That worked out really well with prohibition. It is a great suggestion, but hoping people will not send texts/emails/answer phone calls while driving is simply naive.
Don't know about you, but where I live, it's illegal to do this while driving.
What really needs to happen is for the police to start enforcing it, because I can go to any intersection and watch a large chunk of drivers texting.
Start fining people and taking away their licenses, and you'll see some change.
If you're trying to use a gesture interface to post a fscking Facebook update, you're not paying enough attention to the road -- and if you get into an accident, you are criminally negligent.
other applications can also be controlled with hand gestures enabled by an infrared camera
So, instead of people taking their hands of the steering wheel to hold onto their phone, they're going to take them off the steering wheel to control their stuff with gestures???
Seriously people, are you actually designing something for people who are driving cars?
Here's a suggestion, save your damned text messages and social media updates for when you're not bloody well driving.
So i hope we can still laugh about it in 30 years or so.
You know, anybody who knows that joke now... in 30 years or so will be sitting in the old geeks home laughing into their beard for reasons nobody else understands.
And, yes, I consider myself among them... now, if you'll excuse me, I should get started on my beard.
99% of code is better slow and simple. Because it simply doesn't matter.
Right up until it does.
And the people who think optimization is pointless because it doesn't matter are generally clueless about how to fix it when it does fall apart, because they're so reliant on their frameworks and libraries they haven't the slightest idea of where to begin.
I can't even tell you how many times I've seen code which was written to look pretty, but which in practice was bordering on unworkable.
I've seen more than a few OO developers who write what looks like clean, elegant code, but which actually has a huge amount more overhead and convolution which is masked by the library -- so much so that they're calling an n^2 algorithm n^2 times, instead of just writing something which didn't suck from the beginning.
Because, in their mind, the magic library and compiler would make it super efficient, when it did anything but.
LOL, you know in general, that you are less cynical and paranoid than me is probably not a terrible thing.
I've just learned to go straight to the worst case scenario, and then give the world a little time to catch up. There's usually a 3-6 month lag time before people go from saying "you're a paranoid loon" to "holy crap".;-)
My wife, however, still stands by paranoid loon most of the time.
I've also worked with custom cpus that had 2 registers and no stack
Luxury, we used to dream of two registers...;-)
But, seriously, having been through assembly, Pascal, C, Data Structures, Compiler Design, telecomms, and some bare-metal hardware programming... I do lament that for a lot of people it's just "oh, well, we're gonna need an infinite supply of memory" instead of actually writing compact code which doesn't just keep getting bigger.
I once had a former co-worker who followed the mantra that optimization was a pointless exercise. He tended to include every library known to man, not give a damn about the efficiency of the library, and ended up with code which was slow but couldn't be optimized because he had no control over anything.
I never understood how someone could continue to claim that optimization was pointless, and then write slow code. You'd think some empirical evidence to the contrary would have helped sway him.
CS students who primarily learn Java are inferior because they don't have to deal with memory management as they would if they used C
You know, I wouldn't want to specifically use the word 'inferior', but you do learn a hell of a lot from having to deal with your own memory management.
When I was in school, lo these many years ago, I and a fellow student wrote the same basic assignment for a course.
He was one of the sysadmins on the VAX and could set his process to use a vast array which was mostly empty, and rely purely on virtual memory. I had a tiny little 80286, and had to implement the same thing in a sparse array which took up a fraction of the space.
We both got the expected results and got good grades, but the prof basically said since I'd done so much more thought on memory management and the other guy didn't, I'd get the A+ and he got the A.
The Prof also stole my code to use in his own project, because by the time you accounted for architecture mine was about 4x faster and 100x smaller, and he'd basically given us an assignment which overlapped with his own research.
Would I want to do bare metal memory management in C every day? Probably not. Do I think it was valuable to have had to learn how to shoehorn something into a small amount of memory and explicitly be the one to make sure my memory wasn't leaking? Absolutely.
I think more modern software would suck less if developers didn't just assume there were massive gobs of memory sitting around, and implement everything in the easiest way possible without having to factor in resources. Most modern browsers seem to grow their memory usage at a pretty linear rate, even if you're not using the browser.
Because, really, pretty much every piece of software seems to double in it resource requirements every few years.
And understanding pointer arithmetic and semantics in C is valuable, even if most people will never directly see anything resembling a pointer these days.
Licensing? Can code released under the BSD license be re-released under the GPL?
Been years since I read the license, but the BSD licenses are pretty permissive, to the extent you can take BSD stuff and use it as a basis for commercial products.
BSD has always been about writing awesome code, and letting people do what they want with it, as opposed to imposing ideology on people.
I'd be surprised if Linux doesn't already have code from FreeBSD in it.
Sounds like an insane argument. Defending a law because you're using it for something it wasn't intended to be used for.
In fairness, the government does it all the time... so it's no more screwed up when corporations do it.
News flash, badly written laws get misused.
The problem comes when the people passing laws have no idea of what they say, the laws are written by corporate lobbyists, and the law makers ignore people pointing out the flaws in the law before it's passed.
When your elected representatives owe more to their corporate sponsors/donors than they do the people who elected them, this is what you get.
You know what, this is precisely what happens when you decide corporations are people, and that money equals speech... your democratic process becomes subverted by the will of corporations and ceases to be about representing the people.
I think it's worse than that... it's a nascent authoritarian state which is beholden to an oligarchy.
Which means whatever the government doesn't control is in the hands of the corporations.
So, if you're not being screwed in the name of secret national security by agencies which lie cheat and steal... you're being screwed in the name of corporate profits. Or both.
As a free society, America has pretty much almost ran it's course.
Papers please, comrade, and don't forget to keep the economy going by buying stuff from one of our sponsors.
they actually allowed a scientist pointing at a water spectrum graph to be broadcast. This is almost like being back in the 70's when they treated the audience as if they had done high school and were actually interested
I wonder if this is a general difference in science reporting between Europe and North America?
Don't worry, I'm sure FOX will ignore all of the complicated sciency bits.
What I don't understand is why they don't just make everyone's life easier and sell the unlimited plans by bandwidth, not 'data limit'
Because, selling more than what you have is profitable, and selling what you have is less so, and requires honesty in advertising.
What they're saying is that "unlimited" is a marketing term which really means "a bunch, but probably not as much as you think it means, and definitely not actually unlimited".
This is giving shittier service and claiming it's for your own good.
Lots of medical tests are worthwhile with a lot more than 50% false positives.
Sure, and there are objective criteria involved in those, and objective results.
This list boils down to some police officer, informant, agent, intercept, or disgruntled asshole said "I think he's a terrorist, and I have nothing to support that".
It then goes into the ever growing list of people whose lives will be fucked with for no good reason, and to justify these spy agencies and their lists full of terrible data.
You're damned right this has more serious consequences, which means it should also require some credible evidence, instead of any law enforcement officer anywhere being encouraged to add people to the list "just in case".
I see this list as nothing more than the scope creep of fascism, and will be defended by the fascists as a necessary tool. Accurate information is a necessary too. Garbage information is just a recipe for abuse.
Right now, either through laziness, incompetence, or spite, a huge amount of people can add pretty much anybody to this list. In fact, they're encouraged to.
And it sounds like there are no checks and balances, and no accountability.
It doesn't, but you need to go a little deeper into the article:
So this is the blurb in the summary:
That category -- 280,000 people -- dwarfs the number of watchlisted people suspected of ties to al Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah combined.
And this is deeper in the article:
The groups with the largest number of targeted people on the main terrorism watchlist -- aside from "no recognized terrorist group affiliation" -- are al Qaeda in Iraq (73,189), the Taliban (62,794), and al Qaeda (50,446). Those are followed by Hamas (21,913) and Hezbollah (21,199).
So, there are 50K more people who are known to NOT have terrorist ties than all of those combined, and several times more than any single category.
Basically the list is useless, because they have more known non-terror linked subjects than they have people with actual links to terrorism.
I'm betting that list is anti-war protesters, people who disagree with the government, or who have done any number of innocent things which you have a right to do.
In other words, pretty much anybody they can find.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't know about you, but where I live, it's illegal to do this while driving.
What really needs to happen is for the police to start enforcing it, because I can go to any intersection and watch a large chunk of drivers texting.
Start fining people and taking away their licenses, and you'll see some change.
If you're trying to use a gesture interface to post a fscking Facebook update, you're not paying enough attention to the road -- and if you get into an accident, you are criminally negligent.
So, instead of people taking their hands of the steering wheel to hold onto their phone, they're going to take them off the steering wheel to control their stuff with gestures???
Seriously people, are you actually designing something for people who are driving cars?
Here's a suggestion, save your damned text messages and social media updates for when you're not bloody well driving.
You know, anybody who knows that joke now ... in 30 years or so will be sitting in the old geeks home laughing into their beard for reasons nobody else understands.
And, yes, I consider myself among them ... now, if you'll excuse me, I should get started on my beard.
Nor does shooting Oracle.
What about those Texas "he needed killin' " laws?
Could we shoot Oracle in Texas and say it was a public service?
And, a note for the humor impaired, I'm not actually advocating anybody getting shot here, it's a fscking joke.
Right up until it does.
And the people who think optimization is pointless because it doesn't matter are generally clueless about how to fix it when it does fall apart, because they're so reliant on their frameworks and libraries they haven't the slightest idea of where to begin.
I can't even tell you how many times I've seen code which was written to look pretty, but which in practice was bordering on unworkable.
I've seen more than a few OO developers who write what looks like clean, elegant code, but which actually has a huge amount more overhead and convolution which is masked by the library -- so much so that they're calling an n^2 algorithm n^2 times, instead of just writing something which didn't suck from the beginning.
Because, in their mind, the magic library and compiler would make it super efficient, when it did anything but.
LOL, you know in general, that you are less cynical and paranoid than me is probably not a terrible thing.
I've just learned to go straight to the worst case scenario, and then give the world a little time to catch up. There's usually a 3-6 month lag time before people go from saying "you're a paranoid loon" to "holy crap". ;-)
My wife, however, still stands by paranoid loon most of the time.
Luxury, we used to dream of two registers ... ;-)
But, seriously, having been through assembly, Pascal, C, Data Structures, Compiler Design, telecomms, and some bare-metal hardware programming ... I do lament that for a lot of people it's just "oh, well, we're gonna need an infinite supply of memory" instead of actually writing compact code which doesn't just keep getting bigger.
I once had a former co-worker who followed the mantra that optimization was a pointless exercise. He tended to include every library known to man, not give a damn about the efficiency of the library, and ended up with code which was slow but couldn't be optimized because he had no control over anything.
I never understood how someone could continue to claim that optimization was pointless, and then write slow code. You'd think some empirical evidence to the contrary would have helped sway him.
You know, I wouldn't want to specifically use the word 'inferior', but you do learn a hell of a lot from having to deal with your own memory management.
When I was in school, lo these many years ago, I and a fellow student wrote the same basic assignment for a course.
He was one of the sysadmins on the VAX and could set his process to use a vast array which was mostly empty, and rely purely on virtual memory. I had a tiny little 80286, and had to implement the same thing in a sparse array which took up a fraction of the space.
We both got the expected results and got good grades, but the prof basically said since I'd done so much more thought on memory management and the other guy didn't, I'd get the A+ and he got the A.
The Prof also stole my code to use in his own project, because by the time you accounted for architecture mine was about 4x faster and 100x smaller, and he'd basically given us an assignment which overlapped with his own research.
Would I want to do bare metal memory management in C every day? Probably not. Do I think it was valuable to have had to learn how to shoehorn something into a small amount of memory and explicitly be the one to make sure my memory wasn't leaking? Absolutely.
I think more modern software would suck less if developers didn't just assume there were massive gobs of memory sitting around, and implement everything in the easiest way possible without having to factor in resources. Most modern browsers seem to grow their memory usage at a pretty linear rate, even if you're not using the browser.
Because, really, pretty much every piece of software seems to double in it resource requirements every few years.
And understanding pointer arithmetic and semantics in C is valuable, even if most people will never directly see anything resembling a pointer these days.
Isn't Netcraft dead?
Because people have been saying the BSDs are dying for night on 20 years now, possibly longer.
Been years since I read the license, but the BSD licenses are pretty permissive, to the extent you can take BSD stuff and use it as a basis for commercial products.
BSD has always been about writing awesome code, and letting people do what they want with it, as opposed to imposing ideology on people.
I'd be surprised if Linux doesn't already have code from FreeBSD in it.
Way more cowbell, and a much cooler logo.
Look, this is FreeBSD ... why not just take their damned code?
It's not like you're not allowed to do that. That's what is great about the BSD license.
If FreeBSD's network stack is what you aspire to, why reinvent the wheel?
Yes, I know, before you bother telling me ... I've already put on the cone of shame.
I for one welcome out new, magnetic fruit fly overlords.
So, we can shoot Oracle then?
Thanks for clarifying that.
Really? Because pretty much as soon as it happened this is what most of us expected.
The people who want to do this probably started the process the next day.
So, do you have known ties to terrorists? If not, you must be a terrorist too, right?
So you agree that we should put you on the list because you haven't been 100% excluded as a suspect?
You may want to live in that stupid world, but the rest of us don't.
In fairness, the government does it all the time ... so it's no more screwed up when corporations do it.
News flash, badly written laws get misused.
The problem comes when the people passing laws have no idea of what they say, the laws are written by corporate lobbyists, and the law makers ignore people pointing out the flaws in the law before it's passed.
When your elected representatives owe more to their corporate sponsors/donors than they do the people who elected them, this is what you get.
You know what, this is precisely what happens when you decide corporations are people, and that money equals speech ... your democratic process becomes subverted by the will of corporations and ceases to be about representing the people.
It's pretty much all downhill from here.
I think it's worse than that ... it's a nascent authoritarian state which is beholden to an oligarchy.
Which means whatever the government doesn't control is in the hands of the corporations.
So, if you're not being screwed in the name of secret national security by agencies which lie cheat and steal ... you're being screwed in the name of corporate profits. Or both.
As a free society, America has pretty much almost ran it's course.
Papers please, comrade, and don't forget to keep the economy going by buying stuff from one of our sponsors.
I wonder if this is a general difference in science reporting between Europe and North America?
Don't worry, I'm sure FOX will ignore all of the complicated sciency bits.
Because, selling more than what you have is profitable, and selling what you have is less so, and requires honesty in advertising.
What they're saying is that "unlimited" is a marketing term which really means "a bunch, but probably not as much as you think it means, and definitely not actually unlimited".
This is giving shittier service and claiming it's for your own good.
Then, on behalf of the rest of us, thanks for the continuing awesomeness of space exploration. :-P
Sure, and there are objective criteria involved in those, and objective results.
This list boils down to some police officer, informant, agent, intercept, or disgruntled asshole said "I think he's a terrorist, and I have nothing to support that".
It then goes into the ever growing list of people whose lives will be fucked with for no good reason, and to justify these spy agencies and their lists full of terrible data.
You're damned right this has more serious consequences, which means it should also require some credible evidence, instead of any law enforcement officer anywhere being encouraged to add people to the list "just in case".
I see this list as nothing more than the scope creep of fascism, and will be defended by the fascists as a necessary tool. Accurate information is a necessary too. Garbage information is just a recipe for abuse.
Right now, either through laziness, incompetence, or spite, a huge amount of people can add pretty much anybody to this list. In fact, they're encouraged to.
And it sounds like there are no checks and balances, and no accountability.
It doesn't, but you need to go a little deeper into the article:
So this is the blurb in the summary:
And this is deeper in the article:
So, there are 50K more people who are known to NOT have terrorist ties than all of those combined, and several times more than any single category.
Basically the list is useless, because they have more known non-terror linked subjects than they have people with actual links to terrorism.
I'm betting that list is anti-war protesters, people who disagree with the government, or who have done any number of innocent things which you have a right to do.
In other words, pretty much anybody they can find.