Besides we didn't even get ridden of the old useless ones yet... (e.g. the fifth toe) Ah, that's an important fallacy about evolution. Why would we get rid of "useless" features like the 5th toe? It doesn't cost us anything to keep it (unless you account for some women's shoe fashions over the decades...).
Something that's not selected against or selected for will just get carried along (or not) by the more important mutations.
If some other mutation that actually helps us has the side-effect of fusing in the 5th toe, then it'll happen -- but if not, it's probably not going anywhere for a long time. Hell, we might even get 6 toes to a foot (even if the new toe were also superfluous!), if that change was a side-effect of an important mutation... and genetics are complicated enough that this particular genetic mutation could be a tweak that conveys certain disease resistance, or a special brain change.. that just happens to *also* affect foot development.
You could make it simpler, though -- give him a few scripts to run on each computer in his network, entitled "defect_patch_432553.sh"....then really have fun.
"You may get a few warnings, and you'll need to enter your password to authorize the changes -- yes, that's pretty normal when you're applying a custom patch like this, since it needs to make some changes to the underlying operating system, which is protected. Ah, it's all done now? Excellent."
I guess MS should have checked every IPv6 site out there and ensured they worked fine, and if they found any that didn't (like facebook, because they are too incompetent to setup IPv6 correctly for their site) then IPv6 should again default to not enabled. What about the concept of failover back to IPv4 if IPv6 doesn't come up with a functioning address?
Huh.. I'm putting more time into this than I intended, but I can at least steal some of this for an essay or something down the line!
I vowed not to continue in a discussion where I am presumed to be taking a moral stance against something that, in fact, I see as completely exclusive to "morality" from my POV at least.
To sum up your argument: 1) homosexuality is a defect evolutionary-wise 2) because it involves using reproductive organs for non-reproductive purposes, hence 3) it isn't natural or normal, and hence 4) your repulsion for it is probably an evolved instinct
To sum up mine: 1) Either a mutation stops you from reproducing (and the tweaked genes don't survive) or it helps you somehow (and the tweak spreads widely). Either way, homosexual behavior has varying levels of popularity in varying animals species, humans among them, so to the extent that it's genetic, it's not wiping itself out. And you gotta ask why, right? This is science. 2) Organs don't have a purpose. They weren't designed. They *do* serve functions, and their evolution is shaped by how well they serve those functions, but they can all serve multiple functions, and can take on new functions, or drop old functions completely. 3) "Natural" doesn't mean much now that we know humans are part of the natural world, not sitting on top of it. But "normal" just depends on commonality -- homosexual behavior is very normal for some species, less for others, non-existent for some. For humans it's somewhere in the middle. Much more common than 6th fingers, but less so than non-black hair. 4) If your repulsion were instinctive, then we'd likely all have it. Since we can point to cultures where homosexual pairings are common and accepted, that seems very unlikely.
See other response for good examples of how disgust for gay sex is not at all universal (and what about its commonplace nature in ancient Greek culture? That's pretty generally known, I thought).
You (and the other guy) should delve further into the matter. Romans and Greeks had an interesting sexual culture indeed, but if you read up you will find that the case was generally of men using younger boys for pleasure, with the added benefit of [...]
Just to snip there -- the role of it in the culture is a separate discussion. The point is that it was commonplace, and there were well-respected members of society doing it non-secretly, hence it was clearly not generally considered disgusting. Another pointer towards non-disgust: all of the art depicting it. This discussion is about whether your disgust is a simple instinctive behavior (like spitting out something very bitter) or a learned reaction.
As for me wanting to throw up when I see two men kissing even though I respect their right to do so, I doubt that is a Freudian thing.
I was talking about how fascinated (not disgusted) toddlers are with feces, urine, genitalia, etc.. Hence the idea that we have to learn disgust especially for something as subtle as two men kissing.
It makes sense from an evolutionary point of view that I despise feminine behaviour in another male (to see him being dominated sexually) because of my empathic instincts and egoist ones. Also, it makes sense that society despises the behavior IF that behavior leads to less/no reproduction.
Sanity check: does society, in fact, despise all behavior that leads to less reproduction? Education, for example. Or condom use. You need to re-evaluate your assumptions if they point to "facts" that don't turn up.
Survival is ultimately dependent on intercourse between man and woman. Reproduction is the key to (or at least the basis for) everything.
Reproducing is not the hard part of survival. Mutations like walking upright (that made childbirth so painful for us!) trumps reproduction, because if you can't see farther to avoid predators and find food, you won't even get around to having
Here's a quick sanity check: 1) what did he know when he asked the question? 2) what does he know *now*, assuming he read the responses?
You're saying that he didn't know that he was even dealing with a complex & possibly risky situation.
That is exactly my point -- people ask the questions because they don't know the answers, and possibly don't even know the questions. Now he knows he's not dealing with a situation where he just needs to download the right form. It wasn't an ego question, he simply didn't know.
Honestly, do you pay real money for legal advice every time you have a random, possibly-law-related question? You'd go broke in a month. You ask people who at least know more than you, and if you realize you're dealing with a tricky legal situation and you want to proceed, then you pony up and get proper legal advice. If not, then not.
I mean, it's also possible that he works in a 4-person company, and the owner is cool with the OSS project idea, and the easy solution is simply for the company to retain the copyrights but the owner would personally make the first GPL release (after which the developer could manage the project himself built on that code -- just stick with the GPL). Still need to pay for a lawyer? Hey, in the end it's up to him -- but he has a much better grasp on the situation now, which is the whole point.
I love these two sentences together:
I'm a lawyer who has to deal with many IT/IP issues on a weekly if not daily basis. This is exactly the wrong place to ask for or have legal advice rendered [...] In other words, this isn't the right place for your question... BUT yeah, you're getting actual feedback from a professional lawyer who works regularly with IT/IP issues.
Why do people always say these questions don't belong on Slashdot? This question is the perfect example of how Slashdot *actually* works vs. how people *imagine* it works.
The question: I want to open source some code I wrote for work that the company is scrapping. Expected Slashdot answer: Just do it! Don't ask The Man, he'll only push you down... OSS FTW!!1! Actual Slashdot answer, overall: It's possible, but you definitely don't have the rights to that code, and it's probably not in the company's best interest to give them to you... so it probably won't hurt to ask, but chances are you'll need to find another project.
Included in that actual answer: details from other developers who've been in the same situation, and comments from actual IT lawyers who work with these issues.
So -- wrong place?
Yes, none of this is "official" legal advice (though about as close as you can get for free & online), and if the questioner wants to try something risky, he should pay to get that legal advice... but now he knows what "risky" even means in this situation (he didn't know before) and has some idea of if it's worth pushing for it (probably not).
So: can we just hash out a new feature for Ask Slashdot postings? Have the editor just flag the question as "responses might contain legality discussions"... and automatically include regular disclaimer text saying "reminder: comments in this discussion are not legal advice." Or add a checkbox to the reply form, next to "No Karma Bonus" and "Post Anonymously", called "Include Not-Legal-Advice Disclaimer"?
Then we don't need to fill the comments with all of these disclaimers and warnings, and the actual lawyers don't have to worry about someone pointing back to their comment as "rendered legal advice" and holding them responsible for it being a complete and accurate answer. And (this is not a response to the parent) we can start smacking down the people who always post "Don't ask Slashdot - get a lawyer!" to every single Ask Slashdot story, looking for cheap karma.
It's not like picking cookies, this is a very strong instinct we are talking about. [...] the universal disgust for gay sex among men in particular is not backed by any single cultural or religious force, but seemingly by all of them.
See other response for good examples of how disgust for gay sex is not at all universal (and what about its commonplace nature in ancient Greek culture? That's pretty generally known, I thought). I'd also point you towards reading up a bit on child development and some of the things children tend to do normally and with no natural disgust or shame until it's taught to them (obviously Freud found it all very interesting).
Second, I think you have some basic misunderstandings about how evolution works. We have evolved into social and intensely "teaching" creatures -- humanity's real strength is our power to pass on huge amounts of information to our offspring *not* via genes, but through direct teaching and conveying complex information through language and communication on many, many levels.
Your disgust is so strong NOT because the disgust itself is an instinct (you can also do your own research to find plenty all the counter-examples you want). It's strong because your instinct to learn and internalize the behaviors of the people around you is effective. Why do many modern cultures and religions have such strong taboos against homosexual sex? And even though they do, why does homosexuality persist in all of these places (even where punishable by death)? That's multiple doctoral theses worth of exploration there just to dig into it, but no, it's not because we have a built-in instinct against it.
The nature/nurture either/or question is bunk anyway (you can find lots of articles online to elucidate why) but the "humans evolved to teach our children" aspect is important. The things we're taught (and the things we learn sometimes in spite of what we're taught) as children, the concepts that are *built* *in* to our language and social interactions: this stuff is incredible important to how we behave and how we think. I'm not saying we have no more-strongly-genetically-based factors in our behavior; there are definite patterns to human morality that tend to "fall out" the same from our abilities for empathy and logic. But our learning nature plays a huge role.
Another point about evolution:
it's pretty obvious that since genital organs in most sexually reproducing animals evolved for sexual reproduction between hetero couples
You're imputing purpose on evolution. There's no goal, and never a singular "for".
Any feature that evolved is used for whatever purpose the creature manages to use it for -- natural selection doesn't give a damn, unless that purpose manages to make it more or less likely that the creature's genes are passed on. One genetic feature may boost itself in many different ways, furthermore -- it's never simple, and there is utterly no moral value you can take from it, either way. If there are rampant homosexual pairings going on in a society between older men and the adolescent boys that they choose to mentor... and those chosen boys are more successful, and either have more children themselves *or* feed their extended families better, then natural selection in that example chooses that particular use of the human sexual organs. [Wait, why extended families? Well, they share genes. The gene is all that counts to natural selection.]
The probable first reason something evolved -- like getting sperm to egg even on dry land, reliably -- has no bearing on the subsequent changes that come about later. Physical features (including genitals) that are involved in courting rituals can undergo huge changes because of the effects on the courting ritual -- EVEN IF those changes make it harder to actually physically mate.
Human sexuality is a huge part of our culture, and the purely reproductive part is dwarfed by the rest of it. Your social success is a factor in whether
...you just have to slow down and think this over a bit more.
if you are gay and you have no interest in sexual intercourse with members of the opposite sex, then you have to engage in activity that is as disgusting to you as gay sex is to us "straight" people in order to have kids of your own. First off, gay sex isn't *disgusting* to all straight people -- unless you're conditioned that way, it's just "meh... no thanks, I'd rather go with her instead." Aren't there opposite-sex people you simply find sexually unappealing? It's like that.
Same deal the other way. The gay people that I know at least don't find straight sex "disgusting". It just has no sexual appeal to them.
But they may still have a drive to have children -- so it might be worth 10 minutes of fantasizing about person A while having sex with less-appealing person B, a few times. Artificial insemination is also pretty much a no-brainer to figure out, for that matter.
I know gay people with kids, in fact I know an ex-priest who had a family, but that was before he "realized" he was gay. See, you know this after all. Sort of. He wasn't recoiling in horror from his wife; I'll bet you that ex-priest was just finding sex remarkably... uninteresting, and perhaps wondered more and more why he was fantasizing about the shirtless 25-year-old neighbor mowing his lawn while sleeping with his wife. But again, he wasn't "disgusted" or revolted by straight sex. And it's possible he has very strong "father" feelings towards his kids and is very glad to have them -- but that's a separate issue from his sexuality.
I am simply making the statement that you cannot pass on your genes if you truly stick to being homosexual, and that is why it is evolutionary suicide, a dead end. How is using a turkey baster to impregnate your lesbian friend not "truly sticking" to being homosexual? Or even impregnating her more or less the standard way as an experiment, if you've never tried hetero sex? (Hint, if it's 90% tedious and 10% spark, you're still gay).
I get the sense you have a pretty simplistic idea of how human sexuality works, and how evolution works. Here's an important point -- if we develop reliable test-tube methods of reproduction that don't require opposite sex parents, and eventually men dropped out of the species but women went on to colonize other planets, that's still evolutionary success for humans. "Evolution" doesn't give a $#!# how you do it. If it's exists, it's "natural".
Since you know the world could never be entirely gay (to the extent that it becomes a straw man argument to you), then you also understand that this phenomenon is not "normal" sexual behavior in any way. Well, define "normal". We aren't the only species that has gay sex (or non-reproductive sex), you know, for entertainment, social bonding, etc.. Sex is part of human interaction, and not purely for reproductive purposes. Would you also say that condoms are not "normal", and couples that have sex after the woman has reached menopause are not "normal"?
If enough people do it, does that make it normal? 'Cause, uh, then if you want to argue that gay sex is abnormal, there's a hell of a lot of other human activities you also have to flag as abnormal, like being an American who read even a single book of poetry or literary fiction last year.
At EUR 350.- per month you can get [...] Euro 350... but that's, like, 600 dollars US nowadays.
Anyway, it's not a dedicated server, it's a shell account. A dedicated server will set you back EUR 1500/month, or something like 2300 USD.
And confusingly, the server will be "physically located in the Republic CyberBunker, or one of their subsidiaries around the globe." WTF? What's the point if your server ends up actually being at a "subsidiary around the world"? Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose?
'Cause, uh, *I* can offer you a dedicated server physically located in a nuclear-impact-proof, 1-mile-underground, robot-machine-gun guarded hosting center outside all governmental control and ON THE MOON (...or one of my subsidiary locations around the globe) for a cheaper price than that.
I would just run a perl script that does a regex on the access logs for anything that does not match the files that should be delivered to clients. Put the perl script in a cron job and let it run. Sounds like LogCheck. I'm using that; it provides a decent organized daily summary of all access to the server.
Also do an MD5 hash on those files regularly and check for any changes to static files. Know any pre-written scripts/software that handle this? The trouble is, you'd have to secure the hashes as well, which gets tricky, plus it doesn't offer any help for regularly changing content or database contents (where a content hack like secretly added JS would probably be inserted). But still, better security for non-changing files seems like a good idea; the chattr +i suggestion above seemed useful, assuming you are keeping your root account safe.
And use very strong root passwords, don't let root account login remotely, and use ssh keys with no interactive logins. Strongly agreed WRT SSH keys vs. passwords. Another one: if you use cPanel, or phpMyAdmin, or Tomcat's management console, anything like that -- ONLY let it bind to 127.0.0.1 and use SSH tunneling to connect. There's simply no reason to let these listen to public IP if you don't want the "public" accessing & exploiting them.
SSH tunneling is easy to set up; if the PuTTY instructions are too complex, try the BitVise Tunnelier (free as in beer ONLY), it's super-simple. Map local port 10000 to 127.0.0.1:10000 on the host (cPanel example) and you're all set.
Oh, and it would probably kill most/all of the bot nets. No -- many of the bots nowadays lock down the PC themselves (once they're in...) to keep it "safe" from competing bots. They even actively remove other bots when they can manage it.
As for the idea, though... I think about that as well. Even if just to get onto computers that haven't been compromised by a really effective bot yet (as I mentioned above) would be a big step.
Alas, most of the people talented enough to write such a thing are probably either: * well-employed enough that they don't want to risk the jailtime * working on building botnets of their own
...and I tend to think they just aren't doing anything *significant* in just-learned languages. The problem is not learning the syntax and basic idioms. Agreed, that's pretty quick, particularly if you have a good reference.
The problem (and the time sink) is the *ugly* side of every language. The parts of the standard libraries that sucked, and were reimplemented elsewhere (but you gotta know that...). The functionality where everyone who "lives with" the language grabs X open source library to implement -- not Y! it's a POS! -- but you don't know that yet. The language features that have secret, illogical gotchas for special cases. The bugs in the compiler or interpreter that are easy to avoid -- once you've been burned once. The code that will break cross-platform compatibility for obscure reasons. The code that will make it almost impossible to internationalize later, because you didn't learn how that support worked yet.
Granted, the cost of these things with any reasonable mature language should not be enormous (though it depends how long you go down a wrong path...), and you can allow for it, but it's always a significant risk *especially* if you don't have someone on the team (perhaps the new team who has to maintain your old code) who's already more-or-less expert level.
But either way, you have to allow *something* for that cost, and sometimes it's not worth it just to use the absolute best tool for the job when you have a pretty close fit available.
I didn't click on it; I just recognize that some people probably will, and be briefly annoyed. It's lower on the annoyance scale than goatse or tubgirl or something like that. But "self-challenge"? How does a stupid practical joke challenge your or anyone?
I'm not clear on how it can be a badge of honor to piss people off. Does it require any ability of any kind?
Eh, whatever. I can only pray that the mods of slashdot will bring their most righteous anger down upon your fragile karma, leaving you, uh, weeping for mercy at the onslaught.
Funny, or anything. Just mod them down and move on. The only reason accounts like this are posting at all is to trick people into clicking the fake links in their sigs.
Yeah, only stupid people will click & log themselves out, but why encourage the trolls?
I can second that. I've been making my living as a Java programmer for a long time as well (this is perhaps obvious), and this was another excellent article.
Studying computer science needs to impart a deeper understanding than how to patch together Swing components to pop up a GUI. Well, yeah -- they're just learning the right chunks of code to paste together, then struggling their way through the compiler errors until it "works". That's not even programming. It's not even useful if they're planning to be Java developers when they graduate.
His main point is that schools are trying to make compsci programs "easy and fun" by removing the hard parts, because enrollment is declining since the dot-com crash and they're getting panicky.
And the article doesn't mention this explicitly, but I'll point it out -- they're shooting themselves in the foot.
The demand for good developers is still going up and up. But the demand for shitty, clueless developers is NOT. So by loosing a horde of CS graduates who only know how to cobble together libraries with no idea as to what's going on under the covers, who will then have trouble getting employed... they're just exacerbating their image problem. Look at these unemployed CS grads!
On the other hand, a more rigorous program would mean fewer but higher quality and more successful grads, which would in turn increase the demand for CS grads and convince more bright people that this is where they belong, no?
The morons that put critical data / control on outward facing servers deserve the hosing they get. [...] I am more concerned about who they give physical access to the data / hardware are. All it takes is one vengeful employee and a thumb drive to lose very sensitive data. These are both examples where there's at least something individual companies can do about it internally.
Personally, I was extremely unsettled a few years ago when the spammer powers-that-be decided they wanted BlueSecurity shut down, and a bunch of DNS servers, Tucows and 4 other hosting providers, and SixApart/LiveJournal/TypePad fell as collateral damage.
Is that not *scarier* for business? Let's see -- I'm free to conduct my business... as long as I don't step on any toes in the organized crime world. 'Cause if I do, they're shutting me down whenever they feel like it, and there's not a damned thing I (or the supposed "protection" of the law) can do about it.
And of course, no power, once it exists, goes unused for very long. I see more and more stories about botnets used for extortion -- which is a bit trickier to carry out, since it's tough to get paid without a money trail, and law enforcement has more experience dealing with that -- but it's just another example. If they just want to squelch my business, it's incredibly easy.
[Addendum: oh look... the article points to cyber espionage as #3 in the SANS institute's top 10 threats of 2008; botnets are #2]
The UML summary might *also* be helpful, and you can use that as something of a roadmap while you're following actual execution paths through the code... but by itself, no. Not that helpful. "Oh, look - we have 2500 objects, with a tangle of interdependancies." (You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all different.)
The problem is that the MOST useful detail would be the *common* use cases linked with detailed sequence diagrams. Is there any way to auto-gen that?
Unfortunately, I think these tools are going to have no idea what are important objects, unimportant, essential but loaded dynamically, and perhaps not even used anymore. And alas, if this project is big enough, there are probably a few entire sections in there where (if you could ask) you'd hear something like "well, when we were using the rules engine from X we needed to build this whole architecture around that to get it to do what we needed; but eventually we migrated over to our own simpler system in this module over here - we haven't pulled that old code out yet because we think there's other code that still uses the utility methods".
Hence, yeah -- following actual code execution is an excellent way to get your bearings. You can figure out the "well-trodden paths" of the application vs. the dim haunted forests of code that are only ever explored in exceptional conditions, if ever. If the system is distributed, you just repeat the experience for each representative piece.
My personal suggestion -- do some documentation and/or code commenting of your own as you figure stuff out, and keep notes on the areas where you know you're missing something important for now. These docs are going to be invaluable to you as you go on (partly just because writing it down forces you to understand it a bit better), PLUS to someone else who comes in and is equally lost.
Once again, what Slashdot uses MySQL for is really totally uninteresting compared to the needs of the business world, where you are moving money, not "first post".;-) Once again, the "needs of the business world" vary greatly (interestingly, most businesses have some purpose other than just "moving money" - I might also point out that Slashdot is part of a profitable enterprise), and MySQL is one of many different tools that might or might not fit your requirements at an enterprise scale.
The fact that I've spent the last 6 months migrating from MySQL does not mean I haven't done a lot of work on it before. (You can find some really old posts from me moaning about their date-datatype on/., I guess) Ah, no -- I can explain where I got the idea that you hadn't done a lot of work with MySQL before:
Uh, if you want RI, ACID, triggers and stored procedures, or in general, a decent relational database; I cannot see how the aquisition of MySQL will solve that.
(Go ahead, you drooling MySQL fanbois, mod me down, but rest assured, I will smile smugly as you desperately look up the above mentioned key features of a relation database on Wikipedia.) It's hard to imagine you'd be spouting nonsense like that if you weren't either or both a) unaware of ongoing development in MySQL over the past 5-6 years b) just trolling because you enjoy it
I do work on projects at that scale, but so far only using Oracle and DB2. I've also done DBMS migration projects, and even moving between something like DB2400 and DB2 UDB is a lot of careful work... and those are both (sort of) DB2.... MySQL has some quirks that are all its own that (if you don't know them, and I'm guessing you didn't) would make a migration that much trickier.
I personally have not yet used MySQL for any enormous project, partly just because of the way decisions are made in enterprise development, and partly because I personally know data mining techniques in Oracle & DB2 better... most of my MySQL experience has been with high-performance but simpler data complexity & scale requirements. My personal experience is pretty irrelevant to my point, though, that Slashdot itself is an obvious example of using MySQL quite successfully at a large scale.
If you're interested, you can read up on Slashdot's hardware and software setup.
I take it you don't work with enterprise databases containing millions and millions of records and transactions, but I can tell you, MySQL is not the hammer for that job. So, you mean to say it's not YOUR hammer for that job. Though either way it would depend on the actual requirements (not just "big vs. little") and experience of DBAs and developers, etc. to decide the RDBMS.
Fine, go ahead, use MySQL. Give me a hint on Slashdot when you need help to migrate. Thanks, but if I were doing that migration I think I'd prefer working with people who knew both source & destination RDBMS well. How did you get put in charge of a data migration where you had no knowledge/experience whatsoever of one of the two databases, anyway? That sounds like a recipe for trouble to me.
Re:Im a sun employee
on
Sun Buys MySQL
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· Score: 2, Informative
(Go ahead, you drooling MySQL fanbois, mod me down, but rest assured, I will smile smugly as you desperately look up the above mentioned key features of a relation database on Wikipedia.) Speaking of desperate researching, why don't you look up what toy database Slashdot uses? Perhaps one of those drooling fanbois can evict you now.
Yes, in the short term it's not a good thing for the kids affected -- but the quality of their education is already a crying shame.
For the longer term, I think it's a good thing to have these issues blow up. Let them get global press. Let well-known people all over the world make snide comments about Florida and America. Let them think most Americans are frothing Bible wavers. Won't it start to sting after a while?
Maybe Americans will eventually be forced to re-evaluate their silly notions, either: 1) there's anything remotely "factual" in a literal interpretation of the Bible, or 2) that the people who currently believe (1) are going to keep to themselves and not screw things up for the rest of Americans and their children.
The US govt is pouring money into the "terrorist threat" -- the Congressional Budget Offices estimates the Afghanistan & Iraq wars will cost a total of $2.4 trillion (approx. the US population x 8,000) -- just imagine if they used friggin *any* of that for something that actually affected US residents, like, uh, education.
I'm hoping that enough slaps in the face like this and people will start to wake up.
So, yeah -- all you anti-evolutionists out there, make some noise! May your impassioned shouts echo grandly in the empty void of space.
I've learned to manage my e-mails without these kinds of filters, even when dealing with more than 100 e-mails a day. And, when you're getting that many e-mails a day, organizing "friends" to the top isn't likely to be much help.
Absolutely agreed. I already know more or less what's going on with my friends (and they can call me if somehow I missed an important email).
On the contrary, when a more-or-less stranger emails me because they might want to hire me for a project, or I get that rare email from a credit card company saying that my account has been locked for possible fraud, these may be all first-time, no-social-network emails, but they're far more important.
It's better to just support good email triage skills. I remember when email clients first started letting you actually TOGGLE the read/unread flag on an email -- that made me very happy. Currently I keep emails sorted by read flag then by order received; in the mornings I do a quick sort of the unreads and either file them somewhere, just mark them "read", or leave them on the "unread" to-do-soon list. Works pretty well.
That covers some DOM support, but also some basic language stuff -- events, math, objects like function, arguments, array, string... basic stuff that still was wide broken. No mention of exception handling... that's another thing I don't know about support at the time, because we sure weren't using it.
Slashdot Mirror
Something that's not selected against or selected for will just get carried along (or not) by the more important mutations.
If some other mutation that actually helps us has the side-effect of fusing in the 5th toe, then it'll happen -- but if not, it's probably not going anywhere for a long time. Hell, we might even get 6 toes to a foot (even if the new toe were also superfluous!), if that change was a side-effect of an important mutation... and genetics are complicated enough that this particular genetic mutation could be a tweak that conveys certain disease resistance, or a special brain change.. that just happens to *also* affect foot development.
Exactly the type of solution I was imagining....
...then really have fun.
You could make it simpler, though -- give him a few scripts to run on each computer in his network, entitled "defect_patch_432553.sh".
"You may get a few warnings, and you'll need to enter your password to authorize the changes -- yes, that's pretty normal when you're applying a custom patch like this, since it needs to make some changes to the underlying operating system, which is protected. Ah, it's all done now? Excellent."
I vowed not to continue in a discussion where I am presumed to be taking a moral stance against something that, in fact, I see as completely exclusive to "morality" from my POV at least.
To sum up your argument:
1) homosexuality is a defect evolutionary-wise
2) because it involves using reproductive organs for non-reproductive purposes, hence
3) it isn't natural or normal, and hence
4) your repulsion for it is probably an evolved instinct
To sum up mine:
1) Either a mutation stops you from reproducing (and the tweaked genes don't survive) or it helps you somehow (and the tweak spreads widely). Either way, homosexual behavior has varying levels of popularity in varying animals species, humans among them, so to the extent that it's genetic, it's not wiping itself out. And you gotta ask why, right? This is science.
2) Organs don't have a purpose. They weren't designed. They *do* serve functions, and their evolution is shaped by how well they serve those functions, but they can all serve multiple functions, and can take on new functions, or drop old functions completely.
3) "Natural" doesn't mean much now that we know humans are part of the natural world, not sitting on top of it. But "normal" just depends on commonality -- homosexual behavior is very normal for some species, less for others, non-existent for some. For humans it's somewhere in the middle. Much more common than 6th fingers, but less so than non-black hair.
4) If your repulsion were instinctive, then we'd likely all have it. Since we can point to cultures where homosexual pairings are common and accepted, that seems very unlikely.
See other response for good examples of how disgust for gay sex is not at all universal (and what about its commonplace nature in ancient Greek culture? That's pretty generally known, I thought).
You (and the other guy) should delve further into the matter. Romans and Greeks had an interesting sexual culture indeed, but if you read up you will find that the case was generally of men using younger boys for pleasure, with the added benefit of [...]
Just to snip there -- the role of it in the culture is a separate discussion. The point is that it was commonplace, and there were well-respected members of society doing it non-secretly, hence it was clearly not generally considered disgusting. Another pointer towards non-disgust: all of the art depicting it. This discussion is about whether your disgust is a simple instinctive behavior (like spitting out something very bitter) or a learned reaction.
As for me wanting to throw up when I see two men kissing even though I respect their right to do so, I doubt that is a Freudian thing.
I was talking about how fascinated (not disgusted) toddlers are with feces, urine, genitalia, etc.. Hence the idea that we have to learn disgust especially for something as subtle as two men kissing.
It makes sense from an evolutionary point of view that I despise feminine behaviour in another male (to see him being dominated sexually) because of my empathic instincts and egoist ones. Also, it makes sense that society despises the behavior IF that behavior leads to less/no reproduction.
Sanity check: does society, in fact, despise all behavior that leads to less reproduction? Education, for example. Or condom use. You need to re-evaluate your assumptions if they point to "facts" that don't turn up.
Survival is ultimately dependent on intercourse between man and woman. Reproduction is the key to (or at least the basis for) everything.
Reproducing is not the hard part of survival. Mutations like walking upright (that made childbirth so painful for us!) trumps reproduction, because if you can't see farther to avoid predators and find food, you won't even get around to having
Here's a quick sanity check:
1) what did he know when he asked the question?
2) what does he know *now*, assuming he read the responses?
You're saying that he didn't know that he was even dealing with a complex & possibly risky situation.
That is exactly my point -- people ask the questions because they don't know the answers, and possibly don't even know the questions. Now he knows he's not dealing with a situation where he just needs to download the right form. It wasn't an ego question, he simply didn't know.
Honestly, do you pay real money for legal advice every time you have a random, possibly-law-related question? You'd go broke in a month. You ask people who at least know more than you, and if you realize you're dealing with a tricky legal situation and you want to proceed, then you pony up and get proper legal advice. If not, then not.
I mean, it's also possible that he works in a 4-person company, and the owner is cool with the OSS project idea, and the easy solution is simply for the company to retain the copyrights but the owner would personally make the first GPL release (after which the developer could manage the project himself built on that code -- just stick with the GPL). Still need to pay for a lawyer? Hey, in the end it's up to him -- but he has a much better grasp on the situation now, which is the whole point.
Why do people always say these questions don't belong on Slashdot? This question is the perfect example of how Slashdot *actually* works vs. how people *imagine* it works.
The question: I want to open source some code I wrote for work that the company is scrapping.
Expected Slashdot answer: Just do it! Don't ask The Man, he'll only push you down... OSS FTW!!1!
Actual Slashdot answer, overall: It's possible, but you definitely don't have the rights to that code, and it's probably not in the company's best interest to give them to you... so it probably won't hurt to ask, but chances are you'll need to find another project.
Included in that actual answer: details from other developers who've been in the same situation, and comments from actual IT lawyers who work with these issues.
So -- wrong place?
Yes, none of this is "official" legal advice (though about as close as you can get for free & online), and if the questioner wants to try something risky, he should pay to get that legal advice... but now he knows what "risky" even means in this situation (he didn't know before) and has some idea of if it's worth pushing for it (probably not).
So: can we just hash out a new feature for Ask Slashdot postings? Have the editor just flag the question as "responses might contain legality discussions"... and automatically include regular disclaimer text saying "reminder: comments in this discussion are not legal advice." Or add a checkbox to the reply form, next to "No Karma Bonus" and "Post Anonymously", called "Include Not-Legal-Advice Disclaimer"?
Then we don't need to fill the comments with all of these disclaimers and warnings, and the actual lawyers don't have to worry about someone pointing back to their comment as "rendered legal advice" and holding them responsible for it being a complete and accurate answer. And (this is not a response to the parent) we can start smacking down the people who always post "Don't ask Slashdot - get a lawyer!" to every single Ask Slashdot story, looking for cheap karma.
It's not like picking cookies, this is a very strong instinct we are talking about. [...] the universal disgust for gay sex among men in particular is not backed by any single cultural or religious force, but seemingly by all of them.
See other response for good examples of how disgust for gay sex is not at all universal (and what about its commonplace nature in ancient Greek culture? That's pretty generally known, I thought). I'd also point you towards reading up a bit on child development and some of the things children tend to do normally and with no natural disgust or shame until it's taught to them (obviously Freud found it all very interesting).
Second, I think you have some basic misunderstandings about how evolution works. We have evolved into social and intensely "teaching" creatures -- humanity's real strength is our power to pass on huge amounts of information to our offspring *not* via genes, but through direct teaching and conveying complex information through language and communication on many, many levels.
Your disgust is so strong NOT because the disgust itself is an instinct (you can also do your own research to find plenty all the counter-examples you want). It's strong because your instinct to learn and internalize the behaviors of the people around you is effective. Why do many modern cultures and religions have such strong taboos against homosexual sex? And even though they do, why does homosexuality persist in all of these places (even where punishable by death)? That's multiple doctoral theses worth of exploration there just to dig into it, but no, it's not because we have a built-in instinct against it.
The nature/nurture either/or question is bunk anyway (you can find lots of articles online to elucidate why) but the "humans evolved to teach our children" aspect is important. The things we're taught (and the things we learn sometimes in spite of what we're taught) as children, the concepts that are *built* *in* to our language and social interactions: this stuff is incredible important to how we behave and how we think. I'm not saying we have no more-strongly-genetically-based factors in our behavior; there are definite patterns to human morality that tend to "fall out" the same from our abilities for empathy and logic. But our learning nature plays a huge role.
Another point about evolution:
it's pretty obvious that since genital organs in most sexually reproducing animals evolved for sexual reproduction between hetero couples
You're imputing purpose on evolution. There's no goal, and never a singular "for".
Any feature that evolved is used for whatever purpose the creature manages to use it for -- natural selection doesn't give a damn, unless that purpose manages to make it more or less likely that the creature's genes are passed on. One genetic feature may boost itself in many different ways, furthermore -- it's never simple, and there is utterly no moral value you can take from it, either way. If there are rampant homosexual pairings going on in a society between older men and the adolescent boys that they choose to mentor... and those chosen boys are more successful, and either have more children themselves *or* feed their extended families better, then natural selection in that example chooses that particular use of the human sexual organs. [Wait, why extended families? Well, they share genes. The gene is all that counts to natural selection.]
The probable first reason something evolved -- like getting sperm to egg even on dry land, reliably -- has no bearing on the subsequent changes that come about later. Physical features (including genitals) that are involved in courting rituals can undergo huge changes because of the effects on the courting ritual -- EVEN IF those changes make it harder to actually physically mate.
Human sexuality is a huge part of our culture, and the purely reproductive part is dwarfed by the rest of it. Your social success is a factor in whether
Same deal the other way. The gay people that I know at least don't find straight sex "disgusting". It just has no sexual appeal to them.
But they may still have a drive to have children -- so it might be worth 10 minutes of fantasizing about person A while having sex with less-appealing person B, a few times. Artificial insemination is also pretty much a no-brainer to figure out, for that matter. I know gay people with kids, in fact I know an ex-priest who had a family, but that was before he "realized" he was gay. See, you know this after all. Sort of. He wasn't recoiling in horror from his wife; I'll bet you that ex-priest was just finding sex remarkably... uninteresting, and perhaps wondered more and more why he was fantasizing about the shirtless 25-year-old neighbor mowing his lawn while sleeping with his wife. But again, he wasn't "disgusted" or revolted by straight sex. And it's possible he has very strong "father" feelings towards his kids and is very glad to have them -- but that's a separate issue from his sexuality. I am simply making the statement that you cannot pass on your genes if you truly stick to being homosexual, and that is why it is evolutionary suicide, a dead end. How is using a turkey baster to impregnate your lesbian friend not "truly sticking" to being homosexual? Or even impregnating her more or less the standard way as an experiment, if you've never tried hetero sex? (Hint, if it's 90% tedious and 10% spark, you're still gay).
I get the sense you have a pretty simplistic idea of how human sexuality works, and how evolution works. Here's an important point -- if we develop reliable test-tube methods of reproduction that don't require opposite sex parents, and eventually men dropped out of the species but women went on to colonize other planets, that's still evolutionary success for humans. "Evolution" doesn't give a $#!# how you do it. If it's exists, it's "natural". Since you know the world could never be entirely gay (to the extent that it becomes a straw man argument to you), then you also understand that this phenomenon is not "normal" sexual behavior in any way. Well, define "normal". We aren't the only species that has gay sex (or non-reproductive sex), you know, for entertainment, social bonding, etc.. Sex is part of human interaction, and not purely for reproductive purposes. Would you also say that condoms are not "normal", and couples that have sex after the woman has reached menopause are not "normal"?
If enough people do it, does that make it normal? 'Cause, uh, then if you want to argue that gay sex is abnormal, there's a hell of a lot of other human activities you also have to flag as abnormal, like being an American who read even a single book of poetry or literary fiction last year.
But what other criteria do you use for "normal"?
Anyway, it's not a dedicated server, it's a shell account.
A dedicated server will set you back EUR 1500/month, or something like 2300 USD.
And confusingly, the server will be "physically located in the Republic CyberBunker, or one of their subsidiaries around the globe." WTF? What's the point if your server ends up actually being at a "subsidiary around the world"? Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose?
'Cause, uh, *I* can offer you a dedicated server physically located in a nuclear-impact-proof, 1-mile-underground, robot-machine-gun guarded hosting center outside all governmental control and ON THE MOON (...or one of my subsidiary locations around the globe) for a cheaper price than that.
Whoops -- I mean LogWatch, not LogCheck (though I think that's another, similar package).
SSH tunneling is easy to set up; if the PuTTY instructions are too complex, try the BitVise Tunnelier (free as in beer ONLY), it's super-simple. Map local port 10000 to 127.0.0.1:10000 on the host (cPanel example) and you're all set.
As for the idea, though... I think about that as well. Even if just to get onto computers that haven't been compromised by a really effective bot yet (as I mentioned above) would be a big step.
Alas, most of the people talented enough to write such a thing are probably either:
* well-employed enough that they don't want to risk the jailtime
* working on building botnets of their own
...and I tend to think they just aren't doing anything *significant* in just-learned languages.
The problem is not learning the syntax and basic idioms. Agreed, that's pretty quick, particularly if you have a good reference.
The problem (and the time sink) is the *ugly* side of every language. The parts of the standard libraries that sucked, and were reimplemented elsewhere (but you gotta know that...). The functionality where everyone who "lives with" the language grabs X open source library to implement -- not Y! it's a POS! -- but you don't know that yet. The language features that have secret, illogical gotchas for special cases. The bugs in the compiler or interpreter that are easy to avoid -- once you've been burned once. The code that will break cross-platform compatibility for obscure reasons. The code that will make it almost impossible to internationalize later, because you didn't learn how that support worked yet.
Granted, the cost of these things with any reasonable mature language should not be enormous (though it depends how long you go down a wrong path...), and you can allow for it, but it's always a significant risk *especially* if you don't have someone on the team (perhaps the new team who has to maintain your old code) who's already more-or-less expert level.
But either way, you have to allow *something* for that cost, and sometimes it's not worth it just to use the absolute best tool for the job when you have a pretty close fit available.
I didn't click on it; I just recognize that some people probably will, and be briefly annoyed. It's lower on the annoyance scale than goatse or tubgirl or something like that. But "self-challenge"? How does a stupid practical joke challenge your or anyone?
I'm not clear on how it can be a badge of honor to piss people off. Does it require any ability of any kind?
Eh, whatever. I can only pray that the mods of slashdot will bring their most righteous anger down upon your fragile karma, leaving you, uh, weeping for mercy at the onslaught.
Funny, or anything. Just mod them down and move on.
The only reason accounts like this are posting at all is to trick people into clicking the fake links in their sigs.
Yeah, only stupid people will click & log themselves out, but why encourage the trolls?
I can second that. I've been making my living as a Java programmer for a long time as well (this is perhaps obvious), and this was another excellent article.
Studying computer science needs to impart a deeper understanding than how to patch together Swing components to pop up a GUI. Well, yeah -- they're just learning the right chunks of code to paste together, then struggling their way through the compiler errors until it "works". That's not even programming. It's not even useful if they're planning to be Java developers when they graduate.
His main point is that schools are trying to make compsci programs "easy and fun" by removing the hard parts, because enrollment is declining since the dot-com crash and they're getting panicky.
And the article doesn't mention this explicitly, but I'll point it out -- they're shooting themselves in the foot.
The demand for good developers is still going up and up. But the demand for shitty, clueless developers is NOT. So by loosing a horde of CS graduates who only know how to cobble together libraries with no idea as to what's going on under the covers, who will then have trouble getting employed... they're just exacerbating their image problem. Look at these unemployed CS grads!
On the other hand, a more rigorous program would mean fewer but higher quality and more successful grads, which would in turn increase the demand for CS grads and convince more bright people that this is where they belong, no?
Personally, I was extremely unsettled a few years ago when the spammer powers-that-be decided they wanted BlueSecurity shut down, and a bunch of DNS servers, Tucows and 4 other hosting providers, and SixApart/LiveJournal/TypePad fell as collateral damage.
Is that not *scarier* for business? Let's see -- I'm free to conduct my business... as long as I don't step on any toes in the organized crime world. 'Cause if I do, they're shutting me down whenever they feel like it, and there's not a damned thing I (or the supposed "protection" of the law) can do about it.
And of course, no power, once it exists, goes unused for very long. I see more and more stories about botnets used for extortion -- which is a bit trickier to carry out, since it's tough to get paid without a money trail, and law enforcement has more experience dealing with that -- but it's just another example. If they just want to squelch my business, it's incredibly easy.
[Addendum: oh look... the article points to cyber espionage as #3 in the SANS institute's top 10 threats of 2008; botnets are #2]
The UML summary might *also* be helpful, and you can use that as something of a roadmap while you're following actual execution paths through the code... but by itself, no. Not that helpful. "Oh, look - we have 2500 objects, with a tangle of interdependancies." (You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all different.)
The problem is that the MOST useful detail would be the *common* use cases linked with detailed sequence diagrams. Is there any way to auto-gen that?
Unfortunately, I think these tools are going to have no idea what are important objects, unimportant, essential but loaded dynamically, and perhaps not even used anymore. And alas, if this project is big enough, there are probably a few entire sections in there where (if you could ask) you'd hear something like "well, when we were using the rules engine from X we needed to build this whole architecture around that to get it to do what we needed; but eventually we migrated over to our own simpler system in this module over here - we haven't pulled that old code out yet because we think there's other code that still uses the utility methods".
Hence, yeah -- following actual code execution is an excellent way to get your bearings. You can figure out the "well-trodden paths" of the application vs. the dim haunted forests of code that are only ever explored in exceptional conditions, if ever. If the system is distributed, you just repeat the experience for each representative piece.
My personal suggestion -- do some documentation and/or code commenting of your own as you figure stuff out, and keep notes on the areas where you know you're missing something important for now. These docs are going to be invaluable to you as you go on (partly just because writing it down forces you to understand it a bit better), PLUS to someone else who comes in and is equally lost.
(Go ahead, you drooling MySQL fanbois, mod me down, but rest assured, I will smile smugly as you desperately look up the above mentioned key features of a relation database on Wikipedia.) It's hard to imagine you'd be spouting nonsense like that if you weren't either or both
a) unaware of ongoing development in MySQL over the past 5-6 years
b) just trolling because you enjoy it
I personally have not yet used MySQL for any enormous project, partly just because of the way decisions are made in enterprise development, and partly because I personally know data mining techniques in Oracle & DB2 better... most of my MySQL experience has been with high-performance but simpler data complexity & scale requirements. My personal experience is pretty irrelevant to my point, though, that Slashdot itself is an obvious example of using MySQL quite successfully at a large scale.
If you're interested, you can read up on Slashdot's hardware and software setup. I take it you don't work with enterprise databases containing millions and millions of records and transactions, but I can tell you, MySQL is not the hammer for that job. So, you mean to say it's not YOUR hammer for that job. Though either way it would depend on the actual requirements (not just "big vs. little") and experience of DBAs and developers, etc. to decide the RDBMS. Fine, go ahead, use MySQL. Give me a hint on Slashdot when you need help to migrate. Thanks, but if I were doing that migration I think I'd prefer working with people who knew both source & destination RDBMS well. How did you get put in charge of a data migration where you had no knowledge/experience whatsoever of one of the two databases, anyway? That sounds like a recipe for trouble to me.
Perhaps one of those drooling fanbois can evict you now.
Hash cornbread? With, uh, toasted switchgrass seeds sprinkled on top?
Yes, in the short term it's not a good thing for the kids affected -- but the quality of their education is already a crying shame.
For the longer term, I think it's a good thing to have these issues blow up. Let them get global press. Let well-known people all over the world make snide comments about Florida and America. Let them think most Americans are frothing Bible wavers. Won't it start to sting after a while?
Maybe Americans will eventually be forced to re-evaluate their silly notions, either:
1) there's anything remotely "factual" in a literal interpretation of the Bible, or
2) that the people who currently believe (1) are going to keep to themselves and not screw things up for the rest of Americans and their children.
The US govt is pouring money into the "terrorist threat" -- the Congressional Budget Offices estimates the Afghanistan & Iraq wars will cost a total of $2.4 trillion (approx. the US population x 8,000) -- just imagine if they used friggin *any* of that for something that actually affected US residents, like, uh, education.
I'm hoping that enough slaps in the face like this and people will start to wake up.
So, yeah -- all you anti-evolutionists out there, make some noise! May your impassioned shouts echo grandly in the empty void of space.
I've learned to manage my e-mails without these kinds of filters,
Absolutely agreed. I already know more or less what's going on with my friends (and they can call me if somehow I missed an important email).even when dealing with more than 100 e-mails a day. And, when you're
getting that many e-mails a day, organizing "friends" to the top isn't
likely to be much help.
On the contrary, when a more-or-less stranger emails me because they might want to hire me for a project, or I get that rare email from a credit card company saying that my account has been locked for possible fraud, these may be all first-time, no-social-network emails, but they're far more important.
It's better to just support good email triage skills. I remember when email clients first started letting you actually TOGGLE the read/unread flag on an email -- that made me very happy. Currently I keep emails sorted by read flag then by order received; in the mornings I do a quick sort of the unreads and either file them somewhere, just mark them "read", or leave them on the "unread" to-do-soon list. Works pretty well.
Here's an illustration, from 1999 (4-5 years after we were using JavaScript in class...):
http://www.webdevelopersjournal.com/articles/javascript_limitations.html
That covers some DOM support, but also some basic language stuff -- events, math, objects like function, arguments, array, string... basic stuff that still was wide broken. No mention of exception handling... that's another thing I don't know about support at the time, because we sure weren't using it.