A Social Security number is "meaningless". It's just an identifier. But it's a number that uniquely identifies you, and if other people get their hands on it, or are able to spoof it, then than meaningless number can have adverse effects on your life.
How is this "meaningless" identifier any different?
As far as I can tell, what Prof. Reiss actually said was not very unscientific at all.
It seems to me that this whole episode has the Royal Society played right into the hands of Ben Stein and the clowns behind that Expelled crap. They couldn't have asked for a better example of the kind of "persecution" they claim they're being subjected to.
I always thought, if I had an electric car, I'd actually want to make it not seem so... electric.
It's actually a chance to personalize your car. You could buy car-tones the same way people buy ring-tones. Lots of selection. I'd like my electric car to sound like a Lamborghini, or maybe like something really cool like a gas-turbine. You might prefer a big throaty 70's muscle-car sound. A geek might prefer something like the Jetson's car sound, or the sound of a TIE fighter.
If you're tuning it to ignore assignment within a test , ie "if( x=y ) {}", then you're missing the one of the great points of using PC-Lint.
That code is simply in poor taste, even if it works. What PC-Lint, and good taste, say you should do is change the code to "if( (x=y) != 0 ) {}". This will satisfy PC-Lint, and also makes your intention very clear to the next programmer who comes along. And, best of all, it doesn't generate a single byte of extra code, because you've only made explicit what the compiler was going to do anyway.
I use PC-Lint religiously, and have been for maybe 18 years now. In my opinion, it has made me a better programmer. It teaches you to be disciplined, because whenever you get sloppy, it barfs all over your disgusting code. The discipline you learn from it remains even after you stop using it. You start to think like Lint.
The First Commandment for C Programmers states "Thou shalt run lint frequently and study its pronouncements with care, for verily its perception and judgment oft exceed thine."
This is as true now as it was when the prophet (PBUH) spoke.
I love PC-Lint, but it does have some drawbacks. They added C++ support to it, but it really is having a hard time with the crazy template meta-programming tricks found in the Boost library. Using Boost will bury you under an avalanche of spurious warnings. Sometimes, it will even crash. In this case, studying its pronouncements with care is liable to give you a stroke.
The linked article, and even the Wikipedia page about it, are leaving me very puzzled.
The fundamental circuit elements are all "fundemental" because they have very simple mathematic functions that describe their behaviour.
For resitors, it's just Ohm's law: V = I*R
For capacitors and inductors, there are integrals involved (which, for you paranoiacs, means they "remember" the past, just like this memristor thing).
Capacitor: V = 1/Capacitance * Integral( I ) Inductor: I = 1/Inductance * Integral( V )
Inductors can be seen as the "dual" of capacitors (just swap voltages and currents in the equations.) Resistance can be seen as having a "dual" of conductance (again, swap voltages and currents).
So, where does this "memistor" fit in? What is its mathematical function? Does it have a dual? Perhaps a "forgetistor"?
Personally, I've always found Fluidic Logic to be fascinating. It's based on the flow of a fluid (usually air) through specially-shaped chambers. Typically implemented in a stack of etched glass plates. But no moving parts, just fluid-dynamics. They can make logic gates, flip-flops, all kinds of things.
Precedents and analogies are great for making the law consistent, but they will only go so far. Once in a long while, it's necessary to create new models, which may then become the source for analogies in the future. Google is probably one of these. Google isn't precisely like a newspaper, nor is it precisely like a broadcaster, or a phone-book, or a credit-reporting agency, or a common-carrier. It's a new kind of thing, called a "search-engine."
Analogies may provide some context for deciding how to treat it in law, but trying to pound the square search-engine peg into any single one of the existing round analogies will only lead to irrational and unhelpful rules.
Over time, new case-law will develop, and someday lawyers will be arguing that their next new thing is analogous to a search-engine and subject to the same freedoms and restrictions. I think Google, by doing deliberately provocative things like the Book Search, is working to accelerate that process. That's a good thing, even if the Foot-shooters and Nose-cutters Association of America doesn't see it that way.
I stumbled over this in-depth article, based on interviews with Kaleidescape people. Describes the whole story of the Kaleidescape product from the beginning right through to the end of this court case.
Seems like DVD-CCA's original legal strategy was not really well thought-out. They tried to patch it up with a bunch of bluster and an "I AM ABOVE ZE LAW!" attitude, but the judge would have none of it.
Pricey? Well, it's not free, but it's almost free compared to Coverity or high-end tools like that. And it really does some very clever checks. You get a lot of bang for your static analysis buck.
I've been using PC-Lint for over 10 years now. I think it's made me a better programmer.
I love PC-Lint, but I really do wish its handling of C++ was better. It was really rough at first, generating kinds of false errors on even the most harmless-looking template code. It's better now, but it still has a lot of trouble with the Boost libraries. Boost pushes C++ to the uttermost limits of what is legal, and PC-Lint chokes on a great deal of it.
I love PC-Lint, and I love Boost, and it breaks my heart that they can't get along better.
It was great, until I let them upgrade it to firmware 1.2. Then it was crap. Couldn't run for more than 20 minutes without locking up. Everybody had this problem, not just me.
Did Apple release a patch the next day? No. Did they release a patch next week? No. Next month? No.
For month after month, my iPod sucked ass because of that godawful firmware. Did Apple ever announce that a fix was coming? Did they ever acknowledge that there was a problem? Did they ever even say one single word about it? Hell no. They're Apple, they don't have bugs.
Eventually they did release a fix, and my iPod is good again. But damn, that really pissed me off.
So, we're talking about a law that, applied to ordinary citizens, would be considered unjust. And we even admit that it will have no value if applied only to sex-offenders. But that's okay, because it's really just a way to punish them, and they deserve to be punished more. Always more. They can never be punished enough. This is how we justify it?
If the punishment for their actual crime is not sufficient, why do we not just increase the punishment? Why create all sorts of imaginary pseudo-crimes to heap onto them? How is this justice?
This kind of punishment reminds me of a short-story by Isaac Asimov called "A Perfect Fit" (included in the anthology "The Winds of Change"). In that story, the world has become utterly dependant on computers (like ours is.) The main character, a guy who has committed computer crimes, is given the "perfect" punishment: psychological conditioning that makes him incapable of operating a computer.
He becomes a ghost living on the edges of society. Unable to use bank-machines, unable to buy or sell almost anything without help (all money being computerized). He has struck at the very foundations of society, therefore let him live in a society without the benefit of those foundations. That's the theory, anyway.
Seriously, BMW demoed a device many years ago that would allow you to get much closer to the vehicle in front but in a safe manner. I think that it is only a metter of time before there is a viable system to connect vehicles together electronically in such a way that they can be physically very close to each other in a safe manner. The driver would join such a convoy and then switch on an autopilot system and sit back and relax.
That would be a pretty sweet system, but I don't expect to see it in the US or Canada within our lifetimes. I think we have the technology to do it... it's amazing to think about all the things we have the technology to do, if only somebody could be found to put up the money. But this one is probably doomed by one thing: litigation. Such a system would be amazingly efficient and fast, and would almost certainly save lives. But the first time something goes wrong and you get a hundred car pileup at 120mph, you just know the inevitable lawsuits would bankrupt every company even peripherally involved in it, and probably a few smaller governments too. Nobody will risk that in the US. It may happen in Europe, but not in the US.
The likelihood that Kim Jong Il be even momentarily inconvenienced by this is negligible. The project is a failure before it's even started.
Probably not a lot of money spent, just the salaries of a bunch of high-ranking national security people for a few months. Nothing compared to the costs of an Iraq war or anything, but still... couldn't they find something more useful to do than waste their time on this useless masturbatory fantasy?
If the intention was to make Kim Jong Il fall over and die laughing at those whacky American imperialists, then maybe it would have a slim chance of success.
If the oil people decide to cut your funding because of it, then on their conciences be it. I'm sure the organization can survive without it.
Conversely, if you refuse to show this movie soley out of fear of losing oil-industry funding, then remove the word "Science" from your name, since your motivations clearly have little to do with Science.
Bender: "What should we point it at first?" Fry: "I dunno. Try it on me!" *zap* "Ow! My sperm!" Bender: "Wow! Neat! Mind if I try that again?" *zap* Fry: "Huh, didn't hurt that time."
My money goes to Canon. I had an Epson printer for a while, and it sucked ass with a huge sucking noise.
My Canon i960, on the other hand, rocks my world...
- quiet
- fast
- never, ever clogs
- individual ink tanks
- no chip in the tanks
- uses a clever optical scheme with a prism in the tank to read the ink level.
- replaceable print head (not that I've needed to)
And Canon has not engaged in any absurd DMCA or patent barratry against anyone yet (that I know of.) They've just done a fantastic job of not pissing me off, unlike HP and Lexmark.
Ok, their ink cartridges still cost a bundle. And their newer cartridges designs have chips... but they're still the best of a bad lot as far as I'm concerned.
Slashdot Mirror
A Social Security number is "meaningless". It's just an identifier. But it's a number that uniquely identifies you, and if other people get their hands on it, or are able to spoof it, then than meaningless number can have adverse effects on your life.
How is this "meaningless" identifier any different?
As far as I can tell, what Prof. Reiss actually said was not very unscientific at all.
It seems to me that this whole episode has the Royal Society played right into the hands of Ben Stein and the clowns behind that Expelled crap. They couldn't have asked for a better example of the kind of "persecution" they claim they're being subjected to.
Will the thought of living in a machine comfort people?
Not if they've read the short-story The Machine Stops by E.M. Forster.
I always thought, if I had an electric car, I'd actually want to make it not seem so... electric.
It's actually a chance to personalize your car. You could buy car-tones the same way people buy ring-tones. Lots of selection. I'd like my electric car to sound like a Lamborghini, or maybe like something really cool like a gas-turbine. You might prefer a big throaty 70's muscle-car sound. A geek might prefer something like the Jetson's car sound, or the sound of a TIE fighter.
If you're tuning it to ignore assignment within a test , ie "if( x=y ) {}", then you're missing the one of the great points of using PC-Lint.
That code is simply in poor taste, even if it works. What PC-Lint, and good taste, say you should do is change the code to "if( (x=y) != 0 ) {}". This will satisfy PC-Lint, and also makes your intention very clear to the next programmer who comes along. And, best of all, it doesn't generate a single byte of extra code, because you've only made explicit what the compiler was going to do anyway.
I use PC-Lint religiously, and have been for maybe 18 years now. In my opinion, it has made me a better programmer. It teaches you to be disciplined, because whenever you get sloppy, it barfs all over your disgusting code. The discipline you learn from it remains even after you stop using it. You start to think like Lint.
The First Commandment for C Programmers states "Thou shalt run lint frequently and study its pronouncements with care, for verily its perception and judgment oft exceed thine."
This is as true now as it was when the prophet (PBUH) spoke.
I love PC-Lint, but it does have some drawbacks. They added C++ support to it, but it really is having a hard time with the crazy template meta-programming tricks found in the Boost library. Using Boost will bury you under an avalanche of spurious warnings. Sometimes, it will even crash. In this case, studying its pronouncements with care is liable to give you a stroke.
The linked article, and even the Wikipedia page about it, are leaving me very puzzled.
The fundamental circuit elements are all "fundemental" because they have very simple mathematic functions that describe their behaviour.
For resitors, it's just Ohm's law: V = I*R
For capacitors and inductors, there are integrals involved (which, for you paranoiacs, means they "remember" the past, just like this memristor thing).
Capacitor: V = 1/Capacitance * Integral( I )
Inductor: I = 1/Inductance * Integral( V )
Inductors can be seen as the "dual" of capacitors (just swap voltages and currents in the equations.) Resistance can be seen as having a "dual" of conductance (again, swap voltages and currents).
So, where does this "memistor" fit in? What is its mathematical function? Does it have a dual? Perhaps a "forgetistor"?
Personally, I've always found Fluidic Logic to be fascinating. It's based on the flow of a fluid (usually air) through specially-shaped chambers. Typically implemented in a stack of etched glass plates. But no moving parts, just fluid-dynamics. They can make logic gates, flip-flops, all kinds of things.
Precedents and analogies are great for making the law consistent, but they will only go so far. Once in a long while, it's necessary to create new models, which may then become the source for analogies in the future. Google is probably one of these. Google isn't precisely like a newspaper, nor is it precisely like a broadcaster, or a phone-book, or a credit-reporting agency, or a common-carrier. It's a new kind of thing, called a "search-engine."
Analogies may provide some context for deciding how to treat it in law, but trying to pound the square search-engine peg into any single one of the existing round analogies will only lead to irrational and unhelpful rules.
Over time, new case-law will develop, and someday lawyers will be arguing that their next new thing is analogous to a search-engine and subject to the same freedoms and restrictions. I think Google, by doing deliberately provocative things like the Book Search, is working to accelerate that process. That's a good thing, even if the Foot-shooters and Nose-cutters Association of America doesn't see it that way.
Hanlon's razor comes to mind: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Those 7500 people will be lucky if they see pennies on the dollar from any settlement.
Googling "Merchant Law Group" turns up some strange legalese terms. What does "conduct unbecoming a lawyer" mean? What does "disbarment" mean?
Unfortunately, the Merchant firm also has powerful friends in high places.
Have you seen Demon Seed?
"Those who can't do, teach."
I stumbled over this in-depth article, based on interviews with Kaleidescape people. Describes the whole story of the Kaleidescape product from the beginning right through to the end of this court case.
Seems like DVD-CCA's original legal strategy was not really well thought-out. They tried to patch it up with a bunch of bluster and an "I AM ABOVE ZE LAW!" attitude, but the judge would have none of it.
Pricey? Well, it's not free, but it's almost free compared to Coverity or high-end tools like that. And it really does some very clever checks. You get a lot of bang for your static analysis buck.
I've been using PC-Lint for over 10 years now. I think it's made me a better programmer.
I love PC-Lint, but I really do wish its handling of C++ was better. It was really rough at first, generating kinds of false errors on even the most harmless-looking template code. It's better now, but it still has a lot of trouble with the Boost libraries. Boost pushes C++ to the uttermost limits of what is legal, and PC-Lint chokes on a great deal of it.
I love PC-Lint, and I love Boost, and it breaks my heart that they can't get along better.
I only own one Apple product, a 60GB 5G iPod.
It was great, until I let them upgrade it to firmware 1.2. Then it was crap. Couldn't run for more than 20 minutes without locking up. Everybody had this problem, not just me.
Did Apple release a patch the next day? No. Did they release a patch next week? No. Next month? No.
For month after month, my iPod sucked ass because of that godawful firmware. Did Apple ever announce that a fix was coming? Did they ever acknowledge that there was a problem? Did they ever even say one single word about it? Hell no. They're Apple, they don't have bugs.
Eventually they did release a fix, and my iPod is good again. But damn, that really pissed me off.
So, we're talking about a law that, applied to ordinary citizens, would be considered unjust. And we even admit that it will have no value if applied only to sex-offenders. But that's okay, because it's really just a way to punish them, and they deserve to be punished more. Always more. They can never be punished enough. This is how we justify it?
If the punishment for their actual crime is not sufficient, why do we not just increase the punishment? Why create all sorts of imaginary pseudo-crimes to heap onto them? How is this justice?
This kind of punishment reminds me of a short-story by Isaac Asimov called "A Perfect Fit" (included in the anthology "The Winds of Change"). In that story, the world has become utterly dependant on computers (like ours is.) The main character, a guy who has committed computer crimes, is given the "perfect" punishment: psychological conditioning that makes him incapable of operating a computer.
He becomes a ghost living on the edges of society. Unable to use bank-machines, unable to buy or sell almost anything without help (all money being computerized). He has struck at the very foundations of society, therefore let him live in a society without the benefit of those foundations. That's the theory, anyway.
The likelihood that Kim Jong Il be even momentarily inconvenienced by this is negligible. The project is a failure before it's even started.
Probably not a lot of money spent, just the salaries of a bunch of high-ranking national security people for a few months. Nothing compared to the costs of an Iraq war or anything, but still... couldn't they find something more useful to do than waste their time on this useless masturbatory fantasy?
If the intention was to make Kim Jong Il fall over and die laughing at those whacky American imperialists, then maybe it would have a slim chance of success.
If the oil people decide to cut your funding because of it, then on their conciences be it. I'm sure the organization can survive without it.
Conversely, if you refuse to show this movie soley out of fear of losing oil-industry funding, then remove the word "Science" from your name, since your motivations clearly have little to do with Science.
Bender: "What should we point it at first?"
Fry: "I dunno. Try it on me!" *zap* "Ow! My sperm!"
Bender: "Wow! Neat! Mind if I try that again?" *zap*
Fry: "Huh, didn't hurt that time."
Perl is a great language for writing such sophisticated logarithms.
My money goes to Canon. I had an Epson printer for a while, and it sucked ass with a huge sucking noise.
My Canon i960, on the other hand, rocks my world...
- quiet
- fast
- never, ever clogs
- individual ink tanks
- no chip in the tanks
- uses a clever optical scheme with a prism in the tank to read the ink level.
- replaceable print head (not that I've needed to)
And Canon has not engaged in any absurd DMCA or patent barratry against anyone yet (that I know of.) They've just done a fantastic job of not pissing me off, unlike HP and Lexmark.
Ok, their ink cartridges still cost a bundle. And their newer cartridges designs have chips... but they're still the best of a bad lot as far as I'm concerned.
That's the wrong question. People should be asking Apple, "Will it work with Linux?"