There is no way of preventing it that still allows your employees to function,
Yes there is. By default sequester all downloaded content to a sandboxed environment with very limited access rights to anything (such as no access to other files, and no access to the network without being given explicit permission for every action). Making functionality to make that trivial to do would be a killer app for virtualization technology. For most users, having a shared clipboard to cut and paste data, images and other info scrubbed clean of anything resembling script or executable stuff from the sandboxes would be sufficient to get the data they need out.
You'd still need a way of bypassing it for things like application downloads, but even most apps could be sandboxed - for the most part they have no business accessing files other than those a user gives explicit permission to or that are part of the app. I like the Java security model - I wish OS's would enforce a similar model for all system access. It would make it so much harder for malicious code.
You are assuming that any such technology would send messages in a way that could be picked up by receivers we already have. There's no reason to believe that.
Presumably "counterfeit" here refers to something that is intended to look like the original, whereas "piratical" refers to something that is merely a copy without any attempt to pass it off as a legal copy. That's my guess at least. If so, "counterfeit and piratical" is just the combination of both, not a separate type.
It also would have no real freedom to do things which are legal but enough out of the mainstream to cause significant problems if your neighbors and family knows. Depending on where you live, that can be anything from being a member of a fringe political group to sexual preferences.
The problem is that if you have a problem that decompose neatly into four parts, and you want to be able to take advantage of new systems with far more cores, the amount of work you may need to do to decompose the problem further may be orders of magnitude more complex than getting it to decompose into the original four parts. The problem isn't when it decomposes naturally into more parts than you have cores, but when it decomposes into fewer parts.
Developers that fail to handle that will be unable to compete with those who can as the number of cores in relatively low end systems increase and not parallelizing your apps sufficiently leave you unable to take advantage of the full potential of the systems it runs on.
Speaking from European point of view, I've yet to see a single US channel broadcast anything but severely right wing news.
Try checking out some European news and compare. Here we have a very wide spectrum, while in the US the mainstream news is right wing or slightly more right wing.
Re:git is pretty cool, take a closer look
on
Linus on GIT and SCM
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· Score: 2, Informative
Reading people say stuff like "Subversion is awesome" makes me wince. How can something that doesn't have "real" branches, and doesn't have tags OF ANY KIND, be useful for anything?
The concept of tags is a crutch for systems where a versioned copy operation is too expensive. Since subversion keeps track of history across copies, and also doesn't copy the file content unless there's changes, there's simply no reason to have a separate concept of tags in subversion. The reason systems like CVS has tags is exactly because branching is expensive in CVS.
And a copy IS a "real" branch. To quote you further:
"One great thing about git is that so much of it is just files in the.git dir and shell scripts that combine very simple low-level functions. For instance, you can create a branch just by saving the SHA1 ID of the tip into a file in.git. You can branch off any point in the history this way, including branches you've deleted in the past (git keeps all the old commit objects by default, even ones that aren't pointed to by any branch or tag.. this is very simple and understandable model, like reference-counting in a way)."
Gee... Wonder how Subversion does it? Oh, that's right, it keeps a single revision number that uniquely define each commit, and a branch is just a copy of a subset of data at a specific revision, and you can branch of any point in the history by saving the revision number, including branches you've deleted in the past.
As for your "A-B-C" example, I just don't see the point - it's just a type of situation that's never come up for me. However, if you absolutely want to do it in subversion, you certainly can. It's not particularly hard either - all you have to do is selectively copy or merge the changes you want into your working directory.
I'm not saying Subversion is perfect, but don't blame Subversion for things that reflect your poor understanding of it rather than actual limitations.
You seem to think evolution can't lead to genes that preclude survival of individuals from becoming widespread, but that's bullshit. Evolution doesn't "care" about individuals - what matters is if the expression of the gene causes a net increase in the odds of someone surviving and passing on their genes than without it.
If one or more genes lead to homosexuality or increase the chances of it when they are expressed alone or together, then clearly those genes would need to have other effects alone or together that would cause a net beneficial effect in terms of the spread of those genes. There would be nothing unusual with that.
Trying to dismiss the idea with comments like that just makes you seem silly.
IANAL, but I don't know of a single jurisdiction that has the concept of moral rights that would allow any restriction like that. Moral rights are very limited, and are tied to things like attribution or rights intended to protect the reputation of the creator of a work, not restriction on how a recipient of a work makes use of it.
Btw their other idea is to get rid of the apple iBuds and get quality recievers. Hint, This is what got the less interchangable results? I don't exactly see why getting a "higher quality" headset would be desirable if it creates less of a difference instead of more of a difference between two bit rates.
Sorry, but that is just a completely clueless comment. They are recommending the earbuds that most of their test subjects preferred listening to, which makes sense. That it creates less of a difference does not have to mean that it reproduces the sound less accurately - on the contrary it could just as well be the cheap apple ones that reproduces the 128k bitrate ones worse than necessary.
Getting a higher quality set is desirable if it sounds better. It's not as if listeners will be buying more expensive earbuds so they can oh and ah over the differences between different bitrates.
As for me, if anything the article shows me that if I decide I want better sound quality, I'll rather buy better earbuds than pay for higher bitrates.
If it's DRM less really doesn't matter much - ITunes lets you "backup" your tracks to CD. The DRM only stops less experienced computer users and creates a slight hassle for the rest of us if you really want to take your music somewhere else.
Massive RAM disks with battery backup are available, but they are ridiculously expensive and also large unless you're satisfied with very small amounts of storage. They're primarily targeted at people with large database systems etc. who for whatever reason can't or won't partition their system to boost IO performance.
You can easily make flash based storage units that are fast as an alternative - it's just a matter of how much you parallelize the unit. However that too drives cost.
I share your frustration, though - most of the systems I work on are IO constrained rather than CPU constrained.
I like RPM, but that is a problem. Particularly when the dependencies doesn't specify what the package need to operate, but what it need to operate in a specific way. There's plenty of cases where you can just rebuild an RPM with a Require: entry taken out and everything works fine... I'd love to see a way of specifying "recommended" dependencies, that doesn't have to be present, but that will add capabilities. It could dramatically cut dependencies for a huge number of RPMs.
Another issue, though, is that a lot of apps are prime examples of bad separation of concerns - you'll find tons of dependencies caused by compile time (i.e. via configure) decisions that could trivially have been deferred to load time with trivial plugin infrastructures, giving users much more flexibility.
I'm used to recompiling stuff, but I'd rather not have to much with the packages I install just to disable or enable features, and I'm not alone, which is a key reason why some distros err on the side of enabling almost every option and add a ton of dependencies instead.
Not only that, but even if you die, if you save someone else which share most of your genes and are more likely to spread them (for example a child), those genes are more likely to spread than if you let someone else die. Since, throughout most of a gene's "lifespan" in a population you will share it with people around you, there is a certain level of benefit for your genes even in you taking risks for your family or society - you may end up not procreating but on the balance improve the chance of some gene spreading.
Natural selection is one of several mechanism behind evolution. When certain traits get removed from the gene pool through natural selection, that is just as much evolution as when mutation or other mechanisms change the gene pool.
That argument only works if people happen to agree with you that the Christian god truly is all-powerful or all-knowing and all good in the strictest sense.
Unfortunately, you'll pretty quickly meet people who add qualifications or work their way around it. A typical example to unify the all powerful, all knowing and all good bit is for them to say that he's all good because he's used his power to create the least amount of suffering possible, and that since he's all knowing you shouldn't question why there's still so much suffering because he knows best, being all knowing and all that.
It's a possibility, no matter how ridiculous, and we can't disprove it. The best we can do is point to suffering and keep asking _why_ that suffering is necessary, and how stopping it would harm "God's plan" if he prevented it from happening. Incidentally, pointing to deaths doesn't work, as the perfect deflection to that is to say that God wanted to bring that person to heaven to end their suffering, and that the good coming out of that far outweighs any pain of those left behind.
It's a bit like playing chess with a brilliant chess player with the temper of a five year old. Most religious people have played this game in a highly defensive way all their lives. They know how to avoid giving up any territory, and whenever they feel threatened, they'll kick the board and run away crying and refuse to play with you again until they've purged it from their memory.
I myself think that atheism requires just as much faith as a person who believes in god. Who are you to know for a fact that something intelligent didn't create everything,
As an atheist, I don't. However that is no excuse to believe in a god without proof. I also don't know that you aren't the Tooth Fairy taking a break in between collecting teeth to write on Slashdot, but I have no rational reason to believe you are, so I don't. Nor do I believe you are Superman, or hold an infinite number of other ridiculous beliefs for exactly the same reason.
I can't prove that you aren't the Tooth Fairy or Superman without more information. Yet I will state categorically that you aren't unless I see proof to indicate that there is a possibility you could be, because the odds are vanishingly small and it seemingly violates a huge amount of knowledge I have of the world.
My lack of belief in a god is of exactly the same character. And so I say there is no god.
Since you can't prove the non-existence of something without having it precisely enough defined to be able to prove it can't exist, and the idea of gods differ so widely, proving the non-existence of the nebulous concept of "god" is impossible, so that's as far as it goes, just as with similar nebulous fantasy creatures.
something had to come from somewhere no one knows so why it is that it has to be nothing.
Why do you assume that atheists thinks the universe comes from nothing? A preferable alternative is to assume it came from another universe or another structure that could result in something like the Big Bang purely through natural processes.
As others have pointed out, introducing a "creator" achieves nothing - it just pushes the question of what the start was one step back. Who created the creator? And the creators creator?
We can't prove there was no creator, again, just as we can't prove an infinite number of other explanations for all kinds of actions. At the same time we have no reason to assume a complex solution involving a sentient being of enormous power all the time we have no observations to support such an assumption.
"Anachronistic ray gun" is not a precise description. An anachronism is something that is set in the wrong era. If we accept that it's even right to refer to an object as anachronistic in itself without a setting, it is still not a precise description. Using the term steampunk references it as something that is likely to have been anachronistic if set in Victorian times, but which is based around technological choices that seems archaic today, even if the object itself might even still be beyond technological reach. It also visually implies certain stylistic choices.
I'm not saying it's wrong to say "anachronistic ray gun", but it's not saying nearly as much. So come on, give us a concise description that avoids the use of "trendy slang" and is actually precise.
As someone who's never played any of the games, I saw it largely because of the CG, and liked it. However, the reason I saw it for the CG was that the CG was all that was being focused on in the advertising. Only geeks go to see a movie because it's better CG than previous movies, and so the trailers really did nothing to promote the movie to ordinary moviegoers. It was a fundamental marketing fuckup - trying to sell something based on qualities your customer couldn't care less about.
Just the way it should be. Well perhaps not burned, but brown. The ability to get me a steak that is juicy enough and red enough that my plate looks like I've just slaughtered an animal on it by the time I'm done is the measure of someone who knows how to do a good steak. I want it warm all the way through, but still pink/red all the way through or the flavor will have been completely ruined.
It's hard enough to find a steak house capable of delivering a truly rare steak that isn't lukewarm, and without warmer grills there's no way I'll bother eating a grilled steak.
It really annoys me that people keeps spreading that line. I, and many others, have done those config changes and still have to close Firefox regularly to reclaim memory. It takes a day or two at my regular usage for Firefox to eat 1-1.5GB of memory that it won't give back if I close tabs.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes there is. By default sequester all downloaded content to a sandboxed environment with very limited access rights to anything (such as no access to other files, and no access to the network without being given explicit permission for every action). Making functionality to make that trivial to do would be a killer app for virtualization technology. For most users, having a shared clipboard to cut and paste data, images and other info scrubbed clean of anything resembling script or executable stuff from the sandboxes would be sufficient to get the data they need out.
You'd still need a way of bypassing it for things like application downloads, but even most apps could be sandboxed - for the most part they have no business accessing files other than those a user gives explicit permission to or that are part of the app. I like the Java security model - I wish OS's would enforce a similar model for all system access. It would make it so much harder for malicious code.
You are assuming that any such technology would send messages in a way that could be picked up by receivers we already have. There's no reason to believe that.
Presumably "counterfeit" here refers to something that is intended to look like the original, whereas "piratical" refers to something that is merely a copy without any attempt to pass it off as a legal copy. That's my guess at least. If so, "counterfeit and piratical" is just the combination of both, not a separate type.
It also would have no real freedom to do things which are legal but enough out of the mainstream to cause significant problems if your neighbors and family knows. Depending on where you live, that can be anything from being a member of a fringe political group to sexual preferences.
Developers that fail to handle that will be unable to compete with those who can as the number of cores in relatively low end systems increase and not parallelizing your apps sufficiently leave you unable to take advantage of the full potential of the systems it runs on.
Try checking out some European news and compare. Here we have a very wide spectrum, while in the US the mainstream news is right wing or slightly more right wing.
The concept of tags is a crutch for systems where a versioned copy operation is too expensive. Since subversion keeps track of history across copies, and also doesn't copy the file content unless there's changes, there's simply no reason to have a separate concept of tags in subversion. The reason systems like CVS has tags is exactly because branching is expensive in CVS.
And a copy IS a "real" branch. To quote you further:
"One great thing about git is that so much of it is just files in the .git dir and shell scripts that combine very simple low-level functions. For instance, you can create a branch just by saving the SHA1 ID of the tip into a file in .git. You can branch off any point in the history this way, including branches you've deleted in the past (git keeps all the old commit objects by default, even ones that aren't pointed to by any branch or tag.. this is very simple and understandable model, like reference-counting in a way)."
Gee... Wonder how Subversion does it? Oh, that's right, it keeps a single revision number that uniquely define each commit, and a branch is just a copy of a subset of data at a specific revision, and you can branch of any point in the history by saving the revision number, including branches you've deleted in the past.
As for your "A-B-C" example, I just don't see the point - it's just a type of situation that's never come up for me. However, if you absolutely want to do it in subversion, you certainly can. It's not particularly hard either - all you have to do is selectively copy or merge the changes you want into your working directory.
I'm not saying Subversion is perfect, but don't blame Subversion for things that reflect your poor understanding of it rather than actual limitations.
And that's ALL the information we need about your sex life.
If one or more genes lead to homosexuality or increase the chances of it when they are expressed alone or together, then clearly those genes would need to have other effects alone or together that would cause a net beneficial effect in terms of the spread of those genes. There would be nothing unusual with that.
Trying to dismiss the idea with comments like that just makes you seem silly.
Sorry, but that is just a completely clueless comment. They are recommending the earbuds that most of their test subjects preferred listening to, which makes sense. That it creates less of a difference does not have to mean that it reproduces the sound less accurately - on the contrary it could just as well be the cheap apple ones that reproduces the 128k bitrate ones worse than necessary.
Getting a higher quality set is desirable if it sounds better. It's not as if listeners will be buying more expensive earbuds so they can oh and ah over the differences between different bitrates.
As for me, if anything the article shows me that if I decide I want better sound quality, I'll rather buy better earbuds than pay for higher bitrates.
If it's DRM less really doesn't matter much - ITunes lets you "backup" your tracks to CD. The DRM only stops less experienced computer users and creates a slight hassle for the rest of us if you really want to take your music somewhere else.
You can easily make flash based storage units that are fast as an alternative - it's just a matter of how much you parallelize the unit. However that too drives cost.
I share your frustration, though - most of the systems I work on are IO constrained rather than CPU constrained.
Another issue, though, is that a lot of apps are prime examples of bad separation of concerns - you'll find tons of dependencies caused by compile time (i.e. via configure) decisions that could trivially have been deferred to load time with trivial plugin infrastructures, giving users much more flexibility.
I'm used to recompiling stuff, but I'd rather not have to much with the packages I install just to disable or enable features, and I'm not alone, which is a key reason why some distros err on the side of enabling almost every option and add a ton of dependencies instead.
Natural selection is one of several mechanism behind evolution. When certain traits get removed from the gene pool through natural selection, that is just as much evolution as when mutation or other mechanisms change the gene pool.
Unfortunately, you'll pretty quickly meet people who add qualifications or work their way around it. A typical example to unify the all powerful, all knowing and all good bit is for them to say that he's all good because he's used his power to create the least amount of suffering possible, and that since he's all knowing you shouldn't question why there's still so much suffering because he knows best, being all knowing and all that.
It's a possibility, no matter how ridiculous, and we can't disprove it. The best we can do is point to suffering and keep asking _why_ that suffering is necessary, and how stopping it would harm "God's plan" if he prevented it from happening. Incidentally, pointing to deaths doesn't work, as the perfect deflection to that is to say that God wanted to bring that person to heaven to end their suffering, and that the good coming out of that far outweighs any pain of those left behind.
It's a bit like playing chess with a brilliant chess player with the temper of a five year old. Most religious people have played this game in a highly defensive way all their lives. They know how to avoid giving up any territory, and whenever they feel threatened, they'll kick the board and run away crying and refuse to play with you again until they've purged it from their memory.
Like most religious people the best bet is that he knows this because mommy or daddy told him so.
As an atheist, I don't. However that is no excuse to believe in a god without proof. I also don't know that you aren't the Tooth Fairy taking a break in between collecting teeth to write on Slashdot, but I have no rational reason to believe you are, so I don't. Nor do I believe you are Superman, or hold an infinite number of other ridiculous beliefs for exactly the same reason.
I can't prove that you aren't the Tooth Fairy or Superman without more information. Yet I will state categorically that you aren't unless I see proof to indicate that there is a possibility you could be, because the odds are vanishingly small and it seemingly violates a huge amount of knowledge I have of the world.
My lack of belief in a god is of exactly the same character. And so I say there is no god.
Since you can't prove the non-existence of something without having it precisely enough defined to be able to prove it can't exist, and the idea of gods differ so widely, proving the non-existence of the nebulous concept of "god" is impossible, so that's as far as it goes, just as with similar nebulous fantasy creatures.
something had to come from somewhere no one knows so why it is that it has to be nothing. Why do you assume that atheists thinks the universe comes from nothing? A preferable alternative is to assume it came from another universe or another structure that could result in something like the Big Bang purely through natural processes.
As others have pointed out, introducing a "creator" achieves nothing - it just pushes the question of what the start was one step back. Who created the creator? And the creators creator?
We can't prove there was no creator, again, just as we can't prove an infinite number of other explanations for all kinds of actions. At the same time we have no reason to assume a complex solution involving a sentient being of enormous power all the time we have no observations to support such an assumption.
I'm not saying it's wrong to say "anachronistic ray gun", but it's not saying nearly as much. So come on, give us a concise description that avoids the use of "trendy slang" and is actually precise.
These specifically reference a subgenre that never concerned itself with realism.
Realism or at least practicality in sci fi has it's place, but this is not it.
As someone who's never played any of the games, I saw it largely because of the CG, and liked it. However, the reason I saw it for the CG was that the CG was all that was being focused on in the advertising. Only geeks go to see a movie because it's better CG than previous movies, and so the trailers really did nothing to promote the movie to ordinary moviegoers. It was a fundamental marketing fuckup - trying to sell something based on qualities your customer couldn't care less about.
It's hard enough to find a steak house capable of delivering a truly rare steak that isn't lukewarm, and without warmer grills there's no way I'll bother eating a grilled steak.
Finally someone with useful advice on the memory issue rather than the tired old line about caching.... Installing Leak Monitor now. Thanks!
It really annoys me that people keeps spreading that line. I, and many others, have done those config changes and still have to close Firefox regularly to reclaim memory. It takes a day or two at my regular usage for Firefox to eat 1-1.5GB of memory that it won't give back if I close tabs.
Why do you keep spreading this bullshit? For those who report large and rapid memory leaks with Firefox this makes _no_ difference.