Cancer isn't some magical disease that turns up. It's literally coding errors (for the most part). If you want a computer analogy, it's like expecting an hard drive as old as you are not to have any bad sectors - it's possible, but it ain't gonna stay like that forever. And if those errors are in the wrong places - the whole thing becomes a mess that destroys itself. Of course, a lot of the time those errors go unnoticed for decades or even forever if they are in an unimportant part of the code. And there's a certain amount of "error checking and correction" going on in various reproductive processes of the cells that lessens the impact.
Cancer is, basically, the MTBF of a human. If something else doesn't get you, cancer will eventually catch you up by sheer random statistics - enough time exposed to the sun (not even in a sunny country, or deliberate exposure), or a million and one other factors (which is why *everything* is stated in the news as "causing cancer"), and the cell's DNA "bits" will flip and it'll go crazy and stop all its highly-evolved self-limiting processes until it starts to take over your body. With some people it happens within their first year of life, some people live to 100 and never see it... but live long enough and you'll get cancer.
You can extend life, you can treat cancer, in theory you can "cure" it (i.e. push its statistical error rate outside the lifespan of a human) but it'll always be there. Try and find someone who's lived past 40/50 and hasn't had either several friends/relatives or themselves have it / die from it... we've all been there. I can name five serious (two fatal) off the top of my head just from blood relations and I'm only 30 - and those are just the ones I know about.
Cancer isn't a brake on population growth - the genetic factors are rarely subject to natural selection as others have pointed out - it's just the natural lifespan of a human. We didn't have it very much a few thousand years ago because we weren't living long enough for it to have a big effect. In the future, it will always be there even if we "trick" our way around it (there are animals that live longer than us and don't see such a high rate of mutation). Just look at the primary methods of treatment for a condition which sinks billions of pounds of research money - surgically cut it out, poison it or nuke it.
Pulling some stats from the wiki: Cancer causes 13% of all deaths worldwide and 25% of all deaths in the US. More than 30% of cancer is preventable via avoiding risk factors (which suggests that 70% of it is not preventable at all). It's a statistical function, not a disease, and the more exposure you have to things, the more your chances go up (but, some would argue, the more your quality of life would go down). Nothing brings those chances down below their base rate, though. It can be made more survivable, less painful, less affecting, but you can't "stop" it. Change your lifestyle and you have more effect than researching drugs that few can afford, won't be effective and will have terrible side-effects - the story of all medicine ("Since 1971 the United States has invested over $200 billion on cancer research... Despite this substantial investment, the country has only seen a five percent decrease in the cancer death rate in the last 50 years"). Who here wants to give up alcohol and sex and modern living to live longer? I would guess few. Same as everything else on the planet: Live life, enjoy and if you exercise and take care you'll extend your average lifespan. You could still get cancer tomorrow, though.
Cancer is what you're left with if you've survived everything else. In the brutal, inhumane terms of statistics, it's not very important in terms of sustaining the planet / population or anything else.
Any employer that relies on search engine information on their candidates to be accurate is a moron, unless they *really* research your background and know precisely which "John Smith" you are. You wouldn't *want* to work for anyone that just googles your name / college and automatically assumes everything they find is about you.
If they go far enough to actually research the accuracy of the information they found, you are *not* going to be able to hide anything anyway - they would have been checking with the college and previous employers anyway. Google my real name and you come up with a PhD in America who has expertise in my field. It's not me, though, and I've only ever been to America once and never got a PhD. His results are mixed in randomly with my forum posts, technical articles or random blog links, etc. A search is unreliable. A *real* background search would turn up whatever history you have anyway, and falsely denying that is worse than just having it on your record.
Don't worry about it, live life, work for whomever you please. If you think it's become a big, well-known problem in your field talk to your employers beforehand and explain that it was just a thing you did when you were younger. If they can't forgive that, do you *really* want to work for them anyway? What're they gonna find out about your youth next and hold against you?
Maybe the people on the other side were like yourself: your credentials hold no water if you weren't involved enough to spell "counsel" - the word you used means something completely different.
And if you think it makes any difference to an otherwise-normal teenager or adult if they play violent games, or view porn, or not, you're sadly mistaken. A survey by a UK university recently wanted to analyse the difference between people who did view violent / pornographic material and those who did not. They could not find a single suitable person to analyse, who'd never been exposed to either. This is pretty much the same throughout human history once a person hits a certain age.
Humans are animals, we are built by nature to compete, be strong, even fight among each other, and to have sex. Like every other animal on the planet. And if you think that *viewing* such actions makes any difference to an otherwise-normal person, you're wrong. I can watch someone smoke on television (or in the case of one parent, every single day at home) and not want to fill my lungs with poisonous gases, even when I was a teenager and had my schoolmates encouraging me (never even tried it, never want to try it) - it's called a conscience and it's also called educating your children properly.
Unfortunately the exact actions you support (banning material of that nature) makes it impossible for people to adjust to and determine the proper place of such material. Nobody wants 11-year-olds playing Grand Theft Auto or psychotics playing Doom - that's what ratings are designed to prevent but require a *sensible* adult the other end to enforce, otherwise known as a parent/guardian - but ordinary, everyday, human beings should become acclimatised to such material - or you know what happens? The same as when you withhold a substance and then only introduce it later in life - over-reaction to that substance (e.g. allergies, intolerances, obsessive behaviour etc.).
When governments babysit, you end up with babies. When parents parent, you end up with human children and adults.
Because no-one yet has ever managed to pull things from this theoretical "historical" layer without at least something like a electron microscope costing tens or hundreds of thousands, thousands of hours of skilled *manual* work and having to crack the damn harddrive open and destroy it (if at all)? I believe there is a still a challenge going around with a hard drive that was "zeroed" quite simply and if anyone can recover the password in the single file that was on it before it was zeroed, then can get a few thousand dollars - nobody has even done more than look at it yet. (It certainly can't be done by software alone - are you thinking of unzeroed filesystem residue that has nothing to do with hardware at all?)
In theory you might think you were right, but digital is nothing to do with historical layering (which is doubtful whether it exists in a practical sense that can be utilised)... it's the method of recording - 1 or 0 or more possible patterns? Hard drives might store by majority by they do it for a reason - because a single bit it *useless* on such a fine recording medium because it *can* change over time or just by slight inaccuracies in the recording/reading methods, so you have to swipe a whole bunch of the disk to be assured of reading back a 1 or 0 with your reader (which could never read more than the consensus of 1 or 0 because it's just not that accurate - it has to have a large bunch of magnetised particles to make any reading at all, it doesn't read each individually and then think "Oh, that's enough to be a 1" - when it reads it back, only a certain amount "trigger" it to think the thing is a 0 or 1 - thus it *IS* digital because the only answer it can give is 0 or 1 and not "well, almost a 1").
And if manufacturers thought for a second any of that was do-able in even enterprise drives, it would be done already and sold to the highest bidder. The fact is that it just isn't feasible or even possible - it's almost impossible to do that in a device small enough to fit in your car, or reliably, or without totally destroying the operation or performance of a drive, or for less than the price of a large rack full of storage.
The price you pay for a little more realistic water and other minor changes that could easily be "faked" without DirectX 11 (if they bothered) isn't worth it for the hardware, the driver suppport, forced OS for DirectX11, the increased power of the cards, etc. If that was my PC, I'd be playing it in DirectX 9 mode.
There's not much you can do, this is why SSL saves millions of people's asses everyday - just be ultra-suspicious of any warnings that you don't normally get. This is why everyone has a "trusted" network piped into their house by their ISP, and why they get so uppity when that trust is abused (DNS redirection, deep packet inspection, traffic analysis, advertisement insertion etc).
Have a software firewall at *ALL* times that distrusts everything... on Windows I use Zonealarm with everything set to "Internet" and all the high-security settings for that (only exception is an OpenVPN interface which can *obviously* only be my remote access into my trusted networks at home - I let OpenVPN - the program - connect to the Internet and I let the OpenVPN interface do whatever the hell it wants ["trusted"], and obviously have all the checks enabled for certificate-authentication to get onto my home network). On Linux, that's just bog-standard iptables doing its job the same as ever.
I don't expect anything non-SSL to be secure by default. I treat it as if I was using Tor in that respect. Make sure you have Gmail or whatever set to "always use https". If you want anything better than that (i.e. email, IM, http, etc. traffic), or better assurance overall, you have to have a VPN to be safe.
My OpenVPN automatically deletes other routes except for the essential ones and adds a default route through my VPN interface so when connected to home I *know* everything has to be using the VPN to communicate in that instance (hate the idea that if OpenVPN dies, there might be "another" route lurking which sends things out on another interface - I've seen it happen with some "automatic" configurations on Windows).
I often game over an OpenVPN instance, even when playing locally, so don't take heed of the rubbish about it being too costly in latency terms - of course, if you are in a foreign country and relaying to another, it will lag, but the actual overhead is not much worse than just ordinary IP routing to your destination.
Basically - SSL in some form or another, whether that's direct or over a VPN... otherwise you cannot trust things. Of course, millions of people trust ordinary wifi points all over the world, all day, every day. If you decide to follow their lead, that's up to you.
"Interestingly, revTalk does also use "return" to return a value from a function, as shown at the end of the sortWord handler. But we have different meanings for words in English, too. I think it's nifty that he compiler knows how to evaluate these terms "in context.""
I don't... overloading operators is a pain in the ass to the novice programmer, because they assume the computer will "just know". A lot of the time they are right, but when they are wrong, it doesn't even occur to them where or why. There are two approaches to poor syntax - error about it, or accept it and try to make sense. This seems to be a "try to make sense" language, which can cause a *lot* of problems with novices.
"FYI, one can use "cr" or "crlf" or "numtochar(13)" as synonyms for "return" in the context of strings, but I like "return." The idea of synonyms in code probably makes it that much messier and aggravating for some!:)"
Alternatives to a particular name are always welcome - everybody likes an alias, it just aids learning by providing choice, but that's a particularly horrible example, that's all. I literally had to read the whole program to work out what that "return" was because I was trying to interpret it as a function return or keyword. And I noticed that I found the use of && and & quite odd, but maybe my brain wasn't into it. "return" is ambiguous (newline would have been better, possibly?) and confusing. Though why it's even necessary to return-space a set of strings in order to sort them is another matter entirely (it suggests to me that strings are inherently unbounded, but I doubt that would be the actual case).
"I'd like to see the 50 lines of BASIC code. (Which would be about twice as long.)"
It'd be messy, lots of loops, but possible.
"At least you agreed that with zero previous knowledge of the language, you could "already see what the code is trying to do." I think that would be true for even non-programmers, and is a testament to the self-documenting strength of revTalk."
I'm a programmer (not professionally but I program as part of my job and in my spare time)... that means I can tell what code is *trying* to do just by the names of functions and outlying structure, even if I don't know the language. If I'm brutally honest, it took me longer than most with this language and if it hadn't been for the variable with "anagram" in the name, I would have been stuck. I don't want to push that down to say that *all* novices would do the same, but I would find it highly unlikely a novice programmer could understand that code at all, and one would need several weeks/months of using Rev as a first language to even get close if they'd never programmed before.
Last month, I taught BASIC to a 15-year-old (who was into "old" computer stuff but had never programmed, so I just demonstrated the concept of programming using BASIC) in an afternoon. He came back the next day with a game he'd written - and we're talking old-fashioned "I want a dot here, a letter ther" kind of game, not some DarkBASIC template. I don't claim that BASIC is "good" or easier to learn, but the point was that the structure of a program (including subroutines, program flow, variables, keywords, etc.) can be taught in an afternoon to the point that someone can replicate it and understand it. However reading *that* program would have given him a lot of trouble in this language, even if I'd started him on that. Damn, even I struggled to find meaning and separate variables/keywords/structure.
"The main idea here is that revTalk appeals to people who are not keen on traditional programming languages. It can therefore enable them to accomplish things they wouldn't normally consider trying, either because of the expense or time involved."
I appreciate the idea, but I've seen a lot of novices and I don't think it works. There will be ten people totally put off by that code for every one that it "clicks" with. And those people would have clicked with any language, most
Thanks for the post with some source code, it's the only way I can judge a language and I didn't want to hunt it down.
And... Yeurk. That might be more readable to some people but I think I just lost some braincells.
First, the use of the word "return" to mean, in this case, line return. Nobody I know calls them line returns except established programmers (i.e. those who know the historical difference between carriage return and line feed), and people who deal with typography in some way. Return actually *means* something in 99% of programming languages, if not as a keyword than as a name for a particular program flow.
And it reads like someone "pronouncing" pseudocode or some kind of BASIC. I don't see how this line is *at all* intuitive:
"if c is not in sourceWord then filter wordList without ("*" & c & "*")"
It was fine right up until that last bit, which could have a billion different interpretations. I assume it's doing wildcard removal of anything that doesn't have the character c in it but, hell, that's just because I can already see what the code is trying to do.
The syntax is *too* loose, so loose that you will stray into incorrect meaning by accident. Possibly it's more "readable" to a novice, but they probably aren't aware of the subtleties of exactly how it could go wrong, by a simple mis-wording or instruction-order-problem. I can read code and think "Yeah, that'll work" when in actual fact if you look closely, there are critical errors that turn it into gibberish. A novice might be able to read that code, but if they could know for sure whether it did what they want without unintended side effects is another matter.
And it seems *very* long-hand. Too much, in fact. I'm now stranger to lines of code that need to be wrapped because they hit the column limit, and in this language it seems even more likely to occur.
50 or so lines of BASIC with a simple comment every now and then would do the same job much more "intuitively" to me. And I've taught many people programming in my time (I taught most of my school's programming classes when I was supposed to be a student of that same class!), from scratch. That language is truly horrible and no better than any other. Sure, once you're used to it, and if it was your first language, you'd think it was "good", but... no thanks.
A few years back, I bought every copy of INPUT - a Marshall Cavendish collect-each-weekly-part programming magazine that was released back in the Speccy days. Every page has Speccy, Amstrad, Commodore, Dragon/Tandy code, and code for other machines of the era, that you had to type in. That magazine single-handedly got me interested in programming. And then a few years ago I mentioned it on Slashdot and spoke to someone who had written one of the big games (10 or so issues full of code) that was published in it!:-)
I was *nearly* the first person to publish a map for Nonterraqueous too, but we were pipped to the post after HOURS of mapping.
The trouble is that your game will sink into the piles of "8's and 9's" like everyone else. There's nothing to distinguish your game from, say, a crap game from a big publisher that has bought the review. That's the problem and, unfortunately, that's why I can't trust *any* review, wherever it's come from.
I was a "whatever had the best game on the covertape" reader but I basically bought every magazine going.
Crash was okay with tapes, not so fun to read. Your Sinclair was good to read and had fairly decent tapes. And Sinclair User - I probably never read enough of them to make a choice.
I had a letter published in Your Sinclair once, so you'd probably say that was my favourite, given the evidence. In reality, I was just after a freebie and their cover tapes.
I agree, rebranding is an exercise in management of boredom (and trying to sweep bad reputations under the carpet), not anything practical or useful. Does "Nick the Plumber", small-time business man need to rebrand every few years? No. Does IBM or Microsoft or other large companies? No. Rebranding on mergers / takeovers, I can sort of understand that, but even when Santander took over a lot of UK banks, they were smart enough to keep the original names and start a *very* *very* slow transition to introduce the Santander name in the UK (which was unheard of).
Marathon -> Snickers (I will never forgive them) Opal Fruits -> Starburst (I still ask for these in shops and people always know what I'm talking about).
Rebranding is a waste of time and money in order to confuse your existing customers and keep them asking for your previous name.
And why? Because the grade-grubbing means that as of about 10-15 years ago, reviews are nothing more than adverts, and ratings are nothing more than auctions to the highest bidder.
I've *never* bought any game because of a review. Not even back when they were a bit more honest (e.g. in the Spectrum days, it was very common to see sub-50% and even sub-10% scores of games, some of them were even immortalised in things like a "crap games collection"). Game preference is completely subjective and neither words nor pictures can convey how a game operates.
But it's not just games that suffer from the problem - I know someone who buys cameras, cars, all manner of electrical goods etc. on the basis of the Which? review. I have seriously watched them buy something that costs a month's wages just because the Which? magazine said it was the best, only for them to discover that all the things *I* said about the brand / device / features etc. were true and it was useless to them. What was even more annoying is that they asked my advice every time about PC's and electrical goods, then completely ignored it, bought what the Which? review recommended, then complained and expected me to provide support for the thing they just bought.
I read reviews as entertainment. If I want to know about a game, I might read the review of it to pass the time and introduce me to the *suggested* features that it may have. But I would never use them as a basis for a purchase... that's why you let other dummies buy it first and then hear first-hand from them after a month if they are still playing it and enjoying it.
Tech related: intercepted private pager messages from a variety of sources. Someone managed to collate these en-masse and distribute them. Politically related (Slashdot has a politics section): suggestion of interception and storage of pager messages on a grand scale beyond that needed for operational reasons (this is 24-hours worth, don't forget, from several sources). Privacy related: A release of otherwise private information, including private communications between ordinary people, presumably gathered direct from telco's, to a website known for doing that with politically-sensitive material. If nothing else, this shows you where your "private communications" end up when you're texting something erotic to your girlfriend... not "analysed", not "anonymised", just saved onto a disk somewhere at the telco for a random person to collect and leak to the Internet.
I think it's relevant and I have zero interest in 9/11, conspiracy theories, or even most of the things the US does.
£1 on any boot sale, pound shop, major booksellers, buys you a brand new, completely anonymous (i.e. not requiring activation or any personal details *AT ALL*, even to "top-up") pre-pay SIM card that will work with data products too.
That's what robots.txt is for - Google really don't care if you want to use them or not, but they respect anyone who wants to opt out using an industry standard. Good luck being the person to explain to your boss why 83% of your market can't even see you online any more, though. It's like "opting-out" of advertising for free on 83% of all billboards in the city you're advertising in... nobody's stopping you, and nobody can blame the biggest billboard company in the world if you can't get enough people interested in your product when you only advertise on the other 17%.
If a site is "de-listed", that's it. Google don't really care at all and there's not much that can or would ever want to do about that. And by not showing up on Google, nobody else really cares about those sites either.
Google can't and won't start "paying" sites to have them appear on Google. That would be the entire antithesis of any search engine's business model ("Hi, I'm Bing, I'm now a fake advert page for every result but someone in a back room is actually deciding who gets to post here!"). If they wanted that, they'd be selling those top-spots and not just having clear adverts/search results seperation like they do now - it's the same thing but the other way around (we-pay-them instead of they-pay-us). I can't think of a more stupid system to run a "search engine" on, even temporarily. It'll be like domain names all over again - hey Microsoft, I have a good article on X that's extremely popular - how much will you pay me to sell it to Bing?
It's a silly thing to do, and all that will happen is that Google will index pages that talk about why you can't get those sites through the search engine (because someone wants money). And because the Bing results won't even show up in Google either, you'll just never hear about those sites. People who want them will type them in directly (it's a newspaper, right? So it has the URL written on the heading of the front page) or favourite them, people who don't won't be aware they exist, and the "transition group" in between will never even see an article to let them decide if they like the style of reporting.
To be honest, when I search for a news story, I have *too many* newspapers and online news outlets fighting to supply me with facts. A few missing won't make me care at all, I'll just be even less exposed to their name/reputation/exclusives.
MS: Do it, make it bomb big-time, then see why the rest of the world was ignoring the pillock.
I use UltraVNC - they have a little util (UltraVNC SC) that compiles UltraVNC into a standalone exe that people can run and it automatically connects back to you (even using a chosen set of encryption plugins etc. if necessary) at YOUR IP, so they just double-click an EXE and you deal with opening ports and running any VNC listen server on your end.
I keep a copy on my website and then if people need it, I just point them to a very simple URL and while they are downloading / double-clicking it, I run my script that opens the relevant port and starts the VNC listen server. Been using that for about 5-6 years, I think. Never had a problem.
Yep. Never even used photoshop past installing it for others (which throws another of these comments out of the window). I'm used to arcane interfaces, I regularly deal with everything from ancient Borland Delphi programs, to Windows-3.1-ports, to DOS menus, to Linux command lines, you name it. But GIMP just blows my mind because the tools aren't obvious, aren't attached, I can easily end up just playing for hours to get settings right with several dozen tools in order to achieve something quite simple. Keyboard shortcuts - great fan of them, should never have to use them on my *first* run of a program... they are a *shortcut*, not a primary functionality selector (hence why I don't use emacs either).
I've never even seriously *attempted*, after about an hour of playing about trying to do it, to do anything as simple as crop, rotate or scale with GIMP (canvas size, or image size, or selection size, or window size, or mouse pointer size, what layer, etc.etc.etc.). My life is too short when *every* other program is a matter of finding some menu that says "rotate" or "scale" or "crop" and maybe, in the really pernickity ones, making a selection first. And their interfaces end up much less cluttered that GIMP's even with those options! It's not just against photoshop (though I really don't care about that), it's just against every modern rule of UI design - GIMP's interface sticks out a million miles from every other program I have installed and... this is the killer... doesn't make *anything* any easier by doing so.
I don't doubt I could learn to do these things. I once followed a tutorial on how to make an animated GIF in GIMP once, just to get the hang of it's layer interfaces... I managed it but God knows how, and still come away none the wiser about the program. Learning GIMP just isn't worth the time I would ever invest in it, and I do hours of image manipulation all the time.
I may be just me but as a casual user, I'm glad someone else realises this.
I use Irfanview for conversion, resizing, cropping and other basics (yes, even on Linux - sorry but it runs perfect on WINE and does 90% of what I need to do to get photos from digital media or my scanner, get them ready for going across the internet, onto various accounts, to relatives, etc. in a decent time). I use Paint Shop Pro, or the virtually identical but cheaper ancient-version-of-Serif-Photoplus that I still have, for anything more "fancy". With those I've done everything from creating panaromic photo images to creating individual bits of clipart, to doing curves, borders and backgrounds for websites and all sorts.
But GIMP? Hell, I don't even know where to start whenever I load it. I've installed it dozens of times thinking I must be missing something that makes it easier to use but it's just not worth my time. The photoshop-modifications made it a million times simpler in a matter of seconds, why they aren't the default I can't fathom.
Simple fact is, I specify software for schools. If they demand a free bit of software, we use Irfanview for scanning, conversion, cropping etc. and maybe Artweaver for anything that needs to be created. GIMP has never got past the "WTF is that" stage of its initial screens.
"4 million passwords per second" is, as has been established, bullshit for anything other than plaintext "is this the password" checking. Any sort of encryption will kill that rate down to a more sensible number (and multiply up the time taken) because decrypting, even with a known password, is dependent on the encryption scheme used and can run into hundreds or thousands of individual instructions.
And that's assuming that there *is* a simple check that will say "Yes, this is the right password." Guessing a password and checking against a known MD5 hash is a LOT different to checking whether you've successfully decrypted an encrypted file with unknown contents. If the source was an EXE, then you could decrypt with a password, look for "MZ" signature, etc. If it's a zip, or a jpeg, or a disk image, or any other of the several hundred plausible filetypes, then you've just multiplied your decryption time - by several factors. Now not only do you have to generate "the next random password", you have to perform heavy decryption operations to get out the decrypted texts and analyse a tiny portion of the encrypted file before that particular thread can move on to another password.
And then multiply that by the "longer password" factor and you start hitting stupidly impractical time really, really quickly. The point was to highlight that even "months" of decryption time is an ideal scenario with factors working in your favour (e.g. known plaintext to know when you've successfully decrypted). Without that, you really, really start adding time on quite fast. And, in fact, anyone even *bothering* with encryption to avoid incrimination is really going to have done it properly, or they'd be caught out by other traces.
Encryption is still in use for a reason - that one entity with even several thousand processors which are ideal for decrypting things would still take *decades* to decrypt even a simple message.
Assuming you can brute force it that easily and not, say, have to deal with any CPU intensive encryption/decryption process for each password. And that he only used 8 characters.
Slashdot Mirror
Totally agree with your logic. Thinko.
Cancer isn't some magical disease that turns up. It's literally coding errors (for the most part). If you want a computer analogy, it's like expecting an hard drive as old as you are not to have any bad sectors - it's possible, but it ain't gonna stay like that forever. And if those errors are in the wrong places - the whole thing becomes a mess that destroys itself. Of course, a lot of the time those errors go unnoticed for decades or even forever if they are in an unimportant part of the code. And there's a certain amount of "error checking and correction" going on in various reproductive processes of the cells that lessens the impact.
Cancer is, basically, the MTBF of a human. If something else doesn't get you, cancer will eventually catch you up by sheer random statistics - enough time exposed to the sun (not even in a sunny country, or deliberate exposure), or a million and one other factors (which is why *everything* is stated in the news as "causing cancer"), and the cell's DNA "bits" will flip and it'll go crazy and stop all its highly-evolved self-limiting processes until it starts to take over your body. With some people it happens within their first year of life, some people live to 100 and never see it... but live long enough and you'll get cancer.
You can extend life, you can treat cancer, in theory you can "cure" it (i.e. push its statistical error rate outside the lifespan of a human) but it'll always be there. Try and find someone who's lived past 40/50 and hasn't had either several friends/relatives or themselves have it / die from it... we've all been there. I can name five serious (two fatal) off the top of my head just from blood relations and I'm only 30 - and those are just the ones I know about.
Cancer isn't a brake on population growth - the genetic factors are rarely subject to natural selection as others have pointed out - it's just the natural lifespan of a human. We didn't have it very much a few thousand years ago because we weren't living long enough for it to have a big effect. In the future, it will always be there even if we "trick" our way around it (there are animals that live longer than us and don't see such a high rate of mutation). Just look at the primary methods of treatment for a condition which sinks billions of pounds of research money - surgically cut it out, poison it or nuke it.
Pulling some stats from the wiki: Cancer causes 13% of all deaths worldwide and 25% of all deaths in the US. More than 30% of cancer is preventable via avoiding risk factors (which suggests that 70% of it is not preventable at all). It's a statistical function, not a disease, and the more exposure you have to things, the more your chances go up (but, some would argue, the more your quality of life would go down). Nothing brings those chances down below their base rate, though. It can be made more survivable, less painful, less affecting, but you can't "stop" it. Change your lifestyle and you have more effect than researching drugs that few can afford, won't be effective and will have terrible side-effects - the story of all medicine ("Since 1971 the United States has invested over $200 billion on cancer research... Despite this substantial investment, the country has only seen a five percent decrease in the cancer death rate in the last 50 years"). Who here wants to give up alcohol and sex and modern living to live longer? I would guess few. Same as everything else on the planet: Live life, enjoy and if you exercise and take care you'll extend your average lifespan. You could still get cancer tomorrow, though.
Cancer is what you're left with if you've survived everything else. In the brutal, inhumane terms of statistics, it's not very important in terms of sustaining the planet / population or anything else.
Any employer that relies on search engine information on their candidates to be accurate is a moron, unless they *really* research your background and know precisely which "John Smith" you are. You wouldn't *want* to work for anyone that just googles your name / college and automatically assumes everything they find is about you.
If they go far enough to actually research the accuracy of the information they found, you are *not* going to be able to hide anything anyway - they would have been checking with the college and previous employers anyway. Google my real name and you come up with a PhD in America who has expertise in my field. It's not me, though, and I've only ever been to America once and never got a PhD. His results are mixed in randomly with my forum posts, technical articles or random blog links, etc. A search is unreliable. A *real* background search would turn up whatever history you have anyway, and falsely denying that is worse than just having it on your record.
Don't worry about it, live life, work for whomever you please. If you think it's become a big, well-known problem in your field talk to your employers beforehand and explain that it was just a thing you did when you were younger. If they can't forgive that, do you *really* want to work for them anyway? What're they gonna find out about your youth next and hold against you?
Non-issue.
Maybe the people on the other side were like yourself: your credentials hold no water if you weren't involved enough to spell "counsel" - the word you used means something completely different.
And if you think it makes any difference to an otherwise-normal teenager or adult if they play violent games, or view porn, or not, you're sadly mistaken. A survey by a UK university recently wanted to analyse the difference between people who did view violent / pornographic material and those who did not. They could not find a single suitable person to analyse, who'd never been exposed to either. This is pretty much the same throughout human history once a person hits a certain age.
Humans are animals, we are built by nature to compete, be strong, even fight among each other, and to have sex. Like every other animal on the planet. And if you think that *viewing* such actions makes any difference to an otherwise-normal person, you're wrong. I can watch someone smoke on television (or in the case of one parent, every single day at home) and not want to fill my lungs with poisonous gases, even when I was a teenager and had my schoolmates encouraging me (never even tried it, never want to try it) - it's called a conscience and it's also called educating your children properly.
Unfortunately the exact actions you support (banning material of that nature) makes it impossible for people to adjust to and determine the proper place of such material. Nobody wants 11-year-olds playing Grand Theft Auto or psychotics playing Doom - that's what ratings are designed to prevent but require a *sensible* adult the other end to enforce, otherwise known as a parent/guardian - but ordinary, everyday, human beings should become acclimatised to such material - or you know what happens? The same as when you withhold a substance and then only introduce it later in life - over-reaction to that substance (e.g. allergies, intolerances, obsessive behaviour etc.).
When governments babysit, you end up with babies. When parents parent, you end up with human children and adults.
Because no-one yet has ever managed to pull things from this theoretical "historical" layer without at least something like a electron microscope costing tens or hundreds of thousands, thousands of hours of skilled *manual* work and having to crack the damn harddrive open and destroy it (if at all)? I believe there is a still a challenge going around with a hard drive that was "zeroed" quite simply and if anyone can recover the password in the single file that was on it before it was zeroed, then can get a few thousand dollars - nobody has even done more than look at it yet. (It certainly can't be done by software alone - are you thinking of unzeroed filesystem residue that has nothing to do with hardware at all?)
In theory you might think you were right, but digital is nothing to do with historical layering (which is doubtful whether it exists in a practical sense that can be utilised)... it's the method of recording - 1 or 0 or more possible patterns? Hard drives might store by majority by they do it for a reason - because a single bit it *useless* on such a fine recording medium because it *can* change over time or just by slight inaccuracies in the recording/reading methods, so you have to swipe a whole bunch of the disk to be assured of reading back a 1 or 0 with your reader (which could never read more than the consensus of 1 or 0 because it's just not that accurate - it has to have a large bunch of magnetised particles to make any reading at all, it doesn't read each individually and then think "Oh, that's enough to be a 1" - when it reads it back, only a certain amount "trigger" it to think the thing is a 0 or 1 - thus it *IS* digital because the only answer it can give is 0 or 1 and not "well, almost a 1").
And if manufacturers thought for a second any of that was do-able in even enterprise drives, it would be done already and sold to the highest bidder. The fact is that it just isn't feasible or even possible - it's almost impossible to do that in a device small enough to fit in your car, or reliably, or without totally destroying the operation or performance of a drive, or for less than the price of a large rack full of storage.
Not worth 20fps on an 80fps game, I'm afraid.
The price you pay for a little more realistic water and other minor changes that could easily be "faked" without DirectX 11 (if they bothered) isn't worth it for the hardware, the driver suppport, forced OS for DirectX11, the increased power of the cards, etc. If that was my PC, I'd be playing it in DirectX 9 mode.
There's not much you can do, this is why SSL saves millions of people's asses everyday - just be ultra-suspicious of any warnings that you don't normally get. This is why everyone has a "trusted" network piped into their house by their ISP, and why they get so uppity when that trust is abused (DNS redirection, deep packet inspection, traffic analysis, advertisement insertion etc).
Have a software firewall at *ALL* times that distrusts everything... on Windows I use Zonealarm with everything set to "Internet" and all the high-security settings for that (only exception is an OpenVPN interface which can *obviously* only be my remote access into my trusted networks at home - I let OpenVPN - the program - connect to the Internet and I let the OpenVPN interface do whatever the hell it wants ["trusted"], and obviously have all the checks enabled for certificate-authentication to get onto my home network). On Linux, that's just bog-standard iptables doing its job the same as ever.
I don't expect anything non-SSL to be secure by default. I treat it as if I was using Tor in that respect. Make sure you have Gmail or whatever set to "always use https". If you want anything better than that (i.e. email, IM, http, etc. traffic), or better assurance overall, you have to have a VPN to be safe.
My OpenVPN automatically deletes other routes except for the essential ones and adds a default route through my VPN interface so when connected to home I *know* everything has to be using the VPN to communicate in that instance (hate the idea that if OpenVPN dies, there might be "another" route lurking which sends things out on another interface - I've seen it happen with some "automatic" configurations on Windows).
I often game over an OpenVPN instance, even when playing locally, so don't take heed of the rubbish about it being too costly in latency terms - of course, if you are in a foreign country and relaying to another, it will lag, but the actual overhead is not much worse than just ordinary IP routing to your destination.
Basically - SSL in some form or another, whether that's direct or over a VPN... otherwise you cannot trust things. Of course, millions of people trust ordinary wifi points all over the world, all day, every day. If you decide to follow their lead, that's up to you.
"Interestingly, revTalk does also use "return" to return a value from a function, as shown at the end of the sortWord handler. But we have different meanings for words in English, too. I think it's nifty that he compiler knows how to evaluate these terms "in context.""
I don't... overloading operators is a pain in the ass to the novice programmer, because they assume the computer will "just know". A lot of the time they are right, but when they are wrong, it doesn't even occur to them where or why. There are two approaches to poor syntax - error about it, or accept it and try to make sense. This seems to be a "try to make sense" language, which can cause a *lot* of problems with novices.
"FYI, one can use "cr" or "crlf" or "numtochar(13)" as synonyms for "return" in the context of strings, but I like "return." The idea of synonyms in code probably makes it that much messier and aggravating for some! :)"
Alternatives to a particular name are always welcome - everybody likes an alias, it just aids learning by providing choice, but that's a particularly horrible example, that's all. I literally had to read the whole program to work out what that "return" was because I was trying to interpret it as a function return or keyword. And I noticed that I found the use of && and & quite odd, but maybe my brain wasn't into it. "return" is ambiguous (newline would have been better, possibly?) and confusing. Though why it's even necessary to return-space a set of strings in order to sort them is another matter entirely (it suggests to me that strings are inherently unbounded, but I doubt that would be the actual case).
"I'd like to see the 50 lines of BASIC code. (Which would be about twice as long.)"
It'd be messy, lots of loops, but possible.
"At least you agreed that with zero previous knowledge of the language, you could "already see what the code is trying to do." I think that would be true for even non-programmers, and is a testament to the self-documenting strength of revTalk."
I'm a programmer (not professionally but I program as part of my job and in my spare time)... that means I can tell what code is *trying* to do just by the names of functions and outlying structure, even if I don't know the language. If I'm brutally honest, it took me longer than most with this language and if it hadn't been for the variable with "anagram" in the name, I would have been stuck. I don't want to push that down to say that *all* novices would do the same, but I would find it highly unlikely a novice programmer could understand that code at all, and one would need several weeks/months of using Rev as a first language to even get close if they'd never programmed before.
Last month, I taught BASIC to a 15-year-old (who was into "old" computer stuff but had never programmed, so I just demonstrated the concept of programming using BASIC) in an afternoon. He came back the next day with a game he'd written - and we're talking old-fashioned "I want a dot here, a letter ther" kind of game, not some DarkBASIC template. I don't claim that BASIC is "good" or easier to learn, but the point was that the structure of a program (including subroutines, program flow, variables, keywords, etc.) can be taught in an afternoon to the point that someone can replicate it and understand it. However reading *that* program would have given him a lot of trouble in this language, even if I'd started him on that. Damn, even I struggled to find meaning and separate variables/keywords/structure.
"The main idea here is that revTalk appeals to people who are not keen on traditional programming languages. It can therefore enable them to accomplish things they wouldn't normally consider trying, either because of the expense or time involved."
I appreciate the idea, but I've seen a lot of novices and I don't think it works. There will be ten people totally put off by that code for every one that it "clicks" with. And those people would have clicked with any language, most
Thanks for the post with some source code, it's the only way I can judge a language and I didn't want to hunt it down.
And... Yeurk. That might be more readable to some people but I think I just lost some braincells.
First, the use of the word "return" to mean, in this case, line return. Nobody I know calls them line returns except established programmers (i.e. those who know the historical difference between carriage return and line feed), and people who deal with typography in some way. Return actually *means* something in 99% of programming languages, if not as a keyword than as a name for a particular program flow.
And it reads like someone "pronouncing" pseudocode or some kind of BASIC. I don't see how this line is *at all* intuitive:
"if c is not in sourceWord then filter wordList without ("*" & c & "*")"
It was fine right up until that last bit, which could have a billion different interpretations. I assume it's doing wildcard removal of anything that doesn't have the character c in it but, hell, that's just because I can already see what the code is trying to do.
The syntax is *too* loose, so loose that you will stray into incorrect meaning by accident. Possibly it's more "readable" to a novice, but they probably aren't aware of the subtleties of exactly how it could go wrong, by a simple mis-wording or instruction-order-problem. I can read code and think "Yeah, that'll work" when in actual fact if you look closely, there are critical errors that turn it into gibberish. A novice might be able to read that code, but if they could know for sure whether it did what they want without unintended side effects is another matter.
And it seems *very* long-hand. Too much, in fact. I'm now stranger to lines of code that need to be wrapped because they hit the column limit, and in this language it seems even more likely to occur.
50 or so lines of BASIC with a simple comment every now and then would do the same job much more "intuitively" to me. And I've taught many people programming in my time (I taught most of my school's programming classes when I was supposed to be a student of that same class!), from scratch. That language is truly horrible and no better than any other. Sure, once you're used to it, and if it was your first language, you'd think it was "good", but... no thanks.
A few years back, I bought every copy of INPUT - a Marshall Cavendish collect-each-weekly-part programming magazine that was released back in the Speccy days. Every page has Speccy, Amstrad, Commodore, Dragon/Tandy code, and code for other machines of the era, that you had to type in. That magazine single-handedly got me interested in programming. And then a few years ago I mentioned it on Slashdot and spoke to someone who had written one of the big games (10 or so issues full of code) that was published in it! :-)
I was *nearly* the first person to publish a map for Nonterraqueous too, but we were pipped to the post after HOURS of mapping.
The trouble is that your game will sink into the piles of "8's and 9's" like everyone else. There's nothing to distinguish your game from, say, a crap game from a big publisher that has bought the review. That's the problem and, unfortunately, that's why I can't trust *any* review, wherever it's come from.
I was a "whatever had the best game on the covertape" reader but I basically bought every magazine going.
Crash was okay with tapes, not so fun to read. Your Sinclair was good to read and had fairly decent tapes. And Sinclair User - I probably never read enough of them to make a choice.
I had a letter published in Your Sinclair once, so you'd probably say that was my favourite, given the evidence. In reality, I was just after a freebie and their cover tapes.
I agree, rebranding is an exercise in management of boredom (and trying to sweep bad reputations under the carpet), not anything practical or useful. Does "Nick the Plumber", small-time business man need to rebrand every few years? No. Does IBM or Microsoft or other large companies? No. Rebranding on mergers / takeovers, I can sort of understand that, but even when Santander took over a lot of UK banks, they were smart enough to keep the original names and start a *very* *very* slow transition to introduce the Santander name in the UK (which was unheard of).
Marathon -> Snickers (I will never forgive them)
Opal Fruits -> Starburst (I still ask for these in shops and people always know what I'm talking about).
Rebranding is a waste of time and money in order to confuse your existing customers and keep them asking for your previous name.
And why? Because the grade-grubbing means that as of about 10-15 years ago, reviews are nothing more than adverts, and ratings are nothing more than auctions to the highest bidder.
I've *never* bought any game because of a review. Not even back when they were a bit more honest (e.g. in the Spectrum days, it was very common to see sub-50% and even sub-10% scores of games, some of them were even immortalised in things like a "crap games collection"). Game preference is completely subjective and neither words nor pictures can convey how a game operates.
But it's not just games that suffer from the problem - I know someone who buys cameras, cars, all manner of electrical goods etc. on the basis of the Which? review. I have seriously watched them buy something that costs a month's wages just because the Which? magazine said it was the best, only for them to discover that all the things *I* said about the brand / device / features etc. were true and it was useless to them. What was even more annoying is that they asked my advice every time about PC's and electrical goods, then completely ignored it, bought what the Which? review recommended, then complained and expected me to provide support for the thing they just bought.
I read reviews as entertainment. If I want to know about a game, I might read the review of it to pass the time and introduce me to the *suggested* features that it may have. But I would never use them as a basis for a purchase... that's why you let other dummies buy it first and then hear first-hand from them after a month if they are still playing it and enjoying it.
Tech related: intercepted private pager messages from a variety of sources. Someone managed to collate these en-masse and distribute them.
Politically related (Slashdot has a politics section): suggestion of interception and storage of pager messages on a grand scale beyond that needed for operational reasons (this is 24-hours worth, don't forget, from several sources).
Privacy related: A release of otherwise private information, including private communications between ordinary people, presumably gathered direct from telco's, to a website known for doing that with politically-sensitive material. If nothing else, this shows you where your "private communications" end up when you're texting something erotic to your girlfriend... not "analysed", not "anonymised", just saved onto a disk somewhere at the telco for a random person to collect and leak to the Internet.
I think it's relevant and I have zero interest in 9/11, conspiracy theories, or even most of the things the US does.
£1 on any boot sale, pound shop, major booksellers, buys you a brand new, completely anonymous (i.e. not requiring activation or any personal details *AT ALL*, even to "top-up") pre-pay SIM card that will work with data products too.
That's what robots.txt is for - Google really don't care if you want to use them or not, but they respect anyone who wants to opt out using an industry standard. Good luck being the person to explain to your boss why 83% of your market can't even see you online any more, though. It's like "opting-out" of advertising for free on 83% of all billboards in the city you're advertising in... nobody's stopping you, and nobody can blame the biggest billboard company in the world if you can't get enough people interested in your product when you only advertise on the other 17%.
If a site is "de-listed", that's it. Google don't really care at all and there's not much that can or would ever want to do about that. And by not showing up on Google, nobody else really cares about those sites either.
Google can't and won't start "paying" sites to have them appear on Google. That would be the entire antithesis of any search engine's business model ("Hi, I'm Bing, I'm now a fake advert page for every result but someone in a back room is actually deciding who gets to post here!"). If they wanted that, they'd be selling those top-spots and not just having clear adverts/search results seperation like they do now - it's the same thing but the other way around (we-pay-them instead of they-pay-us). I can't think of a more stupid system to run a "search engine" on, even temporarily. It'll be like domain names all over again - hey Microsoft, I have a good article on X that's extremely popular - how much will you pay me to sell it to Bing?
It's a silly thing to do, and all that will happen is that Google will index pages that talk about why you can't get those sites through the search engine (because someone wants money). And because the Bing results won't even show up in Google either, you'll just never hear about those sites. People who want them will type them in directly (it's a newspaper, right? So it has the URL written on the heading of the front page) or favourite them, people who don't won't be aware they exist, and the "transition group" in between will never even see an article to let them decide if they like the style of reporting.
To be honest, when I search for a news story, I have *too many* newspapers and online news outlets fighting to supply me with facts. A few missing won't make me care at all, I'll just be even less exposed to their name/reputation/exclusives.
MS: Do it, make it bomb big-time, then see why the rest of the world was ignoring the pillock.
I use UltraVNC - they have a little util (UltraVNC SC) that compiles UltraVNC into a standalone exe that people can run and it automatically connects back to you (even using a chosen set of encryption plugins etc. if necessary) at YOUR IP, so they just double-click an EXE and you deal with opening ports and running any VNC listen server on your end.
I keep a copy on my website and then if people need it, I just point them to a very simple URL and while they are downloading / double-clicking it, I run my script that opens the relevant port and starts the VNC listen server. Been using that for about 5-6 years, I think. Never had a problem.
Yep. Never even used photoshop past installing it for others (which throws another of these comments out of the window). I'm used to arcane interfaces, I regularly deal with everything from ancient Borland Delphi programs, to Windows-3.1-ports, to DOS menus, to Linux command lines, you name it. But GIMP just blows my mind because the tools aren't obvious, aren't attached, I can easily end up just playing for hours to get settings right with several dozen tools in order to achieve something quite simple. Keyboard shortcuts - great fan of them, should never have to use them on my *first* run of a program... they are a *shortcut*, not a primary functionality selector (hence why I don't use emacs either).
I've never even seriously *attempted*, after about an hour of playing about trying to do it, to do anything as simple as crop, rotate or scale with GIMP (canvas size, or image size, or selection size, or window size, or mouse pointer size, what layer, etc.etc.etc.). My life is too short when *every* other program is a matter of finding some menu that says "rotate" or "scale" or "crop" and maybe, in the really pernickity ones, making a selection first. And their interfaces end up much less cluttered that GIMP's even with those options! It's not just against photoshop (though I really don't care about that), it's just against every modern rule of UI design - GIMP's interface sticks out a million miles from every other program I have installed and... this is the killer... doesn't make *anything* any easier by doing so.
I don't doubt I could learn to do these things. I once followed a tutorial on how to make an animated GIF in GIMP once, just to get the hang of it's layer interfaces... I managed it but God knows how, and still come away none the wiser about the program. Learning GIMP just isn't worth the time I would ever invest in it, and I do hours of image manipulation all the time.
I may be just me but as a casual user, I'm glad someone else realises this.
I use Irfanview for conversion, resizing, cropping and other basics (yes, even on Linux - sorry but it runs perfect on WINE and does 90% of what I need to do to get photos from digital media or my scanner, get them ready for going across the internet, onto various accounts, to relatives, etc. in a decent time). I use Paint Shop Pro, or the virtually identical but cheaper ancient-version-of-Serif-Photoplus that I still have, for anything more "fancy". With those I've done everything from creating panaromic photo images to creating individual bits of clipart, to doing curves, borders and backgrounds for websites and all sorts.
But GIMP? Hell, I don't even know where to start whenever I load it. I've installed it dozens of times thinking I must be missing something that makes it easier to use but it's just not worth my time. The photoshop-modifications made it a million times simpler in a matter of seconds, why they aren't the default I can't fathom.
Simple fact is, I specify software for schools. If they demand a free bit of software, we use Irfanview for scanning, conversion, cropping etc. and maybe Artweaver for anything that needs to be created. GIMP has never got past the "WTF is that" stage of its initial screens.
"4 million passwords per second" is, as has been established, bullshit for anything other than plaintext "is this the password" checking. Any sort of encryption will kill that rate down to a more sensible number (and multiply up the time taken) because decrypting, even with a known password, is dependent on the encryption scheme used and can run into hundreds or thousands of individual instructions.
And that's assuming that there *is* a simple check that will say "Yes, this is the right password." Guessing a password and checking against a known MD5 hash is a LOT different to checking whether you've successfully decrypted an encrypted file with unknown contents. If the source was an EXE, then you could decrypt with a password, look for "MZ" signature, etc. If it's a zip, or a jpeg, or a disk image, or any other of the several hundred plausible filetypes, then you've just multiplied your decryption time - by several factors. Now not only do you have to generate "the next random password", you have to perform heavy decryption operations to get out the decrypted texts and analyse a tiny portion of the encrypted file before that particular thread can move on to another password.
And then multiply that by the "longer password" factor and you start hitting stupidly impractical time really, really quickly. The point was to highlight that even "months" of decryption time is an ideal scenario with factors working in your favour (e.g. known plaintext to know when you've successfully decrypted). Without that, you really, really start adding time on quite fast. And, in fact, anyone even *bothering* with encryption to avoid incrimination is really going to have done it properly, or they'd be caught out by other traces.
Encryption is still in use for a reason - that one entity with even several thousand processors which are ideal for decrypting things would still take *decades* to decrypt even a simple message.
Assuming you can brute force it that easily and not, say, have to deal with any CPU intensive encryption/decryption process for each password. And that he only used 8 characters.
Cymbal.