Better yet, you wrote all your emails and sent them online. They're all now public property, by your reckoning. Please post the contents of every email you've ever sent or received for everyone to laugh at.
Just because it's online, just because it exists, does not mean that ANYONE but a court has the right to demand you show it to them (and even then, the laws against self-incrimination hinder even the courts).
If you then *don't* give me the position, I'll have an investigation initiated ANYWAY into unfair hiring practices (whether or not I actually wanted it or thought I had a chance).
The case might fall on its face because of lack of evidence after a year or two but it will cost you TONS on re-doing your procedures, proving compliance, fighting the case, the media, etc. and it won't be ME suing you, it'll be a no-win, no-fee lawyer and/or the Department for Work and Pensions.
If you were applying for, say, MI5 or GCHQ - maybe, possibly, still doubtful, but only because I'd expect them to ALREADY have that information. I'd actually half-expect them to just say at random "What about this post on The Reg where you talk about Turing..." or something completely random in that case.
Every other job that's not actually related to the military / national security? Go fish, my friend. I won't lie to you and say I haven't got an account, or tell you I forgot the password, I would just flat-out refuse. And I'd kick up one HELL of a fuss whatever happened. Even if I got the job, I'd make it clear that continuing to ask candidates that question is liable to cause them a lot of problems.
I'd no more accept this as a request in an interview as "Please drop your trousers so we can see if you've got an STD or you're Jewish".
Note to any of my future employers: Try it. Please.
Not being funny, but you can HAVE that level of privacy. Throw your smartphone (which didn't exist when you were a child) away. Disconnect your computer from the Internet (because my ZX Spectrum never had an Internet connection). Write letters (so that you hand them off to some several thousand minimum-wage workers who really have no personal incentive to ensure your letter reaches its destination at all, let alone unread). Use only your landline (which has ALWAYS been as simple to tap as putting a device in your phone, or a guy at the telecoms provider, or just clamping onto the analog cables running into the street - in the UK these are mainly aerial cables and nobody would notice a man in a hi-vis vest sticking something on the pole at all).
You *haven't* suddenly walked into a world of less privacy. You were in one already and then you CHOSE to use facilities which, by their very design, allow you to have some of that privacy taken away. And you're still there now. Email is NOT ENCRYPTED - even if it's sent from and arrives at a location you trust, you cannot trust the message without making provisions for this YOURSELF.
You chose to buy a satnav with a 3G connection because IT HELPS YOU. There were satnavs without it. There still are. But most people I know have satnavs with 3G capability.
You chose to buy a mobile phone that, by it's very principle of operation, requires the telecoms provider to know your rough location. Then you chose to buy one that has a GPS receiver built-in. Then one that tells your friends on Facebook that you just walked into the restaurant.
At any time, you can go back to the previous era, but it means ditching technology that you didn't have back then. Some people do. I have JUST bought my first smartphone. Not because I'm a privacy nut, but because I never wanted to have to manage another computer alongside all the ones I do professionally. Up until 4 days ago, I literally had a GSM phone with NO features. Was still trackable, though, by it's very design. My satnav DOESN'T have 3G connections - I get traffic over the one-way radio RDS-TMC system. It's not as good as live updates but it doesn't subvert my privacy or (more importantly) cost me anything to run.
I *don't* post when I'm going on holiday to Facebook. I don't post which restaurant I'm sitting in. I don't trust anything that comes in an email to not be overhead (i.e. I've never sent my credit card details by email).
You can do all these things already, and preserve your privacy. But privacy problems are not a result of changing attitudes towards privacy. They are the result of convenient technologies that have the side-effect of some lost privacy. And *everyone* who's used one has chosen to exchange that privacy for that feature. They would have 50 years ago, too. This is how 1984 was written - first published in 1949! - someone sat down and said "What if we had the technology to do X?" and followed through the natural progression of human response to that, even imagining a "future" of only 28 years ago (when I was a toddler).
You haven't "lost" privacy. You've been given more options of trade-off against it. And almost everyone, of any age and generation, is willing to take that trade-off even with prior warning. Because, on the whole, in Western society, your privacy isn't worth much to you at all. It doesn't make you a higher-class or give you cheaper taxes. When I *MUST* give away my name and address to public record in any court, when I *MUST* give my details to the electoral register even if I don't vote, when I *MUST* fill out a load of forms and take them to a random Post Office employee who passes them off to a dozen random government employees in order to get the document to legally travel to another country - the privacy of a text message to a friend isn't actually worth that much at all.
You chose to trade-off. If you own a mobile phone, or a GPS device that talks to central servers, or have a Facebook account, or don't use PGP for *EVE
Pretty much, after you learn your second or third programming language, they are all pretty much the same. There are some oddball ones for very specific purposes (e.g. PROLOG), but pretty much they are all the same things with different syntax and different libraries.
Some of them are slightly more suited to different tasks (e.g. LISt Processing, etc.) but there's really not much to choose between them. I'm not a fan of the newer languages - anything that LOOKS like gobbledegook from a distance usually does a good job of masking gobbledegook close-up. Just looking at some of the Ruby examples on the Wikipedia page makes my programming-mind want to vomit. I find C++ quite obtuse too. C99 is pretty much the best compromise that I've found between gobbledegook and flexibility.
Does your language compile to the target? Does your language run and compile from your development host? Does your language enable you to do the things you want without unnecessary hindrance? Almost every programmer who chooses a language asks themselves that and if they aren't satisfied it's true, will move to something else.
To an extent, OOP is just a formalisation of things that function programmers have been doing for decades into a space-saving syntax. Similarly for other "paradigms" of programming. In the end, the compiler still has to squeeze it all into the same instruction set and it's just whether it bothers to check for over-runs, abstract away certain details, make certain optimisations, etc. that makes any difference. The end code is usually pretty indistinguishable.
This is my answer when someone wants to choose a language to "start programming": Any of them. It doesn't really matter. Probably good to start with something you can understand immediately but it really doesn't matter what you do it in. It's like a child who's started learning to speak wondering what language they should speak - whatever is available, practical and you can manage.
Programming is communication of some instruction to the computer, that's why we call them "languages". What language you use is merely a practical consideration (i.e. verbosity, popularity, availability, what others can understand, etc.) that's pretty much made for you. Some languages aren't available, don't have a compiler (only an interpreter), need external libraries for everything, aren't cross-platform, etc. Beyond that, the only thing that matters is the message - the program itself - not the language.
Since I was a teenager, I thought of writing my own language that would pick bits I like out of each language and merge them. It would just create a hideous mess, of course, but if I've considered it, it usually means lots of other people have done it before me. Any language that purports to be the collation of the good points of others will be regarded by everyone else as a collation of the bad points of everything else.
A one-man language isn't, in and of itself, a bad thing. The problem comes when it literally does nothing you can't already do, albeit with slightly different syntax and slightly more work.
Basically, if you wanted, you could rewrite a C pre-processor to compile any of those languages directly to C syntax, and vice-versa. There's nothing "new", just some "shiny" things.
Things haven't moved on since C, really. Sure, we've prettied up the syntax, clarified some edge-cases, added some libraries, etc. but it's all just spit-and-polish on a language made in the 60's. The fact we use those slightly-cleaner versions for the vast majority of software today (including the compilers of most of those other languages) means that there really wasn't any huge paradigm shift, or change in the way we work, or need to move on.
The only thing I think might change the way we work in quantum computing. That's going to need a serious rethink and redesign in order for people to "program" them effectively. But, you know what? I have a suspicion that the first practical languages for that will be "C with knobs on".
My experience, similar story, from someone who knows how children learn:
15-year-old kid, work experience (I'm an IT manager, some would say systems- or network- manager, in primary schools). He'd NEVER seen anything approaching a programming language in his life. Slack afternoon because, hell, if you do your job right, the network runs itself. We get talking about computer games while in my office.
Ten minutes later, we're into "Yeah, but how do you do 3D / physics / motion sensing / etc.". After about an hour, he discovers the magic words: It's all a number. Everything in the computer is a number. Once you get it down to numbers, computing is easy.
Kid, admittedly, had a good (but not great) grounding in mathematics. So although we didn't do any of the actual maths involved, it was briefly shown how a 3D object is a set of coords and how all the fancy effects you see are just matrix transformations of those coords. We also got into how, if you pretend an object's mass is M, gravity is G, x-velocity is X, etc. then physics pretty much becomes the same. As, if I remember rightly, I was also able to demonstrate the same for things like joysticks, keyboards, mice, printers, scanners, webcams, Kinect, etc. etc. etc. It's all just numbers. Before long, he works out where the numbers come from for just about anything you can mention (e.g. networking, online gaming, colour effects, gestures, etc.)
Over the next few days, we delve deeper but only very casually and only in the slack periods. Before you know it, he's looking at some code I was working on and wondering how it worked. I show him something more interesting (a game I was writing - nothing "modern", literally something you could have done in the 80's), show him a few example lines.
Next thing I know, I've taught basically the whole of the BASIC keyword set in an afternoon, and what they do, the concept of variables, etc. Knock him up a simple "Yahtzee"-style dice game in BASIC just to show him line-by-line and how things work (like variables being a "box" in memory, etc.) - we literally build it up line-by-line in a hand-holding style all the way through. Think we got about 30 lines written. On paper. Without a single computer switched on in the room.
The kid comes in the next day with a bouncing-ball game he's written in QBASIC (written on Windows 7, which is no easy feat in itself!). He has had zero assistance outside of what I showed him. Nothing. Not even Google.
What courses was he going to go to next year? Not maths. Not IT. Not electronics. It was a waste, but it shows you that you can teach anyone if you want to. Most kids *don't* have the self-sufficiency to learn by themselves today without a lot of incentive (read: Money and/or a good grounding in the subject already). Throwing them in the deep end is just scary and pointless, even if that's what we had when we were kids (I learned "programming" from the orange ZX Spectrum instruction manual, which nobody else in my family ever saw a page of).
When I was a kid, the challenge was to learn it for yourself. Now you need to spoon-feed (I hesitate on the word 'need' but with today's generation and teaching methods, it's basically true). Once they have a start and know where to head, then they are more confident running off on their own. Leave them in a room with a HTML manual, you'll never see them try to use it. And don't make it relevant and they'll switch off, like all kids.
You can inspire kids to program, you just need to do it right. Destroying their vision of ever being able to write a computer game isn't the best start. And at what point did you do things on paper?
Hell, I'd rather have a couple of conceptual MMORPG "classes" for characters, inventory, etc. and some pseudocode about how to manage it all than to give them a duff language not designed for programming and a duff "game" to start on. He couldn't get the grid going because, you know what, that part would bore me to tears. If you'd started off in
Quoting a monotheism, the ultimate case of a dictatorship, totalitarianism, authoritarianism and despotism, is really quite an ironic way to make your point.
Cos, yeah, if the US president said he was going to release people who were imprisoned in a foreign country by the previous president for 10+ years at the US's behest, abused, tortured, denied fair trial, etc. and then he never followed through on his promise - yeah, democracy would set him right.
Some code I knocked up a few months ago had a problem with the leap-day just gone.
Difference being, that script wasn't meant to run for more than a few days, was knocked up in an hour, was untested, and didn't run anything critical at all (it moved scanned PDF files into an archive folder for a scanner used by precisely two people).
Seriously, Microsoft, you have a system that you expect government to use and you can't even work around a leap-day in advance?
I do 500 miles in a standard working week, doing one journey a day to/from a bog-standard 9-5 job at a single site.
Where do I live? London. Where do I work? London.
How much would it cost on public transport? More than my (expensive UK) petrol costs, mainly because of a very efficient engine, in a 15-year-old car. That's not counting my extra lost-time travelling, though.
How much more hassle is it to rely on the Tubes, Buses, etc. instead of a car in London? Add about 2-3 hours onto my working day on a PERFECT day with no stoppages or delays (which I've never witnessed on the London Underground) and where I catch everything just as it leaves the station. Some days, it's actually technically impossible to do that journey by public transport because of all the outages.
Direct, my place of work is half-as-many miles from me, involving THE worst roads in London and hours of queues every morning. A 7 mile detour onto the orbital motorway around London saves me over an hour every day and stops me crawling at 20mph along miles of main "A" road.
I do *not* live on the very outskirts. If you do, you can drive much more than me (about 30% more I'd estimate). Going North/South is even worse because of the direction of most traffic through London at that time of the day (and you can burn more petrol than a 100 mile a day in a single journey just queuing through everyday queues).
Now multiply that up by people who *can't* afford to live near London and/or commute in from Oxford, etc. and it soon gets just-as-crazy.
The American disease is thinking you're worse off than everyone else and making a bigger fuss than everyone else. The English disease is *knowing* you're not worse off than others, but moaning like you are anyway.
Compare and contrast the SLOPE of the graph for the US with all the other countries listed. Ignore the actual figure, watch the slope, which indicates change.
Trust me, we hurt just as bad when the fuel price rises, if not more.
Australia is a similarly big country, with a much greater amount of vast empty wasteland and having to travel 100miles plus to a doctor (flying doctors normally cover an area around the size of the UK each).
The prices are AU$ per litre. Multiply by 3.8 (ish) to get US Gallons. Hint: Diesel's gonna cost ya over 5 AU$ which is more than 5 US$.
If the US price were really hit that bad by petrol prices, you'd have rural petrol subsidies and/or inner-city petrol taxes to compensate.
The US may finally have to live in the real world regarding petrol prices and why European engines are "small" and yet can still do 70mph with a family of kids in the back and towing a caravan without even struggling.
Great, so you don't mind them telling all their advertisers (adult or not) that your IP surfs porn sites that use Google Analytics then?
The problem is not the EXISTING privacy policy, it's the new one where all the information can be tied together and used in ways it couldn't before.
Like with UK ID-card debacle. The problem is not the ID card. The problem is the associated (and unnecessary) tying of separate databases and allowing *ALL* that information to propagate through entities that never had access to it before. While people focus on the fact that everyone else has ID, every other country doesn't object, etc. they miss the point that this is a slightly different situation.
Git? Seriously? So the system developed by the primary "enemy" (or so it's portrayed) of the designer of MINIX (and most vocal opponent of the way MINIX operates) is used to develop MINIX itself now, presumably because "it works" even if it's not architecturally perfect?
I can't decide if that's incredibly ironic, or a wonderfully beautiful illustration of Open Source.
E.coli has been around for over 100m years. Even in the 1800's when it was isolated, it was present in every subject's gut flora. There's nothing "modern" about it at all. If you create food, especially food that's been anywhere near an animal, you have a chance of E.coli.
Salmonella is almost identical in these terms too. Animals have it naturally in their bodies, it's just whether it takes hold in a particular session of you eating it. If you're eating animals, you're going to get it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow,... People were dying of bacteria like this for millions of years before we worked out how to cook food properly (and even there, as you can see by how easy TOMATOES can be affected by a bacterium from animals, there's nothing we can do to stop it, or to stop it getting more successful at infecting us!).
And incidents of poor hygiene show you exactly what was happening even 100 years ago in terms of people eating food. WW2 "Stomach Divisions" were rife, and have been in every war prior to that. It's arguable that the UK became such a world power because we discovered several facts related to food hygiene.
Meat is no more dangerous than before. You don't have to be any more careful cooking with a modern cow than with a ancient one. The only fact is that we're much more likely to spot the cause and isolate it today.
There is also no amount of cooking or scrubbing that will guarantee your food free of such adverse effects. Our grandparents eat food fresh or not at all. We now *CHOOSE* to keep food for months because we can.
Nobody claims that modern food is perfect, but even in my grandparents time, we weren't able to station an army for a year without people falling foul of all sorts of stomach illness and food poisoning. In some famous historical European battles, nearly HALF of the troops used were out of action at any one time because of illness, primarily caused by food hygiene and the food itself.
The health scares you talk about regarding modern processed are like the modern "war" news. One person dies and it's front-page. Back in my grandparents time, entire streets of civilians were bombed to obliteration and didn't get a mention in the local paper because it was so insignificant compared to everything else happening at the time.
Today, a few dozen people falling to E.coli is "news", because we don't see E.coli much in the wild now because of the extent of processed and tested food. In my grandparent's time, it was taking out vast swathes of the army and a major problem.
Consider that juice is probably from fruit that was grown half-way around the world to most people who drink it. I know I drink Spanish orange juice, for instance. This is a luxury that you complain you lack because of price. If you wanted to drink healthily, you'd only drink water alongside your ordinary food intake. My point is that the food you eat, even the horrible "unhealthy" stuff is much more nutritious than anything that anyone was eating even a hundred years ago. It may not be *ideal* but it's certainly better than ever before. Ever seen a real carrot, not one farmed on a mass scale, for instance? They are small, purple, spindly things that you wouldn't give to a goat.
Again, it's a time/effort/nutrition tradeoff. If you want better food you have to work slightly more. But, historically, if you wanted ANY food you had to work VERY hard ALL the time. Still, the difference in effort between you eating "healthily" (by modern standards) and just eating is less than 1% of your income, hence less than 1% of the work you need to do to get it. I'm not saying I can afford it either (but I'm one of these unhealthy sods who just doesn't care what they eat), but it's still nothing compared to all of human history prior to our generation (and maybe one or two back but that's about it).
To say that eating unhealthily is the killer of modern life is to be extremely ignorant of the exact statistics and impact of simple things. What kills us is *desire* and *laziness* - because it's easier to buy a carton of juice in a convenient box that tastes nice rather than drink only water.
Humans survive quite adequately on water and food alone. But you've been *spoiled* to the point where you expect juice instead of soda (flavoured sugar water). That's a trade-off you've made in terms of effort vs reward. Juice tastes better than water. Soda tastes better than water, come to that. That's why we drink more of that than we even do pure water.
Of course modern food is more expensive - it has more done to it and more safeguards. But there's nothing stopping you growing your own potatoes or lettuce (that's a choice you can make, but not necessarily afford to make - in time if nothing else). You'll find them insipid, lacklustre, small, EXTREMELY expensive and far too much effort required to make them, no matter how much you scale up (e.g. organic farming). Again the *desire* tradeoff means we never do it. It's not about cost - you can grow some items cheaply - it's about the tradeoff and ALL humans in Western civilisation prefer the tradeoff of "tastes good while keeping me alive".
The difference between the cost of healthy living and, say, the "gain" of working for an hour in the night (which is now believed to be a "natural" state within humans, who historically refer to first- and second-sleeps in almost all cultures in the world while our 8-hours-uninterrupted is an entirely modern fabrication) is absolutely without comparison. We could all do it. We don't, because we're lazy. That's the killer of modern life - our free-time is more precious than the food we eat or the drink we drink.
(P.S. Cooking healthy isn't hard. Just don't try for "ideally" healthy, which is something you'll never achieve on any budget. Cut out cheese, drink water, carrying on eating everything else the same. Bang. Instantly more healthy. Or eat a Mediterranean diet (mostly pasta or olive or...). Or just cut out the things you "enjoy" rather than the things you "need". A lot of modern cooking is about making things *exciting* or tasty to eat, and people think that's a requirement, for some reason.)
How well does it spot a child who's tripped up the kerb and is now lying on the ground behind your car and not moving? How well does it spot someone who's just about to walk out behind you? How well does it spot someone small, like a toddler? How well does it spot the kid on the bike about to cycle behind you? Try it. By the time that picks ANYTHING up, it's already too late and you've shoved them into the car / road behind you, or squished them under your tyres.
Sonar sensors are an *indicator*. You should not be relying on them to back out. That's what your eyes and human intelligence are for and you can still go wrong. The sensor isn't intelligent enough to do anything than indicate if there's a large solid object behind you and at what distance from the sensor (which doesn't necessarily mean anything at all in terms of an obstruction).
I'm not saying cameras are any better, they're not, but trying to mollycoddle everybody as if they were a bad driver just makes every new driver a bad driver.
And, in the UK, this is the only exception to the "seatbelt while driving" rule for drivers. You are legally allowed to unclip your seatbelt so that you can turn around while reversing the car.
If you need a camera, you aren't driving well-enough. Like if you need speed-camera warnings, or you need lane-advice, or you need ABS, or you need reversing radar, or you need tyres rated over the maximum speed limit, etc.
Diet? Seriously? We have the cleanest, most rigorously tested, most reliable, most nutritious, most easily digested and most available food sources that we've ever had in human history.
Part of the problem that you basically imagine, is caused by us having TOO GOOD FOOD. Too much of it, too easily available, too cheap, too nutritious (fat / carbohydrate is a nutrient!). We cook everything to rigorous standards (and though that does slightly increase incidences of cancer, it's a much better alternative to eating food raw by orders of magnitude) and check and control them through managed supply lines.
What's killing us "early" (i.e. earlier than we could potentially live but A LOT LONGER than even our grandparents were ever expected to live) is that we no longer favour longevity over, say, enjoyment. We are making conscious, informed decisions to eat too much of the wrong things, drink too much of the wrong things, exercise too little (and when we do exercise, don't do it anywhere near properly), etc. so that our time here on Earth can be spent doing things that our bodies were never designed to do voluntarily (roller-coasters!) but that we find exciting.
When farming was established, that left humans with free time. It's with that free time that we did all the myriad things we've achieved - from maths and the arts to social structure in modern Western society. All of the things you know as "going to work" is done because we don't have to have everyone till fields all day long, every day any more. We can put in 8 hours a day MINIMUM of productive work into something that's not required for a human to survive, even to the point that we are rewarded for doing so by being GIVEN the ability to have food brought to our door.
That free time from pure survival has become our anathema, but also our greatest attribute. What kills us nowadays is choice. We didn't have a lot of it historically, now we do. I can choose to not smoke, not drink, eat well, exercise and thus live - on average - for longer. Or I can choose not to do those things, and yet STILL SURVIVE PAST MATING, still nurture an infant to adulthood, etc.
Human innovation and ingenuity over eras have given us the ability to choose what we do with almost our entire lives. Use it. And stop worrying about whose going to "fix" the problem of being able to do just what we want with our life.
There have been night-plans for electricity in the UK for decades. Some old house still have two meters for the two different rates. Economy 7 came in in 1978, and that wasn't necessarily the first incarnation.
It changes nothing. People just use the electricity anyway and then complain about the prices. The vast majority of people can't / won't put off chores until midnight even if it's possible. Some intelligent washing machines can leave their programs until later on but how many of them can unload themselves and put the next load on? Everyone I know who has a washing machine has ONE setting that they know works and that's it. You can't even get them to try shorter spin cycles, let alone program a timer with the electricity rates.
The peak hours are the peak hours for a reason. That's when MOST people want to use MOST of their electricity. Kettles, lighting, heating, air conditioning, water usage etc. are all things that require humans in the house to benefit and thus are timed for when the humans are in the house.
Slashdot Mirror
Better yet, you wrote all your emails and sent them online. They're all now public property, by your reckoning. Please post the contents of every email you've ever sent or received for everyone to laugh at.
Just because it's online, just because it exists, does not mean that ANYONE but a court has the right to demand you show it to them (and even then, the laws against self-incrimination hinder even the courts).
Yeah, UK here too.
My response would be: Afraid not.
Simple as that.
If you then *don't* give me the position, I'll have an investigation initiated ANYWAY into unfair hiring practices (whether or not I actually wanted it or thought I had a chance).
The case might fall on its face because of lack of evidence after a year or two but it will cost you TONS on re-doing your procedures, proving compliance, fighting the case, the media, etc. and it won't be ME suing you, it'll be a no-win, no-fee lawyer and/or the Department for Work and Pensions.
If you were applying for, say, MI5 or GCHQ - maybe, possibly, still doubtful, but only because I'd expect them to ALREADY have that information. I'd actually half-expect them to just say at random "What about this post on The Reg where you talk about Turing..." or something completely random in that case.
Every other job that's not actually related to the military / national security? Go fish, my friend. I won't lie to you and say I haven't got an account, or tell you I forgot the password, I would just flat-out refuse. And I'd kick up one HELL of a fuss whatever happened. Even if I got the job, I'd make it clear that continuing to ask candidates that question is liable to cause them a lot of problems.
I'd no more accept this as a request in an interview as "Please drop your trousers so we can see if you've got an STD or you're Jewish".
Note to any of my future employers: Try it. Please.
Not being funny, but you can HAVE that level of privacy. Throw your smartphone (which didn't exist when you were a child) away. Disconnect your computer from the Internet (because my ZX Spectrum never had an Internet connection). Write letters (so that you hand them off to some several thousand minimum-wage workers who really have no personal incentive to ensure your letter reaches its destination at all, let alone unread). Use only your landline (which has ALWAYS been as simple to tap as putting a device in your phone, or a guy at the telecoms provider, or just clamping onto the analog cables running into the street - in the UK these are mainly aerial cables and nobody would notice a man in a hi-vis vest sticking something on the pole at all).
You *haven't* suddenly walked into a world of less privacy. You were in one already and then you CHOSE to use facilities which, by their very design, allow you to have some of that privacy taken away. And you're still there now. Email is NOT ENCRYPTED - even if it's sent from and arrives at a location you trust, you cannot trust the message without making provisions for this YOURSELF.
You chose to buy a satnav with a 3G connection because IT HELPS YOU. There were satnavs without it. There still are. But most people I know have satnavs with 3G capability.
You chose to buy a mobile phone that, by it's very principle of operation, requires the telecoms provider to know your rough location. Then you chose to buy one that has a GPS receiver built-in. Then one that tells your friends on Facebook that you just walked into the restaurant.
At any time, you can go back to the previous era, but it means ditching technology that you didn't have back then. Some people do. I have JUST bought my first smartphone. Not because I'm a privacy nut, but because I never wanted to have to manage another computer alongside all the ones I do professionally. Up until 4 days ago, I literally had a GSM phone with NO features. Was still trackable, though, by it's very design. My satnav DOESN'T have 3G connections - I get traffic over the one-way radio RDS-TMC system. It's not as good as live updates but it doesn't subvert my privacy or (more importantly) cost me anything to run.
I *don't* post when I'm going on holiday to Facebook. I don't post which restaurant I'm sitting in. I don't trust anything that comes in an email to not be overhead (i.e. I've never sent my credit card details by email).
You can do all these things already, and preserve your privacy. But privacy problems are not a result of changing attitudes towards privacy. They are the result of convenient technologies that have the side-effect of some lost privacy. And *everyone* who's used one has chosen to exchange that privacy for that feature. They would have 50 years ago, too. This is how 1984 was written - first published in 1949! - someone sat down and said "What if we had the technology to do X?" and followed through the natural progression of human response to that, even imagining a "future" of only 28 years ago (when I was a toddler).
You haven't "lost" privacy. You've been given more options of trade-off against it. And almost everyone, of any age and generation, is willing to take that trade-off even with prior warning. Because, on the whole, in Western society, your privacy isn't worth much to you at all. It doesn't make you a higher-class or give you cheaper taxes. When I *MUST* give away my name and address to public record in any court, when I *MUST* give my details to the electoral register even if I don't vote, when I *MUST* fill out a load of forms and take them to a random Post Office employee who passes them off to a dozen random government employees in order to get the document to legally travel to another country - the privacy of a text message to a friend isn't actually worth that much at all.
You chose to trade-off. If you own a mobile phone, or a GPS device that talks to central servers, or have a Facebook account, or don't use PGP for *EVE
But breaking something in a way that no-one has ever done before is a lot HARDER than either.
This.
Pretty much, after you learn your second or third programming language, they are all pretty much the same. There are some oddball ones for very specific purposes (e.g. PROLOG), but pretty much they are all the same things with different syntax and different libraries.
Some of them are slightly more suited to different tasks (e.g. LISt Processing, etc.) but there's really not much to choose between them. I'm not a fan of the newer languages - anything that LOOKS like gobbledegook from a distance usually does a good job of masking gobbledegook close-up. Just looking at some of the Ruby examples on the Wikipedia page makes my programming-mind want to vomit. I find C++ quite obtuse too. C99 is pretty much the best compromise that I've found between gobbledegook and flexibility.
Does your language compile to the target? Does your language run and compile from your development host? Does your language enable you to do the things you want without unnecessary hindrance? Almost every programmer who chooses a language asks themselves that and if they aren't satisfied it's true, will move to something else.
To an extent, OOP is just a formalisation of things that function programmers have been doing for decades into a space-saving syntax. Similarly for other "paradigms" of programming. In the end, the compiler still has to squeeze it all into the same instruction set and it's just whether it bothers to check for over-runs, abstract away certain details, make certain optimisations, etc. that makes any difference. The end code is usually pretty indistinguishable.
This is my answer when someone wants to choose a language to "start programming": Any of them. It doesn't really matter. Probably good to start with something you can understand immediately but it really doesn't matter what you do it in. It's like a child who's started learning to speak wondering what language they should speak - whatever is available, practical and you can manage.
Programming is communication of some instruction to the computer, that's why we call them "languages". What language you use is merely a practical consideration (i.e. verbosity, popularity, availability, what others can understand, etc.) that's pretty much made for you. Some languages aren't available, don't have a compiler (only an interpreter), need external libraries for everything, aren't cross-platform, etc. Beyond that, the only thing that matters is the message - the program itself - not the language.
Since I was a teenager, I thought of writing my own language that would pick bits I like out of each language and merge them. It would just create a hideous mess, of course, but if I've considered it, it usually means lots of other people have done it before me. Any language that purports to be the collation of the good points of others will be regarded by everyone else as a collation of the bad points of everything else.
A one-man language isn't, in and of itself, a bad thing. The problem comes when it literally does nothing you can't already do, albeit with slightly different syntax and slightly more work.
Basically, if you wanted, you could rewrite a C pre-processor to compile any of those languages directly to C syntax, and vice-versa. There's nothing "new", just some "shiny" things.
Things haven't moved on since C, really. Sure, we've prettied up the syntax, clarified some edge-cases, added some libraries, etc. but it's all just spit-and-polish on a language made in the 60's. The fact we use those slightly-cleaner versions for the vast majority of software today (including the compilers of most of those other languages) means that there really wasn't any huge paradigm shift, or change in the way we work, or need to move on.
The only thing I think might change the way we work in quantum computing. That's going to need a serious rethink and redesign in order for people to "program" them effectively. But, you know what? I have a suspicion that the first practical languages for that will be "C with knobs on".
My experience, similar story, from someone who knows how children learn:
15-year-old kid, work experience (I'm an IT manager, some would say systems- or network- manager, in primary schools). He'd NEVER seen anything approaching a programming language in his life. Slack afternoon because, hell, if you do your job right, the network runs itself. We get talking about computer games while in my office.
Ten minutes later, we're into "Yeah, but how do you do 3D / physics / motion sensing / etc.". After about an hour, he discovers the magic words: It's all a number. Everything in the computer is a number. Once you get it down to numbers, computing is easy.
Kid, admittedly, had a good (but not great) grounding in mathematics. So although we didn't do any of the actual maths involved, it was briefly shown how a 3D object is a set of coords and how all the fancy effects you see are just matrix transformations of those coords. We also got into how, if you pretend an object's mass is M, gravity is G, x-velocity is X, etc. then physics pretty much becomes the same. As, if I remember rightly, I was also able to demonstrate the same for things like joysticks, keyboards, mice, printers, scanners, webcams, Kinect, etc. etc. etc. It's all just numbers. Before long, he works out where the numbers come from for just about anything you can mention (e.g. networking, online gaming, colour effects, gestures, etc.)
Over the next few days, we delve deeper but only very casually and only in the slack periods. Before you know it, he's looking at some code I was working on and wondering how it worked. I show him something more interesting (a game I was writing - nothing "modern", literally something you could have done in the 80's), show him a few example lines.
Next thing I know, I've taught basically the whole of the BASIC keyword set in an afternoon, and what they do, the concept of variables, etc. Knock him up a simple "Yahtzee"-style dice game in BASIC just to show him line-by-line and how things work (like variables being a "box" in memory, etc.) - we literally build it up line-by-line in a hand-holding style all the way through. Think we got about 30 lines written. On paper. Without a single computer switched on in the room.
The kid comes in the next day with a bouncing-ball game he's written in QBASIC (written on Windows 7, which is no easy feat in itself!). He has had zero assistance outside of what I showed him. Nothing. Not even Google.
What courses was he going to go to next year? Not maths. Not IT. Not electronics. It was a waste, but it shows you that you can teach anyone if you want to. Most kids *don't* have the self-sufficiency to learn by themselves today without a lot of incentive (read: Money and/or a good grounding in the subject already). Throwing them in the deep end is just scary and pointless, even if that's what we had when we were kids (I learned "programming" from the orange ZX Spectrum instruction manual, which nobody else in my family ever saw a page of).
When I was a kid, the challenge was to learn it for yourself. Now you need to spoon-feed (I hesitate on the word 'need' but with today's generation and teaching methods, it's basically true). Once they have a start and know where to head, then they are more confident running off on their own. Leave them in a room with a HTML manual, you'll never see them try to use it. And don't make it relevant and they'll switch off, like all kids.
You can inspire kids to program, you just need to do it right. Destroying their vision of ever being able to write a computer game isn't the best start. And at what point did you do things on paper?
Hell, I'd rather have a couple of conceptual MMORPG "classes" for characters, inventory, etc. and some pseudocode about how to manage it all than to give them a duff language not designed for programming and a duff "game" to start on. He couldn't get the grid going because, you know what, that part would bore me to tears. If you'd started off in
Quoting a monotheism, the ultimate case of a dictatorship, totalitarianism, authoritarianism and despotism, is really quite an ironic way to make your point.
Cos, yeah, if the US president said he was going to release people who were imprisoned in a foreign country by the previous president for 10+ years at the US's behest, abused, tortured, denied fair trial, etc. and then he never followed through on his promise - yeah, democracy would set him right.
Right?
Because it was costing $3333.33 per user?
Some code I knocked up a few months ago had a problem with the leap-day just gone.
Difference being, that script wasn't meant to run for more than a few days, was knocked up in an hour, was untested, and didn't run anything critical at all (it moved scanned PDF files into an archive folder for a scanner used by precisely two people).
Seriously, Microsoft, you have a system that you expect government to use and you can't even work around a leap-day in advance?
I do 500 miles in a standard working week, doing one journey a day to/from a bog-standard 9-5 job at a single site.
Where do I live? London.
Where do I work? London.
How much would it cost on public transport? More than my (expensive UK) petrol costs, mainly because of a very efficient engine, in a 15-year-old car. That's not counting my extra lost-time travelling, though.
How much more hassle is it to rely on the Tubes, Buses, etc. instead of a car in London? Add about 2-3 hours onto my working day on a PERFECT day with no stoppages or delays (which I've never witnessed on the London Underground) and where I catch everything just as it leaves the station. Some days, it's actually technically impossible to do that journey by public transport because of all the outages.
Direct, my place of work is half-as-many miles from me, involving THE worst roads in London and hours of queues every morning. A 7 mile detour onto the orbital motorway around London saves me over an hour every day and stops me crawling at 20mph along miles of main "A" road.
I do *not* live on the very outskirts. If you do, you can drive much more than me (about 30% more I'd estimate). Going North/South is even worse because of the direction of most traffic through London at that time of the day (and you can burn more petrol than a 100 mile a day in a single journey just queuing through everyday queues).
Now multiply that up by people who *can't* afford to live near London and/or commute in from Oxford, etc. and it soon gets just-as-crazy.
The American disease is thinking you're worse off than everyone else and making a bigger fuss than everyone else. The English disease is *knowing* you're not worse off than others, but moaning like you are anyway.
Think you're the only ones? Some European COUNTRIES are going bankrupt.
http://www.staveleyhead.co.uk/utilities/petrol-prices/
Compare and contrast the SLOPE of the graph for the US with all the other countries listed. Ignore the actual figure, watch the slope, which indicates change.
Trust me, we hurt just as bad when the fuel price rises, if not more.
Australia is a similarly big country, with a much greater amount of vast empty wasteland and having to travel 100miles plus to a doctor (flying doctors normally cover an area around the size of the UK each).
http://www.fuelwatch.wa.gov.au/fuelwatch/pages/home.jspx
The prices are AU$ per litre. Multiply by 3.8 (ish) to get US Gallons. Hint: Diesel's gonna cost ya over 5 AU$ which is more than 5 US$.
If the US price were really hit that bad by petrol prices, you'd have rural petrol subsidies and/or inner-city petrol taxes to compensate.
The US may finally have to live in the real world regarding petrol prices and why European engines are "small" and yet can still do 70mph with a family of kids in the back and towing a caravan without even struggling.
Great, so you don't mind them telling all their advertisers (adult or not) that your IP surfs porn sites that use Google Analytics then?
The problem is not the EXISTING privacy policy, it's the new one where all the information can be tied together and used in ways it couldn't before.
Like with UK ID-card debacle. The problem is not the ID card. The problem is the associated (and unnecessary) tying of separate databases and allowing *ALL* that information to propagate through entities that never had access to it before. While people focus on the fact that everyone else has ID, every other country doesn't object, etc. they miss the point that this is a slightly different situation.
The speed of darkness is always faster than the speed of light. No matter how fast light gets somewhere, the darkness has always beaten it to it.
(C) Terry Pratchett
Git? Seriously? So the system developed by the primary "enemy" (or so it's portrayed) of the designer of MINIX (and most vocal opponent of the way MINIX operates) is used to develop MINIX itself now, presumably because "it works" even if it's not architecturally perfect?
I can't decide if that's incredibly ironic, or a wonderfully beautiful illustration of Open Source.
E.coli has been around for over 100m years. Even in the 1800's when it was isolated, it was present in every subject's gut flora. There's nothing "modern" about it at all. If you create food, especially food that's been anywhere near an animal, you have a chance of E.coli.
Salmonella is almost identical in these terms too. Animals have it naturally in their bodies, it's just whether it takes hold in a particular session of you eating it. If you're eating animals, you're going to get it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, ... People were dying of bacteria like this for millions of years before we worked out how to cook food properly (and even there, as you can see by how easy TOMATOES can be affected by a bacterium from animals, there's nothing we can do to stop it, or to stop it getting more successful at infecting us!).
And incidents of poor hygiene show you exactly what was happening even 100 years ago in terms of people eating food. WW2 "Stomach Divisions" were rife, and have been in every war prior to that. It's arguable that the UK became such a world power because we discovered several facts related to food hygiene.
Meat is no more dangerous than before. You don't have to be any more careful cooking with a modern cow than with a ancient one. The only fact is that we're much more likely to spot the cause and isolate it today.
There is also no amount of cooking or scrubbing that will guarantee your food free of such adverse effects. Our grandparents eat food fresh or not at all. We now *CHOOSE* to keep food for months because we can.
Nobody claims that modern food is perfect, but even in my grandparents time, we weren't able to station an army for a year without people falling foul of all sorts of stomach illness and food poisoning. In some famous historical European battles, nearly HALF of the troops used were out of action at any one time because of illness, primarily caused by food hygiene and the food itself.
The health scares you talk about regarding modern processed are like the modern "war" news. One person dies and it's front-page. Back in my grandparents time, entire streets of civilians were bombed to obliteration and didn't get a mention in the local paper because it was so insignificant compared to everything else happening at the time.
Today, a few dozen people falling to E.coli is "news", because we don't see E.coli much in the wild now because of the extent of processed and tested food. In my grandparent's time, it was taking out vast swathes of the army and a major problem.
Consider that juice is probably from fruit that was grown half-way around the world to most people who drink it. I know I drink Spanish orange juice, for instance. This is a luxury that you complain you lack because of price. If you wanted to drink healthily, you'd only drink water alongside your ordinary food intake. My point is that the food you eat, even the horrible "unhealthy" stuff is much more nutritious than anything that anyone was eating even a hundred years ago. It may not be *ideal* but it's certainly better than ever before. Ever seen a real carrot, not one farmed on a mass scale, for instance? They are small, purple, spindly things that you wouldn't give to a goat.
Again, it's a time/effort/nutrition tradeoff. If you want better food you have to work slightly more. But, historically, if you wanted ANY food you had to work VERY hard ALL the time. Still, the difference in effort between you eating "healthily" (by modern standards) and just eating is less than 1% of your income, hence less than 1% of the work you need to do to get it. I'm not saying I can afford it either (but I'm one of these unhealthy sods who just doesn't care what they eat), but it's still nothing compared to all of human history prior to our generation (and maybe one or two back but that's about it).
To say that eating unhealthily is the killer of modern life is to be extremely ignorant of the exact statistics and impact of simple things. What kills us is *desire* and *laziness* - because it's easier to buy a carton of juice in a convenient box that tastes nice rather than drink only water.
Humans survive quite adequately on water and food alone. But you've been *spoiled* to the point where you expect juice instead of soda (flavoured sugar water). That's a trade-off you've made in terms of effort vs reward. Juice tastes better than water. Soda tastes better than water, come to that. That's why we drink more of that than we even do pure water.
Of course modern food is more expensive - it has more done to it and more safeguards. But there's nothing stopping you growing your own potatoes or lettuce (that's a choice you can make, but not necessarily afford to make - in time if nothing else). You'll find them insipid, lacklustre, small, EXTREMELY expensive and far too much effort required to make them, no matter how much you scale up (e.g. organic farming). Again the *desire* tradeoff means we never do it. It's not about cost - you can grow some items cheaply - it's about the tradeoff and ALL humans in Western civilisation prefer the tradeoff of "tastes good while keeping me alive".
The difference between the cost of healthy living and, say, the "gain" of working for an hour in the night (which is now believed to be a "natural" state within humans, who historically refer to first- and second-sleeps in almost all cultures in the world while our 8-hours-uninterrupted is an entirely modern fabrication) is absolutely without comparison. We could all do it. We don't, because we're lazy. That's the killer of modern life - our free-time is more precious than the food we eat or the drink we drink.
(P.S. Cooking healthy isn't hard. Just don't try for "ideally" healthy, which is something you'll never achieve on any budget. Cut out cheese, drink water, carrying on eating everything else the same. Bang. Instantly more healthy. Or eat a Mediterranean diet (mostly pasta or olive or...). Or just cut out the things you "enjoy" rather than the things you "need". A lot of modern cooking is about making things *exciting* or tasty to eat, and people think that's a requirement, for some reason.)
At which point did the OP mention Linux at all?
How well does it spot a child who's tripped up the kerb and is now lying on the ground behind your car and not moving? How well does it spot someone who's just about to walk out behind you? How well does it spot someone small, like a toddler? How well does it spot the kid on the bike about to cycle behind you? Try it. By the time that picks ANYTHING up, it's already too late and you've shoved them into the car / road behind you, or squished them under your tyres.
Sonar sensors are an *indicator*. You should not be relying on them to back out. That's what your eyes and human intelligence are for and you can still go wrong. The sensor isn't intelligent enough to do anything than indicate if there's a large solid object behind you and at what distance from the sensor (which doesn't necessarily mean anything at all in terms of an obstruction).
I'm not saying cameras are any better, they're not, but trying to mollycoddle everybody as if they were a bad driver just makes every new driver a bad driver.
And, in the UK, this is the only exception to the "seatbelt while driving" rule for drivers. You are legally allowed to unclip your seatbelt so that you can turn around while reversing the car.
If you need a camera, you aren't driving well-enough. Like if you need speed-camera warnings, or you need lane-advice, or you need ABS, or you need reversing radar, or you need tyres rated over the maximum speed limit, etc.
Diet? Seriously? We have the cleanest, most rigorously tested, most reliable, most nutritious, most easily digested and most available food sources that we've ever had in human history.
Part of the problem that you basically imagine, is caused by us having TOO GOOD FOOD. Too much of it, too easily available, too cheap, too nutritious (fat / carbohydrate is a nutrient!). We cook everything to rigorous standards (and though that does slightly increase incidences of cancer, it's a much better alternative to eating food raw by orders of magnitude) and check and control them through managed supply lines.
What's killing us "early" (i.e. earlier than we could potentially live but A LOT LONGER than even our grandparents were ever expected to live) is that we no longer favour longevity over, say, enjoyment. We are making conscious, informed decisions to eat too much of the wrong things, drink too much of the wrong things, exercise too little (and when we do exercise, don't do it anywhere near properly), etc. so that our time here on Earth can be spent doing things that our bodies were never designed to do voluntarily (roller-coasters!) but that we find exciting.
When farming was established, that left humans with free time. It's with that free time that we did all the myriad things we've achieved - from maths and the arts to social structure in modern Western society. All of the things you know as "going to work" is done because we don't have to have everyone till fields all day long, every day any more. We can put in 8 hours a day MINIMUM of productive work into something that's not required for a human to survive, even to the point that we are rewarded for doing so by being GIVEN the ability to have food brought to our door.
That free time from pure survival has become our anathema, but also our greatest attribute. What kills us nowadays is choice. We didn't have a lot of it historically, now we do. I can choose to not smoke, not drink, eat well, exercise and thus live - on average - for longer. Or I can choose not to do those things, and yet STILL SURVIVE PAST MATING, still nurture an infant to adulthood, etc.
Human innovation and ingenuity over eras have given us the ability to choose what we do with almost our entire lives. Use it. And stop worrying about whose going to "fix" the problem of being able to do just what we want with our life.
And what do you think people who are "borderline" will do when getting back into their car from the pub?
Not drive "just in case", or pass their own inaccurate breathalyzer and say "Must be okay to drive then"?
Yeah, shame about "being silently disappeared". Makes him sound like an idiot.
You think they haven't already?
There have been night-plans for electricity in the UK for decades. Some old house still have two meters for the two different rates. Economy 7 came in in 1978, and that wasn't necessarily the first incarnation.
It changes nothing. People just use the electricity anyway and then complain about the prices. The vast majority of people can't / won't put off chores until midnight even if it's possible. Some intelligent washing machines can leave their programs until later on but how many of them can unload themselves and put the next load on? Everyone I know who has a washing machine has ONE setting that they know works and that's it. You can't even get them to try shorter spin cycles, let alone program a timer with the electricity rates.
The peak hours are the peak hours for a reason. That's when MOST people want to use MOST of their electricity. Kettles, lighting, heating, air conditioning, water usage etc. are all things that require humans in the house to benefit and thus are timed for when the humans are in the house.