not as long as people in universities and members of the upper-middle and upper classes get to exercise preferential treatment toward people who speak like them.
Heh. This just kills me. If you really want to know who has the most control over language, it's the writers and people on television. Those people are sometimes the "upper classes" and sometimes the "joe sixpack". They're rarely a University instructor, or "expert" on the subject at hand. My point is simply to refute the idea that More Knowledge == Correct when it comes to language.
BTW, if you wrote TFA shame on you! the proper word is "script kiddie", cyberglar, cyber burglar, "computer criminal". Not "hacker" for God's sake.
I never understand this strange attachment people have to word definitions. Give it up, the word also means "computer criminal". Just because Joe Sixpack thinks a "hacker" is a criminal and RAM is a brand of truck doesn't mean we should share in their ignorance.
This is the thing I also don't understand. "Joe Sixpack" is the guy defining the language, not people in Universities, or "experts". There's also plenty of the "break into computers", or "design an exploit" people that proudly call themselves hackers. Who gave you the only valid define the language card?
Language changes. If you don't like that, I suggest you go learn old english, and get all uppity about how nobody understands what you're saying.
Although the Hydrogen and Oxygen in the original cloud may have had almost zero chance of getting together, once the cloud collapsed into relatively dense planetary atmospheres, why couldn't water have formed then?
The problem with that is where we find water. We see a lot of water in the form of comets that couldn't have come from something as big as a planetary body. So the conclusion is water must have formed before planetary bodies. I believe the thinking is most of the water on earth came from comets.
Well a similar thing could be applied to houses as well, in theory. Shut down or reduce certain things during peak times, or zone the usage so only part of the homes in a given area are using it at once.
I'm sure you can do such a thing. The question in my mind is.. why? Electricity usage isn't new. Why are we looking at this now? Are people using a lot more electricity per capita these days? If so, why? All my appliances are becoming more efficient, so I'm likely using less power. Find the root of the problem rather than trying to fix symptoms. I'm not saying it is a cure-all or that we want it doing things like shutting down air conditioners for 3 hours in the desert or something, but there is potential to balance things out better and thus save money.
I guess my response to that is, stop building in the desert.
we should also mandate all new water heaters be tankless by 2015, or sooner
Maybe on new construction, but it's not a simple plugin replacement for a tank. Anyway, why choose a particular technology over another? If you care about energy efficiency, just mandate that the efficiency of the water heaters be above a certain percent. We do it with refrigerators, why not water heaters?
Your first paragraph is all wrong. This is nothing more than a fancy scalpel. Albeit one with tremor-dampening, and fancy haptics/cameras but still a tool nonetheless.
I'm sure you're right. My point is really that all these tools are going to be "surgeon assistants" rather than "surgeon replacements". I have a hard time believing any patient is going to want to trust their internist to do complicated surgery by a robot. Thus those kind of tools will not be developed (and it's likely not even possible).
Anyway, if this guy really wants to worry about being replaced, he should worry about being replaced by a human in India, China, or Thailand. Patients are flying their to hospitals with skilled surgeons that do these procedures at a fraction of the cost.
Who do you want to perform your GABG, a mediocre altruist or an egocentric professional who is confident because he/she really is that good?
Ever consider that the "egocentric professional" might just be closer to Frank Burns than Charles Emerson Winchester III? When you think you're the best, it might just wind up hiding a lot of mediocrity.
As a software developer, I've seen little correlation between ego, and skill. Some of the worst code I've seen came from a guy with (reportedly, I never met him) a huge ego. I see little reason why any other profession is any different in this respect.
Douche bag egocentric surgeons certainly are the stereotype we've seen on TV and movies. If it's actually true my guess is it really has more to do with being a defense mechanism against fucking something up than actual skill. If I mess up, someone is inconvenienced for a little while before I fix it. If a surgeon screws up, people can die. One way to deal with this is to believe you're perfect, or at least "the best", and no one could have done better than you did.
This kind of thing sounds like something that normally would happen in a 3rd world country, not the US or Canada. Are we really to the point where we have to start shutting off hot water heaters because we don't want to re-invest in the electrical infra-structure?
I'm all for more energy efficient appliances. I've got all compact fluorescents, have an automatic thermostat, and my computers power off when not in use. But not having hot water, or raising the temperature by 4 degrees? Forget about it.
if robotics allow every first year med student to perform as flawlessly as the highest skilled brain surgeon by compensating for their every mistake, then it's time to move to some third world country.
I kind of doubt it. This device is likely going to be mainly used to do things a surgeon is bad at, and is never going to be good at (nerve fibers in a prostate surgery), or tedious, time consuming things better left to a robot. It seems unlikely it'll put you out of a job.
What I _do_ hope though is that this device can lower costs by reducing complications, or having fewer assistants during a surgery, or perform more surgeries/day, etc.
For a 4W light bulb, 12VDC supply, assuming wiring with the same resistance as 120VAC:
This is the error that you, and he both make. The resistance will go DOWN for thicker wire (like you'd have to put in to convert to 12V DC). That's why things like jumper cables are so damn thick.
Sometimes it's just about putting a lock on the door and saying, "This doesn't belong to you."
Everything in security isn't a lock. There's no personal property being protected here, so stop with the "enter my house" analogy.
This is more like give away a free small bag of popcorn to anyone with a name badge that says "I own an iPhone" on it. In other words, this is more like lying than it is theft. Lying isn't usually illegal, unless you're defrauding someone.
The comedian Lenny Bruce was prosecuted in the 50s and 60s for merely speaking about "forbidden" topics at nightclubs. Just recently there's an internet site that published text stored "red rose stories" that was raided by the freaking FBI. There's a ton more. The Red Rose Stories prosecution case is scheduled to start soon.
So no, if you think this is about image based porn "obscenity", you're very wrong.
but it is ALWAYS best to learn the text/terminal/shell commands for the very same thing.
Why? I've been doing this linux thing for 14 years or so, and while I think it's important to understand the system, I really don't understand why it's ALWAYS good to know how to edit some file by hand. Sometimes I don't want to know all the internals of every single configuration option. X11 configuration is crazy complicated, for instance, and I hate having to edit that config file by hand. Networking has become a similar sucky config nightmare. Sometimes it's nice to hide all the guts behind a nice GUI.
The gui tools available NATIVELY don't allow for any comprehensive management of Unix/Linux systems. Less is more, terminal is faster, text over ssh, bash scripting - the entire culture of *nix is anti-gui.
That was true maybe 10 years ago. It's no longer true. Changing the network configuration on most distributions, for instance, is a thousand times easier using the GUI tool. I started out doing all the CLI file editing. I still do that to some degree, but I find myself reaching for the nice GUI tools more often. Even adding/editing users/groups is a LOT easier these days using the GUI.
I'd say the only thing that's anti-GUI are the guys that learned it one way, and refuse to learn anything new.
Then when I took the soggy passenger seat out to see if I could get it to dry faster, some ass stole it off my porch...
A soggy car seat? I think I'm convicting you already.
If you really wanted an excuse, you'd rip out the car seat, and leave the car in a bad area with the keys in it. Then report it stolen. Even if the car is recovered, it's still plausible some maniac took out the seat to sell it, or god knows what.
Finally, a way to combine the feature-rich capabilities of Javascript with the speed of Java!
You joke, but I'm sure it's the other way around. The myth that Java is slow persists to this day, though it hasn't been true for many years.
The ugly thing about this hack is going to be the slowness of javascript execution, especially when doing this bizzare translation. I'm all for replacing javascript with a less sucky language. But this doesn't seem like the solution.
No. Linux and MacOS do not get attacked, because normal users don't run with the sort of privileges that would allow the virus (or trojan as in your example) to do very much damage or replicate itself.
I never really understand why people think this is true. What exactly are the privileges required to do damage, or replicate? Linux essentially runs as the logged in user. That means you can:
Run a process. Send email. Write to any file the user can.
A good virus needs to:
survive a reboot. find a new target. send itself to that target.
There's lots of ways to execute a process automatically under linux. Off the top of my head I can think of several. One would be getting in one of the.login,.profile, or all the various different init scripts stored in the users home directory (and belong to the user) that get run when a user logs in. Another would be installing yourself as a plugin to mozilla (I believe you can write to the home direcory to install plugins for just that user). That'd be a pretty nasty one, and might even let you sniff any password/CC/etc they type in.
Once you make sure the virus/worm survives reboot, now you need to target another user. I believe the address book is readable by the logged in user, so there's a big set of new targets. Don't speak SMTP? Well, just read the config file for thunderbird, and find an SMTP server to use. Hell, I think you could even steal the pop/imap/auth SMTP username password, since I don't think it's encrypted by a user selected password by default. Don't spread via email? Well, process's and network connections are all nice and listable to ordinary users. Look to those for guidance.
The only thing protecting Linux is some better written code than is in many Microsoft programs (Outlook, Internet Explorer, etc). Not having root/admin is very little hindrance.
I don't know much about MacOS, but I don't see how it's any different.
The vendors reply is just classic. It's essentially an admission that their products don't work. The whole AV industry is built on trying to idenitify existing viruses, and have a signature for them.
Of course, if you find the virus out in the wild and identify it, you've already failed for a lot of people. (but I'm sure they don't like to talk about that).
This is like a safe manufacturer objecting to someone actually trying to break open a safe like a real criminal would. "What! You used a crowbar and liquid nitrogen?! You're just letting the criminals know more about cold+crowbar usage!!! You should know OUR safes protect against sledgehammers VERY well."
Get real AV vendors. Everyone already knows you can't stand up to new viruses, and only protect against the known ones. People still buy your damn software anyway, because it's better than nothing.
I'll never understand these strange semantic games people like to play. The distinction is really a value judgement, and nothing else. If you want to care about that kind of thing, that's fine. The only thing I really care about is what each actually does, which is produce music.
Are you really trying to argue that Metallica is an "artist", and their former napster suing behavior is in violation of their "artist nature"? If that's your argument, I give up. We might as well be arguing whether chocolate ice cream is better, or strawberry.
The point of being a musician, or another kind of artist, is to share the art, not to make a profit. There's nothing wrong with expecting to make some money off of it, but that should not be the focus.
I can't believe this got modded so highly. Share the art? Are you serious?
I'm sure there's bands out their that care deeply about the "art". There's also bands that just want to make a lot of money, screw some some girls, and party. Don't try to shoehorn all bands into the "share the art" category. You don't have to look too far to realize that just doesn't work. Do you really think Madonna, for instance, has a number one motive of "sharing the art"?
I thought about that possibility at the time, (mostly for fun). We even asked an employee at a different museum about it. She replied the alarm going off was common, and the existence of it involved politics, and money. She said this museum had a lot of money for an expensive alarm system. I thought that explanation kind of funny, since I've been to museums all over the world, and I've never even heard an alarm go off, much less get yelled at by a Nazi guard. I remember a guard in Chicago looking intently at me and my girlfriend while I motioned at a statue as we talked about it. He seemed more amused by our conversation than he was worried about us actually touching it though.
So no, it sadly wasn't some kind of performance art. I think it must be just a different world over their in southern Germany.
I think you've gone beyond the original point I'm trying to convey. Math is what math is. We come up with a few words to try to describe mathematics, but it's always flawed. For instance, is an electron a particle or a wave? Neither of course, it's an electron. Sometimes it's convenient to describe it as a wave, other times as a particle. That's the sense I'm saying that language isn't real. I'd rather not get into the larger argument you've brought up.
Personally, I'd think the underlying question is; "what are the rules of the universe, can we read it and understand it?".
I think that's an important question. I just don't think answering "is math discovered or created" is part of answering that question. This question is essentially philosophy (and not terribly interesting philosophy), and not science.
Slashdot Mirror
not as long as people in universities and members of the upper-middle and upper classes get to exercise preferential treatment toward people who speak like them.
Heh. This just kills me. If you really want to know who has the most control over language, it's the writers and people on television. Those people are sometimes the "upper classes" and sometimes the "joe sixpack". They're rarely a University instructor, or "expert" on the subject at hand. My point is simply to refute the idea that More Knowledge == Correct when it comes to language.
BTW, if you wrote TFA shame on you! the proper word is "script kiddie", cyberglar, cyber burglar, "computer criminal". Not "hacker" for God's sake.
I never understand this strange attachment people have to word definitions. Give it up, the word also means "computer criminal".
Just because Joe Sixpack thinks a "hacker" is a criminal and RAM is a brand of truck doesn't mean we should share in their ignorance.
This is the thing I also don't understand. "Joe Sixpack" is the guy defining the language, not people in Universities, or "experts". There's also plenty of the "break into computers", or "design an exploit" people that proudly call themselves hackers. Who gave you the only valid define the language card?
Language changes. If you don't like that, I suggest you go learn old english, and get all uppity about how nobody understands what you're saying.
Although the Hydrogen and Oxygen in the original cloud may have had almost zero chance of getting together, once the cloud collapsed into relatively dense planetary atmospheres, why couldn't water have formed then?
The problem with that is where we find water. We see a lot of water in the form of comets that couldn't have come from something as big as a planetary body. So the conclusion is water must have formed before planetary bodies. I believe the thinking is most of the water on earth came from comets.
Well a similar thing could be applied to houses as well, in theory. Shut down or reduce certain things during peak times, or zone the usage so only part of the homes in a given area are using it at once.
I'm sure you can do such a thing. The question in my mind is.. why? Electricity usage isn't new. Why are we looking at this now? Are people using a lot more electricity per capita these days? If so, why? All my appliances are becoming more efficient, so I'm likely using less power. Find the root of the problem rather than trying to fix symptoms.
I'm not saying it is a cure-all or that we want it doing things like shutting down air conditioners for 3 hours in the desert or something, but there is potential to balance things out better and thus save money.
I guess my response to that is, stop building in the desert.
we should also mandate all new water heaters be tankless by 2015, or sooner
Maybe on new construction, but it's not a simple plugin replacement for a tank. Anyway, why choose a particular technology over another? If you care about energy efficiency, just mandate that the efficiency of the water heaters be above a certain percent. We do it with refrigerators, why not water heaters?
Your first paragraph is all wrong. This is nothing more than a fancy scalpel. Albeit one with tremor-dampening, and fancy haptics/cameras but still a tool nonetheless.
I'm sure you're right. My point is really that all these tools are going to be "surgeon assistants" rather than "surgeon replacements". I have a hard time believing any patient is going to want to trust their internist to do complicated surgery by a robot. Thus those kind of tools will not be developed (and it's likely not even possible).
Anyway, if this guy really wants to worry about being replaced, he should worry about being replaced by a human in India, China, or Thailand. Patients are flying their to hospitals with skilled surgeons that do these procedures at a fraction of the cost.
Who do you want to perform your GABG, a mediocre altruist or an egocentric professional who is confident because he/she really is that good?
Ever consider that the "egocentric professional" might just be closer to Frank Burns than Charles Emerson Winchester III? When you think you're the best, it might just wind up hiding a lot of mediocrity.
As a software developer, I've seen little correlation between ego, and skill. Some of the worst code I've seen came from a guy with (reportedly, I never met him) a huge ego. I see little reason why any other profession is any different in this respect.
Douche bag egocentric surgeons certainly are the stereotype we've seen on TV and movies. If it's actually true my guess is it really has more to do with being a defense mechanism against fucking something up than actual skill. If I mess up, someone is inconvenienced for a little while before I fix it. If a surgeon screws up, people can die. One way to deal with this is to believe you're perfect, or at least "the best", and no one could have done better than you did.
This kind of thing sounds like something that normally would happen in a 3rd world country, not the US or Canada. Are we really to the point where we have to start shutting off hot water heaters because we don't want to re-invest in the electrical infra-structure?
I'm all for more energy efficient appliances. I've got all compact fluorescents, have an automatic thermostat, and my computers power off when not in use. But not having hot water, or raising the temperature by 4 degrees? Forget about it.
if robotics allow every first year med student to perform as flawlessly as the highest skilled brain surgeon by compensating for their every mistake, then it's time to move to some third world country.
I kind of doubt it. This device is likely going to be mainly used to do things a surgeon is bad at, and is never going to be good at (nerve fibers in a prostate surgery), or tedious, time consuming things better left to a robot. It seems unlikely it'll put you out of a job.
What I _do_ hope though is that this device can lower costs by reducing complications, or having fewer assistants during a surgery, or perform more surgeries/day, etc.
For a 4W light bulb, 12VDC supply, assuming wiring with the same resistance as 120VAC:
This is the error that you, and he both make. The resistance will go DOWN for thicker wire (like you'd have to put in to convert to 12V DC). That's why things like jumper cables are so damn thick.
Sometimes it's just about putting a lock on the door and saying, "This doesn't belong to you."
Everything in security isn't a lock. There's no personal property being protected here, so stop with the "enter my house" analogy.
This is more like give away a free small bag of popcorn to anyone with a name badge that says "I own an iPhone" on it. In other words, this is more like lying than it is theft. Lying isn't usually illegal, unless you're defrauding someone.
Hasn't written material traditionally been exempt from obscenity laws?
Not really. Wikiepedia has a whole section on "non image based obscenity" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity
The comedian Lenny Bruce was prosecuted in the 50s and 60s for merely speaking about "forbidden" topics at nightclubs. Just recently there's an internet site that published text stored "red rose stories" that was raided by the freaking FBI. There's a ton more. The Red Rose Stories prosecution case is scheduled to start soon.
So no, if you think this is about image based porn "obscenity", you're very wrong.
Why do you need an analogy? Can't you just explain yourself describing the thing you're actually talking about?
but it is ALWAYS best to learn the text/terminal/shell commands for the very same thing.
Why? I've been doing this linux thing for 14 years or so, and while I think it's important to understand the system, I really don't understand why it's ALWAYS good to know how to edit some file by hand. Sometimes I don't want to know all the internals of every single configuration option. X11 configuration is crazy complicated, for instance, and I hate having to edit that config file by hand. Networking has become a similar sucky config nightmare. Sometimes it's nice to hide all the guts behind a nice GUI.
The gui tools available NATIVELY don't allow for any comprehensive management of Unix/Linux systems.
Less is more, terminal is faster, text over ssh, bash scripting - the entire culture of *nix is anti-gui.
That was true maybe 10 years ago. It's no longer true. Changing the network configuration on most distributions, for instance, is a thousand times easier using the GUI tool. I started out doing all the CLI file editing. I still do that to some degree, but I find myself reaching for the nice GUI tools more often. Even adding/editing users/groups is a LOT easier these days using the GUI.
I'd say the only thing that's anti-GUI are the guys that learned it one way, and refuse to learn anything new.
Then when I took the soggy passenger seat out to see if I could get it to dry faster, some ass stole it off my porch...
A soggy car seat? I think I'm convicting you already.
If you really wanted an excuse, you'd rip out the car seat, and leave the car in a bad area with the keys in it. Then report it stolen. Even if the car is recovered, it's still plausible some maniac took out the seat to sell it, or god knows what.
Finally, a way to combine the feature-rich capabilities of Javascript with the speed of Java!
You joke, but I'm sure it's the other way around. The myth that Java is slow persists to this day, though it hasn't been true for many years.
The ugly thing about this hack is going to be the slowness of javascript execution, especially when doing this bizzare translation. I'm all for replacing javascript with a less sucky language. But this doesn't seem like the solution.
No. Linux and MacOS do not get attacked, because normal users don't run with the sort of privileges that would allow the virus (or trojan as in your example) to do very much damage or replicate itself.
I never really understand why people think this is true. What exactly are the privileges required to do damage, or replicate? Linux essentially runs as the logged in user. That means you can:
Run a process.
Send email.
Write to any file the user can.
A good virus needs to:
survive a reboot.
find a new target.
send itself to that target.
There's lots of ways to execute a process automatically under linux. Off the top of my head I can think of several. One would be getting in one of the
Once you make sure the virus/worm survives reboot, now you need to target another user. I believe the address book is readable by the logged in user, so there's a big set of new targets. Don't speak SMTP? Well, just read the config file for thunderbird, and find an SMTP server to use. Hell, I think you could even steal the pop/imap/auth SMTP username password, since I don't think it's encrypted by a user selected password by default. Don't spread via email? Well, process's and network connections are all nice and listable to ordinary users. Look to those for guidance.
The only thing protecting Linux is some better written code than is in many Microsoft programs (Outlook, Internet Explorer, etc). Not having root/admin is very little hindrance.
I don't know much about MacOS, but I don't see how it's any different.
The vendors reply is just classic. It's essentially an admission that their products don't work. The whole AV industry is built on trying to idenitify existing viruses, and have a signature for them.
Of course, if you find the virus out in the wild and identify it, you've already failed for a lot of people. (but I'm sure they don't like to talk about that).
This is like a safe manufacturer objecting to someone actually trying to break open a safe like a real criminal would. "What! You used a crowbar and liquid nitrogen?! You're just letting the criminals know more about cold+crowbar usage!!! You should know OUR safes protect against sledgehammers VERY well."
Get real AV vendors. Everyone already knows you can't stand up to new viruses, and only protect against the known ones. People still buy your damn software anyway, because it's better than nothing.
Dude, you can't possibly be making the "it's popular therefore it's good argument"?!?
No, he's trying to make the "it's popular, therefore people paid for it".
Whether it's "good" or not is irrelevant. This discussion is about money, not artistic value.
One is an artist, the other is a rock star.
I'll never understand these strange semantic games people like to play. The distinction is really a value judgement, and nothing else. If you want to care about that kind of thing, that's fine. The only thing I really care about is what each actually does, which is produce music.
Are you really trying to argue that Metallica is an "artist", and their former napster suing behavior is in violation of their "artist nature"? If that's your argument, I give up. We might as well be arguing whether chocolate ice cream is better, or strawberry.
The point of being a musician, or another kind of artist, is to share the art, not to make a profit. There's nothing wrong with expecting to make some money off of it, but that should not be the focus.
I can't believe this got modded so highly. Share the art? Are you serious?
I'm sure there's bands out their that care deeply about the "art". There's also bands that just want to make a lot of money, screw some some girls, and party. Don't try to shoehorn all bands into the "share the art" category. You don't have to look too far to realize that just doesn't work. Do you really think Madonna, for instance, has a number one motive of "sharing the art"?
That act might have been a performance art?
I thought about that possibility at the time, (mostly for fun). We even asked an employee at a different museum about it. She replied the alarm going off was common, and the existence of it involved politics, and money. She said this museum had a lot of money for an expensive alarm system. I thought that explanation kind of funny, since I've been to museums all over the world, and I've never even heard an alarm go off, much less get yelled at by a Nazi guard. I remember a guard in Chicago looking intently at me and my girlfriend while I motioned at a statue as we talked about it. He seemed more amused by our conversation than he was worried about us actually touching it though.
So no, it sadly wasn't some kind of performance art. I think it must be just a different world over their in southern Germany.
I think you've gone beyond the original point I'm trying to convey. Math is what math is. We come up with a few words to try to describe mathematics, but it's always flawed. For instance, is an electron a particle or a wave? Neither of course, it's an electron. Sometimes it's convenient to describe it as a wave, other times as a particle. That's the sense I'm saying that language isn't real. I'd rather not get into the larger argument you've brought up.
Personally, I'd think the underlying question is; "what are the rules of the universe, can we read it and understand it?".
I think that's an important question. I just don't think answering "is math discovered or created" is part of answering that question. This question is essentially philosophy (and not terribly interesting philosophy), and not science.