Pretty much... if government isn't willing to put limits on what companies can do with your private data, what the rest of us want is meaningless.
Unfortunately there seem to be a lot of people in government who believe that having corporations be allowed to collect, use, share, sell, and otherwise exploit every piece of information about you is somehow a good thing.
Of course, those people in government are on the payroll of industry, so of course they're going to roll over like bitches for the corporations.
You mean like how they call it a narcotic, and a hallucinogen, when in fact it is neither?
As you say, they're not interested in facts... they've re-defined the terms to meed an ideological view, and it has nothing at all to do with the truth, just what they want the message to be.
The vilification of marijuana is so engrained in the way these people see the problem they're long past the point where they can discuss it in terms of reality.
Make no mistake about it, these people have built up a fantasy in their heads, and anybody who tries to demonstrate otherwise is "teh evul enemy". There really is no room for science and facts in this debate for some of the idiots involved.
These idiots need to get deemed as common carriers who aren't entitled to track what we do in order to make money off targeted advertising.
That AT&T should be able to hold your privacy ransom is appalling, and definitely means they have far too much power in this equation.
In any sane country with sane privacy laws, this would be illegal... but for some reason corporate entitlement seems to be inviolate.
It really is time to start bringing this to them... if AT&T wants to sell our privacy, maybe the act of working for AT&T means you don't get any and the world starts releasing your personal information?
It's time corporations stopped calling all the shots. Or the rest of the world might have to start taking our own shots.
Of course, I bet even if you paid the monthly extortion fee to not see the ads, they'll still track you for the analytics. This is insane.
- I see, so you don't believe that people and not the state are ultimately owners of their own bodies can decide what to do with themselves (including killing themselves if they want to)?
Oh, stop being a moron.
Name me one terrestrial example in which you could sign up with a private enterprise for an endeavor which would 100% result in your death. The reality is, there isn't anything even similar. Not even close.
Sorry, this isn't about people exercising their rights, this is about signing up for something which pretty much would be illegal in any civilized country.
But, hey, maybe you should sign up and prove to us it's a great idea?
I'd bet most insurance policies will pretty much call this a suicide and be null and void.
They aren't just going to say "oh, gee, you've chosen to die at either launch, in transit, landing, or on the surface of Mars... we'll totally pay your policy."
They're going to basically say "not our damned problem".
This is a suicide with better PR... the only variable is which of several terrible ways to die they will actually experience.
Unless Mars One is taking our special insurance, you're run of the mill policy sure as hell won't cover this as "death by misadventure".
And that has always been what baffles me about this... how is it even legal?
This isn't a "sign up for something which carries some risk". This is a "you are pretty much 100% guaranteed to die".
Seriously, WTF... how is it legal for that??
This is a corporation/foundation/whatever they are who has NEVER even launched a single thing, has no expertise, no technology, no track record... and somehow they've gotten thousands of people signing up to die.
This is completely ridiculous, and more than a little scary... anybody signing up for this almost can't be in their right mind.
I'm sure the TV ratings of them all dying on Mars will be awesome, assuming they make it to Mars.
But the stunning lack of technology, skills, track record, regard for the lives of those who will be sacrificed as a PR stunt... it just boggles the mind.
Funny, but given the massive scale of the criminal conspiracy which was perpetuated by the financial industry with re-packaging shitty debt... I think it's mostly just a demonstration that "the law", and the consequences for breaking it, and entirely dependent on how much you have paid your congressman.
Wall street ripped off the world for trillions of dollars, and not a single person was charged. And yet they're all "too big to fail" and we couldn't possibly charge them with crimes. And certainly the rank and file were clearly just following company policy.
Executives oversee illegal activity all the time, but somehow the fact that they're executives means the "corporate veil" protects them.
I think it's a complete crock that employees of corporations can be charged depending on, literally, how much slush money one set of corporations has given government.
Essentially the *AAs have bought themselves a different set of laws, and the US government are more or less their enforcement arm.
It's hard not to see these kinds of prosecutions as more or less political show trials. Because, they essentially are.
It's not based on the principle of law, it's based on the political desire to make an example of someone. And that someone ran afoul of major campaign donors who have bought off the government.
Honestly, this is just the on-going demonstration of the fact that most network-enabled consumer products are garbage, written by incompetent and lazy idiots, who neither know nor care about your security or privacy, and pushed out the door by greedy bastards.
Until there are real penalties for doing crap like this... I just assume that all things which want to connect to the internet will probably be insecure and dangerous, and therefore won't trust them.
It's pretty much happening so often that it's a safer starting point... assume it was rushed out the door, and nobody gave a shit about security. Because evidence shows that's precisely what happens.
If you can't kick the devs and the marketing weenies in the nuts when their product is proven to be crap... just don't buy it in the first place.
If companies do this out of incompetence, or simple greed, I cannot say. But pretty much weekly (or more), we see these exact stories.
Historically, they've used APIs the rest of us don't see, and since this is also a debugger and who knows what else... it's probably embedded quite deeply into the OS.
Part of the problem is Microsoft's own software has pretty much always been intractably entrenched in the OS, and they've never seen that as an issue.
It doesn't sound like a modular architecture.. it sounds like they just view all of this as one monolithic thing.
Which is probably why they have a terrible track record of supporting other platforms. Because support for something else is hard even for them.
I liken it more to the no call list which has worked so well. Even Gov regulation is meaningless if there is money to be made flouting the regs.
There's two principal problems with do not call lists:
1) There are usually so many holes and exemptions in them as to render them useless
2) The people violating it are probably knowingly scamming you, already breaking the law, and doing it from outside your country
The exemptions in 1) to give businesses an exemption to do caller ID spoofing, so they could use off-shore call centers are exactly why offshore call centers use caller ID spoofing to run these things.
In fact, I'd bet often it's the same offshore call centers who call for the "legit" companies as call for the scams. it's not like the phone company can't actually tell it's from somewhere else and the caller ID is fake.
If they'd simply block calls with fake caller ID, this would stop. But the corporations who want to save money off calling you have made it such that that will never happen.
This is why you don't let corporations have say in the regulatory process -- because they undermine the point of it so much that it becomes ineffective. Which suits their purposes, but defeats the purpose of regulating in the first place.
This isn't supposed to be precise, this isn't supposed to be perfect, this probably isn't even expected to be even effective... this is pure distraction on behalf of an industry group to make it look like they give a crap about your privacy.
This is the corporate equivalent of "I promise not to cum in your mouth".
None at all.. this is what happens when groups of corporations try to stave off being regulated under the myth that they can, and will, self-regulate in any meaningful way.
This is pretty much an empty promise, likely backed by an EULA they can change at any time, and which will give them access to your information they can do anything they want to with.
My read of TFA is "this is utterly meaningless drivel".
There is no authority, just an empty promise by corporations -- it's a PR stunt, nothing more.
You might as well set up a web site which says "No Rob Zone", so all of those other criminals know you do not wish to be robbed... it's about as meaningful.
Obviously you've never seen the weather-proof armbands people use for jogging with their cell phone... put in the headphones, put it in the sealed case, strap it to your arm and go do your thing.
This is literally a solved problem, and has been for a bunch of years.
The accessories makers have been all over covering the running crowd for a LONG time.
Voluntary compliance and self regulation by corporations is never gonna happen. And the people who are using these things for shady purposes won't give a crap. The people who use them for shady purposes who work for the government definitely won't.
In fact, I predict a bunch of drones explicitly flying over those homes just to send a big "f- you" and see what is there.
They'll adhere with things which could bring the government down on them, but Joe Citizen saying "don't fly here"... never gonna happen.
I view this whole prospect as nothing more than wishful thinking at best, or outright deception at worst. And since it carries no enforcement or penalties, it's an empty promise.
The study defines the MINSET as a set of *unique* lexemes, meaning without repetitions, position-independent pieces of sintax that identify functions within the set. But they make no attempt at verifying the correctness of such a metric
LOL, so, essentially it generates pseudo-code from real code and throws away all the boring stuff that makes it work?
Because most of us have probably never heard of foamed polyphasic materials, and consequently don't know the effects of repeated melting and freezing of their surface?
Just sayin'... some of us need the ice cream analogy.
So you're apparently pasting part of your comment from Microsoft Word into Internet Explorer
You're apparently stupid. Slashdot can't implement unicode, and that was pasted from the actual fucking article.
As what is clearly a Microsoft-only jerk posting about computer programming, I can't take you seriously.
LOL, and that confirms it... you are a complete idiot.
I'm about as far as you can get from being Microsoft-centric.
But, hey, don't let reality stop you from spouting your silly bullshit.
I leave the coding to the kiddies nowadays. But I have yet to be convinced that these magic programming languages where you don't write anything or have to do error checking actually exist, or are useful for anything real.
Seriously, grow up, shut up, and get over your dumb self. You're not nearly as smart as you think you are.
All that error-checking is necessary too, but by now, shouldn't we have high-level languages where most of that stuff is handled automatically?
Ah... of course... magic unicorns make it so you can type one command, and the system will identify all possible outcomes, and properly take action for you.
I have yet to be convinced that programming has reached the point where the language can cover all possible outcomes and do it correctly.
You're either writing something someone else has written, or you're writing trivial stuff.
I'm just not buying that the 95% of the code these guys claim are chaff is just saying "if we reduced code to just nouns, and magic happened so the code just did what we meant it would be awesome".
From what I read in TFA, that just sounds like wishful thinking, and ignoring the reality about writing code -- you need to actually do something in your code, and that includes error checking. Not just "because it's magic".
A couple of important points to keep in mind here. First, the MINSET itself is not executable; itâ(TM)s merely the smallest subset of the code which characterizes the core functionality. Some of the other 95% of the code (the chaff) is required to make it run, so itâ(TM)s not useless.
So, we can do a computer transform on it to make it into something a computer can express efficiently, but we ignore the fact that the other 95% of the code is the error checking and other shit which you can't do without.
The whole premise of this "study" has nothing to do with code, how to write it, or what that entails.
I once had a co-worker who kept telling me that lisp or scheme would magically make it so you just wrote a two line program -- something like "getReady; justDoIt".
When I asked him who the hell would write "getReady" and "justDoit", he seemed to think it would be some magic step which sorted itself out. The hard parts don't just magically happen. I can write main() in C which says "getReady(); justdoIt();" -- that doesn't mean that I don't need to implement those parts.
This sounds equally stupid.
Since when have coders started subscribing to wishful thinking where you just wave your hands and the computer does all the hard stuff?
Asking if the number is useful is supposing reviews are honest and unbiased.
Since most reviews are prohibited from coming out before the game, and one assume most of these websites are getting paid for favorable reviews... the number they put next to their review is probably as meaningless as the entire review in a lot of cases.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty much ... if government isn't willing to put limits on what companies can do with your private data, what the rest of us want is meaningless.
Unfortunately there seem to be a lot of people in government who believe that having corporations be allowed to collect, use, share, sell, and otherwise exploit every piece of information about you is somehow a good thing.
Of course, those people in government are on the payroll of industry, so of course they're going to roll over like bitches for the corporations.
You mean like how they call it a narcotic, and a hallucinogen, when in fact it is neither?
As you say, they're not interested in facts ... they've re-defined the terms to meed an ideological view, and it has nothing at all to do with the truth, just what they want the message to be.
The vilification of marijuana is so engrained in the way these people see the problem they're long past the point where they can discuss it in terms of reality.
Make no mistake about it, these people have built up a fantasy in their heads, and anybody who tries to demonstrate otherwise is "teh evul enemy". There really is no room for science and facts in this debate for some of the idiots involved.
These idiots need to get deemed as common carriers who aren't entitled to track what we do in order to make money off targeted advertising.
That AT&T should be able to hold your privacy ransom is appalling, and definitely means they have far too much power in this equation.
In any sane country with sane privacy laws, this would be illegal ... but for some reason corporate entitlement seems to be inviolate.
It really is time to start bringing this to them ... if AT&T wants to sell our privacy, maybe the act of working for AT&T means you don't get any and the world starts releasing your personal information?
It's time corporations stopped calling all the shots. Or the rest of the world might have to start taking our own shots.
Of course, I bet even if you paid the monthly extortion fee to not see the ads, they'll still track you for the analytics. This is insane.
Assholes.
Oh, stop being a moron.
Name me one terrestrial example in which you could sign up with a private enterprise for an endeavor which would 100% result in your death. The reality is, there isn't anything even similar. Not even close.
Sorry, this isn't about people exercising their rights, this is about signing up for something which pretty much would be illegal in any civilized country.
But, hey, maybe you should sign up and prove to us it's a great idea?
I'd bet most insurance policies will pretty much call this a suicide and be null and void.
They aren't just going to say "oh, gee, you've chosen to die at either launch, in transit, landing, or on the surface of Mars ... we'll totally pay your policy."
They're going to basically say "not our damned problem".
This is a suicide with better PR ... the only variable is which of several terrible ways to die they will actually experience.
Unless Mars One is taking our special insurance, you're run of the mill policy sure as hell won't cover this as "death by misadventure".
And that has always been what baffles me about this ... how is it even legal?
This isn't a "sign up for something which carries some risk". This is a "you are pretty much 100% guaranteed to die".
Seriously, WTF ... how is it legal for that??
This is a corporation/foundation/whatever they are who has NEVER even launched a single thing, has no expertise, no technology, no track record ... and somehow they've gotten thousands of people signing up to die.
This is completely ridiculous, and more than a little scary ... anybody signing up for this almost can't be in their right mind.
I'm sure the TV ratings of them all dying on Mars will be awesome, assuming they make it to Mars.
But the stunning lack of technology, skills, track record, regard for the lives of those who will be sacrificed as a PR stunt ... it just boggles the mind.
The whole thing defies common sense or belief.
Funny, but given the massive scale of the criminal conspiracy which was perpetuated by the financial industry with re-packaging shitty debt ... I think it's mostly just a demonstration that "the law", and the consequences for breaking it, and entirely dependent on how much you have paid your congressman.
Wall street ripped off the world for trillions of dollars, and not a single person was charged. And yet they're all "too big to fail" and we couldn't possibly charge them with crimes. And certainly the rank and file were clearly just following company policy.
Executives oversee illegal activity all the time, but somehow the fact that they're executives means the "corporate veil" protects them.
I think it's a complete crock that employees of corporations can be charged depending on, literally, how much slush money one set of corporations has given government.
Essentially the *AAs have bought themselves a different set of laws, and the US government are more or less their enforcement arm.
It's hard not to see these kinds of prosecutions as more or less political show trials. Because, they essentially are.
It's not based on the principle of law, it's based on the political desire to make an example of someone. And that someone ran afoul of major campaign donors who have bought off the government.
Honestly, this is just the on-going demonstration of the fact that most network-enabled consumer products are garbage, written by incompetent and lazy idiots, who neither know nor care about your security or privacy, and pushed out the door by greedy bastards.
Until there are real penalties for doing crap like this ... I just assume that all things which want to connect to the internet will probably be insecure and dangerous, and therefore won't trust them.
It's pretty much happening so often that it's a safer starting point ... assume it was rushed out the door, and nobody gave a shit about security. Because evidence shows that's precisely what happens.
If you can't kick the devs and the marketing weenies in the nuts when their product is proven to be crap ... just don't buy it in the first place.
If companies do this out of incompetence, or simple greed, I cannot say. But pretty much weekly (or more), we see these exact stories.
I bet they didn't so much design an exploit, as design another feature, implement it as designed ... and the discovered they'd made a gaping hole.
I suspect at this point the code is so complex they don't even know what it does any more.
Historically, they've used APIs the rest of us don't see, and since this is also a debugger and who knows what else ... it's probably embedded quite deeply into the OS.
Part of the problem is Microsoft's own software has pretty much always been intractably entrenched in the OS, and they've never seen that as an issue.
It doesn't sound like a modular architecture .. it sounds like they just view all of this as one monolithic thing.
Which is probably why they have a terrible track record of supporting other platforms. Because support for something else is hard even for them.
There's two principal problems with do not call lists:
1) There are usually so many holes and exemptions in them as to render them useless
2) The people violating it are probably knowingly scamming you, already breaking the law, and doing it from outside your country
The exemptions in 1) to give businesses an exemption to do caller ID spoofing, so they could use off-shore call centers are exactly why offshore call centers use caller ID spoofing to run these things.
In fact, I'd bet often it's the same offshore call centers who call for the "legit" companies as call for the scams. it's not like the phone company can't actually tell it's from somewhere else and the caller ID is fake.
If they'd simply block calls with fake caller ID, this would stop. But the corporations who want to save money off calling you have made it such that that will never happen.
This is why you don't let corporations have say in the regulatory process -- because they undermine the point of it so much that it becomes ineffective. Which suits their purposes, but defeats the purpose of regulating in the first place.
This isn't supposed to be precise, this isn't supposed to be perfect, this probably isn't even expected to be even effective ... this is pure distraction on behalf of an industry group to make it look like they give a crap about your privacy.
This is the corporate equivalent of "I promise not to cum in your mouth".
It doesn't mean anything.
None at all .. this is what happens when groups of corporations try to stave off being regulated under the myth that they can, and will, self-regulate in any meaningful way.
This is pretty much an empty promise, likely backed by an EULA they can change at any time, and which will give them access to your information they can do anything they want to with.
My read of TFA is "this is utterly meaningless drivel".
There is no authority, just an empty promise by corporations -- it's a PR stunt, nothing more.
You might as well set up a web site which says "No Rob Zone", so all of those other criminals know you do not wish to be robbed ... it's about as meaningful.
Obviously you've never seen the weather-proof armbands people use for jogging with their cell phone ... put in the headphones, put it in the sealed case, strap it to your arm and go do your thing.
This is literally a solved problem, and has been for a bunch of years.
The accessories makers have been all over covering the running crowd for a LONG time.
"Oh noes, teh website says we can't fly hear".
Does anybody think that will work?
Voluntary compliance and self regulation by corporations is never gonna happen. And the people who are using these things for shady purposes won't give a crap. The people who use them for shady purposes who work for the government definitely won't.
In fact, I predict a bunch of drones explicitly flying over those homes just to send a big "f- you" and see what is there.
They'll adhere with things which could bring the government down on them, but Joe Citizen saying "don't fly here" ... never gonna happen.
I view this whole prospect as nothing more than wishful thinking at best, or outright deception at worst. And since it carries no enforcement or penalties, it's an empty promise.
LOL, so, essentially it generates pseudo-code from real code and throws away all the boring stuff that makes it work?
Because most of us have probably never heard of foamed polyphasic materials, and consequently don't know the effects of repeated melting and freezing of their surface?
Just sayin' ... some of us need the ice cream analogy.
You're apparently stupid. Slashdot can't implement unicode, and that was pasted from the actual fucking article.
LOL, and that confirms it ... you are a complete idiot.
I'm about as far as you can get from being Microsoft-centric.
But, hey, don't let reality stop you from spouting your silly bullshit.
I leave the coding to the kiddies nowadays. But I have yet to be convinced that these magic programming languages where you don't write anything or have to do error checking actually exist, or are useful for anything real.
Seriously, grow up, shut up, and get over your dumb self. You're not nearly as smart as you think you are.
Ah ... of course ... magic unicorns make it so you can type one command, and the system will identify all possible outcomes, and properly take action for you.
I have yet to be convinced that programming has reached the point where the language can cover all possible outcomes and do it correctly.
You're either writing something someone else has written, or you're writing trivial stuff.
I'm just not buying that the 95% of the code these guys claim are chaff is just saying "if we reduced code to just nouns, and magic happened so the code just did what we meant it would be awesome".
From what I read in TFA, that just sounds like wishful thinking, and ignoring the reality about writing code -- you need to actually do something in your code, and that includes error checking. Not just "because it's magic".
So your neighbors don't have to see your junk.
Hmmm, I don't know MakeRocketLauncherGoNow() vs Foo() ... yeah, I think having the code read like sentences makes a lot of sense.
If the onus is on human readability, that simple sentence is more than I've seen many coders put in comments.
A couple of important points to keep in mind here. First, the MINSET itself is not executable; itâ(TM)s merely the smallest subset of the code which characterizes the core functionality. Some of the other 95% of the code (the chaff) is required to make it run, so itâ(TM)s not useless.
So, we can do a computer transform on it to make it into something a computer can express efficiently, but we ignore the fact that the other 95% of the code is the error checking and other shit which you can't do without.
The whole premise of this "study" has nothing to do with code, how to write it, or what that entails.
I once had a co-worker who kept telling me that lisp or scheme would magically make it so you just wrote a two line program -- something like "getReady; justDoIt".
When I asked him who the hell would write "getReady" and "justDoit", he seemed to think it would be some magic step which sorted itself out. The hard parts don't just magically happen. I can write main() in C which says "getReady(); justdoIt();" -- that doesn't mean that I don't need to implement those parts.
This sounds equally stupid.
Since when have coders started subscribing to wishful thinking where you just wave your hands and the computer does all the hard stuff?
I'm saying his article is cool, nerdy, and very DIY.
But in terms of being "teh best keyboard evar", it's essentially puffery and hyperbole, and I'm sure he knows this.
Kudos to the guy who built his, he's got mad skills that I don't.
I'm not saying this to detract from what he's done or belittle it. I'm saying people should just ignore the hyperbole and appreciate the build.
The rest is subjective and hype.
What, and spoil all the fun?
Sorry, but if you have 100 square kms of alcohol producing farm ... someone is going to be looking at that.
Asking if the number is useful is supposing reviews are honest and unbiased.
Since most reviews are prohibited from coming out before the game, and one assume most of these websites are getting paid for favorable reviews ... the number they put next to their review is probably as meaningless as the entire review in a lot of cases.