No. This is silly. You're better off having GPS than not having it - just don't shut off your common sense at the same time.
Quite. For instance, I once had a GPS take me off a main thoroughfare when I knew I was not close to my destination, and then instruct me to turn again at "Martin Luther King Blvd". When I was stupid enough to comply with that, it told me to turn on a small dark road, right where there was a creepy cemetery.
Since I'm alive and typing this, I obviously didn't comply.
My big worry is that this will induce someone to actually start off a zombie apocalypse, simply because they'd rather deal with the zombies than with Amazon's lawyers.
The company I work for "has ways" to determine ROI; If you buy a car based on an ad you saw a couple weeks ago, they are fairly good about linking those two events in some fashion or another. People smarter than me are working on it. I just work on some of the mundane configuration side of things. It's a bit frightening how good it is.
But are you sure those "ways" are actually effective? I've talked to quite a few laymen recently, including last week a successful marketing professional, who were convinced that read-receipts were an effective way to judge when and how many people read the emails they send. The marketing person was even quoting me general statistics based on this.
But of course not all email clients honor, or even support read receipts. I'm not even sure most of them do. Some folks try to get around this by embedding externally-hosted images, but any good email client shouldn't automatically present those either. So while a "read-receipt" can (probably) be used to tell that some person has at least glanced at your email, they don't really tell you anything about who hasn't.
What I'm at getting here is that marketing people have a nasty tendency to have completely unwarranted blind faith in their tools, when they don't really understand how those tools work and what their actual limitations are. So I really would take any info from them about tech with a grain of salt, no matter how certain they are about it. In fact, the more certain they are, the more suspicious you should be.
So Twitter's solution to their unfettered harassment problem is a 40 person committee?
Basically, this is a nice way of saying they won't be doing anything, but perhaps paying protection money into some industry groups so that they won't complain any more.
They can completely change the concept of a feed, and throw out the character limit that has been the defining feature of the service since its inception. But actual tools to allow users to manage asshats on the service (like even/. has had for nearly 20 frigging years)? Ohhh, that's too radical. How about we appoint a committee...
I have to wonder if running a couple of years worth of data through a drive that has no moving parts to wear down is actually a good test for how it will behave two years from now with a normal data load.
According to the study, the only long-term effect they could find was a marked increase in violence towards crates and barrels. The store by that name is investigating moving to a strict "you break it, you bought it" policy, as losses mount.
This is a violation of the type system pure and simple, but one that doesn't compromise any specific compilation unit. That leaves the linker as the next line of defense, but like to keep our C linkers in dark boxes full of trust-me horse shit.
For the most part linkers aren't supposed to be language-specific. Whatever language you use (it could indeed be C, but it could easily be something else) produces an object file in the OS's standard object file format, and the linker's job is to link various object files and libraries together into an executable.
Some of the "warning" -Wall checks and calls out are asinine...
I cannot remember a concrete, very specific case from ages past where this was true.
If you are using the Microsoft compiler, there are rather a lot of warnings along the lines of "I see that you are using a POSIX standard routine. You really should instead consider using our incompatible variant of it (incidentally tying your software to our platform) because F.U.D. Woggity boogity!"
In C++ template programming I also have started seeing a rather lot of "unreachable code" warnings due to code that will never be executed for one specific instantiation of a more generalized template. You could go make yourself a specialization for that one instance that you just found and copy all the code except the unreachable part to get rid of the warning, but that would be kinda stupid.
But even in these cases, I totally agree that you are much better off compiling with -Wall and pragma-ing away the specific warnings (at the lowest scope possible) after first examining that specific occurrence and making sure its not a problem. Back in my Ada days most of those warnings would be full-blown errors. Developers would eventually learn that the painful compiler experience prevents a far more painful debugging experience. Instant gratification in software, like in life, tends to turn out badly.
The issue of designer babies is a moral question, not a scientific one
It isn't just that. Its also quite possible to introduce artificial genetic diseases that are not fully understood for a few generations, and by then the change will have "gone wild" in the gene pool.
Most of us software engineers wouldn't consider it wise to make a code change to a huge poorly-understood program of the "lets tweak this and see what happens" variety and then release it to production without any prior testing. They are just forbidding the genetic programming equivalent of that.
Not quite. The IOCCC entries are just supposed to be really misleading (iow: "obfuscated") in what they actually do. If you can't figure it out at all, that works. If you think you know what it does, but it does something else, that's even better.
The underhanded C contest just takes this principle, but applies it to security specifically.
I'll bet that road was exactly like that when everyone on that street bought their houses. Why is the city supposed to spend city $ to increase only their property values by making their one street more residential than it was when they bought in?
If speed bumps are damaging your car, you need to slow the fuck down.
I'm sorry, but you aren't allowed to counter my entire argument by throwing out your Blame-the-victim Pokémon, because (as you can see from the above quote text) I already used that same Pokémon in the previous round.
I've enjoyed these over the years. My personal favorite was the "English to Pig Latin" translator whose source code looked like ASCII Art for a pig.
But really, if you can do stuff like that, you can do pretty much anything. So what's the point, really? Where's the challenge?
A much more interesting contest would be to write C code that's simple and understandable. Yes, I said it, simple and understandable and in C. There's a challenge to bend the minds of the world's greatest programmers.
I think the solution is for the city to bite the bullet and install speed bumps.
I'm sorry, but speed bumps are never the answer. They damage every car that drives over them, and if badly designed can actually encourage speeding (at least at speed the annoying jostling is over quickly). Hurt worst will be the poor bastards in the neighborhood who have to drive over the car-manglers every day.
The circles aren't a bad idea. Another would be to repave the road to be a bit twisty. Or just suck it up. I'll bet that road was exactly like that when everyone on that street bought their houses. Why is the city supposed to spend city $ to increase only their property values by making their one street more residential than it was when they bought in?
Or they could just do what they used to do on residential streets in New Orleans back in the 80's when I lived there: Never repave them. There was one that actually had a "light chop" to the asphalt (I'm guessing due to a shoddy contractor not accounting for expansion in the summer heat). So it worked like natural speed-bumps. Why not do that on purpose?:-)
I don't have huge problems with the theory behind not allowing people to both post and moderate in the same story. There's an inherent conflict of interest there. However, since the software is threaded, it shouldn't be difficult at all to allow moderating and posting in different threads of the same story. I almost never end up using my mod points, because if I'm interested and knowledgeable enough to moderate, invariably I'll eventually find a comment I want to respond to.
That makes me wonder about the nature of the people who do end up moderating. I suppose I could be optimistic and tell myself they are shy experts.
Perhaps people should use their own intelligence to filter out the signal from the noise, rather than having everything curated for them - otherwise... well, for one, they'll never learn to distinguish signal from noise on their own - like the chemtrail conspiracy nuts.
We had a place like that. It was called Usenet. No filtering there whatsoever except what you yourself put on it.
There's a reason user moderation was put here back in the late 90's. While it may be healthy to be able to do all your own filtering, just like it may be healthy to be able to grow your own food, its horribly inefficient, and most of us have better ways to spend our time.
And how do the Native American tribes for whom the bald eagle is sacred feel about that?
Well, I also happen to be Osage myself. I can't speak for the entire tribe, and certainly not for all tribes, but I personally look at it as showing the proper respect. Which is kind of a nice switch from the usual American attitude toward tribal sensitivities.
When you are appropriating something from another culture, context means everything. If you do it in a supportive and respectful way, it can be a huge plus for both sides. Thus laws like the prohibition on owning "pet" Eagles serve a dual purpose. By and large your typical American finds Bald Eagles nearly as sacred as natives do, but for slightly different reasons.
And this of course ignores the important point that Native Americans (within the confines of the USA boundries) are also Americans. Most I know love their country every bit as much as the non-natives. Sure, they might like it to be better, but you should feel that way about someone or something you love.
Slashdot Mirror
"Permanent" in context means that they don't have to keep renewing the law.
Which is kind of a big deal, considering this congress has trouble passing routine legislation, and for all we know the next one could be even worse.
No. This is silly. You're better off having GPS than not having it - just don't shut off your common sense at the same time.
Quite. For instance, I once had a GPS take me off a main thoroughfare when I knew I was not close to my destination, and then instruct me to turn again at "Martin Luther King Blvd". When I was stupid enough to comply with that, it told me to turn on a small dark road, right where there was a creepy cemetery.
Since I'm alive and typing this, I obviously didn't comply.
Just tell people the AI is American, and it will still pass the Turing Test. At least it will if you only test British people.
Well...technically the place was in breach of contract already.
My big worry is that this will induce someone to actually start off a zombie apocalypse, simply because they'd rather deal with the zombies than with Amazon's lawyers.
The company I work for "has ways" to determine ROI; If you buy a car based on an ad you saw a couple weeks ago, they are fairly good about linking those two events in some fashion or another. People smarter than me are working on it. I just work on some of the mundane configuration side of things. It's a bit frightening how good it is.
But are you sure those "ways" are actually effective? I've talked to quite a few laymen recently, including last week a successful marketing professional, who were convinced that read-receipts were an effective way to judge when and how many people read the emails they send. The marketing person was even quoting me general statistics based on this.
But of course not all email clients honor, or even support read receipts. I'm not even sure most of them do. Some folks try to get around this by embedding externally-hosted images, but any good email client shouldn't automatically present those either. So while a "read-receipt" can (probably) be used to tell that some person has at least glanced at your email, they don't really tell you anything about who hasn't.
What I'm at getting here is that marketing people have a nasty tendency to have completely unwarranted blind faith in their tools, when they don't really understand how those tools work and what their actual limitations are. So I really would take any info from them about tech with a grain of salt, no matter how certain they are about it. In fact, the more certain they are, the more suspicious you should be.
Wow. Its pretty darn clear you haven't actually tried either of those. Unless by crickets you mean Locusts.
Exactly. Slashdot put moderation in about 15 years ago, and look how destroyed it is now.
So Twitter's solution to their unfettered harassment problem is a 40 person committee?
Basically, this is a nice way of saying they won't be doing anything, but perhaps paying protection money into some industry groups so that they won't complain any more.
They can completely change the concept of a feed, and throw out the character limit that has been the defining feature of the service since its inception. But actual tools to allow users to manage asshats on the service (like even /. has had for nearly 20 frigging years)? Ohhh, that's too radical. How about we appoint a committee ...
I have to wonder if running a couple of years worth of data through a drive that has no moving parts to wear down is actually a good test for how it will behave two years from now with a normal data load.
According to the study, the only long-term effect they could find was a marked increase in violence towards crates and barrels. The store by that name is investigating moving to a strict "you break it, you bought it" policy, as losses mount.
So really more like an e-catapult.
This is a violation of the type system pure and simple, but one that doesn't compromise any specific compilation unit. That leaves the linker as the next line of defense, but like to keep our C linkers in dark boxes full of trust-me horse shit.
For the most part linkers aren't supposed to be language-specific. Whatever language you use (it could indeed be C, but it could easily be something else) produces an object file in the OS's standard object file format, and the linker's job is to link various object files and libraries together into an executable.
Some of the "warning" -Wall checks and calls out are asinine...
I cannot remember a concrete, very specific case from ages past where this was true.
If you are using the Microsoft compiler, there are rather a lot of warnings along the lines of "I see that you are using a POSIX standard routine. You really should instead consider using our incompatible variant of it (incidentally tying your software to our platform) because F.U.D. Woggity boogity!"
In C++ template programming I also have started seeing a rather lot of "unreachable code" warnings due to code that will never be executed for one specific instantiation of a more generalized template. You could go make yourself a specialization for that one instance that you just found and copy all the code except the unreachable part to get rid of the warning, but that would be kinda stupid.
But even in these cases, I totally agree that you are much better off compiling with -Wall and pragma-ing away the specific warnings (at the lowest scope possible) after first examining that specific occurrence and making sure its not a problem. Back in my Ada days most of those warnings would be full-blown errors. Developers would eventually learn that the painful compiler experience prevents a far more painful debugging experience. Instant gratification in software, like in life, tends to turn out badly.
The issue of designer babies is a moral question, not a scientific one
It isn't just that. Its also quite possible to introduce artificial genetic diseases that are not fully understood for a few generations, and by then the change will have "gone wild" in the gene pool.
Most of us software engineers wouldn't consider it wise to make a code change to a huge poorly-understood program of the "lets tweak this and see what happens" variety and then release it to production without any prior testing. They are just forbidding the genetic programming equivalent of that.
Didn't read the other comments, did you?
Not quite. The IOCCC entries are just supposed to be really misleading (iow: "obfuscated") in what they actually do. If you can't figure it out at all, that works. If you think you know what it does, but it does something else, that's even better.
The underhanded C contest just takes this principle, but applies it to security specifically.
I'll bet that road was exactly like that when everyone on that street bought their houses. Why is the city supposed to spend city $ to increase only their property values by making their one street more residential than it was when they bought in?
If speed bumps are damaging your car, you need to slow the fuck down.
I'm sorry, but you aren't allowed to counter my entire argument by throwing out your Blame-the-victim Pokémon, because (as you can see from the above quote text) I already used that same Pokémon in the previous round.
I've enjoyed these over the years. My personal favorite was the "English to Pig Latin" translator whose source code looked like ASCII Art for a pig.
But really, if you can do stuff like that, you can do pretty much anything. So what's the point, really? Where's the challenge?
A much more interesting contest would be to write C code that's simple and understandable. Yes, I said it, simple and understandable and in C. There's a challenge to bend the minds of the world's greatest programmers.
I think the solution is for the city to bite the bullet and install speed bumps.
I'm sorry, but speed bumps are never the answer. They damage every car that drives over them, and if badly designed can actually encourage speeding (at least at speed the annoying jostling is over quickly). Hurt worst will be the poor bastards in the neighborhood who have to drive over the car-manglers every day.
The circles aren't a bad idea. Another would be to repave the road to be a bit twisty. Or just suck it up. I'll bet that road was exactly like that when everyone on that street bought their houses. Why is the city supposed to spend city $ to increase only their property values by making their one street more residential than it was when they bought in?
Or they could just do what they used to do on residential streets in New Orleans back in the 80's when I lived there: Never repave them. There was one that actually had a "light chop" to the asphalt (I'm guessing due to a shoddy contractor not accounting for expansion in the summer heat). So it worked like natural speed-bumps. Why not do that on purpose? :-)
I don't have huge problems with the theory behind not allowing people to both post and moderate in the same story. There's an inherent conflict of interest there. However, since the software is threaded, it shouldn't be difficult at all to allow moderating and posting in different threads of the same story. I almost never end up using my mod points, because if I'm interested and knowledgeable enough to moderate, invariably I'll eventually find a comment I want to respond to.
That makes me wonder about the nature of the people who do end up moderating. I suppose I could be optimistic and tell myself they are shy experts.
I strongly believe however that there should be a "-1, Factually Incorrect" mod
Why doesn't "-1, overrated" work for that?
Perhaps people should use their own intelligence to filter out the signal from the noise, rather than having everything curated for them - otherwise ... well, for one, they'll never learn to distinguish signal from noise on their own - like the chemtrail conspiracy nuts.
We had a place like that. It was called Usenet. No filtering there whatsoever except what you yourself put on it.
There's a reason user moderation was put here back in the late 90's. While it may be healthy to be able to do all your own filtering, just like it may be healthy to be able to grow your own food, its horribly inefficient, and most of us have better ways to spend our time.
...who make such a stink about reactions on certain campuses are, IMHO, taking a small sample set and extending it to all of academia
Riiii-ight. (followed by 3 hyperlinks)
Wow you are totally right. Your THREE EXAMPLES prove its totally not an issue of people taking a small sample set and extending it to all of academia.
And how do the Native American tribes for whom the bald eagle is sacred feel about that?
Well, I also happen to be Osage myself. I can't speak for the entire tribe, and certainly not for all tribes, but I personally look at it as showing the proper respect. Which is kind of a nice switch from the usual American attitude toward tribal sensitivities.
When you are appropriating something from another culture, context means everything. If you do it in a supportive and respectful way, it can be a huge plus for both sides. Thus laws like the prohibition on owning "pet" Eagles serve a dual purpose. By and large your typical American finds Bald Eagles nearly as sacred as natives do, but for slightly different reasons.
And this of course ignores the important point that Native Americans (within the confines of the USA boundries) are also Americans. Most I know love their country every bit as much as the non-natives. Sure, they might like it to be better, but you should feel that way about someone or something you love.