"Meanwhile, if you are a private American citizen, break some Russian laws over here, then fly to Moscow, they'd probably arrest you a la Sklyarov. Dmitry Sklyarov did the reverse: he broke American laws in Russia, then entered America's borders, and was arrested."
Let's extend this logic: Iran should have the right to execute anyone that was caught cheating her husband in the US, Greece could put to prison Dutch tourists for having smoked marijuana in Amsterdam, Israel could fine a British traveller who had worked last Saturday, and of course if I ever go to Singapure I'd better worry about the $3000 fine that awaits me for having thrown my chewing gum down the pavement last June in Rome. Oh, and Americans better stay out of the EU (most people can get a driver's license at the age of 18 or 21 here).
And then it was me thinking that national laws are called, "national" because they only apply within, well, *national* territory.
Naturally, when everything is done over the net, the definition of *where* a law was broken becomes a bit fuzzy. But let's accept for the sake of discussion that American courts have juristiction over a crime remotely commited from Russia in computers located in American territory. Then the opposite should of course apply. Russian courts have juristiction over a crime remotly commited from America in computers located in Russian territory. If I were the agents and we lived in a proper world, I would definitely avoid visiting any Russian cousins for the next 30 years or so.
Yeah, typing smb://name_of_share in Konqueror's address bar is so cumbersome... Thank goodness there is a $100 commercial product that hides it behind some stupid icon.
C++ has a weak type system? C++? You may say whatever you want about C++ (complex, full of C pitfalls, a hell to debug, whatever) but "weak type system"? Don't think so... I mean, some compilers won't even let you get away with passing an (un)signed char to something that expects a char. BTW C++ does RTTI and "array" bounds checking at runtime (provided you use a proper string or vector instead of a plain old C-style array).
Successfully go about their business? A friend of mine lost her entire diploma thesis which was written in MS-Word, because Word simply couldn't deal with an 80-page document full of pictures and shapes.
But Office's instability is not the issue here. The issue is that her response to my question "why the fsck weren't you keeping backups?" was a "Huh?". She couldn't create a backup cause she had no concept of her paper as a "file", something that exists physically on the HDD and can be copied to the FDD, possibly after some compression. For that matter, she didn't know what "compression" is, or that MS Word wasn't storing her documents in its own magical place.
Microsoft promotes a very peculiar way of using your computer, which I call "the TV way". For MS users, a PC is much like a TV. You don't have the slightest clue what's going on in there, but you can safely use it to get something done (OK, with a TV you don't get much done, but I'm sure you get the idea). Only a PC is not a TV. A PC is orders of magnitude more complex than even the most advanced house appliance, plus you use it for orders of magnitude more complex and important things (compare "writing a diploma thesis" to "watching the news").
Concepts like "filesystem", "application", "shared library", "process", "compression" etc. are already abstractions of way more complex concepts that actually exist in a PC. E.g. a filesystem is generally an abstraction of a storage device, whose operation might involve concepts such as "magnetic medium", "cylinders" or "laser beam", "throughput" etc.
So, abstractions such as "filesystem" are complex, but only contain the minimum amount of complexity that is required to make the most out of your PC usage. Sure, you can live without understanding the notion of "executable content", or the notion of the "KB". Until someone you 've never heard of sends you a 200KB HTML message titled "I wanna screw you" and your C: drive goes to hell.
Until PCs and applications become smart enough to deal with these abstractions themselves successfully (which not what the MS products do), simply hiding these abstractions away from the user (which is what the MS products do), i.e. giving fish to the user instead of teaching them ho to fish is a disastrous (for the user) decision.
I agree that this discovery is not something to laugh at. Short-term prediction of earthquakes is the ultimate goal of seismologists everywhere and the benefits from accurate short-term prediction are huge. Any progress made at this field is welcomed.
But 30 seconds? And without even 100% accuracy? It takes more time than this to leave your house. It even takes more time than this to leave the 90th floor of a sky-scraper (although sky scrapers are generally earthquake-proof). It even takes considerably more time to issue an alert in a large city.
Sorry guys, but 30 seconds would offer nothing more than panic. More people would be killed by trying to evacuate a building with say, 500 employees (within 30 secs) than any given earthquake could dream off (not to mention heart attacks and such). And false alarms would get to everyone's nerves after the first few months.
So, although the discovery is interesting, it is of little to no practical use.
Add a request for templates (which are by far more powerful than the other three stuff that you mention) and you basically have C++.
But then, why use Java in the first place and not C++? Oh, yes, cause it would be written once and run everywhere. Believe me, with little syntactic sugar additions like templates, pointers, multiple inheritance and DMA, "running everywhere" would be pathetic in terms of speed. Even JIT wouldn't do.
There is a good reason why Java lacks half the syntax of C++. It is (whatever Sun says) an interpreted language[*]. Interpreted languages have to be simple, otherwise the interpreters become monsters. Period.
[*] I do not mean that this is bad. Nothing personal against interpreted languages, mind. It just sounds bad to marketing people.
First of all, the article mentions explicitely "genetically engineered bugs".
Now, when you go around engineering bugs, you are forgeting a couple o' things which might just turn back on you (preferably in a scarier and hungrier version).
For instance: "These organisms are like nanomachines. We know their genetic code, hence the isntructions required to produce them bla bla bla" says the MIT guru. Yeah. The only problem is that microorganisms are not machines. Unlike machines, microorganisms have this annoying tendency of replicating. Plus, they mutate all the time. What if some little bugger genetically engineered to perpetrate cities and stuff develops taste for human flesh?
Furthermore, the ecosystem is more chaotic than most corporate executives believe. Maybe if you release some bug that say, eats toxic waste, this bug also render other bugs extinct. Maybe the bug is a carier for bacteria that kill me, you, and the other bug whose crap cures cancer and hasn't been discovered yet.
There is a solution to environmental pollution. Stop polluting the bloody environment that much! Use smaller cars, don't use CFC, find alternatives to oil, recycle. But these things do not immediately translate into money, so we get stupidities of all kinds instead. Money-making stupidities in fact...
One of the very fist things people learn in Numerical Analysis classes is the principle
Do NOT Extrapolate
Unlike interpolation (which is guessing the value of a function f(x) where x is in (x0,x1) and
f(x0), f(x1) is known), extrapolation (which is forecasting the value f(x) where x is in (x1,+Inf) ) is doomed to almost always yield incorrect results. In plain English, even if traffic had beed growing by 100% every month so far, this would not necessarily mean that the same trend would carry on from now on. I wish somebody put DO NOT EXTRAPOLATE under every manager's, stockholder's, futurist's pillow. Less money would be lost, less nonsense would be said. So, if Telecom companies and stockholders believed Worldcom's lies (or honest nonsense), I guess they had it coming...
Kylix is a commercial app and must use Qt under the terms of the commercial license. But the apps created with Kylix (Open) are not commercial so they can/must use Qt under the terms of the GPL. Probably:-)
Re:I've seen it over and over and I'm tired of it.
on
The Power of Palladium
·
· Score: 1
"Palladium" means "statue of Pallas" (a nickname of Athena). There were quite a few Palladia in the Ancient world. Among these, a golden-ivory statue in the Acropolis of Athens, sculptured by Pheidias. This particular Palladium was among the 7 wonders of the ancient world and presumably it was protecting Athens.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you are not, you forgot "skata", or preferably
"malakes".
> Do you really think the world would let him get away with something like that, or the American people?
I case you haven't noticed, the world is not exactly thrilled
about what Dubya is trying to do, and same goes for
quite a few Americans.
"Meanwhile, if you are a private American citizen, break some Russian laws over here, then fly to Moscow, they'd probably arrest you a la Sklyarov. Dmitry Sklyarov did the reverse: he broke American laws in Russia, then entered America's borders, and was arrested."
Let's extend this logic: Iran should have the
right to execute anyone that was caught cheating her husband in the US, Greece could put to
prison Dutch tourists for having smoked marijuana in Amsterdam, Israel could fine
a British traveller who had worked last Saturday, and of course if I ever go to Singapure I'd better worry about the $3000 fine
that awaits me for having thrown my chewing gum down the pavement last June in Rome. Oh,
and Americans better stay out of the EU (most
people can get a driver's license at the age
of 18 or 21 here).
And then it was me thinking that national laws
are called, "national" because they only apply
within, well, *national* territory.
Naturally, when everything is done over the
net, the definition of *where* a law was broken
becomes a bit fuzzy. But let's accept for the sake of discussion that American courts have
juristiction over a crime remotely commited from Russia in computers located in American territory. Then the opposite should of course apply. Russian courts have juristiction over
a crime remotly commited from America in computers located in Russian territory. If I were the agents and we lived in a proper world, I would definitely avoid visiting any Russian
cousins for the next 30 years or so.
Yeah, typing smb://name_of_share in Konqueror's address bar is so cumbersome... Thank goodness there is a $100 commercial product that hides it behind some stupid icon.
"they have a pretty weak type system"
C++ has a weak type system? C++? You may say
whatever you want about C++ (complex, full of
C pitfalls, a hell to debug, whatever) but
"weak type system"? Don't think so... I mean,
some compilers won't even let you get away
with passing an (un)signed char to something that
expects a char.
BTW C++ does RTTI and "array" bounds checking
at runtime (provided you use a proper string or
vector instead of a plain old C-style array).
Successfully go about their business?
A friend of mine lost her entire diploma thesis which was written in MS-Word, because Word simply couldn't deal with an 80-page document full of pictures and shapes.
But Office's instability is not the issue here. The issue is that her response to my question "why the fsck weren't you keeping backups?" was a "Huh?". She couldn't create a backup cause she had no concept of her paper as a "file", something that exists physically on the HDD and can be copied to the FDD, possibly after some compression. For that matter, she didn't know
what "compression" is, or that MS Word wasn't storing her documents in its own magical place.
Microsoft promotes a very peculiar way of using
your computer, which I call "the TV way". For MS users, a PC is much like a TV. You don't have the slightest clue what's going on in there, but you can safely use it to get something done (OK, with a TV you don't get much done, but I'm sure you get the idea). Only a PC is not a TV. A PC is orders of magnitude more complex than even the most advanced house appliance, plus you use it for orders of magnitude more complex and important things (compare "writing a diploma thesis" to "watching the news").
Concepts like "filesystem", "application",
"shared library", "process", "compression" etc.
are already abstractions of way more complex concepts that actually exist in a PC. E.g. a filesystem is generally an abstraction of a storage device, whose operation might involve concepts such as "magnetic medium", "cylinders" or "laser beam", "throughput" etc.
So, abstractions such as "filesystem" are complex, but only contain the minimum amount of complexity that is required to make the most out of your PC usage. Sure, you can live without understanding the notion of "executable content", or the notion of the "KB". Until someone you 've never heard of sends you a 200KB HTML message titled "I wanna screw you" and your C: drive goes to hell.
Until PCs and applications become smart enough to deal with these abstractions themselves successfully (which not what the MS products do), simply hiding these abstractions away from the user (which is what the MS products do), i.e. giving fish to the user instead of teaching them ho to fish is a disastrous (for the user) decision.
I agree that this discovery is not something to
laugh at. Short-term prediction of earthquakes
is the ultimate goal of seismologists everywhere and the benefits from accurate short-term prediction are huge. Any progress made at this
field is welcomed.
But 30 seconds? And without even 100% accuracy?
It takes more time than this to leave your house. It even takes more time than this to leave the 90th floor of a sky-scraper (although sky scrapers are generally earthquake-proof).
It even takes considerably more time to issue an alert in a large city.
Sorry guys, but 30 seconds would offer nothing more than panic. More people would be killed by trying to evacuate a building with say, 500 employees (within 30 secs) than any given earthquake could dream off (not to mention heart attacks and such). And false alarms would get to everyone's nerves after the first few months.
So, although the discovery is interesting, it is of little to no practical use.
Add a request for templates (which are by far more powerful than the other three stuff that
you mention) and you basically have C++.
But then, why use Java in the first place and
not C++? Oh, yes, cause it would be written once
and run everywhere. Believe me, with little syntactic sugar additions like templates,
pointers, multiple inheritance and DMA, "running
everywhere" would be pathetic in terms of
speed. Even JIT wouldn't do.
There is a good reason why Java lacks half the
syntax of C++. It is (whatever Sun says) an
interpreted language[*]. Interpreted languages
have to be simple, otherwise the interpreters
become monsters. Period.
[*] I do not mean that this is bad. Nothing
personal against interpreted languages, mind.
It just sounds bad to marketing people.
First of all, the article mentions explicitely "genetically engineered bugs".
Now, when you go around engineering bugs, you are forgeting a couple o' things which might just turn back on you (preferably in a scarier and hungrier version).
For instance:
"These organisms are like nanomachines. We know their genetic code, hence the isntructions required to produce them bla bla bla" says the MIT guru. Yeah. The only problem is that microorganisms are not machines. Unlike machines, microorganisms have this annoying tendency of replicating. Plus, they mutate all the time. What if some little bugger genetically engineered to perpetrate cities and stuff develops taste for human flesh?
Furthermore, the ecosystem is more chaotic than most corporate executives believe. Maybe if you release some bug that say, eats toxic waste, this bug also render other bugs extinct. Maybe the bug is a carier for bacteria that kill me, you, and the other bug whose crap cures cancer and hasn't been discovered yet.
There is a solution to environmental pollution. Stop polluting the bloody environment that much! Use smaller cars, don't use CFC, find alternatives to oil, recycle. But these things do not immediately translate into money, so we get stupidities of all kinds instead. Money-making stupidities in fact...
One of the very fist things people learn in Numerical Analysis classes is the principle
Do NOT Extrapolate
Unlike interpolation (which is guessing the value of a function f(x) where x is in (x0,x1) and f(x0), f(x1) is known), extrapolation (which is forecasting the value f(x) where x is in (x1,+Inf) ) is doomed to almost always yield incorrect results.
In plain English, even if traffic had beed growing by 100% every month so far, this would not necessarily mean that the same trend would carry on from now on.
I wish somebody put DO NOT EXTRAPOLATE under every manager's, stockholder's, futurist's pillow. Less money would be lost, less nonsense would be said.
So, if Telecom companies and stockholders believed Worldcom's lies (or honest nonsense), I guess they had it coming...
Kylix is a commercial app and must use Qt :-)
under the terms of the commercial license.
But the apps created with Kylix (Open) are not commercial so they can/must use Qt under the terms of the GPL. Probably
"Palladium" means "statue of Pallas" (a nickname
of Athena). There were quite a few Palladia in the Ancient world. Among these, a golden-ivory statue in the Acropolis of Athens, sculptured by Pheidias. This particular Palladium was among the
7 wonders of the ancient world and presumably it
was protecting Athens.