The UK is putting its judicial system under tremendous financial pressure at the moment, to the extent that some criminal cases are just being abandoned because there's insufficient money to run them. They're (finally!) starting to experiment with allowing small claims court cases to be resolved over the phone, and also looking at decriminalising TV license violations to reduce pressure on the system. But you get the idea - the judicial system innovates extremely slowly even when being sliced to the bone. So don't hold your breath.
They're also moving the low-level courts to use a lot more technology to support them, things like video links so remand prisoners do not need to be brought to court, tablet computers with the legal texts on them in searchable form, that sort of thing. These are the sorts of things that technology can definitely help with, even though they definitely change the nature of justice somewhat.
This is one reason the US (which only funds healthcare for Federal employees, Federal retirees, 65-year-olds, and the poor) actually paid more per capita for health care then the Canadian Federal government did, despite the fact that the Canadian Feds provide 100% of health funding in that country.
The real key is that there is a body in Canada (other than the ordinary Joe on the street) who wants prices to be kept down, and which has the power to actually make that happen. Because keeping charges down is a priority, use of generic drugs will be more widespread, as will the use of programmes to improve general public health (because they tend to be very cost effective overall) and the more rapid progression from diagnosis to treatment. That last point can be both good and bad: good because if they got it right, you're getting treated sooner instead of having more expensive (and possibly invasive) tests done, and bad because if they got it wrong, you're not being treated for what's wrong at all.
I haven't heard anybody discuss what the half-life of graphene is though, so it could be just as bad.
They're probably still working that out. It's one thing to know that it's theoretically possible, but another to demonstrate how to actually do it, so the report that it has been done (even if it turns out to not be very useful in the end) is relevant.
The US has the most corrupt political system... it's really fascism where the corporations and the rich control the government.
That's not true. It's that the rich control both corporations and government. Observe how many senior politicians move in the same circles as corporate board members, and typically have done since early in life. It's not precisely corrupt, it's just that they prefer to do things for their kind of people above and beyond all else. Joe Dumbass can always be told what to vote for on things where it matters through advertizing and related stuff. It's not total control though; they ignore much of the detail of local politics, since who is your neighborhood dog-catcher doesn't matter at all to those with real power.
That matches my memory of trying to build things with the IRIX C compiler too, especially in 64-bit mode. Or were you talking about libressl specifically?
How in bog's green earth is any sort of family unit supposed to deal with the current knowledge set? Hell, even a university level professor can barely keep track of what goes on in their own field.
That's what the professor's family is for, to keep track of all the rest of human knowledge that the professor hasn't got time for.
The problem in the USA is that people are getting several to dozens of calls a day.
That's not special to the USA. I have some numbers set to auto-block with very good reason. It's significantly less annoying in Europe though, as the caller pays the cost of the call (except in exceptional circumstances, which robocalls don't count as).
Blacklists/Blocking numbers is useless because the callers use spoofed callerID, so the number shown is different every time. Lately, they have been using spoofed callerID numbers that belong to government agencies or well-known businesses.
That's what the FCC needs to crack down on. The easiest way would probably to have a rule change that makes the phone companies part liable for any court-imposed liabilities arising from private actions over robocalls where those robocalls come from a spoofed number. That'll encourage the phone companies to sort out the problem very rapidly indeed, perhaps by making it significantly more difficult for phone users to supply the phone number in the first place. I know this will be inconvenient for some PBX operators, but mechanisms that are too easy to abuse need revision anyway.
Versioning only ensures that anyone who subsequently performs the calculations will reach the same result - it does not verify the data is complete or correct.
Nothing much ensures that the data is complete or correct now either, other than peer review over a long period of time by people who are wholly unconnected with the original work (and its funding). In fact, in some sciences you're not going to get complete data in a public venue anyway (some sciences work with data that in raw form can identify individual people; think medical research). Correctness is hard to evaluate; what does it even mean for raw data in the first place?
But keeping versioned data does help with some types of analysis, such as working out whether a scientist's hypothesis was reasonable based on what data was available at the time, and whether that hypothesis still holds water or when it ceased to be good. It also makes it much easier to detect fraud, and you can use all the sorts of concepts developed for distributed source code management to make it all more comprehensible.
Don't think "wikipedia for scientific data", think "github for scientific data". That's a much better model.
As opposed to what? Saving state by tattooing it on a hairy fairy's derriere? If you're saving state, so that you can shut down an IDE and start it up again in the sam place, it's going to be saved to disk somewhere, and the chance that it's going to be in a file when its going to disk is enormously high. (Technically you could also store it in a DB that is written to a raw partition, but I'm not aware of anyone mad enough to use a full installation of Oracle on dedicated storage devices just to save the state of their IDE...)
In other words message passing works completely dynamic and is resolved by the runtime system while method calls are resolved statically by the compiler.
Am I right in saying that the marks of a message passing solution are that it can handle "calls" of arbitrary methods and that the class/object itself can control what happens in that case?
No they are not procedural, if at all they are like C++ and are called multi paradigm.
That's largely a crock of shit and C++ programmers are just kidding themselves. The only two paradigms that C++ really implements are OO (for structural organisation) and imperative (for operation description). It's not functional in any meaningful way (it's possible to pretend, but it feels very strange if you do) and declarative programming is rather different. The only declarative language that most programmers normally encounter is SQL.
My point was that there's no real reason why OO can't be used with functional programming, or declarative programming. It just tends to be paired up with imperative programming for historical reasons.
You are mixing up 'imperative' languages (that is actually what the parent meant) with 'declarative' languages.
Most OO language really fall under that category, too.
That's because most OO languages are also procedural programming languages (for historical reasons). OO is principally about how to organise data and the operations on it, which is orthogonal to whether the operations are sequences of commands or composite functions to be applied.
the problem is 'security' software is never as secure as promised
And the problem with OpenSSL is that they start out from the position "this is complicated" and then go straight to "so Joe Working Programmer should deal with all the complexity themselves" without properly spelling this out in very clear letters in a large font. That's abysmally awful. It leaves people exposed to trouble without them realising that this so.
That's a double edge sword as shown by the clusterfuck that is OpenSSL. When you start supporting many architectures then the strange hacks you need to do to make things work can be the ones that introduce the security risk.
If you're introducing strange hacks, it's probably a sign that the design of some of the rest of the code (being charitable here!) is wrong in the first place. Writing the code to be more portable, to use fewer quirks (ideally none), that's the way to go. Yes, it can make things long-winded, but it's worth it.
"Don't roll your own security" is advice aimed at people who don't know about security. Some of us have to implement and 'roll' the specs. The world looks different when your reputation is tied to your stuff not get broken before senility sets in. You can do it right, but you need all the elements in place including a well thought out spec.
A good start is to have some sort of test suite. When implementing a spec, TDD is very much the way to go. You should also try to make sure you've got tests for all the failure modes that you expect (including all the ones in the spec). Yes, that can be devilishly hard. Do it anyway.
when you've measured and proven the compiler is generating sub optimal code
That's the important part. Don't start mucking around with low-level assembly for things until you've proven that you've got a problem and that the fix you're proposing to work on is worthwhile. (Where a library gets very widely distributed, such as a basic math library, it may well become worthwhile very quickly. Most code doesn't get anything like that level of distribution.)
Of-course I am against slavery and initiation of force by anybody, however it is the government initiation of force that is the most immoral of all, since it is the 'law of the land', so to speak, so you can be born into a system that prearranged your slavery within it.
So, in effect you're denying that there is such a thing as society, as comprised of the bulk wishes and desires of the country that you live in, and consequently the use of taxation as a redistributative economic measure? That's a morally/politically consistent position, even though I thoroughly disagree with it.
The first step in security is to assume that your office network is the same as "the Internet": you don't know what's on there, it is full of malware and hackers, and they are actively out to try and get you.
Unfortunately, the office network is also definitely full of managers, and prizing a bit more convenience at the cost of "a little" more risk is a classic thing that managers order. They are also usually able to find people who will carry out the orders.
You IT security is only as good as your control of the hardware!
But you have to let the users on anyway. If you manage to completely secure systems so that it is completely impossible for any data to leak, you'll have excluded everyone who has legitimate reasons to have access, and you'll have cost the company a lot of money in the process. You'll be seen as the weak point in the whole process and will get replaced with someone less expensive and more compliant with what the business needs.
Clearcase sucks for Java. Anything else sucks for C/C++. Don't even consider Clearcase if you're an Eclipse shop. Don't even consider doing serious C++ job on Git. Just use the right tool and move on.
Also, lawyers and Microsoft combining to call the government a hypocrite? This is like a cesspool of double standards, each trying to be the worst.
The really big problem Microsoft has (and numerous other large US companies that run cloud services with datacenters in the EU, such as Amazon and IBM) is that if they give in with this, there will be lots of EU customers who will leave as soon as possible, and nothing that they'll be able to say or do will stop it short of relocating the company HQ and ownership structure entirely outside the US so the US government and courts really won't have jurisdiction (but will instead have to work through international treaties). This will be caused by the perception in the EU of overreach by the US, and the EU's generally fairly aggressive data protection laws.
At the very least, giving in on this will cost MS a huge amount of money to put right, and there'd be a real danger of an EU competitor being able to grow large enough to lock them out while they're sorting it all out (other US corporations would be in the same position).
Swapping shifting hands and not turning on your wipers to signal a turn are the only parts most have to relearn if they swap styles often.
When you're dealing with an automatic, it depends on what the car manufacturer thought was a good idea for their brand image; there's no benefit at all to either side (but you need to pick one). With a manual shift, you want the signal lever on the opposite side so that you are able to signal while changing gear.
The windscreen wiper control appears to migrate from side to side with no technical considerations at all, and headlight controls are even more variable...
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I've been using Linux for an awfully long time, since the mid 1990s (Yggdrasil, then Debian).
Darn noobs! I remember having fun making the MCC Interim distribution work...
The UK is putting its judicial system under tremendous financial pressure at the moment, to the extent that some criminal cases are just being abandoned because there's insufficient money to run them. They're (finally!) starting to experiment with allowing small claims court cases to be resolved over the phone, and also looking at decriminalising TV license violations to reduce pressure on the system. But you get the idea - the judicial system innovates extremely slowly even when being sliced to the bone. So don't hold your breath.
They're also moving the low-level courts to use a lot more technology to support them, things like video links so remand prisoners do not need to be brought to court, tablet computers with the legal texts on them in searchable form, that sort of thing. These are the sorts of things that technology can definitely help with, even though they definitely change the nature of justice somewhat.
This is one reason the US (which only funds healthcare for Federal employees, Federal retirees, 65-year-olds, and the poor) actually paid more per capita for health care then the Canadian Federal government did, despite the fact that the Canadian Feds provide 100% of health funding in that country.
The real key is that there is a body in Canada (other than the ordinary Joe on the street) who wants prices to be kept down, and which has the power to actually make that happen. Because keeping charges down is a priority, use of generic drugs will be more widespread, as will the use of programmes to improve general public health (because they tend to be very cost effective overall) and the more rapid progression from diagnosis to treatment. That last point can be both good and bad: good because if they got it right, you're getting treated sooner instead of having more expensive (and possibly invasive) tests done, and bad because if they got it wrong, you're not being treated for what's wrong at all.
I haven't heard anybody discuss what the half-life of graphene is though, so it could be just as bad.
They're probably still working that out. It's one thing to know that it's theoretically possible, but another to demonstrate how to actually do it, so the report that it has been done (even if it turns out to not be very useful in the end) is relevant.
The US has the most corrupt political system... it's really fascism where the corporations and the rich control the government.
That's not true. It's that the rich control both corporations and government. Observe how many senior politicians move in the same circles as corporate board members, and typically have done since early in life. It's not precisely corrupt, it's just that they prefer to do things for their kind of people above and beyond all else. Joe Dumbass can always be told what to vote for on things where it matters through advertizing and related stuff. It's not total control though; they ignore much of the detail of local politics, since who is your neighborhood dog-catcher doesn't matter at all to those with real power.
I'm not sure IRIX will ever work right
That matches my memory of trying to build things with the IRIX C compiler too, especially in 64-bit mode. Or were you talking about libressl specifically?
How in bog's green earth is any sort of family unit supposed to deal with the current knowledge set? Hell, even a university level professor can barely keep track of what goes on in their own field.
That's what the professor's family is for, to keep track of all the rest of human knowledge that the professor hasn't got time for.
I was developing Linux-only software. It wouldn't have been practical to develop it from within OS X.
Not even within a VM? OS X hosts those just fine...
They're free to go fork the kernel and have their own software wonderland, with neither blackjack nor hookers.
If they want to arrange their own blackjack and hookers, they're free to do so. It's Open Source.
I will screw my tinfoil hat on a little tighter and suggest it might have something to do with the US Army being their largest customer.
I really doubt that that's it. I think you've let the tinfoil slip over your eyes a bit too far, and you've lost sight of reality there.
The problem in the USA is that people are getting several to dozens of calls a day.
That's not special to the USA. I have some numbers set to auto-block with very good reason. It's significantly less annoying in Europe though, as the caller pays the cost of the call (except in exceptional circumstances, which robocalls don't count as).
Blacklists/Blocking numbers is useless because the callers use spoofed callerID, so the number shown is different every time. Lately, they have been using spoofed callerID numbers that belong to government agencies or well-known businesses.
That's what the FCC needs to crack down on. The easiest way would probably to have a rule change that makes the phone companies part liable for any court-imposed liabilities arising from private actions over robocalls where those robocalls come from a spoofed number. That'll encourage the phone companies to sort out the problem very rapidly indeed, perhaps by making it significantly more difficult for phone users to supply the phone number in the first place. I know this will be inconvenient for some PBX operators, but mechanisms that are too easy to abuse need revision anyway.
Versioning only ensures that anyone who subsequently performs the calculations will reach the same result - it does not verify the data is complete or correct.
Nothing much ensures that the data is complete or correct now either, other than peer review over a long period of time by people who are wholly unconnected with the original work (and its funding). In fact, in some sciences you're not going to get complete data in a public venue anyway (some sciences work with data that in raw form can identify individual people; think medical research). Correctness is hard to evaluate; what does it even mean for raw data in the first place?
But keeping versioned data does help with some types of analysis, such as working out whether a scientist's hypothesis was reasonable based on what data was available at the time, and whether that hypothesis still holds water or when it ceased to be good. It also makes it much easier to detect fraud, and you can use all the sorts of concepts developed for distributed source code management to make it all more comprehensible.
Don't think "wikipedia for scientific data", think "github for scientific data". That's a much better model.
if they save it to a file
As opposed to what? Saving state by tattooing it on a hairy fairy's derriere? If you're saving state, so that you can shut down an IDE and start it up again in the sam place, it's going to be saved to disk somewhere, and the chance that it's going to be in a file when its going to disk is enormously high. (Technically you could also store it in a DB that is written to a raw partition, but I'm not aware of anyone mad enough to use a full installation of Oracle on dedicated storage devices just to save the state of their IDE...)
In other words message passing works completely dynamic and is resolved by the runtime system while method calls are resolved statically by the compiler.
Am I right in saying that the marks of a message passing solution are that it can handle "calls" of arbitrary methods and that the class/object itself can control what happens in that case?
No they are not procedural, if at all they are like C++ and are called multi paradigm.
That's largely a crock of shit and C++ programmers are just kidding themselves. The only two paradigms that C++ really implements are OO (for structural organisation) and imperative (for operation description). It's not functional in any meaningful way (it's possible to pretend, but it feels very strange if you do) and declarative programming is rather different. The only declarative language that most programmers normally encounter is SQL.
My point was that there's no real reason why OO can't be used with functional programming, or declarative programming. It just tends to be paired up with imperative programming for historical reasons.
You are mixing up 'imperative' languages (that is actually what the parent meant) with 'declarative' languages.
I forgot the term. Oh well.
Most OO language really fall under that category, too.
That's because most OO languages are also procedural programming languages (for historical reasons). OO is principally about how to organise data and the operations on it, which is orthogonal to whether the operations are sequences of commands or composite functions to be applied.
the problem is 'security' software is never as secure as promised
And the problem with OpenSSL is that they start out from the position "this is complicated" and then go straight to "so Joe Working Programmer should deal with all the complexity themselves" without properly spelling this out in very clear letters in a large font. That's abysmally awful. It leaves people exposed to trouble without them realising that this so.
That's a double edge sword as shown by the clusterfuck that is OpenSSL. When you start supporting many architectures then the strange hacks you need to do to make things work can be the ones that introduce the security risk.
If you're introducing strange hacks, it's probably a sign that the design of some of the rest of the code (being charitable here!) is wrong in the first place. Writing the code to be more portable, to use fewer quirks (ideally none), that's the way to go. Yes, it can make things long-winded, but it's worth it.
"Don't roll your own security" is advice aimed at people who don't know about security. Some of us have to implement and 'roll' the specs. The world looks different when your reputation is tied to your stuff not get broken before senility sets in. You can do it right, but you need all the elements in place including a well thought out spec.
A good start is to have some sort of test suite. When implementing a spec, TDD is very much the way to go. You should also try to make sure you've got tests for all the failure modes that you expect (including all the ones in the spec). Yes, that can be devilishly hard. Do it anyway.
when you've measured and proven the compiler is generating sub optimal code
That's the important part. Don't start mucking around with low-level assembly for things until you've proven that you've got a problem and that the fix you're proposing to work on is worthwhile. (Where a library gets very widely distributed, such as a basic math library, it may well become worthwhile very quickly. Most code doesn't get anything like that level of distribution.)
Of-course I am against slavery and initiation of force by anybody, however it is the government initiation of force that is the most immoral of all, since it is the 'law of the land', so to speak, so you can be born into a system that prearranged your slavery within it.
So, in effect you're denying that there is such a thing as society, as comprised of the bulk wishes and desires of the country that you live in, and consequently the use of taxation as a redistributative economic measure? That's a morally/politically consistent position, even though I thoroughly disagree with it.
The first step in security is to assume that your office network is the same as "the Internet": you don't know what's on there, it is full of malware and hackers, and they are actively out to try and get you.
Unfortunately, the office network is also definitely full of managers, and prizing a bit more convenience at the cost of "a little" more risk is a classic thing that managers order. They are also usually able to find people who will carry out the orders.
You IT security is only as good as your control of the hardware!
But you have to let the users on anyway. If you manage to completely secure systems so that it is completely impossible for any data to leak, you'll have excluded everyone who has legitimate reasons to have access, and you'll have cost the company a lot of money in the process. You'll be seen as the weak point in the whole process and will get replaced with someone less expensive and more compliant with what the business needs.
Clearcase sucks for Java. Anything else sucks for C/C++. Don't even consider Clearcase if you're an Eclipse shop. Don't even consider doing serious C++ job on Git. Just use the right tool and move on.
So... you're saying that anyone using git for a serious C project is an idiot? Hmm...
Also, lawyers and Microsoft combining to call the government a hypocrite? This is like a cesspool of double standards, each trying to be the worst.
The really big problem Microsoft has (and numerous other large US companies that run cloud services with datacenters in the EU, such as Amazon and IBM) is that if they give in with this, there will be lots of EU customers who will leave as soon as possible, and nothing that they'll be able to say or do will stop it short of relocating the company HQ and ownership structure entirely outside the US so the US government and courts really won't have jurisdiction (but will instead have to work through international treaties). This will be caused by the perception in the EU of overreach by the US, and the EU's generally fairly aggressive data protection laws.
At the very least, giving in on this will cost MS a huge amount of money to put right, and there'd be a real danger of an EU competitor being able to grow large enough to lock them out while they're sorting it all out (other US corporations would be in the same position).
Swapping shifting hands and not turning on your wipers to signal a turn are the only parts most have to relearn if they swap styles often.
When you're dealing with an automatic, it depends on what the car manufacturer thought was a good idea for their brand image; there's no benefit at all to either side (but you need to pick one). With a manual shift, you want the signal lever on the opposite side so that you are able to signal while changing gear.
The windscreen wiper control appears to migrate from side to side with no technical considerations at all, and headlight controls are even more variable...