Perhaps Gates simply has a giant inferiority complex, and wants to prove to his former Harvard friends that he is not the dumbest of them, with limited creativity and overblown ambitions.
Gates for all his life tried to "look smart" -- glasses, bad haircut, speaking about trivial things using big words. As if he wanted to be Steve Jobs but couldn't.
It's not done by clicking (though there is nothing that prevents writing a little GUI frontend), but combination of ps, lsof and a package manager (rpm -qvf , dpkg-query -S) gives a pretty good idea, what the executable is, and what it is doing, or who is accessing a particular file.
And if someone wants to find out, what a program is doing right now, there is always strace (there are countless cases when I had to merely run strace -fp <pid> 2>&1 |grep open to find out, what is missing or broken).
The progress in industrial automation in US is now nearly nonexistent -- CNC machinery is the same as what was being produced in 80's, with faster computers, and better CADs. Go to any used machinery dealer, and you will see the same equipment produced in each year in the last two decades.
It's not really a question if Linus is smart or even right about this. It's Linus who decided to place Linux under GPL, in good faith, believing that GPL expresses his intentions, and he stated his intentions pretty clearly in various form over the years, meaning exactly the same thing.
Therefore if there is any question about the interpretation of any of the GPL terms, it should be resolved based on the original intention of Linus, and the recipient of the license (that we can assume, heard Linus' expression of his intentions, and shared his understanding of the license). Some bullshit about unclear terms would have a chance to stand up in court, but considering that Linus often expressed his intentions, and they are widely known, I would say, fat chance, even in US legal system.
It's quite possible that the number of deaths and injuries what would happen because non-functioning GPS would delay vehicles and ships (worldwide, but even counting US only would be enough) would far outweigh the consequences of a terrorist attack that could be prevented by turning off GPS.
Not to mention that likely only a tiny percentage of planned attacks involve GPS-guided missiles, and now, when this is widely announced, it's safe to assume that terrorists would never rely on GPS. I would understand if government kept quiet about such a plans, and suddenly turned off GPS when someone tried to perform an attack with something GPS-guided, and the attack was significant enough to outweigh the dangers of turning off GPS. That would be the only case when it would work, and now it's never going to happen because it's widely announced that US government will do exactly that, and therefore no terrorist would rely on GPS.
Selection does not happen in human in the generation that shows life-threatening hereditary diseases first -- it happens IN THE NEXT ONE. Those people simply don't breed much -- either because they consciously avoid it (thanks to medicine, there are both easy diagnosis and birth control), or simply because their disabilities make them undesirable for potential mates, and they are most likely to be rejected by those (thanks to the modern society's achievements such as transportation, communications, and refined shallowness of the popular culture, making such rejection easier to accomplish).
Where do you draw the line between human and animal?
In the current definition "human" means species homo sapiens. The only significant distinctive feature of humans, is sentience, that is a result of a particular advanced structure of human brain, that, among other distinctive features, provides capability for development of abstract thought, structured language and production of tools. First never develops in animals or machines (machines can perform operations that are part of abstract thinking process, however only humans are currently capable of developing abstract structures from external stimuli without pre-existing knowledge of their structure, so development is still specific to humans), second and third are not developed by anyone but humans except in the simpliest forms possible. In theory, there may be, or will be other sentient beings that should be considered human, even if they do not share the same origin, and some creatures that have the same or close origin, yet lack sentience, and therefore can never be considered human.
How will this affect evolution?
Not at all. Evolution happens only through hereditary changes in organisms.
Can we go home now? I mean, didn't humans develop a better definition for themselves than "Two-legged, without feathers"?
Thanks for the correction. I am aware that this refers to a geographical locality, rather than a general word used to describe a labour camp (even though it used that way).
GULAG is not a geographical locality, and anyone who think that, is ignorant enough to have no right to discuss those things. Shut up until you learn something.
You missed one of the points there: starvation. The decisions of Stalin caused widescale stavation in the country. There are no figures for how many people starved at this time, but the number could well be signifigant (millions).
Starvation only happened in one region, so it could not possibly be an intentional result of consistent policy. Similar things happened in other countries many times over the history, and no one considers them equal to mass murder.
I am well aware of German history during and around WW2.
Either, you are not, or you are really bad at math.
Much of Hitler's destructive energy was devoted to external enemies
Much of Hitler's destructive energy was devoted to attacking countries that weren't Germany's enemies in the first place (like, say, USSR), however Hitler definitely did not distinguish between people of "lesser race" who lived within and outside Germany. It's just modern Americans consider racism to be a lesser evil than the image of the Communist enemy that their propaganda painted over half a century.
Stalin devoted a lot energy to internal 'enemies'. (Note that I said most, I am aware that there were plenty of Germans in concentration camps). I guess I am re-hashing your point though, these were people he was supposed to protect.
In other words, you are fully aware that Hitler outdid Stalin in every kind of butchery and genocide, yet you choose to ignore it because it does not support things that your propaganda was telling you, with no base in fact, for a few decades. Way to go.
First of all, a person who writes "GULAG" in plural has no business discussing Russian history. This is as bad as "rumors on the internets".
"Kulaks" were sent to exile and prison camps, and that definitely was one of the worst things Stalin did, however their numbers at any time were around a million-something people, of whom less than half a million died before WWII -- and that includes natural mortality among the exiled. Still horrible, but hardly Hitler's scale, where count was in tens of millions.
I understand that some "historians" are eager to pin all WWII deaths on Stalin, however this is just stupid. It was Nazi war, Hitler was the aggressor, and it was German military that attacked USSR, after conquering Europe, so every soldier who died in a battle, and every civilian killed on the occupied territory by Nazi was his responsibility. Without Nazi, those people would live, and this is what matters.
It's also worth to be mentioned that Hitler's victims weren't all Jewish, so numbers that are mentioned as Holocaust statistics are not the total count, as some people want to present them. The number of USSR citizens alone, killed in WWII is somewhere around 27 millions, this is far beyond the scale of "jewish-only" version of Holocaust.
Stalin can be accused of being incompetent in handling of defense, but it does not make him a butcher -- other things do. Hatred toward Stalin is not based on the number of his victims, it's based on the fact that those were the very people that he was supposed to protect (or be allied with, in case of Poland), on the lies that his government used to support that, and on his hypocrisy, and atmosphere of fear that he used to achieve his goals. Hitler is less impressive -- merely a very honest, consistent racist pig, grown to a scale that can't be understood without seeing it, but despite being such a trivial person from the modern point of view, he is many, many times more of a butcher than Stalin ever was.
Yes, he is (he isn't dead yet). And he definitely wasn't any smarter in 80's than he is now. Also he had shitty education, no understanding of economy (less than all his predecessors, Khruschev and Brezhnev included, Chernenko excluded), used his own retarded-sounding pronunication of various words, and was eager to leap ahead when it suited his understanding of ideology without doing any analysis... Hey, wait! Bush can be described in exactly the same terms! US has a bright future, indeed.
This is the second most illogical statement that American believe in (first place still belongs to the invisible omnipotent man in the sky, who invented moral and ethics, like Al Gore invented the Internet).
Even the linked articles show enough evidence to conclude that until the moment of USSR dissolution, the last things its government had to worry about is the amount of money (that they printed -- no FR and a pyramid of crooks), manpower (that was, according to the same "economists" under-used), or natural resources (that USSR exported). USSR government was scared shitless by the first economic recession in the post-WWII history, and being incompetent, it decided to do a complete overhaul of the economy, along with some political changes that made sense at the moment.
Since US is now in a deeper recession than one USSR had in 80's, I guess, we will see, how US government, lead by Bush who is even dumber than Gorbachev, will handle the same situation.
Re:An error in one of his essays
on
Joel On Software
·
· Score: 1
I was looking at the previous example, where there was done more than printing, so the address was physically accessed, and therefore would produce a segfault..
It's impossible to prove what did, or didn't happen, however the Occam's razor only applies to the phenomena, that can be reliably observed, and then explained. If the observation process itself is questionable, it goes deeper than that.
Voting could be "observed" by reliable or unreliable method, yet the government applied a lot of effort to make sure that an unreliable method is chosen, so there can be no record. Now, what is a simplier explanation --
1. that the government and Diebold managed to choose the worst options of all available, despite having all the data and manpower to use any of the more reliable ones, and despite all research, recommendations and protests about this very issue
or
2. that the most unreliable method was chosen, against all recommendations and research, with the goal to exploit this unreliability and perform fraud.
The results themselves, are not in any way relevant -- they are likely to be tampered with. Discrepancies merely show that the problem likely was exploited (and discrepancies in any direction would mean that -- unusual number of Democrat votes in a shithole filled with uneducated rednecks that usually voted >90% for Republicans would be just as much a discrepancy as unusual support of Bush in an urban area with large percentage of ethnic minorities).
Re:An error in one of his essays
on
Joel On Software
·
· Score: 2, Informative
*p in this case _is_ the dereferencing of the NULL pointer, and it certainly will produce a segmentation fault. The use of reference merely obfuscates the nature of dereferencing in this example, and a debugger or runtime has to find out, what exactly should be said about the reference when the segfault/exception/... happens inside the function because dereferencing happened not at the earlier moment (outside the function) when it looked like it was supposed to be done. Even if some particular behavior was defined for this situation, optimization would likely break it.
So the most Joel could accomplish by using a reference is that the dereference of NULL would kinda supposed to happen outside of his precious function, and in the code of the poor guy who dared to call it. "Kinda supposed" because it isn't even guaranteed to work that way in the first place.
1. No one uses solid fuel for anything important now.
2. The whole point of ICBMs is to be launched from the place where the enemy can't destroy a significant quantity of that. This is why there are a lot of them, and distributed sparsely over a large territory. Once a large enough number is in place, it's easy to guarantee that ones that will hit the target, will produce enough damage, even if some would be destroyed.
3. North Korea does not have any ICBMs -- fixed or mobile. However if a country that small wanted to develop a nuclear strategy, they would have to rely on a navy, to distribute a large number of launch sites over a large area.
The amount of effort necessary to significantly decrease their effect is likely to be just as devastating to the country's economy as an actual nuclear war that such effort is trying to prevent.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps Gates simply has a giant inferiority complex, and wants to prove to his former Harvard friends that he is not the dumbest of them, with limited creativity and overblown ambitions.
Gates for all his life tried to "look smart" -- glasses, bad haircut, speaking about trivial things using big words. As if he wanted to be Steve Jobs but couldn't.
It's not done by clicking (though there is nothing that prevents writing a little GUI frontend), but combination of ps, lsof and a package manager (rpm -qvf , dpkg-query -S) gives a pretty good idea, what the executable is, and what it is doing, or who is accessing a particular file.
And if someone wants to find out, what a program is doing right now, there is always strace (there are countless cases when I had to merely run
strace -fp <pid> 2>&1 |grep open
to find out, what is missing or broken).
The progress in industrial automation in US is now nearly nonexistent -- CNC machinery is the same as what was being produced in 80's, with faster computers, and better CADs. Go to any used machinery dealer, and you will see the same equipment produced in each year in the last two decades.
It's not really a question if Linus is smart or even right about this. It's Linus who decided to place Linux under GPL, in good faith, believing that GPL expresses his intentions, and he stated his intentions pretty clearly in various form over the years, meaning exactly the same thing.
Therefore if there is any question about the interpretation of any of the GPL terms, it should be resolved based on the original intention of Linus, and the recipient of the license (that we can assume, heard Linus' expression of his intentions, and shared his understanding of the license). Some bullshit about unclear terms would have a chance to stand up in court, but considering that Linus often expressed his intentions, and they are widely known, I would say, fat chance, even in US legal system.
It's quite possible that the number of deaths and injuries what would happen because non-functioning GPS would delay vehicles and ships (worldwide, but even counting US only would be enough) would far outweigh the consequences of a terrorist attack that could be prevented by turning off GPS.
Not to mention that likely only a tiny percentage of planned attacks involve GPS-guided missiles, and now, when this is widely announced, it's safe to assume that terrorists would never rely on GPS. I would understand if government kept quiet about such a plans, and suddenly turned off GPS when someone tried to perform an attack with something GPS-guided, and the attack was significant enough to outweigh the dangers of turning off GPS. That would be the only case when it would work, and now it's never going to happen because it's widely announced that US government will do exactly that, and therefore no terrorist would rely on GPS.
Exorcist may have a different answer, but the geek would say:
"When the parent process (Microsoft) calls wait*() on him, or dies".
What would be quite close to the truth.
Selection does not happen in human in the generation that shows life-threatening hereditary diseases first -- it happens IN THE NEXT ONE. Those people simply don't breed much -- either because they consciously avoid it (thanks to medicine, there are both easy diagnosis and birth control), or simply because their disabilities make them undesirable for potential mates, and they are most likely to be rejected by those (thanks to the modern society's achievements such as transportation, communications, and refined shallowness of the popular culture, making such rejection easier to accomplish).
At what level is a chimera 'too' human?
When it is sentient.
Where do you draw the line between human and animal?
In the current definition "human" means species homo sapiens. The only significant distinctive feature of humans, is sentience, that is a result of a particular advanced structure of human brain, that, among other distinctive features, provides capability for development of abstract thought, structured language and production of tools. First never develops in animals or machines (machines can perform operations that are part of abstract thinking process, however only humans are currently capable of developing abstract structures from external stimuli without pre-existing knowledge of their structure, so development is still specific to humans), second and third are not developed by anyone but humans except in the simpliest forms possible. In theory, there may be, or will be other sentient beings that should be considered human, even if they do not share the same origin, and some creatures that have the same or close origin, yet lack sentience, and therefore can never be considered human.
How will this affect evolution?
Not at all. Evolution happens only through hereditary changes in organisms.
Can we go home now? I mean, didn't humans develop a better definition for themselves than "Two-legged, without feathers"?
Good Times email-borne virus was a joke, too.
Then Microsoft "blessed" the world with Outlook Express.
Like this?
Thanks for the correction. I am aware that this refers to a geographical locality, rather than a general word used to describe a labour camp (even though it used that way).
GULAG is not a geographical locality, and anyone who think that, is ignorant enough to have no right to discuss those things. Shut up until you learn something.
You missed one of the points there: starvation. The decisions of Stalin caused widescale stavation in the country. There are no figures for how many people starved at this time, but the number could well be signifigant (millions).
Starvation only happened in one region, so it could not possibly be an intentional result of consistent policy. Similar things happened in other countries many times over the history, and no one considers them equal to mass murder.
I am well aware of German history during and around WW2.
Either, you are not, or you are really bad at math.
Much of Hitler's destructive energy was devoted to external enemies
Much of Hitler's destructive energy was devoted to attacking countries that weren't Germany's enemies in the first place (like, say, USSR), however Hitler definitely did not distinguish between people of "lesser race" who lived within and outside Germany. It's just modern Americans consider racism to be a lesser evil than the image of the Communist enemy that their propaganda painted over half a century.
Stalin devoted a lot energy to internal 'enemies'. (Note that I said most, I am aware that there were plenty of Germans in concentration camps). I guess I am re-hashing your point though, these were people he was supposed to protect.
In other words, you are fully aware that Hitler outdid Stalin in every kind of butchery and genocide, yet you choose to ignore it because it does not support things that your propaganda was telling you, with no base in fact, for a few decades. Way to go.
Former USSR members' resources, accumulated over the USSR times are STILL being looted by "new" oligarchy, with no "collapse" in sight.
US, on the other hand, lost most of its industrial potential, and is using Enron-style creative accounting to keep its currency from collapsing.
We will see, what will be left of it in 20 years.
First of all, a person who writes "GULAG" in plural has no business discussing Russian history. This is as bad as "rumors on the internets".
"Kulaks" were sent to exile and prison camps, and that definitely was one of the worst things Stalin did, however their numbers at any time were around a million-something people, of whom less than half a million died before WWII -- and that includes natural mortality among the exiled. Still horrible, but hardly Hitler's scale, where count was in tens of millions.
I understand that some "historians" are eager to pin all WWII deaths on Stalin, however this is just stupid. It was Nazi war, Hitler was the aggressor, and it was German military that attacked USSR, after conquering Europe, so every soldier who died in a battle, and every civilian killed on the occupied territory by Nazi was his responsibility. Without Nazi, those people would live, and this is what matters.
It's also worth to be mentioned that Hitler's victims weren't all Jewish, so numbers that are mentioned as Holocaust statistics are not the total count, as some people want to present them. The number of USSR citizens alone, killed in WWII is somewhere around 27 millions, this is far beyond the scale of "jewish-only" version of Holocaust.
Stalin can be accused of being incompetent in handling of defense, but it does not make him a butcher -- other things do. Hatred toward Stalin is not based on the number of his victims, it's based on the fact that those were the very people that he was supposed to protect (or be allied with, in case of Poland), on the lies that his government used to support that, and on his hypocrisy, and atmosphere of fear that he used to achieve his goals. Hitler is less impressive -- merely a very honest, consistent racist pig, grown to a scale that can't be understood without seeing it, but despite being such a trivial person from the modern point of view, he is many, many times more of a butcher than Stalin ever was.
Yes, he is (he isn't dead yet). And he definitely wasn't any smarter in 80's than he is now. Also he had shitty education, no understanding of economy (less than all his predecessors, Khruschev and Brezhnev included, Chernenko excluded), used his own retarded-sounding pronunication of various words, and was eager to leap ahead when it suited his understanding of ideology without doing any analysis... Hey, wait! Bush can be described in exactly the same terms! US has a bright future, indeed.
GDP can be manipulated easier than Enron accounting, and the current government looks quite proficient in this form of art.
I lived in USSR then, and I am in US now, so I certainly can make comparison much better than propaganda workers that write your "economy" classes.
Stalin killed more Russians than Hitler.
Prove it, dumbass. All credible data shows otherwise.
This is the second most illogical statement that American believe in (first place still belongs to the invisible omnipotent man in the sky, who invented moral and ethics, like Al Gore invented the Internet).
Even the linked articles show enough evidence to conclude that until the moment of USSR dissolution, the last things its government had to worry about is the amount of money (that they printed -- no FR and a pyramid of crooks), manpower (that was, according to the same "economists" under-used), or natural resources (that USSR exported). USSR government was scared shitless by the first economic recession in the post-WWII history, and being incompetent, it decided to do a complete overhaul of the economy, along with some political changes that made sense at the moment.
Since US is now in a deeper recession than one USSR had in 80's, I guess, we will see, how US government, lead by Bush who is even dumber than Gorbachev, will handle the same situation.
I was looking at the previous example, where there was done more than printing, so the address was physically accessed, and therefore would produce a segfault..
Goatse.
It's impossible to prove what did, or didn't happen, however the Occam's razor only applies to the phenomena, that can be reliably observed, and then explained. If the observation process itself is questionable, it goes deeper than that.
Voting could be "observed" by reliable or unreliable method, yet the government applied a lot of effort to make sure that an unreliable method is chosen, so there can be no record. Now, what is a simplier explanation --
1. that the government and Diebold managed to choose the worst options of all available, despite having all the data and manpower to use any of the more reliable ones, and despite all research, recommendations and protests about this very issue
or
2. that the most unreliable method was chosen, against all recommendations and research, with the goal to exploit this unreliability and perform fraud.
The results themselves, are not in any way relevant -- they are likely to be tampered with. Discrepancies merely show that the problem likely was exploited (and discrepancies in any direction would mean that -- unusual number of Democrat votes in a shithole filled with uneducated rednecks that usually voted >90% for Republicans would be just as much a discrepancy as unusual support of Bush in an urban area with large percentage of ethnic minorities).
*p in this case _is_ the dereferencing of the NULL pointer, and it certainly will produce a segmentation fault. The use of reference merely obfuscates the nature of dereferencing in this example, and a debugger or runtime has to find out, what exactly should be said about the reference when the segfault/exception/... happens inside the function because dereferencing happened not at the earlier moment (outside the function) when it looked like it was supposed to be done. Even if some particular behavior was defined for this situation, optimization would likely break it.
So the most Joel could accomplish by using a reference is that the dereference of NULL would kinda supposed to happen outside of his precious function, and in the code of the poor guy who dared to call it. "Kinda supposed" because it isn't even guaranteed to work that way in the first place.
1. No one uses solid fuel for anything important now.
2. The whole point of ICBMs is to be launched from the place where the enemy can't destroy a significant quantity of that. This is why there are a lot of them, and distributed sparsely over a large territory. Once a large enough number is in place, it's easy to guarantee that ones that will hit the target, will produce enough damage, even if some would be destroyed.
3. North Korea does not have any ICBMs -- fixed or mobile. However if a country that small wanted to develop a nuclear strategy, they would have to rely on a navy, to distribute a large number of launch sites over a large area.
American Christians can't do that -- they can't live without at least some kind of slaves.
ICBMs *ALWAYS* work.
The amount of effort necessary to significantly decrease their effect is likely to be just as devastating to the country's economy as an actual nuclear war that such effort is trying to prevent.