Not a father, voluntarily consuming o nicotine, alcohol. It's realy hard to understand what you mean by that. Would you elaborate?
I know, it's hard to believe, if you don't already accept this, but addicts don't consume the substances they are addicted to voluntarily. That's the nature of addiction.
And, I think you might have trouble parsing English: sober addict means a person dependant on a substance that consciously, actively doesn't use. So "addicted to alcohol (sober), GABA (sober)" means that I consume neither alcohol, nor GABA agonists, voluntarily or not.
As for the rest of your message: why are you so full of anger and hate? Does this topic trouble you so much?
It's very difficult to understand the nature of addiction even if you are addicted.
With nicotine it's the curiosity, stupidity or thousand different things that make people start smoking. First couple of cigarettes actually give you high by stimulating acetylcholine receptors. Then dependency gradually develops and it's too late to make conscious choice to quit smoking.
This vaccine doesn't modify behaviour. If given before the first contact with nicotine it will cause the "nicotine high" to never apear and consequently will prevent the dependency from developing.
Remember, it's much easier, and cheaper to prevent the addiction from developing, that to cure it afterwards. And time and again it's been proven, that PR campaigns like "just say no" simply don't work. Our kids will try cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, no matter how hard we try. What better gift to give them, than the real freedom of choice, by making sure that they will never get hooked up?
Robert
(father, addicted from nicotine (active), alcohol (sober), GABA agonists (sober))
Seriously, what's wrong with this attitude? Isn't this exactly what security personel should be doing at the airport, profiling passengers based on their overall behaviour (including facial clues)? Instead of checking my shoes, electrocuting helpless foreigners and matching the phonetic value of my name to the list compiled by bulying and torturing people being suspected of having a connection with someone suspected (but never proven) of being terrorist?
Wow, it's almost like it was for a decade on GSM networks all over the world?!? Except that no one needs acceptance tests from local operator, if their device complies with GSM standards.
That's what I call progress, ten years in the making.
It's not a pretty solution, nor quick, but it will work.
Below, you can find the series of character pairs: first latin character, and than Polish diacritical character based on it (e.g. a-with-tail, c-acute, e-with-tail etc).
a - c - e - l - n - o - ó s - z - z -
All those characters have been given as html entity of the form � Of them only the counterpart of "o" apears in Latin1 table, and consequently is the only one displayed. The rest of the characters disapears from the HTML source.
So, once again: no matter what your input method, if the character is latin1 plus arbitrary set of other characters, it is displayed by slashcode, otherwise, it gets filtered out from the source. Particularly, Latin2 cannot be displayed, and I suppose the same goes for Cyryllic.
Watching as US Copyright goes south is particularly painful for someone who grew in a communist country. I was old enough before '89 to take part in political discourse, which often took form of political jokes. It was a kind of very bitter humor, uninteligible for someone who didn't breathe this air of suspicion and fear. So this is a kind of nasty flashback for me, as it reminds me the joke/saying from those times: there is a law on everybody*. As soon as you stick your head too high, to far, put your nose where it doesn't belong, someone will find a law that will punish you severly. It's kind of bitter irony, that it is US, the mythical Land of the Free of my youth.
Robert
* pl. na kazdego jest paragraf
PS The nineties called and they want their "iso-8859-1 hardcoded webpages" back. Need I wait for "Web 5.0" to be able to use non-latin1 characters in/. comments?
Re:Ruby could be the answer as well
on
Open Source Math
·
· Score: 1
I don't suppose Ruby has something comparable to SciPy and IPython?
I don't suppose Python has something comparable to Fortran libraries for mathematics, physics, astrophysics and many other science stuff? I don't really suppose there's any programming language that can compare with Fortran when it comes to the number of scientific packages. Yet, it doesn't seem to stop you from using Python.
Go figure.
Robert
Re:Ruby could be the answer as well
on
Open Source Math
·
· Score: 1
I'd truly like to know what kind of "high volume systems" your ruby programs handle.
gsm-to-pstn SMS gateway in 38mln country. Full traffic, all networks, there and back again.
Robert
Ruby could be the answer as well
on
Open Source Math
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Python seems to deftly marry precision with looseness. When code is laid out in Python I find it is easier to see what it's trying to do than other languages. It's aesthetic qualities aside, it supports a number of features out of the box which I imagine would be ideal of mathematicians. To list a few, it's treating of lists and tuples as first class objects, support for large integers, complex numbers, it's ability to integrate with C for high-performance work.
I often think of Python as "basic done right" and it's ideal for mathematicians (or anybody) who don't want to think about programming but the problem at hand.
I could also recommend Ruby for the job. It has all the features you recommend, and more. If you could forget for a moment about the monstrosity that is Rails (I don't know, lobotomy might do the trick), the language in itself is quite beautiful.
There is one special feature of Ruby, that I miss in every single programming language I used since: iterator methods. Any time I want to iterate over elements of an array or hash I just do:
myhash.each_pair do |key,val|
puts "#{key}: #{val}" end
That's it, instant "anonymous function" given as a parameter in estetically pleasing syntax. In fact, "for" loop in Ruby is just obfuscated way of calling method #each on an object. But the madness doesn't stop here:
File::open("somefile.txt") do |fh|
fh.each do |line|
puts line
end end
It's a pity that so many people disregard Ruby as a "platform for Rails". It is a feature complete countepart to Python, and as my company high volume systems can attest, can handle anything other languages can handle.
Yeah, look how well this closed source secure environment played for Apple's latest gadget. Or Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo consoles. It was supposed to be impossible to install and run unauthorised software.
The point I was trying to make with my implementation of SMTP server is that the state of the art is a careful ballance between usability and security. My example was 100% secure and 0% usable. Qmail at its inception was maybe 50% usable, but on today Internet it's 0%[1] usable, while still very secure.
There is no point in running an email server if the only way to do so is to necessarily expose yourself to vulnerability.
Let me counter you on this: there's no point in running an email server if it cannot serve mail.
Robert
[1] smtpd w/o ssl/tls and client auth is useless today, no buts and ifs, period. qmail also misses some other features, but it's been too long since my sysadmin days, to remember all of them; as for external patches doing just that, they're not part of qmail, so for the sake of this discussion they don't exist;
int main(int argc, char *argv[]) {
printf("Hello World!"); }
That's the most secure SMTP server ever, I just had to remove some parts, that potentially could make it insecure.
Robert
PS Reductio ad Absurdum is a valid tool. It just lets you see if your thesis takes all the borderline cases into account. In this case I am just trying to tell you, that the (lost) functionality cannot be the cost of security.
[2] qmail will never deliver mail to secondary MX; or tertiary etc; If primary MX for the address is dead, then you're screwed;
Which really breaks an antispam trick that many servers use, putting fake MX records in your DNS after and before your real MX.
Not only that. All the secondary MX-es are also called a backup MX-es, because that's what they are. I once had my private server die on me. It was located 250km away from me, so it took some week or so to replace the broken parts. Almost all the messages adressed to the domain on this server waited on backup MX (we inreased the time limit on retries). Except for the messages from the domains served by qmail, which managed to expire at the sender side.
Not at all. DJB just carefully picks where to be ueberstrict, just to make fun of the others[1], and where to completely ignore useful function, just because he had a dream that it's bad[2].
Robert
[1] like rejecting SMTP transactions which use LF for line termination (RFC states it must be CR/LF), but most smtp servers of the time accepted either, while some "challenged" servers sent mail with LF only;
[2] qmail will never deliver mail to secondary MX; or tertiary etc; If primary MX for the address is dead, then you're screwed;
The programming model used by DJB is more or less:
Implement only a subset of protocols, ignore the parts that you don't like, or might be insecure or are too boring to implement. Bonus points if you ignore actual features depended on by the users. Double bonus, if you manage to make it non interoperable by nazi-strict implementation of protocol, ignoring the rule,,be strict as possible when sending, and liberal as possible when receiving''. If you can destroy other systems functionality especially designed for email (like multiple mx-es?), huuuge karma boost.
Then refuse to implement needed features, pointing to third parties and their patches, and offer a prize for successful hack of your software. And ignore the insecurity of the patches. They're third party, after all.
Robert
PS I was so glad when some mature alternatives to sendmail and qmail apeared...
Yes, I realize that's a legit medical concern, but maybe we could work on other things besides another depression pill, or another drug for impotence, or another of whatever cash crop drug is currently popular with the medical industry.
As a person suffering from Bipolar Disorder, I'd like to ask you to refrain from enumerating antidepressants in single sentence with v14gr4 etc. For me (as a supplement to Lithium) antidepressants are lifesavers. And there are still no perfect AD drugs, I have to occasionally switch to another AD, because I get depression or strong mixed state, which several times ended in suicide attempts.
Which proves empirically: antidepressants are no life style drugs, they literally save lifes. I suppose millions of lives around the world.
Robert
Re:Really worried about losing his stranglehold
on
NBC Chief Slamming Apple
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
While the bar for TV shows is a bit higher, its certainly not out of reach.
It's already happening: Sanctuary, starring and produced by Amanda Tapping.
Same CPU, not a faster one, so the post is flawed.
Not acording to all reports I've read all over the web since yesterday. ArsTechnica says it's the same procesor, only clocked 80MHz faster, at 400MHz. For last couple of years I've learned to trust ArsTechnica over any random slashdotter when it comes to verifying their sources.
There's an excelent GPL program for Palm OS: Palm Fiction. It doesn't need any conversion programs, it can read plain.txt,.html,.rtf files, also in.zip or.gz compression, straight from the memory card. I used it on m500, Tungsten T3, TX and now on Treo 650 and I'm glad I've found it. The UI is so much configurable, I sometimes consider it a drawback.
The only thing Palm Fiction lacks IMO is webpage and documentation in English;)
Of course it doesn't read any proprietary, encrypted formats, but since I've got Baen free and commercial offerings, as well as MLDonkey I can't complain. I just feel sorry for the publishers that don't want to take my money and thank the authors for their hard work in such cases.
You missed the point. E-paper as the name implies isn't a replacement for computer screens. It's a replacement for a printed paper as in newspapers and books. Most of the people still get their knowledge from dead trees and e-paper for them is more or less just like paper, only better, since you can "print" on it many times.
I am an avid ebook reader using Palms for the purpose for years, but as soon as I can get an e-paper reader without stupid limitations at a reasonable price (which for me is anything south of 250eur), I'll go that route. I mean, that would be the best of both world: paper book with the ability to (non-destructivelly) bookmark, annotate, search, copy text at will.
Is Brazil trying to frighten away foreign investment?
Of course they're trying to frighten away this special kind of foreign investment that tries to exploit the country w/o paying any taxes or playing by the rules.
Next time you gonna have problems with countries trying to frighten away cocaine/heroine foreign investment?
Ah, I was eagerly waiting for the merger of those two technologies under the name HSDUPA, and the bastards decided to go with the shorter name HSPA. They've lost such a chance of the century on the name of technology that actually sounds like what it does;)
"I can't answer any of your questions due to pending litigation and NDAs, but keep the faith, Amiga is and will be the best platform, ever. Oh, and 20yrs old sources to historic versions of AmigaOS is our core intelectual property asset, so the release of them is never going to happen."
The experience of getting online in North America and Europe is years behind the internet connectivity options in Japan
How many mistakes can one make in single sentence?;)
First, Europe is years behind Japan and South Korea -- those pesky Asians go head to head in wiring their countries. Europe, even Western isn't uniformly connected, there are years worth of difference between the countries. North America isn't uniform either: Cannada is basically on pair with Western Europe, while US fell years behind even some Eastern European countries.
I mean, I live in Warsaw/Poland, far from the city centre and I have a choice of two physical cable operators, and two physical DSL operators. On top of that, one of the DSL operators (TPSA) is a monopolist (dominant operator in today lingo) wich by law has to sell BSA and WLR to dozen or so virtual DSL operators which compete with each other and with TPSA. I don't think you can get this kind of choice even in NY, which is a part of megalopolis with the biggest population on Earth and one of the biggest population densities in the world.
Wroclaw (Breslau for those teutonically inclined) is a much smaller city, yet it had fiber laid in sewers couple of years ago, reaching all parts of the city with speeds up to 100Mbps.
And don't even get me started on municipal and private wifi networks in rural areas... They just work, selling not only IP, but also phone services based on VoIP.
Both the movies mentioned are long available as torrents all over the web. And HDCP protecting the transfer between various HD STB and HD TVs was broken before it was even finalized and small boxes decrypting HDMI signal on the fly are available in various shady places.
Meanwhile a paying customer cannot play the crappy, overpriced movies on his overpriced video player. And my national HD Sat operator's STBs still cannot authenticate via HDMI with my LG LCD. Which is not good, since HDMI/HDCP is a requirement for their VOD HD content...
Screw'em, gotta go and see what's new on trakcers...
Slashdot Mirror
I know, it's hard to believe, if you don't already accept this, but addicts don't consume the substances they are addicted to voluntarily. That's the nature of addiction.
And, I think you might have trouble parsing English: sober addict means a person dependant on a substance that consciously, actively doesn't use. So "addicted to alcohol (sober), GABA (sober)" means that I consume neither alcohol, nor GABA agonists, voluntarily or not.
As for the rest of your message: why are you so full of anger and hate? Does this topic trouble you so much?
Robert
It's very difficult to understand the nature of addiction even if you are addicted.
With nicotine it's the curiosity, stupidity or thousand different things that make people start smoking. First couple of cigarettes actually give you high by stimulating acetylcholine receptors. Then dependency gradually develops and it's too late to make conscious choice to quit smoking.
This vaccine doesn't modify behaviour. If given before the first contact with nicotine it will cause the "nicotine high" to never apear and consequently will prevent the dependency from developing.
Remember, it's much easier, and cheaper to prevent the addiction from developing, that to cure it afterwards. And time and again it's been proven, that PR campaigns like "just say no" simply don't work. Our kids will try cigarettes, alcohol, drugs, no matter how hard we try. What better gift to give them, than the real freedom of choice, by making sure that they will never get hooked up?
Robert
(father, addicted from nicotine (active), alcohol (sober), GABA agonists (sober))
Seriously, what's wrong with this attitude? Isn't this exactly what security personel should be doing at the airport, profiling passengers based on their overall behaviour (including facial clues)? Instead of checking my shoes, electrocuting helpless foreigners and matching the phonetic value of my name to the list compiled by bulying and torturing people being suspected of having a connection with someone suspected (but never proven) of being terrorist?
Robert
Wow, it's almost like it was for a decade on GSM networks all over the world?!? Except that no one needs acceptance tests from local operator, if their device complies with GSM standards.
That's what I call progress, ten years in the making.
Robert
a -
c -
e -
l -
n -
o - ó
s -
z -
z -
All those characters have been given as html entity of the form � Of them only the counterpart of "o" apears in Latin1 table, and consequently is the only one displayed. The rest of the characters disapears from the HTML source.
So, once again: no matter what your input method, if the character is latin1 plus arbitrary set of other characters, it is displayed by slashcode, otherwise, it gets filtered out from the source. Particularly, Latin2 cannot be displayed, and I suppose the same goes for Cyryllic.
Robert
Watching as US Copyright goes south is particularly painful for someone who grew in a communist country. I was old enough before '89 to take part in political discourse, which often took form of political jokes. It was a kind of very bitter humor, uninteligible for someone who didn't breathe this air of suspicion and fear. So this is a kind of nasty flashback for me, as it reminds me the joke/saying from those times: there is a law on everybody*. As soon as you stick your head too high, to far, put your nose where it doesn't belong, someone will find a law that will punish you severly. It's kind of bitter irony, that it is US, the mythical Land of the Free of my youth.
/. comments?
Robert
* pl. na kazdego jest paragraf
PS The nineties called and they want their "iso-8859-1 hardcoded webpages" back. Need I wait for "Web 5.0" to be able to use non-latin1 characters in
Go figure.
Robert
Robert
There is one special feature of Ruby, that I miss in every single programming language I used since: iterator methods. Any time I want to iterate over elements of an array or hash I just do: That's it, instant "anonymous function" given as a parameter in estetically pleasing syntax. In fact, "for" loop in Ruby is just obfuscated way of calling method #each on an object. But the madness doesn't stop here: It's a pity that so many people disregard Ruby as a "platform for Rails". It is a feature complete countepart to Python, and as my company high volume systems can attest, can handle anything other languages can handle.
Robert
Yeah, look how well this closed source secure environment played for Apple's latest gadget. Or Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo consoles. It was supposed to be impossible to install and run unauthorised software.
Robert
The point I was trying to make with my implementation of SMTP server is that the state of the art is a careful ballance between usability and security. My example was 100% secure and 0% usable. Qmail at its inception was maybe 50% usable, but on today Internet it's 0%[1] usable, while still very secure.Let me counter you on this: there's no point in running an email server if it cannot serve mail.
Robert
[1] smtpd w/o ssl/tls and client auth is useless today, no buts and ifs, period. qmail also misses some other features, but it's been too long since my sysadmin days, to remember all of them; as for external patches doing just that, they're not part of qmail, so for the sake of this discussion they don't exist;
Robert
PS Reductio ad Absurdum is a valid tool. It just lets you see if your thesis takes all the borderline cases into account. In this case I am just trying to tell you, that the (lost) functionality cannot be the cost of security.
Which really breaks an antispam trick that many servers use, putting fake MX records in your DNS after and before your real MX.
Not only that. All the secondary MX-es are also called a backup MX-es, because that's what they are. I once had my private server die on me. It was located 250km away from me, so it took some week or so to replace the broken parts. Almost all the messages adressed to the domain on this server waited on backup MX (we inreased the time limit on retries). Except for the messages from the domains served by qmail, which managed to expire at the sender side.Robert
Robert
[1] like rejecting SMTP transactions which use LF for line termination (RFC states it must be CR/LF), but most smtp servers of the time accepted either, while some "challenged" servers sent mail with LF only;
[2] qmail will never deliver mail to secondary MX; or tertiary etc; If primary MX for the address is dead, then you're screwed;
The programming model used by DJB is more or less:
,,be strict as possible when sending, and liberal as possible when receiving''. If you can destroy other systems functionality especially designed for email (like multiple mx-es?), huuuge karma boost.
Implement only a subset of protocols, ignore the parts that you don't like, or might be insecure or are too boring to implement. Bonus points if you ignore actual features depended on by the users. Double bonus, if you manage to make it non interoperable by nazi-strict implementation of protocol, ignoring the rule
Then refuse to implement needed features, pointing to third parties and their patches, and offer a prize for successful hack of your software. And ignore the insecurity of the patches. They're third party, after all.
Robert
PS I was so glad when some mature alternatives to sendmail and qmail apeared...
Which proves empirically: antidepressants are no life style drugs, they literally save lifes. I suppose millions of lives around the world.
Robert
Robert
Not acording to all reports I've read all over the web since yesterday. ArsTechnica says it's the same procesor, only clocked 80MHz faster, at 400MHz. For last couple of years I've learned to trust ArsTechnica over any random slashdotter when it comes to verifying their sources.
Robert
There's an excelent GPL program for Palm OS: Palm Fiction. It doesn't need any conversion programs, it can read plain .txt, .html, .rtf files, also in .zip or .gz compression, straight from the memory card. I used it on m500, Tungsten T3, TX and now on Treo 650 and I'm glad I've found it. The UI is so much configurable, I sometimes consider it a drawback.
;)
The only thing Palm Fiction lacks IMO is webpage and documentation in English
Of course it doesn't read any proprietary, encrypted formats, but since I've got Baen free and commercial offerings, as well as MLDonkey I can't complain. I just feel sorry for the publishers that don't want to take my money and thank the authors for their hard work in such cases.
Robert
You missed the point. E-paper as the name implies isn't a replacement for computer screens. It's a replacement for a printed paper as in newspapers and books. Most of the people still get their knowledge from dead trees and e-paper for them is more or less just like paper, only better, since you can "print" on it many times.
I am an avid ebook reader using Palms for the purpose for years, but as soon as I can get an e-paper reader without stupid limitations at a reasonable price (which for me is anything south of 250eur), I'll go that route. I mean, that would be the best of both world: paper book with the ability to (non-destructivelly) bookmark, annotate, search, copy text at will.
Robert
Of course they're trying to frighten away this special kind of foreign investment that tries to exploit the country w/o paying any taxes or playing by the rules.
Next time you gonna have problems with countries trying to frighten away cocaine/heroine foreign investment?
Robert
Ah, I was eagerly waiting for the merger of those two technologies under the name HSDUPA, and the bastards decided to go with the shorter name HSPA. They've lost such a chance of the century on the name of technology that actually sounds like what it does
Robert
"I can't answer any of your questions due to pending litigation and NDAs, but keep the faith, Amiga is and will be the best platform, ever. Oh, and 20yrs old sources to historic versions of AmigaOS is our core intelectual property asset, so the release of them is never going to happen."
Robert
How many mistakes can one make in single sentence?
First, Europe is years behind Japan and South Korea -- those pesky Asians go head to head in wiring their countries. Europe, even Western isn't uniformly connected, there are years worth of difference between the countries. North America isn't uniform either: Cannada is basically on pair with Western Europe, while US fell years behind even some Eastern European countries.
I mean, I live in Warsaw/Poland, far from the city centre and I have a choice of two physical cable operators, and two physical DSL operators. On top of that, one of the DSL operators (TPSA) is a monopolist (dominant operator in today lingo) wich by law has to sell BSA and WLR to dozen or so virtual DSL operators which compete with each other and with TPSA. I don't think you can get this kind of choice even in NY, which is a part of megalopolis with the biggest population on Earth and one of the biggest population densities in the world.
Wroclaw (Breslau for those teutonically inclined) is a much smaller city, yet it had fiber laid in sewers couple of years ago, reaching all parts of the city with speeds up to 100Mbps.
And don't even get me started on municipal and private wifi networks in rural areas... They just work, selling not only IP, but also phone services based on VoIP.
Robert
Both the movies mentioned are long available as torrents all over the web. And HDCP protecting the transfer between various HD STB and HD TVs was broken before it was even finalized and small boxes decrypting HDMI signal on the fly are available in various shady places.
Meanwhile a paying customer cannot play the crappy, overpriced movies on his overpriced video player. And my national HD Sat operator's STBs still cannot authenticate via HDMI with my LG LCD. Which is not good, since HDMI/HDCP is a requirement for their VOD HD content...
Screw'em, gotta go and see what's new on trakcers...
Robert