well, i guess throwing war criticism in DARPA's face isn't exactly the most diplomatic approach, but cutting funding for an important application like OpenSSH over such personal issues seems like a pretty childish action to me! there's just nothing like being a "good patriot", i guess.
you're quite in awe of yourself, aren't you. i wasn't quoting the movie or anything, just too lazy to lookup the name of the short story. the movie actually picks up a few things from that specific story, as one escaped robot actually hides among many of its non-modified kind.
but i totally agree, the movie was atrocious. that's a pretty weak basis to criticize my post on, though.
i was just answering your (slightly arrogant) post that stated "you should reread the short stories then, because those robots always obeyed the laws [...]" and i was making the point that in this particular story the laws were tweaked, i.e. not obeyed unconditionally and unmodified.
please show a little more respect towards your fellow slashdotters, unless you want to be perceived as a total jerk.
you should reread the short stories then, because those robots always obeyed the laws since they were hardwired to break if they tried to violate the first law.
you should reread the short stories then, because the one used as a template for the film "i, robot" featured a series of robots for whom the laws were tweaked. this was done because the humans on a space stations had to shortly go through radiation fields which would cause damage only after longer exposure, but the robots would try to keep the humans from entering the radiation at all and then perish themselves in it.
the adjustment prooved potentially fatal though, because now with the option of inaction in face of danger, a robot could drop something heavy on a human being in the knowledge that it could prevent harm by getting there first, but then use its new inaction "feature" to not intervene.
i know, a badly worded summary of a good story, but it's kinda difficult to convey:)
yes, the "./configure" bit might have been a bit misplaced. but i was less "defining" unix and more trying to capture what frequent users of unix systems would have in common. and the "./configure" idea factored into it for me, although this might well be a GNU invention.
don't many programs under BSDs do it like that too, BTW?
i don't quite understand your MAC commentary. if i had meant MAC i would've said so.
The principle of least privilege requires that a user be given no more privilege than necessary to perform a job..
and from what i understand about unix systems, this has been an important aspect since they have supported multiple users. even though lacking ACLs and MAC, it's never been very fine-grained or comfortable.
- everything is a file - every file is a stream of bytes - do one thing and one thing well, Keep It Simple Stupid - human readable/editable config files - principle of least privilege - services as daemon processes - clear separation of kernel and userland (although this one is debatable) - multi-user environment (despite the name) - remote access facilities - console/automation oriented, powerful shells -./configure && make && make install
?
well, that's just a few things that come to my (linux/bsd slanted) view of what (a modern) unix is...
there's nothing like advertising with other people's wrong-doing, is there?
now "piracy estimates" are used to push business models... is this madness never going to end? let's all just agree that the collective conscience owes the music industry 1 quintillion dollars and be done with it.
"stealing" copyrighted material is wrong, pushing people into "law-circumvention" is too, suing them for ridiculous amounts of money certainly is. let's all just switch to legal (mostly not well produced) music and hope it'll get better in time. the big labels creep me out and the commercial online distributors are starting to scare me too, with their current line of reasoning.
they are basically blackmailing the music industry, saying "either you syndicate through us, or [we'll let] people steal it from right under your noses"
great, now soldiers will learn crowd control and interacting with other cultures in the isolation of a computer.
i don't want to be too cynical, and i'm sure this is an interesting approach, but i still would prefer soldiers to get this kind of cultural briefing in a less synthetical environment. like spending a few days with people from the target culture, or even better, spending a few days in a country where such a culture persists.
verbal and non-verbal communication when controlling a (possibly violent) situation is hard enough with people understanding each others signals. when cultures clash that haven't met before (for the participants) this can be aggravated to utmost misunderstandings.
at least, this kind of thing is given some thought, instead of sending people around the world (who've never gotten out of their hometown before) without prior cultural briefings.
Once I put my coat over a camera before giving my speech, when I learned it was webcasting in RealPlayer format.
though i agree with much of what he says, this guy never ceases to amaze me.
i think during the last 10 years he's grown a little more sour than he was before all this (GNU) linux "controversy". i certainly sympathize with the GNU project on being underrepresented in the public awareness, but RMS will not change this only by acting sullen!
i'd like it if a majority of home users used free software, but his position on the alternative is more than crass:
Q: [...]if there is no alternative? If, say, there is no free software way of doing a particular job [...] RMS: One can live without doing those jobs.
what kind of an attitude is that? no wonder the OpenSource movement was founded, because confronted with this attitude or even affiliation few companies would consider adopting GNU Linux.
well, i'm glad that RMS is applying himself so productively to a worthy cause; i'd just hope that he'd go for a slightly more pragmatic way of spreading the idea of freedom. putting your coat over cameras might otherwise be perceived as slightly "coockoo"
Sure "nature" will survive but it will be so different from what we have now that it would be hard with good conscious not to consider our responsibility in bringing it about. I guess you're just hoping that humans don't make it to have to deal with the consequences of having no animal species to live amongst?
apart from the "hoping that humanity will not make it" part you've just beautifully summarized my point. "nature" will survive global warming, humanity might, but will we want to live in a world so different from ours?
easy question, easy answer, so let's fix this global warming problem! (no ethics attached)
i was not talking about "acceptable". i was saying that under any of our actions that won't destroy the planet, life will go on and in a few millions of years likely reach a very complex state again. and we are _not_ the ones to decide whether this newly evolving ecosystem will be better or worse than ours.
if you ask me whether i think we can do what we please, my answer is no. but we are changing the planet's ecosystems day by day and with the current state of affairs will have to do so for a long time to come. if nature were untouchable we wouldn't be allowed to extract _any_ kind of energy because all forms (maybe solar enery to a lesser degree) have measurable impacts on the environment. nor could we try to "improve" our cattle or plant species. not even to speak of powerlines, dams, cities, waste dumps, etc.
i don't think that our actions have enough punch to destroy _all_ life on this planet. some fungi, single-cell organisms, bacteria will survive anything we could possibly do. and AFAIK there _are_ lifeforms that can live on oil, plastic and about anything. it would just be a very different world than the one we know.
there has been no balance for billions of years. it's been turmoil all the way, just on a very slow scale. ice ages coming and going, the dinosaurs going extinct, sea level changes, continents shifting and i'd be pretty surprised if the gulf stream had been there all the time.
all i'm saying is that apart from moral/ethical issues, purely _pragmatically_ we have to try to keep the status quo for the sake of our own survival. BTW, what should we do if a naturally caused ice age was coming? would we really be talking about how the projected climated looked like or wouldn't we rather try to prevent it from happening? we are not smart enough to know what would've been there without our intervention, so why try to second-guess it? this obviously doesn't absolve us from morals/ethics, but it puts into perspective the idea of "correcting" our past misdoings.
well, it might not be the _exact_ thing i was thinking/writing, but your explanation represents sth like a radical version of my view:)
i didn't want to get into any discussion about morals and ethics, but was indeed pointing out that if we change the earth's climate enough, we'd be one of the first species to go down. some humans might survive, but a population of billions is simply not sustainable if our crops won't grow. and switching from wheat/rice/corn to something different in a few years or even decades is a challenge that we might not be up to. and the slightest shortage of food will cause riots, wars, etc...
therefore the idea of us as the caretaker of nature is ridiculous; us being one of the first of its inhabitants to vanish... the idea of us being such astopping. guardian is a christian one of human dominion over all of nature. if the gulf stream stopped turning, we'd have no way of getting it to move again and that should be pragmatically enough reason to prevent it from happening.
but deciding whether an ice age or a warmer period has "good" or "bad" effects on the flora and fauna of this planet is ridiculous! and whether this climate change is caused by us or not is really quite a moot point. if the next ice age were upon us we'd also try to prevent it from happening and there'd be no discussion of "letting nature have its way". humanity is defined by its possibility of changing and transforming its environment, and trying to abstain from that is hard enough without billions of mouths to feed, but nearly impossible with them.
who are we to decide what the climate should look like, who are we to decide which species are to survive (maybe except the ones we _directly_ killed)? we are not smart enough yet to discern between the changes made by us and how the process would have looked without our interference! let's just drop the topic of what caused it initially and get on with the question of how to prevent billions of people from dying.
the idea of saving species seems like a very romantic notion to me; as if our understanding of beauty had any objectivity. who's talking about all the life-form's living space we are taking up with our cities or the predators that would otherwise have lived from the cattle that we now claim for us? if we kill the wolves either something else will take its place or the ecosystem will change (or unlikely vanish).
whether we feel an obligation towards some species, and whether we are fond of the current status quo of nature, are completely different questions and should really be discussed separately from global warming. maybe the dog is a better animal than the wolve, and maybe not. but i'm not even sure whether we can decide that conclusively.
in the end, nature is a process of adaption, and trying to fix its status quo or working against its selections seems futile.
and i don't think we have the possibilities yet to extinguish all life on this planet - at least not by accident!
1) could we please have a proper discourse about probability distributions? having the ice recede 200 miles further north than the average means nothing without a given variance. and even then they would have to name the period of observation to get any meaning out of it. obviously giving all that information won't go so well for an article, but giving just scraps of information isn't all that hot either
2) global warming is not a threat to nature! nature has dealt with catastrophic climated changes in the past and it will deal with them in the future. the threat of global warming is to us humans and the the status quo of nature, but there's no doubt in my mind that the ecosystems will adapt to a warming planet - as they have to countless ice ages, meteor hits, etc. although i would find it a shame to see ice bears going extinct due to human interference in world climate, we _can_ not take responsibility of _nature_ on this scale; what if a warmer climate brought forth an even more beautiful creature than the ice bear? wouldn't we make _that_ extinct by preventing global warming as well?
note, i'm not advocating to do nothing, nor am i lacking sympathy for the ice bears. but in my mind, global warming is first and formost a danger to the status quo and to _our_ survival. if the planet heats up drastically other species will replace the current ones and the cycle of life will turn on; with the difference of us being dragged down by the environmental changes...
right, because getting a windows system up to usability is such a breeze these days...
can't use IE for security issues -> firefox / opera can't use outlook express (same reason) -> thunderbird / pegasus / eudora don't want to use notepad/wordpad -> (something else) none of your friends is on MSN -> some instant messenger and most people prefer real dvd players over media player...
not to speak of the necessity for third party drivers (independent of the above). and most people install an "office suite" anyway!
so, the need to additional downloads/hassle is surely not the issue!
1972 - Richard Nixon orders the development of a space shuttle program. 1968 - "Prague Spring" begins in Czechoslovakia. 1984 - Richard Stallman starts developing GNU. 1997 - Withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya. 2000 - The 1st day of the 2000 Al Qaeda Summit.
those chechnian terrorists are gonna be mighty annoyed when they find out, that their plot is perceived as nazi propaganda;-)
Dr. Thompson didn't say the code was perfect. He was saying that Microsoft does not provide pre-official-release versions of their patches.
noone "provides" pre-release versions of their patches. the moment they are "provided" they are "released". the fact that "official" is a question of definition in the open-source-world might make the whole thing less reliable from a legal standpoint and maybe less consistent across applications but is certainly no measure of patch quality!
Thompson didn't state anything about the extent of Microsoft's "due diligence". The only thing he said about how Microsoft approaches patch release was "In the Windows world, one doesn't get the alpha or beta patches, just the blessed finished product."
well, EXCUSE ME for calling this process of getting from alpha to beta to official "due diligence". all i was saying is that their "blessed" patches cause a hell of a ruckus from time to time. i am not denying that open source patches had problems in the past, and i am certainly a proponent of a more stringent process for software quality assurance in OSS, BUT i wouldn't take microsoft as a prime example of solid patches. and anyone stating how much effort they spend in assuring their patches reliability doesn't change the fact that IE for example is basically as unsafe now as it was 6 years and hundreds of patches ago.
In the Windows world, one doesn't get the alpha or beta patches, just the blessed finished product
yeah, right! i won't even mention IE's security holes for the last 8 or so years (active x,...) or outlook's bad record of keeping spam from executing malicious code (mostly through the IE engine).
but boldly stating how much due diligence is exacted upon the microsoft patches before final release is ridiculous in face of them frequently backfiring and leaving old or new vulnerabilities in their wake:
i totally agree and i wasn't calling into question the idea of projection and extrapolation.
but just as noone would call a game or even a game series so early, i really don't see the point of "announcing" something now, that could have easily waited till the end of the year.
and who said, the global climate's mean temperature would stay the same within "global warming"? noone knows the processes and it might just be that initial temperature rises will lead to drastic global cooling lateron. i am not saying that, but where do all these predictions about local and global climate come from?
yes, but causation might not be the only point here...
the question is whether so-called "global warming" is a real trend or just a usual short-term (whatever that means) fluctuation. who or what caused it, is IMHO not all that important. the question is, whether temperatures ARE rising in the (human) long term, whether we are in favor of such a development and what we can realisticly do against it.
the main problem lies in the trend prediction and extrapolation. the next ice age is getting overdue (argue some by extrapolation from historical data) and if the climate is really changing in MAJOR fashion, there might be very little we can do about it.
does that mean we shouldn't TRY to steer the climate in a favorable direction / keep the status quo? of course not. the dilemma however is, how to make sure that our "evasive actions" won't aggravate the situation (in which direction whatsoever).
with "global warming" (now more appropriately called "global extreme temperatures" or something like that) in mind, isn't it a bit early to call it the hottest year in october already?
isn't "global warming" supposed to cause extreme temperatures in BOTH directions, and isn't weather prediction limited to a few days?
so how can anyone predict the weather for the next 2 1/2 months based on historical records and in face of supposedly dramatic climate changes...
well, gotta believe the scientists, especially when they are overeager to get their results out first and maybe "prove a point" in passing.
the default value expression is evaluated once, when the function object is created, and the resulting object is bound to the argument.
FIX / WORKAROUND:
if you want to create a new object on every call, you have to do that yourself: def __init__( self, myList=None):
if myList is None:
myList = [] # create a new list
self.myList = myList
Slashdot Mirror
well, i guess throwing war criticism in DARPA's face isn't exactly the most diplomatic approach, but cutting funding for an important application like OpenSSH over such personal issues seems like a pretty childish action to me! there's just nothing like being a "good patriot", i guess.
go reread my post
you're quite in awe of yourself, aren't you. i wasn't quoting the movie or anything, just too lazy to lookup the name of the short story. the movie actually picks up a few things from that specific story, as one escaped robot actually hides among many of its non-modified kind.
but i totally agree, the movie was atrocious. that's a pretty weak basis to criticize my post on, though.
i was just answering your (slightly arrogant) post that stated "you should reread the short stories then, because those robots always obeyed the laws [...]" and i was making the point that in this particular story the laws were tweaked, i.e. not obeyed unconditionally and unmodified.
please show a little more respect towards your fellow slashdotters, unless you want to be perceived as a total jerk.
you should reread the short stories then, because those robots always obeyed the laws since they were hardwired to break if they tried to violate the first law.
you should reread the short stories then, because the one used as a template for the film "i, robot" featured a series of robots for whom the laws were tweaked. this was done because the humans on a space stations had to shortly go through radiation fields which would cause damage only after longer exposure, but the robots would try to keep the humans from entering the radiation at all and then perish themselves in it.
the adjustment prooved potentially fatal though, because now with the option of inaction in face of danger, a robot could drop something heavy on a human being in the knowledge that it could prevent harm by getting there first, but then use its new inaction "feature" to not intervene.
i know, a badly worded summary of a good story, but it's kinda difficult to convey
yes, the "./configure" bit might have been a bit misplaced. but i was less "defining" unix and more trying to capture what frequent users of unix systems would have in common. and the "./configure" idea factored into it for me, although this might well be a GNU invention.
don't many programs under BSDs do it like that too, BTW?
i don't quite understand your MAC commentary. if i had meant MAC i would've said so.
The principle of least privilege requires that a user be given no more privilege than necessary to perform a job..
and from what i understand about unix systems, this has been an important aspect since they have supported multiple users. even though lacking ACLs and MAC, it's never been very fine-grained or comfortable.
isn't unix:
./configure && make && make install
- everything is a file
- every file is a stream of bytes
- do one thing and one thing well, Keep It Simple Stupid
- human readable/editable config files
- principle of least privilege
- services as daemon processes
- clear separation of kernel and userland (although this one is debatable)
- multi-user environment (despite the name)
- remote access facilities
- console/automation oriented, powerful shells
-
?
well, that's just a few things that come to my (linux/bsd slanted) view of what (a modern) unix is...
there's nothing like advertising with other people's wrong-doing, is there?
now "piracy estimates" are used to push business models... is this madness never going to end? let's all just agree that the collective conscience owes the music industry 1 quintillion dollars and be done with it.
"stealing" copyrighted material is wrong, pushing people into "law-circumvention" is too, suing them for ridiculous amounts of money certainly is. let's all just switch to legal (mostly not well produced) music and hope it'll get better in time. the big labels creep me out and the commercial online distributors are starting to scare me too, with their current line of reasoning.
they are basically blackmailing the music industry, saying "either you syndicate through us, or [we'll let] people steal it from right under your noses"
"i've noticed you're trying to calm a crowd of trigger happy extremists. would you like to use the "Middle East Crowd" wizard?"
great, now soldiers will learn crowd control and interacting with other cultures in the isolation of a computer.
i don't want to be too cynical, and i'm sure this is an interesting approach, but i still would prefer soldiers to get this kind of cultural briefing in a less synthetical environment. like spending a few days with people from the target culture, or even better, spending a few days in a country where such a culture persists.
verbal and non-verbal communication when controlling a (possibly violent) situation is hard enough with people understanding each others signals. when cultures clash that haven't met before (for the participants) this can be aggravated to utmost misunderstandings.
at least, this kind of thing is given some thought, instead of sending people around the world (who've never gotten out of their hometown before) without prior cultural briefings.
Once I put my coat over a camera before giving my speech, when I learned it was webcasting in RealPlayer format.
though i agree with much of what he says, this guy never ceases to amaze me.
i think during the last 10 years he's grown a little more sour than he was before all this (GNU) linux "controversy". i certainly sympathize with the GNU project on being underrepresented in the public awareness, but RMS will not change this only by acting sullen!
i'd like it if a majority of home users used free software, but his position on the alternative is more than crass:
Q: [...]if there is no alternative? If, say, there is no free software way of doing a particular job [...]
RMS: One can live without doing those jobs.
what kind of an attitude is that? no wonder the OpenSource movement was founded, because confronted with this attitude or even affiliation few companies would consider adopting GNU Linux.
well, i'm glad that RMS is applying himself so productively to a worthy cause; i'd just hope that he'd go for a slightly more pragmatic way of spreading the idea of freedom. putting your coat over cameras might otherwise be perceived as slightly "coockoo"
jethr0
Sure "nature" will survive but it will be so different from what we have now that it would be hard with good conscious not to consider our responsibility in bringing it about. I guess you're just hoping that humans don't make it to have to deal with the consequences of having no animal species to live amongst?
apart from the "hoping that humanity will not make it" part you've just beautifully summarized my point. "nature" will survive global warming, humanity might, but will we want to live in a world so different from ours?
easy question, easy answer, so let's fix this global warming problem! (no ethics attached)
i was not talking about "acceptable". i was saying that under any of our actions that won't destroy the planet, life will go on and in a few millions of years likely reach a very complex state again. and we are _not_ the ones to decide whether this newly evolving ecosystem will be better or worse than ours.
if you ask me whether i think we can do what we please, my answer is no. but we are changing the planet's ecosystems day by day and with the current state of affairs will have to do so for a long time to come. if nature were untouchable we wouldn't be allowed to extract _any_ kind of energy because all forms (maybe solar enery to a lesser degree) have measurable impacts on the environment. nor could we try to "improve" our cattle or plant species. not even to speak of powerlines, dams, cities, waste dumps, etc.
i don't think that our actions have enough punch to destroy _all_ life on this planet. some fungi, single-cell organisms, bacteria will survive anything we could possibly do. and AFAIK there _are_ lifeforms that can live on oil, plastic and about anything. it would just be a very different world than the one we know.
there has been no balance for billions of years. it's been turmoil all the way, just on a very slow scale. ice ages coming and going, the dinosaurs going extinct, sea level changes, continents shifting and i'd be pretty surprised if the gulf stream had been there all the time.
all i'm saying is that apart from moral/ethical issues, purely _pragmatically_ we have to try to keep the status quo for the sake of our own survival. BTW, what should we do if a naturally caused ice age was coming? would we really be talking about how the projected climated looked like or wouldn't we rather try to prevent it from happening? we are not smart enough to know what would've been there without our intervention, so why try to second-guess it? this obviously doesn't absolve us from morals/ethics, but it puts into perspective the idea of "correcting" our past misdoings.
well, it might not be the _exact_ thing i was thinking/writing, but your explanation represents sth like a radical version of my view :)
i didn't want to get into any discussion about morals and ethics, but was indeed pointing out that if we change the earth's climate enough, we'd be one of the first species to go down. some humans might survive, but a population of billions is simply not sustainable if our crops won't grow. and switching from wheat/rice/corn to something different in a few years or even decades is a challenge that we might not be up to. and the slightest shortage of food will cause riots, wars, etc...
therefore the idea of us as the caretaker of nature is ridiculous; us being one of the first of its inhabitants to vanish... the idea of us being such astopping. guardian is a christian one of human dominion over all of nature. if the gulf stream stopped turning, we'd have no way of getting it to move again and that should be pragmatically enough reason to prevent it from happening.
but deciding whether an ice age or a warmer period has "good" or "bad" effects on the flora and fauna of this planet is ridiculous! and whether this climate change is caused by us or not is really quite a moot point. if the next ice age were upon us we'd also try to prevent it from happening and there'd be no discussion of "letting nature have its way". humanity is defined by its possibility of changing and transforming its environment, and trying to abstain from that is hard enough without billions of mouths to feed, but nearly impossible with them.
who are we to decide what the climate should look like, who are we to decide which species are to survive (maybe except the ones we _directly_ killed)? we are not smart enough yet to discern between the changes made by us and how the process would have looked without our interference! let's just drop the topic of what caused it initially and get on with the question of how to prevent billions of people from dying.
the idea of saving species seems like a very romantic notion to me; as if our understanding of beauty had any objectivity. who's talking about all the life-form's living space we are taking up with our cities or the predators that would otherwise have lived from the cattle that we now claim for us? if we kill the wolves either something else will take its place or the ecosystem will change (or unlikely vanish).
whether we feel an obligation towards some species, and whether we are fond of the current status quo of nature, are completely different questions and should really be discussed separately from global warming. maybe the dog is a better animal than the wolve, and maybe not. but i'm not even sure whether we can decide that conclusively.
in the end, nature is a process of adaption, and trying to fix its status quo or working against its selections seems futile.
and i don't think we have the possibilities yet to extinguish all life on this planet - at least not by accident!
1) could we please have a proper discourse about probability distributions? having the ice recede 200 miles further north than the average means nothing without a given variance. and even then they would have to name the period of observation to get any meaning out of it. obviously giving all that information won't go so well for an article, but giving just scraps of information isn't all that hot either
2) global warming is not a threat to nature! nature has dealt with catastrophic climated changes in the past and it will deal with them in the future. the threat of global warming is to us humans and the the status quo of nature, but there's no doubt in my mind that the ecosystems will adapt to a warming planet - as they have to countless ice ages, meteor hits, etc. although i would find it a shame to see ice bears going extinct due to human interference in world climate, we _can_ not take responsibility of _nature_ on this scale; what if a warmer climate brought forth an even more beautiful creature than the ice bear? wouldn't we make _that_ extinct by preventing global warming as well?
note, i'm not advocating to do nothing, nor am i lacking sympathy for the ice bears. but in my mind, global warming is first and formost a danger to the status quo and to _our_ survival. if the planet heats up drastically other species will replace the current ones and the cycle of life will turn on; with the difference of us being dragged down by the environmental changes...
jethr0
right, because getting a windows system up to usability is such a breeze these days...
can't use IE for security issues -> firefox / opera
can't use outlook express (same reason) -> thunderbird / pegasus / eudora
don't want to use notepad/wordpad -> (something else)
none of your friends is on MSN -> some instant messenger
and most people prefer real dvd players over media player...
not to speak of the necessity for third party drivers (independent of the above). and most people install an "office suite" anyway!
so, the need to additional downloads/hassle is surely not the issue!
yes, i am sure it would be shearly impossible to find FREE replacements for
...
IE - firefox
email client - thunderbird
notepad, wordpad - (choose one)
Instant Messenger - (choose one)
Media Player, cd player - xine, mplayer, bsplay,
and by the looks of it, my distribution of windows comes already without or with crippled versions of:
email client, editor, network browser, backup tool, remote desktop, scripting tool, shell.
sincerely...
1972 - Richard Nixon orders the development of a space shuttle program.
;-)
1968 - "Prague Spring" begins in Czechoslovakia.
1984 - Richard Stallman starts developing GNU.
1997 - Withdrawal of Russian forces from Chechnya.
2000 - The 1st day of the 2000 Al Qaeda Summit.
those chechnian terrorists are gonna be mighty annoyed when they find out, that their plot is perceived as nazi propaganda
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_5
if you thought dolphins armed with guns on the loose were bad, try to imagine a rogue rat squadron of fighter planes...
Dr. Thompson didn't say the code was perfect. He was saying that Microsoft does not provide pre-official-release versions of their patches.
noone "provides" pre-release versions of their patches. the moment they are "provided" they are "released". the fact that "official" is a question of definition in the open-source-world might make the whole thing less reliable from a legal standpoint and maybe less consistent across applications but is certainly no measure of patch quality!
Thompson didn't state anything about the extent of Microsoft's "due diligence". The only thing he said about how Microsoft approaches patch release was "In the Windows world, one doesn't get the alpha or beta patches, just the blessed finished product."
well, EXCUSE ME for calling this process of getting from alpha to beta to official "due diligence". all i was saying is that their "blessed" patches cause a hell of a ruckus from time to time. i am not denying that open source patches had problems in the past, and i am certainly a proponent of a more stringent process for software quality assurance in OSS, BUT i wouldn't take microsoft as a prime example of solid patches.
and anyone stating how much effort they spend in assuring their patches reliability doesn't change the fact that IE for example is basically as unsafe now as it was 6 years and hundreds of patches ago.
jethr0
In the Windows world, one doesn't get the alpha or beta patches, just the blessed finished product
...) or outlook's bad record of keeping spam from executing malicious code (mostly through the IE engine).
p hp?story=20020924094345962r sjump_1.htmls pr aised-microsoft-patches
yeah, right!
i won't even mention IE's security holes for the last 8 or so years (active x,
but boldly stating how much due diligence is exacted upon the microsoft patches before final release is ridiculous in face of them frequently backfiring and leaving old or new vulnerabilities in their wake:
http://www.hideaway.net/home/public_html/article.
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/09/08/HNhacke
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1753511,00.a
http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2120864/doubts-
jethr0
did you just use "frack" in your active vocabulary? please tell me, that you didn't pick that one up from "battlestar galactica" ;-))
i totally agree and i wasn't calling into question the idea of projection and extrapolation.
but just as noone would call a game or even a game series so early, i really don't see the point of "announcing" something now, that could have easily waited till the end of the year.
and who said, the global climate's mean temperature would stay the same within "global warming"? noone knows the processes and it might just be that initial temperature rises will lead to drastic global cooling lateron. i am not saying that, but where do all these predictions about local and global climate come from?
yes, but causation might not be the only point here...
the question is whether so-called "global warming" is a real trend or just a usual short-term (whatever that means) fluctuation. who or what caused it, is IMHO not all that important. the question is, whether temperatures ARE rising in the (human) long term, whether we are in favor of such a development and what we can realisticly do against it.
the main problem lies in the trend prediction and extrapolation. the next ice age is getting overdue (argue some by extrapolation from historical data) and if the climate is really changing in MAJOR fashion, there might be very little we can do about it.
does that mean we shouldn't TRY to steer the climate in a favorable direction / keep the status quo? of course not. the dilemma however is, how to make sure that our "evasive actions" won't aggravate the situation (in which direction whatsoever).
with "global warming" (now more appropriately called "global extreme temperatures" or something like that) in mind, isn't it a bit early to call it the hottest year in october already?
isn't "global warming" supposed to cause extreme temperatures in BOTH directions, and isn't weather prediction limited to a few days?
so how can anyone predict the weather for the next 2 1/2 months based on historical records and in face of supposedly dramatic climate changes...
well, gotta believe the scientists, especially when they are overeager to get their results out first and maybe "prove a point" in passing.
*darn*, i totally bogged up the result:
./test.py
RESULT:
$
> ["hello", "world"]
EXAMPLE:
./test.py
def test(arr = []):
return arr
t = test()
t.extend(["hello", "world"])
u = test()
print u
RESULT:
$
hello
hello hello
REASON:
the default value expression is evaluated once, when the function
object is created, and the resulting object is bound to the argument.
FIX / WORKAROUND:
if you want to create a new object on every call, you have to do
that yourself:
def __init__( self, myList=None):
if myList is None:
myList = [] # create a new list
self.myList = myList