This is a legal issue, not an ethical one. Under current American law, it's legal. Where I live, filming someone without consent gives them an implicit copyright over the footage. This is a grey area where freedom and privacy clash, and I'm not sure which one I prefer in this case. This guy is not a freedom fighter, he is a massive jerk.
I don't think he means more professional programmers, but more people who understand programming. Just like it's great that every person nowadays learns to read. They don't all become linguists, but having that skill is an advantage regardless. I just don't think that people have a chance to understand programming without understanding the mindset of math first, so in my opinion if you want to teach people to code you should first teach them logical thinking. But while all people could benefit from learning it, not all of them are committed enough to jump through all the barriers at the beginning. I know many who were, but even for them simple friendly advice where to start could have saved months of torture. And I know many who weren't interested until someone showed them Javascript or a Python interpreter. Having to learn how to use a complicated IDE and toolchain just to write "hello world!" is an overkill. In fact, I've met people who learned programming at university, and were totally lost without their IDE. Seems to me like knowing how to write code with just a text editor and compiler is a skill in itself, and too much reliance on the tools can just as well make you a bad programmer.
They didn't identify 80% of the users, they managed to make a guess in 80% of the cases, which they didn't even bother to try to verify. There's no proof that their technique actually works.
This is an interesting story, thanks for sharing it. But I find it hard to accept that C is the only possible way. While it's that modern hardware has its limitations, but is it really C that was designed to be close to hardware, or did modern architectures evolve to be close to C? And why is getting close to the metal an advantage in itself? Speed is an advantage, but the two aren't necessarily related. Wanting something to stay close to hardware yet at the same time be crossplatform is a contradiction. A crossplatform language should be able to abstract away the hardware underneath. Anyway, there still are many choices you can make. Typed or untyped? How to structure it? And the preprocessor can be anything.
For instance, I wanted to use multiple stacks: a separate stack for the call stack and another one for parameters / local vars / etc -- In fact I wanted to extend that to support co-routines at the lowest levels possible, all while eliminating stack smashing as a direct exploit vector -- Ah, but because of the way Virtual Memory Addressing works, and because there are dedicated operations for doing single stack per thread function calling, there's a huge performance hit to doing things in other ways down at the low level (I figured out a few tricks, but it's still slower than C functions).
Forth does use two stacks, although I don't think it's flexible enough for coroutines.
Indeed, when I take a look at GoLang disassembled I see all the same familiar C idioms
Maybe it's implemented in C?
My problem with C is not the syntax, in fact I think that C got this far because of its nice syntax. One problem is its bad modularity: that I need a makefile or an IDE just to compile a project consiting of multiple files, that I need to use macros just so a file doesn't get imported twice. When most programming you do is gluing libraries together, modularity becomes important. But the really big problem is that C provides absolutely no way to organize code. I'm not saying it should be namespaces, classes or nested functions, just that without at least one of them any bigger C project is unmanageable. The C preprocessor is also weak for all the roles it's supposed to fill.
Not really. While I agree that C is a bad language, it has no competition in low-level coding. With embedded systems gaining ground, more and more people will start to use it. Although C++ could take its role and it even fixes many of its shortcomings (e.g. namespaces), it's very easy to misuse, so most project leaders don't trust their collegues with it. What would people switch to? Forth, Pascal?
For many of us, math is easier to read than human language. Language is inherently inaccurate, and terrible at describing complex algorithms. The problem with syntax isn't that it doesn't look like human language, otherwise everybody would be using Smalltalk. But when a piece of code can be written in too many ways (and there isn't a simple "obvious" way to guide programmers), it becomes hard to understand code written by someone who thinks differently. One solutions to this is to limit the language to a single style like Java does, which forces all programmers to write similar code, making it easy to understand what others have written. Now of course there are people who can write ugly code in any language, and there's no way to eliminate that, but most coders are lazy, and if a language makes it easy to write nice code and hard to write ugly code, they will choose the former. The tradeoff is that these languages are more rigid and less costumizable.
I don't really see the point of astronauts visiting a rock that's smaller than they are. This is a waste of resources, there are plenty of small asteroids that come to Earth by themselves, why not study them?
The two options aren't unquestioning acceptance and total ban. GMO with strict regulations can be useful. Without it, it's a disaster waiting to happen. He is just a professional activist who can't accept that the world isn't black and white.
now if software is some part of an actual physical product (ie something that would go THUD is dropped) and is an intergral part of said physical product then you can have a patent on the entire setup.
I never understood this argument. If the software is purpose-built for your hardware, then there's no use in copying it without said hardware. Here in Europe a similar precedent gets misused to push all kinds of software patents. Getting a patent on the hardware part only should be enough.
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His only crime is making bomb threats from hacked machines. The police is stupid to participate in his game, they get what they deserve.
A set of concentric circles used for sports shooting purposes. Should be relatively easy to recognise for a software.
Is to disable them unless they are aimed at a target. But that wouldn't work for hunters, and a motivated owner would likely be able to get around it.
This is a legal issue, not an ethical one. Under current American law, it's legal. Where I live, filming someone without consent gives them an implicit copyright over the footage. This is a grey area where freedom and privacy clash, and I'm not sure which one I prefer in this case. This guy is not a freedom fighter, he is a massive jerk.
Or it would be a known species we haven't sequenced yet.
Have we sequenced the DNA of every known species or what?
Attribution does not help, period. Most attacks happen from hacked bots anyway.
I don't think he means more professional programmers, but more people who understand programming. Just like it's great that every person nowadays learns to read. They don't all become linguists, but having that skill is an advantage regardless. I just don't think that people have a chance to understand programming without understanding the mindset of math first, so in my opinion if you want to teach people to code you should first teach them logical thinking.
But while all people could benefit from learning it, not all of them are committed enough to jump through all the barriers at the beginning. I know many who were, but even for them simple friendly advice where to start could have saved months of torture. And I know many who weren't interested until someone showed them Javascript or a Python interpreter. Having to learn how to use a complicated IDE and toolchain just to write "hello world!" is an overkill. In fact, I've met people who learned programming at university, and were totally lost without their IDE. Seems to me like knowing how to write code with just a text editor and compiler is a skill in itself, and too much reliance on the tools can just as well make you a bad programmer.
They didn't identify 80% of the users, they managed to make a guess in 80% of the cases, which they didn't even bother to try to verify. There's no proof that their technique actually works.
I agree, Kuhn's theory has become dated. I suggest we all shift to a new...oh, wait.
This is an interesting story, thanks for sharing it. But I find it hard to accept that C is the only possible way. While it's that modern hardware has its limitations, but is it really C that was designed to be close to hardware, or did modern architectures evolve to be close to C?
And why is getting close to the metal an advantage in itself? Speed is an advantage, but the two aren't necessarily related. Wanting something to stay close to hardware yet at the same time be crossplatform is a contradiction. A crossplatform language should be able to abstract away the hardware underneath.
Anyway, there still are many choices you can make. Typed or untyped? How to structure it? And the preprocessor can be anything.
For instance, I wanted to use multiple stacks: a separate stack for the call stack and another one for parameters / local vars / etc -- In fact I wanted to extend that to support co-routines at the lowest levels possible, all while eliminating stack smashing as a direct exploit vector -- Ah, but because of the way Virtual Memory Addressing works, and because there are dedicated operations for doing single stack per thread function calling, there's a huge performance hit to doing things in other ways down at the low level (I figured out a few tricks, but it's still slower than C functions).
Forth does use two stacks, although I don't think it's flexible enough for coroutines.
Indeed, when I take a look at GoLang disassembled I see all the same familiar C idioms
Maybe it's implemented in C?
My problem with C is not the syntax, in fact I think that C got this far because of its nice syntax. One problem is its bad modularity: that I need a makefile or an IDE just to compile a project consiting of multiple files, that I need to use macros just so a file doesn't get imported twice. When most programming you do is gluing libraries together, modularity becomes important. But the really big problem is that C provides absolutely no way to organize code. I'm not saying it should be namespaces, classes or nested functions, just that without at least one of them any bigger C project is unmanageable. The C preprocessor is also weak for all the roles it's supposed to fill.
Once corporate people discover encryption, we will be doomed.
Not really. While I agree that C is a bad language, it has no competition in low-level coding. With embedded systems gaining ground, more and more people will start to use it. Although C++ could take its role and it even fixes many of its shortcomings (e.g. namespaces), it's very easy to misuse, so most project leaders don't trust their collegues with it. What would people switch to? Forth, Pascal?
You might want to read that sentence again. The part you quote is about Perl, not Javascript.
For many of us, math is easier to read than human language. Language is inherently inaccurate, and terrible at describing complex algorithms. The problem with syntax isn't that it doesn't look like human language, otherwise everybody would be using Smalltalk. But when a piece of code can be written in too many ways (and there isn't a simple "obvious" way to guide programmers), it becomes hard to understand code written by someone who thinks differently. One solutions to this is to limit the language to a single style like Java does, which forces all programmers to write similar code, making it easy to understand what others have written. Now of course there are people who can write ugly code in any language, and there's no way to eliminate that, but most coders are lazy, and if a language makes it easy to write nice code and hard to write ugly code, they will choose the former. The tradeoff is that these languages are more rigid and less costumizable.
Somehow I don't think it will be of professional quality.
I'm pretty sure some guy have already failed to start a drone delivery business.
So what, he uses spellchecking. The actual content is still complete lunacy.
Which is why I block popups and flash. But that's not a reason to also block still images.
I don't really see the point of astronauts visiting a rock that's smaller than they are. This is a waste of resources, there are plenty of small asteroids that come to Earth by themselves, why not study them?
The two options aren't unquestioning acceptance and total ban. GMO with strict regulations can be useful. Without it, it's a disaster waiting to happen. He is just a professional activist who can't accept that the world isn't black and white.
So how do you use an emulated chainsaw for logging?
now if software is some part of an actual physical product (ie something that would go THUD is dropped) and is an intergral part of said physical product then you can have a patent on the entire setup.
I never understood this argument. If the software is purpose-built for your hardware, then there's no use in copying it without said hardware. Here in Europe a similar precedent gets misused to push all kinds of software patents. Getting a patent on the hardware part only should be enough.
Right now, implementations of patented algorithms also get copyright, patents don't help against copyright at all.
When Mars still had its atmosphere, it was mostly CO2, so the greenhouse effect could keep it warm enough for liquid water.