"And the highway system is responsible for all of those drunk driving deaths..."
That is _exactly_ the point that the lawyers are making. They're saying that the file-sharing software is no more guilty than the ISP's, etc. Which is exactly what _you're_ saying. Now if the post hadn't been so poorly worded, or if you'd actually _read_ the article, this confusion wouldn't have happened.
I can do make (and there are books if I can't), I can do C++ (and there are plenty of books on that), and I could figure out how to debug in MS VC++.
But just last week I was _desperately_ looking for a book about debugging with gdb. Feel free to includ any other tools that might help with debugging, optimizing, whatever. I realize that all of this is out there in docs or on the Net, but I want something thorough, easy-to-read, with lots of examples.
Although I don't buy the books because they say "in 24 hours/21 days/7 days/insert time period here", I have found some very good ones in that category. "Teach Yourself C++ in 21 days" took much longer than 21 days (although I really wasn't shooting for that goal), but it did put me 3 semesters ahead in my programming class when I got to college, and I can not remember one time that I was frustrated with its explanation of anything. When I got to college, I couldn't understand why my classmates were so scared of pointers, they always made perfect sense to me.
So while I wouldn't recommend buying a book just because of the time period in the title, I wouldn't rule it out either.
The thing about terrorism is that there is no way the terrorists can't win. Any security can be circumvented. So we protect against any given types of attacks, what's to prevent them from using a different means. I could drive my pickup truck head-on into a school-bus this afternoon and nobody could stop me. (trust me, I won't)
You're absolutely right. We should just keep doing what we've always done because we will obviously never win completely.
For that matter, there's no way we can ever stop theifs, so lets get rid of all those expensive bank vaults (you can always get around them with some good explosives, lasers, etc.). And the same with encryption--there is no such thing as unbreakable encryption, so lets just get rid of it.
If you believe this so thorougly, carry some implement of hijacking on your next flight.
Wait, you won't? Why?
Oh, because on the off chance that they catch you, you don't want to be interrogated endlessly. Huh, funny that.
Besides, from what I heard, the terrorists involved in 9/11 were pretty high-strung (they were later ID'ed because they had gotten really mad at someone in the parking lot or in the airport). So seeing someone ahead of them getting fully searched, and knowing that the system is shooting for them, will probably make them really high-strung. Hopefully to the point that they won't be able to keep their cool, and someone will notice.
I read the article. Why is he pissing and moaning? I went through the same exact thing (including having my checked luggage searched). It's completely random as far as I can tell. My name is as "American" as you can get. I've never been out of the country, and I've flown off-and-on for a while. No criminal record or anything. If a person was looking for "suspicious" people, he'd pass right over me.
To all of the people that say, "Guilty until proven innocent!" my response is, great, let's go arrest the guys that crashed those planes. Oh wait, we can't, because they, and several thousand other people, are already dead.
This will not eliminate terrorism (nothing will). However, it will make it harder, which means that fewer organizations will be able to pull it off.
You might be cuffed and locked up for hours, but once you get enough innocent Americans to vouch for your patriotism and loyalty, you'll be released. Whoopee.
Umm, no. You get extra attention at the airport, that means:
(1) all stowed luggage gets hand-searched
(2) just before getting on the plane, they frisk you and go through all of your carry-on items.
I know, I've had it done to me as part of a random check.
It takes less than 15 minutes, total. You still get on the plane. No arrests, no detainments, just a little more thorough searching, which is perfectly legal. IIRC, police officers are allowed to frisk any "suspicious" person to see if they have weapons. That search can not involve looking for drugs, etc. (if they find any during that search, it won't be allowed into court). They can do this to you on the street already, why are you so upset that they might do it at the airport?
So please unbunch your panties, and get your facts straight.
Ok, to everyone who is moaning about the 1-click patent, let's get something straight: If Amazon hadn't come up with it, I doubt anyone here would have.
Yes, yes, I realize that the technical way to do it is painfully obvious. But according to Alan Cooper in "The Inmates are Running the Asylum", Bezos and the designers had to drag the programmers kicking and screaming into writing the code to do it. Why? Because the programmers wanted to give the user a confirmation screen, and effectively make it 2-click shopping.
Face it, Bezos and his designers were thinking outside the box, and the rest of us are just pissed that we couldn't see something so obvious.
The security of AES is currently being hailed as the fact it has a key field 10 to the 21 times larger than 56bit DES. Great. Only an idiot would try to brute force it though, so the number of keys is somewhat arbitrary.
I'm not anywhere near a crypto expert, but in one of Tom Clancy's books, there's a conversation that goes something like this:
Mastermind Criminal: "I'm using xxxx crypto, I don't need to worry about the government reading that."
Computer Criminal: "The government used to use xxxx crypto, but has switched to yyyy crypto."
*blank stare from Mastermind Criminal*
Computer Criminal: "It's very expensive for the entire government to switch crypto methods--they don't do it just for fun, so there had to be a reason. A reason like: they figured out how to break xxxx crypto."
I think Clancy has a good point. The basic rule is: for anything that you really want to be secure, make sure that you're crypto method is at least as secure as what the government uses.
You're right, to some extent. Generally, my comments aren't explaining _what_ the code does, but _why_ it does it, and include a brief description of any peculiarities. Sometimes this isn't necessary, sometimes it's a godsend. Comments are particularly useful when you're searching for the section of code that does xxxx.
You're code example of freeing an array is self-explanatory if it's in a destructor, or in some other function where freeing memory is in the name of the game. But if it's in the middle of a program's execution, it'd be really useful to know why you suddenly decided that the entire array is useless. Was the data preserved someplace else? Is it going to be refilled? Those are a few of the questions that come to mind.
I realize that the answers would be somewhere else in your code, but when I'm trying to find a bug or understand that specific function, I don't want to have to go wandering around the entire codebase.
If you don't believe comments are important, find code that you haven't touched in 2 or more years. Now try to add some significant features. I had to do this _once_, and now my code is always at least half comments.
"A stitch in time saves nine." Comment code while you still remember what the heck you're doing!!
Americorps is about the last place you would want to go if you're looking to do charitable work. If you join Americorps, you're most likely to end up in a intern-level job at a large corporate non-profit making less than the minimum wage ($802 a month, I believe, $826 in urban areas).
I'm not sure where you got that information, but it's definitely not always true. While I was in high school, I worked with an Americorps crew on a project to give schools decent computers (note: I was not a member of Americorps at any time). Big businesses would donate old computers for a tax write-off, and we'd turn them back around for the schools. Along the way, the volunteers learned a lot about computer hardware repair (the computers we got weren't always in the best condition).
The program wasn't run by Americorps, but Americorps volunteers provided a mix of technical know-how and administrative help (finding businesses to get stuff from, and schools to donate to). High school and middle school students provided a lot of the volunteer hours in actually rebuilding the computers (in exchange for learning how to repair computers, and having lots of computers to practice on).
The Americorps people that I worked with were definitely _not_ doing intern-level work. They were getting a great mix of technical and managerial experience.
Re:Somewhat naive - so am I
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Tiny Apps
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· Score: 1
>A stand alone, plain, small generic text editor knows when there's a spellchecker, font manager etc. available, and would spin them up as separate processes and let them modify the data as needed.
Believe it or not, this was (some say still is) the UNIX philosophy. That's why you have grep, sed, etc, and can pipe all of them together to create an incredible little "program" that does some amazing stuff.
Why this probably won't work on a large scale now (unfortunately):
* In the open source world, developers like to do their own thing. They figure they're doing it for free, so they can do it however they want. "If you don't like it, don't use it!" is their reasoning.
* In the closed source world, Microsoft has proven that the way to increase market share is to make your program incompatible with others. You don't want your user to be able to painlessly swap your product out for your comptetitors.
Frankly, I don't see much in the way of a solution. You can't tell open source developers what to do unless you pay them to do it, which is not a proven business model right now* (see below before you flame me). Small companies may be willing to do this with their closed source products so that they can break into the market, but established "leaders" will add their own custom extensions that require you to use their matching [insert plug-in here] to take full advantage of it.
* Before you flame me, find a company that:
1) Hires developers to work on their core software product, which is released under an open source license
2) Has been doing so profitably for at least 2 years (and I'm really giving you a break here, because 2 years doesn't come close to proving a business model).
I'd like to coin a new term, if no one has done this already: "code-jock". I think this accurately describes a lot of people in my CS classes. They're arrogant, single-minded morons who are completely unaware of anything outside of their little world. They are only interested in computers (some are so narrow-minded as to only concentrate on code, and not understand the basics of hardware).
The really ironic thing is that CS people can not afford to do this in any way, shape, or form. Athletic jocks can do it to a large extent because they can be "pure" jocks and still make lots of money (hire accountants to take care of money, managers to take care of business issues, etc). However, people in the computer-related fields are tool makers. Our main purpose is to make software/hardware that enables other people in other fields to complete their jobs. It doesn't matter how many programming languages and OSes you know how to use if you can't understand the problem that you're trying to solve!
How many times have you been in a building and realized that some part of the layout is ridiculously stupid, and then realized that it's that way because it makes the overall design easier or "prettier". It's the same when programmers write software that is easy to write at the expense of error-handling, completeness, etc.
So basically, a lot of people in computer-related fields need to wake-up to the world around them. There are a lot of interesting things besides computers, and if you choose CS as a career, you'll almost definitely have to combine it with another field (business, marketing, communication, biology, physics, etc).
How do they monitor the site constatly from 5000 feet? is there a plane constantly
circling around the site or is it done by a sort of balloon? can't this monitoring be
achieved by satellites?
"The Federal Aviation Administration granted EarthData permission to make daily flights in the tightly controlled airspace over the site. Each day since Sept. 15, EarthData's plane has passed over Lower Manhattan, shooting 15,000 laser pulses a second. EarthData then produces a grid of more than 100,000 points of topographic elevations, spaced about five feet apart, over the trade center area. The information is then analyzed by the researchers at Hunter College."
Ummmm... yeah, let's make the voting lines longer...
Or, we could hand out a little pamphlet serving the same purpose while people would stand in line. Granted, that wouldn't make use of this "wonderful technology", but it wouldn't make voting take orders of magnitude longer.
Judging from the comments, it seems as though the best way to get modded up is to express a view from the far right or far left. So I doubt this post will get very far:(
In my short stay on Earth, I've learned on important fact about science: no one knows a damned thing. I'm not trying to knock scientists; in fact, I'm currently studying so that I can work in the bioinformatics field. However, in reading books on the subject, and listening to professors, I've found this phrase quite often: "Well, xxx _seems_ to work this way, but we're not exactly sure how or why."
That's when I'm getting the information directly from someone "in the field". When I listen to things from general news sources, I've found that they tend to filter those statements out. So that every scientist is reported as being much more sure than they really are.
This is how we get "science proves that eggs are good for you (high protein, etc.)" one year, and "science proves that eggs are bad for you (high cholesterol, etc.)" a few years later. And of course, both are stated as absolute, undeniably-proved facts.
All in all, I tend not to believe "science" as reported by the general news. When I read it in a science publication, I give it a little more weight. Although, it's best to remember that this isn't a perfect world, so science is affected by society.
For instance, around the 1920's science "proved" (through our vast knowledge of genetics) that whites were genetically superior to blacks, that criminalism was genetic, etc. This folly could almost be amusing in it's naivete (sp?), if so many people were not sterilized to keep their "inferior" genes out of the gene pool. Unfortunately, this is one of many examples of society leading science, and not the other way around.
All in all, if I read this in a reputable scientific publication, and the majority of scientists believe this theory several years from now, I may believe it. Otherwise, I'm going to be just a touch skeptical;-)
Without a reference or something, I'm inclined to believe that you placed your keyboard between you and the toilet in order to create your post.
I suppose what your suggesting could be true, without some sort of proof, it sounds awfully far-fetched (that, or your stretching the truth or leaving out a lot of important "details").
To whomever modded this up "Informative", I have one thing to say: "Gullible isn't in the dictionary. Go ahead, try to look it up, it's not there".
After I read your comment, a thought hit me (it doesn't happen often, so I feel I must share it with you). You mentioned the Xwindows/UNIX "interface guidelines are fascism" mindset. The irony of this, is that the command line is the most fascist UI interface that I can think of. I could probably count on one hand the number of ways a user can pass an option to a program from the command line. There's on/off options that start with '-' (and sometimes can be reversed with a '+' option); options that start with '-' and require some additional text (the name of a file, or an ip address). But that's just about it (I'm sure I missed some, and I'm sure the UNIX zealots of slashdot will flame me for it).
And yet, there are many times when it's almost to learn a command line program than a GUI program. Why? Because they're all the same except for what comes after the '-'. I don't have to remember which menu has the option that's on the 'General' tab.
However, the straight command line has lackings (if you don't believe me, give up vim or emacs and try using cat as your editor and sed to fix your mistakes). So we invented the GUI (which includes CUI's for this discussion). This allowed programmer's to have much more control over the user interface, which turned out to be just enough rope to allow them to hang themselves. Apple saw the mistake and said, "we have to make programmers stop designing UI's, so we'll set some strict rules".
Unfortunately, I don't know what the next step should be...my thought didn't last that long:-(
Hopefully someone will read my comment and finish the thought, and free programmers from having to design UI's (because most of them hate it anyways), and free users from UI's designed by programmers (because most non-programming users realize that programmers don't have a clue about good UI design).
Re:carrying on after wilbur and orville
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To the Moon, Alice
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· Score: 1
"I think he is carrying on a fine tradition where one person with guts can make a big impact on the world"...quite literally, if he screws up. Yup, he'll leave his mark alright:-)
Seriously, I hope he makes it, but I'll be staying a (hopefully) safe distance away.
This is a LAF, or Late April Fools (yes, I know it should be a Late April Fools Joke, but then the acronym isn't nearly as amusing).
Personally, I think that ads in games are fine, so long as they don't interfere with gameplay. And if it does interfere with gameplay, then I expect the game to receive a lower review because of the inferior gameplay.
I also think that well-places ads in news sites is also appropriate. I like most of the ads on Slashdot, and make a point of reading them. I realize that they are opinions, and take them as such (I know that's difficult for some to understand). The ads on Slashdot expose me to products that I might have never known about otherwise. After I'm exposed to the product, I still do the standard amount of research to make sure that the ad lives up to its claim, and that it really is the best product for me (sometimes it is, sometimes its not). My point is, so long as you realize that something is an ad, it can't be harmful (unless it's obnoxious because its vulgar [which is personally defined], or because it flashes, etc).
The only ads that bother me are the ones that come from something/someone that should be impartial, and are not generally understood to be ads. For instance, if Coke sponsors a 60 Minutes investigation of unhealthy practices by Pepsi, then 60 Minutes had better say "This investigation sponsored by Coke" at the beginning and end of every commercial break.
Note that this is not the same as Quake IV including a Smith & Wesson (sp?) gun. I *don't* expect impartiality from game makers. As far as I'm concerned, they're in the entertainment industry, and I don't expect impartiality from that industry (otherwise I'd have to ban myself from everything that came out of Hollywood in the past couple decades).
I don't know about the uneducated masses, but *I* expect impartial, unbiased, well-researched NEWS from my games. Filling them with ads just to lower the price would confuse the issue, and I would no longer be able to trust the impartiality of the gaming industry. What's the world coming to?
Now, news sources such as/. ("*News* for Nerds. Stuff that matters") has every right to place ads in their pages and promote sales for other businesses (such as ThinkGeek.com). In fact, I expect it. When I go to a news site, I *want* the opinions of the editors, because to me, that's the "Stuff that matters"!
A _committee_ is _hearing_testimony_ on the bill. That's about the equivalent of you or I looking at Saturn's website while we're in the market for a car. It doesn't mean that we intend to buy a Saturn. It means that it's a possibility, if they meet certain requirements. Right now, this Slashdot story is about the equivalent of a Ford fanatic going nuts because he happened to look over your shoulder and see what you were doing.
Let me explain the steps that this bill will have to go through in order to be passed (as I understand it):
1) A committe hears testimony.
2) The committe votes on whether or not to recommend it to the House as a whole. I believe the committee can also modify the bill, or recommend modifications.
3) If the committe approved, then the House considers it (I'm not sure if they hear more testimony or not). This may also include modifying the bill.
4) The House votes on whether or not they approve the bill.
5) The Senate considers the bill (again, I'm not sure if they hear more testimony). The Senate can also consider modifying whatever the House sent them.
(I'm not sure which order the next two steps occur in)
6/7?) The Senate votes.
7/6?) If the Senate approved a different version of the bill than the House, then people from the Senate and House have to work together to reach some sort of compromise.
8) If the governor approves, he signs the bill.
That's no less than 8 steps (possibly more), and we are on the _first_ step. Along the way, the bill can be modified at 2 or more places. These modifications could include clauses for OS's that don't have censorware, and maybe a clause that will allow the buyer to opt out of the censorware. In fact, as I understand it, very few bills (possibly none) survive the process without modifications.
Or the bill could be outright rejected at no less than FOUR places (committe, House, Senate, governor). What this really means is that the democratic process is working. Someone wrote a bill that they think is being important. A small group of people are looking over the bill to see whether it's worth having everyone look at it. At this stage, if you're a Texas resident, this might be a good time to send one of these people a kind, well-worded letter about some of the shortcomings of the bill. If no one in the committee listens, then you still have two more opportunities to influence someone into making that change.
This is how the democratic process works: slow but steady. The entire thing was designed so that Joe Q. Citizen could provide his/her input at many places.
So, please remove the stick from your rear end, and report on what's actually happening.
By the way timothy, if you're going to knock states off your list because of the bills they've considered, you might as well knock them all off, and find a new country (maybe you could be Slashdots first foreign correspondent?). Actually, this might be a good idea, because you seem to have very little understanding of how the U.S. government works.
Also, to the person that submitted this story, where's your source for the thing about the AOL email? I followed all of the links, and didn't see anything about it. As far as I know, you made that whole thing up and then posted it as a fact.
I understand that this could be a nice feature and all, but a finished, functional, and [Ff]ree browser would be even nicer. Note that Netscape = 4.x is not functional (I've had to write cross-browser Javascript, and lemme tell you, NS is _not_ standards-compliant in any way, shape, or form). Opera is shaping up to be a very nice browser, but it's not free (as in beer), so I can't expect people viewing my websites to use it. So basically, if one of my clients wants to do something really cutting edge with their website, right now I have to tell them, "Fine, but that functionality is only going to work in IE 4 or 5, or Opera 5". I hate doing this, because I despise Microsoft. I keep checking back at Mozilla's site, waiting for the damn thing to get out of beta. But everytime I hear about Mozilla, it's "Mozilla added this great new feature...but they're still in beta."
I think this represents one of the few flaws in the Open Source philosophy. Because developers are working on their own time, they work on whatever suits their fancy. More often than not, this involves some great new feature that's completely unnecessary, but rates high on the "cool-factor". So the things that really need to get done are delayed.
This happens in a lot of volunteer organizations. In one organization that I belong to, we rotate cooking a meal before the meeting. We can generally find someone to cook, but it's very difficult to get people to clean. Why? Because cooking is a kind of "glory" job; if you do it right, you'll get compliments and thanks. Cleaning, on the other hand, is just as necessary, but people that do the cleaning aren't noticed or thanked.
So, in closing, I'd like to thank all of the under-appreciated people who make Mozilla a _browser_. And I'd like to tell all of the people who are busy bloating the hell out of it before it even gets out of beta to STOP killing a great product. If you really want to help, work on the rendering code, or the Javascript interpreter. Heck, just use the browser and submit bug reports so that they're found and fixed faster. Just stop killing on of the few alternative browsers that are available.
I do web programming for my job, and our company has started considering charging extra for NS support on more advanced features. "That's evil, you must work for MS!" Actually, the reason we considered this was because of our experience with NS out-right violating the standards. I would write standards-compliant webpages using OReilly's reference books on JavaScript and HTML (which I'm fairly sure aren't going to spread MS's FUD), and then test them. IE would almost always work, NS would almost never work. In order to get things to work for NS, I would have to use NS-specific tags. All of this applies to NS 4.7. I can't speak for Mozilla, because frankly, Mozilla is still in beta, and therefore we can't expect our customers to use it.
So I'd appreciate it if everyone would stop spreading FUD about "MS extensions" to the language, since most "MS extensions" are really the features of standard HTML 4.0 and JavaScript 1.2 that NS refuses to implement. Just because IE is the only browser that supports a certain tag doesn't mean that it's IE-specific; most of the tags (there are a few exceptions, but not nearly as much as NS) are really HTML 4.0 tags that no other browser has gotten around to implementing. The only exception _might_ be Mozilla, but like I said, Mozilla is still betaware. Honestly, I'm dying for Mozilla to be finished, and I'm waiting for Opera to get up to speed (which reminds me, I need to check them out again...) because I'd really like to have an option that works on Linux, and I despise supporting MS. But the fact of the matter is: right now, their browser is the best production browser that I've found.
Blocking "known" attackers sounds like a great idea...at first. And then you remember that many people are on a modem with a dynamic IP, and that most attacks are executed from previously hacked boxes. This is why counter-attacks are almost never a good idea; you generally end up attacking someone who's in your position, and then they mistake you for the real attacker, and you end up with a nice pretty lawsuit.
And the whole time the real attacker sits back and laughes his butt off.
Slashdot Mirror
"And the highway system is responsible for all of those drunk driving deaths..."
That is _exactly_ the point that the lawyers are making. They're saying that the file-sharing software is no more guilty than the ISP's, etc. Which is exactly what _you're_ saying. Now if the post hadn't been so poorly worded, or if you'd actually _read_ the article, this confusion wouldn't have happened.
I can do make (and there are books if I can't), I can do C++ (and there are plenty of books on that), and I could figure out how to debug in MS VC++.
But just last week I was _desperately_ looking for a book about debugging with gdb. Feel free to includ any other tools that might help with debugging, optimizing, whatever. I realize that all of this is out there in docs or on the Net, but I want something thorough, easy-to-read, with lots of examples.
As soon as you publish this book, I will buy it!
Although I don't buy the books because they say "in 24 hours/21 days/7 days/insert time period here", I have found some very good ones in that category. "Teach Yourself C++ in 21 days" took much longer than 21 days (although I really wasn't shooting for that goal), but it did put me 3 semesters ahead in my programming class when I got to college, and I can not remember one time that I was frustrated with its explanation of anything. When I got to college, I couldn't understand why my classmates were so scared of pointers, they always made perfect sense to me.
So while I wouldn't recommend buying a book just because of the time period in the title, I wouldn't rule it out either.
You're absolutely right. We should just keep doing what we've always done because we will obviously never win completely.
For that matter, there's no way we can ever stop theifs, so lets get rid of all those expensive bank vaults (you can always get around them with some good explosives, lasers, etc.). And the same with encryption--there is no such thing as unbreakable encryption, so lets just get rid of it.
If you believe this so thorougly, carry some implement of hijacking on your next flight.
Wait, you won't? Why?
Oh, because on the off chance that they catch you, you don't want to be interrogated endlessly. Huh, funny that.
Besides, from what I heard, the terrorists involved in 9/11 were pretty high-strung (they were later ID'ed because they had gotten really mad at someone in the parking lot or in the airport). So seeing someone ahead of them getting fully searched, and knowing that the system is shooting for them, will probably make them really high-strung. Hopefully to the point that they won't be able to keep their cool, and someone will notice.
I read the article. Why is he pissing and moaning? I went through the same exact thing (including having my checked luggage searched). It's completely random as far as I can tell. My name is as "American" as you can get. I've never been out of the country, and I've flown off-and-on for a while. No criminal record or anything. If a person was looking for "suspicious" people, he'd pass right over me.
To all of the people that say, "Guilty until proven innocent!" my response is, great, let's go arrest the guys that crashed those planes. Oh wait, we can't, because they, and several thousand other people, are already dead.
This will not eliminate terrorism (nothing will). However, it will make it harder, which means that fewer organizations will be able to pull it off.
Umm, no. You get extra attention at the airport, that means: (1) all stowed luggage gets hand-searched (2) just before getting on the plane, they frisk you and go through all of your carry-on items.
I know, I've had it done to me as part of a random check.
It takes less than 15 minutes, total. You still get on the plane. No arrests, no detainments, just a little more thorough searching, which is perfectly legal. IIRC, police officers are allowed to frisk any "suspicious" person to see if they have weapons. That search can not involve looking for drugs, etc. (if they find any during that search, it won't be allowed into court). They can do this to you on the street already, why are you so upset that they might do it at the airport?
So please unbunch your panties, and get your facts straight.
Ok, to everyone who is moaning about the 1-click patent, let's get something straight: If Amazon hadn't come up with it, I doubt anyone here would have.
Yes, yes, I realize that the technical way to do it is painfully obvious. But according to Alan Cooper in "The Inmates are Running the Asylum", Bezos and the designers had to drag the programmers kicking and screaming into writing the code to do it. Why? Because the programmers wanted to give the user a confirmation screen, and effectively make it 2-click shopping.
Face it, Bezos and his designers were thinking outside the box, and the rest of us are just pissed that we couldn't see something so obvious.
The security of AES is currently being hailed as the fact it has a key field 10 to the 21 times larger than 56bit DES. Great. Only an idiot would try to brute force it though, so the number of keys is somewhat arbitrary.
I'm not anywhere near a crypto expert, but in one of Tom Clancy's books, there's a conversation that goes something like this:
Mastermind Criminal: "I'm using xxxx crypto, I don't need to worry about the government reading that."
Computer Criminal: "The government used to use xxxx crypto, but has switched to yyyy crypto."
*blank stare from Mastermind Criminal*
Computer Criminal: "It's very expensive for the entire government to switch crypto methods--they don't do it just for fun, so there had to be a reason. A reason like: they figured out how to break xxxx crypto."
I think Clancy has a good point. The basic rule is: for anything that you really want to be secure, make sure that you're crypto method is at least as secure as what the government uses.
You're right, to some extent. Generally, my comments aren't explaining _what_ the code does, but _why_ it does it, and include a brief description of any peculiarities. Sometimes this isn't necessary, sometimes it's a godsend. Comments are particularly useful when you're searching for the section of code that does xxxx.
You're code example of freeing an array is self-explanatory if it's in a destructor, or in some other function where freeing memory is in the name of the game. But if it's in the middle of a program's execution, it'd be really useful to know why you suddenly decided that the entire array is useless. Was the data preserved someplace else? Is it going to be refilled? Those are a few of the questions that come to mind.
I realize that the answers would be somewhere else in your code, but when I'm trying to find a bug or understand that specific function, I don't want to have to go wandering around the entire codebase.
If you don't believe comments are important, find code that you haven't touched in 2 or more years. Now try to add some significant features. I had to do this _once_, and now my code is always at least half comments.
"A stitch in time saves nine." Comment code while you still remember what the heck you're doing!!
I'm not sure where you got that information, but it's definitely not always true. While I was in high school, I worked with an Americorps crew on a project to give schools decent computers (note: I was not a member of Americorps at any time). Big businesses would donate old computers for a tax write-off, and we'd turn them back around for the schools. Along the way, the volunteers learned a lot about computer hardware repair (the computers we got weren't always in the best condition).
The program wasn't run by Americorps, but Americorps volunteers provided a mix of technical know-how and administrative help (finding businesses to get stuff from, and schools to donate to). High school and middle school students provided a lot of the volunteer hours in actually rebuilding the computers (in exchange for learning how to repair computers, and having lots of computers to practice on).
The Americorps people that I worked with were definitely _not_ doing intern-level work. They were getting a great mix of technical and managerial experience.
>A stand alone, plain, small generic text editor knows when there's a spellchecker, font manager etc. available, and would spin them up as separate processes and let them modify the data as needed.
Believe it or not, this was (some say still is) the UNIX philosophy. That's why you have grep, sed, etc, and can pipe all of them together to create an incredible little "program" that does some amazing stuff.
Why this probably won't work on a large scale now (unfortunately):
* In the open source world, developers like to do their own thing. They figure they're doing it for free, so they can do it however they want. "If you don't like it, don't use it!" is their reasoning.
* In the closed source world, Microsoft has proven that the way to increase market share is to make your program incompatible with others. You don't want your user to be able to painlessly swap your product out for your comptetitors.
Frankly, I don't see much in the way of a solution. You can't tell open source developers what to do unless you pay them to do it, which is not a proven business model right now* (see below before you flame me). Small companies may be willing to do this with their closed source products so that they can break into the market, but established "leaders" will add their own custom extensions that require you to use their matching [insert plug-in here] to take full advantage of it.
* Before you flame me, find a company that:
1) Hires developers to work on their core software product, which is released under an open source license
2) Has been doing so profitably for at least 2 years (and I'm really giving you a break here, because 2 years doesn't come close to proving a business model).
The really ironic thing is that CS people can not afford to do this in any way, shape, or form. Athletic jocks can do it to a large extent because they can be "pure" jocks and still make lots of money (hire accountants to take care of money, managers to take care of business issues, etc). However, people in the computer-related fields are tool makers. Our main purpose is to make software/hardware that enables other people in other fields to complete their jobs. It doesn't matter how many programming languages and OSes you know how to use if you can't understand the problem that you're trying to solve!
How many times have you been in a building and realized that some part of the layout is ridiculously stupid, and then realized that it's that way because it makes the overall design easier or "prettier". It's the same when programmers write software that is easy to write at the expense of error-handling, completeness, etc.
So basically, a lot of people in computer-related fields need to wake-up to the world around them. There are a lot of interesting things besides computers, and if you choose CS as a career, you'll almost definitely have to combine it with another field (business, marketing, communication, biology, physics, etc).
How do they monitor the site constatly from 5000 feet? is there a plane constantly circling around the site or is it done by a sort of balloon? can't this monitoring be achieved by satellites?
"The Federal Aviation Administration granted EarthData permission to make daily flights in the tightly controlled airspace over the site. Each day since Sept. 15, EarthData's plane has passed over Lower Manhattan, shooting 15,000 laser pulses a second. EarthData then produces a grid of more than 100,000 points of topographic elevations, spaced about five feet apart, over the trade center area. The information is then analyzed by the researchers at Hunter College."
It seems pretty well spelled out to me...
Ummmm... yeah, let's make the voting lines longer...
Or, we could hand out a little pamphlet serving the same purpose while people would stand in line. Granted, that wouldn't make use of this "wonderful technology", but it wouldn't make voting take orders of magnitude longer.
Judging from the comments, it seems as though the best way to get modded up is to express a view from the far right or far left. So I doubt this post will get very far :(
;-)
In my short stay on Earth, I've learned on important fact about science: no one knows a damned thing. I'm not trying to knock scientists; in fact, I'm currently studying so that I can work in the bioinformatics field. However, in reading books on the subject, and listening to professors, I've found this phrase quite often: "Well, xxx _seems_ to work this way, but we're not exactly sure how or why."
That's when I'm getting the information directly from someone "in the field". When I listen to things from general news sources, I've found that they tend to filter those statements out. So that every scientist is reported as being much more sure than they really are.
This is how we get "science proves that eggs are good for you (high protein, etc.)" one year, and "science proves that eggs are bad for you (high cholesterol, etc.)" a few years later. And of course, both are stated as absolute, undeniably-proved facts.
All in all, I tend not to believe "science" as reported by the general news. When I read it in a science publication, I give it a little more weight. Although, it's best to remember that this isn't a perfect world, so science is affected by society.
For instance, around the 1920's science "proved" (through our vast knowledge of genetics) that whites were genetically superior to blacks, that criminalism was genetic, etc. This folly could almost be amusing in it's naivete (sp?), if so many people were not sterilized to keep their "inferior" genes out of the gene pool. Unfortunately, this is one of many examples of society leading science, and not the other way around.
All in all, if I read this in a reputable scientific publication, and the majority of scientists believe this theory several years from now, I may believe it. Otherwise, I'm going to be just a touch skeptical
Without a reference or something, I'm inclined to believe that you placed your keyboard between you and the toilet in order to create your post.
I suppose what your suggesting could be true, without some sort of proof, it sounds awfully far-fetched (that, or your stretching the truth or leaving out a lot of important "details").
To whomever modded this up "Informative", I have one thing to say: "Gullible isn't in the dictionary. Go ahead, try to look it up, it's not there".
After I read your comment, a thought hit me (it doesn't happen often, so I feel I must share it with you). You mentioned the Xwindows/UNIX "interface guidelines are fascism" mindset. The irony of this, is that the command line is the most fascist UI interface that I can think of. I could probably count on one hand the number of ways a user can pass an option to a program from the command line. There's on/off options that start with '-' (and sometimes can be reversed with a '+' option); options that start with '-' and require some additional text (the name of a file, or an ip address). But that's just about it (I'm sure I missed some, and I'm sure the UNIX zealots of slashdot will flame me for it).
:-(
And yet, there are many times when it's almost to learn a command line program than a GUI program. Why? Because they're all the same except for what comes after the '-'. I don't have to remember which menu has the option that's on the 'General' tab.
However, the straight command line has lackings (if you don't believe me, give up vim or emacs and try using cat as your editor and sed to fix your mistakes). So we invented the GUI (which includes CUI's for this discussion). This allowed programmer's to have much more control over the user interface, which turned out to be just enough rope to allow them to hang themselves. Apple saw the mistake and said, "we have to make programmers stop designing UI's, so we'll set some strict rules".
Unfortunately, I don't know what the next step should be...my thought didn't last that long
Hopefully someone will read my comment and finish the thought, and free programmers from having to design UI's (because most of them hate it anyways), and free users from UI's designed by programmers (because most non-programming users realize that programmers don't have a clue about good UI design).
"I think he is carrying on a fine tradition where one person with guts can make a big impact on the world"...quite literally, if he screws up. Yup, he'll leave his mark alright :-)
Seriously, I hope he makes it, but I'll be staying a (hopefully) safe distance away.
This is a LAF, or Late April Fools (yes, I know it should be a Late April Fools Joke, but then the acronym isn't nearly as amusing).
Personally, I think that ads in games are fine, so long as they don't interfere with gameplay. And if it does interfere with gameplay, then I expect the game to receive a lower review because of the inferior gameplay.
I also think that well-places ads in news sites is also appropriate. I like most of the ads on Slashdot, and make a point of reading them. I realize that they are opinions, and take them as such (I know that's difficult for some to understand). The ads on Slashdot expose me to products that I might have never known about otherwise. After I'm exposed to the product, I still do the standard amount of research to make sure that the ad lives up to its claim, and that it really is the best product for me (sometimes it is, sometimes its not). My point is, so long as you realize that something is an ad, it can't be harmful (unless it's obnoxious because its vulgar [which is personally defined], or because it flashes, etc).
The only ads that bother me are the ones that come from something/someone that should be impartial, and are not generally understood to be ads. For instance, if Coke sponsors a 60 Minutes investigation of unhealthy practices by Pepsi, then 60 Minutes had better say "This investigation sponsored by Coke" at the beginning and end of every commercial break.
Note that this is not the same as Quake IV including a Smith & Wesson (sp?) gun. I *don't* expect impartiality from game makers. As far as I'm concerned, they're in the entertainment industry, and I don't expect impartiality from that industry (otherwise I'd have to ban myself from everything that came out of Hollywood in the past couple decades).
I don't know about the uneducated masses, but *I* expect impartial, unbiased, well-researched NEWS from my games. Filling them with ads just to lower the price would confuse the issue, and I would no longer be able to trust the impartiality of the gaming industry. What's the world coming to?
/. ("*News* for Nerds. Stuff that matters") has every right to place ads in their pages and promote sales for other businesses (such as ThinkGeek.com). In fact, I expect it. When I go to a news site, I *want* the opinions of the editors, because to me, that's the "Stuff that matters"!
Now, news sources such as
A _committee_ is _hearing_testimony_ on the bill. That's about the equivalent of you or I looking at Saturn's website while we're in the market for a car. It doesn't mean that we intend to buy a Saturn. It means that it's a possibility, if they meet certain requirements. Right now, this Slashdot story is about the equivalent of a Ford fanatic going nuts because he happened to look over your shoulder and see what you were doing.
Let me explain the steps that this bill will have to go through in order to be passed (as I understand it):
1) A committe hears testimony.
2) The committe votes on whether or not to recommend it to the House as a whole. I believe the committee can also modify the bill, or recommend modifications.
3) If the committe approved, then the House considers it (I'm not sure if they hear more testimony or not). This may also include modifying the bill.
4) The House votes on whether or not they approve the bill.
5) The Senate considers the bill (again, I'm not sure if they hear more testimony). The Senate can also consider modifying whatever the House sent them.
(I'm not sure which order the next two steps occur in)
6/7?) The Senate votes.
7/6?) If the Senate approved a different version of the bill than the House, then people from the Senate and House have to work together to reach some sort of compromise.
8) If the governor approves, he signs the bill.
That's no less than 8 steps (possibly more), and we are on the _first_ step. Along the way, the bill can be modified at 2 or more places. These modifications could include clauses for OS's that don't have censorware, and maybe a clause that will allow the buyer to opt out of the censorware. In fact, as I understand it, very few bills (possibly none) survive the process without modifications.
Or the bill could be outright rejected at no less than FOUR places (committe, House, Senate, governor). What this really means is that the democratic process is working. Someone wrote a bill that they think is being important. A small group of people are looking over the bill to see whether it's worth having everyone look at it. At this stage, if you're a Texas resident, this might be a good time to send one of these people a kind, well-worded letter about some of the shortcomings of the bill. If no one in the committee listens, then you still have two more opportunities to influence someone into making that change.
This is how the democratic process works: slow but steady. The entire thing was designed so that Joe Q. Citizen could provide his/her input at many places.
So, please remove the stick from your rear end, and report on what's actually happening.
By the way timothy, if you're going to knock states off your list because of the bills they've considered, you might as well knock them all off, and find a new country (maybe you could be Slashdots first foreign correspondent?). Actually, this might be a good idea, because you seem to have very little understanding of how the U.S. government works.
Also, to the person that submitted this story, where's your source for the thing about the AOL email? I followed all of the links, and didn't see anything about it. As far as I know, you made that whole thing up and then posted it as a fact.
I understand that this could be a nice feature and all, but a finished, functional, and [Ff]ree browser would be even nicer. Note that Netscape = 4.x is not functional (I've had to write cross-browser Javascript, and lemme tell you, NS is _not_ standards-compliant in any way, shape, or form). Opera is shaping up to be a very nice browser, but it's not free (as in beer), so I can't expect people viewing my websites to use it. So basically, if one of my clients wants to do something really cutting edge with their website, right now I have to tell them, "Fine, but that functionality is only going to work in IE 4 or 5, or Opera 5". I hate doing this, because I despise Microsoft. I keep checking back at Mozilla's site, waiting for the damn thing to get out of beta. But everytime I hear about Mozilla, it's "Mozilla added this great new feature...but they're still in beta."
I think this represents one of the few flaws in the Open Source philosophy. Because developers are working on their own time, they work on whatever suits their fancy. More often than not, this involves some great new feature that's completely unnecessary, but rates high on the "cool-factor". So the things that really need to get done are delayed.
This happens in a lot of volunteer organizations. In one organization that I belong to, we rotate cooking a meal before the meeting. We can generally find someone to cook, but it's very difficult to get people to clean. Why? Because cooking is a kind of "glory" job; if you do it right, you'll get compliments and thanks. Cleaning, on the other hand, is just as necessary, but people that do the cleaning aren't noticed or thanked.
So, in closing, I'd like to thank all of the under-appreciated people who make Mozilla a _browser_. And I'd like to tell all of the people who are busy bloating the hell out of it before it even gets out of beta to STOP killing a great product. If you really want to help, work on the rendering code, or the Javascript interpreter. Heck, just use the browser and submit bug reports so that they're found and fixed faster. Just stop killing on of the few alternative browsers that are available.
I do web programming for my job, and our company has started considering charging extra for NS support on more advanced features. "That's evil, you must work for MS!" Actually, the reason we considered this was because of our experience with NS out-right violating the standards. I would write standards-compliant webpages using OReilly's reference books on JavaScript and HTML (which I'm fairly sure aren't going to spread MS's FUD), and then test them. IE would almost always work, NS would almost never work. In order to get things to work for NS, I would have to use NS-specific tags. All of this applies to NS 4.7. I can't speak for Mozilla, because frankly, Mozilla is still in beta, and therefore we can't expect our customers to use it.
So I'd appreciate it if everyone would stop spreading FUD about "MS extensions" to the language, since most "MS extensions" are really the features of standard HTML 4.0 and JavaScript 1.2 that NS refuses to implement. Just because IE is the only browser that supports a certain tag doesn't mean that it's IE-specific; most of the tags (there are a few exceptions, but not nearly as much as NS) are really HTML 4.0 tags that no other browser has gotten around to implementing. The only exception _might_ be Mozilla, but like I said, Mozilla is still betaware. Honestly, I'm dying for Mozilla to be finished, and I'm waiting for Opera to get up to speed (which reminds me, I need to check them out again...) because I'd really like to have an option that works on Linux, and I despise supporting MS. But the fact of the matter is: right now, their browser is the best production browser that I've found.
Blocking "known" attackers sounds like a great idea...at first. And then you remember that many people are on a modem with a dynamic IP, and that most attacks are executed from previously hacked boxes. This is why counter-attacks are almost never a good idea; you generally end up attacking someone who's in your position, and then they mistake you for the real attacker, and you end up with a nice pretty lawsuit.
And the whole time the real attacker sits back and laughes his butt off.