Well, under the present system, dead people vote. And where I vote, the votes are counted by poll workers who look 90-something and must be getting close to dead themselves. So what's wrong with electing a dead man?
They did elect a dead Senator in Missouri (I think) last election.
Best of all, an Angry Dead Drunken Dwarf wouldn't do much. Compared to Clinton and Bush, that's _good_.
(Except in Oregon) it's the difference between having about 5% of the voters possibly subject to coercion or bribery, and those people being widely scattered, or having the 95% of the voters who can be found in their local homes also subject to coercion and bribery...
I find it funny that we can file our taxes over the internet to the IRS, but we can't get an anonymous voting system put together.
1) Different challenges. Anonymity conflicts with security. You can't keep an audit trail on computer without identifying information. With internet tax filing, the ID has got to go along with the records; with voting, it's supposed to be stripped out.
2)Your vote is supposed to be entirely private. Your tax return isn't (your spouse signs it, your accountant may know more about it than you do). I'm not sure there is any real security against internet snooping, except that finding your return in millions of packets would be a big job...
3) No one is going to come around to your house offering $100 if you will let them file a tax return in your name. Before reforms were instituted in the late 19th century, there was a lot of flat out vote buying in the USA, but now only congressmen get to sell their votes...
More seriously: secret balloting and several other security measures were instituted because of widespread vote-buying in 19th century America. Early in the century, party workers could accompany you to the polls and "help" you vote. (It did solve the problem of illiteracy. But if you actually _want_ illiterates voting, you paste pictures of the candidates onto piggybanks and give each voter one token to drop into the slot.) Later on, when ballots were marked in private booths, it was common for party workers to pass out pre-marked ballots, and pay the voter when they returned with the blank ballot from the polls. So now, ballots have serial numbers on a little tear-off piece; when I come out of the booth, they check the number matches the blank ballot they gave me, then tear it off.
Now if they only had a way to detect dead people voting... Although the local poll workers might resent that, they're all over 80 and it's getting hard to tell the difference.;-)
Well, I suppose you do not have to return these new movies, but is that a big enough incentive?
Depends on where you live. The nearest video store around here is about 10 miles out of my way. If I rent a disk, I've got to go there twice. I could rent several at once, but I don't have time to watch several at once, so it tends to work out to two trips per movie. Very few movies are worth it, and I'm probably going to want to buy those that are...
It sounds like with these disks, I make one trip, buy a stack, and unwrap one at a time whenever I do have a night free.
OTOH, it will be awfully tempting to make "backup" copies... Worried about the two layer original not fitting onto a single layer writable DVD? So you copy it to two disks.
So in Haskell, printf (or whatever the equivalent is) won't run unless the compiler or run-time decides that the value returned from it is needed? Or prints may be parallized and evaluated out of order?
I suppose that the language does have features that keep I/O operations in order, but in the sort of low-level hardware-oriented programming I do, no damn way can you let the compiler rearrange the code...
C# is sounding better. If only it wasn't proprietary to the evil empire...
I would love to see that ID dongle become common for many other purposes, but not for voting from home. Consider this scenario:
Knock, Knock.
"Hello"
"We're from the Cosa Nostra party, and we're here to 'help' you vote."
--- later ---
"You understand that you can go to the election commission and contest this vote. Do you also understand that we'll hear about it and blow up your house?"
The problem arose because candidates would walk through the dorms pumping their platform, knock on people's doors, log them into the voting website and show them how easy it was to vote for them.
How about chartering a bus to bring people to the polls, and showing them a marked sample ballot during the ride? This is actually a fairly common practice. Where I grew up, a big real estate speculator funded a political organization that would pick up old folks from their homes, prime them to vote against anything and anyone that might raise real-estate taxes, and took them to the polls. In local elections, this could actually amount to 1/3 of the total vote. Or I heard about Democrats in Florida's larger cities sending busses out to the welfare housing, etc. But in one case they got the instructions wrong -- told their clients to be sure to make one punch on each page, but in this city the presidential candidates had been spread across two pages (to avoid the damned butterfly ballot), so anyone who followed instructions voted Gore and someone else for president...
The Democrats ability to shoot themselves in the foot, again and again, has always been amazing.
Getting back on topic -- we've always had party workers trying to be "helpful." Before voting was reformed with ballots never leaving the polling place, they could be even more helpful, giving people an already filled-in ballot to drop in the box. (To prevent any form of this, where I vote there is a tear-off serial number on the ballot. You come out of the booth, they check the number is the same you went in with, then tear it off and feed the ballot into the scanner.) The big trouble wasn't the helpfulness -- it was that too often the party workers were also paying bribes to get voters to cooperate. And that's the reason no form of voting from home (including absentee ballots) should be allowed except for a few percent of people who genuinely cannot make it to the polls.
One real, unsolvable difficulty with both absentee ballots and internet voting is that it becomes impossible to guarantee people are voting in secret. But we also accept that blind people won't be voting in secret -- although there are both technological and non-technological ways to give them a secret ballot, no American district I have ever heard of has implemented them. For that reason alone, absentee ballots should be restricted to real need, not Oregon's policy of giving them to anyone who just doesn't want to stand in line.
Aside from the secret ballot, at present paper absentee ballots, properly run, are considerably more secure than internet voting could be. You'd have to suborn a lot of people to be able to tamper with paper absentee ballots in the mail, and someone would talk, but for e-voting you just have to crack a computer.
The bigger challenge in either system is verifying the identity of the voter. This gets worse when election officials aren't following all the rules. Florida rules required the request for an absentee ballot to include name, address, and voter registration number. Missing ID #'s got a lot of applications thrown out, but for certain voters in certain counties, republican party workers filled in the ID #'s. Furthermore, ballots were supposed to be postmarked before election day, which creates a difficulty when the damned post office doesn't date it's postmarks; in some counties, Kathy Harris got that rule waived, but not in others. (Who was it that sued about not counting everyone's vote the same?) But if the system had been run honestly, very few bogus absentee ballots would have been counted. It's just too hard to steal large numbers of identities when you have to send paper documents by snail mail, unless you create an organization big enough to make leaks probable.
My best guess is that if Florida had accurately counted all the votes statewide, George II would still have won. But we'll never know, now. And if the entire system had been running honestly, I do not think that either the Bush's most wayward son, or Mr. Roger's evil twin (Gore) would have had a chance at the nomination...
well, there are random nutcases in every country. Just look at the Creationists in the USA.
What I hear is that in Saudi Arabia and many other Arab Muslim countries, the "nutcases" (extremist Muslims) are running government-sponsored schools, and in most Muslim countries Islam is the official religion. The curious thing about this is that most European countries have long had "established churches", with or without church control of the schools, and in the 20th century the majority of people raised under these arrangements abandoned all religion. As far as I can tell from the BBC sitcoms that get replayed over here, a Church of England vicar still commands respect, but more as a pseudo-government official who handles weddings and funerals for the faithful and the non-church-goers alike than as a minister of God. In western Europe, a government endorsement of one sect seems to discredit all sects...
Yet Muslim governments embrace religion and get more fanaticism among the population. Is it simply that socially they're a few centuries behind? Or is it that the relation between gov't and religion is different? Maybe their leaders loudly proclaim themselves devout Muslims but try to avoid being too specific about which _kind_ of Muslim. (Substitute Christian for Muslim and you are describing America.) And there is considerable governmental support for churches and religious schools, or religion in the public schools, but not a definite endorsement of one particular sect. (This could describe America up to the 1950's, when the courts started enforcing a much stricter view of the 1st Amendment.)
why doesn't every retail store put a sign by their cash register that says, "By paying for this product you agree that you will not say anything bad about it to anyone, ever."
Because a lot of people would drop their intended purchases on the floor, walk out, and tell _everyone_ about it. The whole problem with EULA's is that people don't really read them, so the software companies get away with things that are totally unacceptable in any other circumstances.
Obviously I know less about c++ than I thought I did (I've never programmed in it), and got some things I heard about Java references mixed up with c++ references. OK, in C++ references are checked at the time of creation, rather than the time of use. That's less unsafe than pointers that are _never_ checked, but there are bound to be ways that the reference can become invalid later.
In c, I did shoot myself in the foot with something similar to your second example once. Not twice, but that's mainly because I do such low-level programming that I do have to always think about how it comes out in machine operations... (The low-level view: x is a local variable, allocated from the stack. It goes away when the function ends, leaving y pointing to space that will be re-used for something else on the next function call. In debugging, you will be scratching your head as to why the value of *y keeps changing.)
In your first example, it is possible for the compiler to interpret that in such a way as to make the code correct. That is, since x is returned, this object should be allocated space that outlives the function. I have no idea whether the c++ specs call for it to work this way, but if c# is purporting to be safe they certainly should do this. But is it possible to cover every way that an originally valid reference could be come invalid?
First off, I'm primarily a hardware engineer, who writes small programs in C or assembly that deal directly with hardware. So I use pointers and other "unsafe" code a lot; they are both extremely useful and extremely frustrating when it comes to debug time.
Pointers let you use just about any arbitrary number as an address and poke data in there. The virtual memory system might block this on the grounds that you don't have a page at that address -- but not all computers have the hardware to do that, you can still do horrible things by writing to the wrong place in the pages you do own, and if the protection does block the misplaced write, the resulting invalid page error is not pretty from the user's point of view.
Pointers can be used safely -- if you program very well, like checking every address before you use it (which takes a hell of a lot of extra code), or checking the data going into the pointer calculations to ensure that no way could a wrong value come out (which assumes you didn't make any programming mistakes). And if it is a case of running downloaded code where there is a finite chance that the programmer is _maliciously_ misusing pointers, there is no way for the computer to analyze the code and detect this before you run it. Hence Microsoft's attempt to make internet and e-mail user friendly by automatically running any included executables spawned a plague of viruses, worms, and trojans...
C++ gives you the choice of traditional pointers or references. A "reference" is a sort of super-pointer that includes data on where valid targets must be, and gets checked for validity every time you use it. I don't do Java, but I am under the impression that it uses references only. That isn't enough in itself to prevent writing Java viruses, but it gives the OS a fighting chance of confining them to the sandbox...
OTOH, no computer is going to run entirely on "safe" code. At some level, the code has to read and write hardware registers. To do that, you take the numeric address of the register, and use that as a pointer. True, a good, secure OS would confine all such activities to drivers, which can only be installed by the administrator, who ought to know the difference between a driver and a trojan. But Microsoft doesn't write OS's like that -- NT/2000/XP is rather improved on DOS where direct writes to the video card were almost mandatory, but the security is still swiss cheese.
Incidentally, the original reason for C allowing all sorts of unsafe activities (pointers everywhere, strcpy with no length check, etc.) was performance. Checking the length of a string every time it was used took CPU cycles and RAM to hold the extra machine code. So the creators of C left it up to the programmer to shove in an if statement to check the length when the string was input, and to do the math and pop in another if statement anywhere it was possible for the string to grow too long. This was efficient, but puts quite a load on the programmer. About that time, I was running an 8 bit computer with 16K of RAM, clock speed under 1M, and all the accounting, class schedules, grade reports, etc. for a small college went through it. Efficiency was important! Now, who's going to notice whether the program runs in 1 millisecond or 2? It's better to be reliable. And it's necessary to get the program up and running pretty fast -- that's a lot easier if you don't have to worry about pointers going wild except when you do go to the hardware.
In C# apparently the programmer has the choice of using references and avoiding all "unsafe" code, or of declaring a module "unsafe" and programming any way that gets the job done. By making "unsafe" a PITA, they've encouraged programmers to avoid it except when absolutely necessary. I have a suspicion that once the coders get used to it, that will increase their productivity overall. In addition, it gives any tool that may run code from outside a quick way of determining whether the code was written to be safe or not. In theory...
I have serious doubts about whether that (being able to run "safe" C-sharp programs) will actually work. First off, won't a virus-writer be able to hack the tags that say "unsafe"? Second, ways to do unsafe things in "safe" code will be discovered. Third, if your OS has security like swiss cheese, no program is going to really be safe. Do e-mail viruses actually have to do anything that isn't allowed?
From what I've heard, Microsoft's idea of securing Outlook was to have it look at the HTML tag, and if it said executable pop up a warning which is incomprehensible to the people who are actually ignorant enough to get e-mail viruses. ('Yeah, it's from a trusted source. See the "From" line...') But if the HTML said "text", then it passed the attachment on to the Windows "open" command, which determines the type of the attachment by looking at the attachment, and if it was.exe or dozens of script-containing formats, it would let it run. Surely virus writers wouldn't be _dishonest_ and change the HTML tag so their.exe's would slip through...
Until that sort of thinking changes, giving people a way of tagging the programs "safe" or "unsafe" is just asking for trouble.
I haven't heard about the Mt St Helens dating. Links? I do know that the dating of the Earth's age is based on using several different radioactive dating methods on many different rock samples, so the occasional screwy sample gets thrown out.
Trees have sometimes been clocked at 60mph on traffic radar, but try convincing a cop or a judge that his radar just happened to go out of whack while your were going by...
I suspect that salt gets incorporated into the sea bottom in various ways (the bodies of sea creatures for example), and eventually a continental crustal plate overrides the sea floor and pushes it down into the magma. Eventually the salt comes back up on the land via volcano.
Helium on Earth would be the product of alpha-decay of radioactive elements such as Uranium. The source isn't that big, and the helium atoms eventually leak from top of the atmosphere into space. That is, thermal motion puts some of the atoms over the escape velocity. This happens much less with heavier molecules, because the speeds are lower. (He 4; H2O 18; N2 28; O2 32; CO2 44.)
Thanks, I was wondering. This BSD-style license allows a commercial enterprise to incorporate the free code into their product, giving credit to the authors of the free code, but not publishing the enterprise's changes to it. That is, you can take it, use it, and change it, without giving anything back to the community (aside from free advertising, plus whatever enrichment we might get from having a possibly superior commercial program available).
Have I got the other alternatives right?
The GPL still allows using the unmodified free code without giving back, but it severely limits combining the free code with proprietary code. If you sell something where your code works with GPL code, you have to publish your source code under the GPL.
The LGPL allows linking proprietary and free code together. If you insert your own code into an LGPL module, then you have to publish the changed module (when you sell anything including that module). But if you link separate modules to LGPL modules, you can keep your modules proprietary.
The good thing about GPL is that it allows only the most basic commercial use of free software without giving back to the community of coders who created the software. (An OEM selling PC's pre-loaded with Linux doesn't have to give back, for instance. The bad thing is, it's so far reaching that it's rather scary to commercial enterprises, so they'll tend to avoid GPL. Which means that if the GPL programs are the best available (gcc definitely is; Linux might be), available commercial products are likely to be second rate because they used something else as a starting point. Quite often, we won't see free programs that adequately cover the more specialized needs either.
LGPL is a nice compromise in-between. You can't just grab the code and start modifying, unless you are planning to give it back to the community. But you can _use_ it without risking your rights to your own work.
Malaysia is OK. (Been there.) That might have something to do with the large and prosperous Chinese element in the country. But the terrorists we've been chasing around Afghanistan aren't Afghani, they're saudis, egyptians, etc.
You missed a decimal point. (At least, I hope it was you and not the book publisher -- although science textbooks are full of errors.) The Earth is about 4.6 billion years old. (This is the American billion, 10^9 -- in Britain, 1 billion = 10^12.)
Of course, there's a good bit of scientific wild ass guessing in those age estimates. For certain kinds of rock, analysis of radioactive isotopes can give a +/-10% or better measurement of the age when the rock solidified. It is less easy to estimate how long the Earth existed as a ball of molten rock, and it is possible that we haven't found the very first solid rocks yet, or even that we aren't going to find them since they may have all been sucked down into the mantle and re-melted. But it is quite clear that the Earth is _at least_ 4 billion years old, and it's not likely to be much over 5 billion unless astrophysicists' models of solar aging are all way off.
[In England] we have an established religion but few people take it seriously and hardly anybody goes to church.
And in most of the officially Catholic countries, the church gets no respect. It truly does seem like the best way to discredit Christianity in general is to have the government support one sect. (Anything too closely associated with gov't has got to be a crock...) But why isn't that working in the Muslim countries???
You may be right about wine-making getting a very late start in America. Distilled liquor was an early American product -- there was even a small rebellion against the federal gov't in the 1790's because of a tax on distilled spirits. The basic issue was that with dirt roads and all, farmers living more than a few miles from the cities couldn't get their grain to market. But turn that grain into whiskey, and it was worth shipping out even through terrain that only pack-mules could handle. This was gradually eased by roadbuilding, the acquisition of Louisiana (giving the Ohio and Tennessee valleys the option of simply rafting their produce down to New Orleans), and railroads, but by the time most farmers could ship grain economically, there was quite an American tradition of distilling whiskey and drinking too much of it, and not much tradition concerning weaker stuff.
Depends where you are in Texas. Deaf Smith county (west of Lubbock) is dry (Prohibition still in effect by county law), or at least it was when I was in the Air Force near there 1978-1987. That is, the cops saw you with a drink, in or out of a car, it could be an instant bust. OTOH, _someone_ was selling the booze, and I wouldn't have been surprised to find out it was a close relative of the sheriff...
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Well, under the present system, dead people vote. And where I vote, the votes are counted by poll workers who look 90-something and must be getting close to dead themselves. So what's wrong with electing a dead man?
They did elect a dead Senator in Missouri (I think) last election.
Best of all, an Angry Dead Drunken Dwarf wouldn't do much. Compared to Clinton and Bush, that's _good_.
(Except in Oregon) it's the difference between having about 5% of the voters possibly subject to coercion or bribery, and those people being widely scattered, or having the 95% of the voters who can be found in their local homes also subject to coercion and bribery...
I find it funny that we can file our taxes over the internet to the IRS, but we can't get an anonymous voting system put together.
1) Different challenges. Anonymity conflicts with security. You can't keep an audit trail on computer without identifying information. With internet tax filing, the ID has got to go along with the records; with voting, it's supposed to be stripped out.
2)Your vote is supposed to be entirely private. Your tax return isn't (your spouse signs it, your accountant may know more about it than you do). I'm not sure there is any real security against internet snooping, except that finding your return in millions of packets would be a big job...
3) No one is going to come around to your house offering $100 if you will let them file a tax return in your name. Before reforms were instituted in the late 19th century, there was a lot of flat out vote buying in the USA, but now only congressmen get to sell their votes...
However, I was *not* looking forward to Bill Gates running for president and all of MSFT's employees each voting hundreds of thousands of times.
...
Yeah, we'd have to crack the MSN computers (it's been done before) and change all those votes to
More seriously: secret balloting and several other security measures were instituted because of widespread vote-buying in 19th century America. Early in the century, party workers could accompany you to the polls and "help" you vote. (It did solve the problem of illiteracy. But if you actually _want_ illiterates voting, you paste pictures of the candidates onto piggybanks and give each voter one token to drop into the slot.) Later on, when ballots were marked in private booths, it was common for party workers to pass out pre-marked ballots, and pay the voter when they returned with the blank ballot from the polls. So now, ballots have serial numbers on a little tear-off piece; when I come out of the booth, they check the number matches the blank ballot they gave me, then tear it off.
;-)
Now if they only had a way to detect dead people voting... Although the local poll workers might resent that, they're all over 80 and it's getting hard to tell the difference.
Well, I suppose you do not have to return these new movies, but is that a big enough incentive?
Depends on where you live. The nearest video store around here is about 10 miles out of my way. If I rent a disk, I've got to go there twice. I could rent several at once, but I don't have time to watch several at once, so it tends to work out to two trips per movie. Very few movies are worth it, and I'm probably going to want to buy those that are...
It sounds like with these disks, I make one trip, buy a stack, and unwrap one at a time whenever I do have a night free.
OTOH, it will be awfully tempting to make "backup" copies... Worried about the two layer original not fitting onto a single layer writable DVD? So you copy it to two disks.
So in Haskell, printf (or whatever the equivalent is) won't run unless the compiler or run-time decides that the value returned from it is needed? Or prints may be parallized and evaluated out of order?
I suppose that the language does have features that keep I/O operations in order, but in the sort of low-level hardware-oriented programming I do, no damn way can you let the compiler rearrange the code...
C# is sounding better. If only it wasn't proprietary to the evil empire...
I would love to see that ID dongle become common for many other purposes, but not for voting from home. Consider this scenario:
Knock, Knock.
"Hello"
"We're from the Cosa Nostra party, and we're here to 'help' you vote."
--- later ---
"You understand that you can go to the election commission and contest this vote. Do you also understand that we'll hear about it and blow up your house?"
The problem arose because candidates would walk through the dorms pumping their platform, knock on people's doors, log them into the voting website and show them how easy it was to vote for them.
How about chartering a bus to bring people to the polls, and showing them a marked sample ballot during the ride? This is actually a fairly common practice. Where I grew up, a big real estate speculator funded a political organization that would pick up old folks from their homes, prime them to vote against anything and anyone that might raise real-estate taxes, and took them to the polls. In local elections, this could actually amount to 1/3 of the total vote. Or I heard about Democrats in Florida's larger cities sending busses out to the welfare housing, etc. But in one case they got the instructions wrong -- told their clients to be sure to make one punch on each page, but in this city the presidential candidates had been spread across two pages (to avoid the damned butterfly ballot), so anyone who followed instructions voted Gore and someone else for president...
The Democrats ability to shoot themselves in the foot, again and again, has always been amazing.
Getting back on topic -- we've always had party workers trying to be "helpful." Before voting was reformed with ballots never leaving the polling place, they could be even more helpful, giving people an already filled-in ballot to drop in the box. (To prevent any form of this, where I vote there is a tear-off serial number on the ballot. You come out of the booth, they check the number is the same you went in with, then tear it off and feed the ballot into the scanner.) The big trouble wasn't the helpfulness -- it was that too often the party workers were also paying bribes to get voters to cooperate. And that's the reason no form of voting from home (including absentee ballots) should be allowed except for a few percent of people who genuinely cannot make it to the polls.
So how is that worse than what has been elected lately?
One real, unsolvable difficulty with both absentee ballots and internet voting is that it becomes impossible to guarantee people are voting in secret. But we also accept that blind people won't be voting in secret -- although there are both technological and non-technological ways to give them a secret ballot, no American district I have ever heard of has implemented them. For that reason alone, absentee ballots should be restricted to real need, not Oregon's policy of giving them to anyone who just doesn't want to stand in line.
Aside from the secret ballot, at present paper absentee ballots, properly run, are considerably more secure than internet voting could be. You'd have to suborn a lot of people to be able to tamper with paper absentee ballots in the mail, and someone would talk, but for e-voting you just have to crack a computer.
The bigger challenge in either system is verifying the identity of the voter. This gets worse when election officials aren't following all the rules. Florida rules required the request for an absentee ballot to include name, address, and voter registration number. Missing ID #'s got a lot of applications thrown out, but for certain voters in certain counties, republican party workers filled in the ID #'s. Furthermore, ballots were supposed to be postmarked before election day, which creates a difficulty when the damned post office doesn't date it's postmarks; in some counties, Kathy Harris got that rule waived, but not in others. (Who was it that sued about not counting everyone's vote the same?) But if the system had been run honestly, very few bogus absentee ballots would have been counted. It's just too hard to steal large numbers of identities when you have to send paper documents by snail mail, unless you create an organization big enough to make leaks probable.
My best guess is that if Florida had accurately counted all the votes statewide, George II would still have won. But we'll never know, now. And if the entire system had been running honestly, I do not think that either the Bush's most wayward son, or Mr. Roger's evil twin (Gore) would have had a chance at the nomination...
well, there are random nutcases in every country. Just look at the Creationists in the USA.
What I hear is that in Saudi Arabia and many other Arab Muslim countries, the "nutcases" (extremist Muslims) are running government-sponsored schools, and in most Muslim countries Islam is the official religion. The curious thing about this is that most European countries have long had "established churches", with or without church control of the schools, and in the 20th century the majority of people raised under these arrangements abandoned all religion. As far as I can tell from the BBC sitcoms that get replayed over here, a Church of England vicar still commands respect, but more as a pseudo-government official who handles weddings and funerals for the faithful and the non-church-goers alike than as a minister of God. In western Europe, a government endorsement of one sect seems to discredit all sects...
Yet Muslim governments embrace religion and get more fanaticism among the population. Is it simply that socially they're a few centuries behind? Or is it that the relation between gov't and religion is different? Maybe their leaders loudly proclaim themselves devout Muslims but try to avoid being too specific about which _kind_ of Muslim. (Substitute Christian for Muslim and you are describing America.) And there is considerable governmental support for churches and religious schools, or religion in the public schools, but not a definite endorsement of one particular sect. (This could describe America up to the 1950's, when the courts started enforcing a much stricter view of the 1st Amendment.)
why doesn't every retail store put a sign by their cash register that says, "By paying for this product you agree that you will not say anything bad about it to anyone, ever."
Because a lot of people would drop their intended purchases on the floor, walk out, and tell _everyone_ about it. The whole problem with EULA's is that people don't really read them, so the software companies get away with things that are totally unacceptable in any other circumstances.
You forgot the most important part:
:)
By reading my comment, you hereby agree to the following contract:
I hereby declare that this comment cannot be moderated down without my express permission
Accept Activate Computer's Self-destruct
Obviously I know less about c++ than I thought I did (I've never programmed in it), and got some things I heard about Java references mixed up with c++ references. OK, in C++ references are checked at the time of creation, rather than the time of use. That's less unsafe than pointers that are _never_ checked, but there are bound to be ways that the reference can become invalid later.
In c, I did shoot myself in the foot with something similar to your second example once. Not twice, but that's mainly because I do such low-level programming that I do have to always think about how it comes out in machine operations... (The low-level view: x is a local variable, allocated from the stack. It goes away when the function ends, leaving y pointing to space that will be re-used for something else on the next function call. In debugging, you will be scratching your head as to why the value of *y keeps changing.)
In your first example, it is possible for the compiler to interpret that in such a way as to make the code correct. That is, since x is returned, this object should be allocated space that outlives the function. I have no idea whether the c++ specs call for it to work this way, but if c# is purporting to be safe they certainly should do this. But is it possible to cover every way that an originally valid reference could be come invalid?
Excuse my ignorance of c++, but isn't *(Foo*)0 using pointers, so the declaration
Foo& f = *(Foo*)0;
would be "unsafe" in c#?
First off, I'm primarily a hardware engineer, who writes small programs in C or assembly that deal directly with hardware. So I use pointers and other "unsafe" code a lot; they are both extremely useful and extremely frustrating when it comes to debug time.
.exe or dozens of script-containing formats, it would let it run. Surely virus writers wouldn't be _dishonest_ and change the HTML tag so their .exe's would slip through...
Pointers let you use just about any arbitrary number as an address and poke data in there. The virtual memory system might block this on the grounds that you don't have a page at that address -- but not all computers have the hardware to do that, you can still do horrible things by writing to the wrong place in the pages you do own, and if the protection does block the misplaced write, the resulting invalid page error is not pretty from the user's point of view.
Pointers can be used safely -- if you program very well, like checking every address before you use it (which takes a hell of a lot of extra code), or checking the data going into the pointer calculations to ensure that no way could a wrong value come out (which assumes you didn't make any programming mistakes). And if it is a case of running downloaded code where there is a finite chance that the programmer is _maliciously_ misusing pointers, there is no way for the computer to analyze the code and detect this before you run it. Hence Microsoft's attempt to make internet and e-mail user friendly by automatically running any included executables spawned a plague of viruses, worms, and trojans...
C++ gives you the choice of traditional pointers or references. A "reference" is a sort of super-pointer that includes data on where valid targets must be, and gets checked for validity every time you use it. I don't do Java, but I am under the impression that it uses references only. That isn't enough in itself to prevent writing Java viruses, but it gives the OS a fighting chance of confining them to the sandbox...
OTOH, no computer is going to run entirely on "safe" code. At some level, the code has to read and write hardware registers. To do that, you take the numeric address of the register, and use that as a pointer. True, a good, secure OS would confine all such activities to drivers, which can only be installed by the administrator, who ought to know the difference between a driver and a trojan. But Microsoft doesn't write OS's like that -- NT/2000/XP is rather improved on DOS where direct writes to the video card were almost mandatory, but the security is still swiss cheese.
Incidentally, the original reason for C allowing all sorts of unsafe activities (pointers everywhere, strcpy with no length check, etc.) was performance. Checking the length of a string every time it was used took CPU cycles and RAM to hold the extra machine code. So the creators of C left it up to the programmer to shove in an if statement to check the length when the string was input, and to do the math and pop in another if statement anywhere it was possible for the string to grow too long. This was efficient, but puts quite a load on the programmer. About that time, I was running an 8 bit computer with 16K of RAM, clock speed under 1M, and all the accounting, class schedules, grade reports, etc. for a small college went through it. Efficiency was important! Now, who's going to notice whether the program runs in 1 millisecond or 2? It's better to be reliable. And it's necessary to get the program up and running pretty fast -- that's a lot easier if you don't have to worry about pointers going wild except when you do go to the hardware.
In C# apparently the programmer has the choice of using references and avoiding all "unsafe" code, or of declaring a module "unsafe" and programming any way that gets the job done. By making "unsafe" a PITA, they've encouraged programmers to avoid it except when absolutely necessary. I have a suspicion that once the coders get used to it, that will increase their productivity overall. In addition, it gives any tool that may run code from outside a quick way of determining whether the code was written to be safe or not. In theory...
I have serious doubts about whether that (being able to run "safe" C-sharp programs) will actually work. First off, won't a virus-writer be able to hack the tags that say "unsafe"? Second, ways to do unsafe things in "safe" code will be discovered. Third, if your OS has security like swiss cheese, no program is going to really be safe. Do e-mail viruses actually have to do anything that isn't allowed?
From what I've heard, Microsoft's idea of securing Outlook was to have it look at the HTML tag, and if it said executable pop up a warning which is incomprehensible to the people who are actually ignorant enough to get e-mail viruses. ('Yeah, it's from a trusted source. See the "From" line...') But if the HTML said "text", then it passed the attachment on to the Windows "open" command, which determines the type of the attachment by looking at the attachment, and if it was
Until that sort of thinking changes, giving people a way of tagging the programs "safe" or "unsafe" is just asking for trouble.
Use grep to count all the "fsck microsoft" versus "I hate microsoft" vs. "Leave Microsoft alone!" (return address @microsoft.com)... 8-)
I haven't heard about the Mt St Helens dating. Links? I do know that the dating of the Earth's age is based on using several different radioactive dating methods on many different rock samples, so the occasional screwy sample gets thrown out.
Trees have sometimes been clocked at 60mph on traffic radar, but try convincing a cop or a judge that his radar just happened to go out of whack while your were going by...
I suspect that salt gets incorporated into the sea bottom in various ways (the bodies of sea creatures for example), and eventually a continental crustal plate overrides the sea floor and pushes it down into the magma. Eventually the salt comes back up on the land via volcano.
Helium on Earth would be the product of alpha-decay of radioactive elements such as Uranium. The source isn't that big, and the helium atoms eventually leak from top of the atmosphere into space. That is, thermal motion puts some of the atoms over the escape velocity. This happens much less with heavier molecules, because the speeds are lower. (He 4; H2O 18; N2 28; O2 32; CO2 44.)
Thanks, I was wondering. This BSD-style license allows a commercial enterprise to incorporate the free code into their product, giving credit to the authors of the free code, but not publishing the enterprise's changes to it. That is, you can take it, use it, and change it, without giving anything back to the community (aside from free advertising, plus whatever enrichment we might get from having a possibly superior commercial program available).
Have I got the other alternatives right?
The GPL still allows using the unmodified free code without giving back, but it severely limits combining the free code with proprietary code. If you sell something where your code works with GPL code, you have to publish your source code under the GPL.
The LGPL allows linking proprietary and free code together. If you insert your own code into an LGPL module, then you have to publish the changed module (when you sell anything including that module). But if you link separate modules to LGPL modules, you can keep your modules proprietary.
The good thing about GPL is that it allows only the most basic commercial use of free software without giving back to the community of coders who created the software. (An OEM selling PC's pre-loaded with Linux doesn't have to give back, for instance. The bad thing is, it's so far reaching that it's rather scary to commercial enterprises, so they'll tend to avoid GPL. Which means that if the GPL programs are the best available (gcc definitely is; Linux might be), available commercial products are likely to be second rate because they used something else as a starting point. Quite often, we won't see free programs that adequately cover the more specialized needs either.
LGPL is a nice compromise in-between. You can't just grab the code and start modifying, unless you are planning to give it back to the community. But you can _use_ it without risking your rights to your own work.
Malaysia is OK. (Been there.) That might have something to do with the large and prosperous Chinese element in the country. But the terrorists we've been chasing around Afghanistan aren't Afghani, they're saudis, egyptians, etc.
You missed a decimal point. (At least, I hope it was you and not the book publisher -- although science textbooks are full of errors.) The Earth is about 4.6 billion years old. (This is the American billion, 10^9 -- in Britain, 1 billion = 10^12.)
Of course, there's a good bit of scientific wild ass guessing in those age estimates. For certain kinds of rock, analysis of radioactive isotopes can give a +/-10% or better measurement of the age when the rock solidified. It is less easy to estimate how long the Earth existed as a ball of molten rock, and it is possible that we haven't found the very first solid rocks yet, or even that we aren't going to find them since they may have all been sucked down into the mantle and re-melted. But it is quite clear that the Earth is _at least_ 4 billion years old, and it's not likely to be much over 5 billion unless astrophysicists' models of solar aging are all way off.
[In England] we have an established religion but few people take it seriously and hardly anybody goes to church.
And in most of the officially Catholic countries, the church gets no respect. It truly does seem like the best way to discredit Christianity in general is to have the government support one sect. (Anything too closely associated with gov't has got to be a crock...) But why isn't that working in the Muslim countries???
You may be right about wine-making getting a very late start in America. Distilled liquor was an early American product -- there was even a small rebellion against the federal gov't in the 1790's because of a tax on distilled spirits. The basic issue was that with dirt roads and all, farmers living more than a few miles from the cities couldn't get their grain to market. But turn that grain into whiskey, and it was worth shipping out even through terrain that only pack-mules could handle. This was gradually eased by roadbuilding, the acquisition of Louisiana (giving the Ohio and Tennessee valleys the option of simply rafting their produce down to New Orleans), and railroads, but by the time most farmers could ship grain economically, there was quite an American tradition of distilling whiskey and drinking too much of it, and not much tradition concerning weaker stuff.
Depends where you are in Texas. Deaf Smith county (west of Lubbock) is dry (Prohibition still in effect by county law), or at least it was when I was in the Air Force near there 1978-1987. That is, the cops saw you with a drink, in or out of a car, it could be an instant bust. OTOH, _someone_ was selling the booze, and I wouldn't have been surprised to find out it was a close relative of the sheriff...