sure there is. cryogenic freezing. hell of a lot more likely to be plausible than warp drives. you can get anywhere at walking speed if you or the universe doesn't die in the mean time...
"Consider this scenario: John's First National Bank and Laundromat decides they need verifier software. They outsource the writing to a cheap software contractor shop who doesn't care much other than they deliver on time."
Why would they do that when, by the nature of currency, there will be exactly one system which everything from the National Bank to joe's laundromat would be following if they wanted to check the currency?
You wouldn't go and hire a software contract shop to write your own verification system. You'd use the exact same verification system that every other small business in the country was using. It's not like you could get some kind of competitive benefit by having your own verifier. Does every laundromat in the country hire a Chinese OEM to build its own little machine to check for counterfeit bills currently? Of course not. They all just buy a counterfeit checker from the same giant company that sells the same counterfeit checkers to everybody.
"It's not an erroneous assumption at all. The banks wouldn't print a URL in their QR code, but we're talking about an attacker modifying a bill, not the bank."
But if the system simply involves a QR code which encodes content that's essentially plain text to be evaluated, then the system which reads the QR code does not need to be capable of executing anything or following symlinks. You only need your QR reading code to follow symlinks out to the public internet if that's what the 'genuine' QR codes you're trying to read contain. No-one would psychopathically stupid enough to invent a currency-verification system based on QR codes that were hyperlinks to the public internet, I'd hope.
If the software used to verify the QR codes weren't capable of following hyperlinks it doesn't matter how many evil hyperlinks you put into 'malicous' QR codes, the reader won't follow them and you'll have achieved precisely nothing.
You're probably right, I doubt HFT as it's happening today really provides much if at all arbitrage that you couldn't get at a coarser level, as you suggest. But my point, I guess, is that - with the OP - I don't think that doing so would solve any other problems we have. HFT is a vicious cut-throat form of gambling for certain people who want to indulge in it. But I doubt it's actually causing any major negative effects for normal economic activity - companies actually doing things to make money, regular investors investing in stocks with a vaguely long-term horizon (or really, anything outside of a week). I don't see any 'real world' problem that would be solved by outlawing HFT, really. All it'd do is stop one set of HFT traders making themselves extremely rich at the expense of a bunch of other HFT traders, so far as I can see.
There's nothing wrong with group ownership and representation.
I suppose you want me to say I own shares in lots of companies and know nothing about them, but that isn't really true. I have very fractional ownership of a few mutual funds. Your average person with money in some kind of fund doesn't actually own any shares. The fund owns the shares and is responsible for them. As an average joe investing in funds, you're simply saying 'I have decided to trust this body to know about companies and buy shares partially on my behalf, instead of doing it myself'.
The big institutional investors certainly *do* know an awful lot about the companies they invest in, and take an active part in monitoring the running of those firms. They do so on behalf of their clients.
This really isn't a crazy system. We use it for lots of other things. Modern life is complex. You can't know everything about everything. We have evolved various neat systems whereby we are able to each know about different things, on each other's behalf. Overall, it seems to work a lot better than each human trying to know everything all humans can possibly know. That ceased to be possible somewhere several centuries back...
The argument in favour of HFT is that what it essentially provides is arbitrage. It only works so long as someone is doing something 'wrong'. It's like arbitrage of sporting odds - it only works so long as different bookmakers are posting different odds, and clearly, one of them must be 'wrong'. Arbers ultimately act as a force that tends to result in more accurate odds being posted. In theory, high frequency traders should, over the long term, act to iron out inconsistencies in prices.
Remember, HFT is a _relative_ term. I mean, you could look at trading stocks over the telegraph rather than by sending a letter to your broker as the HFT of 1855 (or whatever the correct date is, I don't know exactly). Ultimately that led to more 'rational' markets, because significant time delays in trading can obviously lead to some fairly weird results, like people buying stock in a company that went bankrupt the day before or something. Really, HFT theoretically ought to have the same effect, just on a much smaller scale.
I'm kind of in agreement with the OP that it's easy to overblow HFT as a problem. As long as the things being traded have a direct and obvious relationship to real economic transactions, it's fairly obvious when HFT is doing something ridiculous, and it gets quickly corrected. I think the OP's correct that HFT really isn't a problem to a truly conservative investor, who is investing long term on the basis of corporate performance. It's really only a problem for those who are day trading, trying to make money by taking advantage of imperfect investment decisions by others. In other words, the only ones who are hurt by HFT are people who are doing the same thing HFT traders are doing, just not as _well_. They don't necessarily deserve much sympathy, and making things better for them probably won't result in magic improvement in the economy or anything.
"Unfortunately, the rules of Wikipedia are what they are. You deal with them or you don't take part."
That's absurd - not just as it applies to Wikipedia, but in general. For any set of laws that wasn't carved in stone and handed down from a deity (of your choice, naturally), it isn't at all true that they 'are what they are'. Rules change _all the time_. Wikipedia's rules were designed to try and produce the best Wikipedia possible. Having been written by people and not $DEITY_OF_YOUR_CHOICE, they are inevitably fallible and therefore improvable. Wikipedia should, and I'm sure is, be open to and capable of modifying its own rules, if it becomes clear that the rules aren't producing the desired result. Any set of rules drawn up by people *should*, and almost inevitably *does*, countenance its own modification. The process of modifying rules is often one which starts by the calling out of a clearly absurd situation created by those rules. Is this scenario starting to sound familiar yet?
So placebo is, in fact, an effective remedy for pain and other subjective symptoms. This is a perfectly correct formulation. Pain is an entirely subjective phenomenon. If a sugar pill causes a person to perceive less pain, it is an effective form of pain relief, pure and simple.
I don't know about the States, but maple syrup is fairly strictly regulated in Canada. You label it 'maple syrup' it had better be 100% maple syrup, or you're in trouble. And it has to be graded as well.
I said Samsung 'comes off looking like crap' if you look back at the highlights of the trial. I was referring to Samsung's actions during the legal case in that sentence, not its actions prior to that. Seriously: forget for a moment what you think about what patents should be, and just look at the detailed reports from Groklaw &c about Samsung's actual behaviour during the trial. It was a terribly conducted case on their part. They should sue their legal team.
I kind of agree, really. I think you can actually oppose software patents but still support the decision in this case.
A lot of the evidence was pretty damning and indicates that in this case, the systems happens to have achieved what it was actually supposed to achieve. That doesn't mean the damaging side-effects which are why lots of us believe the current patent system is problematic don't exist; it just means that *in this case* the system actually happens to have probably given the right result. It seems pretty clear from a lot of the evidence that was entered into the case that Samsung really did set about intentionally, directly copying a lot of Apple's design and function - not looking at it as a basis for possible improvements, but just going 'hey, let's do exactly what they did'. Samsung also conducted its case appallingly badly; I don't know where they got their lawyers, but they pulled some really ridiculous stunts which probably did more to harm Samsung's case than to help it.
If you just step back a bit and dispassionately look at a lot of the highlights of the case, Samsung comes off looking like crap, frankly.
"Such reverent tones prompted Atlassian to poke a little fun at the practice with Spooning, an instructional video in which a burly engineer sits on a colleague's lap, wraps his arms around his partner's waist and types along with him hand over hand"
Thus combining male chauvinism (all programmers are guys, right?) with the common misconception that the concept of two guys doing something sexual together is so unlikely as to be innately hilarious.
Two dumbass prejudices the industry would be better off without, nicely combined for your convenience. Great job, sport.
"Anyone time someone says "consider the source," they've just committed argumentum ad hominem. Think about that for a moment."
I just did, and it's bullcrap.
Argumentum ad hominem is a concept that applies only to a debate based on formal logic. This is not a debate based on formal logic. The source is not a text which constructs an argument from universally-agreed principles, where only the logic of the argument is up for debate: it's an assertion that certain events took place. The concept of argumentum ad hominem just _doesn't apply_. We're not debating formal logic. The issue is not whether the source's logical reasoning is sound, but whether things actually happened as the source describes, and the source's credibility absolutely is a factor in trying to determine that.
That's what they were doing. He wasn't arrested, he was detained for psychiatric treatment. In the U.K. there's a handy verbified noun for this - 'sectioned'. I dunno if there's something equivalent in U.S. English. I think most jurisdictions allow for the forcible confinement of people who clearly have dangerous mental problems but refuse to be treated voluntarily - there's a demonstrated need for this, after all.
" I guess you could call that a form of recycling."
It's not, but it's better!
Aside from just recycling there's a concept you see a lot of called 'reduce, reuse, recycle' - those three are in *order of preference*. Better than recycling something - i.e. sending it through an industrial process to reclaim some raw material components from it for re-fabrication later - is just to re-use the finished product as is. So, your example of TV 're-use'. Or returning beer/milk bottles, which are usually just washed/sterilized and re-used, not smashed and re-processed into some other form of glass. Better than either of these is 'reduce' - don't buy the Shiny New Thing at all unless you really need it.
"1. A system for providing an operating system over a network to a local device, comprising: a base image server configured to transmit a base image of the operating system; a preferences image server configured to transmit at least one preferences image; and an image loader configured to combine the base image and the at least one preferences image into a combined image at the local device in order to provide a full version of the operating system on the local device and automatically remove the full version of the operating system from the local device when logging off or exiting the full version of the operating system on the local device."
If this ever gets used in a court case, I predict a world of fun in defining exactly what a 'preferences image' is.
Nah, the use of 'liberal' and 'conservative' as opposing ends of the political spectrum, liberal equating more or less to leftish and Democratic, 'conservative' equating more or less to rightish and Republican, is pretty much uniquely American. British political analysis doesn't really use the two terms in those ways. 'Liberal' has a rather different meaning in a British political context.
UEFI is a standard. It's not a codebase. There's no reason there can't be F/OSS implementations of UEFI, and indeed Secure Boot - SB relies on asymmetrical key signing, which of course can be perfectly well implemented by F/OSS code. In fact, I think there's a partial F/OSS implementation of UEFI and SB for qemu already.
Well, statistically speaking, since approx. 50% of Americans are opposed to same-sex marriage, you can no longer ever buy anything at all, because at least _someone_ whose salary is paid by the business probably opposes same sex marriage.
Look, I'm gay. Hell, I'm married to someone of the same sex. But I really think some of the pro-marriage activists in the U.S. are going off the freaking deep end. It's a complex issue which deeply divides your country (and many countries). Approaching it like a cartoon in which everyone who supports same-sex marriage is a glorious white knight and anyone who opposes it is evil and eats babies isn't really a mature approach. It's frankly disingenous, disrespectful, rude and counter-productive to imply that anyone who opposes same-sex marriage is necessarily a hate-mongering bigot. A lot of them aren't.
But then, this is America, where major sociopolitical issues are fought out in fast-food chicken restaurants.
As far as I know, no other country does this ludicrous crap, it's only the U.S. In this case, there's no intrinsic need for the ugly bits of the process, it's just a problem of your particular political process.
Slashdot Mirror
sure there is. cryogenic freezing. hell of a lot more likely to be plausible than warp drives. you can get anywhere at walking speed if you or the universe doesn't die in the mean time...
"Consider this scenario: John's First National Bank and Laundromat decides they need verifier software. They outsource the writing to a cheap software contractor shop who doesn't care much other than they deliver on time."
Why would they do that when, by the nature of currency, there will be exactly one system which everything from the National Bank to joe's laundromat would be following if they wanted to check the currency?
You wouldn't go and hire a software contract shop to write your own verification system. You'd use the exact same verification system that every other small business in the country was using. It's not like you could get some kind of competitive benefit by having your own verifier. Does every laundromat in the country hire a Chinese OEM to build its own little machine to check for counterfeit bills currently? Of course not. They all just buy a counterfeit checker from the same giant company that sells the same counterfeit checkers to everybody.
"It's not an erroneous assumption at all. The banks wouldn't print a URL in their QR code, but we're talking about an attacker modifying a bill, not the bank."
But if the system simply involves a QR code which encodes content that's essentially plain text to be evaluated, then the system which reads the QR code does not need to be capable of executing anything or following symlinks. You only need your QR reading code to follow symlinks out to the public internet if that's what the 'genuine' QR codes you're trying to read contain. No-one would psychopathically stupid enough to invent a currency-verification system based on QR codes that were hyperlinks to the public internet, I'd hope.
If the software used to verify the QR codes weren't capable of following hyperlinks it doesn't matter how many evil hyperlinks you put into 'malicous' QR codes, the reader won't follow them and you'll have achieved precisely nothing.
You're probably right, I doubt HFT as it's happening today really provides much if at all arbitrage that you couldn't get at a coarser level, as you suggest. But my point, I guess, is that - with the OP - I don't think that doing so would solve any other problems we have. HFT is a vicious cut-throat form of gambling for certain people who want to indulge in it. But I doubt it's actually causing any major negative effects for normal economic activity - companies actually doing things to make money, regular investors investing in stocks with a vaguely long-term horizon (or really, anything outside of a week). I don't see any 'real world' problem that would be solved by outlawing HFT, really. All it'd do is stop one set of HFT traders making themselves extremely rich at the expense of a bunch of other HFT traders, so far as I can see.
"It doesn't seem to have stopped the City of London from participating in these sorts of HFT schemes."
But were they trading UK shares on UK exchanges?
There's nothing wrong with group ownership and representation.
I suppose you want me to say I own shares in lots of companies and know nothing about them, but that isn't really true. I have very fractional ownership of a few mutual funds. Your average person with money in some kind of fund doesn't actually own any shares. The fund owns the shares and is responsible for them. As an average joe investing in funds, you're simply saying 'I have decided to trust this body to know about companies and buy shares partially on my behalf, instead of doing it myself'.
The big institutional investors certainly *do* know an awful lot about the companies they invest in, and take an active part in monitoring the running of those firms. They do so on behalf of their clients.
This really isn't a crazy system. We use it for lots of other things. Modern life is complex. You can't know everything about everything. We have evolved various neat systems whereby we are able to each know about different things, on each other's behalf. Overall, it seems to work a lot better than each human trying to know everything all humans can possibly know. That ceased to be possible somewhere several centuries back...
The argument in favour of HFT is that what it essentially provides is arbitrage. It only works so long as someone is doing something 'wrong'. It's like arbitrage of sporting odds - it only works so long as different bookmakers are posting different odds, and clearly, one of them must be 'wrong'. Arbers ultimately act as a force that tends to result in more accurate odds being posted. In theory, high frequency traders should, over the long term, act to iron out inconsistencies in prices.
Remember, HFT is a _relative_ term. I mean, you could look at trading stocks over the telegraph rather than by sending a letter to your broker as the HFT of 1855 (or whatever the correct date is, I don't know exactly). Ultimately that led to more 'rational' markets, because significant time delays in trading can obviously lead to some fairly weird results, like people buying stock in a company that went bankrupt the day before or something. Really, HFT theoretically ought to have the same effect, just on a much smaller scale.
I'm kind of in agreement with the OP that it's easy to overblow HFT as a problem. As long as the things being traded have a direct and obvious relationship to real economic transactions, it's fairly obvious when HFT is doing something ridiculous, and it gets quickly corrected. I think the OP's correct that HFT really isn't a problem to a truly conservative investor, who is investing long term on the basis of corporate performance. It's really only a problem for those who are day trading, trying to make money by taking advantage of imperfect investment decisions by others. In other words, the only ones who are hurt by HFT are people who are doing the same thing HFT traders are doing, just not as _well_. They don't necessarily deserve much sympathy, and making things better for them probably won't result in magic improvement in the economy or anything.
"Unfortunately, the rules of Wikipedia are what they are. You deal with them or you don't take part."
That's absurd - not just as it applies to Wikipedia, but in general. For any set of laws that wasn't carved in stone and handed down from a deity (of your choice, naturally), it isn't at all true that they 'are what they are'. Rules change _all the time_. Wikipedia's rules were designed to try and produce the best Wikipedia possible. Having been written by people and not $DEITY_OF_YOUR_CHOICE, they are inevitably fallible and therefore improvable. Wikipedia should, and I'm sure is, be open to and capable of modifying its own rules, if it becomes clear that the rules aren't producing the desired result. Any set of rules drawn up by people *should*, and almost inevitably *does*, countenance its own modification. The process of modifying rules is often one which starts by the calling out of a clearly absurd situation created by those rules. Is this scenario starting to sound familiar yet?
So placebo is, in fact, an effective remedy for pain and other subjective symptoms. This is a perfectly correct formulation. Pain is an entirely subjective phenomenon. If a sugar pill causes a person to perceive less pain, it is an effective form of pain relief, pure and simple.
I don't know about the States, but maple syrup is fairly strictly regulated in Canada. You label it 'maple syrup' it had better be 100% maple syrup, or you're in trouble. And it has to be graded as well.
Well, that's easy enough - just attend absolutely any hockey game.
"However, to claim that such behavior is "crap""
Except, that's not what I did.
I said Samsung 'comes off looking like crap' if you look back at the highlights of the trial. I was referring to Samsung's actions during the legal case in that sentence, not its actions prior to that. Seriously: forget for a moment what you think about what patents should be, and just look at the detailed reports from Groklaw &c about Samsung's actual behaviour during the trial. It was a terribly conducted case on their part. They should sue their legal team.
I kind of agree, really. I think you can actually oppose software patents but still support the decision in this case.
A lot of the evidence was pretty damning and indicates that in this case, the systems happens to have achieved what it was actually supposed to achieve. That doesn't mean the damaging side-effects which are why lots of us believe the current patent system is problematic don't exist; it just means that *in this case* the system actually happens to have probably given the right result. It seems pretty clear from a lot of the evidence that was entered into the case that Samsung really did set about intentionally, directly copying a lot of Apple's design and function - not looking at it as a basis for possible improvements, but just going 'hey, let's do exactly what they did'. Samsung also conducted its case appallingly badly; I don't know where they got their lawyers, but they pulled some really ridiculous stunts which probably did more to harm Samsung's case than to help it.
If you just step back a bit and dispassionately look at a lot of the highlights of the case, Samsung comes off looking like crap, frankly.
"Such reverent tones prompted Atlassian to poke a little fun at the practice with Spooning, an instructional video in which a burly engineer sits on a colleague's lap, wraps his arms around his partner's waist and types along with him hand over hand"
Thus combining male chauvinism (all programmers are guys, right?) with the common misconception that the concept of two guys doing something sexual together is so unlikely as to be innately hilarious.
Two dumbass prejudices the industry would be better off without, nicely combined for your convenience. Great job, sport.
"Anyone time someone says "consider the source," they've just committed argumentum ad hominem. Think about that for a moment."
I just did, and it's bullcrap.
Argumentum ad hominem is a concept that applies only to a debate based on formal logic. This is not a debate based on formal logic. The source is not a text which constructs an argument from universally-agreed principles, where only the logic of the argument is up for debate: it's an assertion that certain events took place. The concept of argumentum ad hominem just _doesn't apply_. We're not debating formal logic. The issue is not whether the source's logical reasoning is sound, but whether things actually happened as the source describes, and the source's credibility absolutely is a factor in trying to determine that.
*One* of the quoted bits of text is in that song. Not any of the others.
" Then see how you can offer medical treatment "
That's what they were doing. He wasn't arrested, he was detained for psychiatric treatment. In the U.K. there's a handy verbified noun for this - 'sectioned'. I dunno if there's something equivalent in U.S. English. I think most jurisdictions allow for the forcible confinement of people who clearly have dangerous mental problems but refuse to be treated voluntarily - there's a demonstrated need for this, after all.
Well it's not like they can fire you ;)
" I guess you could call that a form of recycling."
It's not, but it's better!
Aside from just recycling there's a concept you see a lot of called 'reduce, reuse, recycle' - those three are in *order of preference*. Better than recycling something - i.e. sending it through an industrial process to reclaim some raw material components from it for re-fabrication later - is just to re-use the finished product as is. So, your example of TV 're-use'. Or returning beer/milk bottles, which are usually just washed/sterilized and re-used, not smashed and re-processed into some other form of glass. Better than either of these is 'reduce' - don't buy the Shiny New Thing at all unless you really need it.
"1. A system for providing an operating system over a network to a local device, comprising: a base image server configured to transmit a base image of the operating system; a preferences image server configured to transmit at least one preferences image; and an image loader configured to combine the base image and the at least one preferences image into a combined image at the local device in order to provide a full version of the operating system on the local device and automatically remove the full version of the operating system from the local device when logging off or exiting the full version of the operating system on the local device."
If this ever gets used in a court case, I predict a world of fun in defining exactly what a 'preferences image' is.
"Perhaps it's a UK thing"
Nah, the use of 'liberal' and 'conservative' as opposing ends of the political spectrum, liberal equating more or less to leftish and Democratic, 'conservative' equating more or less to rightish and Republican, is pretty much uniquely American. British political analysis doesn't really use the two terms in those ways. 'Liberal' has a rather different meaning in a British political context.
UEFI is a standard. It's not a codebase. There's no reason there can't be F/OSS implementations of UEFI, and indeed Secure Boot - SB relies on asymmetrical key signing, which of course can be perfectly well implemented by F/OSS code. In fact, I think there's a partial F/OSS implementation of UEFI and SB for qemu already.
Well, statistically speaking, since approx. 50% of Americans are opposed to same-sex marriage, you can no longer ever buy anything at all, because at least _someone_ whose salary is paid by the business probably opposes same sex marriage.
Look, I'm gay. Hell, I'm married to someone of the same sex. But I really think some of the pro-marriage activists in the U.S. are going off the freaking deep end. It's a complex issue which deeply divides your country (and many countries). Approaching it like a cartoon in which everyone who supports same-sex marriage is a glorious white knight and anyone who opposes it is evil and eats babies isn't really a mature approach. It's frankly disingenous, disrespectful, rude and counter-productive to imply that anyone who opposes same-sex marriage is necessarily a hate-mongering bigot. A lot of them aren't.
But then, this is America, where major sociopolitical issues are fought out in fast-food chicken restaurants.
As far as I know, no other country does this ludicrous crap, it's only the U.S. In this case, there's no intrinsic need for the ugly bits of the process, it's just a problem of your particular political process.
Can we please have a Quiet the Use of Improbably sTretched Initialisms, Twats (QUIT IT) Act next?