..., so that the momentum of the photon in the medium is nhk.
Hmmm... a bit of googling...
NHK could be Nihon Hohsoh Kyokai, the Japanese broadcasting company.
NHK could be Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk, the Dutch Reformed Church.
But somehow, I suspect that neither was what was meant. Got a better expansion that makes sense in context?
Re:Add the danger off false positives...
on
My Genome, My Self?
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· Score: 2, Informative
[W]hat good would "normal" cancer test be if it detected 100% of cancer cases, but also, for every one detected, falsely marked 3 others as having cancer when they didn't.
We do have a lot of data on how society in general (and the corporate world in particular) deals with such data. For example, ten years ago the two most common HIV tests had 10% and 5% false-positive rates. There was a lot of PR to reassure people that this wasn't important, but the data said otherwise.
Consider the math with a simple example: You have a test population of about a million, of which roughly 1000 have HIV. The better (5%) test would show 51,000 positives, 1000 true positives and 50,000 (5% of a million) false positives.
This in itself should make you cautious. But consider how many employers and insurance companies dealt with it. They had forms that asked whether you have ever tested positive for HIV. If you were one of the 50,000 false positives, and later tests showed that you didn't have HIV, this didn't matter. There's no place on the application form for that information. For the rest of your life, you have tested positive to HIV, and to not mention this is fraud.
Actually, in most cases, the 10%-false-positive test was the first used, so 1/10 people who had that test are now and forever among the group that have tested positive for HIV. Further testing with other tests won't decrease this number; it can only increase the percentage that have tested positive. So the fact that we have better HIV tests now is mostly irrelevant to those who tested positive 10 or 20 years ago. They still have it on their medical record, and they legally have to admit it, despite the results of later tests.
Now, it's true that there are corporations that are more responsible than this. But as long as a significant portion of the corporate world treats false positives this way, the sensible approach is to avoid any tests that have a nonzero false-positive rate.
And note that I haven't mentioned the possibility of fraudulent positive test results. This is a very real worry when the legal system is involved, as with blood-alcohol and polygraph tests. Those require a different sort of defensive approach.
According to Symwave, this will result in 'speeds previously unattainable with legacy USB technology.' Which means, if you understand PR-write, it will be much faster."
What does it mean if you don't know PR-write?
Clearly much slower
Heh. While you might be right, a careful analysis of the statement leads to the same result whether you know PR-write or not. What it really means is that, under ideal test conditions, it will be at least a tiny bit faster. The statement is satisfied if a single measurement shows USB 3.0 to be 0.0001% faster than any previous USB.
Of course, for the majority of us who won't be using it under ideal, carefully controlled conditions, it well might be slower. That wouldn't make the PR statement false. The only way to falsify it is to show that under all conditions, there exists some earlier USB hardware+software that will do one particular task at the same speed or faster.
When reading such things, it's useful to ask yourself "How bad could it be and still make the PR claim true?" And you should understand that words like "faster" don't necessarily mean "by a large amount"; they just mean "by any amount greater than zero".
If you want to do it really right, then use whatever handy utility you know of that claims to write over the whole drive. Just once. With zeroes.
I'd quibble over that "With zeroes" part. The problem is that this overwrites each bit with the same value. On a lot of kinds of disks, this leaves behind a lot of disks that have two distinguishable value, which are easily read and interpreted as zeroes and ones, giving the previous data. The data-recovery people have equipment that can read the value of each "bit" to several decimal places, and overwriting tends to leave a portion of the previous magnetization. So instead of bits reading 1.00 and 0.00, they'll read 0.04 and 0.00, for example.
This is why it's better to use software that overwrites with random values, and does it N times. This way, a string of bits that were all zeroes and ones come out with values like 0.93, 0.02, 0.04, 0.96, 1,.01, 0.08, 0.98, 1.02, 0,91, etc. Each of these is a sum of the last random value and N earlier nearly-erased values, and there's no way to pull out the original bits.
Of course, this is mostly for when you want to reuse the disk or sell it. If you truly want to dispose of it, melting is probably better, and a lot simpler.
Or, as others have suggested, install Vista on it. That has a good record of making the disk useless to everyone.
Until Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, NTT, Telekom, or any other major ISPs start showing up on that list all of this IPv6 stuff is going to remain a research toy.
The phrase "research toy" strikes me as an excellent opportunity for the canonical auto analogy:
Imagine that all the commercial transport vendors had "standardized" on the Ford Model T (a very good car in its day). Your chain of stores needs to deliver tons of material from suppliers to warehouses to retail outlets? Organize a fleet of millions of Model Ts, each one carrying maybe 1/4 ton of material. Worldide shipping would be done by having the Model Ts board small ferries that would carry them across the oceans. You have 1 100-tone product? You simply break it down into 1/4-tone pieces, send them via Model T fleet, and assemble them at the customer's site. Maybe there would be some special 1- or 2-ton "extended" Model Ts, for use on the few highways that could support them.
Meanwhile, in academia, they would be using "research toys" like trucks, trains, airliners and huge ships to transport 100-ton objects (or packets of smaller objects) between campuses and research stations. The commercial world would look at this, and dismiss it as untried and unreliable. They wouldn't be willing to make the admittedly huge investment on giant vehicles and infrastructure (rail lines, superhighways, airports, and container seaport facilities) that it would take to change over. Customers wouldn't be demanding it, because they wouldn't understand the technology or economics, and this would be further grounds for the corporate world to "do what the customers want".
The nerdy tech types would be off at the side, discussing amongst themselves what the world might be like if these research toys could be somehow introduced to the public. But commerce would remail slow and crippled relative to our world. The commercial system would refuse to take such wild proposals seriously, because the current system works just fine for them. After all, the Model T is so much better and faster than the horse- and ox-drawn vehicles used by previous generations.
I'm sure that others here can extend the analogy. Maybe we could work out the details and turn it into a fun "alternate history" novel or video game.
And, of course, if this sort of lawsuit succeeds, it's only a mater of time before publishers are suing bookstores for allowing people to open books and read a few pages.
I've also read a few comments from publishers about the problem they have with public libraries, which openly and brazenly let people read entire books without paying for them. Some publishers are seriously considering that they might be able to use the lawsuits over P2P downloads to shut down libraries, or at least impose a royalty on them for every book checked out.
[E]ven Javascript, which is an modern language designed with all the lessons learned from C, also has a way to break to a specific label, added exactly because it lacked a GOTO.
In other words, they learned that goto commands are fine if they're spelled differently. The objection is to the four letters "GOTO", not to the language construct. Sorta like the Jewish objections to the sequence of four letters transliterated as "YHWH". So they replace that name by a name that's spelled differently, and it's all OK.
The objection to GOTOs really is a kind of religious commandment (handed down by the Prophet Dijkstra), and it's every bit as logical as most religious commandments.
[Microsoft] designed it and sell it as a unit even if parts are from other places. They have a responsibility to test it.
No, they don't. They have several decades of success selling untested software. Their customers have given them a very strong message: "We don't care about quality or reliability. We only want to buy whatever Microsoft sells. Don't tell us about something from another vendor that's higher quality; we aren't interested."
They've become a huge success. They're obviously doing what their customers want. They'd be stupid to waste good money on silly things like testing that won't increase their sales.
Or, as others here keep pointing out, Microsoft's only "responsibility" is to its shareholders. Their ongoing success has hugely rewarded their shareholders. They are obviously Doing It Right. They have no other responsibilities.
If there are signs that this fuss has a lasting effect on their profitability, they'll do something about it. But it'll probably die off in a short time, and only a few geeks (non-customers) will remember it. How many people can name even one piece of software that died on Jan 1, 2000? Customers won't remember this one, either. Most of them will never even hear about it. So Microsoft's management isn't worried about it.
And anyway, the problem is "fixed" now (for another 3.99 years). So why even bother discussing it?
Has it occured to anyone else that with all of the surveillance and tracking going on in the UK that they might simply make certain crimes, like say identity theft, more attractive without really reducing the overall amount of crime or catching those who are actually responsible?
Well, my first thought was that it's only a matter of time until they learn that part of the rise in identity theft is because some of the cops are setting up profitable businesses on the side, subletting their access to citizens' computers to the identity thieves.
Have there been any cases like this in the UK yet? I'd expect that they are happening now, but the information may not be public yet.
Nah; most code-size measurements exclude comments, on the grounds that comments aren't executed by the computer, and thus aren't code. This puts subtle pressure on the programmers to not write comments, since this just takes time that leads to being behind schedule.
It's hard to imagine any rating system that's more screwed up than the system used in most companies to rate the output of their programmers. If they were consciously trying to sabotage the software, they probably wouldn't come up with any schemes nearly as effective as judging programmers by lines of code produced.
You can always have shortcuts. But it's the shortcuts that create this kind of problem in the first place.
Usually, but not in this case. The shortcut would have been to make a 1-line call to existing library date routines. But the programmer chose to write an entirely new date-munging routine instead, using many lines of code. And unfortunately, the programmer was incompetent at doing even the simplest date calculations.
It can be truly impressive how incompetent most people, even professional programmers, can be at handling dates. You can see obvious signs of this in most software that deals with dates. The competent programmers understand that it's plain silly to attempt calculations on dates stored in human-readable forms. Almost always, the sensible thing to do is to translate such dates to a binary second counter, do the calculations, and then convert back to human-readable form. And resist every attempt by others to force the software to save the human-readable forms internally, since that just tempts incompetent programmers to do arithmetic on them. But you see junk code like this all over the place, doing arithmetic on fields within dates. And we keep reading about the disasters that result from such incompetence. We'll probably still have this problem in 2100, which all sorts of code will treat as a leap year.
while (days > daysInYear(year)) { days -= daysInYear(year); year += 1; }
Hey, c'mon now; programmers are almost universally judged by their bosses by the number of lines of code they produce. The (buggy) MS code used 16 lines to do what you did in 5 lines. Therefore, the original (buggy) code is considered more than 3 times better than yours. No programmer interested in a good professional career would write code so simply and obviously correct.
This isn't really a joke. One a project a few years ago, I fixed several bugs by doing rewrites like yours, resulting in fewer lines of code. My record actually had a note indicating that I had negative productivity during that period, and my superiors had a real problem giving me a good review because of it.
Yes, I did find another job soon thereafter. But that wasn't the last time something like that happened.
(And I would probably save the first call of daysInYear(year) in a local variable, which would make the code a bit faster. But I could declare the local on a separate line, incrementing the line count, so it would look good to the line counters.;-)
READ the damn TOS. It SPECIFICALLY STATES that you cannot rely on guaranteed availability or ongoing continuation of service. There goes your reliable reliance, right there. So sad, too bad.
Not necessarily. In most jurisdictions, there are a lot of legal restrictions on what a company can do to a victim, even if the victim isn't paying the company. If I give you something for free, tell you it's something that you want, but instead it's something that injures you, in most of the world you'll have grounds to sue. You can't just hand out poison labelled "candy" and expect to get away with it because you included a fine-print notice that you aren't liable for damages.
That's what this story is all about. The proposed laws, if passed, will put legal limits on the damage that companies can do to victims that accept a "free" handout from a company. There's plenty of legal precedent for imposing such limits. The fact that the company has said "on the internet" and "free" doesn't necessarily cancel all legal precedent and absolve them from liability to damage to their victims.
Where do people come up with the idea that a TOS or EULA document can overwrite existing laws, and any draconian restriction is legal if put in writing? That just shows extreme ignorance of how legal systems work.
Well, I understand that, but it does nothing to answer the question of what is the legal definition of a "web site".
Note that most current web servers allow only one robots.txt file per "site". If you just use the default installation, this means that there's only one robots.txt file per machine - unless you run extra servers on non-80 ports, in which case each one can have its own robots.txt file. However, if you do the "virtual hosting" gimmick, you can have a robots.txt file per virtual host.
But I'd bet that none of these would agree with any legal definition of "site", which would be defined in legalese rather than in terms that a software person would understand. So it's highly likely that, even if you do virtual hosts, and have a separate age.txt file per virtual host, this would not satisfy the legal definition of a "web site", and you'd be in violation of the laws in ways that you don't understand. Until the court explains them to you during your trial, of course.
So how might we sync the set of age.txt files with whatever the legal definition of "web site" might be in our jurisdictions? (Or, in countries like the US and Canada, how might we satisfy the various definitions in all the nested jurisdictions that we might be subject to?;-)
This is something I've wondered whenever this topic comes up. Suppose I have a home server, and I've helped several friends build their own web sites on it. One friend has registered JoesKiddieSite.org and the name points to my IP address. Another friend has registered SuziesPornSite.com and that name also points to my IP address Yet another friend just uses my example.com domain, and I've set up SamsPetPics.example.com and SamsNudeMidgets.example.com domain names for him.
Are there one, three or four "sites" on my machine? Would a rating system give them all the same rating (presumably X), because they all have the same IP address and are thus the same "site"? Or would it give each of them a different rating, because they all have different domain names and are independent "sites"? Or would all pages owned by the same owner would be a single site, even if Sam keeps his two "virtual sites" strictly independent?
So far, I've never heard a coherent answer to such questions.
I have a curious case on my real machine, and on a remote account where all my stuff is mirrored in a guest account. Over 10 years ago, I got tired of the claim that if you put something online, any child can find it. So I put a naughty picture on my web site, an "artsy" picture of a naked woman, and challenged visitors to find it. So far, according to the server log and "ls -lu", nobody but me has ever accessed the photo. It's hidden by the most trivial method I know: the directory has an index.html file and there are no links to the image. So you can only find it if you type the bizarre random-looking name that I gave it. The question is: Because I state openly that the image exists, would my site get an X rating? Would a court subpoena the image's URL, and would I have to tell the judge how to find the picture?
It's pretty easy to come up with absurdities about such site ratings. As long as it's only search sites that are doing the rating, it doesn't much matter if they are occasionally nonsensical. But if written into law without dealing sensibly with questions like the above, it seems fairly clear that a legal rating system for web sites would be simply wrong much of the time. It might give JoesKiddieSite the same rating as SuziesPornSite the same rating due to a common address, or might give Sam's two "sites" the same rating due to a common owner.
Or perhaps someone has worked out a scheme to reasonably define "site" for legal purposes in a way that solves such problems. Anyone have a link to such a scheme?
Yeah, that story has sounded suspicious from the start. I've wondered whether we'll ever read the real story, which is probably about who decided they didn't like him and decided to get rid of him. There's also the question of whether anyone with any sense will take the job now. How long before the next guy is treated the same way? I know I'd want to hear a good explanation of just what I'd be walking into, and see some evidence that I'd be allowed to do a good job.
Many organizations, both governmental and corporate, have a tendency to react to employees (or consultants) finding security problems by harrassing, firing, and/or suing them. We already know that the MBTA has management that takes this approach. So the kids should be carefully documenting everything they do, with an eye towards defending themselves from or countersuing the MBTA for the MBTA's actions against them if they do their job well.
Something I've been noticing in particular is that when I read management characterizations of security "hacking", it almost always sounds like a description of what I do routinely as part of all software debugging. In the eyes of management, the media, and the courts, all software developers are "hackers", and they mean this term as a criminal indictment. We are all suspect, especially when we give them bad news about what their systems are already doing.
You are essentially comparing the likelihood of two scenarios:
1. a global conspiracy of the majority of climate scientists involved in leeching (absolutely HUUUGE amounts of) grant money from unsuspecting taxpayers,
2. a global conspiracy by oil (and related industry) companies involved in sustaining their ever-so-slightly lucrative business models through the use of media manipulation underpinned by very little actual science.
Hmmmmmm. I wonder which is more likely?
Actually, if you look at the money flow, you'll find that both do happen quite a lot. However, 2 is 3 or 4 orders of magnitude greater than 1.
There's a running semi-joke in many scientific fields, in which it is observed that the most important part of any scientific paper is the paragraph near the end in which the author states that "further research is needed." This is, of course, a blatant case of scenario 1. And it's a nice example of the "Ha, ha, only serious" sort of joke.
(But I did like the sarcasm. It's best when done lightly.;-)
My realization came in the late 80s after witnessing an 'event' in person and noticing that NOONE had the truth afterwards. Each news outlet twisted the facts to suit their own agenda. But if you were not there you would never know.
So now what you do is write it up yourself and put it on your web site. Check with the MSM reports to see what keywords to include in the <meta>> tag. The various search sites will find your report and you'll get visited by people who search for those keywords.
You couldn't do that 20 years ago. Well, you could, if you had access to a web site, which most university students did but hardly anyone else. Nowadays, it's a lot easier, at least if you're in a metro area.
It's interesting to see all the "little" sites appearing that cover some topic that the owners find interesting. This gives us information that previously was filtered out by the news media. It's especially fun when several little special-interest sites report radically different takes on the same story, from a first-person viewpoint.
Maybe you should write up your story and get it online. It may only of interest to historians by now, but if it was reported by the MSM back then, it probably is of interest to several historians. Your report can be of historical value, if nothing else. And in the future, when such things happen, you'll know how to get your version online more quickly.
Despite what you may have heard on your favorite talk radio outlet, there has been no "recent push for the reinstitution of the Fairness Doctrine".
First off, congratulations on getting the "insightful troll" mods. I got one of those a couple of years ago, and it's one of my proudest achievements on/.;-)
Anyway, I'd suspect that "Fairness Doctrine" has become such a source of humor that if it is revived, it will have to be with a different name. That name now brings out thoughts of treating the flat-earth doctrine on equal terms with the round-earth doctrine, both equally plausible religious beliefs that must be given equal coverage.
So we need to go on to a different name, if not a different approach. At present, a useful one is the "net neutrality" phrase. The idea here is that if every nut case has the right to put his (or her) own opinion online, and the corporate powers that run the Net can't discriminate against any nut case's packets, then all the information will be Out There and accessible. The problem will be to sort out the wheat from the chaff (to use another worn-out metaphor), and that can be done by the zillions of would-be analysts who would also not be blocked by our corporate masters. The usual chaotic forces that we see in the blogger community can come to play (and not be blocked, yadda, yadda), and they'll give us all something maybe worth thinking about or even believing for a while.
After all, the real problem all along has been that the rich and powerful have been able to take control of the distribution of information, so that we only see, hear and read when they want us to see, hear and read. We have an opportunity to stop this control now. If we can pull this off, we stand a chance of making the actual facts of a story available to everyone. Our problem then will be how we sort the truth out from the fiction. But this won't be possible if someone with power and money can block the truth and divert us to their version of the story.
Of course, as with other technological advance, we may well end up in a situation where the rich and powerful again have control over the information that gets to us. In that case, we'll have to abandon "net neutrality", and find yet another euphemism to refer to what we're really pushing for. How many ways are there to say "access to information that other people don't want us to know"?
Some years back, I saw a good illustration of how people can adjust their strides to match a standard. When I was in college, I was in the marching band. After rehearsing the music indoors, we went to "field practice", where we learned to play the music while walking around in complex patterns. The field was marked up with lines every 5 yards, and our standard was that we took 8 steps (4 bars) for each 5 yards. We'd learn to do this by walking straight up and down the field while playing, of course. And then we'd use the same pace for other directions. The band consisted of people with a wide range of sizes. But nobody had any real trouble with it. As one of the taller (6'1") men, I just learned to take slightly shorter steps than I would normally use. The 5'-tall women learned to take long steps. Nobody found this very difficult. After doing it several hours a week for a month or so, we could all do it without any conscious thought.
I should try a blindfold test on a nearby football field to see whether I can still do it. I know that back then, I could close my eyes, take 32 steps, open my eyes, and find my foot on a line. Most of us could. It might be interesting to see how far off I'd be today, after not having done it for years.
If the system were really defined around a sensible number base, we would all be working in base 12... All we need is to modify the human race with a couple of extra fingers - are you game?
Well, I'm a keyboard player, and anyone who plays any sort of keyboard instrument will tell you how often they've wished they had an extra finger on each hand. I recall a keyboard master class a few decades ago, in which the instructor said that we probably thought that by now he knew all the fingerings and didn't have to spend so much time working them out. He told us that we were wrong, and we should face the fact that every one of us would spend the rest of our lives puzzling over fingerings just as much as we do now. It's just a fact of life if you're playing on a keyboard.
So where can we order the upgrade? Is there somewhere we can download a torrent of it?
That's how most people get it wrong. Kilimanjaro does have glaciers, but it's two degrees south of the equator. It's Mount Kenya (aka Kirinyaga) that has glaciers right on the equator. Kilimanjaro is the more famous of the two, of course, and that's probably why most people guess that it's the answer. If you want to see the glaciers on either of them, you should probably plan your visit for the next decade or so, because the glaciers are shrinking fast. And wouldn't you love to have a photo of yourself standing on a glacier, right on the equator?
It's funny that when asked where the two glaciers on the equator are found, most people don't even think of South America. But the Andes are the only significant mountain range that crosses the equator. (Unless you consider the Rift Valley in Africa to be a mountain range.;-)
I see it as equally absurd that other companies should be able to take the open source community's work for free. They get the binaries and sources under a contract, they can follow it or their rights terminate.
Actually, this is where you got it wrong. You don't get a contract to use GPL'd code; you get a license. Ask your friendly local corporate lawyer to explain the difference.
Slashdot Mirror
..., so that the momentum of the photon in the medium is nhk.
Hmmm ... a bit of googling ...
NHK could be Nihon Hohsoh Kyokai, the Japanese broadcasting company.
NHK could be Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk, the Dutch Reformed Church.
But somehow, I suspect that neither was what was meant. Got a better expansion that makes sense in context?
[W]hat good would "normal" cancer test be if it detected 100% of cancer cases, but also, for every one detected, falsely marked 3 others as having cancer when they didn't.
We do have a lot of data on how society in general (and the corporate world in particular) deals with such data. For example, ten years ago the two most common HIV tests had 10% and 5% false-positive rates. There was a lot of PR to reassure people that this wasn't important, but the data said otherwise.
Consider the math with a simple example: You have a test population of about a million, of which roughly 1000 have HIV. The better (5%) test would show 51,000 positives, 1000 true positives and 50,000 (5% of a million) false positives.
This in itself should make you cautious. But consider how many employers and insurance companies dealt with it. They had forms that asked whether you have ever tested positive for HIV. If you were one of the 50,000 false positives, and later tests showed that you didn't have HIV, this didn't matter. There's no place on the application form for that information. For the rest of your life, you have tested positive to HIV, and to not mention this is fraud.
Actually, in most cases, the 10%-false-positive test was the first used, so 1/10 people who had that test are now and forever among the group that have tested positive for HIV. Further testing with other tests won't decrease this number; it can only increase the percentage that have tested positive. So the fact that we have better HIV tests now is mostly irrelevant to those who tested positive 10 or 20 years ago. They still have it on their medical record, and they legally have to admit it, despite the results of later tests.
Now, it's true that there are corporations that are more responsible than this. But as long as a significant portion of the corporate world treats false positives this way, the sensible approach is to avoid any tests that have a nonzero false-positive rate.
And note that I haven't mentioned the possibility of fraudulent positive test results. This is a very real worry when the legal system is involved, as with blood-alcohol and polygraph tests. Those require a different sort of defensive approach.
Heh. While you might be right, a careful analysis of the statement leads to the same result whether you know PR-write or not. What it really means is that, under ideal test conditions, it will be at least a tiny bit faster. The statement is satisfied if a single measurement shows USB 3.0 to be 0.0001% faster than any previous USB.
Of course, for the majority of us who won't be using it under ideal, carefully controlled conditions, it well might be slower. That wouldn't make the PR statement false. The only way to falsify it is to show that under all conditions, there exists some earlier USB hardware+software that will do one particular task at the same speed or faster.
When reading such things, it's useful to ask yourself "How bad could it be and still make the PR claim true?" And you should understand that words like "faster" don't necessarily mean "by a large amount"; they just mean "by any amount greater than zero".
The delay?
They couldn't figure out how to upload the torrent to PirateBay.....
Not to worry; someone has already taken care of it.
If you want to do it really right, then use whatever handy utility you know of that claims to write over the whole drive. Just once. With zeroes.
I'd quibble over that "With zeroes" part. The problem is that this overwrites each bit with the same value. On a lot of kinds of disks, this leaves behind a lot of disks that have two distinguishable value, which are easily read and interpreted as zeroes and ones, giving the previous data. The data-recovery people have equipment that can read the value of each "bit" to several decimal places, and overwriting tends to leave a portion of the previous magnetization. So instead of bits reading 1.00 and 0.00, they'll read 0.04 and 0.00, for example.
This is why it's better to use software that overwrites with random values, and does it N times. This way, a string of bits that were all zeroes and ones come out with values like 0.93, 0.02, 0.04, 0.96, 1,.01, 0.08, 0.98, 1.02, 0,91, etc. Each of these is a sum of the last random value and N earlier nearly-erased values, and there's no way to pull out the original bits.
Of course, this is mostly for when you want to reuse the disk or sell it. If you truly want to dispose of it, melting is probably better, and a lot simpler.
Or, as others have suggested, install Vista on it. That has a good record of making the disk useless to everyone.
Until Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, NTT, Telekom, or any other major ISPs start showing up on that list all of this IPv6 stuff is going to remain a research toy.
The phrase "research toy" strikes me as an excellent opportunity for the canonical auto analogy:
Imagine that all the commercial transport vendors had "standardized" on the Ford Model T (a very good car in its day). Your chain of stores needs to deliver tons of material from suppliers to warehouses to retail outlets? Organize a fleet of millions of Model Ts, each one carrying maybe 1/4 ton of material. Worldide shipping would be done by having the Model Ts board small ferries that would carry them across the oceans. You have 1 100-tone product? You simply break it down into 1/4-tone pieces, send them via Model T fleet, and assemble them at the customer's site. Maybe there would be some special 1- or 2-ton "extended" Model Ts, for use on the few highways that could support them.
Meanwhile, in academia, they would be using "research toys" like trucks, trains, airliners and huge ships to transport 100-ton objects (or packets of smaller objects) between campuses and research stations. The commercial world would look at this, and dismiss it as untried and unreliable. They wouldn't be willing to make the admittedly huge investment on giant vehicles and infrastructure (rail lines, superhighways, airports, and container seaport facilities) that it would take to change over. Customers wouldn't be demanding it, because they wouldn't understand the technology or economics, and this would be further grounds for the corporate world to "do what the customers want".
The nerdy tech types would be off at the side, discussing amongst themselves what the world might be like if these research toys could be somehow introduced to the public. But commerce would remail slow and crippled relative to our world. The commercial system would refuse to take such wild proposals seriously, because the current system works just fine for them. After all, the Model T is so much better and faster than the horse- and ox-drawn vehicles used by previous generations.
I'm sure that others here can extend the analogy. Maybe we could work out the details and turn it into a fun "alternate history" novel or video game.
It's also the same idea as a bookstore.
And, of course, if this sort of lawsuit succeeds, it's only a mater of time before publishers are suing bookstores for allowing people to open books and read a few pages.
I've also read a few comments from publishers about the problem they have with public libraries, which openly and brazenly let people read entire books without paying for them. Some publishers are seriously considering that they might be able to use the lawsuits over P2P downloads to shut down libraries, or at least impose a royalty on them for every book checked out.
[E]ven Javascript, which is an modern language designed with all the lessons learned from C, also has a way to break to a specific label, added exactly because it lacked a GOTO.
In other words, they learned that goto commands are fine if they're spelled differently. The objection is to the four letters "GOTO", not to the language construct. Sorta like the Jewish objections to the sequence of four letters transliterated as "YHWH". So they replace that name by a name that's spelled differently, and it's all OK.
The objection to GOTOs really is a kind of religious commandment (handed down by the Prophet Dijkstra), and it's every bit as logical as most religious commandments.
[Microsoft] designed it and sell it as a unit even if parts are from other places. They have a responsibility to test it.
No, they don't. They have several decades of success selling untested software. Their customers have given them a very strong message: "We don't care about quality or reliability. We only want to buy whatever Microsoft sells. Don't tell us about something from another vendor that's higher quality; we aren't interested."
They've become a huge success. They're obviously doing what their customers want. They'd be stupid to waste good money on silly things like testing that won't increase their sales.
Or, as others here keep pointing out, Microsoft's only "responsibility" is to its shareholders. Their ongoing success has hugely rewarded their shareholders. They are obviously Doing It Right. They have no other responsibilities.
If there are signs that this fuss has a lasting effect on their profitability, they'll do something about it. But it'll probably die off in a short time, and only a few geeks (non-customers) will remember it. How many people can name even one piece of software that died on Jan 1, 2000? Customers won't remember this one, either. Most of them will never even hear about it. So Microsoft's management isn't worried about it.
And anyway, the problem is "fixed" now (for another 3.99 years). So why even bother discussing it?
(What, me cynical? ;-)
Has it occured to anyone else that with all of the surveillance and tracking going on in the UK that they might simply make certain crimes, like say identity theft, more attractive without really reducing the overall amount of crime or catching those who are actually responsible?
Well, my first thought was that it's only a matter of time until they learn that part of the rise in identity theft is because some of the cops are setting up profitable businesses on the side, subletting their access to citizens' computers to the identity thieves.
Have there been any cases like this in the UK yet? I'd expect that they are happening now, but the information may not be public yet.
Nah; most code-size measurements exclude comments, on the grounds that comments aren't executed by the computer, and thus aren't code. This puts subtle pressure on the programmers to not write comments, since this just takes time that leads to being behind schedule.
It's hard to imagine any rating system that's more screwed up than the system used in most companies to rate the output of their programmers. If they were consciously trying to sabotage the software, they probably wouldn't come up with any schemes nearly as effective as judging programmers by lines of code produced.
You can always have shortcuts. But it's the shortcuts that create this kind of problem in the first place.
Usually, but not in this case. The shortcut would have been to make a 1-line call to existing library date routines. But the programmer chose to write an entirely new date-munging routine instead, using many lines of code. And unfortunately, the programmer was incompetent at doing even the simplest date calculations.
It can be truly impressive how incompetent most people, even professional programmers, can be at handling dates. You can see obvious signs of this in most software that deals with dates. The competent programmers understand that it's plain silly to attempt calculations on dates stored in human-readable forms. Almost always, the sensible thing to do is to translate such dates to a binary second counter, do the calculations, and then convert back to human-readable form. And resist every attempt by others to force the software to save the human-readable forms internally, since that just tempts incompetent programmers to do arithmetic on them. But you see junk code like this all over the place, doing arithmetic on fields within dates. And we keep reading about the disasters that result from such incompetence. We'll probably still have this problem in 2100, which all sorts of code will treat as a leap year.
It ought to simply be
while (days > daysInYear(year))
{
days -= daysInYear(year);
year += 1;
}
Hey, c'mon now; programmers are almost universally judged by their bosses by the number of lines of code they produce. The (buggy) MS code used 16 lines to do what you did in 5 lines. Therefore, the original (buggy) code is considered more than 3 times better than yours. No programmer interested in a good professional career would write code so simply and obviously correct.
This isn't really a joke. One a project a few years ago, I fixed several bugs by doing rewrites like yours, resulting in fewer lines of code. My record actually had a note indicating that I had negative productivity during that period, and my superiors had a real problem giving me a good review because of it.
Yes, I did find another job soon thereafter. But that wasn't the last time something like that happened.
(And I would probably save the first call of daysInYear(year) in a local variable, which would make the code a bit faster. But I could declare the local on a separate line, incrementing the line count, so it would look good to the line counters. ;-)
READ the damn TOS. It SPECIFICALLY STATES that you cannot rely on guaranteed availability or ongoing continuation of service. There goes your reliable reliance, right there. So sad, too bad.
Not necessarily. In most jurisdictions, there are a lot of legal restrictions on what a company can do to a victim, even if the victim isn't paying the company. If I give you something for free, tell you it's something that you want, but instead it's something that injures you, in most of the world you'll have grounds to sue. You can't just hand out poison labelled "candy" and expect to get away with it because you included a fine-print notice that you aren't liable for damages.
That's what this story is all about. The proposed laws, if passed, will put legal limits on the damage that companies can do to victims that accept a "free" handout from a company. There's plenty of legal precedent for imposing such limits. The fact that the company has said "on the internet" and "free" doesn't necessarily cancel all legal precedent and absolve them from liability to damage to their victims.
Where do people come up with the idea that a TOS or EULA document can overwrite existing laws, and any draconian restriction is legal if put in writing? That just shows extreme ignorance of how legal systems work.
Well, I understand that, but it does nothing to answer the question of what is the legal definition of a "web site".
Note that most current web servers allow only one robots.txt file per "site". If you just use the default installation, this means that there's only one robots.txt file per machine - unless you run extra servers on non-80 ports, in which case each one can have its own robots.txt file. However, if you do the "virtual hosting" gimmick, you can have a robots.txt file per virtual host.
But I'd bet that none of these would agree with any legal definition of "site", which would be defined in legalese rather than in terms that a software person would understand. So it's highly likely that, even if you do virtual hosts, and have a separate age.txt file per virtual host, this would not satisfy the legal definition of a "web site", and you'd be in violation of the laws in ways that you don't understand. Until the court explains them to you during your trial, of course.
So how might we sync the set of age.txt files with whatever the legal definition of "web site" might be in our jurisdictions? (Or, in countries like the US and Canada, how might we satisfy the various definitions in all the nested jurisdictions that we might be subject to? ;-)
This is something I've wondered whenever this topic comes up. Suppose I have a home server, and I've helped several friends build their own web sites on it. One friend has registered JoesKiddieSite.org and the name points to my IP address. Another friend has registered SuziesPornSite.com and that name also points to my IP address Yet another friend just uses my example.com domain, and I've set up SamsPetPics.example.com and SamsNudeMidgets.example.com domain names for him.
Are there one, three or four "sites" on my machine? Would a rating system give them all the same rating (presumably X), because they all have the same IP address and are thus the same "site"? Or would it give each of them a different rating, because they all have different domain names and are independent "sites"? Or would all pages owned by the same owner would be a single site, even if Sam keeps his two "virtual sites" strictly independent?
So far, I've never heard a coherent answer to such questions.
I have a curious case on my real machine, and on a remote account where all my stuff is mirrored in a guest account. Over 10 years ago, I got tired of the claim that if you put something online, any child can find it. So I put a naughty picture on my web site, an "artsy" picture of a naked woman, and challenged visitors to find it. So far, according to the server log and "ls -lu", nobody but me has ever accessed the photo. It's hidden by the most trivial method I know: the directory has an index.html file and there are no links to the image. So you can only find it if you type the bizarre random-looking name that I gave it. The question is: Because I state openly that the image exists, would my site get an X rating? Would a court subpoena the image's URL, and would I have to tell the judge how to find the picture?
It's pretty easy to come up with absurdities about such site ratings. As long as it's only search sites that are doing the rating, it doesn't much matter if they are occasionally nonsensical. But if written into law without dealing sensibly with questions like the above, it seems fairly clear that a legal rating system for web sites would be simply wrong much of the time. It might give JoesKiddieSite the same rating as SuziesPornSite the same rating due to a common address, or might give Sam's two "sites" the same rating due to a common owner.
Or perhaps someone has worked out a scheme to reasonably define "site" for legal purposes in a way that solves such problems. Anyone have a link to such a scheme?
Yeah, that story has sounded suspicious from the start. I've wondered whether we'll ever read the real story, which is probably about who decided they didn't like him and decided to get rid of him. There's also the question of whether anyone with any sense will take the job now. How long before the next guy is treated the same way? I know I'd want to hear a good explanation of just what I'd be walking into, and see some evidence that I'd be allowed to do a good job.
Many organizations, both governmental and corporate, have a tendency to react to employees (or consultants) finding security problems by harrassing, firing, and/or suing them. We already know that the MBTA has management that takes this approach. So the kids should be carefully documenting everything they do, with an eye towards defending themselves from or countersuing the MBTA for the MBTA's actions against them if they do their job well.
Something I've been noticing in particular is that when I read management characterizations of security "hacking", it almost always sounds like a description of what I do routinely as part of all software debugging. In the eyes of management, the media, and the courts, all software developers are "hackers", and they mean this term as a criminal indictment. We are all suspect, especially when we give them bad news about what their systems are already doing.
Actually, if you look at the money flow, you'll find that both do happen quite a lot. However, 2 is 3 or 4 orders of magnitude greater than 1.
There's a running semi-joke in many scientific fields, in which it is observed that the most important part of any scientific paper is the paragraph near the end in which the author states that "further research is needed." This is, of course, a blatant case of scenario 1. And it's a nice example of the "Ha, ha, only serious" sort of joke.
(But I did like the sarcasm. It's best when done lightly. ;-)
My realization came in the late 80s after witnessing an 'event' in person and noticing that NOONE had the truth afterwards. Each news outlet twisted the facts to suit their own agenda. But if you were not there you would never know.
So now what you do is write it up yourself and put it on your web site. Check with the MSM reports to see what keywords to include in the <meta>> tag. The various search sites will find your report and you'll get visited by people who search for those keywords.
You couldn't do that 20 years ago. Well, you could, if you had access to a web site, which most university students did but hardly anyone else. Nowadays, it's a lot easier, at least if you're in a metro area.
It's interesting to see all the "little" sites appearing that cover some topic that the owners find interesting. This gives us information that previously was filtered out by the news media. It's especially fun when several little special-interest sites report radically different takes on the same story, from a first-person viewpoint.
Maybe you should write up your story and get it online. It may only of interest to historians by now, but if it was reported by the MSM back then, it probably is of interest to several historians. Your report can be of historical value, if nothing else. And in the future, when such things happen, you'll know how to get your version online more quickly.
Despite what you may have heard on your favorite talk radio outlet, there has been no "recent push for the reinstitution of the Fairness Doctrine".
First off, congratulations on getting the "insightful troll" mods. I got one of those a couple of years ago, and it's one of my proudest achievements on /. ;-)
Anyway, I'd suspect that "Fairness Doctrine" has become such a source of humor that if it is revived, it will have to be with a different name. That name now brings out thoughts of treating the flat-earth doctrine on equal terms with the round-earth doctrine, both equally plausible religious beliefs that must be given equal coverage.
So we need to go on to a different name, if not a different approach. At present, a useful one is the "net neutrality" phrase. The idea here is that if every nut case has the right to put his (or her) own opinion online, and the corporate powers that run the Net can't discriminate against any nut case's packets, then all the information will be Out There and accessible. The problem will be to sort out the wheat from the chaff (to use another worn-out metaphor), and that can be done by the zillions of would-be analysts who would also not be blocked by our corporate masters. The usual chaotic forces that we see in the blogger community can come to play (and not be blocked, yadda, yadda), and they'll give us all something maybe worth thinking about or even believing for a while.
After all, the real problem all along has been that the rich and powerful have been able to take control of the distribution of information, so that we only see, hear and read when they want us to see, hear and read. We have an opportunity to stop this control now. If we can pull this off, we stand a chance of making the actual facts of a story available to everyone. Our problem then will be how we sort the truth out from the fiction. But this won't be possible if someone with power and money can block the truth and divert us to their version of the story.
Of course, as with other technological advance, we may well end up in a situation where the rich and powerful again have control over the information that gets to us. In that case, we'll have to abandon "net neutrality", and find yet another euphemism to refer to what we're really pushing for. How many ways are there to say "access to information that other people don't want us to know"?
Some years back, I saw a good illustration of how people can adjust their strides to match a standard. When I was in college, I was in the marching band. After rehearsing the music indoors, we went to "field practice", where we learned to play the music while walking around in complex patterns. The field was marked up with lines every 5 yards, and our standard was that we took 8 steps (4 bars) for each 5 yards. We'd learn to do this by walking straight up and down the field while playing, of course. And then we'd use the same pace for other directions. The band consisted of people with a wide range of sizes. But nobody had any real trouble with it. As one of the taller (6'1") men, I just learned to take slightly shorter steps than I would normally use. The 5'-tall women learned to take long steps. Nobody found this very difficult. After doing it several hours a week for a month or so, we could all do it without any conscious thought.
I should try a blindfold test on a nearby football field to see whether I can still do it. I know that back then, I could close my eyes, take 32 steps, open my eyes, and find my foot on a line. Most of us could. It might be interesting to see how far off I'd be today, after not having done it for years.
If the system were really defined around a sensible number base, we would all be working in base 12 ... All we need is to modify the human race with a couple of extra fingers - are you game?
Well, I'm a keyboard player, and anyone who plays any sort of keyboard instrument will tell you how often they've wished they had an extra finger on each hand. I recall a keyboard master class a few decades ago, in which the instructor said that we probably thought that by now he knew all the fingerings and didn't have to spend so much time working them out. He told us that we were wrong, and we should face the fact that every one of us would spend the rest of our lives puzzling over fingerings just as much as we do now. It's just a fact of life if you're playing on a keyboard.
So where can we order the upgrade? Is there somewhere we can download a torrent of it?
... Kilimanjaro ...
That's how most people get it wrong. Kilimanjaro does have glaciers, but it's two degrees south of the equator. It's Mount Kenya (aka Kirinyaga) that has glaciers right on the equator. Kilimanjaro is the more famous of the two, of course, and that's probably why most people guess that it's the answer. If you want to see the glaciers on either of them, you should probably plan your visit for the next decade or so, because the glaciers are shrinking fast. And wouldn't you love to have a photo of yourself standing on a glacier, right on the equator?
It's funny that when asked where the two glaciers on the equator are found, most people don't even think of South America. But the Andes are the only significant mountain range that crosses the equator. (Unless you consider the Rift Valley in Africa to be a mountain range. ;-)
I see it as equally absurd that other companies should be able to take the open source community's work for free. They get the binaries and sources under a contract, they can follow it or their rights terminate.
Actually, this is where you got it wrong. You don't get a contract to use GPL'd code; you get a license. Ask your friendly local corporate lawyer to explain the difference.