That argument sounds cute until you think about the concept of paradoxes. Then you see that they're all around us, and we solve paradoxes that cannot be solved rationally at least on an hourly basis. Being a rational human being, for the mathematical definition of rationality... is impossible, and therefore such a thing doesn't exist.
So, frankly, anyone claiming rationality is lying.
What you're saying sounds reasonable at first glance... and then you look at scientific accomplishment. And while being muslim certainly seems to massively impede scientific achievement (Luxenbourg has about the same scientific output than the entire billion of muslims), Buddhists, Christians and especially Jews are very well represented when it comes to actual historic scientific accomplishment.
That standard can only apply to sciences which allow for direct experimentation. You couldn't apply that to half of the "exact" sciences, let alone applied sciences or statistics based sciences (like medicine).
By that standard, climate change doesn't exist, you should analyse diseases only on the atomic level (and even then... experiments are seriously indirect here)...
Experiments cannot ever prove anything about the past (like prove or disprove evolution) without a time machine. For obvious reasons. Where this becomes really, really problematic is in sciences like history : the evidence that Jesus rose from the grave, from primary historic sources, is a lot more compelling and better confirmed (I mean the books and the text can be traced through the ages *very* well, and we are very sure that they were written by Greeks who were in Jerusalem when it "happened") than, say, the fact that we had something called "world war I".
I don't think you realize the magnitude of the problem here.
It's kinda cute how they say "what the IPCC predicted". That's not at all accurate, the IPCC made 3 predictions (they "neglected" to actually predict the temperature anomaly in 2007, which would have been their fourth prediction. This of course has nothing at all to do with the world stubbornly refusing to warm even as much as their lowest prediction).
The plural of waterfalls is correct. We'd need 2 niagara falls for every large nuclear power plant. That means several hundred to even provide 50% of the power we need.
The real nuclear power position of... everybody... is (3) 50 year old reactor designs beat the crap out the of the safety record of every other technology, including solar and wind ("how could that possibly be ?", well solar is installed on rooftops, I'm sure your mother told you why that's a problem, and wind is in 50-150 meter high towers and not well designed : wind generators have exposed wheels, meaning every x-th maintenance they double as a meatgrinder. And boy, do wind towers need a lot of maintenance).
And that's ignoring the fact that ~40% of cancer diagnoses would be impossible without nuclear reactors (without, to be exact, plutonium-producing nuclear reactors). If you count the lives saved due to the availability of advanced isotopes, made in the worst type of nuclear reactor design we have, then nuclear power saves more people per TWh than coal kills. In 50 years, the number of lives saved is probably more than all the deaths due to bombs as well, even though it's complely unfair to chalk bomb casualties up to the technology. I mean if you counted bomb casualties, in WWII, the Germans used coal, so that's bound to be a disastrous stat, and everyone else used oil in the 65 years since, with a bit of solar power military systems thrown in in the last decade)
The sad-part is that petty control-freak jealous dictators seem to be doing very well in those races. At least when it comes to OS'es, both on computers and phones.
I mean we used to have Bill Gates, now all but replaced by Steve Jobs (or Tim Cook or whatever his name is). It's even going in the wrong direction. If Microsoft was the devil for screwing it's customers in the ass, Apple is demonstrating that there are more usable holes in customers. From the $100 to have apple even look at an app, to the massive restrictions on distribution, to the anal and ridiculous app removals and restrictions, to the carrier lock-in because Apple clearly feels you need to get screwed by more than Apple alone.
What I don't understand is why people accept Apple's screwing around just for some shiny provider-locked phone.
Thanks, Google (even though Google's motives are also unlikely to be what I want them to be, they're doing the right thing as far as I'm concerned).
You only need to disturb one part of the pressure gradient. If you disturb the bottom flow, the top must compensate, which will in effect move the place where the top-bottom exchange takes place. If you can shift that point over water (which is pretty much the only place it will find flat enough in southern Europe), the desert should be gone, no ?
So if you disturbed southward air flow over the sahara at relatively low altitudes it would become much wetter ? Basically disturb the Hadley cell, which would probably cause air to come in from over the mediterranean ?
Wouldn't the southern European Alps (and all sorts of mountain things in Southern Spain, Italy & Greece) have this effect, preventing the drying effect from affecting... mostly anything ?
Why is the actual dry region shifted to the north ? The equator does not actually fall in the sahara, but above a part of Africa that's thick forest (and I mean THICK forest, as in, you can maybe walk 5-10km daily, cars are useless and there are few roads because a new road will get "eaten" by the forest in a matter of months without constant fixing).
Also there does not seem to be an equivalent desert either in Asia or in the Americas... why not ?
Exactly. What people here don't realize is carrier profit per customer... which is of course the maximum amount they could drop your bill without significantly cutting your service.
Avg. revenue per user $54.12 (/month) Number of users 70 million Verizon profit per month 2.37/12 * 1000 million = 197.5
Profit margin per customer per month : $2.82.
This is the same as with people complaining about gas price and "record profits" for the oil companies. Those boil down to about $0.3/gallon. That's a record high.
Some areas could become 'increasingly marginal as places to live in,' the report concludes.
Great. And how is this different from before ? My grandfather left north holland because it became too cold. Before that I'm told that a few dambreaks (presumably caused either by storms, rising sea level, or in the worst case incompetence) cause my family to leave a place between Amsterdam and Zeeland. That's just the last 200 years, maybe less (I only have generations to go on, not years. And there sure were a lot of dambreaks in the 19th century).
That's again just the last century (and not all climate related, some are though). But going further back there's plenty of stuff. 2000 years ago, the Sahara was lush green forest, filled with civilized black people (not arabs, who since exterminated them) who at one point dared attack Rome, and there was serious concern that campaign might succeed (and it did manage to cast aside 4 Roman legions, 3 in less time than it took the senate to notice their legions were gone, never mind decide what to do about it. They didn't do anything about it). The only reason there are Europeans in Europe is climate change in Eastern Asia. This is not news.
Where do we get the weird idea that climate was constant before today ? Where do we get the massive egocentric idea that it will start staying constant for us ? Gaia is a fickle godess that constantly slays things from houses, to cities, to entire states.
I am not saying that "there isn't something going on", but I do remember being taught how Darwinism categorizes species : adapt... or die.
The whole strategy that seems to be pushed implicitly here seems to me a strategy that falls squarely in the latter category. Trying to keep things constant is not just a losing strategy, it's the way to extinction.
That's of course why atheism works : it's a double standard.
It's mathematical equivalent is to demand cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma, yet fail to cooperate yourself. It is inherently destructive behavior which will end once the default switches. When, by default, people refuse to help each other, atheism will wither and die. And every "convert" to atheism brings that day closer.
The general moral principle making the distinction here is the "no personal stake" rule. From the bible, the established principle is that almost any crime (but specifically stealing and killing) is forgivable under the following condition : the perpetrator cannot have any stake, either financially, socially, politically, or whatever, in the crime, and there is no reasonable option to avoid the crime.
This is how e.g. police authority works in the western world : a police officer is paid to stand between perpetrators and a victims. If he decides to shoot a suspect (who is nothing but a suspect at this point), he can only do so if the intent is to protect others and nothing more than protect others. If self-interest is involved, even tangentially, it's murder. Note also that this crime is only forgiven : it is *NOT* morally OK to shoot anyone, no matter how horrible the crime he was committing, or how few options the killer had. It is merely forgiveable, in the sense that there are no consequences. Anyone is free to act as a police officer under the same set of rules (if that's what it takes to prevent him from pressing a bomb-belt button, you will be forgiven for breaking the neck of a terrorist in court, or even shooting the guy point-blank. You will however get judged on this action).
You see how this rule would apply here ? You get to hack around for others' gain, but not for your own, not even indirectly : being "paid" to hack others in your employer's intrest is wrong (which is why "white hat" hackers are OK : it's perfectly allright to hack your employer, or even your customers, if they so desire). These hackers are in clear violation of that principle.
(btw. the reason this is a good dividing line is that it's brilliant in it's simplicity. E.g. islam uses the principle for police authority that the state has the right to kill anyone for any reason, in war or peace, without needing an excuse or even an explanation. They do not even consider themselves to have the duty to inform next-of-kin or anyone. If a "muslim court" (which is a very nebulous concept, e.g. most terror organisations justify themselves partially like this, without any outside authority) decides to do something, they quite literally send a mob to kill you, and throw your body in the nearest ditch. This is how it worked 1500 years ago, and in a lot of places, this is how it works today)
True - but the same argument would apply to a toddler jumping up and down in his (or her) crib, if said crib was sufficiently disastrously placed.
So really, what's the point of beating this dead horse ? Maybe fracking was responsible for the final little crack. Maybe a horse walking in the street. Maybe a car collision. Maybe a toddler jumping in his crib.
You can be pretty fucking sure that eventually there would have been an earthquake.
Gravity is more random than "pure" randomness even. You cannot predict the effect of gravity once more than 2 bodies are involved - unless you're God (which is to be understood as a mathematical statement). Gravity is a chaotic phenomenon - which is a bit like a public-key encrypted file. Even with a file, the encryption method *and* the password used to encrypt it, it would still be near-impossible to decode it. Chaotic phenomena are the same, except without the "near".
(What you need to know about Chaotic phenomena in order to gain the ability to "decode" them is the future. You can understand perfectly well what happened, but only after it happens. Prediction is an impossible problem without this information. In most cases what you're trying to do is, of course, predicting the future, so you're up a creek without a paddle)
And in case you're wondering "but what about gravity in the small, on a planet"... well, we have no better theory than Newton's, which may not be random, but we also do know that is because it's wrong. Rather significantly wrong even... How do you factor that one in ?
Because slashdot seems to require Google release code they acquired on a licence other than the GPL licence (they had their employees write it, which gives them pretty fucking favorable terms)
The point usually made is that this applies to the android kernel source, which has indeed been promptly released directly to the kernel developers (and for download for anyone who cares). Much more promptly, by the way, than required by the licence.
It does *NOT* apply to the full android system, nor will it ever. Android itself (the various subprojects have separate licences, which I think you'll find, are all proprietary).
Just distributing a linux kernel running distribution does *not* make it GPL.
You can actually override new() in C++. Or you could simply do what the linker normally does : statically declare a big segment, call it a heap and pass it to the standard library initializer.
Every non-object oriented imperative systems programming language can easily be converted into any other. There are bigger issues in the conversion :
1) strings. Pascal uses length + value, C uses null-terminated strings 2) memory allocation is different. C is better though. It would be much harder translating C to pascal imho. 3) Calling conventions. Though both C and Pascal support mostly any calling convention, hooking one up to the other correctly is a minefield. Although I suppose that's not a problem if you always use either only C or only Pascal.
I've once seen a genius/total idiot create a series of #defines that allowed BASIC code to be entered in C. It actually mostly worked. I'm sure something similar can be done for pascal ("#define begin {" will actually work). It supported all sorts of strange things, from translating declarations (%i = 0 => int i = 0;). It wasn't even that much code, only about 50 lines.
C is very versatile, but boilerplate in C rivals that in Java. You can fix that using the preprocessor, but that's also a minefield.
The problem is what happens if "reasonable" security measures from a technical and commercial point of view conflict with the measures indicated by PCI-DSS.
This is pretty much exactly the problem most payment processors face. The obvious way out "a compromise" is a big no-no because compromise, law and lots of money don't mix.
This is the thing that really gets me about the whole industry: they know very well that the most effective single way to combat card fraud is two-factor authentication of the cardholder, hence Chip & Pin (or whatever you call it where you are) and 3-D Secure (for cardholder not present transactions over the Internet).
And this is a theoretical view you find a lot within academia. It doesn't work in practice (it's been tried). 3-D Secure has the problem that it's vulnerable to replay attacks. In the US there's just a softer target available, which is why this hardly ever gets attacked. In Euro the simplest attacks are replay attacks, and what you're saying isn't true.
The general problem with 2-factor auth is twofold. First, banks' customers are idiots. Large groups of idiots + even mild complexity in authentication = millions in support costs, mountains of complains and customers running away. Large groups of idiots versus good intentions... an explosive mix.
Second there is no such thing as a simple and secure machine-human challenge-response authentication scheme. In other words, the human part of the equation is vulnerable to replay attacks. PINs are easily copied, or given up under threat. Just ask Euro banks, who require PINs on pretty much all transactions.
In theory Euro banks have a fix for this. Euro bank cards have 2 PINs that will work. A normal PIN and a "panic" PIN : which will authorize transactions, but also call the police. Brilliant idea if you ask me. There's just one tiny issue : nobody knows about this (the banks do, of course, customers don't). Except for 2 ATM programmers I was working with (who had to implement the "call the police" behavior) I've never met anyone who knew. Just so you know : it's "usually" your pin + 1 (if your code is 1234, try 1235. Keep in mind that if you enter the panic code, your card *will* end up blocked, just not immediately).
The smartest production human-computer authentication scheme I've ever seen is this : the bank would issue you a paper, containing a long series of numbers. Like so :
098435-82482398-82394823489-982383
Then, come challenge time, they present you with a string like this :
***X**-**X*****-***X*******-*X****
And a four-digit input field. I'm sure you can figure out what to do. The problem is of course, that everybody keeps the paper with the full key. The number of unique 4 digit combinations they can present is huge, and with a creative permutation scheme, "nearby" authentication attempts do not share any information.
Actually, while PCI-DSS may not be law, it's so deeply ingrained in the industry that it might as well be. I mean as far as international law exists, PCI-DSS holds the distinction of actually being adhered to outside of the US. Hell, even Iran's government follows this system.
if you screw up and leak the data, no amount of protesting that you were PCI compliant is going to get you off the hook.
The law, unless I'm very mistaken, simply requires that you implement "reasonable" security measures and register with the authorities. I believe there's also a requirement that you tell the police as soon as you find out that something's happened. Other than that, there's no legal requirement. However, the state is never going to reimburse damages to you, so really, this hardly matters at all.
Where PCI-DSS gets you of the hook is with insurance companies. If you accept payments, and you screw up while adhering to PCI-DSS, they will cover most of your losses. One of the ways to screw up within PCI-DSS is to have 2 saboteurs cooperating inside your organisation, which has happened.
Here's the big difference : if you screw up and lose other people's credit card numbers, there's 2 options : 1) you did not implement PCI-DSS : you will get sued and you're responsible for all damage done with the stolen credit cards. This can, obviously be a lot 2) you did implement PCI-DSS : you will not get money for fraudulent transactions. VISA or the issuing bank assumes responsibility for further fraudulent transactions made on other sites.
In both cases you're "fucked" in that you lose money (which is a good thing imho, after all, you screwed up), but if you implement PCI-DSS you're significantly less screwed.
Also, in many places (the US being one of the major exceptions) the banks will simply refuse to accept transactions from any non-PCI-compliant source. Anyone who's attempted to implement payments on a website will (should) know this.
What bothers most people about this system is that there is no way to get a definitive answer on a transaction, either for a card holder or a business, given that you don't know it's fraudulent or not. The banks, paypal, credit card processors, even ATM centrals may give you the "OK" on a transaction, and register it, and *still* refuse to pay you the money afterwards, claiming fraudulent use of the card. There's no way to protect yourself 100% against this. It is a very American system : it protects the innocent, but not 100%. You can be fucked even in the case where you did not (knowingly) did anything wrong, and where it was not a case of negligence either. On average it works really well, but in the almost-never-happens cases there is no clear procedure to follow and there's lots of uncertainties.
Slashdot Mirror
That argument sounds cute until you think about the concept of paradoxes. Then you see that they're all around us, and we solve paradoxes that cannot be solved rationally at least on an hourly basis. Being a rational human being, for the mathematical definition of rationality ... is impossible, and therefore such a thing doesn't exist.
So, frankly, anyone claiming rationality is lying.
What you're saying sounds reasonable at first glance ... and then you look at scientific accomplishment. And while being muslim certainly seems to massively impede scientific achievement (Luxenbourg has about the same scientific output than the entire billion of muslims), Buddhists, Christians and especially Jews are very well represented when it comes to actual historic scientific accomplishment.
That standard can only apply to sciences which allow for direct experimentation. You couldn't apply that to half of the "exact" sciences, let alone applied sciences or statistics based sciences (like medicine).
By that standard, climate change doesn't exist, you should analyse diseases only on the atomic level (and even then ... experiments are seriously indirect here) ...
Experiments cannot ever prove anything about the past (like prove or disprove evolution) without a time machine. For obvious reasons. Where this becomes really, really problematic is in sciences like history : the evidence that Jesus rose from the grave, from primary historic sources, is a lot more compelling and better confirmed (I mean the books and the text can be traced through the ages *very* well, and we are very sure that they were written by Greeks who were in Jerusalem when it "happened") than, say, the fact that we had something called "world war I".
I don't think you realize the magnitude of the problem here.
It's kinda cute how they say "what the IPCC predicted". That's not at all accurate, the IPCC made 3 predictions (they "neglected" to actually predict the temperature anomaly in 2007, which would have been their fourth prediction. This of course has nothing at all to do with the world stubbornly refusing to warm even as much as their lowest prediction).
The plural of waterfalls is correct. We'd need 2 niagara falls for every large nuclear power plant. That means several hundred to even provide 50% of the power we need.
You should be a politician.
The real nuclear power position of ... everybody ... is (3) 50 year old reactor designs beat the crap out the of the safety record of every other technology, including solar and wind ("how could that possibly be ?", well solar is installed on rooftops, I'm sure your mother told you why that's a problem, and wind is in 50-150 meter high towers and not well designed : wind generators have exposed wheels, meaning every x-th maintenance they double as a meatgrinder. And boy, do wind towers need a lot of maintenance).
And that's ignoring the fact that ~40% of cancer diagnoses would be impossible without nuclear reactors (without, to be exact, plutonium-producing nuclear reactors). If you count the lives saved due to the availability of advanced isotopes, made in the worst type of nuclear reactor design we have, then nuclear power saves more people per TWh than coal kills. In 50 years, the number of lives saved is probably more than all the deaths due to bombs as well, even though it's complely unfair to chalk bomb casualties up to the technology. I mean if you counted bomb casualties, in WWII, the Germans used coal, so that's bound to be a disastrous stat, and everyone else used oil in the 65 years since, with a bit of solar power military systems thrown in in the last decade)
The sad-part is that petty control-freak jealous dictators seem to be doing very well in those races. At least when it comes to OS'es, both on computers and phones.
I mean we used to have Bill Gates, now all but replaced by Steve Jobs (or Tim Cook or whatever his name is). It's even going in the wrong direction. If Microsoft was the devil for screwing it's customers in the ass, Apple is demonstrating that there are more usable holes in customers. From the $100 to have apple even look at an app, to the massive restrictions on distribution, to the anal and ridiculous app removals and restrictions, to the carrier lock-in because Apple clearly feels you need to get screwed by more than Apple alone.
What I don't understand is why people accept Apple's screwing around just for some shiny provider-locked phone.
Thanks, Google (even though Google's motives are also unlikely to be what I want them to be, they're doing the right thing as far as I'm concerned).
You only need to disturb one part of the pressure gradient. If you disturb the bottom flow, the top must compensate, which will in effect move the place where the top-bottom exchange takes place. If you can shift that point over water (which is pretty much the only place it will find flat enough in southern Europe), the desert should be gone, no ?
So if you disturbed southward air flow over the sahara at relatively low altitudes it would become much wetter ? Basically disturb the Hadley cell, which would probably cause air to come in from over the mediterranean ?
Wouldn't the southern European Alps (and all sorts of mountain things in Southern Spain, Italy & Greece) have this effect, preventing the drying effect from affecting ... mostly anything ?
Why is the actual dry region shifted to the north ? The equator does not actually fall in the sahara, but above a part of Africa that's thick forest (and I mean THICK forest, as in, you can maybe walk 5-10km daily, cars are useless and there are few roads because a new road will get "eaten" by the forest in a matter of months without constant fixing).
Also there does not seem to be an equivalent desert either in Asia or in the Americas ... why not ?
Exactly. What people here don't realize is carrier profit per customer ... which is of course the maximum amount they could drop your bill without significantly cutting your service.
(numbers from http://www.totaltele.com/view.aspx?ID=466491 )
Avg. revenue per user $54.12 (/month)
Number of users 70 million
Verizon profit per month 2.37/12 * 1000 million = 197.5
Profit margin per customer per month : $2.82.
This is the same as with people complaining about gas price and "record profits" for the oil companies. Those boil down to about $0.3/gallon. That's a record high.
Nobody makes the obvious point.
Some areas could become 'increasingly marginal as places to live in,' the report concludes.
Great. And how is this different from before ? My grandfather left north holland because it became too cold. Before that I'm told that a few dambreaks (presumably caused either by storms, rising sea level, or in the worst case incompetence) cause my family to leave a place between Amsterdam and Zeeland. That's just the last 200 years, maybe less (I only have generations to go on, not years. And there sure were a lot of dambreaks in the 19th century).
This is not an exception. Just read this : http://weburbanist.com/2008/07/06/20-abandoned-cities-and-towns/.
That's again just the last century (and not all climate related, some are though). But going further back there's plenty of stuff. 2000 years ago, the Sahara was lush green forest, filled with civilized black people (not arabs, who since exterminated them) who at one point dared attack Rome, and there was serious concern that campaign might succeed (and it did manage to cast aside 4 Roman legions, 3 in less time than it took the senate to notice their legions were gone, never mind decide what to do about it. They didn't do anything about it). The only reason there are Europeans in Europe is climate change in Eastern Asia. This is not news.
Where do we get the weird idea that climate was constant before today ? Where do we get the massive egocentric idea that it will start staying constant for us ? Gaia is a fickle godess that constantly slays things from houses, to cities, to entire states.
I am not saying that "there isn't something going on", but I do remember being taught how Darwinism categorizes species : adapt ... or die.
The whole strategy that seems to be pushed implicitly here seems to me a strategy that falls squarely in the latter category. Trying to keep things constant is not just a losing strategy, it's the way to extinction.
For all intents and purposes - this is based on chance. So as ridiculous as it sounds, it may very well happen.
All of what you claim to require is available for dollars (or yen, as it was in Japan apparently - didn't know that).
You know which organisation would by far have the easiest time doing this ? Siemens itself. Anyone on this list, for example :
Siemen's management
If they think it their duty to be responsible, stuxnet may be part of that, no ? Then again, it's a corporation ... I don't know.
That's of course why atheism works : it's a double standard.
It's mathematical equivalent is to demand cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma, yet fail to cooperate yourself. It is inherently destructive behavior which will end once the default switches. When, by default, people refuse to help each other, atheism will wither and die. And every "convert" to atheism brings that day closer.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
And indeed economics confirms that being the sole "smart" person in a group of stupid people is not nearly as smart as you'd think :
A Darwinian enigma (generally, following the group is the wisest course of action, almost regardless of how stupid it is)
The general moral principle making the distinction here is the "no personal stake" rule. From the bible, the established principle is that almost any crime (but specifically stealing and killing) is forgivable under the following condition : the perpetrator cannot have any stake, either financially, socially, politically, or whatever, in the crime, and there is no reasonable option to avoid the crime.
This is how e.g. police authority works in the western world : a police officer is paid to stand between perpetrators and a victims. If he decides to shoot a suspect (who is nothing but a suspect at this point), he can only do so if the intent is to protect others and nothing more than protect others. If self-interest is involved, even tangentially, it's murder. Note also that this crime is only forgiven : it is *NOT* morally OK to shoot anyone, no matter how horrible the crime he was committing, or how few options the killer had. It is merely forgiveable, in the sense that there are no consequences. Anyone is free to act as a police officer under the same set of rules (if that's what it takes to prevent him from pressing a bomb-belt button, you will be forgiven for breaking the neck of a terrorist in court, or even shooting the guy point-blank. You will however get judged on this action).
You see how this rule would apply here ? You get to hack around for others' gain, but not for your own, not even indirectly : being "paid" to hack others in your employer's intrest is wrong (which is why "white hat" hackers are OK : it's perfectly allright to hack your employer, or even your customers, if they so desire). These hackers are in clear violation of that principle.
(btw. the reason this is a good dividing line is that it's brilliant in it's simplicity. E.g. islam uses the principle for police authority that the state has the right to kill anyone for any reason, in war or peace, without needing an excuse or even an explanation. They do not even consider themselves to have the duty to inform next-of-kin or anyone. If a "muslim court" (which is a very nebulous concept, e.g. most terror organisations justify themselves partially like this, without any outside authority) decides to do something, they quite literally send a mob to kill you, and throw your body in the nearest ditch. This is how it worked 1500 years ago, and in a lot of places, this is how it works today)
True - but the same argument would apply to a toddler jumping up and down in his (or her) crib, if said crib was sufficiently disastrously placed.
So really, what's the point of beating this dead horse ? Maybe fracking was responsible for the final little crack. Maybe a horse walking in the street. Maybe a car collision. Maybe a toddler jumping in his crib.
You can be pretty fucking sure that eventually there would have been an earthquake.
Gravity is more random than "pure" randomness even. You cannot predict the effect of gravity once more than 2 bodies are involved - unless you're God (which is to be understood as a mathematical statement). Gravity is a chaotic phenomenon - which is a bit like a public-key encrypted file. Even with a file, the encryption method *and* the password used to encrypt it, it would still be near-impossible to decode it. Chaotic phenomena are the same, except without the "near".
(What you need to know about Chaotic phenomena in order to gain the ability to "decode" them is the future. You can understand perfectly well what happened, but only after it happens. Prediction is an impossible problem without this information. In most cases what you're trying to do is, of course, predicting the future, so you're up a creek without a paddle)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-body_problem
And in case you're wondering "but what about gravity in the small, on a planet" ... well, we have no better theory than Newton's, which may not be random, but we also do know that is because it's wrong. Rather significantly wrong even ... How do you factor that one in ?
Because slashdot seems to require Google release code they acquired on a licence other than the GPL licence (they had their employees write it, which gives them pretty fucking favorable terms)
The point usually made is that this applies to the android kernel source, which has indeed been promptly released directly to the kernel developers (and for download for anyone who cares). Much more promptly, by the way, than required by the licence.
It does *NOT* apply to the full android system, nor will it ever. Android itself (the various subprojects have separate licences, which I think you'll find, are all proprietary).
Just distributing a linux kernel running distribution does *not* make it GPL.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/linus-torvalds-on-android-the-linux-fork/9426
You can actually override new() in C++. Or you could simply do what the linker normally does : statically declare a big segment, call it a heap and pass it to the standard library initializer.
Every non-object oriented imperative systems programming language can easily be converted into any other. There are bigger issues in the conversion :
1) strings. Pascal uses length + value, C uses null-terminated strings
2) memory allocation is different. C is better though. It would be much harder translating C to pascal imho.
3) Calling conventions. Though both C and Pascal support mostly any calling convention, hooking one up to the other correctly is a minefield. Although I suppose that's not a problem if you always use either only C or only Pascal.
I've once seen a genius/total idiot create a series of #defines that allowed BASIC code to be entered in C. It actually mostly worked. I'm sure something similar can be done for pascal ("#define begin {" will actually work). It supported all sorts of strange things, from translating declarations (%i = 0 => int i = 0;). It wasn't even that much code, only about 50 lines.
C is very versatile, but boilerplate in C rivals that in Java. You can fix that using the preprocessor, but that's also a minefield.
I'm confused :
The problem is what happens if "reasonable" security measures from a technical and commercial point of view conflict with the measures indicated by PCI-DSS.
This is pretty much exactly the problem most payment processors face. The obvious way out "a compromise" is a big no-no because compromise, law and lots of money don't mix.
This is the thing that really gets me about the whole industry: they know very well that the most effective single way to combat card fraud is two-factor authentication of the cardholder, hence Chip & Pin (or whatever you call it where you are) and 3-D Secure (for cardholder not present transactions over the Internet).
And this is a theoretical view you find a lot within academia. It doesn't work in practice (it's been tried). 3-D Secure has the problem that it's vulnerable to replay attacks. In the US there's just a softer target available, which is why this hardly ever gets attacked. In Euro the simplest attacks are replay attacks, and what you're saying isn't true.
The general problem with 2-factor auth is twofold. First, banks' customers are idiots. Large groups of idiots + even mild complexity in authentication = millions in support costs, mountains of complains and customers running away. Large groups of idiots versus good intentions ... an explosive mix.
Second there is no such thing as a simple and secure machine-human challenge-response authentication scheme. In other words, the human part of the equation is vulnerable to replay attacks. PINs are easily copied, or given up under threat. Just ask Euro banks, who require PINs on pretty much all transactions.
In theory Euro banks have a fix for this. Euro bank cards have 2 PINs that will work. A normal PIN and a "panic" PIN : which will authorize transactions, but also call the police. Brilliant idea if you ask me. There's just one tiny issue : nobody knows about this (the banks do, of course, customers don't). Except for 2 ATM programmers I was working with (who had to implement the "call the police" behavior) I've never met anyone who knew. Just so you know : it's "usually" your pin + 1 (if your code is 1234, try 1235. Keep in mind that if you enter the panic code, your card *will* end up blocked, just not immediately).
The smartest production human-computer authentication scheme I've ever seen is this : the bank would issue you a paper, containing a long series of numbers. Like so :
098435-82482398-82394823489-982383
Then, come challenge time, they present you with a string like this :
***X**-**X*****-***X*******-*X****
And a four-digit input field. I'm sure you can figure out what to do. The problem is of course, that everybody keeps the paper with the full key. The number of unique 4 digit combinations they can present is huge, and with a creative permutation scheme, "nearby" authentication attempts do not share any information.
Actually, while PCI-DSS may not be law, it's so deeply ingrained in the industry that it might as well be. I mean as far as international law exists, PCI-DSS holds the distinction of actually being adhered to outside of the US. Hell, even Iran's government follows this system.
if you screw up and leak the data, no amount of protesting that you were PCI compliant is going to get you off the hook.
The law, unless I'm very mistaken, simply requires that you implement "reasonable" security measures and register with the authorities. I believe there's also a requirement that you tell the police as soon as you find out that something's happened. Other than that, there's no legal requirement. However, the state is never going to reimburse damages to you, so really, this hardly matters at all.
Where PCI-DSS gets you of the hook is with insurance companies. If you accept payments, and you screw up while adhering to PCI-DSS, they will cover most of your losses. One of the ways to screw up within PCI-DSS is to have 2 saboteurs cooperating inside your organisation, which has happened.
Here's the big difference : if you screw up and lose other people's credit card numbers, there's 2 options :
1) you did not implement PCI-DSS : you will get sued and you're responsible for all damage done with the stolen credit cards. This can, obviously be a lot
2) you did implement PCI-DSS : you will not get money for fraudulent transactions. VISA or the issuing bank assumes responsibility for further fraudulent transactions made on other sites.
In both cases you're "fucked" in that you lose money (which is a good thing imho, after all, you screwed up), but if you implement PCI-DSS you're significantly less screwed.
Also, in many places (the US being one of the major exceptions) the banks will simply refuse to accept transactions from any non-PCI-compliant source. Anyone who's attempted to implement payments on a website will (should) know this.
What bothers most people about this system is that there is no way to get a definitive answer on a transaction, either for a card holder or a business, given that you don't know it's fraudulent or not. The banks, paypal, credit card processors, even ATM centrals may give you the "OK" on a transaction, and register it, and *still* refuse to pay you the money afterwards, claiming fraudulent use of the card. There's no way to protect yourself 100% against this. It is a very American system : it protects the innocent, but not 100%. You can be fucked even in the case where you did not (knowingly) did anything wrong, and where it was not a case of negligence either. On average it works really well, but in the almost-never-happens cases there is no clear procedure to follow and there's lots of uncertainties.