Most companies have a wildly inflated idea of what their code would be worth to a competitor. In general, your competitors have no interest in seeing your crappy code.
It depends on what they're planning on doing with it. I agree that a competitor's codebase is going to be of approximately zero interest to developers trying to implement a similar system. It might, however, be very interesting to a legal team, who might want to scan it for patent and licensing violations. If they can find some, real or imagined, they can exploit these liabilities for FUD purposes, or to strategically cripple the competition's products.
"Behold, my robot can solve a Rubik's cube in less than a second!"
[He pushes the button. There is a whirr of motion, and a flash.]
"Uh... well, as you can see, after the procedure, the cube is a bit too... on fire... to read. But rest assured, if it weren't charred, and, um... also, if it were still a cube, I guess... then each side would be a single color. Uh, a single other than black, I mean. Impressive, no?"
Feeding livestock takes more resources then eating plants directly.
This is certainly true from a purely thermodynamic perspective. However, it should be noted that, in some circumstances, livestock grazing requires less labor, equipment, and energy than crop farming, and can be performed with climates and terrains where crop farming might be difficult or impossible. For the individual food producer, then, there may not always be much of a choice as to whether to be a farmer or a rancher--it's often a foregone conclusion.
The guy is a brilliant theoretical physicist and a celebrity scientist, but this in no way makes him an authority in the social implications of scientific discovery.
I don't know. How qualified does he have to be? He just has to be able to detect this pattern:
1. Scientists discover something new and exciting about physics, chemistry, biology, computing, or psychology.
2. Military organizations pounce on the new discovery, ostensibly to further their explicit mission to outcompete other militaries. In doing so, of course, they also kill, wound, displace, or otherwise negatively affect a lot of civilians.
3. Meanwhile, unscrupulous governments attempt to use the advance to better control their citizens, while simultaneously attempting to restrict those citizens from using the advance for peaceful ends, because that might erode their control.
4. Even if a particular advance is seemingly benign, it will later turn out to have far-reaching negative implications, which will be used as a justification for more governmental restriction and control, and indeed, more technological innovations to combat the unanticipated side-effects of the earlier advance. These "counter-advances" will of course have their own consequences, intended and unintended
5. Repeat. The number of people affected, and the degree to which they are affected, increases each cycle.
Aren't we all qualified to see where this is going?
You do realize there are secrets that government officials only know. Democracies have run for some time this way.
I guess so, maybe. But there's a world of difference between the government being unwilling to tell you where exactly the nuclear missile silos are located and being unwilling to tell you why they broke down your Uncle Ahmed's door and trundled him off to Guantanamo Bay.
As for this particular case, Clinton saying this is, to me, like the Joker saying: "You should vote for me as mayor, because only I know the codes to deactivate the nerve gas bombs I planted in various locations around Gotham City."
After mentioning that Obama Administration officials had "started the conversation" with tech companies on the encryption issue, one of the moderators noted that the government "got nowhere" with its requests. Clinton replied, "That is not what I've heard. Let me leave it at that."
Oh, superb. Now we not only have secret organizations with secret appropriations running secret surveillance programs to gather secret evidence which is submitted to secret courts for secret trials, but we actually have a presidential candidate trying to convince voters to vote for her on the basis of privileged secrets that only she, of all the candidates, is allowed to know. How the fucking fuck can we run a democracy this way?
To me, an everyday citizen of the Roman Empire, it seems that indoor plumbing will become nothing more then a expensive luxury product. The one percent will have another reason to spend their money. I have yet to read a practical use for these so called "pipes" except for supplying the estates of rich people, for which Plumbnus Tertullius has obtained that contract. Otherwise none of these pipes seem important in supplying water to Rome at large. They are just rich guys with a fantasy for not walking to the river every morning. Giving wealthy people an indoor bath is not a municipal water supply.
It seems there is no better technology to fly to the Space as the one developed at Baikonur in 1957 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . Get over it, and just keep copying what the Great Engineers and Scientists built. It was not patented.
There is certainly much to be proud of in the old Soviet space program, but I'm not sure any of that is contained in the article you linked to, which seems to be about the Baikonur Cosmodrome itself. Most of the article is a history of how they decided where to put it, and a list of the exact coordinates of a bunch of individual launch pads. There's not a lot of technology mentioned in that article, unless you consider latitude and longitude a technology.
If you're suggesting that a modern space program should exclusively use 1950's technology, well, where would we even find that many vacuum tubes and that much asbestos?
...the fight against noisy leaf blowers is gaining momentum, in part, because residents are framing it as a public health issue. Two-stroke engine leaf blowers mix fuel with oil and don't undergo a complete combustion, emitting a number of toxins...
Don't fucking do that. If you hate leaf blowers because they make a giant fucking noise that makes the quiet enjoyment of your property impossible, then pass a law that bans making giant fucking noises in a residential neighborhood. Don't try to ban leaf blowers by coughing like a sad little passive-aggressive Chihuahua every time you hear one and then climb into your Land Dominator SUV and go vote down the latest mass transit initiative in favor of knocking down a forest and putting up a football stadium instead.
I can't believe all of the hate for this. It's not a big deal and it's something I've always been doing anyway.
Sure, it's probably not a big deal to you. But it is very much a big deal to people who write commercial software, which is a fair percentage of the people who use StackOverflow. I'm not a lawyer myself, but I can say from experience that, when a lawyer finds a comment somewhere in the codebase that says "//these next two lines of code are MIT-licensed", steam shoots out of their ears and every developer in the company has to attend an all-day meeting about it.
"OW, My Balls" is not intellectually far removed from the current state of 'reality' television.
That's an unfair comparison. At least in Ow, My Balls there was something exciting happening. The latest wave of reality TV shows are just people standing around whining. Also, Ow, My Balls had a certain pathos. With the Kardashians, by contrast, I frankly don't care whose butt it is or why it's fart--I mean, breaking the internet.
You have to realize you are talking to an Ixian here. If it can be made more complex through technology, they are the ones to do it.
It could be worse. He could be Tleilaxu.
Yes. Remember the time all those Tleilaxu "Interface Dancer" Bio-Omni-Appliances turned against their masters, and they had to do a recall? But the original manufacturer had shut down operations by then, so the replacements had to be made by a child company? And those weren't nearly as good, so everybody stopped buying them.
I have been unable to find a listing for the USA. Netflix site does not list it. The only suggestion or direction I ever get is "Sign up for the Free Trial to find out!" No. Show me the goods and I'll consider giving the money.
Yes, I have always found this frustrating as well. No doubt there is some dumb reason for this in whatever contracts they sign with the rights-holders, but I find it hard to imagine how this policy benefits anyone. It's like shopping for ham at pig-in-a-poke.com.
The problem is not a particular president or a particular Congress. It's the fact that space missions have, somehow, become politicized. So, every time the balance of power shifts, the new legislature/administration immediately cancels the space program decided upon by the previous administration/legislature, because they want to screw over the other party. Then the new guys propose their own plan for space exploration, which, just like the old one, will take 15 years to show results, which of course guarantees that it will be cancelled in its turn when the electorate gets tired of the clowns in charge and votes them out again.
If NASA is ever again going to be a serious participant in the exploration of space, then it's going to need to either run missions that only take a couple years start-to-finish, which severely limits what can be done, or get buy-in from both parties for a longer-term project, which will be almost impossible to achieve.
As for the automobile, in some ways it really is just a better horse. We use the automobile for exactly the same reasons as we used the horse: to move people and things from place to place. Only you don't have to feed the car as much, house it as well, or treat it as carefully. If something breaks on it, you can generally just replace that part, instead of shooting it and burying it in a giant hole. The car's waste products are easier to deal with, at least for the individual user And, of course, cars can be much faster.
Rest assured, users of horses had complained about all these many relative inconveniences before the advent of the car. They just didn't know what the inconveniences were relative to, so to speak. So, despite Henry Ford's charming, irascible, I-didn't-hire-you-to-think, industrialist-plutocrat attitude, I would contend that the invention of the automobile could indeed be viewed as simply a response to user demand. And that all of the subsequent improvements to the car were also responses to user demands, from "I wish I could start this thing from inside" to "I wish I could listen to the Little Orphan Annie program while driving" to "I wish my butt didn't get so cold in the winter".
Speaking for myself, I don't remember ever saying anything close to "I wish that some mysterious buttons would appear whenever I moved the mouse pointer to the edge of the screen" or "You know what I hate about Windows? All the windows!" Of all the people I know, only about 2% of them actually claim to be happy about the latest wave of UI design, whereas about 80% complain about them. That, to me, means they need to be turned off, at least by default.
Say what you want about Richard Stallman, no one's ever accused him of being too willing to compromise on his principles in the name of pragmatism and expediency.
If you ask your users what they want, you'll deliver just that, not what they're going to want when the next release is delivered.
Hear, hear! Look, listening to users is a obviously a dead end. Users, selfish as they are, only care about usability. I mean, just imagine: If UI designers listened to users, there would have been no Windows 8! That means there'd be no tiles, active or otherwise. We'd all still be putzing around with old-fashioned desktops like a bunch of putzes. That, in turn, means that users might be able to feasbily use more than one program at a time! Shudder!
In Gnome, there would be no hot corners and no overview. There would still be minimize and maximize buttons on the windows, and they might even be on the right side of the title bar. For God's sake, the taskbar might still be on the bottom of the screen! Heavens preserve us!
So count your blessings. If not for the selfless charity of our modern rockstar UX gurus, gracing our poor selves with their genius innovations, we'd be living in a veritable Stone Age where the applications running on on operating system were actually considered more important than the OS itself.
If we're really hung up on the relatively minor governmental expense of having a coin whose face value is less than the value of its constituents, then we already have a tested solution for this "problem". Make the pennies out of steel, like we did in WWII. A quick web search indicates that zinc is currently a little more than 1500 dollars per metric ton, while steel is 170 dollars per metric tonne. That should solve the problem for a while.
Interesting! I must have missed that part. I'll need to watch it again. But obviously training is overrated. If you can kill one of the major Dark Force guys using half-forgotten lessons it must not be very difficult to master. Maybe just a short course is all that is needed.
Luke used to bullseye womprats in Beggar's Canyon back home, and they're not much bigger than two meters, which apparently is amazing marksmanship, and that was possibly before he had even heard of the Force. And he was able to hold his own against Vader for a while at the end of Empire, despite the fact that his formal training on Dagobah lasted.. maybe a week, tops? And he had no formal training before the amazingly acrobatic fight with Jabba's gang in Jedi.
So it would appear that, yes, at least for certain people, proficiency in using the Force is more a matter of natural talent, and knowing what's possible with it, rather than a result of repetitive drilling. Which, frankly, is kind of what one might expect when you're dealing with a mystical and ineffable power that pervades the very fabric of reality.
Slashdot Mirror
Most companies have a wildly inflated idea of what their code would be worth to a competitor. In general, your competitors have no interest in seeing your crappy code.
It depends on what they're planning on doing with it. I agree that a competitor's codebase is going to be of approximately zero interest to developers trying to implement a similar system. It might, however, be very interesting to a legal team, who might want to scan it for patent and licensing violations. If they can find some, real or imagined, they can exploit these liabilities for FUD purposes, or to strategically cripple the competition's products.
Doesn't the word "conspiracy" mean that you make at least a token effort to hide what you're doing?
My first car was a Trebuchet.
My other car is a trebuchet.
Set your secret question answers to random passwords.
This. My mother's maiden name really is YGIL68ovlh9p7 ;biy7/l gp79kl;yha47v clj 7i! We're European and African heritage... :-)
I think you mean "My mother's maiden name really is YGIL68ovlh9p7 ;biy7/l gp79kl;yha47v clj 7i, you insensitive clod!"
"Behold, my robot can solve a Rubik's cube in less than a second!"
[He pushes the button. There is a whirr of motion, and a flash.]
"Uh... well, as you can see, after the procedure, the cube is a bit too... on fire... to read. But rest assured, if it weren't charred, and, um... also, if it were still a cube, I guess... then each side would be a single color. Uh, a single other than black, I mean. Impressive, no?"
[The audience is silent.]
"Uh... ta-daaaa!"
We aren't just talking about homebrew routers here, fuckface.
I nominate that sentence for consideration as the Most Slashdot Thing Anyone Has Ever Said.
Feeding livestock takes more resources then eating plants directly.
This is certainly true from a purely thermodynamic perspective. However, it should be noted that, in some circumstances, livestock grazing requires less labor, equipment, and energy than crop farming, and can be performed with climates and terrains where crop farming might be difficult or impossible. For the individual food producer, then, there may not always be much of a choice as to whether to be a farmer or a rancher--it's often a foregone conclusion.
The guy is a brilliant theoretical physicist and a celebrity scientist, but this in no way makes him an authority in the social implications of scientific discovery.
I don't know. How qualified does he have to be? He just has to be able to detect this pattern:
1. Scientists discover something new and exciting about physics, chemistry, biology, computing, or psychology.
2. Military organizations pounce on the new discovery, ostensibly to further their explicit mission to outcompete other militaries. In doing so, of course, they also kill, wound, displace, or otherwise negatively affect a lot of civilians.
3. Meanwhile, unscrupulous governments attempt to use the advance to better control their citizens, while simultaneously attempting to restrict those citizens from using the advance for peaceful ends, because that might erode their control.
4. Even if a particular advance is seemingly benign, it will later turn out to have far-reaching negative implications, which will be used as a justification for more governmental restriction and control, and indeed, more technological innovations to combat the unanticipated side-effects of the earlier advance. These "counter-advances" will of course have their own consequences, intended and unintended
5. Repeat. The number of people affected, and the degree to which they are affected, increases each cycle.
Aren't we all qualified to see where this is going?
You do realize there are secrets that government officials only know. Democracies have run for some time this way.
I guess so, maybe. But there's a world of difference between the government being unwilling to tell you where exactly the nuclear missile silos are located and being unwilling to tell you why they broke down your Uncle Ahmed's door and trundled him off to Guantanamo Bay.
As for this particular case, Clinton saying this is, to me, like the Joker saying: "You should vote for me as mayor, because only I know the codes to deactivate the nerve gas bombs I planted in various locations around Gotham City."
After mentioning that Obama Administration officials had "started the conversation" with tech companies on the encryption issue, one of the moderators noted that the government "got nowhere" with its requests. Clinton replied, "That is not what I've heard. Let me leave it at that."
Oh, superb. Now we not only have secret organizations with secret appropriations running secret surveillance programs to gather secret evidence which is submitted to secret courts for secret trials, but we actually have a presidential candidate trying to convince voters to vote for her on the basis of privileged secrets that only she, of all the candidates, is allowed to know. How the fucking fuck can we run a democracy this way?
To me, an everyday citizen of the Roman Empire, it seems that indoor plumbing will become nothing more then a expensive luxury product. The one percent will have another reason to spend their money. I have yet to read a practical use for these so called "pipes" except for supplying the estates of rich people, for which Plumbnus Tertullius has obtained that contract. Otherwise none of these pipes seem important in supplying water to Rome at large. They are just rich guys with a fantasy for not walking to the river every morning. Giving wealthy people an indoor bath is not a municipal water supply.
It seems there is no better technology to fly to the Space as the one developed at Baikonur in 1957 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... . Get over it, and just keep copying what the Great Engineers and Scientists built. It was not patented.
There is certainly much to be proud of in the old Soviet space program, but I'm not sure any of that is contained in the article you linked to, which seems to be about the Baikonur Cosmodrome itself. Most of the article is a history of how they decided where to put it, and a list of the exact coordinates of a bunch of individual launch pads. There's not a lot of technology mentioned in that article, unless you consider latitude and longitude a technology.
If you're suggesting that a modern space program should exclusively use 1950's technology, well, where would we even find that many vacuum tubes and that much asbestos?
...the fight against noisy leaf blowers is gaining momentum, in part, because residents are framing it as a public health issue. Two-stroke engine leaf blowers mix fuel with oil and don't undergo a complete combustion, emitting a number of toxins...
Don't fucking do that. If you hate leaf blowers because they make a giant fucking noise that makes the quiet enjoyment of your property impossible, then pass a law that bans making giant fucking noises in a residential neighborhood. Don't try to ban leaf blowers by coughing like a sad little passive-aggressive Chihuahua every time you hear one and then climb into your Land Dominator SUV and go vote down the latest mass transit initiative in favor of knocking down a forest and putting up a football stadium instead.
I can't believe all of the hate for this. It's not a big deal and it's something I've always been doing anyway.
Sure, it's probably not a big deal to you. But it is very much a big deal to people who write commercial software, which is a fair percentage of the people who use StackOverflow. I'm not a lawyer myself, but I can say from experience that, when a lawyer finds a comment somewhere in the codebase that says "//these next two lines of code are MIT-licensed", steam shoots out of their ears and every developer in the company has to attend an all-day meeting about it.
"OW, My Balls" is not intellectually far removed from the current state of 'reality' television.
That's an unfair comparison. At least in Ow, My Balls there was something exciting happening. The latest wave of reality TV shows are just people standing around whining. Also, Ow, My Balls had a certain pathos. With the Kardashians, by contrast, I frankly don't care whose butt it is or why it's fart--I mean, breaking the internet.
You have to realize you are talking to an Ixian here. If it can be made more complex through technology, they are the ones to do it.
It could be worse. He could be Tleilaxu.
Yes. Remember the time all those Tleilaxu "Interface Dancer" Bio-Omni-Appliances turned against their masters, and they had to do a recall? But the original manufacturer had shut down operations by then, so the replacements had to be made by a child company? And those weren't nearly as good, so everybody stopped buying them.
I have been unable to find a listing for the USA. Netflix site does not list it. The only suggestion or direction I ever get is "Sign up for the Free Trial to find out!" No. Show me the goods and I'll consider giving the money.
Yes, I have always found this frustrating as well. No doubt there is some dumb reason for this in whatever contracts they sign with the rights-holders, but I find it hard to imagine how this policy benefits anyone. It's like shopping for ham at pig-in-a-poke.com.
The problem is not a particular president or a particular Congress. It's the fact that space missions have, somehow, become politicized. So, every time the balance of power shifts, the new legislature/administration immediately cancels the space program decided upon by the previous administration/legislature, because they want to screw over the other party. Then the new guys propose their own plan for space exploration, which, just like the old one, will take 15 years to show results, which of course guarantees that it will be cancelled in its turn when the electorate gets tired of the clowns in charge and votes them out again.
If NASA is ever again going to be a serious participant in the exploration of space, then it's going to need to either run missions that only take a couple years start-to-finish, which severely limits what can be done, or get buy-in from both parties for a longer-term project, which will be almost impossible to achieve.
As for the iPhone: well, who's "we", kemo sabe?
As for the automobile, in some ways it really is just a better horse. We use the automobile for exactly the same reasons as we used the horse: to move people and things from place to place. Only you don't have to feed the car as much, house it as well, or treat it as carefully. If something breaks on it, you can generally just replace that part, instead of shooting it and burying it in a giant hole. The car's waste products are easier to deal with, at least for the individual user And, of course, cars can be much faster.
Rest assured, users of horses had complained about all these many relative inconveniences before the advent of the car. They just didn't know what the inconveniences were relative to, so to speak. So, despite Henry Ford's charming, irascible, I-didn't-hire-you-to-think, industrialist-plutocrat attitude, I would contend that the invention of the automobile could indeed be viewed as simply a response to user demand. And that all of the subsequent improvements to the car were also responses to user demands, from "I wish I could start this thing from inside" to "I wish I could listen to the Little Orphan Annie program while driving" to "I wish my butt didn't get so cold in the winter".
Speaking for myself, I don't remember ever saying anything close to "I wish that some mysterious buttons would appear whenever I moved the mouse pointer to the edge of the screen" or "You know what I hate about Windows? All the windows!" Of all the people I know, only about 2% of them actually claim to be happy about the latest wave of UI design, whereas about 80% complain about them. That, to me, means they need to be turned off, at least by default.
Say what you want about Richard Stallman, no one's ever accused him of being too willing to compromise on his principles in the name of pragmatism and expediency.
Oh, wait, they totally just accused him of that.
If you ask your users what they want, you'll deliver just that, not what they're going to want when the next release is delivered.
Hear, hear! Look, listening to users is a obviously a dead end. Users, selfish as they are, only care about usability. I mean, just imagine: If UI designers listened to users, there would have been no Windows 8! That means there'd be no tiles, active or otherwise. We'd all still be putzing around with old-fashioned desktops like a bunch of putzes. That, in turn, means that users might be able to feasbily use more than one program at a time! Shudder!
In Gnome, there would be no hot corners and no overview. There would still be minimize and maximize buttons on the windows, and they might even be on the right side of the title bar. For God's sake, the taskbar might still be on the bottom of the screen! Heavens preserve us!
So count your blessings. If not for the selfless charity of our modern rockstar UX gurus, gracing our poor selves with their genius innovations, we'd be living in a veritable Stone Age where the applications running on on operating system were actually considered more important than the OS itself.
If we're really hung up on the relatively minor governmental expense of having a coin whose face value is less than the value of its constituents, then we already have a tested solution for this "problem". Make the pennies out of steel, like we did in WWII. A quick web search indicates that zinc is currently a little more than 1500 dollars per metric ton, while steel is 170 dollars per metric tonne. That should solve the problem for a while.
Wait, Apple wants to know what expression their users have while they're using Apple products?
I could have saved them some time and money: It's smugness.
Interesting! I must have missed that part. I'll need to watch it again. But obviously training is overrated. If you can kill one of the major Dark Force guys using half-forgotten lessons it must not be very difficult to master. Maybe just a short course is all that is needed.
Luke used to bullseye womprats in Beggar's Canyon back home, and they're not much bigger than two meters, which apparently is amazing marksmanship, and that was possibly before he had even heard of the Force. And he was able to hold his own against Vader for a while at the end of Empire, despite the fact that his formal training on Dagobah lasted.. maybe a week, tops? And he had no formal training before the amazingly acrobatic fight with Jabba's gang in Jedi.
So it would appear that, yes, at least for certain people, proficiency in using the Force is more a matter of natural talent, and knowing what's possible with it, rather than a result of repetitive drilling. Which, frankly, is kind of what one might expect when you're dealing with a mystical and ineffable power that pervades the very fabric of reality.
They're both lazy plot contrivances.
Too much of the Force ruins Star Wars like too much salt ruins beef jerky.
Too much holodeck ruins Star Trek like too much hot sauce ruins a chocolate cake.