My argument on point 1 is that it's hardly unusual for 4-year computer science program to expose students to low-level code (and demand they write some low-level code). You show a developer who mostly writes in Python some C or assembler and there's a good chance they'll understand what they're looking at.
Regarding point 2, the specific phenomenon that I'm going to focus on is classic buffer overflows, because those still are some of the most common forms of attack (see CWE-120). In C, a programmer has to be very careful to manage their malloc's and C arrays (particularly stack-allocated arrays) and pointers in general to ensure that they can't walk off the end of a data structure or point to their own running code or stuff 1100 bytes into a 1000-byte spot in memory. In, say, Python, because the interpreter has had a lot of checking for this, and because the structures in C that allow these kind of vulnerabilities aren't available directly, they're a non-issue. The scripting language interpreter / compiler solves that problem once for you, and then you don't have to solve it again. And the effect is that higher-level applications tend to be more vulnerable to application-layer mistakes like SQL injection than they are buffer overflows.
To be fair, Scientology doesn't claim an ideology of hopelessness (unlike, say, Norse religion that claimed that the entire world and almost everyone in it was doomed) - it believes that by "clearing" it can rid us of the evils that are a legacy of Xenu. It's crazy, not hopeless.
Yes, I was simplifying things a bit. The point was that English is actually a pretty good jumping-off into German, and German (in my experience) is somewhat easier for an English-speaker to pick up than, say, Italian. And of course, once you get away from IE languages, all bets are off: Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin, Turkish, Swahili, etc are all quite tricky for an English-speaker to wrap their heads around, because they use structures and sounds that are wildly different from English.
What's also key is that the better points of ReiserFS, such as journaling, have migrated into other file systems. The experiment wasn't a failure, it was a darn good idea that has led to an overall improvement in reliability and speed of other file systems.
Two objections: 1. The programmers who use scripting languages extensively often understand lower-level code, even down to the machine code, but choose not to use it because it creates a whole bunch of unnecessary headaches. 2. Well-written scripting languages ensure that the lower-level layer is not vulnerable to the most likely forms of attack, like buffer overflows. That means that the lower-level attack doesn't work, so in your scenario you might have a good machine gun and a roof to protect your position from orbital X-ray laser arrays.
Unrelated issue: You have a right to vote, and attempts to deny that right by requiring you to pay a certain amount of money to exercise it is unconstitutional. You don't have a right to pay only a certain amount for a car.
Can I have your attention please... May I have your attention please? Will the real Bruce Perens please stand up? I repeat, will the real Bruce Perens please stand up? (We're gonna have a problem here.)
Y'all act like you've never seen a great hacker before, Jaws all on the floor like Ken or Linus just burst in the door and started deleting lines that were worse than before there first were bad cores, throwing buffer overflows It's bad returns from the... "Ah, wait, no way, you're kidding, he didn't just write what I think he did, did he?" And dmr said... nothing you idiots! dmr's dead, he's still locked in Bell Labs!
Further, your founding fathers were, by-and-large, not religious
That's not quite true: They were religious, in many cases, but were very clear that they didn't want the newly created federal government establishing a religion of any kind. The idealistic reasons for this are many, and the Enlightenment-oriented folks like Jefferson advocated religious freedom on those grounds. But there was also a realpolitik reason, namely that the fledgling United States was in no way unified in their religious views, and the last thing they wanted was for the whole thing to fall apart over a question of what the Church of America would look like.
Also important to note at the time is that people identifying their religious preference would probably have given specific denominations like "Baptist" or "Congregationalist" rather than "Christian".
It's the "within limits" part that makes the "Free Speech Zones" so bad.
The key issue is that the "Free Speech Zones" have always been designated far away from where the event that the protesters are protesting is happening, and the mainstream media is discouraged from actually covering anything the protesters are doing. The goal of the zones is and has always been to silence protesters who's views fall outside the realm of what's deemed acceptable by the political establishment. For instance, I went to a VP debate back in 2004, and what was clearly allowed were signs saying "Kerry / Edwards" or "Bush / Cheney", but what was not allowed anywhere near a TV camera were signs saying "End the Fed" or "Leave Iraq Now".
... there is no supply of used cars in reach of their serfs^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpoor people's spending power.
I just did a quick search for used cars for under $3000, and found quite a few of them on the market within a 50 miles radius. (Like everything else, if you're in a more rural area, you have to travel further to find stuff.) I mean, there are reasonable objections to Cash for Clunkers (e.g. it costs too much), but yours doesn't seem to be based in reality.
The most likely story: 1. The Youtube video gave fundamentalist Muslim leaders an excuse to call a protest, and got a few thousand people to turn up. Nothing surprising or even really wrong about that, fundamentalist Christian leaders regularly pull larger crowds in this country. 2. Al Qaida saw the opportunity to embed themselves in the protest and carry out some violence that they'd been wanting to do for months.
The dynamic doesn't seem all that different from the many cases of political protests where you have 15,000 of completely peaceful demonstrators and then a 200 person "Black Bloc" that engages in vandalism and assaults police.
They are allowed to do as they please citing religious pretext or freedom of speech/expression, but we're not allowed to hinder them using the same freedoms they abuse.
Sure we are, and we do: The counter to speech we find offensive is more speech opposing that which we find offensive.
An example, using the Westboro Baptist Church: They started picketing funerals of soldiers. A lot of people really didn't like that. Some tried to solve it with a law, which was ultimately struck down on free speech grounds. A bunch of other people solved it the right way: They worked with the families of the fallen and arranged to surround the funeral procession with people holding American flags, so that the mourners didn't see the bigots, they saw a group of patriotic Americans holding American flags in their honor.
The interesting question is what's "deviant" versus "normal", because the researchers who've looked into this stuff have made it pretty clear that acts that were once considered "deviant" are actually quite common. When you look at what religious authorities and the like have approved of, the only choices that seem to be universally acceptable (for those not part of a religious clergy that demands celibacy) is: 1. You can have sex only with exactly one person over the course of your lifetime 2.... of the opposite sex 3.... from the same social, religious, cultural, racial, etc background as you 4.... at least 16 years old (this age has varied a bit, going as low as 14 and as high as 22) 5.... after you've gone through some sort of wedding ceremony 6.... with the approval of the woman's father (or if her father is dead, her uncle, brother, or some other male relative who's taken over the role) 7.... not using birth control to prevent pregnancy 8.... in the missionary position 9.... and no concern whatsoever with whether the woman had an orgasm.
No society in human history has ever gotten even close to the point where this was universal. The Puritans did everything they could to make that happen, and there were still lots of babies born less than 9 months after the wedding, couples eloping, and lots of adultery. Everything else has been considered deviance at some point in human history, but even the risk of being killed if caught doesn't stop people from having different kinds of sex.
Mice will be dead; everything will be motion tracking, eye tracking, touch tracking, etc.
I'd bet against that - mice do a very good job of solving the problem they're targeting, which is why they're still around over 20 years after they were introduced to the mass market. Touchscreen technology in particular has to contend with "gorilla arm", because holding your arm up to a screen is tiring.
Nobody will type (by "Nobody I mean you can safely round the number of typists in the world down to zero).
Also a bad bet. Keyboards work, and work well, which is why the concept, introduced with typewriters well over a century ago, is still very much alive today, even on smartphones. Among their advantages are: - They allow the typist to express exactly what they intend. That solves the "Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all." problem. - They make use of all 10 of the typists' fingers, in an appropriate proportion. Many other input method do not. - Most typists can type at least as fast as they can speak. - Anyone in an open plan office or a public location would be driven insane by the noise of everyone talking to their computers, making speech-to-text not a viable option. Also, that same noise would be confusing the voice wreckognition software.
Latin, being not only the root language of the Romance languages, it is also a key to better understanding other European languages such as English, German &c., would be undoubtedly provide the child with great advantage.
I'd highly recommend Latin for young children, although it has very little relationship with German and only some relationship to English. Many of the apparent similarities between Latin and German have to do with the fact that they were both descended from a common ancestral language, and German is more closely related to English than Latin. It helps immensely with reading and learning closely related languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian), and of course reading early academic literature in the original.
Of course, dealing with all the difficulties of moving 200lb bodies to where they physically meet has a significant advantage: If you meet in meatspace, you have a very slight chance of getting laid.
No, I wouldn't: 1. Most Muslims are not members of Hamas. 2. The leaders of Hamas aren't widely considered to be religious authorities, only political authorities in a certain area of the world (this would be the equivalent of treating, say, John F Kennedy, as a leading authority on Catholicism). 3. The leaders of Hamas have a clear motive that has nothing to do with religion for convincing people that jihad, as envisioned by Hamas, is the ultimate in religious devotion.
So tell me again... who are the ones promoting hatred and violence?
That's easy - anyone who believes that people who believe differently than they do are fundamentally and typically irredeemably evil. Which is where Islamic nutjobs (e.g. Al Qaida) and Christian nutjobs (e.g. Xe, formerly Blackwater) and atheist nutjobs (e.g. the Soviets) all are much more similar than they'd like to admit.
What about non-militant Islam, is that evil? These aren't the "death to America" types, but the much more common "I want to go to work, come home to my family, and help raise the best and brightest kids I can, and maybe I stop by Friday prayers at the mosque" types.
For reference, here are the 5 fundamental practices of Islam: 1. Regular personal declaration in belief in monotheism, and that Mohammed is the messenger of that 1 god. This conceptually would be like a Christian reciting the Nicene Creed. 2. Praying 5 times a day. Totally harmless for anyone who's not doing this. 3. Giving at least 2.5% of ones income as charity towards the less fortunate. This seems positively virtuous. 4. Fasting, particularly during Ramadan, if practical (exceptions are made for children, pregnant women, etc). Again, harmless to anyone who isn't fasting. 5. A pilgrimage to Mecca. This could potentially support the Saudi government, but it's also basically harmless to anyone who isn't doing it, and often quite moving to those who do (Malcolm X is a great example - his experiences led him to stop hating white people due to their race).
And I should point out, for the record, that I'm not Muslim myself, but I've noticed that those who think that Islam is completely evil often know very little about what Muslims actually believe and how they practice their faith.
The world will be dominated by Islamic idiots because the rest of the world will do nothing but appease them.
Are you arguing that what non-Muslims should do is commit genocide against Muslims? If you're not, could you explain how invading Iraq and Afghanistan and applying economic sanctions to Iran, Syria, and the Gaza Strip constitute "appeasing"?
There are hundreds of appointed positions that have gone unfilled for the entire Obama administration.
Also of note is that they attempted to prevent Obama from even making recess appointments by having somebody who lived nearby come in, open the Senate for approximately 30 seconds, and then recess again, so that each recess was less than the time needed for Obama to legally make a recess appointment.
The senate rules need to change. Filibusters should actually be required to fillibuster.
If nothing else, it's entertaining to watch it happen. Besides, I'd like Strohm Thurmond's 23:56 record for longest Senate speech (in opposition to the Civil Rights Act) to be broken.
But don't worry, their tax cuts will be revenue neutral because they'll close "loopholes," but not the mortgage interest deduction, which is the second or third largest loophole in the tax code (depending on how you count it).
I'm still surprised Obama didn't pick up on this at the first debate: Either Romney's proposed tax cut reduces revenue, or it's not really something that can legitimately be called a "tax cut", because -$5 trillion+$5 trillion=0. My guess on what he's going to go after for "loopholes" is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which creates a sort of "negative tax" for people who earn less than the federal poverty line. In other words, it's the policy that creates the semi-mythical "freeloading" 47%.
Slashdot Mirror
My argument on point 1 is that it's hardly unusual for 4-year computer science program to expose students to low-level code (and demand they write some low-level code). You show a developer who mostly writes in Python some C or assembler and there's a good chance they'll understand what they're looking at.
Regarding point 2, the specific phenomenon that I'm going to focus on is classic buffer overflows, because those still are some of the most common forms of attack (see CWE-120). In C, a programmer has to be very careful to manage their malloc's and C arrays (particularly stack-allocated arrays) and pointers in general to ensure that they can't walk off the end of a data structure or point to their own running code or stuff 1100 bytes into a 1000-byte spot in memory. In, say, Python, because the interpreter has had a lot of checking for this, and because the structures in C that allow these kind of vulnerabilities aren't available directly, they're a non-issue. The scripting language interpreter / compiler solves that problem once for you, and then you don't have to solve it again. And the effect is that higher-level applications tend to be more vulnerable to application-layer mistakes like SQL injection than they are buffer overflows.
To be fair, Scientology doesn't claim an ideology of hopelessness (unlike, say, Norse religion that claimed that the entire world and almost everyone in it was doomed) - it believes that by "clearing" it can rid us of the evils that are a legacy of Xenu. It's crazy, not hopeless.
Yes, I was simplifying things a bit. The point was that English is actually a pretty good jumping-off into German, and German (in my experience) is somewhat easier for an English-speaker to pick up than, say, Italian. And of course, once you get away from IE languages, all bets are off: Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin, Turkish, Swahili, etc are all quite tricky for an English-speaker to wrap their heads around, because they use structures and sounds that are wildly different from English.
What's also key is that the better points of ReiserFS, such as journaling, have migrated into other file systems. The experiment wasn't a failure, it was a darn good idea that has led to an overall improvement in reliability and speed of other file systems.
Two objections:
1. The programmers who use scripting languages extensively often understand lower-level code, even down to the machine code, but choose not to use it because it creates a whole bunch of unnecessary headaches.
2. Well-written scripting languages ensure that the lower-level layer is not vulnerable to the most likely forms of attack, like buffer overflows. That means that the lower-level attack doesn't work, so in your scenario you might have a good machine gun and a roof to protect your position from orbital X-ray laser arrays.
Unrelated issue: You have a right to vote, and attempts to deny that right by requiring you to pay a certain amount of money to exercise it is unconstitutional. You don't have a right to pay only a certain amount for a car.
Can I have your attention please ...
May I have your attention please?
Will the real Bruce Perens please stand up?
I repeat, will the real Bruce Perens please stand up?
(We're gonna have a problem here.)
Y'all act like you've never seen a great hacker before,
Jaws all on the floor like Ken or Linus just burst in the door
and started deleting lines that were worse than before
there first were bad cores, throwing buffer overflows
It's bad returns from the... "Ah, wait, no way, you're kidding,
he didn't just write what I think he did, did he?"
And dmr said... nothing you idiots!
dmr's dead, he's still locked in Bell Labs!
Further, your founding fathers were, by-and-large, not religious
That's not quite true: They were religious, in many cases, but were very clear that they didn't want the newly created federal government establishing a religion of any kind. The idealistic reasons for this are many, and the Enlightenment-oriented folks like Jefferson advocated religious freedom on those grounds. But there was also a realpolitik reason, namely that the fledgling United States was in no way unified in their religious views, and the last thing they wanted was for the whole thing to fall apart over a question of what the Church of America would look like.
Also important to note at the time is that people identifying their religious preference would probably have given specific denominations like "Baptist" or "Congregationalist" rather than "Christian".
It's the "within limits" part that makes the "Free Speech Zones" so bad.
The key issue is that the "Free Speech Zones" have always been designated far away from where the event that the protesters are protesting is happening, and the mainstream media is discouraged from actually covering anything the protesters are doing. The goal of the zones is and has always been to silence protesters who's views fall outside the realm of what's deemed acceptable by the political establishment. For instance, I went to a VP debate back in 2004, and what was clearly allowed were signs saying "Kerry / Edwards" or "Bush / Cheney", but what was not allowed anywhere near a TV camera were signs saying "End the Fed" or "Leave Iraq Now".
... there is no supply of used cars in reach of their serfs^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpoor people's spending power.
I just did a quick search for used cars for under $3000, and found quite a few of them on the market within a 50 miles radius. (Like everything else, if you're in a more rural area, you have to travel further to find stuff.) I mean, there are reasonable objections to Cash for Clunkers (e.g. it costs too much), but yours doesn't seem to be based in reality.
In this case, it's also not just the size that counts, but also how they use it.
The most likely story:
1. The Youtube video gave fundamentalist Muslim leaders an excuse to call a protest, and got a few thousand people to turn up. Nothing surprising or even really wrong about that, fundamentalist Christian leaders regularly pull larger crowds in this country.
2. Al Qaida saw the opportunity to embed themselves in the protest and carry out some violence that they'd been wanting to do for months.
The dynamic doesn't seem all that different from the many cases of political protests where you have 15,000 of completely peaceful demonstrators and then a 200 person "Black Bloc" that engages in vandalism and assaults police.
They are allowed to do as they please citing religious pretext or freedom of speech/expression, but we're not allowed to hinder them using the same freedoms they abuse.
Sure we are, and we do: The counter to speech we find offensive is more speech opposing that which we find offensive.
An example, using the Westboro Baptist Church: They started picketing funerals of soldiers. A lot of people really didn't like that. Some tried to solve it with a law, which was ultimately struck down on free speech grounds. A bunch of other people solved it the right way: They worked with the families of the fallen and arranged to surround the funeral procession with people holding American flags, so that the mourners didn't see the bigots, they saw a group of patriotic Americans holding American flags in their honor.
The interesting question is what's "deviant" versus "normal", because the researchers who've looked into this stuff have made it pretty clear that acts that were once considered "deviant" are actually quite common. When you look at what religious authorities and the like have approved of, the only choices that seem to be universally acceptable (for those not part of a religious clergy that demands celibacy) is: ... of the opposite sex ... from the same social, religious, cultural, racial, etc background as you ... at least 16 years old (this age has varied a bit, going as low as 14 and as high as 22) ... after you've gone through some sort of wedding ceremony ... with the approval of the woman's father (or if her father is dead, her uncle, brother, or some other male relative who's taken over the role) ... not using birth control to prevent pregnancy ... in the missionary position ... and no concern whatsoever with whether the woman had an orgasm.
1. You can have sex only with exactly one person over the course of your lifetime
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
No society in human history has ever gotten even close to the point where this was universal. The Puritans did everything they could to make that happen, and there were still lots of babies born less than 9 months after the wedding, couples eloping, and lots of adultery. Everything else has been considered deviance at some point in human history, but even the risk of being killed if caught doesn't stop people from having different kinds of sex.
Mice will be dead; everything will be motion tracking, eye tracking, touch tracking, etc.
I'd bet against that - mice do a very good job of solving the problem they're targeting, which is why they're still around over 20 years after they were introduced to the mass market. Touchscreen technology in particular has to contend with "gorilla arm", because holding your arm up to a screen is tiring.
Nobody will type (by "Nobody I mean you can safely round the number of typists in the world down to zero).
Also a bad bet. Keyboards work, and work well, which is why the concept, introduced with typewriters well over a century ago, is still very much alive today, even on smartphones. Among their advantages are:
- They allow the typist to express exactly what they intend. That solves the "Dear Aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all." problem.
- They make use of all 10 of the typists' fingers, in an appropriate proportion. Many other input method do not.
- Most typists can type at least as fast as they can speak.
- Anyone in an open plan office or a public location would be driven insane by the noise of everyone talking to their computers, making speech-to-text not a viable option. Also, that same noise would be confusing the voice wreckognition software.
Latin, being not only the root language of the Romance languages, it is also a key to better understanding other European languages such as English, German &c., would be undoubtedly provide the child with great advantage.
I'd highly recommend Latin for young children, although it has very little relationship with German and only some relationship to English. Many of the apparent similarities between Latin and German have to do with the fact that they were both descended from a common ancestral language, and German is more closely related to English than Latin. It helps immensely with reading and learning closely related languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian), and of course reading early academic literature in the original.
Of course, dealing with all the difficulties of moving 200lb bodies to where they physically meet has a significant advantage: If you meet in meatspace, you have a very slight chance of getting laid.
For them to be "theives", they would have to be stealing. Stealing != copying and publicizing.
Sir / ma'am, I hereby invoke Godwin's Law. You have lost the argument.
No, I wouldn't:
1. Most Muslims are not members of Hamas.
2. The leaders of Hamas aren't widely considered to be religious authorities, only political authorities in a certain area of the world (this would be the equivalent of treating, say, John F Kennedy, as a leading authority on Catholicism).
3. The leaders of Hamas have a clear motive that has nothing to do with religion for convincing people that jihad, as envisioned by Hamas, is the ultimate in religious devotion.
So tell me again... who are the ones promoting hatred and violence?
That's easy - anyone who believes that people who believe differently than they do are fundamentally and typically irredeemably evil. Which is where Islamic nutjobs (e.g. Al Qaida) and Christian nutjobs (e.g. Xe, formerly Blackwater) and atheist nutjobs (e.g. the Soviets) all are much more similar than they'd like to admit.
What about non-militant Islam, is that evil? These aren't the "death to America" types, but the much more common "I want to go to work, come home to my family, and help raise the best and brightest kids I can, and maybe I stop by Friday prayers at the mosque" types.
For reference, here are the 5 fundamental practices of Islam:
1. Regular personal declaration in belief in monotheism, and that Mohammed is the messenger of that 1 god. This conceptually would be like a Christian reciting the Nicene Creed.
2. Praying 5 times a day. Totally harmless for anyone who's not doing this.
3. Giving at least 2.5% of ones income as charity towards the less fortunate. This seems positively virtuous.
4. Fasting, particularly during Ramadan, if practical (exceptions are made for children, pregnant women, etc). Again, harmless to anyone who isn't fasting.
5. A pilgrimage to Mecca. This could potentially support the Saudi government, but it's also basically harmless to anyone who isn't doing it, and often quite moving to those who do (Malcolm X is a great example - his experiences led him to stop hating white people due to their race).
And I should point out, for the record, that I'm not Muslim myself, but I've noticed that those who think that Islam is completely evil often know very little about what Muslims actually believe and how they practice their faith.
The world will be dominated by Islamic idiots because the rest of the world will do nothing but appease them.
Are you arguing that what non-Muslims should do is commit genocide against Muslims? If you're not, could you explain how invading Iraq and Afghanistan and applying economic sanctions to Iran, Syria, and the Gaza Strip constitute "appeasing"?
There are hundreds of appointed positions that have gone unfilled for the entire Obama administration.
Also of note is that they attempted to prevent Obama from even making recess appointments by having somebody who lived nearby come in, open the Senate for approximately 30 seconds, and then recess again, so that each recess was less than the time needed for Obama to legally make a recess appointment.
The senate rules need to change. Filibusters should actually be required to fillibuster.
If nothing else, it's entertaining to watch it happen. Besides, I'd like Strohm Thurmond's 23:56 record for longest Senate speech (in opposition to the Civil Rights Act) to be broken.
But don't worry, their tax cuts will be revenue neutral because they'll close "loopholes," but not the mortgage interest deduction, which is the second or third largest loophole in the tax code (depending on how you count it).
I'm still surprised Obama didn't pick up on this at the first debate: Either Romney's proposed tax cut reduces revenue, or it's not really something that can legitimately be called a "tax cut", because -$5 trillion+$5 trillion=0. My guess on what he's going to go after for "loopholes" is the Earned Income Tax Credit, which creates a sort of "negative tax" for people who earn less than the federal poverty line. In other words, it's the policy that creates the semi-mythical "freeloading" 47%.