IBM labs (the MITRE Kanji printer labs, specifically) were incredibly uncomfortable, required long, annoying walks from the parking lot and between locations and buildings, and were run in an extremely uncreative manner
When I was at the Cambridge Scientific Center in the late '80s / early '90s, it was quite a nice space, and had a very casual culture, by IBM standards. No dress code, posters on the walls, etc. And we had (shared) offices, not cubicles.
Sure, it's an anecdote - but then I'm not the one generalizing about "IBM labs".
And of course tastes differ. I wouldn't mind working at a location where traditional business dress was required, because I like wearing suits. For some people that's anathema. I wouldn't mind not having a window in my office (indeed I've spent happy years in such offices, and in fact they're useful for avoiding glare, etc) if there are windows in public areas. And so on.
If the point is to spread terror, the destroying an aircraft seems to be more effective than blowing up a queue. Not only is the visual of an aircraft crashing to the earth more vivid, but it demonstrates that security itself is ineffective.
That assumes the terror planners are competent.
The "DC sniper" attacks had the Washington, D.C. area in a tizzy for three weeks. They required two "operatives", a rifle, and an old car. No training or planning. And if Muhammad and Malvo hadn't gotten greedy, they could have kept it up for years, particularly if they occasionally moved on to other cities.
There are plenty of other well-known terrorism strategies that have low initial and ongoing costs and don't require suicide operatives (a high cost in itself). Think tanks like RAND have been writing papers on them since the 1960s. A number of the "movie terror plots" from the contests Schneier used to hold are practical. Any so-called mastermind should have been able to achieve out dozens of effective attacks, with considerable dismay among the populace, in any country of his choice.
The evidence suggests that most of the people interested in conducting terror attacks wait for instructions from the planners, and the planners are obsessed with a relatively small class of attacks that are based on irrational emotional positions rather than any rational calculus of potential affective or material effect.
I figure it's a sop to the airline industry, forcing passengers to rely on their crummy in-flight "entertainment". They'll be banning books in the cabin next.
censoring speech (whatever that speech is) doesn't actually change people's hearts and minds. It just pushes the speech into darker corners of the web.
I agree with that when we're talking about broad censorship by an effective monopoly, whether it's the government or someone who holds an overwhelming position in a particular medium (like, say, Google with web search).
When it's a single non-dominant publisher, though, I can't really fault them for deciding not to publish things they don't like. I don't think I'd have grounds for complaining if they closed my accounts.[1] Twitter is hardly a monopoly, and "extremist" speech is easy to find on the web regardless of what Twitter does. I wouldn't call being kicked off Twitter "push[ed]... into darker corners".
As a matter of principle, if I were running a platform such as Twitter, would I hold freedom of expression on my platform up higher than refusing to promote speech I disagree with? I'm not at all sure that I would. Depending on how I presented that platform (is it a place for people to talk about specific topics I've defined, or an open forum?), I'd probably permit material I disagreed with as long as I thought it was well-reasoned, supported, and mature. But I wouldn't allow offensive speech simply to keep it in the light, because there are plenty of other venues for that.
[1] N.B. I have never actually "tweeted", from either my personal or business Twitter accounts. People I respect asked me to create them, so I did. Actually using them would be a step too far, though.
I'm amazed at people that get on twitter and say horrible things to other people they don't even know.
Amazed? I can see "disappointed" or "saddened", but we have a vast corpus of evidence from the past few decades demonstrating that sort of behavior is normal in online discourse. I have academic articles discussing it from the mid-1990s,[1] and it was a truism among regulars on Usenet and BBSes and other online forums as far back as at least the early '80s.
It seems that a few factors in particular compound to increase the probability of adversarial communication with strangers online: a low barrier to entry (it takes very little time or money to dash off an angry reply), immediacy (most of these channels are low-latency so there's little "cooling-off" time), narrow feedback (you can't see the person you're arguing with or hear their tone of voice), and a lack of corrective sanctions from the community.
These add up to making the cost of flaming very low, and the psychological reward high. The latter is due to that immediacy plus the evolved inclination to win arguments, as demonstrated extensively by any number of (relatively) sound psychological experiments over the past century.
Arguing rationally is learned behavior and requires an investment mindset - you give up the short-term reward in favor of longer-term ones such as self-actualization ("I am the sort of person who resists the urge to flame and wins arguments on merit") and possibly more-durable reputation in certain social circles. It means doing work in online discussions, and most people treat those as entertainment and want to avoid the additional labor.
So points for you, and it's something we all ought to aspire to; but as long as people are the sort of people we'd recognize, it's going to be a minority behavior.
[1] Hell, I wrote one that touches on it myself, in the "Geographies of Cyberspace" special issue of good ol' Works and Days.
I'm surprised, to be honest. I attended public grammar schools quite a few years ago in Massachusetts - not in Boston, but in the vicinity - and we didn't use Mercator. Besides the obligatory globes, all the classrooms had one of the interrupted projections. I think it may have been Boggs eumorphic. Besides being somewhat less distorted, it was a good prompt for explaining projections.
I quite liked maps and globes as a kid. My mother had a really nice big desk globe with a light in it. The globe was marked politically, but when the light was on, an inner printing with physical features showed through. So you could flip it on and off and see how physical barriers influenced political boundaries and that sort of thing.
We kids had a pair of smaller globes, one of the Earth and one of the Moon. A present from my grandmother, I think - probably among the ones we spent the most time with (along with encyclopedias and the like).
What year would that Nobel Peace Prize have been awarded?
You're asking for more information from someone who doesn't know "noble" from "Nobel", and doesn't know "peace" from "economics"?
I'll guess BG doesn't know the difference between the Nobel Prizes proper and the SNB Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel either, though I suppose in this context it doesn't make much difference, since his argument is just "hey, Friedman was awarded some famous prize, so I'm right, jerk!".
I suppose we might also note that the prize was officially awarded to Friedman "for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy", and not "based off his 1976 dissertation on price settings and behavior". Friedman wrote his dissertation in '45. I don't think he published anything new and significant in '76, and in any case the Nobel Committee doesn't give you the prize for something you just wrote the other day. There's a bit of latency. I believe Friedman's consumption-analysis work was mostly done in the '50s.
Lehman Brothers. $680B in supposed assets (and $22B in actual capital), then bankrupt a month later.
Bear Stearns. In 2006, $350B in assets ($66B in capital), and the "Most Admired" securities firm in the US (Fortune magazine survey). In 2008, wiped out and bought by JP Morgan for a song.
WorldCom. $104B in assets when it filed for bankruptcy in 2002, after its huge accounting fraud was discovered. Though WC re-emerged from bankruptcy as MCI and was then bought by Verizon, so I suppose it's debatable whether it "folded" - it was a fairly orderly reorganization. Same can be said for e.g. Global Crossing.
Most of the other big bankruptcies in the US were similarly either bailed out, bought out, or reorganized. It's true that it's relatively rare for a company with that kind of capital to simply fall apart - someone will want to feast on that corpse.
The original phrase is most likely "hear, hear", a Parliamentary cry of support, as in "hear what that dude is saying!".
But perhaps you knew that and were using the homonym for the purpose of amusement. And, of course, there's little chance of confusion. And probably the "wrong" (etymologically unjustified) version of the phrase is close to achieving parity with the "correct" one anyway. (I tried the Google Books ngram viewer, but there are too many false positives.)
Ah, the Indiana General Assembly. All for "local control", as long as "local" means them.
"Overreach" is an ambiguous term. Legally, I suspect this is valid; I'm not about to pour over the whole Indiana constitution, but I suspect the courts would consider it "general" and thus not fall foul of 4.22. And there doesn't seem to be much else in the constitution that protects local-government powers. (IA very much NAL, but I'm happy to pretend on the Internet.)
Conceptually, it looks like an encroachment on powers historically delegated to local governments, such as zoning. But again those seem to be at the discretion of the General Assembly, and what the GA giveth, the GA can taketh the hell back.
Personally, I think it's an asshole move, but then I don't like AirBnB and the rest of the "sharing economy". I don't know that I have any better reason for disliking this bill. And certainly there are times when I don't care for things the local governments in my necks[1] of the woods do, and I may from time to time dream of the state legislatures reining them in. Who's to say who's right?[2]
[1] I own houses in two states. Neither of them happens to be Indiana. I have quite a number of friends there, but I don't know their opinion on this. Not that you care. Why are you even reading this footnote?
[2] I kid. This is the Internet, so of course I'm right.
This is a perfect response. It's angry, confrontational, egotistic, and completely unhelpful. Bravo!
I can't disagree, though. Software is already nearly error-free, and I've never seen a programmer who produced anything other than excellent code. If O'Reilly can't publish a book of programming advice that's perfect, they shouldn't publish anything at all.
What this means in *contemporary* languages is that you *do* use polymophism
No. Polymorphism is not necessary (or sufficient) for an ADT. They're orthogonal concepts.
ADTs are entirely realizable in non-OO languages. They have a long history in traditional non-OO LISP variants, for instance. Consider for example the classic text Elements of Programming Languages by Friedman et al., which introduces ADTs in the second or third chapter,[1] and refers to them extensively throughout, but uses non-OO Scheme as its illustrative language.
In C, ADTs are fully realized by pointers to incomplete structures, which make the implementation inaccessible to ADT consumers. Of course it's possible to have explicit polymorphism in C (with methods implemented as explicit function pointers rather than a vtable or other dispatch construct hidden by the language implementation), and it's even possible to combine that with incomplete structs (though invocation has to be handled by a layer which has access to the type implementation, so it's no longer an ADT at the point of dispatch). But, again, that polymorphism is orthogonal to type abstraction.
I've just skimmed Khan's ADT contribution on the website (which started this thread), and in my opinion it's not wrong per se, but it's not very good either. It does conflate polymorphism and abstraction, and wanders off the path into such matters as static versus dynamic typing. I haven't looked at the other contributions; I hope they're generally better.
[1] It's the third chapter in the '89 draft copy (with the old PL:ARI title) I have, and the second chapter in the third edition of EOPL. I assume the first and second editions are similar.
Of course, "most secure browser" is far too vague to mean anything. There's no threat model specified, and web browsers now do so many things that their "security" is extremely nebulous. The claim is just puffery, like "Microsoft cigarettes are the smoothest!".
[1] I used to use Mosaic, back in 1993, but I've given it up since.
"Not feasible in practice" is just what people said about stack smashing, until Levy published "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit".
"Gee, I think this looks pretty hard, and I've written some code, bro!" is a pretty weak security analysis, and a worse mitigation.
(And, of course, there are a great many C# developers who know very little about how the CLR works, or what goes on in an AppDomain, etc. As a demonstration of authority, "C# developer since 2k3" is pretty weak too.)
Don't get me wrong - I appreciate the Xen team's efforts at security. And other hypervisors have their own problems (though it's been a while since I've seen a report of a VM escape from PR/SM). And "secure" isn't meaningful as an absolute; it only means something in relation to a threat model. But it's still rather premature to label Xen "very secure" in general, assuming a reasonable threat model.
If someone invents an auto-bug-finder, won't every software company run it on their software before releasing it, knowing that if they don't, the malware creators will?
History suggests not. We have hundreds or thousands of static-analysis and dynamic-analysis tools, ranging from simple linters to hybrid-symbolic-and-instrumented-execution ones. Many are free, and commercial ones typically include convenient UIs, training, and ample support. Yet many companies still release software that doesn't even compile warning-free, much less run analysis tools against their source or binaries.
In fact, there are a number of published tools which do most of the work of chaining vulnerabilities into exploits. Leaks suggest that malware creators, whatever their resources and motivation (i.e. everything from the lone enthusiast to state actors), still do a lot of the work by hand. But I'm sure many of them are playing with automation, if they aren't using it "in production" already.
Indeed, we have excellent evidence of automated "hacking" as far back as 1999, from the experiences of The Internet Auditing Project. See http://www.viacorp.com/auditing.html; if you're impatient, search for "custom built software penetration agent". Now, that was apparently a tool which automated the process of searching for known exploits from a UNIX shell prompt, and not a code-analysis exploit builder, but it shows that, yes, when something can be automated, someone's going to automate it. It's pretty safe to assume that in the 18 years since more than one organization has looked at automatically finding vulnerabilities and assembling them into exploits, particularly since there's research in the area (because, again, if it's there, someone will research it).
The WikiLeakies need to grow up. John Young may be a class-A curmudgeon (I've been on the wrong side of his disgruntlement myself), but Cryptome has been doing this since long before Assange was a gleam in the media's eye, and behaving like a site run by adults in the process.
There are far too many self-important glory-hounds associated with WikiLeaks (starting, of course, with the Fugitive himself). The organization has certainly done good in disclosing some important materials, but is all too easily distracted from its ostensible core mission.
Withholding 0-days from vendors is bad, regardless of whether it's the CIA or WikiLeaks that does it.
I'm not particularly tall or broad-shouldered (just quietly handsome), but I support the OP's position. Even if I fit into coach-class seats, that doesn't guarantee the person sitting next to me will.
I'd be happy to see, oh, a 15% or 20% price increase across the board if it meant a bit more seating room. You wouldn't be? Well, consumers often have different opinions on price / value trade-offs.
As for upgrading: I just looked at a random itinerary for a route I sometimes fly. Economy Plus was only available in one direction (for a flight six weeks from today), at a 24% premium. Presumably if it had been available in both directions I'd be looking at around a 50% additional charge. Business Class was almost nine times as expensive.
What I'd really like, though, is to see fees for checked luggage eliminated. Carry-on luggage is in my mind one of the worst aspects of air travel. People trying to cram their bags into the overhead compartments, or haul them down at the end of the flight, cause most of the latency in boarding and disembarking. They fight over luggage space, and fight to board early in order to get it. It's madness, so what have the airlines done? Created a huge incentive against using the alternative.
I had a better education with regard to grammar than students in most of the schools in my area, and even I am not absolutely sure what is technically correct
Easily solved: neither is "technically correct". English is a natural language and has no generally-recognized authority. Ascribing rules to it is the prescriptive fallacy. Any English statement that's understood by a sufficiently-large audience is "correct", and terms like "understood" and "sufficiently-large" have no precise definitions either.
Descriptivism is the only supportable position regarding English usage. That has always been the case - there probably weren't any attempts to standardize Old English, and by the time Middle English got rolling, with competing Germanic and Romance vocabularies and wildly inconsistent orthography, all bets were off. The occasional schoolmarmish attempts by self-appointed language fiddlers like the Neo-Augustans to clamp down often had some effect, but never anything like what they hoped to achieve.
As satire, though, I think it's too subtle; it misses the mark. If you're serious, then please forget this line of argument unless and until you're a practicing linguist at the height of structuralism in the early 20th century. Actually, don't even bother with it then.
In American English, it's quite clear that the two items were meant to be separate and no comma is required before the last conjunction.
Impressively wrong-headed.
Would you care to cite the methodologically-sound, comprehensive research on the (non-)use of the serial comma in "American English" (a collection of a huge number of dialects) and the unambiguous interpretation of its absence by various readers thereof? I'm sure we'd be interested to see it.
Since the phrase is, under any rational analysis, de facto ambiguous - normal English usage allows either interpretation - your claim that "it's quite clear" one interpretation is obviously intended requires rather extraordinary evidence in its support.
(Since this is a question of interpreting a statute, we can overlook the intentional fallacy in this case, at least for the moment. There's a secondary issue of whether the members of the legislature who voted for the law all shared the same interpretation; but your marvelous sweeping generalization would cover that as well. A handy thing, this proof-by-fiat you're using.)
Indeed. And it should be "seen as improper usage", not "seen as grammatically incorrect". Application of the serial comma is a matter of usage and mechanics, not grammar.
And it should be either "should always be seen", or "has always been seen". No idea which the OP meant.
Of course, even with those changes it's still wrong. While I for one have always been an advocate of the serial comma, for the usual reasons of clarity and consistency, and for better mimesis of typical speech patterns, I'm fully aware that it has long been controversial even among experts. And given the lack of a generally-recognized authority for English usage, prescriptivists don't have any real ground to stand on.
That seems extremely far-fetched. Even now on OEM systems the TPM module and Secure Boot are not used to prevent you from installing an older/alternate OS or even for pirating stuff in Windows 10.
I work with one of the authors of the TPM 1.0 spec, and he certainly wasn't doing it to support DRM. I'd like to see the OP supply some evidence (but I'm not holding my breath).
Slashdot Mirror
IBM labs (the MITRE Kanji printer labs, specifically) were incredibly uncomfortable, required long, annoying walks from the parking lot and between locations and buildings, and were run in an extremely uncreative manner
When I was at the Cambridge Scientific Center in the late '80s / early '90s, it was quite a nice space, and had a very casual culture, by IBM standards. No dress code, posters on the walls, etc. And we had (shared) offices, not cubicles.
Sure, it's an anecdote - but then I'm not the one generalizing about "IBM labs".
And of course tastes differ. I wouldn't mind working at a location where traditional business dress was required, because I like wearing suits. For some people that's anathema. I wouldn't mind not having a window in my office (indeed I've spent happy years in such offices, and in fact they're useful for avoiding glare, etc) if there are windows in public areas. And so on.
If the point is to spread terror, the destroying an aircraft seems to be more effective than blowing up a queue. Not only is the visual of an aircraft crashing to the earth more vivid, but it demonstrates that security itself is ineffective.
That assumes the terror planners are competent.
The "DC sniper" attacks had the Washington, D.C. area in a tizzy for three weeks. They required two "operatives", a rifle, and an old car. No training or planning. And if Muhammad and Malvo hadn't gotten greedy, they could have kept it up for years, particularly if they occasionally moved on to other cities.
There are plenty of other well-known terrorism strategies that have low initial and ongoing costs and don't require suicide operatives (a high cost in itself). Think tanks like RAND have been writing papers on them since the 1960s. A number of the "movie terror plots" from the contests Schneier used to hold are practical. Any so-called mastermind should have been able to achieve out dozens of effective attacks, with considerable dismay among the populace, in any country of his choice.
The evidence suggests that most of the people interested in conducting terror attacks wait for instructions from the planners, and the planners are obsessed with a relatively small class of attacks that are based on irrational emotional positions rather than any rational calculus of potential affective or material effect.
Unless, of course, their real goal is just to annoy us.
This is about cloning hard drives
I figure it's a sop to the airline industry, forcing passengers to rely on their crummy in-flight "entertainment". They'll be banning books in the cabin next.
censoring speech (whatever that speech is) doesn't actually change people's hearts and minds. It just pushes the speech into darker corners of the web.
I agree with that when we're talking about broad censorship by an effective monopoly, whether it's the government or someone who holds an overwhelming position in a particular medium (like, say, Google with web search).
When it's a single non-dominant publisher, though, I can't really fault them for deciding not to publish things they don't like. I don't think I'd have grounds for complaining if they closed my accounts.[1] Twitter is hardly a monopoly, and "extremist" speech is easy to find on the web regardless of what Twitter does. I wouldn't call being kicked off Twitter "push[ed] ... into darker corners".
As a matter of principle, if I were running a platform such as Twitter, would I hold freedom of expression on my platform up higher than refusing to promote speech I disagree with? I'm not at all sure that I would. Depending on how I presented that platform (is it a place for people to talk about specific topics I've defined, or an open forum?), I'd probably permit material I disagreed with as long as I thought it was well-reasoned, supported, and mature. But I wouldn't allow offensive speech simply to keep it in the light, because there are plenty of other venues for that.
[1] N.B. I have never actually "tweeted", from either my personal or business Twitter accounts. People I respect asked me to create them, so I did. Actually using them would be a step too far, though.
I'm amazed at people that get on twitter and say horrible things to other people they don't even know.
Amazed? I can see "disappointed" or "saddened", but we have a vast corpus of evidence from the past few decades demonstrating that sort of behavior is normal in online discourse. I have academic articles discussing it from the mid-1990s,[1] and it was a truism among regulars on Usenet and BBSes and other online forums as far back as at least the early '80s.
It seems that a few factors in particular compound to increase the probability of adversarial communication with strangers online: a low barrier to entry (it takes very little time or money to dash off an angry reply), immediacy (most of these channels are low-latency so there's little "cooling-off" time), narrow feedback (you can't see the person you're arguing with or hear their tone of voice), and a lack of corrective sanctions from the community.
These add up to making the cost of flaming very low, and the psychological reward high. The latter is due to that immediacy plus the evolved inclination to win arguments, as demonstrated extensively by any number of (relatively) sound psychological experiments over the past century.
Arguing rationally is learned behavior and requires an investment mindset - you give up the short-term reward in favor of longer-term ones such as self-actualization ("I am the sort of person who resists the urge to flame and wins arguments on merit") and possibly more-durable reputation in certain social circles. It means doing work in online discussions, and most people treat those as entertainment and want to avoid the additional labor.
So points for you, and it's something we all ought to aspire to; but as long as people are the sort of people we'd recognize, it's going to be a minority behavior.
[1] Hell, I wrote one that touches on it myself, in the "Geographies of Cyberspace" special issue of good ol' Works and Days.
I'm surprised, to be honest. I attended public grammar schools quite a few years ago in Massachusetts - not in Boston, but in the vicinity - and we didn't use Mercator. Besides the obligatory globes, all the classrooms had one of the interrupted projections. I think it may have been Boggs eumorphic. Besides being somewhat less distorted, it was a good prompt for explaining projections.
I quite liked maps and globes as a kid. My mother had a really nice big desk globe with a light in it. The globe was marked politically, but when the light was on, an inner printing with physical features showed through. So you could flip it on and off and see how physical barriers influenced political boundaries and that sort of thing.
We kids had a pair of smaller globes, one of the Earth and one of the Moon. A present from my grandmother, I think - probably among the ones we spent the most time with (along with encyclopedias and the like).
And Microsoft has never screwed up an update, so they're perfectly safe.
And they've never installed anything users didn't want.
And they never forcibly reboot your system, or nag you to do so.
Oh, wait.
What year would that Nobel Peace Prize have been awarded?
You're asking for more information from someone who doesn't know "noble" from "Nobel", and doesn't know "peace" from "economics"?
I'll guess BG doesn't know the difference between the Nobel Prizes proper and the SNB Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel either, though I suppose in this context it doesn't make much difference, since his argument is just "hey, Friedman was awarded some famous prize, so I'm right, jerk!".
I suppose we might also note that the prize was officially awarded to Friedman "for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy", and not "based off his 1976 dissertation on price settings and behavior". Friedman wrote his dissertation in '45. I don't think he published anything new and significant in '76, and in any case the Nobel Committee doesn't give you the prize for something you just wrote the other day. There's a bit of latency. I believe Friedman's consumption-analysis work was mostly done in the '50s.
Yeah. Other examples:
Lehman Brothers. $680B in supposed assets (and $22B in actual capital), then bankrupt a month later.
Bear Stearns. In 2006, $350B in assets ($66B in capital), and the "Most Admired" securities firm in the US (Fortune magazine survey). In 2008, wiped out and bought by JP Morgan for a song.
WorldCom. $104B in assets when it filed for bankruptcy in 2002, after its huge accounting fraud was discovered. Though WC re-emerged from bankruptcy as MCI and was then bought by Verizon, so I suppose it's debatable whether it "folded" - it was a fairly orderly reorganization. Same can be said for e.g. Global Crossing.
Most of the other big bankruptcies in the US were similarly either bailed out, bought out, or reorganized. It's true that it's relatively rare for a company with that kind of capital to simply fall apart - someone will want to feast on that corpse.
Here, here.
The original phrase is most likely "hear, hear", a Parliamentary cry of support, as in "hear what that dude is saying!".
But perhaps you knew that and were using the homonym for the purpose of amusement. And, of course, there's little chance of confusion. And probably the "wrong" (etymologically unjustified) version of the phrase is close to achieving parity with the "correct" one anyway. (I tried the Google Books ngram viewer, but there are too many false positives.)
Carry on.
Ah, the Indiana General Assembly. All for "local control", as long as "local" means them.
"Overreach" is an ambiguous term. Legally, I suspect this is valid; I'm not about to pour over the whole Indiana constitution, but I suspect the courts would consider it "general" and thus not fall foul of 4.22. And there doesn't seem to be much else in the constitution that protects local-government powers. (IA very much NAL, but I'm happy to pretend on the Internet.)
Conceptually, it looks like an encroachment on powers historically delegated to local governments, such as zoning. But again those seem to be at the discretion of the General Assembly, and what the GA giveth, the GA can taketh the hell back.
Personally, I think it's an asshole move, but then I don't like AirBnB and the rest of the "sharing economy". I don't know that I have any better reason for disliking this bill. And certainly there are times when I don't care for things the local governments in my necks[1] of the woods do, and I may from time to time dream of the state legislatures reining them in. Who's to say who's right?[2]
[1] I own houses in two states. Neither of them happens to be Indiana. I have quite a number of friends there, but I don't know their opinion on this. Not that you care. Why are you even reading this footnote?
[2] I kid. This is the Internet, so of course I'm right.
You know, I think I completely misread your previous post. My apologies.
This is a perfect response. It's angry, confrontational, egotistic, and completely unhelpful. Bravo!
I can't disagree, though. Software is already nearly error-free, and I've never seen a programmer who produced anything other than excellent code. If O'Reilly can't publish a book of programming advice that's perfect, they shouldn't publish anything at all.
What this means in *contemporary* languages is that you *do* use polymophism
No. Polymorphism is not necessary (or sufficient) for an ADT. They're orthogonal concepts.
ADTs are entirely realizable in non-OO languages. They have a long history in traditional non-OO LISP variants, for instance. Consider for example the classic text Elements of Programming Languages by Friedman et al., which introduces ADTs in the second or third chapter,[1] and refers to them extensively throughout, but uses non-OO Scheme as its illustrative language.
In C, ADTs are fully realized by pointers to incomplete structures, which make the implementation inaccessible to ADT consumers. Of course it's possible to have explicit polymorphism in C (with methods implemented as explicit function pointers rather than a vtable or other dispatch construct hidden by the language implementation), and it's even possible to combine that with incomplete structs (though invocation has to be handled by a layer which has access to the type implementation, so it's no longer an ADT at the point of dispatch). But, again, that polymorphism is orthogonal to type abstraction.
I've just skimmed Khan's ADT contribution on the website (which started this thread), and in my opinion it's not wrong per se, but it's not very good either. It does conflate polymorphism and abstraction, and wanders off the path into such matters as static versus dynamic typing. I haven't looked at the other contributions; I hope they're generally better.
[1] It's the third chapter in the '89 draft copy (with the old PL:ARI title) I have, and the second chapter in the third edition of EOPL. I assume the first and second editions are similar.
I never use Edge, so it's the most secure browser for me!
Well, tied with Opera, Safari, Konqueror, Vivaldi, Sea Monkey, Mosaic,[1] HotJava, ...
Of course, "most secure browser" is far too vague to mean anything. There's no threat model specified, and web browsers now do so many things that their "security" is extremely nebulous. The claim is just puffery, like "Microsoft cigarettes are the smoothest!".
[1] I used to use Mosaic, back in 1993, but I've given it up since.
"Not feasible in practice" is just what people said about stack smashing, until Levy published "Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit".
"Gee, I think this looks pretty hard, and I've written some code, bro!" is a pretty weak security analysis, and a worse mitigation.
(And, of course, there are a great many C# developers who know very little about how the CLR works, or what goes on in an AppDomain, etc. As a demonstration of authority, "C# developer since 2k3" is pretty weak too.)
Xen is "very secure"?
There were 15 Xen security vulnerabilities fixed this month.
Shi et al. just presented a paper on architectural security problems with Xen.
Don't get me wrong - I appreciate the Xen team's efforts at security. And other hypervisors have their own problems (though it's been a while since I've seen a report of a VM escape from PR/SM). And "secure" isn't meaningful as an absolute; it only means something in relation to a threat model. But it's still rather premature to label Xen "very secure" in general, assuming a reasonable threat model.
If someone invents an auto-bug-finder, won't every software company run it on their software before releasing it, knowing that if they don't, the malware creators will?
History suggests not. We have hundreds or thousands of static-analysis and dynamic-analysis tools, ranging from simple linters to hybrid-symbolic-and-instrumented-execution ones. Many are free, and commercial ones typically include convenient UIs, training, and ample support. Yet many companies still release software that doesn't even compile warning-free, much less run analysis tools against their source or binaries.
In fact, there are a number of published tools which do most of the work of chaining vulnerabilities into exploits. Leaks suggest that malware creators, whatever their resources and motivation (i.e. everything from the lone enthusiast to state actors), still do a lot of the work by hand. But I'm sure many of them are playing with automation, if they aren't using it "in production" already.
Indeed, we have excellent evidence of automated "hacking" as far back as 1999, from the experiences of The Internet Auditing Project. See http://www.viacorp.com/auditing.html; if you're impatient, search for "custom built software penetration agent". Now, that was apparently a tool which automated the process of searching for known exploits from a UNIX shell prompt, and not a code-analysis exploit builder, but it shows that, yes, when something can be automated, someone's going to automate it. It's pretty safe to assume that in the 18 years since more than one organization has looked at automatically finding vulnerabilities and assembling them into exploits, particularly since there's research in the area (because, again, if it's there, someone will research it).
The WikiLeakies need to grow up. John Young may be a class-A curmudgeon (I've been on the wrong side of his disgruntlement myself), but Cryptome has been doing this since long before Assange was a gleam in the media's eye, and behaving like a site run by adults in the process.
There are far too many self-important glory-hounds associated with WikiLeaks (starting, of course, with the Fugitive himself). The organization has certainly done good in disclosing some important materials, but is all too easily distracted from its ostensible core mission.
Withholding 0-days from vendors is bad, regardless of whether it's the CIA or WikiLeaks that does it.
I'm not particularly tall or broad-shouldered (just quietly handsome), but I support the OP's position. Even if I fit into coach-class seats, that doesn't guarantee the person sitting next to me will.
I'd be happy to see, oh, a 15% or 20% price increase across the board if it meant a bit more seating room. You wouldn't be? Well, consumers often have different opinions on price / value trade-offs.
As for upgrading: I just looked at a random itinerary for a route I sometimes fly. Economy Plus was only available in one direction (for a flight six weeks from today), at a 24% premium. Presumably if it had been available in both directions I'd be looking at around a 50% additional charge. Business Class was almost nine times as expensive.
What I'd really like, though, is to see fees for checked luggage eliminated. Carry-on luggage is in my mind one of the worst aspects of air travel. People trying to cram their bags into the overhead compartments, or haul them down at the end of the flight, cause most of the latency in boarding and disembarking. They fight over luggage space, and fight to board early in order to get it. It's madness, so what have the airlines done? Created a huge incentive against using the alternative.
I had a better education with regard to grammar than students in most of the schools in my area, and even I am not absolutely sure what is technically correct
Easily solved: neither is "technically correct". English is a natural language and has no generally-recognized authority. Ascribing rules to it is the prescriptive fallacy. Any English statement that's understood by a sufficiently-large audience is "correct", and terms like "understood" and "sufficiently-large" have no precise definitions either.
Descriptivism is the only supportable position regarding English usage. That has always been the case - there probably weren't any attempts to standardize Old English, and by the time Middle English got rolling, with competing Germanic and Romance vocabularies and wildly inconsistent orthography, all bets were off. The occasional schoolmarmish attempts by self-appointed language fiddlers like the Neo-Augustans to clamp down often had some effect, but never anything like what they hoped to achieve.
I just wrote some grammars for a language...
The Poe's Law is strong with this one.
As satire, though, I think it's too subtle; it misses the mark. If you're serious, then please forget this line of argument unless and until you're a practicing linguist at the height of structuralism in the early 20th century. Actually, don't even bother with it then.
In American English, it's quite clear that the two items were meant to be separate and no comma is required before the last conjunction.
Impressively wrong-headed.
Would you care to cite the methodologically-sound, comprehensive research on the (non-)use of the serial comma in "American English" (a collection of a huge number of dialects) and the unambiguous interpretation of its absence by various readers thereof? I'm sure we'd be interested to see it.
Since the phrase is, under any rational analysis, de facto ambiguous - normal English usage allows either interpretation - your claim that "it's quite clear" one interpretation is obviously intended requires rather extraordinary evidence in its support.
(Since this is a question of interpreting a statute, we can overlook the intentional fallacy in this case, at least for the moment. There's a secondary issue of whether the members of the legislature who voted for the law all shared the same interpretation; but your marvelous sweeping generalization would cover that as well. A handy thing, this proof-by-fiat you're using.)
Indeed. And it should be "seen as improper usage", not "seen as grammatically incorrect". Application of the serial comma is a matter of usage and mechanics, not grammar.
And it should be either "should always be seen", or "has always been seen". No idea which the OP meant.
Of course, even with those changes it's still wrong. While I for one have always been an advocate of the serial comma, for the usual reasons of clarity and consistency, and for better mimesis of typical speech patterns, I'm fully aware that it has long been controversial even among experts. And given the lack of a generally-recognized authority for English usage, prescriptivists don't have any real ground to stand on.
That seems extremely far-fetched. Even now on OEM systems the TPM module and Secure Boot are not used to prevent you from installing an older/alternate OS or even for pirating stuff in Windows 10.
I work with one of the authors of the TPM 1.0 spec, and he certainly wasn't doing it to support DRM. I'd like to see the OP supply some evidence (but I'm not holding my breath).