of the gameplay probably isn't as deep.
I think antisymmetric.com is a SLASH'EM server (Super Lotsa Added Stuff Hack - Extended Magic)... even more stuff and more ways to die (do not eat unidentified tins in SLASH'EM, even though it's relatively safe in vanilla nethack, for example). You might get a warped view of strategy from watching someone play something like a doppleganger ice mage (not available in vanilla), unless you're discerning enough to pick up underlying themes of patience and absolute paranoia. On the other hand, you may find SLASH'EM more fun.
The problem is that these web searches and other techniques aren't really very fruitful.
Fruitful? Fruitful!? Who in the hell was doing a search for prior art on this patent? Anyone with more than a year's experience with any aspect of the software development process would know that nearly all of the general concepts of version control (and those that seem to be mentioned in this patent) have been in use for decades. RCS and SCCS are Ken Ritchie's contemporaries.
I suppose that supports your point -- automated searches of databases aren't really that great. But it seems that they ought to have some minimally educated people awarding software patents. To such people, the "search" for prior art here would barely be necessary.
What if you combined that feature with a mesh-network style feature -- ie, any MiFi device will also (if you ask it to), scan for other MiFi broadcasts, pick them up, and rebroadcast.
Competition/cooperation might be a problem, but you could essentially blanket a college campus. Legally.
Most of those "modern web techniques" cause more trouble than they're worth. They tend to work consistently only with Internet Explorer, which is their real reason for their existence and the reason Microsoft promotes them
I agree that differences in browser support for CSS can be troublesome, but there's a large majority of CSS techniques (even positioning) that work across most browsers. There are also a few clever hacks that can give you broad browser support. The only thing you really have to leave behind is the 4.x browsers -- and the page data will still be accessible (sans presentation) if you've done it right. Saying only IE supports CSS is nearly completely wrong.
CSS is in a wierd niche - unneeded for simple pages, and too weak to do what Flash can do. If you really need exciting animated graphical effects (and you usually don't), Flash has far better capabilities.
While CSS can be used to do animation and effects, that's not what it's really about at all. Comparing CSS and Flash is sortof like comparing a power saw and cordless drill.
Most of what CSS is usually used for can be done on the authoring side, with Dreamweaver templates or something similar.
With Dreamweaver? Hardly. Maybe the being able to change the whole appearance of a site at once bit. That's a nice side effect of CSS, but CSS is at core the second half of a semantic/accessible web philosophy. The first half is using XHTML/XML -- make your markup semantic. The second half is making presentation of markup purty and accessible in/across different browsers using styles. With Dreamweaver, semanticity isn't even a concern because it's all about visual manipulation of presentation. Not to mention you'll end up making a different version of each page for different browsers (or embedding conditional scripting) andyway.
Almost nobody uses XML as originally envisioned - as a way to send structured data from a web site to the user's client. I built Downside [downside.com] to do just that for SEC filings, but apart from one obscure client program nobody uses, nobody downloads data that way.
RSS feeds. XML-RPC. I agree that XML isn't used at all as a human readable format, but disagree that means it has failed (or that it was meant for that purpose). XML is a data exchange format for heirarchical data. It's working to exchange data between websites, outside of organizations somewhat, but more inside because most commercial orgs are a little iffy about just giving away their information in an uncontrolled way. We'll see more of inside and outside exchange (though again, more of the former) as web-service enabled applications become more commonplace.
I don't know. I assume that anytime you conduct a survey, you run the risk that those giving it or even those who are responding will give deliberately false or misleading answers. The most you can hope for with any survey method (including this one), is that you publish not only the results and conclusions, but the methodology, and let people make their own decisions about what it means.
Incidentally, though, I'd give the majority of slashdot readers the benefit of the doubt. There are axes aplenty to grind here, and I don't think it's really infrequent that there are incorrect implications drawn from events, but I think that falsifying data is outside of the nature of most geeks. It's antithetical to intellectual curiousity.
I laughed too, but......what this really makes me wonder how you can really respond to a survey that presents a questionable outcome. If you respond with witty, funny (and all too true) aphorisms like the above... then the meme spreads. Then when you have a case to make, backed up with statistics and valid research, all it takes is some bozo who doesn't agree with you to throw the meme back in your face. If most people are like that bozo, then you're hosed, whether or not your methodology was meticulous and straightforward and your conclusions are correct.
So while I think the parent posters are correct and what they said is amusing, I don't think repeating it frequently and simply dismissing stats is a good idea. Better to challenge it with another study.
I wonder if it'd be possible to harness a community like slashdot to do something like this. Obviously, you can't just survey slashdot -- the bias would make it worthless as a representative standard. But what if 500-1000 slashdot readers were to contact a single person randomly selected from a phone book, and ask a small (1-5) set of questions. The set of individuals slashdot readers can find select randomly from a phone book might be random enough.
Come to think of it, if anyone here is intruiged by this idea, email me, and we'll set something like this up. Maybe a verification survey for the RIAA's stats.
I like Bush less than Clinton. Much less. I don't think that changes the fact that Clinton committed perjury when asked a question that, whether or not you believe SHOULD have been asked, legally could be and was asked. And should have been answered truthfully.
Again, no claim on my part that Bush is a better president, or even that he's a better person, or hasn't broken 15 laws. None of that is excuse for perjury. Nothing is.
Slashdot Mirror
OK. Let's review the score here. So the post topic was embedding backdoors. The thread that was progressing was on destructive backdoors. A comment was made comparing this activity to destroying a building.
I then make a comment (the parent of this one) about how this scenario has in fact been examined in one of Ayn Rand's books. I do this because it might be interesting to some folks to examine how Rand approached the ethics of the situation. Then I also mention some differences in the situation.
And some crack smoking moderator comes and labels this offtopic?!!? Bah.
I think there's an Ayn Rand novel with exactly this event as a plot device.
It's not strictly comparable, though. A software application can be destroyed with no loss of materials or labor, and restored in a matter of minutes. A building can't.
And this is almost symbiotic and worthwhile. If you *really* like a product, I don't see why it would be anything but worthwhile to everybody accept compensation for endorsing it.
:)
Think of your favorite computing language/OS/Environment, for an example. I'll happily go on and on about Mac OS X, for example. If Apple gave me free stuff for evangelizing, it wouldn't change that.
The only real concern I can think of: I will also grumpilly go on and on about OS X as well. Perhaps they wouldn't like that. Perhaps no free stuff anymore if I did that. But that really wouldn't be all that different than what's happening today.
Having types work their way into names isn't entirely brain damaged. The hungarian way may be -- I tried it for a while, and couldn't make it stick. However, some data types lend themselves to it. Ever notice how often file pointers have the name fptr? That's because the naming convention serves the programmer -- programmers have an abstract convention of a file pointer in their head, and they work with it. Similarly, every once in a while I'll find myself giving a name like "HostList" -- a list (linked list, perl list, doesn't matter) of hosts.
And Code Complete really isn't a bad book at all. It may give you some false starts and misdirections, but it will definitely make you think about aspects of software development methodology.
If we limit ourselves to terrestrial industry it is literally impossible to build a car for every person in China due to a lack of energy and raw materials.
I think it's hard to argue that building a car for every person in China would be desireable. Aside from raw material considerations, there's pollution output, but aside from that, there's the school of thought that widespread automobile use has had a particularly negative impact on U.S. communities/culture.
Finally, can you imagine the uholy mess of traffic?
Clearly, making such a statement is not any less productive than say, posting on a web message board, however. :)
I'm bitter. I've applied for jobs that ask for 8+ years of experience implementing J2EE solutions. Even 3 years of experience is asking quite a bit, since Java 1.2/2 was barely released in 1999. And that's just the specific examples. In general, I find that HR departments are often my biggest obstacles to getting a job. Most of my interviews (and occasional contract work) over the last 8-10 months have either been with smaller organizations like the one he's describing, or with larger orgs where I knew someone who could get past the wall of flaming cow dung that is HR.
Silly Geese. I blame the Stallman. He's been going out of their way to make it GNU/Linux (and GNU/Whatever), and as everyone knows: Gnu's Not Unix.
So naturally our CIO friend is confused.
(And it's so easy to blame Stallman.)
The group estimates that piracy costs the U.S. motion picture industry $3.0 billion annually in lost sales.
Followup calculation:
3 billion
number of people in U.S. about 300 million
Assuming an average cost of $10 per DVD, their calculation seems to assume an average drop of 1 DVD purchase per year per person.
Maybe it gets different when you start considering marketing groups and everything (I know I hardly ever pirate nor purchase any kind of video entertainment, so I'm probably not in the focus group) but I don't see how an average drop of 1 DVD purchase per person has any significance whatsoever, let alone from "piracy".
Finally, I don't see how this factoid (or any facts about piracy) could have any relevancy to Jon's case. Piracy is possibly without what Jon wrote, and the primary purpose of Jon's work was viewing DVDs -- a capability without which I can guarantee anyone that DVD sales will go down.
The UN is nothing, and has done very little to deal with dictators. The UN considers dictators and tryant's it's #1 allies.
Against whom? What evidence do you have to back up the claim that the U.N. likes dictators best?
The U.N. is still a fledgling organization. You could even argue it has only started to really perform during the 1990s, once the general political (as well as military) detente of the cold war ended. It has had projects longer, certainly, but even if you take it from its inception, it's been around a relatively short time in history. And it takes time to give any organization structure (unless there's a single central authority doing it with $$ or a gun -- not what you want for the world).
Rational consideration of the U.N.'s place in the world leaves room for the question "How do we balance sovereignty with a commitment to cooperation?"
Irrational responses include "The U.N. is all evil! They hate freedom! Just get us out!"
Or as Parker Palmer would have said "Involvement has its problems, but is detachment always the solution?"
Thanks much. I assume S+ is the same package that's often referred to as SPLUS or S-PLUS? Either way, R sounds interesting, and I'll be happy to try it out!
Every time this is discussed, I see matlab, mathematica, C, fortran, Maple, etc come up. That's great if you're working primarily in modeling or mathematical research.
However, I'm looking into policy research, and in that area, statistics focused software is king. I've managed to learn the barest bit of SAS, which may or may not do me any good. I'm told I should get STATA down. I'm wondering if there are any comparable open source apps with this statistical focus.
Anyone know?
Is R comparable to SAS or Stata?
The thing that really gets me is monsters that attack faster than you can, because they can outrun you and attack you and there's nothing you can do. (Or is there?)
If you have the misfortune to run into an air elemental, leacrotta, or even rothe before you're prepared, about the only thing you can do is use the E-word (Elbereth) or some other repeatable method to try and scare them away repeatedly. It's a bit tedious, but it can work. I've used it to keep a crowd of 8 orcs, 2 rothes, a mean kitten, and an iguana off of an inexperienced healer's back -- and eventually chop them all up.
Otherwise:
(1) Get speed intrinsic (wand of speed monster, some corpses). Get speed boots if at all possible (right after magic resistance).
(2) Wand of Teleport. Best, because you can use it on you, or on the monster.
(3) Scroll of teleportation.
(4) Wand of digging. Fast escape through the floor.
And of course, a good AC and good weapon. But everybody wants that.
Maybe my view is just tainted because I'm finding myself leaning more toward the pro-War campaign...
I'm against the Iraq war as it looks like it would be currently conducted and justified, but I agree. Not letting your code be licensed for that use would do little good -- it would simply increase defense budgets and decrease auditability as closed source code was used.
I'm not saying you have to begin work on device drivers for a tank right now, or release IraqSim to the world. I'm saying that the idea that not releasing code to the world will make a difference is probably not particularly sound.
The only exception I can thinkg of is if you've come up with something truly unique. And if it's that unique and dangerous, you shouldn't release the idea at all, because one way or another, someone powerful will get their hands on/mind around it and use it with or without your permission.
Sinks? Scroll readings have different effects when confused? Large number of player classes, each with own quest? Prayer?
I haven't played Diablo/2, but it's pretty easy for me to suspect that even if the basic item classes and combat are roughly the same, the rest of the gameplay probably isn't as deep.
I believe that's a feature.
I think antisymmetric.com is a SLASH'EM server (Super Lotsa Added Stuff Hack - Extended Magic)... even more stuff and more ways to die (do not eat unidentified tins in SLASH'EM, even though it's relatively safe in vanilla nethack, for example). You might get a warped view of strategy from watching someone play something like a doppleganger ice mage (not available in vanilla), unless you're discerning enough to pick up underlying themes of patience and absolute paranoia. On the other hand, you may find SLASH'EM more fun.
The problem is that these web searches and other techniques aren't really very fruitful.
Fruitful? Fruitful!? Who in the hell was doing a search for prior art on this patent? Anyone with more than a year's experience with any aspect of the software development process would know that nearly all of the general concepts of version control (and those that seem to be mentioned in this patent) have been in use for decades. RCS and SCCS are Ken Ritchie's contemporaries.
I suppose that supports your point -- automated searches of databases aren't really that great. But it seems that they ought to have some minimally educated people awarding software patents. To such people, the "search" for prior art here would barely be necessary.
We had terminals. Connected to an ICON unix minicomputer, with a 68020 processor.
USCD Pascal and K & R C by day... nethack by night (well, afternoon). It was good for us.
What if you combined that feature with a mesh-network style feature -- ie, any MiFi device will also (if you ask it to), scan for other MiFi broadcasts, pick them up, and rebroadcast.
Competition/cooperation might be a problem, but you could essentially blanket a college campus. Legally.
Most of those "modern web techniques" cause more trouble than they're worth. They tend to work consistently only with Internet Explorer, which is their real reason for their existence and the reason Microsoft promotes them
I agree that differences in browser support for CSS can be troublesome, but there's a large majority of CSS techniques (even positioning) that work across most browsers. There are also a few clever hacks that can give you broad browser support. The only thing you really have to leave behind is the 4.x browsers -- and the page data will still be accessible (sans presentation) if you've done it right. Saying only IE supports CSS is nearly completely wrong.
CSS is in a wierd niche - unneeded for simple pages, and too weak to do what Flash can do. If you really need exciting animated graphical effects (and you usually don't), Flash has far better capabilities.
While CSS can be used to do animation and effects, that's not what it's really about at all. Comparing CSS and Flash is sortof like comparing a power saw and cordless drill.
Most of what CSS is usually used for can be done on the authoring side, with Dreamweaver templates or something similar.
With Dreamweaver? Hardly. Maybe the being able to change the whole appearance of a site at once bit. That's a nice side effect of CSS, but CSS is at core the second half of a semantic/accessible web philosophy. The first half is using XHTML/XML -- make your markup semantic. The second half is making presentation of markup purty and accessible in/across different browsers using styles. With Dreamweaver, semanticity isn't even a concern because it's all about visual manipulation of presentation. Not to mention you'll end up making a different version of each page for different browsers (or embedding conditional scripting) andyway.
Almost nobody uses XML as originally envisioned - as a way to send structured data from a web site to the user's client. I built Downside [downside.com] to do just that for SEC filings, but apart from one obscure client program nobody uses, nobody downloads data that way.
RSS feeds. XML-RPC. I agree that XML isn't used at all as a human readable format, but disagree that means it has failed (or that it was meant for that purpose). XML is a data exchange format for heirarchical data. It's working to exchange data between websites, outside of organizations somewhat, but more inside because most commercial orgs are a little iffy about just giving away their information in an uncontrolled way. We'll see more of inside and outside exchange (though again, more of the former) as web-service enabled applications become more commonplace.
I don't know. I assume that anytime you conduct a survey, you run the risk that those giving it or even those who are responding will give deliberately false or misleading answers. The most you can hope for with any survey method (including this one), is that you publish not only the results and conclusions, but the methodology, and let people make their own decisions about what it means.
Incidentally, though, I'd give the majority of slashdot readers the benefit of the doubt. There are axes aplenty to grind here, and I don't think it's really infrequent that there are incorrect implications drawn from events, but I think that falsifying data is outside of the nature of most geeks. It's antithetical to intellectual curiousity.
I laughed too, but... ...what this really makes me wonder how you can really respond to a survey that presents a questionable outcome. If you respond with witty, funny (and all too true) aphorisms like the above... then the meme spreads. Then when you have a case to make, backed up with statistics and valid research, all it takes is some bozo who doesn't agree with you to throw the meme back in your face. If most people are like that bozo, then you're hosed, whether or not your methodology was meticulous and straightforward and your conclusions are correct.
So while I think the parent posters are correct and what they said is amusing, I don't think repeating it frequently and simply dismissing stats is a good idea. Better to challenge it with another study.
I wonder if it'd be possible to harness a community like slashdot to do something like this. Obviously, you can't just survey slashdot -- the bias would make it worthless as a representative standard. But what if 500-1000 slashdot readers were to contact a single person randomly selected from a phone book, and ask a small (1-5) set of questions. The set of individuals slashdot readers can find select randomly from a phone book might be random enough.
Come to think of it, if anyone here is intruiged by this idea, email me, and we'll set something like this up. Maybe a verification survey for the RIAA's stats.
I like Bush less than Clinton. Much less. I don't think that changes the fact that Clinton committed perjury when asked a question that, whether or not you believe SHOULD have been asked, legally could be and was asked. And should have been answered truthfully.
Again, no claim on my part that Bush is a better president, or even that he's a better person, or hasn't broken 15 laws. None of that is excuse for perjury. Nothing is.