The difference between atomic time and solar time is minuscule compared to the inaccuracy of a typical computer clock. No physicist would be using their computer clock for anything that requires serious precision.
The SI second should continue to be what it's been since 1967: 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom. But there's no reason such an arbitrary unit needs to be part of our calendar.
It's bad enough that the day doesn't fit into the year evenly -- there's no way around that, so we need leap days to fix it. But why do we have to introduce another annoyance, one that is even worse as it needs constant maintenance (unlike the leap-day system which hasn't needed adjustment since 1752), by trying to shoehorn the SI second into the day? As far as I can tell, this accomplishes nothing but making life harder for people.
So let the length of the day change, and let the second change with it.
Physicists can continue to use the constant cesium-133-defined second, let's call it the "SI second", for measurements when they need precision. But why does the SI second need to exactly equal the time_t second? I can't think of any reason.
Christ, as if programmers don't have enough damn complexity to deal with already. For the purposes of timekeeping, a second should just be defined as 1/86400 of a day. There, problem solved, we never have to screw with the calendar again for thousands of years.
Oh, get over your entitlement mentality already. You use the waste disposal service, you play by their rules. Don't like it? Buy your own damn landfill. It's not your God-given right to fill ours' up with recyclables.
Yeah! Stick it to that evil minimum-wage worker hired to sort through the recycles, who has no influence on the laws or on this program whatsoever. That'll show 'em!
Copyrights and patents are one of the things the Constitution actually allows Congress to make laws regarding:
Article I, section 8: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
The "limited time" part has been completely forgotten in the case of copyright, though.
Yes, let's hand over to the government the power to dictate to everyone what they can and can't do with the hardware they bought. Governments never abuse their power!
Just because one can feasibly do something oneself, doesn't mean that most people will. People are lazy. (How do computer makers stay in business when people could easily just buy the parts and assemble them themselves?)
The underlying architecture is fine. Ever since the 286 it's been possible to run code while limiting it to accessing only a specified set of memory addresses. What more is it supposed to do? It's not the CPUs' fault that OSes are failing so hard at the principle of least privilege.
They're just "executing code they're told to execute"? Well, of course - do you want them to refuse to execute "bad" code? If so, please show me an implementation of an IsCodeBad() function.
A big problem with this kind of license is that it doesn't work well with other licenses, like the GPL, that don't allow people to add restrictions. If you wanted to combine HPL and GPL code in a program, you couldn't do it - making it GPL would violate the HPL; making it HPL or "GPL-plus-don't-hurt-animals" would violate the GPL.
Government created this problem in the first place, by recognizing software patents, by allowing the monopolies created thereby (like MPEG-LA) to sue people over such patents in government courts, and by sending police after the people sued if they fail to pay the monopoly.
To stop enforcing patents is solving a problem with a reduction in the scope of government.
On a 1440kB floppy formatted by MS-DOS, there's a boot sector, two FATs (9 sectors each), and a root directory large enough to hold 224 32-byte entries (14 sectors).
That makes (2880 - 1 - 9 - 9 - 14) * 512 = 1457664 bytes available for files.
The laws of physics are mathematical, so fundamentally the human mind is an algorithm.
That does not follow. There are plenty of things one can describe mathematically but which are nevertheless uncomputable. The obvious example: A function defined as f(p,i) = { 1 if p halts on input i, 0 if not }, where p ranges over programs in some Turing-complete language.
fflush() just flushes stdio's buffer, so that any data written to the file is sent to the operating system (via write() on *nix), making it visible to other programs. It does not flush anything in the operating system's own buffers/caches. Also, fclose() calls fflush() automatically, so calling both is redundant.
You're probably thinking of fsync(), a system call that does actually force data to disk. And should almost never be used, unless you enjoy waiting through several seconds of disk grinding and general unresponsiveness.
I am an American. If it is a right for the Queen of England, it is a right for me.
We Americans have the rights to knight people, give or withhold the royal assent on acts of Parliament, and appoint the Prime Minister? Whoa. There's something I didn't learn in civics class.
And maybe the current owners of Amazon.com will keep that promise - maybe they won't ever do it again. But think ahead 10 years or, so by which time the company will probably have been bought by the Chinese. Do you really think the new owners will feel the same way, especially when their government says "Ban this list of books and delete all existing digital copies, or be executed"?
I don't think that much would change: if some piece of memory is accessible like RAM--that is, it can be modified quickly, with just a single CPU instruction--then for most practical purposes it might as well be volatile memory, because a software bug could easily lead to it being completely wiped.
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The difference between atomic time and solar time is minuscule compared to the inaccuracy of a typical computer clock. No physicist would be using their computer clock for anything that requires serious precision.
The SI second should continue to be what it's been since 1967: 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom. But there's no reason such an arbitrary unit needs to be part of our calendar.
It's bad enough that the day doesn't fit into the year evenly -- there's no way around that, so we need leap days to fix it. But why do we have to introduce another annoyance, one that is even worse as it needs constant maintenance (unlike the leap-day system which hasn't needed adjustment since 1752), by trying to shoehorn the SI second into the day? As far as I can tell, this accomplishes nothing but making life harder for people.
So let the length of the day change, and let the second change with it.
Physicists can continue to use the constant cesium-133-defined second, let's call it the "SI second", for measurements when they need precision. But why does the SI second need to exactly equal the time_t second? I can't think of any reason.
Christ, as if programmers don't have enough damn complexity to deal with already. For the purposes of timekeeping, a second should just be defined as 1/86400 of a day. There, problem solved, we never have to screw with the calendar again for thousands of years.
Oh, get over your entitlement mentality already. You use the waste disposal service, you play by their rules. Don't like it? Buy your own damn landfill. It's not your God-given right to fill ours' up with recyclables.
Yeah! Stick it to that evil minimum-wage worker hired to sort through the recycles, who has no influence on the laws or on this program whatsoever. That'll show 'em!
You mean, unlike the highways and freeways which always completely fund themselves? Not one dollar of "stolen" money there, right?
No - both prime factorization and discrete logarithms can be done in polynomial time with a quantum computer.
Copyrights and patents are one of the things the Constitution actually allows Congress to make laws regarding:
Article I, section 8: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"
The "limited time" part has been completely forgotten in the case of copyright, though.
Yes, let's hand over to the government the power to dictate to everyone what they can and can't do with the hardware they bought. Governments never abuse their power!
The spammers can just choose a random option until they get in. All that will do is slow them down a bit.
Just because one can feasibly do something oneself, doesn't mean that most people will. People are lazy. (How do computer makers stay in business when people could easily just buy the parts and assemble them themselves?)
How many people in Finland are getting away with real theft while the police are busy investigating imaginary theft?
According to the Department of Transportation, one human life is worth $2,600,000, meaning that the damage of this scam was approximately equal to that of 38 deaths. To put this in perspective, the Manson family almost earned death penalties for only 27. I hope the judge takes this into account when deciding sentencing.
Considering that the x86 platform is inherently insecure
How is it any more insecure than any other CPU architecture?
The underlying architecture is fine. Ever since the 286 it's been possible to run code while limiting it to accessing only a specified set of memory addresses. What more is it supposed to do? It's not the CPUs' fault that OSes are failing so hard at the principle of least privilege.
They're just "executing code they're told to execute"? Well, of course - do you want them to refuse to execute "bad" code? If so, please show me an implementation of an IsCodeBad() function.
A big problem with this kind of license is that it doesn't work well with other licenses, like the GPL, that don't allow people to add restrictions. If you wanted to combine HPL and GPL code in a program, you couldn't do it - making it GPL would violate the HPL; making it HPL or "GPL-plus-don't-hurt-animals" would violate the GPL.
Government created this problem in the first place, by recognizing software patents, by allowing the monopolies created thereby (like MPEG-LA) to sue people over such patents in government courts, and by sending police after the people sued if they fail to pay the monopoly.
To stop enforcing patents is solving a problem with a reduction in the scope of government.
On a 1440kB floppy formatted by MS-DOS, there's a boot sector, two FATs (9 sectors each), and a root directory large enough to hold 224 32-byte entries (14 sectors).
That makes (2880 - 1 - 9 - 9 - 14) * 512 = 1457664 bytes available for files.
The laws of physics are mathematical, so fundamentally the human mind is an algorithm.
That does not follow. There are plenty of things one can describe mathematically but which are nevertheless uncomputable. The obvious example: A function defined as f(p,i) = { 1 if p halts on input i, 0 if not }, where p ranges over programs in some Turing-complete language.
Being a common error, I think it's important to learn about participles so you don't end up dangling them.
fflush() just flushes stdio's buffer, so that any data written to the file is sent to the operating system (via write() on *nix), making it visible to other programs. It does not flush anything in the operating system's own buffers/caches. Also, fclose() calls fflush() automatically, so calling both is redundant.
You're probably thinking of fsync(), a system call that does actually force data to disk. And should almost never be used, unless you enjoy waiting through several seconds of disk grinding and general unresponsiveness.
I am an American. If it is a right for the Queen of England, it is a right for me.
We Americans have the rights to knight people, give or withhold the royal assent on acts of Parliament, and appoint the Prime Minister? Whoa. There's something I didn't learn in civics class.
And maybe the current owners of Amazon.com will keep that promise - maybe they won't ever do it again. But think ahead 10 years or, so by which time the company will probably have been bought by the Chinese. Do you really think the new owners will feel the same way, especially when their government says "Ban this list of books and delete all existing digital copies, or be executed"?
I don't think that much would change: if some piece of memory is accessible like RAM--that is, it can be modified quickly, with just a single CPU instruction--then for most practical purposes it might as well be volatile memory, because a software bug could easily lead to it being completely wiped.