You will not remember or recognize the code you wrote 6 months ago. You will not remember how that neat little hack worked or why you put in that odd little exception. Learn to comment the unobvious
(and when commenting the obvious why you did it is more useful than what the code is doing).
Find an editor that does auto-formatting for your language (and use it!), it makes the code
easyer to read and more pragmatically when the formatting goes wrong it means you have
missed out a bracket of a ; or something and can spot/fix it without having to execute the program.
I was told to act suspicious I would start to tiptoe round like a pantomime villain
What they really needed to do was make the test subjects act innocent under stress.... A better test would be to have a control group who have to travel across town and deliver a package particular location and are told its an experiment in traffic routing
The test group are told there on a TV game show and they have to deliver a package to drop off
but there being hunted by men in white suits (and have a load of hunters wandering round town), tell them if there spotted they get a ducking in a vat of slime if there not caught they get $200 and a chance go on to the next show.
That would provide ample data to both test and train a system.
actually a better mechanism would be to use compressed atmosphere to blast the dust away. Wipers have more points of failure and would likely abrade the surface of the solar panels, permanently reducing the efficiency fo the cells.
Compressor + storage = weight + power drain
How about designing the panels to further exploit the natural wind? Either a wind powered
brush (say a little flag on a wire that drags over the panel) or optimize the shape and
surface finish to maximize the effect of the wind.
So either the rovers are overachievers or we just set their goals WAY too low!
I guess they are taking a page from Scotty's manual.
Its both as I understand it the big win was the martian wind kept the solar panels cleaner than expected, it was dust build up (and thus power loss) that was expected to kill the mssion
Well duh. It's cheaper and easier, and there's far less chance of getting caught, and you can do it in such a way as to hide who's dropping off the information and who's collecting it.
[devils advocate]
During WWII there was a sustained attempts to cut German landlines, forcing the signals traffic
onto the radio where it could be intercepted and decrypted. Couriered traffic is hard to intercept
this could be seen as a digital equivalent....
[/devils advocate]. . . .
Bollux who a I trying to fool???? your quite right
This is just about getting people to buckle under to arbitrary authority.
In the last several years, scientists have discovered that non-coding regions of the genome, far from being junk, contain thousands of regulatory elements that act as genetic "switches" to turn genes on or off.
...Biologists discover "flags". Seriously, these guys should just bring a programmer on-staff — preferably assembly, as decoding the arcane secrets of all Earth life should be a breeze for anyone whose day job involves the x86 instruction set.
I'm glad you got you +5 funny (and not insightful), but I'm going to try for the double and try and explain why Biology is hard
Imagine a tech startup company that have just written a 'hello world'
demo script (first life)... Then the whole IT department resigns enmass leaving only the Pointy
Haired Boss to run the operation.
There is a market for boxes that say "hello world" and they sell quite well
but the PHB knows there are other markets (aka ecological niches) to exploit
Rather than getting in new programmers the PHB (who has lots of time on his hands and no understanding of programming) randomly messes with the code, randomly altering/adding/deleting characters, copy pasting whole chunks round.... but he dosn't just mess with the code he also messes with interpreter the operating system and in extreme cases the hardware, creating millions of different products
He then tests the code by putting it on a web site and seeing what sells. He does not understand
why it sells (just it must be slightly better than other products) so he bins the ones that don't sell and uses the sellers as the basis for the next round of diddling (even the ones that only sold once)
The important point here is that he does not know how his products work or even what they do! He just knows that which sell. So he could have had a hello world that became a terminal emulator then into a spread sheet and thence to a mail server. The second important point is that there is is code reuse, but (mostly (1)) only within a product line so there could be several mail server products that work in completely different ways (Dolphin and sharks swim but share an ancestor ~420 Million years ago so have a vastly different biology).
Evolution has produced the ultimate legacy system, vast complex of
undocumented, uncommented spaghetti code, containing massive stretches of commented out code
that is vital to the system, written in an undocumented programming language
that can subtly differ from species to species that exploits every 'neat little hack', every spooky action at a distance, and the very fuzzyest of Logic
I'm not saying that programmers have no place in biology (quite the opposite!), it just takes them a while to appreciate the full complexity of the problem
(1) actually there is code reuse between product lines (ie lineages) bacteria swap DNA all the time and virus can become part of your DNA
If your a terrorist please stop reading here! It would not do at all for this information to get into terrorist hands!
This story says it's possible to bypass the list by using a legal variant of your name
ie Capt. James Robinson said he has learned that "Jim Robinson" and "J.K. Robinson" are not on the list.
Papers always suggest more work. I've not once in my life seen a paper that said "Nope, that's it, we're done here":)
Its a self limiting thing, papers that fail to say/discover anything new tend not to get published (except in [insert discipline you consider most worthy of mockery])
I see a botnet as the weapon of choice, buy a nice quiet worm/day 0 exploit, release it then sit back and wait.
As I understand it botnets upload instructions and updates from a central server so the Lampton Worm could easily masquerade as another budding spam net and hopefully not attract undue attention
Then few days before the attack get your followers to help out. They could wander round busy WiFi sites with infected laptops (hospitals and airports would be excellent targets), leave infected USB drives in power station carparks, send targeted email to people in juicy targets.
Then on August 8th (for a nice catchy date) every infected computer uploads the toxic payload and overwrites any hard disk it can find with copy's the the Lampton manifesto.
For extra class you could limit the attack by IP and roughly target by location.
Even without help there are bound to be a few infected computer in hospitals airports, power stations etc. and it does not matter if they were not attached to anything important, the news story's will be all about how the Lampton worm nearly caused planes to fall, patents to die and 'endangered' the Grimbledown nuclear power plant.
Later on they will move to human interest story's about how the Gumby family lost every precious picture of their dead daughter, along with vastly inflated estimates of the total damage done and productivity lost and the new draconian security policy's that companys now 'have' to enforce.
Sure its no 911 and may not appeal to your typical bomb throwing nut, but perhaps it would appeal to a radical Anti-capitalist group, religious cult, student jihadist wannabes or loan fruitcake.
'the_other_chewey' has an excellent point about rotation being a problem in landing a ship on the
asteroid. I'd also suggest that the asteroid may be too fragile to take the strain of
being pushed on one single point and could break up. The gravity tug provides a gentle even pull on the whole asteroid so would work on all types of asteroid without prior knowledge of its structure.
IMHO Riddles/Puzzles are risky in a Face to Face RPG, either the players get them or they don't.
In a video game this is not a problem if they have problems there is ample time for
the player to sleep on it, obsess about it for a day or two spend hours trying permutations etc
In an RPG there simply isn't that sort of time, play grinds to a halt and everyone drops out of character to work it out.
Thats not to say they have no place in a RPG just they need to be situated so the players have
the option to work on them in 'down time' between sessions.
Ecologically, from a global warming POV, having diesel *not* emit useless soot is absolutely catastrophic, as the carbon has to go somewhere. It's either soot, or carbon dioxide.
I'd prefer they ended up as CO2. then at least the fuel is being used efficiently and since is magic Vetrolium its carbon neutral.
Becides soot is a PM10 and thats not good for your lungs
It's taught as the correct method to deal with them at driving schools, and I believe even tested for now.
this is correct up to the time OP does this
At which point I accelerate, overtake *them*, and put some reasonable distance between our cars. I occasionally have to rinse and repeat, but the majority of people get the hint.
And is the right choice, if done smoothly. Don't mass email. Investigate each contact send a personalized note targeted at them and their business.
Use the information, just don't abuse it. Spam is quick and dirty, but a poor substitute for the elbow grease of real salesmanship.
The things you see when you don't have any mod points:-(
Anyway Absolutely spot on, a competitors mailing list is marketing golddust, you could probably get a lot of sales data without too much hassle,
emails going to the same company would be a good target indicator. Google API searching with the email domain could winnow out the people with websites (
Yes! You know who else was part of that fine tradition? Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini. Hitler was democratically elected. Then manouvered his way to dictatorship.
"The USA is a nation of laws, poorly written and randomly enforced" - Frank Zappa It would be nice if they were randomly enforced, there not, there unevenly enforced with an agenda
Slashdot Mirror
You will not remember or recognize the code you wrote 6 months ago. You will not remember how that neat little hack worked or why you put in that odd little exception. Learn to comment the unobvious (and when commenting the obvious why you did it is more useful than what the code is doing).
Find an editor that does auto-formatting for your language (and use it!), it makes the code easyer to read and more pragmatically when the formatting goes wrong it means you have missed out a bracket of a ; or something and can spot/fix it without having to execute the program.
I was told to act suspicious I would start to tiptoe round like a pantomime villain
What they really needed to do was make the test subjects act innocent under stress.... A better test would be to have a control group who have to travel across town and deliver a package particular location and are told its an experiment in traffic routing
The test group are told there on a TV game show and they have to deliver a package to drop off but there being hunted by men in white suits (and have a load of hunters wandering round town), tell them if there spotted they get a ducking in a vat of slime if there not caught they get $200 and a chance go on to the next show.
That would provide ample data to both test and train a system.
actually a better mechanism would be to use compressed atmosphere to blast the dust away. Wipers have more points of failure and would likely abrade the surface of the solar panels, permanently reducing the efficiency fo the cells.
Compressor + storage = weight + power drain
How about designing the panels to further exploit the natural wind? Either a wind powered brush (say a little flag on a wire that drags over the panel) or optimize the shape and surface finish to maximize the effect of the wind.
So either the rovers are overachievers or we just set their goals WAY too low!
I guess they are taking a page from Scotty's manual.
Its both as I understand it the big win was the martian wind kept the solar panels cleaner than expected, it was dust build up (and thus power loss) that was expected to kill the mssion
Well duh. It's cheaper and easier, and there's far less chance of getting caught, and you can do it in such a way as to hide who's dropping off the information and who's collecting it.
[devils advocate] During WWII there was a sustained attempts to cut German landlines, forcing the signals traffic onto the radio where it could be intercepted and decrypted. Couriered traffic is hard to intercept this could be seen as a digital equivalent.... [/devils advocate] .
.
.
.
Bollux who a I trying to fool???? your quite right
This is just about getting people to buckle under to arbitrary authority.
In the last several years, scientists have discovered that non-coding regions of the genome, far from being junk, contain thousands of regulatory elements that act as genetic "switches" to turn genes on or off.
...Biologists discover "flags". Seriously, these guys should just bring a programmer on-staff — preferably assembly, as decoding the arcane secrets of all Earth life should be a breeze for anyone whose day job involves the x86 instruction set.
I'm glad you got you +5 funny (and not insightful), but I'm going to try for the double and try and explain why Biology is hard
Imagine a tech startup company that have just written a 'hello world' demo script (first life)... Then the whole IT department resigns enmass leaving only the Pointy Haired Boss to run the operation.
There is a market for boxes that say "hello world" and they sell quite well but the PHB knows there are other markets (aka ecological niches) to exploit
Rather than getting in new programmers the PHB (who has lots of time on his hands and no understanding of programming) randomly messes with the code, randomly altering/adding/deleting characters, copy pasting whole chunks round.... but he dosn't just mess with the code he also messes with interpreter the operating system and in extreme cases the hardware, creating millions of different products
He then tests the code by putting it on a web site and seeing what sells. He does not understand why it sells (just it must be slightly better than other products) so he bins the ones that don't sell and uses the sellers as the basis for the next round of diddling (even the ones that only sold once)
The important point here is that he does not know how his products work or even what they do! He just knows that which sell. So he could have had a hello world that became a terminal emulator then into a spread sheet and thence to a mail server. The second important point is that there is is code reuse, but (mostly (1)) only within a product line so there could be several mail server products that work in completely different ways (Dolphin and sharks swim but share an ancestor ~420 Million years ago so have a vastly different biology).
Evolution has produced the ultimate legacy system, vast complex of undocumented, uncommented spaghetti code, containing massive stretches of commented out code that is vital to the system, written in an undocumented programming language that can subtly differ from species to species that exploits every 'neat little hack', every spooky action at a distance, and the very fuzzyest of Logic
I'm not saying that programmers have no place in biology (quite the opposite!), it just takes them a while to appreciate the full complexity of the problem
(1) actually there is code reuse between product lines (ie lineages) bacteria swap DNA all the time and virus can become part of your DNA
What *Windows* is doing in space in the first place.
I've always thought that opening Windows on a space ship is a bad thing
If your a terrorist please stop reading here! It would not do at all for this information to get into terrorist hands!
This story says it's possible to bypass the list by using a legal variant of your name ie Capt. James Robinson said he has learned that "Jim Robinson" and "J.K. Robinson" are not on the list.
Papers always suggest more work. I've not once in my life seen a paper that said "Nope, that's it, we're done here" :)
Its a self limiting thing, papers that fail to say/discover anything new tend not to get published (except in [insert discipline you consider most worthy of mockery])
I will accept nothing less than slashdot comments to read with my fine whisky.
I'd have thought meths is a more appropriate drink when reading slashdot comments.
I see a botnet as the weapon of choice, buy a nice quiet worm/day 0 exploit, release it then sit back and wait.
As I understand it botnets upload instructions and updates from a central server so the Lampton Worm could easily masquerade as another budding spam net and hopefully not attract undue attention
Then few days before the attack get your followers to help out. They could wander round busy WiFi sites with infected laptops (hospitals and airports would be excellent targets), leave infected USB drives in power station carparks, send targeted email to people in juicy targets. Then on August 8th (for a nice catchy date) every infected computer uploads the toxic payload and overwrites any hard disk it can find with copy's the the Lampton manifesto.
For extra class you could limit the attack by IP and roughly target by location.
Even without help there are bound to be a few infected computer in hospitals airports, power stations etc. and it does not matter if they were not attached to anything important, the news story's will be all about how the Lampton worm nearly caused planes to fall, patents to die and 'endangered' the Grimbledown nuclear power plant.
Later on they will move to human interest story's about how the Gumby family lost every precious picture of their dead daughter, along with vastly inflated estimates of the total damage done and productivity lost and the new draconian security policy's that companys now 'have' to enforce.
Sure its no 911 and may not appeal to your typical bomb throwing nut, but perhaps it would appeal to a radical Anti-capitalist group, religious cult, student jihadist wannabes or loan fruitcake.
'the_other_chewey' has an excellent point about rotation being a problem in landing a ship on the asteroid. I'd also suggest that the asteroid may be too fragile to take the strain of being pushed on one single point and could break up. The gravity tug provides a gentle even pull on the whole asteroid so would work on all types of asteroid without prior knowledge of its structure.
Here's the one thing to remember in terms of rsync. It's going to be the CURRENT snapshot of your data.
Rsnapshot may be an option. It creates a sucession of snapshot directory's but only one copy of each file (hard linking to make up the difference)
Just saw the X-files movie. No spoilers here but it was just like watching one of the old TV episodes. But longer.
Was that a good thing of like watching StarTrek the (Slow) Motion Picture?
IMHO Riddles/Puzzles are risky in a Face to Face RPG, either the players get them or they don't.
In a video game this is not a problem if they have problems there is ample time for the player to sleep on it, obsess about it for a day or two spend hours trying permutations etc
In an RPG there simply isn't that sort of time, play grinds to a halt and everyone drops out of character to work it out.
Thats not to say they have no place in a RPG just they need to be situated so the players have the option to work on them in 'down time' between sessions.
Ecologically, from a global warming POV, having diesel *not* emit useless soot is absolutely catastrophic, as the carbon has to go somewhere. It's either soot, or carbon dioxide.
I'd prefer they ended up as CO2. then at least the fuel is being used efficiently and since is magic Vetrolium its carbon neutral.
Becides soot is a PM10 and thats not good for your lungs
No they should calculate the The Nine Billion Names of God and earn a visit from The Doctor
If its Wooosh the joke was way to dry for me ... and the moderators
GP Moderation +3
70% Interesting
30% Insightful
I would not want to bet my future on fusion
Fusion has been the future for the last 40-50 years, its always jam tomorrow
this is correct up to the time OP does this
At which point I accelerate, overtake *them*, and put some reasonable distance between our cars. I occasionally have to rinse and repeat, but the majority of people get the hint.The things you see when you don't have any mod points :-(
Anyway Absolutely spot on, a competitors mailing list is marketing golddust, you could probably get a lot of sales data without too much hassle, emails going to the same company would be a good target indicator. Google API searching with the email domain could winnow out the people with websites (
How the hell are we supposed to defend ourselves against the 75% of attacks that are immune to the laws of logic???
I took that to mean they did nothing clever and tried a directory attack on passwords.
Who owns it? According to the LSM site they built it. Are you thinking of the copy they made for Nathan Myhrvold