I'm surprised the BBC gives-away free news on the web. They block their radio and television programs from being seen by anyone who has not paid a TV/radio license (UK citizens), so I would expect them to do the same for text. (shrug)
It's only advertising-free in the UK, just like their TV channels. (Though to be fair, their web ads are at least reasonably discreet; the ones on BBC World News - which I've watched a fair bit of over the years as I've been traveling - are much more annoying.)
What's this "we" you refer to? Are you one of those fascist imperialist base-0xA running dogs that insists on imposing your prejudiced stupidity on the rest of the world? Bet you do other crimes against humanity too, like using Lotus Notes on Vista...
MP3s lose some quality from CDs and FLAC/WAV, but who cares?
People who care about their music.
But they're part of the 5% and so don't matter. (Plus, I can assure you that the quality of the reproduction is not the same as the quality of the music. Music is far more abstract than a particular reproduction of a particular performance; it's only our grotesque copyright laws - and decades of brainwashing by popular musicians and record companies - that obscure this fundamental fact.)
Looks to me like the actual numbers aren't exactly short on underpants. Why the arbitrary x50 fudge factor? Why do they believe they'll get 50% better each year? (Why do they believe that everyone will have power supplies to support such heinous monsters?)
For fuck's sake, a contract isn't an atomic sacred unit of holy marketology. It's just a piece of paper.
Actually, it's not that either. It's an agreement between two (or more) parties. Writing the thing down is optional, but recommended if you ever want to deal with a dispute over the agreement.
Where things get complex is where one party is vastly more powerful than the other. (Or any time the parties are in different countries; international contracts are horrendously complex. But that's off topic.) This is because too often the powerful side tries to impose unfair conditions on the other that are deleterious. They don't have to, but too often they just can't resist the temptation. Because of this, there are laws (varying by jurisdiction) that restrain the degree of unfairness in a contract and things like that.
For more details, consult a lawyer. Really. Details matter, jurisdiction matters, and a contract lawyer is paid to know this stuff for you. (As a rule of thumb, if it sounds reasonable and legal to you when you read it all, it probably is valid.)
Just seeing that phrase makes me depressed at the stupidity of humanity. Why do so many people think that having the idea is all that's needed to make a business work? Everything I've seen indicates that it's got nothing to do with ideas and all to do with enormous amounts of hard work and lots of luck.
Ideas are cheap. Execution is what counts. Always. Even with Great American Novels, it's not the basic idea that the critics will like and the punters buy, but what you do with it. It's not even true with programming, for goodness' sake!
What, you think no hobby programmers have added quick hacks because they've spent two days chasing a bug and still can't find it? No open source projects have ever added quick hacks to make a feature they want to boast about work in time for their code freeze?
You also get odd things hacked in where one project is being adjusted to work around a new strange feature added elsewhere by a completely different project.
It's a primitive flow control construct. Like all primitives, it's best avoided when something else higher-level will do the job just as well, but when you've got nothing else that will do a neat job, it's better than bodging it with something else (e.g., replacing gotos with a mess of flag variables isn't usually an improvement as control logic - even gotos - is usually easier to read than complex expressions). But only languages that don't let you create your own control constructs need something as low-level as a raw goto.
Computed gotos are evil. If you ever need one, feel dirty.
So I have never forgotten the chainsaw quote, and while I can wield the chainsaw without making a mess, I saw first hand when others in the class tried to use GOTO what a mess you can make if you don't know EXACTLY what your code is doing.
If you want a real coding weapon of mass destruction, try the computed GOTO in a language with numbered lines. Get it wrong, and you've no idea what instruction is going to run next...
What happens if the cup has holes that open and close from time to time, and other people come pour more stuff from time to time? Then how do you predict the future temperature? I became a skeptic through listening to real climate scientists, the very ones who were saying the debate is over. There's just not enough data and their explanations become ever more tortured as more is added to what little we know. The rest is politics.
In that case, you model it as best you can and you provide a range of models covering different scenarios. Over time it will become clearer which scenarios are highly likely and which are outliers. But overall, the real issue is that while we're not sure what's going to happen and don't really even know the odds, we know for sure that we don't like what's been put at stake.
If you're cool with betting the future of human civilization on Earth against your friendly local big coal company's right to make a little more profit, that's nice. A lot of people think that's a really crappy tradeoff of risk and since they can't work out the probabilities well enough, they're deeply scared. Since it's pretty clear that any policy changes will take a long time to have an effect and the climate changes also take quite a long time to filter through (all that mass of water in the oceans has an effect after all) the problem is that by the time it is totally obvious to everyone, it's far too late to do any changes without getting significantly messed up in the meantime. Because of this, the "don't do anything now" crowd are getting a much more hostile reception than normal.
IMO, the real fix is to use the tax system to make the cost of goods and services take into account the actual environmental damage caused by them, so removing problems from externalized costs. (The problem with that... it's a very painful transition to get there from here.)
I don't understand why you people think that any OS can be imprevious to a trojan?
Nobody with half a brain thinks that. The only way to make an OS totally proof against trojans is to stop users from installing new apps, and that's something that general desktop computing hasn't gone down the road of.
What's curious about OSX is that it doesn't have the sort of culture that leads to trojans being a problem. I'm not sure why this is; maybe it is because Mac users are more inclined to buy their software? (Indeed, they buy things that on other platforms would be free...) Accepting (apparently) legitimate payments is not a black hat sort of thing to do, because it is far too easy to trace back to a real identity.
I suppose it also helps that there aren't that many "usability of security" issues in the supplied OSX core apps, so users are less likely to do something catastrophic by accident.
Most viruses these days will work with almost any browser. IE just has a longer legacy of old vulnerabilities. Sure, you could probably protect yourself by using the Cello browser with the OS/Warp operating system, but aside from going that far, you had better use your head and not get cocky (even Linux isn't bulletproof). The ultimate vector of any virus isn't the software, it's the user.
If you're running Firefox with NoScript, nothing is going to get through without you deliberately choosing to allow it. While yes, that still leaves the "cute kitten screensaver" attack vector open, it does make drive-by attacks much rarer.
As a side-benefit, it speeds up browsing by stopping page display from being held up for a stupid flash advert. (I don't mind ads, but hate being held up waiting for them. Webmasters, take note...)
Re:What have they been doing until now?
on
NASA May Outsource
·
· Score: 1
(e.g. Atlas V, Delta IV, SpaceX Falcon 9)
None of which are rated for manned space flight.
What good is manned flight to orbit if you can't afford to do anything up there?
In this case, you could argue that an EELV-based solution wouldn't be as good as a working Ares I, but EELVs are going to be cheaper and faster to man-rate, and with the limited budget they shouldn't waste money re-inventing the wheel.
Well, in that case arguably the EELVs are better because they let more be achieved overall. Spending a lot doing one part perfectly means having to scale back elsewhere (well, not unless you have an infinite budget, which nobody's proposing that NASA should have). If this rubs anyone up the wrong way, they need to remember that it's all about trying to optimize globally rather than locally.
This is what our factories have to compete with. Plants which poison children.
Laws that protect us from this kind of behavior add costs that push companies to these countries.
So get a law passed that makes it illegal to import goods produced under those sorts of conditions. Yes, it will increase prices that you pay, but surely it's worth paying a bit to know that you're not responsible for killing children by being a cheap scumbag?
Right now, you're in a market where people are desperate to sell you goods. Assuming you're not bankrupt, that should put you in a very powerful position to make demands. Alternatively you can just sit there, do nothing, and let those unscrupulous people poison the children for you. <sarcasm> After all, it's OK because you're not doing it personally, can't actually see it being done on Fox News, and anyway they're non-white foreigners. </sarcasm>
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised the BBC gives-away free news on the web. They block their radio and television programs from being seen by anyone who has not paid a TV/radio license (UK citizens), so I would expect them to do the same for text. (shrug)
It's only advertising-free in the UK, just like their TV channels. (Though to be fair, their web ads are at least reasonably discreet; the ones on BBC World News - which I've watched a fair bit of over the years as I've been traveling - are much more annoying.)
Where is my opt-out?
You don't need to own a TV. Or live in the UK. Either will work just fine for getting you out of paying the license fee.
Bottom line - dividing by 1024 is a bug.
Not at the hardware level it isn't. Shifts are ridiculously cheap.
We prefer decimal system to binary or hex
What's this "we" you refer to? Are you one of those fascist imperialist base-0xA running dogs that insists on imposing your prejudiced stupidity on the rest of the world? Bet you do other crimes against humanity too, like using Lotus Notes on Vista...
Tera = 1<<40
Warning! Left shift exceeds side of value.
You probably want
1LL
No, you want to be using a language that has arbitrary precision ints instead.
microsoft not only has dominance on the desktop & laptops, they also have damn near 100% market share in the EVIL department too.
Damn! I didn't know that Halliburton outsourced that sort of thing.
MP3s lose some quality from CDs and FLAC/WAV, but who cares?
People who care about their music.
But they're part of the 5% and so don't matter. (Plus, I can assure you that the quality of the reproduction is not the same as the quality of the music. Music is far more abstract than a particular reproduction of a particular performance; it's only our grotesque copyright laws - and decades of brainwashing by popular musicians and record companies - that obscure this fundamental fact.)
CPU-Alone: 1.2^6 = 3X
CPU+GPU: 50 * 1.????underpants??? = 570X
At a guess, it's this:
50 * 1.5^6
Looks to me like the actual numbers aren't exactly short on underpants. Why the arbitrary x50 fudge factor? Why do they believe they'll get 50% better each year? (Why do they believe that everyone will have power supplies to support such heinous monsters?)
For fuck's sake, a contract isn't an atomic sacred unit of holy marketology. It's just a piece of paper.
Actually, it's not that either. It's an agreement between two (or more) parties. Writing the thing down is optional, but recommended if you ever want to deal with a dispute over the agreement.
Where things get complex is where one party is vastly more powerful than the other. (Or any time the parties are in different countries; international contracts are horrendously complex. But that's off topic.) This is because too often the powerful side tries to impose unfair conditions on the other that are deleterious. They don't have to, but too often they just can't resist the temptation. Because of this, there are laws (varying by jurisdiction) that restrain the degree of unfairness in a contract and things like that.
For more details, consult a lawyer. Really. Details matter, jurisdiction matters, and a contract lawyer is paid to know this stuff for you. (As a rule of thumb, if it sounds reasonable and legal to you when you read it all, it probably is valid.)
There I was, looking for a story about veterinarians in Virginia...
Just seeing that phrase makes me depressed at the stupidity of humanity. Why do so many people think that having the idea is all that's needed to make a business work? Everything I've seen indicates that it's got nothing to do with ideas and all to do with enormous amounts of hard work and lots of luck.
Ideas are cheap. Execution is what counts. Always. Even with Great American Novels, it's not the basic idea that the critics will like and the punters buy, but what you do with it. It's not even true with programming, for goodness' sake!
What, you think no hobby programmers have added quick hacks because they've spent two days chasing a bug and still can't find it? No open source projects have ever added quick hacks to make a feature they want to boast about work in time for their code freeze?
You also get odd things hacked in where one project is being adjusted to work around a new strange feature added elsewhere by a completely different project.
Speaking of cheating, once I called my player save file "makefile" to discourage people from looking at it or modifying it.
I think you'll find that 'sendmail.cf' works even better there.
My boss however *only* does coding tricks. And he puts them in one big 1k line function.
And is proud of it.
So, how cool is it really to work for Larry Wall?
Code in a limited memory space where you are not only calculating line numbers for gotos, but add in massive overlay usage to the mix.
Oh, overlays. I've been trying for 15 years to forget them. Thanks a bunch for bringing the nightmares back.
GOTO :-) (or is that two..?)
It's a primitive flow control construct. Like all primitives, it's best avoided when something else higher-level will do the job just as well, but when you've got nothing else that will do a neat job, it's better than bodging it with something else (e.g., replacing gotos with a mess of flag variables isn't usually an improvement as control logic - even gotos - is usually easier to read than complex expressions). But only languages that don't let you create your own control constructs need something as low-level as a raw goto.
Computed gotos are evil. If you ever need one, feel dirty.
So I have never forgotten the chainsaw quote, and while I can wield the chainsaw without making a mess, I saw first hand when others in the class tried to use GOTO what a mess you can make if you don't know EXACTLY what your code is doing.
If you want a real coding weapon of mass destruction, try the computed GOTO in a language with numbered lines. Get it wrong, and you've no idea what instruction is going to run next...
What happens if the cup has holes that open and close from time to time, and other people come pour more stuff from time to time? Then how do you predict the future temperature? I became a skeptic through listening to real climate scientists, the very ones who were saying the debate is over. There's just not enough data and their explanations become ever more tortured as more is added to what little we know. The rest is politics.
In that case, you model it as best you can and you provide a range of models covering different scenarios. Over time it will become clearer which scenarios are highly likely and which are outliers. But overall, the real issue is that while we're not sure what's going to happen and don't really even know the odds, we know for sure that we don't like what's been put at stake.
If you're cool with betting the future of human civilization on Earth against your friendly local big coal company's right to make a little more profit, that's nice. A lot of people think that's a really crappy tradeoff of risk and since they can't work out the probabilities well enough, they're deeply scared. Since it's pretty clear that any policy changes will take a long time to have an effect and the climate changes also take quite a long time to filter through (all that mass of water in the oceans has an effect after all) the problem is that by the time it is totally obvious to everyone, it's far too late to do any changes without getting significantly messed up in the meantime. Because of this, the "don't do anything now" crowd are getting a much more hostile reception than normal.
IMO, the real fix is to use the tax system to make the cost of goods and services take into account the actual environmental damage caused by them, so removing problems from externalized costs. (The problem with that... it's a very painful transition to get there from here.)
"Everyone agrees with us" is not a scientific argument.
Especially as "everyone" includes all the kooks and corporate shills too. Just sayin'.
I don't understand why you people think that any OS can be imprevious to a trojan?
Nobody with half a brain thinks that. The only way to make an OS totally proof against trojans is to stop users from installing new apps, and that's something that general desktop computing hasn't gone down the road of.
What's curious about OSX is that it doesn't have the sort of culture that leads to trojans being a problem. I'm not sure why this is; maybe it is because Mac users are more inclined to buy their software? (Indeed, they buy things that on other platforms would be free...) Accepting (apparently) legitimate payments is not a black hat sort of thing to do, because it is far too easy to trace back to a real identity.
I suppose it also helps that there aren't that many "usability of security" issues in the supplied OSX core apps, so users are less likely to do something catastrophic by accident.
Most viruses these days will work with almost any browser. IE just has a longer legacy of old vulnerabilities. Sure, you could probably protect yourself by using the Cello browser with the OS/Warp operating system, but aside from going that far, you had better use your head and not get cocky (even Linux isn't bulletproof). The ultimate vector of any virus isn't the software, it's the user.
If you're running Firefox with NoScript, nothing is going to get through without you deliberately choosing to allow it. While yes, that still leaves the "cute kitten screensaver" attack vector open, it does make drive-by attacks much rarer.
As a side-benefit, it speeds up browsing by stopping page display from being held up for a stupid flash advert. (I don't mind ads, but hate being held up waiting for them. Webmasters, take note...)
(e.g. Atlas V, Delta IV, SpaceX Falcon 9)
None of which are rated for manned space flight.
What good is manned flight to orbit if you can't afford to do anything up there?
In this case, you could argue that an EELV-based solution wouldn't be as good as a working Ares I, but EELVs are going to be cheaper and faster to man-rate, and with the limited budget they shouldn't waste money re-inventing the wheel.
Well, in that case arguably the EELVs are better because they let more be achieved overall. Spending a lot doing one part perfectly means having to scale back elsewhere (well, not unless you have an infinite budget, which nobody's proposing that NASA should have). If this rubs anyone up the wrong way, they need to remember that it's all about trying to optimize globally rather than locally.
Well, at least there are no government bureaucrats standing between the sick people and the doctors who could detect and treat these diseases.
Sure. You've got private bureaucrats instead. More cost, less accountability. Tell me again how it's better.
This is what our factories have to compete with. Plants which poison children.
Laws that protect us from this kind of behavior add costs that push companies to these countries.
So get a law passed that makes it illegal to import goods produced under those sorts of conditions. Yes, it will increase prices that you pay, but surely it's worth paying a bit to know that you're not responsible for killing children by being a cheap scumbag?
Right now, you're in a market where people are desperate to sell you goods. Assuming you're not bankrupt, that should put you in a very powerful position to make demands. Alternatively you can just sit there, do nothing, and let those unscrupulous people poison the children for you. <sarcasm> After all, it's OK because you're not doing it personally, can't actually see it being done on Fox News, and anyway they're non-white foreigners. </sarcasm>