Personally, I am on the fence about an ID system. I recognize a need for enforcement to be able to do their job; but at the same time I am not sure there is sufficient justification for imposing such a system on a national level, particularly given that the design of the USA seems to be, from everything I have read, to have been a coalition of independently governed states with a federal arm that performed ONLY those roles that the states could not.
But we already have a national ID. It's called a passport. U.S. passports even include biometric data and RFID now. Of course, you don't have to have a passport -- but try leaving the country and coming back without one. Effectively, your right to travel depends upon your being identified via a national ID.
The answer to "which one?" really depends on your needs (which is why there are multiple extensions in the first place).
I disagree. The reason why there are so many extensions that do more or less the same thing is that nobody in the PHP community can agree on a good way to do something. And this goes double for the core language, which includes features that do the same thing already, except that the features in the core language are so bad that you should skip them and start looking for an extension to do it right. The end result is no two PHP programmers will be doing things the same way, because they each picked a different extension to solve the same problem that PHP failed to solve for them.
What?
You heard me. If you want to get a lot of work programming for the Web, don't learn Python, because Python is relatively uncommon in Web programming, while PHP is near ubiquitous. You will get more Web work knowing PHP than knowing Python. That doesn't change the fact that PHP is an awful, awful language.
I thought the fever was to slow down the replication of the virus
Haven't heard that one, though it's possible. It's also possible that the higher-heat environment is more favorable for white blood cell production, which has the same effect because white cells attack the virus. There are a bunch of theories.
How much programming do you know now? Because if the answer is "very little" (or none), then you would do well to stay the hell away from PHP for as long as you can. PHP is useful because it's widely available on shared hosting servers, but as a language it is truly terrible. It will confuse you and leave you scratching your head at how to solve a problem at the same time that it's teaching you bad habits.
Just for starters, PHP's library is full of inexplicable inconsistencies. For example, the arguments for mysql_query are "querystring, resource." The arguments for pg_query (for PostgreSQL) are "resource, querystring." Why? Don't ask. This is just one example of the typically slipshod way PHP has been put together. Note, also, that in both cases "resource" is optional. Die-hard PHP programmers will surely chime in at this point, telling you you're much better off using a database abstraction layer anyway, but which one? The PHP documentation lists four, but there are more than that.
Python overall has been designed with much more care and forethought, is a much better language, and doesn't deserve to be put down like lame horses and PHP should be.
That said, if you want to get more Web work, faster, learn PHP.
So there would be 'free floating' and live viruses that your immune system would deal with.
Not really. A virus enters a cell, uses cell material to replicate, then the replicated viruses leave the cell in search of new cells to infect. Kill the cell, kill the virus, no replication, no more free-floating virus. This treatment could work very, very quickly.
AFAIK the only way the body can cure a virus once it goes totally rampant inside of your cells is to overheat to the point that it doesn't kill you but it kills the virus (Fever)
Nobody really knows the reason for fever. It might have that effect, but it's unlikely, because (for example) you need to heat water all the way to boiling for it to be effective in sterilizing medical equipment. The increased heat may increase the rate of certain chemical reactions, however. It's also possible that the purpose of fever is simply to disable you, so your body can concentrate on fighting the infection.
Neither do most viruses go "totally rampant," so I don't know why you mention it. TFA talks about this drug being used to treat influenza and the common cold. When is the last time a common cold virus went "totally rampant" in your body?
So to answer your original question: This can only be an incredibly good thing if it works as advertised.
On what do you base that? True, any miracle cure would be a good thing if it worked as advertised. But none of your statements about vaccines and antibodies answers the question of what happens when we don't rely on antibodies to cure vaccines, but instead take a medicine that interrupts the virus replication cycle. If we never allow a virus to take hold in our bodies long enough to require a full immune response, do we not risk maturing with untrained immune systems that attack our own bodies in the absence of pathogens?
On the other hand, now that I think about it, such a treatment really could be a miracle cure for HIV/AIDS patients and others with compromised immune systems, for whom an influenza infection really can be a huge deal.
I wonder, though, where a treatment like this leaves the human immune system.
A vaccine spurs the immune system to generate antibodies, so that when we're actually infected by the virus, the antibodies are available to combat it. Our own immune systems do all the work.
This new type of treatment, however, kills off the cells that have been infected by viruses, so the viruses aren't able to use the cell's materials to replicate. As the cells die, so do the viruses. From the sound of it, the treatment achieves this without any assistance from the immune system.
So to put it bluntly, in a world where everybody pops a few anti-flu pills every time they get a little sniffle, what does the human immune system do all day? I can see two possible outcomes:
1. Humans mature with improperly-tuned immune systems that overreact to fairly minor variations, resulting in an increased instance of allergies and autoimmune diseases. (We seem to already be seeing some of this now, with the overuse of antibiotics and antimicrobial agents in soaps etc.)
2. If the side effects of #1 are sufficiently bad for humans, it seems logical that over time, nature will select for people who have weaker overall immune systems. Can that be good?
I wonder, though, where a treatment like this leaves the human immune system.
A vaccine spurs the immune system to generate antibodies, so that when we're actually infected by the virus, the antibodies are available to combat it. Our own immune systems do all the work.
This new type of treatment, however, kills off the cells that have been infected by viruses, so the viruses aren't able to use the cell's materials to replicate. As the cells die, so do the viruses. From the sound of it, the treatment achieves this without any assistance from the immune system.
So to put it bluntly, in a world where everybody pops a few anti-flu pills every time they get a little sniffle, what does the human immune system do all day? I can see two possible outcomes:
1. Humans mature with improperly-tuned immune systems that overreact to fairly minor variations, resulting in an increased instance of allergies and autoimmune diseases. (We seem to already be seeing some of this now, with the overuse of antibiotics and antimicrobial agents in soaps etc.)
2. If the side effects of #1 are sufficiently bad for humans, it seems logical that over time, nature will select for people who have weaker overall immune systems. Can that be good?
See? I can pretend I didn't understand your point, too!
Yeah, but you're actually not understanding the point, too. The comparison of what you need to develop for a desktop platform to what you need to develop for a mobile platform is not valid. You are always going to need a PC with a keyboard, a monitor, and compilers on it to develop for any platform. If you're developing for a desktop OS, it makes a good deal of sense to buy a workstation that runs that same OS. If you're developing for a mobile platform, however, you're going to write and compile your code on a PC. It's very common, in fact, for developers to code on one platform and target another. For example, Java developers might use Windows workstations but deploy their code on Solaris. You can't do that if you want to develop for iOS. If you want to develop for that platform, you have to buy an Apple development workstation, even if it's only a Mac Mini. But you don't have to go out and buy a new computer if you want to develop for Android. You can install Eclipse and the Android SDK on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. Or a Solaris machine, in all likelihood. The barriers to entry for Android development are much lower than they are for iOS.
I taught high school computer science and its amazing to see the difference between kids. But more importantly, the concepts are what is hard. It is not the expression of those concepts.
At my junior high school, we had a computer class that taught some Basic programming. The thrust of it was just to get kids interested in computers, more than to teach real, practical programming concepts.
After that, there was nothing until junior year, when my high school offered an AP Computer Programming class. It was taught in Pascal (Apple Pascal, if I'm not mistaken). In order to take that class, you had to pass Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra II. By the time I was even old enough to be eligible to sign up for the class, however, I had already taught myself Basic, Pascal, Forth, assembly language, and C. Taking the class would have just been a perfunctory exercise to get the credit on my transcript. What's more, I couldn't imagine what they could possibly talking about in a high school intro programming class that would require all that math. (What does the slope of a line teach you about for-loops, anyway?)
These days, I can understand how computer science can be considered a branch of mathematics. But back then, on a purely practical level, I couldn't understand how math related to programming, at all. I was busy flunking out of every math class I could fall asleep in, but programming concepts presented no problems for me.
What's interesting is that, years later, a friend of mine is a math major, and as part of the curriculum they require all math majors to take some CS classes (intro programming). The classes are taught in C++ and/or Java -- she picked Java. I helped tutor her through the whole semester, and it was really interesting to me to see how much she struggled with the programming material. Why did she struggle? Because she had been through calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, analysis, and all these different math classes... and, just as an example, a variable in Java is NOT the same thing as a variable in mathematics. In a pure functional language with no side effects, maybe it is. But in Java, like most procedural languages, a variable in memory is really only analogous to the mathematical concept of a variable, and my friend had trouble understanding when a variable would contain the answer to some computation and when it wouldn't, or how the value of a variable mapped to the logical concepts of true and false, and all these different programming things that are unique to the practice of programming and don't have much to do with math.
Everything comes down to how your individual brain is wired, and after that it's all curriculum. There was no reason for me to learn advanced algebra just to play around with a programming language I already understood, if they weren't going to teach me any actual computer science concepts. Likewise, there was no reason for my friend the math major to learn Java or C++. Why not let her learn something like Scheme -- or better yet, Mathematica, which will probably come in handy for her "real" coursework?
Here's what Alan Moore, the author of V for Vendetta, had to say about the movie:
When I wrote "V," politics were taking a serious turn for the worse over here. We'd had [Conservative Party Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher in for two or three years, we'd had anti-Thatcher riots, we'd got the National Front and the right wing making serious advances. "V for Vendetta" was specifically about things like fascism and anarchy.
Those words, "fascism" and "anarchy," occur nowhere in the film. It's been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country. In my original story there had been a limited nuclear war, which had isolated Britain, caused a lot of chaos and a collapse of government, and a fascist totalitarian dictatorship had sprung up. Now, in the film, you've got a sinister group of right-wing figures — not fascists, but you know that they're bad guys — and what they have done is manufactured a bio-terror weapon in secret, so that they can fake a massive terrorist incident to get everybody on their side, so that they can pursue their right-wing agenda. It's a thwarted and frustrated and perhaps largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values [standing up] against a state run by neo-conservatives — which is not what "V for Vendetta" was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about [England]. The intent of the film is nothing like the intent of the book as I wrote it. And if the Wachowski brothers had felt moved to protest the way things were going in America, then wouldn't it have been more direct to do what I'd done and set a risky political narrative sometime in the near future that was obviously talking about the things going on today?
I saw pretty much the same thing that Moore saw in the script in the film itself, and I thought it was pretty limp-dicked and lame for the Wachowski brothers to spin it that way. They should have written their own movie if that was what they wanted; now most people associate V for Vendetta with a bunch of bullshit that its creator wanted nothing to do with. And I say this as a fairly liberal guy myself, and as someone who is not a particular fan of the original comics. I just thought the movie was silly and its creators came off as thoroughly uncreative clowns.
Me thinks Anon better come up with something a little more clever than a DDOS though or they are going to be the ones getting schooled.
My thought was that they better hope nobody who claims to represent Anonymous tries to extort money out of Facebook between now and November 5, or anybody who does try to launch a DDOS attack on that date could be going to jail.
True, and the movie V for Vendetta did tragically poorly at the box office. It was one of the best movies made that year yet few people bothered to see it, and not many more saw it on DVD.
And some of us saw it and thought it was puerile, pandering, and plain poor.
And FWIW it completely discarded Alan Moore's original themes of fascism versus anarchism and replaced them with some kind of lib-dem feelgood wank where the conclusion has everybody dressing up in identical V masks, because apparently the new, kinder, gentler uniformity of opinion and action is much preferable to the kind they had before, and if we all just band together we can get rid of Surrogate Dick Cheney and Surrogate George Bush and elect a left-wing government. Or something.
Yeah, it's called "write the website your goddamn self", and the only dependencies are an httpd and a text editor.
That obviously becomes untenable once you accumulate more than a page or two worth of content. Or do you fancy updating all your index pages manually every time content rolls off the homepage? Also, how does your 1995-model Web page support visitor comments?
PHP does everything in its power to make safe and secure software development damn near impossible. Add in some JavaScript, and an already bad situation gets much worse. It, too, is a horrible language for writing safe, secure software.
It seems to me you've just made the case for not writing your own Web software at all, but instead choosing a well-established, well-maintained open source project -- such as WordPress. TFA is surprisingly short on what versions of WordPress are vulnerable to the exploit (and there are many versions). I'm willing to bet, however, that people running the most up-to-date version are not vulnerable.
I don't think JavaScript is as shitty as you claim, but I'm no fan of PHP. Still, A.) It is very easy to find cheap shared hosting that supports PHP; less so for any other language; and B.) Name me a language that I could write a CMS in right now that makes it easy for me to write safe and secure database-backed Web applications. (The answer is there is none; no matter what my personal language preferences, my best bet is to use someone else's mature, open source codebase -- such as WordPress).
Not always. This guy is talking specifically about self-hosted WordPress sites, as opposed to the ones on WordPress.com. The vulnerabilities exist mainly in sites that don't keep up with the latest bugfixes, or potentially, sites that are hosted by shared hosting providers who leave stupid PHP options enabled, leading to the vulnerability. There are various reasons why any site might be compromised. There are plenty of sites running technologies other than PHP that have been compromised. The bottom line is that it does actually take a little bit of diligence to operate your own Web site. Even if you aren't a PHP programmer, you should understand the correct operation and maintenance procedures for your PHP-based software, or else you risk being compromised.
If you want to go the full distance, it's possible that someone with a prior felony conviction might actually be exonerated on a new charge, based on the DNA sample on file with the state.
I think a lot of the fear in this case is a "slippery slope" type of argument -- as in, once the government has all of this information, what do they intend to do with it? DNA sequencing provides a lot more information than simple identification. What if the government decides some day that people with certain genetic markers are predisposed to commit certain types of crimes (say, crimes of a sexual nature) and that someone meeting those terms and who has a felony conviction warrants special surveillance? Is it likely? Maybe not. Is it impossible? Absolutely not.
Unlawful arrest charges against cops are virtually unheard of.
Just because you don't hear about them doesn't mean they don't happen. The United States Code provides for civil -- not criminal -- redress for wrongful arrest. Civil suits are almost always settled out of court, and one of the provisions of the settlement is typically that the claimant doesn't go blabbing about the case.
Really? The phrase "Take that Google!" appears in a subhead from an article from PDC from three years ago and you call the article slanted? Where's the slant? What about the part where he says, "Surprisingly, Office Web applications run in Firefox and Safari, not just Internet Explorer. Far less shocking: You won't get Office Web apps free and clear as you do Google apps." If you hadn't already made up your mind about it, you might take those lines as a little jab against Microsoft.
Here's the thing, too: Eric Knorr works full-time for InfoWorld. He's its editor in chief. I don't remember whether he had that role in 2008; maybe not. But as editor in chief, he really doesn't write very much. He has a column that appears once a week, but you should take that pretty much the same way you do the "letter from the editor" that appears at the front of a magazine. In other words, it's the page you automatically skip before you go to read the magazine.
As far as editorial being slanted, however, it may surprise you to learn that InfoWorld content is contributed by quite a wide variety of freelance writers, myself included, and they hold various opinions on various topics. You claim that InfoWorld takes money from vendors. Well, obviously they do; they accept advertising. But the editors responsible for the content are not the same people responsible for selling advertising. In fact, some of that is coordinated centrally by IDG, a multi-billion dollar privately held company of which InfoWorld is a subsidiary.
I'm sure Eric Knorr is at least aware of who advertises on InfoWorld. I, however, am not (I use AdBlock, for one). And if Eric is actively trying to please advertisers, then he certainly hasn't shared it with me, because nobody ever tells me what I'm suppose to write. In fact, I spend more time telling InfoWorld editors that they don't know what they're talking about than the other way around.
Want proof? You just cited Eric Knorr writing a few hundred words after being shown a demo of the Office Web Apps at PDC in 2008. Guess what we did once we could actually get our hands on the Office Web Apps, two years later? That's right, InfoWorld gave it to me. And this is what I said about it. So you tell me: Am I in Microsoft's pocket, Google's pocket, or exactly whose pocket am I in now?
Normally I don't get into these kinds of arguments, but you're basically calling me and the company I work for a bunch of crooks, and not only is that somewhat offensive, but you have absolutely no evidence to support it.
It's a standard, agreed upon, connector that others are able to use.
Actually, it's not. It looked like a standard, agreed-upon connector when it was first unveiled, but once people got hold of the actual hardware, they realized Samsung had tweaked the connector enough that it's essentially proprietary.
In the current form of the tablet they did. And they have the patents to prove it.
This lawsuit doesn't seem to be about patents, if the linked documents are correct. It appears to be about "community design" rights, which is a subcategory of trademarks in the EU. Apple is literally suing because the Galaxy Tab looks like an iPad. Imagine if another company had the same rights over something like, I dunno... T-shirts.
FWIW, one thing that is annoying to me (that isn't really anybody on/.'s fault) is that my articles are often linked here totally out of context. This particular one wasn't any kind of front-page story or anything. It was an opinion column. Think page B-3 of the newspaper. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. But when it gets linked on/., all of a sudden I'm part of some vast, corrupt disinformation campaign, usually based on the article's headline and the summary alone -- neither of which I even had anything to do with.
This is one reason why I don't usually get involved with discussions of my own articles when they're linked here. It's frustrating trying to answer to attacks against opinions I don't actually hold, by people who haven't actually read what I wrote. (The other reason is that after saying sometimes as much as 2,500 words of what I want to say on a topic, it's usually time to shut up and let other people talk.)
Yeah? Well bow in respect to mine. I wrote TFA in question, and I didn't write any of the ones you cite. Neither were they submitted by me or anyone I know. Does my editorial recap known facts? Sure, but that's how one explains things. If you know every point contained in my editorial -- assuming you made it to the end -- consider yourself clever. Perhaps you weren't the intended audience.
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You are wrong. At least in California and Oregon and Washington, you are required to carry a state issued ID card at all times.
Sorry, it's you who are wrong. I can't speak for Oregon or Washington, but there is no such law in California.
Personally, I am on the fence about an ID system. I recognize a need for enforcement to be able to do their job; but at the same time I am not sure there is sufficient justification for imposing such a system on a national level, particularly given that the design of the USA seems to be, from everything I have read, to have been a coalition of independently governed states with a federal arm that performed ONLY those roles that the states could not.
But we already have a national ID. It's called a passport. U.S. passports even include biometric data and RFID now. Of course, you don't have to have a passport -- but try leaving the country and coming back without one. Effectively, your right to travel depends upon your being identified via a national ID.
The answer to "which one?" really depends on your needs (which is why there are multiple extensions in the first place).
I disagree. The reason why there are so many extensions that do more or less the same thing is that nobody in the PHP community can agree on a good way to do something. And this goes double for the core language, which includes features that do the same thing already, except that the features in the core language are so bad that you should skip them and start looking for an extension to do it right. The end result is no two PHP programmers will be doing things the same way, because they each picked a different extension to solve the same problem that PHP failed to solve for them.
What?
You heard me. If you want to get a lot of work programming for the Web, don't learn Python, because Python is relatively uncommon in Web programming, while PHP is near ubiquitous. You will get more Web work knowing PHP than knowing Python. That doesn't change the fact that PHP is an awful, awful language.
I thought the fever was to slow down the replication of the virus
Haven't heard that one, though it's possible. It's also possible that the higher-heat environment is more favorable for white blood cell production, which has the same effect because white cells attack the virus. There are a bunch of theories.
How much programming do you know now? Because if the answer is "very little" (or none), then you would do well to stay the hell away from PHP for as long as you can. PHP is useful because it's widely available on shared hosting servers, but as a language it is truly terrible. It will confuse you and leave you scratching your head at how to solve a problem at the same time that it's teaching you bad habits.
Just for starters, PHP's library is full of inexplicable inconsistencies. For example, the arguments for mysql_query are "querystring, resource." The arguments for pg_query (for PostgreSQL) are "resource, querystring." Why? Don't ask. This is just one example of the typically slipshod way PHP has been put together. Note, also, that in both cases "resource" is optional. Die-hard PHP programmers will surely chime in at this point, telling you you're much better off using a database abstraction layer anyway, but which one? The PHP documentation lists four, but there are more than that.
Python overall has been designed with much more care and forethought, is a much better language, and doesn't deserve to be put down like lame horses and PHP should be.
That said, if you want to get more Web work, faster, learn PHP.
So there would be 'free floating' and live viruses that your immune system would deal with.
Not really. A virus enters a cell, uses cell material to replicate, then the replicated viruses leave the cell in search of new cells to infect. Kill the cell, kill the virus, no replication, no more free-floating virus. This treatment could work very, very quickly.
AFAIK the only way the body can cure a virus once it goes totally rampant inside of your cells is to overheat to the point that it doesn't kill you but it kills the virus (Fever)
Nobody really knows the reason for fever. It might have that effect, but it's unlikely, because (for example) you need to heat water all the way to boiling for it to be effective in sterilizing medical equipment. The increased heat may increase the rate of certain chemical reactions, however. It's also possible that the purpose of fever is simply to disable you, so your body can concentrate on fighting the infection.
Neither do most viruses go "totally rampant," so I don't know why you mention it. TFA talks about this drug being used to treat influenza and the common cold. When is the last time a common cold virus went "totally rampant" in your body?
So to answer your original question: This can only be an incredibly good thing if it works as advertised.
On what do you base that? True, any miracle cure would be a good thing if it worked as advertised. But none of your statements about vaccines and antibodies answers the question of what happens when we don't rely on antibodies to cure vaccines, but instead take a medicine that interrupts the virus replication cycle. If we never allow a virus to take hold in our bodies long enough to require a full immune response, do we not risk maturing with untrained immune systems that attack our own bodies in the absence of pathogens?
On the other hand, now that I think about it, such a treatment really could be a miracle cure for HIV/AIDS patients and others with compromised immune systems, for whom an influenza infection really can be a huge deal.
I wonder, though, where a treatment like this leaves the human immune system.
A vaccine spurs the immune system to generate antibodies, so that when we're actually infected by the virus, the antibodies are available to combat it. Our own immune systems do all the work.
This new type of treatment, however, kills off the cells that have been infected by viruses, so the viruses aren't able to use the cell's materials to replicate. As the cells die, so do the viruses. From the sound of it, the treatment achieves this without any assistance from the immune system.
So to put it bluntly, in a world where everybody pops a few anti-flu pills every time they get a little sniffle, what does the human immune system do all day? I can see two possible outcomes:
Yikes, sorry about that... wrong thread. Damn tabs!
I wonder, though, where a treatment like this leaves the human immune system.
A vaccine spurs the immune system to generate antibodies, so that when we're actually infected by the virus, the antibodies are available to combat it. Our own immune systems do all the work.
This new type of treatment, however, kills off the cells that have been infected by viruses, so the viruses aren't able to use the cell's materials to replicate. As the cells die, so do the viruses. From the sound of it, the treatment achieves this without any assistance from the immune system.
So to put it bluntly, in a world where everybody pops a few anti-flu pills every time they get a little sniffle, what does the human immune system do all day? I can see two possible outcomes:
See? I can pretend I didn't understand your point, too!
Yeah, but you're actually not understanding the point, too. The comparison of what you need to develop for a desktop platform to what you need to develop for a mobile platform is not valid. You are always going to need a PC with a keyboard, a monitor, and compilers on it to develop for any platform. If you're developing for a desktop OS, it makes a good deal of sense to buy a workstation that runs that same OS. If you're developing for a mobile platform, however, you're going to write and compile your code on a PC. It's very common, in fact, for developers to code on one platform and target another. For example, Java developers might use Windows workstations but deploy their code on Solaris. You can't do that if you want to develop for iOS. If you want to develop for that platform, you have to buy an Apple development workstation, even if it's only a Mac Mini. But you don't have to go out and buy a new computer if you want to develop for Android. You can install Eclipse and the Android SDK on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux. Or a Solaris machine, in all likelihood. The barriers to entry for Android development are much lower than they are for iOS.
I taught high school computer science and its amazing to see the difference between kids. But more importantly, the concepts are what is hard. It is not the expression of those concepts.
At my junior high school, we had a computer class that taught some Basic programming. The thrust of it was just to get kids interested in computers, more than to teach real, practical programming concepts.
After that, there was nothing until junior year, when my high school offered an AP Computer Programming class. It was taught in Pascal (Apple Pascal, if I'm not mistaken). In order to take that class, you had to pass Algebra, Geometry, and Algebra II. By the time I was even old enough to be eligible to sign up for the class, however, I had already taught myself Basic, Pascal, Forth, assembly language, and C. Taking the class would have just been a perfunctory exercise to get the credit on my transcript. What's more, I couldn't imagine what they could possibly talking about in a high school intro programming class that would require all that math. (What does the slope of a line teach you about for-loops, anyway?)
These days, I can understand how computer science can be considered a branch of mathematics. But back then, on a purely practical level, I couldn't understand how math related to programming, at all. I was busy flunking out of every math class I could fall asleep in, but programming concepts presented no problems for me.
What's interesting is that, years later, a friend of mine is a math major, and as part of the curriculum they require all math majors to take some CS classes (intro programming). The classes are taught in C++ and/or Java -- she picked Java. I helped tutor her through the whole semester, and it was really interesting to me to see how much she struggled with the programming material. Why did she struggle? Because she had been through calculus, differential equations, linear algebra, analysis, and all these different math classes ... and, just as an example, a variable in Java is NOT the same thing as a variable in mathematics. In a pure functional language with no side effects, maybe it is. But in Java, like most procedural languages, a variable in memory is really only analogous to the mathematical concept of a variable, and my friend had trouble understanding when a variable would contain the answer to some computation and when it wouldn't, or how the value of a variable mapped to the logical concepts of true and false, and all these different programming things that are unique to the practice of programming and don't have much to do with math.
Everything comes down to how your individual brain is wired, and after that it's all curriculum. There was no reason for me to learn advanced algebra just to play around with a programming language I already understood, if they weren't going to teach me any actual computer science concepts. Likewise, there was no reason for my friend the math major to learn Java or C++. Why not let her learn something like Scheme -- or better yet, Mathematica, which will probably come in handy for her "real" coursework?
Here's what Alan Moore, the author of V for Vendetta, had to say about the movie:
When I wrote "V," politics were taking a serious turn for the worse over here. We'd had [Conservative Party Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher in for two or three years, we'd had anti-Thatcher riots, we'd got the National Front and the right wing making serious advances. "V for Vendetta" was specifically about things like fascism and anarchy.
Those words, "fascism" and "anarchy," occur nowhere in the film. It's been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country. In my original story there had been a limited nuclear war, which had isolated Britain, caused a lot of chaos and a collapse of government, and a fascist totalitarian dictatorship had sprung up. Now, in the film, you've got a sinister group of right-wing figures — not fascists, but you know that they're bad guys — and what they have done is manufactured a bio-terror weapon in secret, so that they can fake a massive terrorist incident to get everybody on their side, so that they can pursue their right-wing agenda. It's a thwarted and frustrated and perhaps largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values [standing up] against a state run by neo-conservatives — which is not what "V for Vendetta" was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about [England]. The intent of the film is nothing like the intent of the book as I wrote it. And if the Wachowski brothers had felt moved to protest the way things were going in America, then wouldn't it have been more direct to do what I'd done and set a risky political narrative sometime in the near future that was obviously talking about the things going on today?
I saw pretty much the same thing that Moore saw in the script in the film itself, and I thought it was pretty limp-dicked and lame for the Wachowski brothers to spin it that way. They should have written their own movie if that was what they wanted; now most people associate V for Vendetta with a bunch of bullshit that its creator wanted nothing to do with. And I say this as a fairly liberal guy myself, and as someone who is not a particular fan of the original comics. I just thought the movie was silly and its creators came off as thoroughly uncreative clowns.
Sometimes people are looking to place politics in films that aren't actually there
If you don't even think V for Vendetta is about politics then the Wachowski brothers failed even more miserably than I thought they did.
Me thinks Anon better come up with something a little more clever than a DDOS though or they are going to be the ones getting schooled.
My thought was that they better hope nobody who claims to represent Anonymous tries to extort money out of Facebook between now and November 5, or anybody who does try to launch a DDOS attack on that date could be going to jail.
True, and the movie V for Vendetta did tragically poorly at the box office. It was one of the best movies made that year yet few people bothered to see it, and not many more saw it on DVD.
And some of us saw it and thought it was puerile, pandering, and plain poor.
And FWIW it completely discarded Alan Moore's original themes of fascism versus anarchism and replaced them with some kind of lib-dem feelgood wank where the conclusion has everybody dressing up in identical V masks, because apparently the new, kinder, gentler uniformity of opinion and action is much preferable to the kind they had before, and if we all just band together we can get rid of Surrogate Dick Cheney and Surrogate George Bush and elect a left-wing government. Or something.
Yeah, it's called "write the website your goddamn self", and the only dependencies are an httpd and a text editor.
That obviously becomes untenable once you accumulate more than a page or two worth of content. Or do you fancy updating all your index pages manually every time content rolls off the homepage? Also, how does your 1995-model Web page support visitor comments?
PHP does everything in its power to make safe and secure software development damn near impossible. Add in some JavaScript, and an already bad situation gets much worse. It, too, is a horrible language for writing safe, secure software.
It seems to me you've just made the case for not writing your own Web software at all, but instead choosing a well-established, well-maintained open source project -- such as WordPress. TFA is surprisingly short on what versions of WordPress are vulnerable to the exploit (and there are many versions). I'm willing to bet, however, that people running the most up-to-date version are not vulnerable.
I don't think JavaScript is as shitty as you claim, but I'm no fan of PHP. Still, A.) It is very easy to find cheap shared hosting that supports PHP; less so for any other language; and B.) Name me a language that I could write a CMS in right now that makes it easy for me to write safe and secure database-backed Web applications. (The answer is there is none; no matter what my personal language preferences, my best bet is to use someone else's mature, open source codebase -- such as WordPress).
Not always. This guy is talking specifically about self-hosted WordPress sites, as opposed to the ones on WordPress.com. The vulnerabilities exist mainly in sites that don't keep up with the latest bugfixes, or potentially, sites that are hosted by shared hosting providers who leave stupid PHP options enabled, leading to the vulnerability. There are various reasons why any site might be compromised. There are plenty of sites running technologies other than PHP that have been compromised. The bottom line is that it does actually take a little bit of diligence to operate your own Web site. Even if you aren't a PHP programmer, you should understand the correct operation and maintenance procedures for your PHP-based software, or else you risk being compromised.
If you want to go the full distance, it's possible that someone with a prior felony conviction might actually be exonerated on a new charge, based on the DNA sample on file with the state.
I think a lot of the fear in this case is a "slippery slope" type of argument -- as in, once the government has all of this information, what do they intend to do with it? DNA sequencing provides a lot more information than simple identification. What if the government decides some day that people with certain genetic markers are predisposed to commit certain types of crimes (say, crimes of a sexual nature) and that someone meeting those terms and who has a felony conviction warrants special surveillance? Is it likely? Maybe not. Is it impossible? Absolutely not.
Unlawful arrest charges against cops are virtually unheard of.
Just because you don't hear about them doesn't mean they don't happen. The United States Code provides for civil -- not criminal -- redress for wrongful arrest. Civil suits are almost always settled out of court, and one of the provisions of the settlement is typically that the claimant doesn't go blabbing about the case.
Really? The phrase "Take that Google!" appears in a subhead from an article from PDC from three years ago and you call the article slanted? Where's the slant? What about the part where he says, "Surprisingly, Office Web applications run in Firefox and Safari, not just Internet Explorer. Far less shocking: You won't get Office Web apps free and clear as you do Google apps." If you hadn't already made up your mind about it, you might take those lines as a little jab against Microsoft.
Here's the thing, too: Eric Knorr works full-time for InfoWorld. He's its editor in chief. I don't remember whether he had that role in 2008; maybe not. But as editor in chief, he really doesn't write very much. He has a column that appears once a week, but you should take that pretty much the same way you do the "letter from the editor" that appears at the front of a magazine. In other words, it's the page you automatically skip before you go to read the magazine.
As far as editorial being slanted, however, it may surprise you to learn that InfoWorld content is contributed by quite a wide variety of freelance writers, myself included, and they hold various opinions on various topics. You claim that InfoWorld takes money from vendors. Well, obviously they do; they accept advertising. But the editors responsible for the content are not the same people responsible for selling advertising. In fact, some of that is coordinated centrally by IDG, a multi-billion dollar privately held company of which InfoWorld is a subsidiary.
I'm sure Eric Knorr is at least aware of who advertises on InfoWorld. I, however, am not (I use AdBlock, for one). And if Eric is actively trying to please advertisers, then he certainly hasn't shared it with me, because nobody ever tells me what I'm suppose to write. In fact, I spend more time telling InfoWorld editors that they don't know what they're talking about than the other way around.
Want proof? You just cited Eric Knorr writing a few hundred words after being shown a demo of the Office Web Apps at PDC in 2008. Guess what we did once we could actually get our hands on the Office Web Apps, two years later? That's right, InfoWorld gave it to me. And this is what I said about it. So you tell me: Am I in Microsoft's pocket, Google's pocket, or exactly whose pocket am I in now?
Normally I don't get into these kinds of arguments, but you're basically calling me and the company I work for a bunch of crooks, and not only is that somewhat offensive, but you have absolutely no evidence to support it.
It's a standard, agreed upon, connector that others are able to use.
Actually, it's not. It looked like a standard, agreed-upon connector when it was first unveiled, but once people got hold of the actual hardware, they realized Samsung had tweaked the connector enough that it's essentially proprietary.
In the current form of the tablet they did. And they have the patents to prove it.
This lawsuit doesn't seem to be about patents, if the linked documents are correct. It appears to be about "community design" rights, which is a subcategory of trademarks in the EU. Apple is literally suing because the Galaxy Tab looks like an iPad. Imagine if another company had the same rights over something like, I dunno... T-shirts.
Well thanks.
FWIW, one thing that is annoying to me (that isn't really anybody on /.'s fault) is that my articles are often linked here totally out of context. This particular one wasn't any kind of front-page story or anything. It was an opinion column. Think page B-3 of the newspaper. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong. But when it gets linked on /., all of a sudden I'm part of some vast, corrupt disinformation campaign, usually based on the article's headline and the summary alone -- neither of which I even had anything to do with.
This is one reason why I don't usually get involved with discussions of my own articles when they're linked here. It's frustrating trying to answer to attacks against opinions I don't actually hold, by people who haven't actually read what I wrote. (The other reason is that after saying sometimes as much as 2,500 words of what I want to say on a topic, it's usually time to shut up and let other people talk.)
I bow in respect to the lower UID.
Yeah? Well bow in respect to mine. I wrote TFA in question, and I didn't write any of the ones you cite. Neither were they submitted by me or anyone I know. Does my editorial recap known facts? Sure, but that's how one explains things. If you know every point contained in my editorial -- assuming you made it to the end -- consider yourself clever. Perhaps you weren't the intended audience.