Since the redesign there is no way for me to filter Idle.
I thought I was alone in noticing. You used to be able to filter it in the old index, and I did. Some[who?] have speculated that they have deliberately made it hard to filter Idle because it helps to push traffic to other chosen sites. I noticed some submitters commenting in threads that their submissions' links have been changed from direct links to the content over to those annoying adword-infested blogs that so many complain about.
I don't want to risk filtering a story about idle CPU time just because it has the word "idle" in it. And even when I do filter Idle, I still get Idle stories showing up. It doesn't work.
I triaged the problem differently than you did: I decided that I loathe Idle enough that I am willing to lose ham in order to kill more of the spam. Of course, as you pointed out, it doesn't work if they studiously avoid using the word "Idle" in the submission.
After the redesign, many options simply don't work.
I know. Since the redesign, I have lived in constant fear of JonKatz returning to post more stories, with no way for me to block him anymore (haha). I believe I originally filtered him out back in 2001. Ah, good times on the old Slashdot...
I have noticed this as well. I chalked it up to a possible abandonment by Slashdot of ACID principles over to the antithesis, namely BASE "(Basically Available, Soft state, Eventual consistency)".
"Eventually consistent"... "I Can't Believe it's not Butter!" (no one can tell the difference!). Personally, I am a strong advocate of ACID and dislike NoSQL. I would really have to be painted into a corner in terms of scalability to relax ACID in favor of a BASE approach to anything remotely important or significant.
Note: I have no citation or evidence that Slashdot has pursued this strategy besides observations like these, so this essentially pointless speculation on my part. Why did I bother to share it with the world then?
Heh. This seems to be a recurring theme. Maybe there is a reason they have been referred to as "Perfidious Albion" (I imagine this is best said in Kirk's "KHAAAAN!" voice).
So, we'll be in UTC+1 for the winter, UTC+2 for the summer, instead of UTC and UTC+1.
Isn't there some fundamental irony here? I mean, UTC is based on GMT. This proposal is intended to fundamentally shift the time zone away from the meridian that was originally defined... by the UK... that runs right through the UK.
The prime meridian is completely arbitrary, but out of the whole world, the UK was allowed to choose it and then base GMT/UTC from it. The more interesting implication is that this proposal is an effort to ensure your "noon" is no longer ever defined as the point when the sun is highest in the UK sky. I mean, the solar/astronomical observations at the Royal Observatory were putatively the reason GMT existed in the first place (and I guarantee the heavenly bodies haven't shifted, haha).
...human lives have a maximum dollar amount attached, of course.
Of course they do. Would you honestly argue that it would be practical to spend the entire GDP of the United States to save a single life?
I know this isn't precisely you meant by your sarcastic vituperation of corporatism, but your implication was absolute. If we can agree that "1 life per GDP of US" is above the upper bound of value of human life, then the debate becomes a matter of establishing what the real value is. I read this week in the NYT that US government agencies are currently pegging it in the 4 to 7 million USD range. Naturally, whether this is the appropriate valuation is open for debate.
See: using one way encryption (hashes) to perform two-way (reversible) encryption.
Okay, I have been wondering about this since last evening.
I'll bite: how does one perform reversible encryption using hashes, given that hashes are not bijective from the domain to the fixed hash output length codomain? Even if you form an algorithmic construct that limits the domain such that the hash function could potentially be injective in the codomain, how do you ensure that it is surjective? Furthermore, isn't the entire point of cryptographic hash function design to make it so that the inverse function is Very Hard To Determine (ie. how would 'decryption' work)?
Those bootleg DVDs, their little brothers the bootleg CDs, their cousins the bootleg shoes, and their close friends the stolen goods, fund the same underground economy that supports drug running and other nasty social ills.
"Combined with a form of fusion, the machines had found all the energy they would ever need..."
The combustion reaction is roughly: hydrocarbons + O2 => energy + H2O + CO2
There is nothing inherently preventing the reaction from being run backwards. Plants do it all the time. However, why not skip the plant stage? There are all sorts of problems with arable land being consumed for biofuel production, even if we disregard corn ethanol. So, why not make the hydrocarbons directly?
This is not a new idea, and it is not theoretical only:
We need to stop conflating petroleum's source with its capacity as a "battery". We are always going to need hydrocarbons for plastics, oils, etc. Also, the energy density of gasoline, at ~45 MJ/kg, is orders of magnitude better than the best battery technology available.
It would be awesome to run reverse combustion at large-scale nuclear facilities. It would benefit from improved efficiency at the nuclear plants due to running the reaction on thermal energy rather than going through the relatively inefficient step of thermal to electrical conversion. This approach would be, by definition, carbon neutral. Hell, if we wanted to remove CO2 from the atmosphere we could just run the plants in overtime and pump the hydrocarbons back into the geological reservoirs we drained in the past (would the EPA have a problem with that? Hmm...)
The potential benefits are significant: a single point solution that retains all the current infrastructure investment in petroleum distribution/consumption, no issues with hydrocarbon "self-discharge" like batteries/ultracaps have, excellent energy density, etc. We will always need hydrocarbons, so why wean ourselves off of them?
...just don't conflate the use of hydrocarbons with their source. If we can make the source clean/renewable, then what further problems exist? I freely admit much more research & engineering is necessary in this field, but all of these prognostications engage in similar thought exercises (including TFA).
tell me, how many would gelman have killed if he had a gun instead of a knife? understand yet?
Just to weigh in on this facet of the debate, I would like to point out that you have here committed a logical fallacy often referred to as Moving the Goalposts.
I've got friends who work in hospital security who have a devil of a time with people leaving their passwords and usernames on sticky-notes everywhere. Building security has problems with assholes defeating the building's fire alarm so they can sneak out to a fire escape (or worse yet, a ground-floor alley) and smoke and get back in.
You had me up until this point. While your cited cases might be reasonable, there is also the all-to-frequent case where "security" regulations induce this behavior.
What does hospital security expect users to do when users are required to rotate passwords every two weeks, have a 12 character long mix of upper/lowercase alpha's and numerics, and then also be subject to a 7 password history non-reuse restriction? Security is cognizant that the result of these provisions will be that users write down their passwords on stickies, so how is this more secure than allowing people to pick a less complex password and retain it longer?
The answer is that this presumes that everyone is playing the same game, with the goal to be the best possible security equilibrium state balanced against inconvenience/usability. Running counter to this is security's CYA factor: they experience no penalty for the insane password restrictions that reduce overall security, because if there is a security breach from the post-it passwords they can dump all the blame on the hapless user for violating the published security protocol that prohibits such actions. So, security has a payoff table that disrupts the equilibrium resulting in the paradoxical, reduced security steady state that is observed in these cases (ie. security is externalizing the costs of implementing the high-grade security practices).
PS. As for defeating the fire alarms, maybe they shouldn't have turned the entire hospital into a "tobacco-free campus", with the nearest "approved" smoking area located six blocks away. This is basic psychology. Normal people like to abide by the rules/laws even if they find them onerous, but there is a limit to their willingness to comply. This is essentially what happened to the entire US during the Prohibition. Again, as I said, your cited cases might be reasonable, but I have seen many that were not.
I most certainly don't want a browser with any kind of RT guarantee, but a "best effort" one.
In order for the browser to make any sort of guarantee like this in a multitasking system it must be running in an RTOS. Concordantly, your fears are very likely misplaced, because everything in normal OS'es is some flavor of "best effort" (again, unless you are actually running an RTOS).
Protip: process priority level "Realtime" in Windows NT kernels... isn't. Similarly, setting a -20 nice level doesn't magically turn your MacOS/*n?x processes into realtime either.
So, while my point about the NRVC is accurate, I missed the obvious issue that California is not a member of the NRVC. However, they do belong to the Driver License Compact. Most states belong to both the DLC and the NRVC:
As you can see from the linked map, the net result is that your home state will yank your license if you ignore a traffic citation from California unless you are from Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Tennessee, or Wisconsin. If you live in one of those states and receive a citation from California you will find that you will likely have to post bail to the Californian police officer at the time of your citation.
And what do you do if the bill isn't paid? Suspend the registration? Cali can't do that to out of state plates
Using similar reasoning have you ever tried ignoring a traffic ticket that you got out of state? You will discover that your own state will revoke your license.
45 of the 50 states belong to the Non-Resident Violator Compact. So, while California can't yank your license, they can report you to your own state who will. Check out the very creepy & insidious v2.0 of the NRVC: the Driver License Agreement. Ugh... if it is fully ratified, then the "or Canada/Mexico" part of your point could also become an issue.
Admittedly, I haven't done the specific research to determine whether ignoring tolls in California using an out of state vehicle would cause them to issue a citation against the registered owner. The scenario doesn't seem far-fetched, because that's what stoplight camera operators do.
Now, to parody a slashdot stereotype, I will attempt to acquire an Inisghtful mod by posing a speciously witty consideration that was obviously discussed by the system engineers in the first 10 minutes of the initial design meeting for this system:
"LOL, I am just going to splash my license plates with mud 'accidentally' and then I can drive for free! Hahaha, stupid designers! I teh smartest!!1!"
It was not done intentionally, it was a matter of serious errors made by government when serious bad harvest occurred.
"I accidentally millions of people. Is that dangerous?"
Most of data on Holodomor that is known in USA and other countries is a falsification by Yushchenko
The data is unequivocal: millions of people died due to policy. This is not seriously debated. The Wikipedia article is well-cited. Cf:
"One modern calculation that uses demographic data, including that recently available from Soviet archives, narrows the losses to about 3.2 million or, allowing for the lack of precise data, 3 million to 3.5 million." (followed by three citations)
Maybe Yushchenko secretly changed the Soviet archives, too! How deep does the conspiracy go?
All countries had serious problems in past.
Countries with failed policies that left millions of dead? I guess I can think of PRC's "Great Leap Forward" under Mao that left tens of millions dead.
I would have guaranteed quality education. I would have guaranteed jobsite, no matter if I like that work or not.
It seems people in the US can get this same situation by joining the military. The government will reimburse college expenses and will guarantee you a job, but does not really care if the soldiers like their job assignment.
And now, without USSR, I had to be flat out for get an education. And that education give me nothing but a certificate of degree. I had to work during my student days, because the rate of scholarships for students in Russia are quite funny.
This sounds very similar to the US. Most students have to go into serious debt to finance their education, and the debt often requires decades to pay off. Many students work on-campus at the university for tuition waivers, but others help to finance their education via a regular job.
I am uncertain what you meant by scholarship rates being "quite funny", but in the US the government and other institutions usually determine how much financial aid to give based on the student's family's income and wealth. That means students might not get much financial aid if their parents are not helping to pay for college, because the government formula expects the parents to pay part of the costs. Of course, there are also merit scholarships that can be won based on academic performance in high school and on standardized tests.
As for the education giving you only a certificate of degree, requiring you to self-teach: all I can say is that I agree. Most of the interesting and useful things I have learned and used in my professional life I had to teach myself. However, to be competitive in the job market I needed to have my undergraduate degree. I got the certificate and that helped to launch my career.
It would be impossible for me to starve to death
Are there many people who starve to death in Russia? In the US there are many privately-run (not government) charities and homeless shelters that give free meals to the homeless and a place to sleep, with no questions asked.
In Russia you have a fair chance, but you shoul work hard to have everything you want. In Soviet Russia you will never have what you want, but you will have what the goverment gives you; enought to live, but too little to be happy.
This is a critical aspect of freedom: the freedom to fail. If people do not have the freedom to fail, then everyone must be forced into mediocrity (as you have described was the case in the USSR).
Now I have a good job in one of the largest russian IT-company. I do what I want, because I have freedom for this, and money and opportunity. I have all of it thanks to my own efforts. I won't change all of this to some guarantees and ideology.
I am glad you have risen to the challenge and have been successful! Good luck in your future endeavors.
You cannot equivocate about the Holodomor. Millions of people died in the man-made famine implemented by the Soviet communists. In the United States, the death rate during the whole Depression was actually lower compared to the previous decade of boom economy (the Roaring Twenties).
Don't try to insinuate that this was just a matter of degree, or worse, "perspective".
Assuming that the Depression is wholly responsible for the upper rate...
That's a rather large assumption and it appears to be incorrect. If you look at Figure 2 (pg 41) from your linked PDF, it shows that non-infant death rate declined during the Depression.
So, not only is it incorrect to compare the deaths caused by the policy-based Holodomor in the USSR to the total death rate in the US (you don't believe that everyone who died during the decade of the Depression died because of the Depression, right?), it appears that the stats wouldn't even support a claim that the Depression killed more people than were dying the decade before during the boom economy of the Roaring Twenties. (My personal bet? Improved sanitation was paying off.)
Google's Public Data and the CDC WONDER site don't go that far back, but here's a random Google result with annual death rates in the US, showing a general, steady decline from the beginning of the century. The worst year from the Depression era (1936) had an 11.6 death rate, which was lower than the 11.7 death rate from 1925: U.S. Annual Death Rates per 1,000 Population, 1900-2005
Thanks for doing that research. However, I stand by my original statement: there's no legitimate comparison on this matter.
There was no "dear leader", no cult of personality and no famine (not since the 30's anyway, but then again the US was pretty shitty in the 30's as well).
"Pretty shitty as well"? Really? The man-made famine that killed millions of people in the Ukraine was implemented by the Soviet communists.
In addition to salting the password, I design my systems to sleep for one second after each failed password attempt, and for 3 seconds before booting the guy off. That should take care of brute force attacks.
Depends on the scenario. If the attacker can deduce that an incorrect password causes the thread to sleep for one second (and successes return immediately), they can craft the attack to use this implicit information via parallelization by using a bunch of workers in a thread pool.
It might not be applicable in your case, but that's why I added a 750 ms delay on my web app for both success and failure (in addition to user account lockouts). A normal user doesn't really notice 750 ms of additional latency when logging into a webapp, because they only do it once per session. This approach decreases the likelihood of brute force attack at the expense of being slightly more vulnerable to denial-of-service or griefing (eg. by going through and causing a bunch of users to have their accounts locked).
I don't believe that there is any good, viable solution to the acronym/initialism situation.
Capitalization is no panacea, especially now that marketing people have started to include lowercase letters when creating acronyms (eg. Verizon FiOS). Both the apostrophe approach and the capitalization approach have drawbacks in that they can cause confusion. I prefer the apostrophe approach because any ambiguity can usually be resolved by parsing the sentence.
To wit:
"The CEO's pay is huge" (Likely a possessive, but context should disambiguate)
"The CEO's went on a pointless junket" (no ambiguity: a possessive wouldn't parse)
However, I understand that the apostrophe approach can be confusing in certain boundary conditions. My preferred solution would be to introduce an orthogonal approach to indicate pluralization for acronyms/initialisms. Out of choice, I would use the backslash character, but I am not married to the particular implementation.
Eg.
"The CEO\s went on a pointless junket"
Of course there is exactly zero chance of this system ever becoming prevalent.
It's not a bug.
I must demur: I still am convinced that it's/its is a bug in English. Normal possessives are denoted by an apostrophe-s, as you pointed out. Whoever set the convention in English decided that a contraction had stronger claim to the use of the apostrophe and then just decided to "resolve" the possessive issue for 'it' by pretending it didn't exist. Hence, "it's" is a contraction for "it is" rather than the possessive. (BTW, here's an example of a pronoun/verb contraction rather than a verb/adverb)
If it had been up to me, I would have awarded the apostrophe to the possessive, because I feel the possessive has stronger claim than the contraction. Also, if we defined "its" as the contraction for "it is", then there is no real weirdness introduced because pluralizing "it" makes no sense (it is singular by definition). Oh well.
I appreciate that comic, and have shared it many times. However, I do deviate from its dogma when it comes to acronyms/initialisms: I pluralize those by using an apostrophe to delimit the acronym/initialism and indicate the plural "s" is not to be considered part of the abbreviated neologism in question.
I believe the approach to be rather straightforward, and certainly no less confusing than the outstanding its/it's bug in English (that issue seems to have been marked "wontfix").
Slashdot Mirror
Since the redesign there is no way for me to filter Idle.
I thought I was alone in noticing. You used to be able to filter it in the old index, and I did. Some[who?] have speculated that they have deliberately made it hard to filter Idle because it helps to push traffic to other chosen sites. I noticed some submitters commenting in threads that their submissions' links have been changed from direct links to the content over to those annoying adword-infested blogs that so many complain about.
I don't want to risk filtering a story about idle CPU time just because it has the word "idle" in it. And even when I do filter Idle, I still get Idle stories showing up. It doesn't work.
I triaged the problem differently than you did: I decided that I loathe Idle enough that I am willing to lose ham in order to kill more of the spam. Of course, as you pointed out, it doesn't work if they studiously avoid using the word "Idle" in the submission.
After the redesign, many options simply don't work.
I know. Since the redesign, I have lived in constant fear of JonKatz returning to post more stories, with no way for me to block him anymore (haha). I believe I originally filtered him out back in 2001. Ah, good times on the old Slashdot...
I have noticed this as well. I chalked it up to a possible abandonment by Slashdot of ACID principles over to the antithesis, namely BASE "(Basically Available, Soft state, Eventual consistency)".
"Eventually consistent"... "I Can't Believe it's not Butter!" (no one can tell the difference!). Personally, I am a strong advocate of ACID and dislike NoSQL. I would really have to be painted into a corner in terms of scalability to relax ACID in favor of a BASE approach to anything remotely important or significant.
Note: I have no citation or evidence that Slashdot has pursued this strategy besides observations like these, so this essentially pointless speculation on my part. Why did I bother to share it with the world then?
...which the U.K. made up and abandoned...
Heh. This seems to be a recurring theme. Maybe there is a reason they have been referred to as "Perfidious Albion" (I imagine this is best said in Kirk's "KHAAAAN!" voice).
So, we'll be in UTC+1 for the winter, UTC+2 for the summer, instead of UTC and UTC+1.
Isn't there some fundamental irony here? I mean, UTC is based on GMT. This proposal is intended to fundamentally shift the time zone away from the meridian that was originally defined... by the UK... that runs right through the UK.
The prime meridian is completely arbitrary, but out of the whole world, the UK was allowed to choose it and then base GMT/UTC from it. The more interesting implication is that this proposal is an effort to ensure your "noon" is no longer ever defined as the point when the sun is highest in the UK sky. I mean, the solar/astronomical observations at the Royal Observatory were putatively the reason GMT existed in the first place (and I guarantee the heavenly bodies haven't shifted, haha).
...human lives have a maximum dollar amount attached, of course.
Of course they do. Would you honestly argue that it would be practical to spend the entire GDP of the United States to save a single life?
I know this isn't precisely you meant by your sarcastic vituperation of corporatism, but your implication was absolute. If we can agree that "1 life per GDP of US" is above the upper bound of value of human life, then the debate becomes a matter of establishing what the real value is. I read this week in the NYT that US government agencies are currently pegging it in the 4 to 7 million USD range. Naturally, whether this is the appropriate valuation is open for debate.
I always appreciate the opportunity to learn... I hadn't considered the approach of using XOR symmetry in this particular way.
See: using one way encryption (hashes) to perform two-way (reversible) encryption.
Okay, I have been wondering about this since last evening.
I'll bite: how does one perform reversible encryption using hashes, given that hashes are not bijective from the domain to the fixed hash output length codomain? Even if you form an algorithmic construct that limits the domain such that the hash function could potentially be injective in the codomain, how do you ensure that it is surjective? Furthermore, isn't the entire point of cryptographic hash function design to make it so that the inverse function is Very Hard To Determine (ie. how would 'decryption' work)?
Perhaps I misinterpreted your statement...
Those bootleg DVDs, their little brothers the bootleg CDs, their cousins the bootleg shoes, and their close friends the stolen goods, fund the same underground economy that supports drug running and other nasty social ills.
"Combined with a form of fusion, the machines had found all the energy they would ever need..."
hydrocarbons + O2 => energy + H2O + CO2
There is nothing inherently preventing the reaction from being run backwards. Plants do it all the time. However, why not skip the plant stage? There are all sorts of problems with arable land being consumed for biofuel production, even if we disregard corn ethanol. So, why not make the hydrocarbons directly?
This is not a new idea, and it is not theoretical only:
We need to stop conflating petroleum's source with its capacity as a "battery". We are always going to need hydrocarbons for plastics, oils, etc. Also, the energy density of gasoline, at ~45 MJ/kg, is orders of magnitude better than the best battery technology available.
...just don't conflate the use of hydrocarbons with their source. If we can make the source clean/renewable, then what further problems exist? I freely admit much more research & engineering is necessary in this field, but all of these prognostications engage in similar thought exercises (including TFA).
It would be awesome to run reverse combustion at large-scale nuclear facilities. It would benefit from improved efficiency at the nuclear plants due to running the reaction on thermal energy rather than going through the relatively inefficient step of thermal to electrical conversion. This approach would be, by definition, carbon neutral. Hell, if we wanted to remove CO2 from the atmosphere we could just run the plants in overtime and pump the hydrocarbons back into the geological reservoirs we drained in the past (would the EPA have a problem with that? Hmm...)
The potential benefits are significant: a single point solution that retains all the current infrastructure investment in petroleum distribution/consumption, no issues with hydrocarbon "self-discharge" like batteries/ultracaps have, excellent energy density, etc. We will always need hydrocarbons, so why wean ourselves off of them?
...how does arguing with an AC require direct kinetic energy transfer ? Oh wait, I understand now.
tell me, how many would gelman have killed if he had a gun instead of a knife? understand yet?
Just to weigh in on this facet of the debate, I would like to point out that you have here committed a logical fallacy often referred to as Moving the Goalposts.
I've got friends who work in hospital security who have a devil of a time with people leaving their passwords and usernames on sticky-notes everywhere. Building security has problems with assholes defeating the building's fire alarm so they can sneak out to a fire escape (or worse yet, a ground-floor alley) and smoke and get back in.
You had me up until this point. While your cited cases might be reasonable, there is also the all-to-frequent case where "security" regulations induce this behavior.
What does hospital security expect users to do when users are required to rotate passwords every two weeks, have a 12 character long mix of upper/lowercase alpha's and numerics, and then also be subject to a 7 password history non-reuse restriction? Security is cognizant that the result of these provisions will be that users write down their passwords on stickies, so how is this more secure than allowing people to pick a less complex password and retain it longer?
The answer is that this presumes that everyone is playing the same game, with the goal to be the best possible security equilibrium state balanced against inconvenience/usability. Running counter to this is security's CYA factor: they experience no penalty for the insane password restrictions that reduce overall security, because if there is a security breach from the post-it passwords they can dump all the blame on the hapless user for violating the published security protocol that prohibits such actions. So, security has a payoff table that disrupts the equilibrium resulting in the paradoxical, reduced security steady state that is observed in these cases (ie. security is externalizing the costs of implementing the high-grade security practices).
PS. As for defeating the fire alarms, maybe they shouldn't have turned the entire hospital into a "tobacco-free campus", with the nearest "approved" smoking area located six blocks away. This is basic psychology. Normal people like to abide by the rules/laws even if they find them onerous, but there is a limit to their willingness to comply. This is essentially what happened to the entire US during the Prohibition. Again, as I said, your cited cases might be reasonable, but I have seen many that were not.
I most certainly don't want a browser with any kind of RT guarantee, but a "best effort" one.
In order for the browser to make any sort of guarantee like this in a multitasking system it must be running in an RTOS. Concordantly, your fears are very likely misplaced, because everything in normal OS'es is some flavor of "best effort" (again, unless you are actually running an RTOS).
Protip: process priority level "Realtime" in Windows NT kernels... isn't. Similarly, setting a -20 nice level doesn't magically turn your MacOS/*n?x processes into realtime either.
Better: deosil and widdershins.
I am disgusted by your attempt at Northern Hemisphere cultural imperialism!
So, while my point about the NRVC is accurate, I missed the obvious issue that California is not a member of the NRVC. However, they do belong to the Driver License Compact. Most states belong to both the DLC and the NRVC:
Map of DLC/NRVC Member Jurisdictions
As you can see from the linked map, the net result is that your home state will yank your license if you ignore a traffic citation from California unless you are from Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Tennessee, or Wisconsin. If you live in one of those states and receive a citation from California you will find that you will likely have to post bail to the Californian police officer at the time of your citation.
And what do you do if the bill isn't paid? Suspend the registration? Cali can't do that to out of state plates
Using similar reasoning have you ever tried ignoring a traffic ticket that you got out of state? You will discover that your own state will revoke your license.
45 of the 50 states belong to the Non-Resident Violator Compact. So, while California can't yank your license, they can report you to your own state who will. Check out the very creepy & insidious v2.0 of the NRVC: the Driver License Agreement. Ugh... if it is fully ratified, then the "or Canada/Mexico" part of your point could also become an issue.
Admittedly, I haven't done the specific research to determine whether ignoring tolls in California using an out of state vehicle would cause them to issue a citation against the registered owner. The scenario doesn't seem far-fetched, because that's what stoplight camera operators do.
Now, to parody a slashdot stereotype, I will attempt to acquire an Inisghtful mod by posing a speciously witty consideration that was obviously discussed by the system engineers in the first 10 minutes of the initial design meeting for this system:
"LOL, I am just going to splash my license plates with mud 'accidentally' and then I can drive for free! Hahaha, stupid designers! I teh smartest!!1!"
...and because his crayons are different sizes, he wants to pack them into the smallest possible volume of his crayon-carrying knapsack.
It was not done intentionally, it was a matter of serious errors made by government when serious bad harvest occurred.
"I accidentally millions of people. Is that dangerous?"
Most of data on Holodomor that is known in USA and other countries is a falsification by Yushchenko
The data is unequivocal: millions of people died due to policy. This is not seriously debated. The Wikipedia article is well-cited. Cf:
"One modern calculation that uses demographic data, including that recently available from Soviet archives, narrows the losses to about 3.2 million or, allowing for the lack of precise data, 3 million to 3.5 million." (followed by three citations)
Maybe Yushchenko secretly changed the Soviet archives, too! How deep does the conspiracy go?
All countries had serious problems in past.
Countries with failed policies that left millions of dead? I guess I can think of PRC's "Great Leap Forward" under Mao that left tens of millions dead.
I would have guaranteed quality education. I would have guaranteed jobsite, no matter if I like that work or not.
It seems people in the US can get this same situation by joining the military. The government will reimburse college expenses and will guarantee you a job, but does not really care if the soldiers like their job assignment.
And now, without USSR, I had to be flat out for get an education. And that education give me nothing but a certificate of degree. I had to work during my student days, because the rate of scholarships for students in Russia are quite funny.
This sounds very similar to the US. Most students have to go into serious debt to finance their education, and the debt often requires decades to pay off. Many students work on-campus at the university for tuition waivers, but others help to finance their education via a regular job.
I am uncertain what you meant by scholarship rates being "quite funny", but in the US the government and other institutions usually determine how much financial aid to give based on the student's family's income and wealth. That means students might not get much financial aid if their parents are not helping to pay for college, because the government formula expects the parents to pay part of the costs. Of course, there are also merit scholarships that can be won based on academic performance in high school and on standardized tests.
As for the education giving you only a certificate of degree, requiring you to self-teach: all I can say is that I agree. Most of the interesting and useful things I have learned and used in my professional life I had to teach myself. However, to be competitive in the job market I needed to have my undergraduate degree. I got the certificate and that helped to launch my career.
It would be impossible for me to starve to death
Are there many people who starve to death in Russia? In the US there are many privately-run (not government) charities and homeless shelters that give free meals to the homeless and a place to sleep, with no questions asked.
In Russia you have a fair chance, but you shoul work hard to have everything you want. In Soviet Russia you will never have what you want, but you will have what the goverment gives you; enought to live, but too little to be happy.
This is a critical aspect of freedom: the freedom to fail. If people do not have the freedom to fail, then everyone must be forced into mediocrity (as you have described was the case in the USSR).
Now I have a good job in one of the largest russian IT-company. I do what I want, because I have freedom for this, and money and opportunity. I have all of it thanks to my own efforts. I won't change all of this to some guarantees and ideology.
I am glad you have risen to the challenge and have been successful! Good luck in your future endeavors.
You cannot equivocate about the Holodomor. Millions of people died in the man-made famine implemented by the Soviet communists. In the United States, the death rate during the whole Depression was actually lower compared to the previous decade of boom economy (the Roaring Twenties).
Don't try to insinuate that this was just a matter of degree, or worse, "perspective".
Assuming that the Depression is wholly responsible for the upper rate...
That's a rather large assumption and it appears to be incorrect. If you look at Figure 2 (pg 41) from your linked PDF, it shows that non-infant death rate declined during the Depression.
So, not only is it incorrect to compare the deaths caused by the policy-based Holodomor in the USSR to the total death rate in the US (you don't believe that everyone who died during the decade of the Depression died because of the Depression, right?), it appears that the stats wouldn't even support a claim that the Depression killed more people than were dying the decade before during the boom economy of the Roaring Twenties. (My personal bet? Improved sanitation was paying off.)
Google's Public Data and the CDC WONDER site don't go that far back, but here's a random Google result with annual death rates in the US, showing a general, steady decline from the beginning of the century. The worst year from the Depression era (1936) had an 11.6 death rate, which was lower than the 11.7 death rate from 1925:
U.S. Annual Death Rates per 1,000 Population, 1900-2005
Thanks for doing that research. However, I stand by my original statement: there's no legitimate comparison on this matter.
There was no "dear leader", no cult of personality and no famine (not since the 30's anyway, but then again the US was pretty shitty in the 30's as well).
"Pretty shitty as well"? Really? The man-made famine that killed millions of people in the Ukraine was implemented by the Soviet communists.
Yep, that just sounds like shades of grey to me.
In addition to salting the password, I design my systems to sleep for one second after each failed password attempt, and for 3 seconds before booting the guy off. That should take care of brute force attacks.
Depends on the scenario. If the attacker can deduce that an incorrect password causes the thread to sleep for one second (and successes return immediately), they can craft the attack to use this implicit information via parallelization by using a bunch of workers in a thread pool.
It might not be applicable in your case, but that's why I added a 750 ms delay on my web app for both success and failure (in addition to user account lockouts). A normal user doesn't really notice 750 ms of additional latency when logging into a webapp, because they only do it once per session. This approach decreases the likelihood of brute force attack at the expense of being slightly more vulnerable to denial-of-service or griefing (eg. by going through and causing a bunch of users to have their accounts locked).
Capitalization is no panacea, especially now that marketing people have started to include lowercase letters when creating acronyms (eg. Verizon FiOS). Both the apostrophe approach and the capitalization approach have drawbacks in that they can cause confusion. I prefer the apostrophe approach because any ambiguity can usually be resolved by parsing the sentence.
To wit:
"The CEO's pay is huge" (Likely a possessive, but context should disambiguate)
"The CEO's went on a pointless junket" (no ambiguity: a possessive wouldn't parse)
However, I understand that the apostrophe approach can be confusing in certain boundary conditions. My preferred solution would be to introduce an orthogonal approach to indicate pluralization for acronyms/initialisms. Out of choice, I would use the backslash character, but I am not married to the particular implementation.
Eg. "The CEO\s went on a pointless junket"
Of course there is exactly zero chance of this system ever becoming prevalent.
It's not a bug.
I must demur: I still am convinced that it's/its is a bug in English. Normal possessives are denoted by an apostrophe-s, as you pointed out. Whoever set the convention in English decided that a contraction had stronger claim to the use of the apostrophe and then just decided to "resolve" the possessive issue for 'it' by pretending it didn't exist. Hence, "it's" is a contraction for "it is" rather than the possessive. (BTW, here's an example of a pronoun/verb contraction rather than a verb/adverb)
If it had been up to me, I would have awarded the apostrophe to the possessive, because I feel the possessive has stronger claim than the contraction. Also, if we defined "its" as the contraction for "it is", then there is no real weirdness introduced because pluralizing "it" makes no sense (it is singular by definition). Oh well.
I appreciate that comic, and have shared it many times. However, I do deviate from its dogma when it comes to acronyms/initialisms: I pluralize those by using an apostrophe to delimit the acronym/initialism and indicate the plural "s" is not to be considered part of the abbreviated neologism in question.
I believe the approach to be rather straightforward, and certainly no less confusing than the outstanding its/it's bug in English (that issue seems to have been marked "wontfix").