Not at all. There are two sides to mathematics: the theoretical side, and the practical side. The theoretician would agree completely with what you say: if you can only use the calculator and don't know the underlying process, you aren't doing math.
The practical side disagrees. If you don't need to have an understanding of the underlying principles to do the problem, there is no point to learn it. The thing is, except for a fairly small group of people, programming is a strictly practical function. If you can accomplish what you need to, there is absolutely no point in having an understanding of the underlying process, just as people do not need to understand the chemistry of gasoline combustion or even engine design to drive a car.
"Programming" is the process of writing an automated process on a computer to solve a particular problem. How you do so, and how much you understand what you are doing, is absolutely irrelevant to that end. Granted, a deeper understanding is often necessary, but not always and not for everyone. In those cases, these kinds of languages are useful.
Trolls will do what trolls do, which is claim crazy theories to get attention and "argue" with people. It's better to ignore them (although the theory about Russia making it is certainly *possible*, just not likely).
Most people have realized from day 1 that the US and/or Israel was responsible, but their governments would never officially admit to it.
Except when something like Stuxnet is deliberately designed to sabotage and damage a weapons development program, or a virus is designed to shut down the power grid. Some thought is required when assigning the term "weapon" to an object, just as with many nouns. LOIC? Not a weapon. As you say, that is vandalism. A virus that causes a reactor to explode? Weapon, not vandalism.
Flame and others are obviously subject to debate about whether they are actually "weapons" or not, especially since we have no idea what it really did, but it can be convenient to lump together all such programs that were created by some high-level organization for some specific purpose as a "cyberweapon": even if it was only intended for espionage purposes (which would make it tricky to call it a "weapon"), you can generalize a term to include things not ordinarily in the same genus if their characteristics are such that it is useful to do so. Since there is no other term widely used for such a program, "cyberweapon" will have to do, unless you can come up with some other term that will be widely accepted to refer to (likely) government-designed sophisticated malware designed to be used against foreign nations.
The difference is that cyberweapons inherently exploit fixable weaknesses in existing infrastructure (assuming the government isn't just inserting backdoors, which they may be doing, but they are also doing much more). The more widely they are used, the greater the pressure to fix those weaknesses and implement better security practices. Given that criminals are going to use those weaknesses even if every single government stops, that means they have fewer and fewer exploits and avenues to exploit, which is good for everyone.
It's more like a rat infestation than nuke testing. Sure, it's annoying, but the more of the bastards you get, the faster you can patch all the holes they are coming through (and the more rat poison to stop the stragglers).
A weapon does not have to kill someone or indeed even be able to kill someone to be a weapon. The two definitions are "a thing designed or used for inflicting bodily harm or physical damage" and "a means of gaining an advantage or defending oneself in a conflict or contest." Cyberweapons fulfill both, except, of course, it's "cyber" damage, not physical (hence the name, which of course is stupid but effective).
What Anonymous does is effectively vandalism, yes. Stuxnet, however, was a weapon.
No. An army of acid belching mutant ponies. With cyborg riders designed to override all of Asimov's laws on command from central in an undisclosed island fortress, accessible only via private submarine.
... for the children, of course. Anyone who doesn't agree is just helping the pedophiles escape
The implication here, since the creators had to know security researchers already had the virus code, is that there is some module the researchers don't know about (which is actually highly probable, anyways, given the fact they wouldn't have unrestricted access to the targeted computers) and the creators wanted to eliminated the evidence. Most likely, that was the module that fulfilled Flame's main purpose, since researchers still aren't sure exactly what it does, which means now they might never know. It also helps that the targeted computers are (most likely) not infected anymore, so people can't even identify if they were ever hit.
A secondary implication is that Flame has fulfilled it's purpose. Again, what that is, no one is exactly sure (espionage, certainly, but you don't create something this advanced without some specific target in mind) and wasn't worth maintaining anymore.
Yeah, my answer was a bit snarkish. Best Buy does have a respectable DVD and music collection, if perhaps only because I'm too lazy/too infrequent a shopper to find a better store. I'm also fortunate to have a MicroCenter ~25-30 minutes away, and a Target 3 minutes away for common/cheap things. But I rarely find myself even going there: all my major purchases are online. The only real use is to pick up smaller things, like case fans and the like, or if I ever needed something right away (which hopefully will never happen).
The whole article reeks of PR and marketspeak. "Of course we can do better than everyone else", "no way is ARM going to beat us, our single core is better than their dual-core!"
My response to Intel is to put up or shut up. Or be ignored, since I know they won't do the latter (they didn't get to be a 100+ billion dollar company by not marketing the hell out of their product).
That is the argument. My point is that that argument is bullshit. Let me ask you: what is the opposite of "more:" less, or fewer? The answer is "less", and yet "more" can be used for both countable and uncountable quantities. The idea that fewer should apply to countable is an artificial and fairly recent grammatical fiction invented not by natural linguistic development, but by some guy basically just straight-up claiming that is how he thinks it should be done, to wit:
This Word is most commonly used in speaking of a Number; where I should think Fewer would do better. "No Fewer than a Hundred" appears to me, not only more elegant than "No less than a Hundred," but more strictly proper. (Baker 1770)
Notice the usage of "I think." That is where the concept originates: it has no basis in the natural linguistic usage of the words, and therefore either word is acceptable for countable nouns (for uncountable, "less" is obviously, due to common usage, the only acceptable alternative). Furthermore, the exceptions to the rule, such as "less clothes" and the fact that less is, even by the strictest Pilkunnussija (look it up), often used in cases where countable objects are being denoted, means that "less" should be considered a perfectly acceptable term to denote a lesser quantity of countable objects (again, another example: "fewer quantity" is clearly inappropriate, yet "quantity" is indeterminate with respect to continuity or lack thereof. Logically, then, "less" must be applicable to countable objects).
Stylistically, which one to use is up to the writer, but you can use either.
"Florine", capitalized, is a given name. Fluorine, not normally capitalized except where appropriate, is the element (my spellchecker also suggests "Florine" if I spell it "flourine" instead of "fluorine", which I'm guessing is what happened.)
Why do Opera fanboys feel the need to convince everyone that Opera invented the web?
Because they did, more or less. Tabs, mobile browsing, CSS support, built-in adblocking (which no other major browser even has, as far as I know), speed... yeah, Opera pretty much pioneered everything important about modern web browsers, and they deserve a lot of credit for that.
So you'd rather have no options than have the option, but just not buy it? You wouldn't have many of those Humble Bundle games if Steam hadn't enabled them to make tens of thousands of sales before they did the bundle (where they usually make relatively little money, between the fact it is split 5+ ways and the charity donations and the hosting costs). Some of those games wouldn't even exist, had it not been for Steam allowing them easy distribution and a massive audience.
I wish Valve would issue an IPO so that I could invest.
No, you don't, because then Valve would be forced to answer to investors, which means a focus on quarterly-earnings, which means rushed games and restrictive DRM and bullshit like that. Look at what happened to Ubisoft, EA, and Activision-Blizzard. Valve manages to be better than most of the other publishers in large part because they are a privately owned company who can afford to mess around if they want (and because of their unique management structure, i.e. they don't have one). Also means their employees are extremely well paid, which pays off in the long run with talented employees sticking around.
I hope not. I'm hoping Linux users are more anti-DRM than that, and that Steam crashes and burns.
So, what, indie developers can go back to being forced to add far, far worse DRM onto their games and sign deals with Ubisoft/EA/Activision to get their games published at all, and have zero games on Linux at all? Because that is the alternative to Steam, you know. You may not have thought this through.
I know a lot of not-terribly computer savvy people who avoided Vista and stuck with XP because of the bad press it got, so yes, people can and will avoid the current version of Windows if it gets bad press (from the nerds). As far as switching to Linux go: again, I know a lot of less-than-nerdy types who have strongly considered and/or used Linux (generally Ubuntu). Linux really has progressed a great deal in public image. No where near Windows-level of adaptation, yet, but it is progressing, which is all you can really ask for.
Just because you never learned how to feel doesn't mean it's "normal" to be a sociopath.
I suppose anyone who wears leather is also a sociopath? Or eats a cow? It's a little unusual to use a skin in this manner, but hardly "sociopathic". I actually found it really funny to see a flying cat. Sure, it's dead, but it's not like he mounted the head on a bloody spike or something.
That's not really what this statistic is saying. It is using a "tipping" model, where it assumes anyone who has more than 50% of his friends exhibiting the behavior will automatically adopt it. A useful model, but not actually true (like nearly all mathematical models, it is only approximately true in the real world). That means they only have to find a "seed" population to adopt the trend: the model says if all of them adopt it, everyone on the network will. Think of it less like sheep and more like dominoes: you only need to trigger one dominoe to trigger the rest, but that presumes a carefully constructed ideal system. In reality, 99% of people may be sheep, but this study says absolutely nothing about that. It assumes it, rather than proving it.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all. There are two sides to mathematics: the theoretical side, and the practical side. The theoretician would agree completely with what you say: if you can only use the calculator and don't know the underlying process, you aren't doing math.
The practical side disagrees. If you don't need to have an understanding of the underlying principles to do the problem, there is no point to learn it. The thing is, except for a fairly small group of people, programming is a strictly practical function. If you can accomplish what you need to, there is absolutely no point in having an understanding of the underlying process, just as people do not need to understand the chemistry of gasoline combustion or even engine design to drive a car.
"Programming" is the process of writing an automated process on a computer to solve a particular problem. How you do so, and how much you understand what you are doing, is absolutely irrelevant to that end. Granted, a deeper understanding is often necessary, but not always and not for everyone. In those cases, these kinds of languages are useful.
Trolls will do what trolls do, which is claim crazy theories to get attention and "argue" with people. It's better to ignore them (although the theory about Russia making it is certainly *possible*, just not likely).
Most people have realized from day 1 that the US and/or Israel was responsible, but their governments would never officially admit to it.
whether there's still an ongoing debate about "emacs vs vi".
Nah, people realized it was silly to still be comparing a text editor to an OS.
Except when something like Stuxnet is deliberately designed to sabotage and damage a weapons development program, or a virus is designed to shut down the power grid. Some thought is required when assigning the term "weapon" to an object, just as with many nouns. LOIC? Not a weapon. As you say, that is vandalism. A virus that causes a reactor to explode? Weapon, not vandalism.
Flame and others are obviously subject to debate about whether they are actually "weapons" or not, especially since we have no idea what it really did, but it can be convenient to lump together all such programs that were created by some high-level organization for some specific purpose as a "cyberweapon": even if it was only intended for espionage purposes (which would make it tricky to call it a "weapon"), you can generalize a term to include things not ordinarily in the same genus if their characteristics are such that it is useful to do so. Since there is no other term widely used for such a program, "cyberweapon" will have to do, unless you can come up with some other term that will be widely accepted to refer to (likely) government-designed sophisticated malware designed to be used against foreign nations.
The difference is that cyberweapons inherently exploit fixable weaknesses in existing infrastructure (assuming the government isn't just inserting backdoors, which they may be doing, but they are also doing much more). The more widely they are used, the greater the pressure to fix those weaknesses and implement better security practices. Given that criminals are going to use those weaknesses even if every single government stops, that means they have fewer and fewer exploits and avenues to exploit, which is good for everyone.
It's more like a rat infestation than nuke testing. Sure, it's annoying, but the more of the bastards you get, the faster you can patch all the holes they are coming through (and the more rat poison to stop the stragglers).
A weapon does not have to kill someone or indeed even be able to kill someone to be a weapon. The two definitions are "a thing designed or used for inflicting bodily harm or physical damage" and "a means of gaining an advantage or defending oneself in a conflict or contest." Cyberweapons fulfill both, except, of course, it's "cyber" damage, not physical (hence the name, which of course is stupid but effective).
What Anonymous does is effectively vandalism, yes. Stuxnet, however, was a weapon.
No. An army of acid belching mutant ponies. With cyborg riders designed to override all of Asimov's laws on command from central in an undisclosed island fortress, accessible only via private submarine.
... for the children, of course. Anyone who doesn't agree is just helping the pedophiles escape
Yep, since Facebook will splatter the people who use their apps all over, it'll help me identify people I shouldn't be friends with that much faster!
The implication here, since the creators had to know security researchers already had the virus code, is that there is some module the researchers don't know about (which is actually highly probable, anyways, given the fact they wouldn't have unrestricted access to the targeted computers) and the creators wanted to eliminated the evidence. Most likely, that was the module that fulfilled Flame's main purpose, since researchers still aren't sure exactly what it does, which means now they might never know. It also helps that the targeted computers are (most likely) not infected anymore, so people can't even identify if they were ever hit.
A secondary implication is that Flame has fulfilled it's purpose. Again, what that is, no one is exactly sure (espionage, certainly, but you don't create something this advanced without some specific target in mind) and wasn't worth maintaining anymore.
Yeah, my answer was a bit snarkish. Best Buy does have a respectable DVD and music collection, if perhaps only because I'm too lazy/too infrequent a shopper to find a better store. I'm also fortunate to have a MicroCenter ~25-30 minutes away, and a Target 3 minutes away for common/cheap things. But I rarely find myself even going there: all my major purchases are online. The only real use is to pick up smaller things, like case fans and the like, or if I ever needed something right away (which hopefully will never happen).
Yea, have him taught by people that know something.
Agreed (love the irony in that sentence, BTW).
Send the kid to school
Wait, I thought you said you wanted him to be taught by people that know something? (*insert rimshot here*)
Answer: any that aren't Best Buy.
The whole article reeks of PR and marketspeak. "Of course we can do better than everyone else", "no way is ARM going to beat us, our single core is better than their dual-core!"
My response to Intel is to put up or shut up. Or be ignored, since I know they won't do the latter (they didn't get to be a 100+ billion dollar company by not marketing the hell out of their product).
That is the argument. My point is that that argument is bullshit. Let me ask you: what is the opposite of "more:" less, or fewer? The answer is "less", and yet "more" can be used for both countable and uncountable quantities. The idea that fewer should apply to countable is an artificial and fairly recent grammatical fiction invented not by natural linguistic development, but by some guy basically just straight-up claiming that is how he thinks it should be done, to wit:
This Word is most commonly used in speaking of a Number; where I should think Fewer would do better. "No Fewer than a Hundred" appears to me, not only more elegant than "No less than a Hundred," but more strictly proper. (Baker 1770)
Notice the usage of "I think." That is where the concept originates: it has no basis in the natural linguistic usage of the words, and therefore either word is acceptable for countable nouns (for uncountable, "less" is obviously, due to common usage, the only acceptable alternative). Furthermore, the exceptions to the rule, such as "less clothes" and the fact that less is, even by the strictest Pilkunnussija (look it up), often used in cases where countable objects are being denoted, means that "less" should be considered a perfectly acceptable term to denote a lesser quantity of countable objects (again, another example: "fewer quantity" is clearly inappropriate, yet "quantity" is indeterminate with respect to continuity or lack thereof. Logically, then, "less" must be applicable to countable objects).
Stylistically, which one to use is up to the writer, but you can use either.
*less.
"Florine", capitalized, is a given name. Fluorine, not normally capitalized except where appropriate, is the element (my spellchecker also suggests "Florine" if I spell it "flourine" instead of "fluorine", which I'm guessing is what happened.)
tl:dr, and totally off topic, The Internet is a bullshit place that deals in half truths
FTFY.
Why do Opera fanboys feel the need to convince everyone that Opera invented the web?
Because they did, more or less. Tabs, mobile browsing, CSS support, built-in adblocking (which no other major browser even has, as far as I know), speed... yeah, Opera pretty much pioneered everything important about modern web browsers, and they deserve a lot of credit for that.
So you'd rather have no options than have the option, but just not buy it? You wouldn't have many of those Humble Bundle games if Steam hadn't enabled them to make tens of thousands of sales before they did the bundle (where they usually make relatively little money, between the fact it is split 5+ ways and the charity donations and the hosting costs). Some of those games wouldn't even exist, had it not been for Steam allowing them easy distribution and a massive audience.
A priceless relic collides with a heavily used piece of transportation infrastructure?
Thank God the relic wasn't damaged, and the Shuttle should be pretty easy to fix.
I wish Valve would issue an IPO so that I could invest.
No, you don't, because then Valve would be forced to answer to investors, which means a focus on quarterly-earnings, which means rushed games and restrictive DRM and bullshit like that. Look at what happened to Ubisoft, EA, and Activision-Blizzard. Valve manages to be better than most of the other publishers in large part because they are a privately owned company who can afford to mess around if they want (and because of their unique management structure, i.e. they don't have one). Also means their employees are extremely well paid, which pays off in the long run with talented employees sticking around.
Yes. Steam already has the market.
I hope not. I'm hoping Linux users are more anti-DRM than that, and that Steam crashes and burns.
So, what, indie developers can go back to being forced to add far, far worse DRM onto their games and sign deals with Ubisoft/EA/Activision to get their games published at all, and have zero games on Linux at all? Because that is the alternative to Steam, you know. You may not have thought this through.
I know a lot of not-terribly computer savvy people who avoided Vista and stuck with XP because of the bad press it got, so yes, people can and will avoid the current version of Windows if it gets bad press (from the nerds). As far as switching to Linux go: again, I know a lot of less-than-nerdy types who have strongly considered and/or used Linux (generally Ubuntu). Linux really has progressed a great deal in public image. No where near Windows-level of adaptation, yet, but it is progressing, which is all you can really ask for.
Just because you never learned how to feel doesn't mean it's "normal" to be a sociopath.
I suppose anyone who wears leather is also a sociopath? Or eats a cow? It's a little unusual to use a skin in this manner, but hardly "sociopathic". I actually found it really funny to see a flying cat. Sure, it's dead, but it's not like he mounted the head on a bloody spike or something.
That's not really what this statistic is saying. It is using a "tipping" model, where it assumes anyone who has more than 50% of his friends exhibiting the behavior will automatically adopt it. A useful model, but not actually true (like nearly all mathematical models, it is only approximately true in the real world). That means they only have to find a "seed" population to adopt the trend: the model says if all of them adopt it, everyone on the network will. Think of it less like sheep and more like dominoes: you only need to trigger one dominoe to trigger the rest, but that presumes a carefully constructed ideal system. In reality, 99% of people may be sheep, but this study says absolutely nothing about that. It assumes it, rather than proving it.