Why should these scientists be any less prone to political bias than anyone else?
...well, partly because they've dedicated their lives to the pursuit of scientific truth. What's more, if you're a good enough scientist to make a breakthrough worthy of a Nobel prize, odds are that you value the integrity of the scientific process above whatever partisan bickering may be going on at the time.
I'm not saying that these people are immune to political motivation. I am saying that if ever there was a group of people capable of making an honest, accurate assessment of this sort of thing, it's a bunch of Nobel laureates. That twenty Nobel laureates people felt strongly enough about this to put their names to paper over it should, at the very least, give a person pause.
In short, you shouldn't trust anyone. The shallow-minded slashdrones will say "Bush is evil, these scientists are 100% correct!" Instead, how about doing some research of your own in order to come to a conclusion? You'll probably find that the truth, as usual, lies somewhere in the middle.
"You shouldn't trust anyone"? No, of course you should trust people, especially people who demonstrate a strong will to improve the lot of their fellow human. The Bush administration, for example, has relied heavily on the trust of the American public, and a majority of the American people have granted them that trust. Now, you shouldn't exercise blind trust in anybody, and skepticsm is healthy, but trust is an absolutely essential part of human interaction.
That said, I'm inclined to think that the scientists that signed this paper are considerably less politically motivated than the administration.
The response to this has been that these scientists are motivated by partisan considerations and are trying to create a political issue.
Trouble is, if you can't count on 20 Nobel laureate scientists to make an honest, apolitical assessment of the state of science in our government, who on earth can you trust?
The big secret: "tip the bottle and see if you can see 'again' under the cap." Sheer genius.
No, really--this would never have occurred to me.
I mean, really--the tipping of the bottle I could probably get to, but then to look through the clear plastic--inspired, my friend, inspired. And differentiating between 'again' and a random string of numbers? This guy has to be into hardcore pattern recognition. NSA, are you seeing this?
Yeah.
There exist elegant solutions to truly vexing problems that, once discovered, are striking in their simplicity. There also exist people who try to pass off the painfully obvious as an elegant solution to a truly vexing problem.
A free iTunes code to the person who can guess which category this falls into...
As I read elsewhere, no you can't. You need JAMMA, as MAME states in the EULA that you can't use it for profit. Starroms no doubt also have the same provision, as they'd surely want a cut.
<marley>...so I hope you like JAMMA, too...</marley>
For the life of me, I can't comprehend why the editors front-paged a Geocities link. Special treat to subscribers, perhaps?
For those of you who can't get to it, don't worry--you didn't miss much. It's just a compilation of Scotty quotes, and contrary to the submitter's assertion, hardly any of them apply to the current situation.
The way I see it, programming languages of the future aren't going to evolve from spoken language. Instead, the spoken languages of the future will evolve from programming languages.
In 200 years, There'll be 637 different words for "bug" in the our universal spoken language, ESPERA~1. To express confusion, a speaker will slap his hands over his face, stand stock still, shout "BLUE!", and wait for the other person to walk away.
These counterarguments work wonderfully, so long as the following conditions are met:
You are in a position to present said conterarguments.
The operating officer you're presenting to is willing to consider what you have to say.
For every decent, hard-working operating officer who has worked his way up cares about what's best for his company, there's at least one who got where he is by being a cutthroat bastard and cares more about his own wealth than he cares about the company he works for. All too often, logical counterarguments will never see the light of day, because you're just some tech grunt and not a four-color glossy trade mag...
More proof that code who's source is open is less secure!
You laugh, but I won't be the least bit surprised when this very logic finds its way to the receptive ears of less-than-tech-saavy corporate officers...
"Linux? Good god no, man! Didn't you see what happened when just a bit of the Microsoft source code got leaked? I thought you were up on these things!"
Dude. I know that. I was using hyperbole to demonstrate a point.
My point isn't "we should have languages where you can't add or assign variables!". That's just silly. That's like making your car safer by removing the axles.
My point is that we can't fix bad programmers by making better languages. So long as a programmer has any degree of control over their code, the bad ones will be able to write bad code.
I'm not suggesting that we do away with basic arithmetic or variable assignment. You can't do that and still have a programming language. The very idea of writing a program of any complexity that doesn't incorporate basic arithmetic or variable assignment is just plain silly.
Rather, I'm saying that so long as programmers can use such essential and basic functionality, the bad ones will find ways of producing buggy code. Inaccurate formulae. Hard-to-maintain code. Inefficient design. Poorly formed logic. Bad algorithm selection. You just can't 'fix' bad programmers with better languages.
There's just no way to teach a compiler to recognize bad code design, and there's no way to tell a programming language, "do as I mean you to do, not as I say you to do." Yes, things like garbage collection and bounds-checking help prevent some bugs, but the really nasty ones--the ones that take ages to fix--are the result of good ol'-fashioned bad design and programming.
As for the troll remark, go ahead and dig through my user info page. I may be snide at times, but I'm no troll.
Frankly, I think the better approach would be to make software developers less buggy. Educate them properly!
So long as you allow developers to do such things as basic arithmetic and variable assignment, you're gonna have to deal with buggy code written by self-recursive sphincter-spelunkers.
Zeroeth point: Who? Neowin.net?...now where have I heard that name before...oh--that's right! Nowhere! It's one of umpteen-dozen Slashdot wannabe sites, your basic news feed/PHP comment page model. I can't imagine they have that much of an investigative team...
First point: The tagline for Neowin.net is "Where unprofessional journalism looks better" I'll take what they say with a block of salt.
Second point: The odds of getting one's hands on the full source to NT4/2K are slim to none--even most Microsoft folks couldn't do that. The code is probably scattered across multiple servers in Redmond, for starters, and you'd only be given access to the parts you needed to work with.
Third point: The article has absolutely no detail to it whatsoever. For all we know, they've released a trojan masquerading as the source code and are trying to sucker geeks and 14m2rZ into downloading it.
...as the site is probably going to crash hard very quickly, here's the article text:
Neowin has learned of shocking and potentially devastating news. It would appear that two packages are circulating on the internet, one being the source code to Windows 2000, and the other being the source code to Windows NT. At this time, it is hard to establish whether or not full code has leaked, and this will undoubtedly remain the situation until an attempt is made to compile them. Microsoft are currently unavailable for comment surrounding this leak so we have no official response from them at the time of writing.
This leak is a shock not only to Neowin, but to the wider IT industry. The ramifications of this leak are far reaching and devastating. This reporter does not wish to be sensationalist, but the number of industries and critical systems that are based around these technologies that could be damaged by new exploits found in this source code is something that doesn't bare thinking about.
We ask that for the wider benefit of the IT community that members and readers support Microsoft by forwarding anything they know about the leak to the Microsoft's Anti-Piracy department.
...you're assuming that AOL only surveyed it's user base. That's probably not the case. Most of the articles I've seen regarding cite several thousand participants in a nationwide, online survey; it makes no mention that the survey was restricted to AOL's subscriber base. (I haven't yet managed to find the report itself--please set me straight if I'm wrong on this.)
Just because AOL is doing the study doesn't mean they're only polling their own users. After all, a political pollster will (usually) want everybody's opinion, whether or not that person says they're of the same political party as the candidate who's doing the poll...
On one hand, this can easily be presented as a way to improve customer service by detecting and addressing angry customers quickly and appropriately. Your normal tech support people answer 'patient' calls, and you set up and train a 'high-risk' support center to handle irate callers. As a normal caller, you end up speaking to a tech that doesn't have to deal with assholes. As an asshole, you get shunted to a person who is specially trained to deal with you. Everybody wins.
On the other hand, one can readily claim that this is a tool to allow companies to better define and pursue the lower bound of just how little money and manpower they can allocate to customer service. As an asshole, you get to barge to the front of the line and berate live support that much faster; as a normal person, you'll either wait an eternity for support or get angry enough to trigger the system. The callers and tech support both lose, but the company sees an immediate reduction in support costs.
You're going to get a lot of tips and suggestions in this thread, many of which will be quite good.
Regardless of whatever advice pops up in this thread, though, the one thing that you absolutely, positively must do is consult a lawyer. Take the tips you pick up here and run it past said lawyer; they'll advise you as to whether or not they'll work and will convert the advice into legalese for you.
If you can't afford a lawyer, track down the family member/friend that is a lawyer and ask/beg for their help.
Employment contracts are very, very important things that businesses take seriously. If you're not careful, you'll put yourself in a position where you could be sued without even realizing you'd done so, which is doubleplusungood. Get a lawyer to help mitigate this risk.
Assume that you're just as good at revising some lawyer's contract as you'd expect that lawyer to be at revising your code. Act accordingly.
A lot of designers seem to believe that, when you try to turn right in a driving game, you shouldn't actually turn right, you should go into a skid and blow up and flip over, otherwise it's not 'realistic'. I believe that if the player tries to turn right, then you should let 'em - rather than messing around trying to make the game some ridiculous simulation that's not very much fun.
Amen. There are too many games out there that try too hard to be simulations, and end up sacrificing 'fun' for 'realistic'. If you want to make a sim, make a sim; if you want to make a game, make a game.
Now, this isn't to say that reality isn't important; the more realistic a game seems, the more fun it'll be. The trick is bridging the gap between what seems real and what would actually be realistic behavior. The Cruis'n series does a good job of this: any truly critical examination of the game's physics reveals it to be utterly unrealistic, and yet part of what makes the game so fun is that when you're playing the game, the controls feel and seem real.
Heh. Thing is, having slavishly played Allegiance for some time back when it came out, it's a wicked cool game. It nailed a perfect balance between first-person space shooter and RTS, it had 'factions' with interesting distinctions between their ships, it had a very fun tech tree that let you explore a bunch of different strategies for gameplay, and it relied heavily on coordination, strategy, and team play.
Of course, it had problems because of that last part--even the slightest bit of griefing or rambo syndrome and your team was in trouble. IF you had a bad commander, your team was screwed. If the sides weren't well balanced, it was very hard for the inferior team to pull off a win. If the sides were balanced, it was an insanely fun and intense game, even better than Tribes was.
They didn't really market this one much, and it was nigh unplayable over modem connections and residential broadband was still in its infancy. Had this game come out today with some decent marketing, I think it could easily become one of the "Best Games of 2004"...
One of those damn kids that always runs across your lawn
Here's how you do it:
First, connect each of the rheostats to a voltmeter. Apply current and test the system to ensure that all the hardware is working properly. Then, take the USB cable and fashion one end of it into a crude snare trap. Hide this snare trap under leaves and grass clippings in the middle of your yard; hold onto the other end of USB cable and lie in wait behind a bush. When the damn kid runs across your lawn and onto the snare trap, tug hard on your end of the USB cable. This will trap the child about the ankle. Tie the free end of the USB to a securely anchored object near your comuter. Have the kid constantly surf the web, checking for information that is interesting to you; when something changes, tell him to twiddle the rheostats or something. When the novelty wears off three hours later, tell the kid to stay off your goddamn lawn from now on and let him go. Throw voltmeters and rheostats in trash. Hang self with USB cable.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying that these people are immune to political motivation. I am saying that if ever there was a group of people capable of making an honest, accurate assessment of this sort of thing, it's a bunch of Nobel laureates. That twenty Nobel laureates people felt strongly enough about this to put their names to paper over it should, at the very least, give a person pause.
In short, you shouldn't trust anyone. The shallow-minded slashdrones will say "Bush is evil, these scientists are 100% correct!" Instead, how about doing some research of your own in order to come to a conclusion? You'll probably find that the truth, as usual, lies somewhere in the middle.
"You shouldn't trust anyone"? No, of course you should trust people, especially people who demonstrate a strong will to improve the lot of their fellow human. The Bush administration, for example, has relied heavily on the trust of the American public, and a majority of the American people have granted them that trust. Now, you shouldn't exercise blind trust in anybody, and skepticsm is healthy, but trust is an absolutely essential part of human interaction.
That said, I'm inclined to think that the scientists that signed this paper are considerably less politically motivated than the administration.
Trouble is, if you can't count on 20 Nobel laureate scientists to make an honest, apolitical assessment of the state of science in our government, who on earth can you trust?
No, really--this would never have occurred to me.
I mean, really--the tipping of the bottle I could probably get to, but then to look through the clear plastic--inspired, my friend, inspired. And differentiating between 'again' and a random string of numbers? This guy has to be into hardcore pattern recognition. NSA, are you seeing this?
Yeah.
There exist elegant solutions to truly vexing problems that, once discovered, are striking in their simplicity. There also exist people who try to pass off the painfully obvious as an elegant solution to a truly vexing problem.
A free iTunes code to the person who can guess which category this falls into...
<marley>...so I hope you like JAMMA, too...</marley>
*ducks*
CROSSHATCH
pound, pound sign, number, number sign, sharp, octothorpe, hash, (garden) fence, crunch, mesh, hex, flash, grid, pig-pen, tictactoe, scratch (mark), (garden) gate, hak, oof, rake, sink&, corridor&, unequal, punch mark
For those of you who can't get to it, don't worry--you didn't miss much. It's just a compilation of Scotty quotes, and contrary to the submitter's assertion, hardly any of them apply to the current situation.
Unless, of course, the ISS has warp drives.
Or is in the midst of battle with Klingons.
! up job, boys--now put on your ^s, head down to the big \ at the local # |, and party 'till you see *s!
In 200 years, There'll be 637 different words for "bug" in the our universal spoken language, ESPERA~1. To express confusion, a speaker will slap his hands over his face, stand stock still, shout "BLUE!", and wait for the other person to walk away.
Positive Feedback: A+++++++++++++!!!! Bomb racks work great! Thanks!!!!!11
These counterarguments work wonderfully, so long as the following conditions are met:
- You are in a position to present said conterarguments.
- The operating officer you're presenting to is willing to consider what you have to say.
For every decent, hard-working operating officer who has worked his way up cares about what's best for his company, there's at least one who got where he is by being a cutthroat bastard and cares more about his own wealth than he cares about the company he works for. All too often, logical counterarguments will never see the light of day, because you're just some tech grunt and not a four-color glossy trade mag...You laugh, but I won't be the least bit surprised when this very logic finds its way to the receptive ears of less-than-tech-saavy corporate officers...
"Linux? Good god no, man! Didn't you see what happened when just a bit of the Microsoft source code got leaked? I thought you were up on these things!"
...so does this make Canada the land of the free and the home of the 'eh?'
My point isn't "we should have languages where you can't add or assign variables!". That's just silly. That's like making your car safer by removing the axles.
My point is that we can't fix bad programmers by making better languages. So long as a programmer has any degree of control over their code, the bad ones will be able to write bad code.
Aaah...it seems Dell is going after the coveted gamers-who-leave-the-basement demographic...
I'm not suggesting that we do away with basic arithmetic or variable assignment. You can't do that and still have a programming language. The very idea of writing a program of any complexity that doesn't incorporate basic arithmetic or variable assignment is just plain silly.
Rather, I'm saying that so long as programmers can use such essential and basic functionality, the bad ones will find ways of producing buggy code. Inaccurate formulae. Hard-to-maintain code. Inefficient design. Poorly formed logic. Bad algorithm selection. You just can't 'fix' bad programmers with better languages.
There's just no way to teach a compiler to recognize bad code design, and there's no way to tell a programming language, "do as I mean you to do, not as I say you to do." Yes, things like garbage collection and bounds-checking help prevent some bugs, but the really nasty ones--the ones that take ages to fix--are the result of good ol'-fashioned bad design and programming.
As for the troll remark, go ahead and dig through my user info page. I may be snide at times, but I'm no troll.
So long as you allow developers to do such things as basic arithmetic and variable assignment, you're gonna have to deal with buggy code written by self-recursive sphincter-spelunkers.
First point: The tagline for Neowin.net is "Where unprofessional journalism looks better" I'll take what they say with a block of salt.
Second point: The odds of getting one's hands on the full source to NT4/2K are slim to none--even most Microsoft folks couldn't do that. The code is probably scattered across multiple servers in Redmond, for starters, and you'd only be given access to the parts you needed to work with.
Third point: The article has absolutely no detail to it whatsoever. For all we know, they've released a trojan masquerading as the source code and are trying to sucker geeks and 14m2rZ into downloading it.
Neowin has learned of shocking and potentially devastating news. It would appear that two packages are circulating on the internet, one being the source code to Windows 2000, and the other being the source code to Windows NT. At this time, it is hard to establish whether or not full code has leaked, and this will undoubtedly remain the situation until an attempt is made to compile them. Microsoft are currently unavailable for comment surrounding this leak so we have no official response from them at the time of writing.
This leak is a shock not only to Neowin, but to the wider IT industry. The ramifications of this leak are far reaching and devastating. This reporter does not wish to be sensationalist, but the number of industries and critical systems that are based around these technologies that could be damaged by new exploits found in this source code is something that doesn't bare thinking about.
We ask that for the wider benefit of the IT community that members and readers support Microsoft by forwarding anything they know about the leak to the Microsoft's Anti-Piracy department.
Just because AOL is doing the study doesn't mean they're only polling their own users. After all, a political pollster will (usually) want everybody's opinion, whether or not that person says they're of the same political party as the candidate who's doing the poll...
When I was your age, we called 'em by their proper name--athletic supporters!
"Package manager", indeed...
On the other hand, one can readily claim that this is a tool to allow companies to better define and pursue the lower bound of just how little money and manpower they can allocate to customer service. As an asshole, you get to barge to the front of the line and berate live support that much faster; as a normal person, you'll either wait an eternity for support or get angry enough to trigger the system. The callers and tech support both lose, but the company sees an immediate reduction in support costs.
Now, which way do you all think this will swing?
When you're looking to cut corners, be careful who you give the scissors to...
Regardless of whatever advice pops up in this thread, though, the one thing that you absolutely, positively must do is consult a lawyer. Take the tips you pick up here and run it past said lawyer; they'll advise you as to whether or not they'll work and will convert the advice into legalese for you. If you can't afford a lawyer, track down the family member/friend that is a lawyer and ask/beg for their help.
Employment contracts are very, very important things that businesses take seriously. If you're not careful, you'll put yourself in a position where you could be sued without even realizing you'd done so, which is doubleplusungood. Get a lawyer to help mitigate this risk.
Assume that you're just as good at revising some lawyer's contract as you'd expect that lawyer to be at revising your code. Act accordingly.
A lot of designers seem to believe that, when you try to turn right in a driving game, you shouldn't actually turn right, you should go into a skid and blow up and flip over, otherwise it's not 'realistic'. I believe that if the player tries to turn right, then you should let 'em - rather than messing around trying to make the game some ridiculous simulation that's not very much fun.
Amen. There are too many games out there that try too hard to be simulations, and end up sacrificing 'fun' for 'realistic'. If you want to make a sim, make a sim; if you want to make a game, make a game.
Now, this isn't to say that reality isn't important; the more realistic a game seems, the more fun it'll be. The trick is bridging the gap between what seems real and what would actually be realistic behavior. The Cruis'n series does a good job of this: any truly critical examination of the game's physics reveals it to be utterly unrealistic, and yet part of what makes the game so fun is that when you're playing the game, the controls feel and seem real.
Of course, it had problems because of that last part--even the slightest bit of griefing or rambo syndrome and your team was in trouble. IF you had a bad commander, your team was screwed. If the sides weren't well balanced, it was very hard for the inferior team to pull off a win. If the sides were balanced, it was an insanely fun and intense game, even better than Tribes was.
They didn't really market this one much, and it was nigh unplayable over modem connections and residential broadband was still in its infancy. Had this game come out today with some decent marketing, I think it could easily become one of the "Best Games of 2004"...
You'll need:
Here's how you do it:
First, connect each of the rheostats to a voltmeter. Apply current and test the system to ensure that all the hardware is working properly. Then, take the USB cable and fashion one end of it into a crude snare trap. Hide this snare trap under leaves and grass clippings in the middle of your yard; hold onto the other end of USB cable and lie in wait behind a bush. When the damn kid runs across your lawn and onto the snare trap, tug hard on your end of the USB cable. This will trap the child about the ankle. Tie the free end of the USB to a securely anchored object near your comuter. Have the kid constantly surf the web, checking for information that is interesting to you; when something changes, tell him to twiddle the rheostats or something. When the novelty wears off three hours later, tell the kid to stay off your goddamn lawn from now on and let him go. Throw voltmeters and rheostats in trash. Hang self with USB cable.