Remember that the subjects of the experiment weren't lead to any actual wrong act. I've always heard this referred to as if it indicated exactly the same thing as it would when someone was really being tortured to death.
Whatever criteria the subjects actually used, the compliant ones came to the correct conclusion that it was okay to keep pressing the buttons. The disobedient ones either came to the incorrect conclusion that they would commit some crime, or the correct conclusion that this is what was truly expected of them from the experimenters. Too little is known to draw any valid conclusions from this, especially since it was obviously a psychological experiment to the subjects themselves (it just wasn't clear which experiment it was).
At any rate, this experiment was torture of its subjects as much as it would be if they were really giving the shocks. "Psychological experiments" like these are crimes, pure and simple, not to mention scientifically invalid smartass cracks about human nature.
Now you know that would just cause the bushmen you believe to be sparse and to have long since integrated into society to adopt the son of one of the current industry representatives as their messiah, resulting in them taking over the world riding elephants, letting hurricanes into mid-west USA and central Asia with nuclear weapons, and shouting loud enough to crack stone floors.
You wouldn't happen to be a grossly obese man who floats around on suspensors, would you?
A rare and expensive commodity is mined from central Africa and there are unsafe working conditions in the mines and violence over access to the deposits?
One thing puzzles me: why do the cafeterias for the coltan mines always have a drink machine that doesn't work and a counter staff that takes off lunch at the same time as the rest of the workers?
Blaming MS is like blaming the Death Star designer for the death of hundreds of thousands of loyal soldiers and the loss of untold billions of credits, when it was really the rebels who blew it up, regardless of any design flaws.
The internet is a hostile network, anything that connects to it should be secure. There's plenty of blame to go around.
This may not be the cause of this particular overflow, but it causes a very large number of them.
The main reason you'd use strncat rather than strcat is to avoid buffer overflows, yet instead of the obvious choice of feeding it the buffer size, you have to feed it the maximum number of characters to add. So to use it to prevent buffer overflows, you not only need to remember the buffer size, you have to track the current string length!
Avoid strncat! Even if you understand it, someone who changes your code might not.
Make something more intuitive:
char *buf_strcat(char *dest, char *src, size_t buflen){
char *cur=dest;
int i=0;
while(*cur && i<buflen-1){cur++; i++;}
while(*src && i<buflen-1){*cur++ = *src++; i++;}
*cur='\0';
return dest;
}
There's really nothing else like it. Not just the Milky Way, but the sheer number of stars everywhere in the sky in a dark area with clean air.
I live in southern central Canada, and going an hour away from Winnipeg (a fair-sized city in the middle of nowhere, by American, let alone European or Pacific rim, standards, so sprawling and covered with trees that it hardly looks like a city when you fly over it) is enough to get as good a view as you'll see anywhere.
It's not enough for me to make the trip just for that view, but it would be if I didn't see it a few times a year anyway. Don't miss it if you get a chance to just walk outside and look. It's an amazing thing to realize there really is no roof of any kind, just a clear view for a million parsecs.
OTOH, I was stunned in a similar way the first time I saw the glowing low cloud cover of a city night sky. I grew up in the country, and didn't realize that cloud cover didn't necessarily mean a pitch black sky at night. Very eerie.
...it's a product of a different value computation than you use. They generally get what they want from those "wasteful" choices.
They find the "wasteful" landscaping more beatiful. Their "wasteful" large vehicles are often safer than small, fuel-efficient vehicles (size remains the best single indicator of vehicle safety), and often confer that most precious of goods: status.
Let's not overlook the benefits of things that seem like absolutely blatant waste. For example: consuming twice as much food as one needs through inefficient processing and overeating. Once in a long while, a really bad year hits, and global famine results. People who normally consume twice what they need get by with minor inconvenience, while others begin resorting to cannibalism. Or consider war: who do you think will be better off between a country with huge factories that produce new oversized vehicles for its citizens every few years, and a country which, through careful design, only produces a handful of replacement parts for small cars that last practically forever? Who has the capacity to suddenly switch over to turning out mass quantities of the newest weapons?
Sometimes a prudent reserve isn't a static cache, but dynamic maintainance of supply lines which aren't currenly needed.
People never deliberately do things wastefully and stupidly, it's because they're busy with other things, haven't expended the effort to understand the problem, or are simply not bright enough to understand it themselves and would have to hire someone else to do it for them.
You might say, "No problem! I know the answer, they just have to do as I say." but even after you manage to communicate it to them, they have no reason to believe you. You're just one more person with an agenda claiming unrelated benefits for compliance, which makes you as unreliable as a commercial advertiser.
After reading this story, almost everyone will forget about it, because it's really not very important. Astronomy is an impractical profession and an unusual hobby; it might be different if you could never get away from the light, but this is simply about the convenience of star-gazers. There are better things to spend our resources on.
If AOL or another big ISP decided to 'crack' down, I'd imagine that an event could be organized where massive amounts of users cancelled at the same time/same day.
Yeah, just assume that they'd pick the worst possible strategy for their own purposes, because it'd be the way to punish the greatest number of their paying customers. That makes sense.
More realistically they'd:
-announce loudly that P2P clients were banned
-loudly kick a few dozen of the most-connected nodes
-send scary warnings in the email of other P2P users
-continue making examples until the majority complied
This is the way ISPs enforce any new restriction on widespread abuse. It works.
It is clear that P2P is being used to refer to something more precise than the traditional meaning of peer-to-peer networking, something with new relevance, which deserves its own name. So what are we going to call it?
The distinguishing technical feature is nodes storing the bulk of the data (connected as peers on the underlying network), which are run voluntarily by the end-users of the system, so they appear and disappear relatively quickly. The distinguishing use pattern is almost exclusively copyright violation.
"transient node architecture"?
"peer today, gone tomorrow"?
"thing sorta like Napster"?
"copyright violation hack"?
"litigation whack-a-mole"?
"free as in peer"?
In all seriousness, we can't go on calling it peer-to-peer and bitching that peer-to-peer is too general. Can anyone think of something technically accurate that doesn't come off as propaganda from either side?
Any legitimate use is a by-product of its illegitimate purpose, just like on Napster: if you're there to copy a dozen commercial songs, and you find one you think you might like which happens to be legally copyable, it only makes sense to grab it while you're there; that doesn't mean you'd sign on for that reason. With Freenet, it's more about porn and warez, but the same principle applies.
Freenet is inconvenient and, frankly, silly compared to the web. It's sole advantage is that it makes it hard to pin down copyright violators for legal action, because they pop up and disappear in a matter of hours.
The brain implants providing the connection were installed by somewhat hostile robots. They contain powerful computers actually running the local client. They were designed to kill the body when the client decides the body has been killed.
It just takes a while, and you must devote all your energy to it, not taking breaks for food or drink. Coincidentally, it takes about the same amount of time it takes to dies of thirst: two days or so. Less if you cry a lot and walk a long way.
I'd be a little more impressed if these one of these disgraced people just went, "Screw you guys, I'm going to the afterlife," rolled his eyes up in their sockets, and keeled over stone dead before the rest of the tribe stopped laughing at whatever faux pas he committed.
Do not try to wait for the sequel. That's impossible. Instead, realize the truth, that there is no sequel, there will never be a sequel, and it is you yourself you are waiting for.
Yet another uninformative top-level post.
on
Rhythms Flatlines
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Really now, how hard would it be to refer to them as "Rhythyms, a DSL connection provider," instead of forcing you to read the story to figure out whether it's something you care about.
Personally, I don't like any single feature of it (except, perhaps, Taasen, the chess-like spinoff game, which is unequivocally awesome). I don't like the cutesy otaku in-jokes, I don't like the oddball fractal universe, I don't like the monochrome art, I don't like the gay adventurers, I don't like the distasteful origin of the main character, etc. But somehow the whole of it just works and is entertaining.
I can't explain it, I just enjoy it. It's definitely worth a look.
Back before he used up his small cache of decent catchphrases, like "I can't decide whether to save the world or do the dishes!" and the audience got over the basic humor of names like "too much coffee man" and "too much german white chocolate woman with almonds."
Then it went through a period of lame, "I'm writing about how I can't think of anything to write!" attempts at humor.
Now it's just standard enviro-socialist garbage, as can be found in any college paper, and the comic is wrapped in an obnoxious shell of uninteresting E/N "content."
The guy had a dozen good jokes to tell, he told them, and now he's trying to milk them for a living after everybody stopped laughing. Pretty sad, really.
Here we are, posting comments on a link to commentary on a review of an analysis of the future of a medium for a mode of expression.
Now people are going to moderate these comments, and meta-moderate the moderation, and probably comment on both level of moderation.
Given the typical error factor in each level of analysis, there is a near certainty that there is no meaningful connection between this discussion and physical reality.
So does this mean we've gone insane or that we've evolved into creatures of pure thought and energy?
Curl is several years old. It was picking up a little momentum as a freely available language/browser (source available) hosted from an MIT page (http://curl.lcs.mit.edu/curl/). It was an academic project with a grant from DARPA. IIRC, the academic page simply disappeared one day (maybe I've just been unlucky every time I try to access it; it's cached on google).
A year or so later, the commercial page showed up with mounds of reeking lawyer-speak.
The idea is pretty good, but it had a hard time taking off when it was free. Maybe it would make sense for someone to do a similar Lisp/TeX cross, but their attitude toward how to promote it is so ridiculously wrong that it's obviously not going anywhere in its current form.
Don't you just love it when government-funded academic research gets fenced off by a clueless corporation?
Slashdot Mirror
Remember that the subjects of the experiment weren't lead to any actual wrong act. I've always heard this referred to as if it indicated exactly the same thing as it would when someone was really being tortured to death.
Whatever criteria the subjects actually used, the compliant ones came to the correct conclusion that it was okay to keep pressing the buttons. The disobedient ones either came to the incorrect conclusion that they would commit some crime, or the correct conclusion that this is what was truly expected of them from the experimenters. Too little is known to draw any valid conclusions from this, especially since it was obviously a psychological experiment to the subjects themselves (it just wasn't clear which experiment it was).
At any rate, this experiment was torture of its subjects as much as it would be if they were really giving the shocks. "Psychological experiments" like these are crimes, pure and simple, not to mention scientifically invalid smartass cracks about human nature.
Now you know that would just cause the bushmen you believe to be sparse and to have long since integrated into society to adopt the son of one of the current industry representatives as their messiah, resulting in them taking over the world riding elephants, letting hurricanes into mid-west USA and central Asia with nuclear weapons, and shouting loud enough to crack stone floors.
You wouldn't happen to be a grossly obese man who floats around on suspensors, would you?
A rare and expensive commodity is mined from central Africa and there are unsafe working conditions in the mines and violence over access to the deposits?
Gee, I'm surprised.
One thing puzzles me: why do the cafeterias for the coltan mines always have a drink machine that doesn't work and a counter staff that takes off lunch at the same time as the rest of the workers?
Blaming MS is like blaming the Death Star designer for the death of hundreds of thousands of loyal soldiers and the loss of untold billions of credits, when it was really the rebels who blew it up, regardless of any design flaws.
The internet is a hostile network, anything that connects to it should be secure. There's plenty of blame to go around.
Blame the bozo who designed strncat!
This may not be the cause of this particular overflow, but it causes a very large number of them.
The main reason you'd use strncat rather than strcat is to avoid buffer overflows, yet instead of the obvious choice of feeding it the buffer size, you have to feed it the maximum number of characters to add. So to use it to prevent buffer overflows, you not only need to remember the buffer size, you have to track the current string length!
Avoid strncat! Even if you understand it, someone who changes your code might not.
Make something more intuitive:
char *buf_strcat(char *dest, char *src, size_t buflen){
char *cur=dest;
int i=0;
while(*cur && i<buflen-1){cur++; i++;}
while(*src && i<buflen-1){*cur++ = *src++; i++;}
*cur='\0';
return dest;
}
There's really nothing else like it. Not just the Milky Way, but the sheer number of stars everywhere in the sky in a dark area with clean air.
I live in southern central Canada, and going an hour away from Winnipeg (a fair-sized city in the middle of nowhere, by American, let alone European or Pacific rim, standards, so sprawling and covered with trees that it hardly looks like a city when you fly over it) is enough to get as good a view as you'll see anywhere.
It's not enough for me to make the trip just for that view, but it would be if I didn't see it a few times a year anyway. Don't miss it if you get a chance to just walk outside and look. It's an amazing thing to realize there really is no roof of any kind, just a clear view for a million parsecs.
OTOH, I was stunned in a similar way the first time I saw the glowing low cloud cover of a city night sky. I grew up in the country, and didn't realize that cloud cover didn't necessarily mean a pitch black sky at night. Very eerie.
...it's a product of a different value computation than you use. They generally get what they want from those "wasteful" choices.
They find the "wasteful" landscaping more beatiful. Their "wasteful" large vehicles are often safer than small, fuel-efficient vehicles (size remains the best single indicator of vehicle safety), and often confer that most precious of goods: status.
Let's not overlook the benefits of things that seem like absolutely blatant waste. For example: consuming twice as much food as one needs through inefficient processing and overeating. Once in a long while, a really bad year hits, and global famine results. People who normally consume twice what they need get by with minor inconvenience, while others begin resorting to cannibalism. Or consider war: who do you think will be better off between a country with huge factories that produce new oversized vehicles for its citizens every few years, and a country which, through careful design, only produces a handful of replacement parts for small cars that last practically forever? Who has the capacity to suddenly switch over to turning out mass quantities of the newest weapons?
Sometimes a prudent reserve isn't a static cache, but dynamic maintainance of supply lines which aren't currenly needed.
People never deliberately do things wastefully and stupidly, it's because they're busy with other things, haven't expended the effort to understand the problem, or are simply not bright enough to understand it themselves and would have to hire someone else to do it for them.
You might say, "No problem! I know the answer, they just have to do as I say." but even after you manage to communicate it to them, they have no reason to believe you. You're just one more person with an agenda claiming unrelated benefits for compliance, which makes you as unreliable as a commercial advertiser.
After reading this story, almost everyone will forget about it, because it's really not very important. Astronomy is an impractical profession and an unusual hobby; it might be different if you could never get away from the light, but this is simply about the convenience of star-gazers. There are better things to spend our resources on.
Why, we should all stop using any and all outdoor lights immediately, to make things easier for astronomers living in densely-populated areas!
Come to think of it, we should also tear up all the asphalt so geologists can get a better look at the ground.
"for all computation-intensive purposes"
If AOL or another big ISP decided to 'crack' down, I'd imagine that an event could be organized where massive amounts of users cancelled at the same time/same day.
Yeah, just assume that they'd pick the worst possible strategy for their own purposes, because it'd be the way to punish the greatest number of their paying customers. That makes sense.
More realistically they'd:
-announce loudly that P2P clients were banned
-loudly kick a few dozen of the most-connected nodes
-send scary warnings in the email of other P2P users
-continue making examples until the majority complied
This is the way ISPs enforce any new restriction on widespread abuse. It works.
It is clear that P2P is being used to refer to something more precise than the traditional meaning of peer-to-peer networking, something with new relevance, which deserves its own name. So what are we going to call it?
The distinguishing technical feature is nodes storing the bulk of the data (connected as peers on the underlying network), which are run voluntarily by the end-users of the system, so they appear and disappear relatively quickly. The distinguishing use pattern is almost exclusively copyright violation.
"transient node architecture"?
"peer today, gone tomorrow"?
"thing sorta like Napster"?
"copyright violation hack"?
"litigation whack-a-mole"?
"free as in peer"?
In all seriousness, we can't go on calling it peer-to-peer and bitching that peer-to-peer is too general. Can anyone think of something technically accurate that doesn't come off as propaganda from either side?
Any legitimate use is a by-product of its illegitimate purpose, just like on Napster: if you're there to copy a dozen commercial songs, and you find one you think you might like which happens to be legally copyable, it only makes sense to grab it while you're there; that doesn't mean you'd sign on for that reason. With Freenet, it's more about porn and warez, but the same principle applies.
Freenet is inconvenient and, frankly, silly compared to the web. It's sole advantage is that it makes it hard to pin down copyright violators for legal action, because they pop up and disappear in a matter of hours.
The brain implants providing the connection were installed by somewhat hostile robots. They contain powerful computers actually running the local client. They were designed to kill the body when the client decides the body has been killed.
Same old lesson: never trust the client.
It just takes a while, and you must devote all your energy to it, not taking breaks for food or drink. Coincidentally, it takes about the same amount of time it takes to dies of thirst: two days or so. Less if you cry a lot and walk a long way.
I'd be a little more impressed if these one of these disgraced people just went, "Screw you guys, I'm going to the afterlife," rolled his eyes up in their sockets, and keeled over stone dead before the rest of the tribe stopped laughing at whatever faux pas he committed.
They sure dodged a bullet on that one! Wonder where they picked up that trick?
[flees the hail of rocks and rotten vegetables]
'nuff said
Do not try to wait for the sequel. That's impossible. Instead, realize the truth, that there is no sequel, there will never be a sequel, and it is you yourself you are waiting for.
Really now, how hard would it be to refer to them as "Rhythyms, a DSL connection provider," instead of forcing you to read the story to figure out whether it's something you care about.
Unicorn Jelly is great. It's great in strange ways.
Personally, I don't like any single feature of it (except, perhaps, Taasen, the chess-like spinoff game, which is unequivocally awesome). I don't like the cutesy otaku in-jokes, I don't like the oddball fractal universe, I don't like the monochrome art, I don't like the gay adventurers, I don't like the distasteful origin of the main character, etc. But somehow the whole of it just works and is entertaining.
I can't explain it, I just enjoy it. It's definitely worth a look.
Back before he used up his small cache of decent catchphrases, like "I can't decide whether to save the world or do the dishes!" and the audience got over the basic humor of names like "too much coffee man" and "too much german white chocolate woman with almonds."
Then it went through a period of lame, "I'm writing about how I can't think of anything to write!" attempts at humor.
Now it's just standard enviro-socialist garbage, as can be found in any college paper, and the comic is wrapped in an obnoxious shell of uninteresting E/N "content."
The guy had a dozen good jokes to tell, he told them, and now he's trying to milk them for a living after everybody stopped laughing. Pretty sad, really.
Here we are, posting comments on a link to commentary on a review of an analysis of the future of a medium for a mode of expression.
Now people are going to moderate these comments, and meta-moderate the moderation, and probably comment on both level of moderation.
Given the typical error factor in each level of analysis, there is a near certainty that there is no meaningful connection between this discussion and physical reality.
So does this mean we've gone insane or that we've evolved into creatures of pure thought and energy?
Curl is several years old. It was picking up a little momentum as a freely available language/browser (source available) hosted from an MIT page (http://curl.lcs.mit.edu/curl/). It was an academic project with a grant from DARPA. IIRC, the academic page simply disappeared one day (maybe I've just been unlucky every time I try to access it; it's cached on google).
A year or so later, the commercial page showed up with mounds of reeking lawyer-speak.
The idea is pretty good, but it had a hard time taking off when it was free. Maybe it would make sense for someone to do a similar Lisp/TeX cross, but their attitude toward how to promote it is so ridiculously wrong that it's obviously not going anywhere in its current form.
Don't you just love it when government-funded academic research gets fenced off by a clueless corporation?