Uniforms do nothing but make ignorant or shallow people happy with symbolic change and symbolic discipline. The behaviors just happen -- treating the symptoms will not sure the disease. You can get discipline with psychology not clothing; not that discipline itself produces good students... or good citizens... good worker drones perhaps... One reason I think people are so easily led astray by officials is because of the level and form of discipline we get in our schools.
You don't tell the dentists how to do their job do you? Are you an expert at dentistry because you've been a client? Just because you spent your childhood in school does not mean you know anything about education. It is different from the other side... as different as the dentists perspective of your teeth is.
I'm sick of ignorant people making education policy and voting for even worse people (politicians) who just placate the ignorant for a living. There are plenty of trained professionals and scientific research to find GOOD ANSWERS and even there its a fuzzy area (soft science) with plenty of biases. We don't need more parent "experts" sticking their noses everywhere but at their own bad parenting skills; who are far more stubborn to change or examine themselves than any school system. People think just because they can pop out a brat who lives long enough to attend school they are unquestionably competent parents.
You can't punish kids today. You can criminalize them in various ways (virtual or actual) but you can't correct their behavior like could be done in the past. The parents are negligent (willfully, ignorant, or simply unavailable) and far too self-defensive when they should be focused more on their children. Kids are not adults! Why we apply similar reasoning is beyond me. Our "corrections" system for adults clearly is a POOR model upon which to build even if kids worked the same as adults! Also modeling schools after our modern MBA run businesses that are ruining our society is foolish on multiple levels. Everything is not a nail no matter how many MBAs claim otherwise! Students are also not products and a school is not a factory.
We NEED to ditch all the police in our schools and replace them with child psychologists - ones with power to invoke child protection services... and to prevent lazy parents from drugging their kids. (ok some kids need it but most do not.) Far too many people are unfit to be parents and their brats are messing things up for everybody else; parenting classes should be required... Actually any parent wanting to keep their child should be mandated by law to take courses in parenting. Nobody has time to read a Dr. Spock book let alone be around the home to practice it... (again a cultural problem not really solved by anything other than shifting the culture.)
Then we have a huge problem of disrespect of experts and an inability to tell fact from opinion... You could run schools the SAME WAY as when the USA was top of the world today and it wouldn't work out-- there are far too many other variables working against us; but we primarily focus on shallow policy solutions in a few narrow areas... again treating symptoms without even finding the disease.
Science isn't being stopped; just some of it is being slowed down.
Nasa only amounts to a few bucks on most people's taxes. We can afford to fund it easily. Its a drop compared to the ocean of debt the crooks have racked up.
The stupid public continues to let these games be played and falls for the propaganda. The banker's didn't just blow a hole in the economy, they are stealing our money to fill the hole before the next explosion.
The debt is never allowed to be paid off and it's compounding interest is killing our worthwhile programs while we can't cut the real waste problems. No, not the "entitlements" the suckers have been tricked into calling medicare, social security, and unemployment-- all of which we pay heavily for and are even ITEMIZED out of our paychecks and are NOT entitlement programs! We let politicians characterize them along with the idiotic media as some sort of charity as they STEAL the money we pay SPECIFICALLY for those programs and put it into the pockets of their cronies.
Social Security was designed to be as separated as they could from the general fund but here we've been mortgaging against it since Bush. Now we are being forced to pay up and it'll get worse-- it really won't matter who is in office because its going to be so bad that they will be forced to give up the house to pay the bankers. Its not really a whole lot conceptually different than what the USA did to 3rd world nations for generations using its tools at the IMF and World Bank-- but now everything we did is being done to us (arguably including the assassination of officials in 'accidents,' blackmail, etc. of course payoffs were far more common... ) It also didn't do us any good to allow all this CIA economic warfare to leak so much into the private sector.. and now with our military as well. Back when it was the USA backing it on others at least the USA was safe - now its migrated away and out of our control. Movies like "The International" are only a tip of the sort of things going on already today in more complex ways (they have to keep it simple in a movie.)
You rob a bank. get hard time. You run a bank into the ground; you get rich. there is no legitimate outrage out there; just flip the channel or find a website that makes you feel better and move on.
I have read it; there is very little of the constitution that is taken as a literal absolute. Free speech has tons of legal limitations imposed upon it and upheld by the supreme court. The practice of religion is limited in many ways as laws passed ban things that are religious practices for some peoples. In the "real world" we allow exceptions to such rules and thereby hand power off to whomever is the current gray area administrator.
I am not much of an advocate for the positions I sometimes take. I tend to agree generally more with you. I feel that such commonly allowed things should be put forward for debate; because we do them yet really have little intelligent discussion because few are willing to take the more complex position of defending the undermining of free speech or religion. Yet it happens despite wide spread open opposition.
As far as banning religion-- that I personally think there are grounds upon which it could be done. Depends upon how you define religion-- and I'm not stretching as far as the Supreme Court recently did saying corporations are a person. When I think religion I think organizations. The organizations could be banned; people can still freely exercise the belief religion without the organizations. (could one say you are free to exercise your belief in prison? and that free doesn't mean out in public?) Even then, like I said, we already accept many exceptions to these broad rules -- you no longer get due process if you are labeled a "terrorist" and the USA can kill you abroad citizen or not - so if your "religion" is classified as a cult or whatever they could then exempt you from protections (the religions that allow children to be impregnated by the leader come to mind.) The republic is all about protecting the few from the many (the many are represented by government.) The public may vote it illegal but the law clearly states that they can't enforce it against a minority. The real situation gets more complex; if you follow the constitution then you must allow the minority religions you don't like along with speech you don't like. (It gets more interesting when one argues children raised to be sex slaves in a cult don't really want it even though they are raised to believe in it... then apply those arguments to major religions..)
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The big point I really disagree with is your claims about the King of England -- it was not solely about persecution of religions the King disliked-- the King himself was a holy figure and endorsed by God himself. That is the kind of crap was well known by everybody back then; which naturally characterized any opposition as opposing God's chosen leader. The King and God were heavily intertwined intentionally as the perfect example of blasphemy (you'd think the commandments would have been more effective... kind of like the constitution...) The state doesn't have to "establish" its own religion completely; it can co-op one or exploit many providing a largely functional equivalent without an official decree. Literal interpretation of this would allow government to come within 99.999% of its own religion and miss the whole purpose behind such a limitation. You could impose religious practices upon everybody but fall short of being a government religion... The intent is to stop all such abuses of government and its officials, not only the extreme cases. It is rather open ended given that unpopular religions even then were mislabeled as something else; the word itself is hard to define. It is left up to the changing society to constantly tweak the meanings of the words.... which can produce significant breaks to whatever was intended (not that we ever cared much for their intentions.)
My position on the teacher: religious practices are limited in the classroom; you can't sacrifice your goat on the teacher's desk. The "free exercise thereof" is already stopped in the classroom. The teacher is not imposing any religions if anything he is imposing non religion (I would argue that is science.) So the imposing religion aspect is
The science teachers should bash religion all the want. Send your kids to church to learn mythology; or allow the humanities teachers to discuss religions equally.
The constitution is against promotion of a religion -- NO pushing of religion. period. Keep religion out of government is the whole point. (remember, the king of England was heavily connected to religion...) Somebody making comments against any of the many idiocies of our primitive ancient (older than mid-evil) beliefs is not violating this at all! Heresy could be a crime if if it wasn't for the prohibition of religion in government. Heresy includes a lot of science, logic, philosophy etc.
Furthermore, my point is that government can bash all religion equally without promoting any single one of them; some could argue that the banning of religion is possible to a degree but I'm not going there (human sacrifices and many other religious practices are illegal and its constitutional.) Non-religion is not a religion. So you are not promoting 1 religion over the others if you are "attacking" them all fairly.
"FREE PRESS" but we tax them... That severely limits the press of today where the real news comes from papers who are going broke. Religions, they don't get taxed yet they get less empowerment in the constitution than the press does.
Virtualization / Emulation belongs back in its niche. The whole point of unix is to abstract and remove the hardware and balancing resources between software and users. The over use of visualization outside of its niche is an indication that our OS and practices have failed to perform their task. Its not good that something lets you avoid fixing real problems by putting it off into a virtual failed OS.
The old mainframe I got to play with had more hardware protected memory spaces so drivers couldn't mess up the kernel for example. Sure doing such things slows you down-- but not like running dozens of virtual machines because some driver could take you down or some program couldn't be recompiled when you upgraded the OS (which was a rare event.)
We need to improve old binary compatibility on linux so we are not forced into virtual machines of multiple builds of linux. Not to mention the fun issues of compiling things with dependencies when stuff gets upgraded. We should have more facilities to make it easier to run some old software without as much labor... Multiple name spaces for dynamic linked libraries (linux there yet? apple has been for a long time...) We need a driver system that isolates driver code! Yes it'll be slower-- so what!! virtualization is much more overhead than solving OS design flaws. It IS a flaw when so much breaks so easily.
So we are ending up with more x86 like crazy hacks... virtual machines with memory sharing games among other hacks to make the virtual machines act more like they were not there-- trying to approximate an OS that actually worked.
If linus wants to fight "evil' he needs to address the use cases driving the adoption of virtual machines... real world IT issues.
NOTE: I have no problems with mainframes running dozens of virtual machines or similar things when it makes sense to do so. Otherwise, it belongs in a single OS.
Sure slower startup and linking times are the price, but look at the overhead of virtual machines! I run them myself but I won't blow all that RAM just because I can download a pre-configured firewall VM. Instead of thinking "VM saves the day" you should be thinking: "Why is it so difficult that I have to get something somebody else put in a lot of time to setup for me?" and for some: "If I can't understand it should I be relying upon a prefigured machine I don't know how to configure?"
Its harmless until Helium begins to cost too much; naturally, we will not regulate it or stop government from handing it over for nothing (because our corporate masters told us that doing anything they do not like is communist and will cost us jobs.) Actually, many in government probably want a shortage to be created so they can invest in it.
It'll follow the pattern of our other natural resources we so wisely manage...
The changes in culture and the rise of extreme consumerism are having very similar changes to ideas AND imagination. (they are not the same but are close enough to be equally harmed.) My mother was an art teacher, she's seen the huge plunge in imagination over the decades -- you don't get that many good ideas without imagination; in fact, all studies show that students with art education (the old kind) do better in other topics-- the well rounded mind does do better.
However, we are now undermining that as well. Art is being turned into a standards testing gig and a cover for helping do the other subjects; they've taken art out of art. Soon, money and lack of peripheral benefits will eliminate art programs. People won't be clever enough to realize why it changed; even more likely, they'll just assume it has always been that way and never investigate if it was any different.
We have increasing numbers of entering college students who do not even have the elementary skill of discriminating between fact and opinion! How is such a person going to even START to investigate anything further? Its like trying to get a Rush or Fox viewer to read...
Customization technology is giving us the ability to live inside a bubble where all unpleasant thoughts are filtered out. Just the hint of some disruptive idea and it gets filtered out and the mind's defenses are deployed. The geometry problem that starts to look like it will undermine your belief in a FLAT earth is just a trick for some crazy liberal with their round earth conspiracy promoting their disturbing opinions so they can change your way of live (which is better than theirs.) Oh, and its politically incorrect to upset anybody...
Good ideas should shake things up a bit; they require some imagination to even realize the possibilities involved-- which are often upsetting in many ways; the more touchy you are the sooner your ego will jump in to defend you with mindless rationalizations (and if you can't tell fact from opinion you'll have a hell of a time defeating your natural illogical defenses.)
This is also why democracy does not work. The culture has to be healthy for its democracy to be healthy; essentially, the democratic government reflects the people and rather than see it as some removed mythical creation (as many do today) it should be seen as a manifestation of the social development of the society. A really complex survey/study in people's collective decision making. (yeah, today's system is broken; it is our collective fault... the reasons Americans are so big on responsibility and accountability is because they are over compensating for their lack of it. They are in denial.)
Version numbers have been bad for decades- marketing people wanting whole version numbers like 5.0 so update end up 5.0.1 and other silly games in the other direction.
What they should be doing is Firefox #.build# so you get the feature set and the build number. They seem to forget developers make the web apps they run too! a whole version number should remain somewhat static as far as features that cause any noticeable changes and bug fixes can go into the build numbers. When they actually do something that impacts web developers and add-on developers then they should go up a whole version. They are partially doing this today, as each version upgrade seems to break everything.
What about the DRM built-in the CPUs?? you know they have some horrible system in place to support this; otherwise, the upgrades will leak out on the internet and we will get them for free.... just think of the malware that could use such features.
A lot of phones use Gorilla glass - the toughest glass made. It is not designed to be weak or designed poorly it is designed to be on par with typical smart phones. They don't sell a rugged version of the iPhone. Bug apple if you want one; otherwise get something else.
I'm only part time, some of the time - provides some insight; which you lack.
That doesn't change what I'm saying, it doesn't matter who states the fact that a (arguably former) democratic government is the responsibility of its citizens. It is their government and what it does is their responsibility. If you vote for some corrupt jerk who purposely screws up your government services and makes it a place nobody wants to work there just so somebody else can profit from the mess-- it is your fault and even more foolish to re-elect them. I have seen this happen locally. Yet this happens over and over... times have been better.
I realize that to some Americans its too hard to take responsibility for their actions especially if it involves thinking beyond literal direct actions. You are raised to think government is some foreign entity that has nothing to do with you and that you are powerless to do anything about it. It is a self fulfilling prophecy; you types are contributing to the problem.
No, not better than a majority of people - the majority DOES NOT VOTE AT ALL (well, ok then, since at least I participate.) There are good people who run for office; they almost never get in and rarely get affiliated with a major party since the party system is designed to filter out good people.
Actually your logic is screwed up because as things have been getting worse and instead of realizing this people hold a grudge against those who have stayed the same or protected their well being. You ever do some reading along these lines? its not that difficult to figure out. The economic mess we have today as well as most the other problems are caused by the private sector-- or did you forget the banks? or the fraudulent ratings that S&P gave those securities? (yes, same people who lowered US credit rating.) So its government's fault for not regulating and enforcing protections against super fraud due to corruption coming from the bankers??? It is your job to prevent these non-government forces from corrupting the government --- this government was created by and for the people at a big cost -- and nobody is willing anymore to put in a fraction of those efforts today. So, we collectively deserve what we get.
Sony broke contract. They made CD tech only (I don't think they did computers yet at that time) and were Japanese so they were a hardware partner. Nintendo sued for breaking the contract, like 10 years later got a HUGE amount of money (billion? I forget) Sadly, the penalty didn't make up for Sony breaking it so what are business contracts worth if you can gamble them away with high profits?? Same goes for worker abuse, pollution etc. without a real business COST to negate the benefits they will ignore law.
NO it is because the USA has gone all corporatist and National laboratories have been nearly ruined as a result. Government employees who want to keep their job or be able to get another job are hesitant to make too many waves or be a whistle blower -- not a whole lot of employers want to hire somebody who will tattle on them if something is wrong.
Have you talked with some old time national lab people? they have to beg for grants many of which are private related either directly or indirectly so besides the usual spin to convince people to fund something (like highlight some minor aspect as if it was the biggest part of the project) they have to cater to special interests as well. Gone are the days when the government handed them money with a general goal to solve and then give away the discoveries for the benefit of man.
Most government workers are not on fatcat salaries and I've met few "leeches" in my dealings; my uncle at the state dept, he saw a lot of leeches-- the higher up you go; but the lower levels were just fine. More loyal employees exist - understandably because its far easier to be patriotic or nationalistic about your government job than it is being a loyal drone for walmart or some private corp. Sounds like incompetent management was more accepted inside government. As for salaries-- that is BS; they set those for slightly lower than the industry jobs but with more stability and benefits and it was like this since FDR days until about Reagan (but started during Nixon.) Private jobs have gone DOWN so while they gradually suck more every year the government ones remained about the same and naturally lag behind (going up or down) but in addition, they still had union protection which made going down more difficult--- like other private industries which unions, they too were slower to decline. The result of all this wasn't to get private jobs back up to par but somehow they lowered "par" in the public's minds so that they resented union people who were hurt less and government people who were hurt less. Instead of realizing that they were GOING DOWN they thought the others were going up! What is amazing is just how gullible Americans are today.
I have a part time government job so you could say I'm biased; but then I could say you are ignorant (which is worse.) I resent my yearly 5+% paycuts -- it is not my fault you all fucked everything up; we are doing out jobs well. Hell, I put in tons of extra time-- they get a good deal; I'm helping society with my work -- its not some meaningless job like most the private sector is. But then the lack of competence of the voters probably should be reflected in government services. Bad management afterall...
The PC will be "dead" in the mainstream just as BSD is "dead." It will persist for people who know better and for niches where it is best suited. The media will talk about how the "PC" as we knew it is dead as a minority of us disputes that "fact" but don't get noticed (unless we pay for lobbyists.... then we'd always get equal time!) OR the media may redefine the "PC" to its LITERAL MEANING since computers are becoming more PERSONAL.
Its totally silly to say the PC is dead because its evolving to be more "Pc" while it has been more "pC". For people who need a real computer the 'old' style will remain-- the masses will be (or are) just vapid consumers (and fewer of them will be creating anything on their jobs as well.)
There are NeXt videos from the late 80s which still have some features that we haven't picked up today. the NeXt system fostered amazing stuff for the 90s which we are still seeing as "new" today its like it rubbed off on other companies who used it... the 1st web browser etc all were done on there. The dock was on there... before the windows crap bar. etc. When Steve left Apple he took the really great people with him; Apple was running on 1985 fumes until it bought NeXt.
Apple has been implementing ideas from the late 80s and early 90s for the last 10 years. The differences are rather minor; the concepts haven't changed from what Steve's dream team thought of back then. Its just refined versions of the same stuff.
Now if the IP nightmare of today existed when Apple started and Steve knew his company was going to lose to cheap copycats -- or more accurately, the hardware business was being killed by the software business; he would have fought to maintain his hardware business like he is doing today but with the IP laws of today (and the stupid new propaganda like "Intellectual Property" a P.R. creation that stifles debate... its like 1984, define the language and control thought.) We'd have nothing like today... Hardware companies would likely be better positioned instead of being junk merchants with low margins and software wouldn't dominate as much as it has under MS's rein. Apple clones may have been allowed; because insane IP would have given them the control they want (and cut of the profits.) Remember, apple had all the big stuff early on; they bought all those Xerox ideas like office networking, mouse, the desktop metaphors, WYSIWYG, all concepts which today people can claim ownership in our broken "IP" system -- which allows for broad concept ownership.
DHX is used in AppleShare; don't use filesharing then that service is not open. SMB is a mess... NFS is not secure... its no wonder AppleShare would be preferred... The ports are not open for clients, just servers. The network browser doesn't use DHX its not likely the problem...
Getting the user's file server password by spoofing the fileserver is a DNS poisoning style attack; the ad-hoc nature is what is causing the problem. If you don't use file sharing, no problem. If you use a DIFFERENT password to connect to the fileserver your mac is not compromised; your data on the fileserver is.
Sounds like ServerAdmin has a similar design-- get into server admin and if they use other management servers you could get into the whole group! (not just the fileserver) If you run a REAL server with afpd on freebsd for example, the ability to do harm will be reduced to shared files. A fancy network setup could prevent peer to peer connections over afpd. This would prevent spoofing and adhoc discovery of this 1 service. ServerAdmin features would be more difficult to protect using the network hardware.
Any adhoc network is going to pose similar problems -- this means Bonjour discovered services from MANY apps (servers) are at risk of similar attacks as those services are designed with authentication security in mind but are not thinking about identity security. An open wifi could spoof DNS and other services causing similar issues; identity is a big problem gone unnoticed a lot of the time.
Bonjour ad-hoc is a wonderful thing; its surprising somebody didn't think about how poisoning it would be a problem.... its highly likely this was known from the beginning but the issues not made clear to the people who were coding network services who didn't think about identity issues outside of basic authentication; identity is often only thought in terms of authentication and nothing deeper than that.
This likely means a solution will be SSH style logging of servers -- but passive as they are detected and notifications when a connection involves a mismatched identity-- and bitching again because of apple devices recording every service they discover over wifi... Just like SSH, this will pose a risk when somebody connects the 1st time and that happens to be the spoof and not the real server (I don't know if a spoofed SSHD can compromise your password... it must be a risk if they put in the server signature system; sure, if you use keys instead of a password its a moot point, but that is a mess to setup account keys for everybody.)
This revisits the identity issues with SSL online which is similar; trusting 1 3rd party business to identify/verify websites because SSL encryption is not enough if you are talking to a spoof. (hopefully apple doesn't address this the same way because they'd make themselves a 'free' monopoly signer.)
just think about encoding nightmares! reading the data problem is not too hard to solve even if we claw back from the stone age; the real problem is how to decode the data and then how to process it.
I can imagine them getting stumped on the DOC files they are trying open; the jpegs have to be even more difficult.
Security discussions often end up lacking the details needed for real progress. People who know better rarely seem to be involved from what I've seen. Knowledgeable need to speak up and educate the policy makers.
SSL is just fine for communication; identity it is as only as good as the signers -- which are not so good and just in it for the easy money. Browsers make money from being in the con game which also causes progress to be slowed. The best identity solution I have seen so far leverages the existing tech and is a Firefox add-on already: http://perspectives-project.org/
Me, I've been bugging my state officials (you should too) that we need the government involved as a signing authority. Not because its flawless (I bet it out performs the private signers easily) but because every BUSINESS already must register their corporation (LLC too) and they should get more than just a TAX ID and some paper. They should get a signed cert. This can be be used for multiple things not just SSL certs which support multiple signers. At least then one can see that a gov has recognized their corp in addition to whatever other signers are involved.
All the above uses existing tech. If you want to get into identity and encryption for the next generation, then I would suggest decoupling different forms of security not only in discussions but also in the implementations. Nothing says that one can't have an identity system verify the keys used for any form encryption-- the two do not need to be combined as if they were addressing the same problem..
Senator obama back around 2006 was sounding quite different and projected about the size of the debt we are in today, minus a few trillion that managed to get added on from later events.
What makes one wonder is just how big of a mess this really is to those with inside information. I don't think much of people's opinions since the press in the USA is incompetent so most people are just too ignorant. Then you have better informed and educated people (like myself) who are not aware of a great deal needed to fully asses the situation like Obama is. Do I trust him, maybe... do I trust him to do the right thing, NO! Can I expect the republicans to generally be wrong all the time, yes. democrats? most likely, yes.
What I find funny is how the most powerful nation on earth is nearly powerless against the BANKSTERS and their credit rating stooges. What congress did was unconstitutional; the debt ceiling limit is not legal. period. Americans are screwed because they are too stupid to realize a budget surplus just means you have some money to pay down your debts-- they think its a signal for more tax cuts. 70+% of the debt is PAST compounded unpaid debt.
Trickle down economics continues under new smokescreens and it continues to fail no matter how much corporate and bankster backing it gets; it even is undermining the field of economics and no matter how warped things get, this economic religion will not work.
Democrats have either been bought or suckered; the republicans are already bought out or are true believers. Social Security and Medicare are NOT entitlements but yet that is how we now refer to them. They are not broke; never will be, the payout just goes down. The Banksters are robbing you all and you don't have a clue... A sucker born every second.... about 1.1 are born in the usa per second last I checked.
Because the C language construct for strings likely would have been like Pascal-- with the 1st byte indicating the extremely short length of 255 characters. This forces that size limit upon you.
I wouldn't say C strings are complex; C doesn't really do much for strings. It does character arrays which are actually byte arrays but were called chars because in those days characters were only 1 byte in size; char was picked to be a byte. (at least as a kid I didn't have a byte data type.) I can think of the compiler only formatting strings constants into this format-- all the other stuff is standard library functions for working with strings; not the language technically but the built-in run-time library (which could have all string functions removed or replaced with pascal styled ones.)
char should have been byte; the string terminator convention could have been a typedef of the byte data type. It only would have made it slightly easier to migrate to 2 byte chars if this was the case. char must remain 1 byte in size. To do serious strings today you must use a massive unicode library with a complex data type and that could be implemented either way.
Anyhow the point is-- a buffer is whatever size you want; a data type which contains it's own length locks you into the definition of that data type for the life of its use.
Length has some speed advantages and some limitations. One can see how cool a tight bit of assembly which handled any size and was more reusable would be favored and seem suitable for promotion over something more involved and requiring more labor to scale.
The one byte "mistake" would help with some problems but it would still exist in other forms. Any terminating data stream is going to have these issues and like I said, it is quite likely that developers would have used it to get around language string length constraints; not to mention all the other uses for terminators outside of strings.
You are missing this general point in the details of his simple example.
There are examples of where goto is beneficial that are more complex and the gains are more than just saving an additional variable test and additional variable.
BTW, conditionals still have impact today when you blow your long instruction pipeline on a bad branch prediction... especially if you have many branches nested near each other where the branch prediction quickly becomes useless. Blowing 20 cycles on a conditional doesn't bother most people anyhow; but I'm just mentioning it so somebody doesn't think 1 more flag test case is only just 2 more ops.
I argue that exceptions are an evolved form of goto; just as a while loop is an evolved form of goto (jump on condition). The language provides an abstraction for a goto situation that prevents some human error and limits a lot of flexibility but it is worth it for the labor saved as well as the portability; which is why we have while loops and then had exception handling; it may not have been in C but C++ forced the need for exceptions to solve the issue of nested constructor errors (I can't think of a better solution to that problem.) When I was a kid, I wanted some sort of jump dispatch table like an evolved switch statement, exceptions partially fit the bill but for complex nests of conditionals (if / else) exceptions didn't work so great.
Logic is not a hierarchy, it is a graph (as in C.S.) and C's constructs as well as many other languages fail to represent these graphs; requiring work around solutions which can add more overhead, complexity, and confusion due to their indirect mapping of the logic. Perhaps a state machine definition syntax would facilitate this? (but editing would probably be just as or more confusing... fancy editors however could generate editable graphs from such a definition.) The state of the machine would be your position in the logic graph. The right tools could make this really powerful... we've been using ascii text-only languages for far too long... we could at least leverage some unicode features... for example: union, intersection (sets), Pi, almost equal, less than or equal, root, not (instead of !), ratio (for fractions; the division op is saved for when it is cast into another type)
If you want to avoid these problems do not support "technologies" that lock you in even if the dealer gives you free samples and is friendly -- it is only to get you addicted, then you are at their mercy.
Oracle may make MS look nicer but moving from 1 megacorp who can screw you at a whim to another one isn't a step away from the problem... MS messed up a whole lot for the planet for a long time; worst. track. record. ever. Nothing says that MS doesn't cause a nightmare later on; they are already making a bunch of idiotic claims against linux and any obvious idea that runs on a cell phone they could skew a patent to cover. MS isn't interested in C# right now, just like SUN was ok with Java and many things for a long time... and look what happened. I'm not saying MS will merge with Oracle and become super evil (that is possible) but they merely can decide to use their power over you with a whim of the CEO (or in this case, a chair throwing fit.)
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Uniforms do nothing but make ignorant or shallow people happy with symbolic change and symbolic discipline. The behaviors just happen -- treating the symptoms will not sure the disease. You can get discipline with psychology not clothing; not that discipline itself produces good students... or good citizens... good worker drones perhaps... One reason I think people are so easily led astray by officials is because of the level and form of discipline we get in our schools.
You don't tell the dentists how to do their job do you? Are you an expert at dentistry because you've been a client? Just because you spent your childhood in school does not mean you know anything about education. It is different from the other side... as different as the dentists perspective of your teeth is.
I'm sick of ignorant people making education policy and voting for even worse people (politicians) who just placate the ignorant for a living. There are plenty of trained professionals and scientific research to find GOOD ANSWERS and even there its a fuzzy area (soft science) with plenty of biases. We don't need more parent "experts" sticking their noses everywhere but at their own bad parenting skills; who are far more stubborn to change or examine themselves than any school system. People think just because they can pop out a brat who lives long enough to attend school they are unquestionably competent parents.
You can't punish kids today. You can criminalize them in various ways (virtual or actual) but you can't correct their behavior like could be done in the past. The parents are negligent (willfully, ignorant, or simply unavailable) and far too self-defensive when they should be focused more on their children. Kids are not adults! Why we apply similar reasoning is beyond me. Our "corrections" system for adults clearly is a POOR model upon which to build even if kids worked the same as adults! Also modeling schools after our modern MBA run businesses that are ruining our society is foolish on multiple levels. Everything is not a nail no matter how many MBAs claim otherwise! Students are also not products and a school is not a factory.
We NEED to ditch all the police in our schools and replace them with child psychologists - ones with power to invoke child protection services... and to prevent lazy parents from drugging their kids. (ok some kids need it but most do not.) Far too many people are unfit to be parents and their brats are messing things up for everybody else; parenting classes should be required... Actually any parent wanting to keep their child should be mandated by law to take courses in parenting. Nobody has time to read a Dr. Spock book let alone be around the home to practice it... (again a cultural problem not really solved by anything other than shifting the culture.)
Then we have a huge problem of disrespect of experts and an inability to tell fact from opinion... You could run schools the SAME WAY as when the USA was top of the world today and it wouldn't work out-- there are far too many other variables working against us; but we primarily focus on shallow policy solutions in a few narrow areas... again treating symptoms without even finding the disease.
Science isn't being stopped; just some of it is being slowed down.
Nasa only amounts to a few bucks on most people's taxes. We can afford to fund it easily. Its a drop compared to the ocean of debt the crooks have racked up.
The stupid public continues to let these games be played and falls for the propaganda. The banker's didn't just blow a hole in the economy, they are stealing our money to fill the hole before the next explosion.
The debt is never allowed to be paid off and it's compounding interest is killing our worthwhile programs while we can't cut the real waste problems. No, not the "entitlements" the suckers have been tricked into calling medicare, social security, and unemployment-- all of which we pay heavily for and are even ITEMIZED out of our paychecks and are NOT entitlement programs! We let politicians characterize them along with the idiotic media as some sort of charity as they STEAL the money we pay SPECIFICALLY for those programs and put it into the pockets of their cronies.
Social Security was designed to be as separated as they could from the general fund but here we've been mortgaging against it since Bush. Now we are being forced to pay up and it'll get worse-- it really won't matter who is in office because its going to be so bad that they will be forced to give up the house to pay the bankers. Its not really a whole lot conceptually different than what the USA did to 3rd world nations for generations using its tools at the IMF and World Bank-- but now everything we did is being done to us (arguably including the assassination of officials in 'accidents,' blackmail, etc. of course payoffs were far more common... ) It also didn't do us any good to allow all this CIA economic warfare to leak so much into the private sector.. and now with our military as well. Back when it was the USA backing it on others at least the USA was safe - now its migrated away and out of our control. Movies like "The International" are only a tip of the sort of things going on already today in more complex ways (they have to keep it simple in a movie.)
You rob a bank. get hard time. You run a bank into the ground; you get rich. there is no legitimate outrage out there; just flip the channel or find a website that makes you feel better and move on.
I have read it; there is very little of the constitution that is taken as a literal absolute. Free speech has tons of legal limitations imposed upon it and upheld by the supreme court. The practice of religion is limited in many ways as laws passed ban things that are religious practices for some peoples. In the "real world" we allow exceptions to such rules and thereby hand power off to whomever is the current gray area administrator.
I am not much of an advocate for the positions I sometimes take. I tend to agree generally more with you. I feel that such commonly allowed things should be put forward for debate; because we do them yet really have little intelligent discussion because few are willing to take the more complex position of defending the undermining of free speech or religion. Yet it happens despite wide spread open opposition.
As far as banning religion-- that I personally think there are grounds upon which it could be done. Depends upon how you define religion-- and I'm not stretching as far as the Supreme Court recently did saying corporations are a person. When I think religion I think organizations. The organizations could be banned; people can still freely exercise the belief religion without the organizations. (could one say you are free to exercise your belief in prison? and that free doesn't mean out in public?) Even then, like I said, we already accept many exceptions to these broad rules -- you no longer get due process if you are labeled a "terrorist" and the USA can kill you abroad citizen or not - so if your "religion" is classified as a cult or whatever they could then exempt you from protections (the religions that allow children to be impregnated by the leader come to mind.) The republic is all about protecting the few from the many (the many are represented by government.) The public may vote it illegal but the law clearly states that they can't enforce it against a minority. The real situation gets more complex; if you follow the constitution then you must allow the minority religions you don't like along with speech you don't like. (It gets more interesting when one argues children raised to be sex slaves in a cult don't really want it even though they are raised to believe in it... then apply those arguments to major religions..)
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The big point I really disagree with is your claims about the King of England -- it was not solely about persecution of religions the King disliked-- the King himself was a holy figure and endorsed by God himself. That is the kind of crap was well known by everybody back then; which naturally characterized any opposition as opposing God's chosen leader. The King and God were heavily intertwined intentionally as the perfect example of blasphemy (you'd think the commandments would have been more effective... kind of like the constitution...) The state doesn't have to "establish" its own religion completely; it can co-op one or exploit many providing a largely functional equivalent without an official decree. Literal interpretation of this would allow government to come within 99.999% of its own religion and miss the whole purpose behind such a limitation. You could impose religious practices upon everybody but fall short of being a government religion... The intent is to stop all such abuses of government and its officials, not only the extreme cases. It is rather open ended given that unpopular religions even then were mislabeled as something else; the word itself is hard to define. It is left up to the changing society to constantly tweak the meanings of the words.... which can produce significant breaks to whatever was intended (not that we ever cared much for their intentions.)
My position on the teacher: religious practices are limited in the classroom; you can't sacrifice your goat on the teacher's desk. The "free exercise thereof" is already stopped in the classroom. The teacher is not imposing any religions if anything he is imposing non religion (I would argue that is science.) So the imposing religion aspect is
The science teachers should bash religion all the want. Send your kids to church to learn mythology; or allow the humanities teachers to discuss religions equally.
The constitution is against promotion of a religion -- NO pushing of religion. period. Keep religion out of government is the whole point. (remember, the king of England was heavily connected to religion...) Somebody making comments against any of the many idiocies of our primitive ancient (older than mid-evil) beliefs is not violating this at all! Heresy could be a crime if if it wasn't for the prohibition of religion in government. Heresy includes a lot of science, logic, philosophy etc.
Furthermore, my point is that government can bash all religion equally without promoting any single one of them; some could argue that the banning of religion is possible to a degree but I'm not going there (human sacrifices and many other religious practices are illegal and its constitutional.) Non-religion is not a religion. So you are not promoting 1 religion over the others if you are "attacking" them all fairly.
"FREE PRESS" but we tax them... That severely limits the press of today where the real news comes from papers who are going broke. Religions, they don't get taxed yet they get less empowerment in the constitution than the press does.
Virtualization / Emulation belongs back in its niche. The whole point of unix is to abstract and remove the hardware and balancing resources between software and users. The over use of visualization outside of its niche is an indication that our OS and practices have failed to perform their task. Its not good that something lets you avoid fixing real problems by putting it off into a virtual failed OS.
The old mainframe I got to play with had more hardware protected memory spaces so drivers couldn't mess up the kernel for example. Sure doing such things slows you down-- but not like running dozens of virtual machines because some driver could take you down or some program couldn't be recompiled when you upgraded the OS (which was a rare event.)
We need to improve old binary compatibility on linux so we are not forced into virtual machines of multiple builds of linux. Not to mention the fun issues of compiling things with dependencies when stuff gets upgraded. We should have more facilities to make it easier to run some old software without as much labor... Multiple name spaces for dynamic linked libraries (linux there yet? apple has been for a long time...) We need a driver system that isolates driver code! Yes it'll be slower-- so what!! virtualization is much more overhead than solving OS design flaws. It IS a flaw when so much breaks so easily.
So we are ending up with more x86 like crazy hacks... virtual machines with memory sharing games among other hacks to make the virtual machines act more like they were not there-- trying to approximate an OS that actually worked.
If linus wants to fight "evil' he needs to address the use cases driving the adoption of virtual machines... real world IT issues.
NOTE: I have no problems with mainframes running dozens of virtual machines or similar things when it makes sense to do so. Otherwise, it belongs in a single OS.
Sure slower startup and linking times are the price, but look at the overhead of virtual machines! I run them myself but I won't blow all that RAM just because I can download a pre-configured firewall VM. Instead of thinking "VM saves the day" you should be thinking: "Why is it so difficult that I have to get something somebody else put in a lot of time to setup for me?" and for some: "If I can't understand it should I be relying upon a prefigured machine I don't know how to configure?"
Its harmless until Helium begins to cost too much; naturally, we will not regulate it or stop government from handing it over for nothing (because our corporate masters told us that doing anything they do not like is communist and will cost us jobs.) Actually, many in government probably want a shortage to be created so they can invest in it.
It'll follow the pattern of our other natural resources we so wisely manage...
Why aspire to simulate human brains? We create more than we need already...
Artificial Intelligence always beats real stupidity.
"We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid" -Ben Franklin
The changes in culture and the rise of extreme consumerism are having very similar changes to ideas AND imagination. (they are not the same but are close enough to be equally harmed.) My mother was an art teacher, she's seen the huge plunge in imagination over the decades -- you don't get that many good ideas without imagination; in fact, all studies show that students with art education (the old kind) do better in other topics-- the well rounded mind does do better.
However, we are now undermining that as well. Art is being turned into a standards testing gig and a cover for helping do the other subjects; they've taken art out of art. Soon, money and lack of peripheral benefits will eliminate art programs. People won't be clever enough to realize why it changed; even more likely, they'll just assume it has always been that way and never investigate if it was any different.
We have increasing numbers of entering college students who do not even have the elementary skill of discriminating between fact and opinion! How is such a person going to even START to investigate anything further? Its like trying to get a Rush or Fox viewer to read...
Customization technology is giving us the ability to live inside a bubble where all unpleasant thoughts are filtered out. Just the hint of some disruptive idea and it gets filtered out and the mind's defenses are deployed. The geometry problem that starts to look like it will undermine your belief in a FLAT earth is just a trick for some crazy liberal with their round earth conspiracy promoting their disturbing opinions so they can change your way of live (which is better than theirs.) Oh, and its politically incorrect to upset anybody...
Good ideas should shake things up a bit; they require some imagination to even realize the possibilities involved-- which are often upsetting in many ways; the more touchy you are the sooner your ego will jump in to defend you with mindless rationalizations (and if you can't tell fact from opinion you'll have a hell of a time defeating your natural illogical defenses.)
This is also why democracy does not work. The culture has to be healthy for its democracy to be healthy; essentially, the democratic government reflects the people and rather than see it as some removed mythical creation (as many do today) it should be seen as a manifestation of the social development of the society. A really complex survey/study in people's collective decision making. (yeah, today's system is broken; it is our collective fault... the reasons Americans are so big on responsibility and accountability is because they are over compensating for their lack of it. They are in denial.)
Version numbers have been bad for decades- marketing people wanting whole version numbers like 5.0 so update end up 5.0.1 and other silly games in the other direction.
What they should be doing is Firefox #.build# so you get the feature set and the build number. They seem to forget developers make the web apps they run too! a whole version number should remain somewhat static as far as features that cause any noticeable changes and bug fixes can go into the build numbers. When they actually do something that impacts web developers and add-on developers then they should go up a whole version. They are partially doing this today, as each version upgrade seems to break everything.
What about the DRM built-in the CPUs?? you know they have some horrible system in place to support this; otherwise, the upgrades will leak out on the internet and we will get them for free.... just think of the malware that could use such features.
A lot of phones use Gorilla glass - the toughest glass made. It is not designed to be weak or designed poorly it is designed to be on par with typical smart phones. They don't sell a rugged version of the iPhone. Bug apple if you want one; otherwise get something else.
I'm only part time, some of the time - provides some insight; which you lack.
That doesn't change what I'm saying, it doesn't matter who states the fact that a (arguably former) democratic government is the responsibility of its citizens. It is their government and what it does is their responsibility. If you vote for some corrupt jerk who purposely screws up your government services and makes it a place nobody wants to work there just so somebody else can profit from the mess-- it is your fault and even more foolish to re-elect them. I have seen this happen locally. Yet this happens over and over... times have been better.
I realize that to some Americans its too hard to take responsibility for their actions especially if it involves thinking beyond literal direct actions. You are raised to think government is some foreign entity that has nothing to do with you and that you are powerless to do anything about it. It is a self fulfilling prophecy; you types are contributing to the problem.
No, not better than a majority of people - the majority DOES NOT VOTE AT ALL (well, ok then, since at least I participate.) There are good people who run for office; they almost never get in and rarely get affiliated with a major party since the party system is designed to filter out good people.
Actually your logic is screwed up because as things have been getting worse and instead of realizing this people hold a grudge against those who have stayed the same or protected their well being. You ever do some reading along these lines? its not that difficult to figure out.
The economic mess we have today as well as most the other problems are caused by the private sector-- or did you forget the banks? or the fraudulent ratings that S&P gave those securities? (yes, same people who lowered US credit rating.) So its government's fault for not regulating and enforcing protections against super fraud due to corruption coming from the bankers??? It is your job to prevent these non-government forces from corrupting the government --- this government was created by and for the people at a big cost -- and nobody is willing anymore to put in a fraction of those efforts today. So, we collectively deserve what we get.
Sony broke contract. They made CD tech only (I don't think they did computers yet at that time) and were Japanese so they were a hardware partner. Nintendo sued for breaking the contract, like 10 years later got a HUGE amount of money (billion? I forget) Sadly, the penalty didn't make up for Sony breaking it so what are business contracts worth if you can gamble them away with high profits?? Same goes for worker abuse, pollution etc. without a real business COST to negate the benefits they will ignore law.
NO it is because the USA has gone all corporatist and National laboratories have been nearly ruined as a result. Government employees who want to keep their job or be able to get another job are hesitant to make too many waves or be a whistle blower -- not a whole lot of employers want to hire somebody who will tattle on them if something is wrong.
Have you talked with some old time national lab people? they have to beg for grants many of which are private related either directly or indirectly so besides the usual spin to convince people to fund something (like highlight some minor aspect as if it was the biggest part of the project) they have to cater to special interests as well. Gone are the days when the government handed them money with a general goal to solve and then give away the discoveries for the benefit of man.
Most government workers are not on fatcat salaries and I've met few "leeches" in my dealings; my uncle at the state dept, he saw a lot of leeches-- the higher up you go; but the lower levels were just fine. More loyal employees exist - understandably because its far easier to be patriotic or nationalistic about your government job than it is being a loyal drone for walmart or some private corp. Sounds like incompetent management was more accepted inside government. As for salaries-- that is BS; they set those for slightly lower than the industry jobs but with more stability and benefits and it was like this since FDR days until about Reagan (but started during Nixon.) Private jobs have gone DOWN so while they gradually suck more every year the government ones remained about the same and naturally lag behind (going up or down) but in addition, they still had union protection which made going down more difficult--- like other private industries which unions, they too were slower to decline. The result of all this wasn't to get private jobs back up to par but somehow they lowered "par" in the public's minds so that they resented union people who were hurt less and government people who were hurt less. Instead of realizing that they were GOING DOWN they thought the others were going up! What is amazing is just how gullible Americans are today.
I have a part time government job so you could say I'm biased; but then I could say you are ignorant (which is worse.) I resent my yearly 5+% paycuts -- it is not my fault you all fucked everything up; we are doing out jobs well. Hell, I put in tons of extra time-- they get a good deal; I'm helping society with my work -- its not some meaningless job like most the private sector is. But then the lack of competence of the voters probably should be reflected in government services. Bad management afterall...
The PC will be "dead" in the mainstream just as BSD is "dead." It will persist for people who know better and for niches where it is best suited. The media will talk about how the "PC" as we knew it is dead as a minority of us disputes that "fact" but don't get noticed (unless we pay for lobbyists.... then we'd always get equal time!) OR the media may redefine the "PC" to its LITERAL MEANING since computers are becoming more PERSONAL.
Its totally silly to say the PC is dead because its evolving to be more "Pc" while it has been more "pC". For people who need a real computer the 'old' style will remain-- the masses will be (or are) just vapid consumers (and fewer of them will be creating anything on their jobs as well.)
From the early 90s:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5144094928842683632
There are NeXt videos from the late 80s which still have some features that we haven't picked up today. the NeXt system fostered amazing stuff for the 90s which we are still seeing as "new" today its like it rubbed off on other companies who used it... the 1st web browser etc all were done on there. The dock was on there... before the windows crap bar. etc. When Steve left Apple he took the really great people with him; Apple was running on 1985 fumes until it bought NeXt.
Apple has been implementing ideas from the late 80s and early 90s for the last 10 years. The differences are rather minor; the concepts haven't changed from what Steve's dream team thought of back then. Its just refined versions of the same stuff.
Now if the IP nightmare of today existed when Apple started and Steve knew his company was going to lose to cheap copycats -- or more accurately, the hardware business was being killed by the software business; he would have fought to maintain his hardware business like he is doing today but with the IP laws of today (and the stupid new propaganda like "Intellectual Property" a P.R. creation that stifles debate... its like 1984, define the language and control thought.) We'd have nothing like today... Hardware companies would likely be better positioned instead of being junk merchants with low margins and software wouldn't dominate as much as it has under MS's rein. Apple clones may have been allowed; because insane IP would have given them the control they want (and cut of the profits.) Remember, apple had all the big stuff early on; they bought all those Xerox ideas like office networking, mouse, the desktop metaphors, WYSIWYG, all concepts which today people can claim ownership in our broken "IP" system -- which allows for broad concept ownership.
DHX is used in AppleShare; don't use filesharing then that service is not open.
SMB is a mess... NFS is not secure... its no wonder AppleShare would be preferred... The ports are not open for clients, just servers. The network browser doesn't use DHX its not likely the problem...
Getting the user's file server password by spoofing the fileserver is a DNS poisoning style attack; the ad-hoc nature is what is causing the problem. If you don't use file sharing, no problem. If you use a DIFFERENT password to connect to the fileserver your mac is not compromised; your data on the fileserver is.
Sounds like ServerAdmin has a similar design-- get into server admin and if they use other management servers you could get into the whole group! (not just the fileserver) If you run a REAL server with afpd on freebsd for example, the ability to do harm will be reduced to shared files. A fancy network setup could prevent peer to peer connections over afpd. This would prevent spoofing and adhoc discovery of this 1 service. ServerAdmin features would be more difficult to protect using the network hardware.
Any adhoc network is going to pose similar problems -- this means Bonjour discovered services from MANY apps (servers) are at risk of similar attacks as those services are designed with authentication security in mind but are not thinking about identity security. An open wifi could spoof DNS and other services causing similar issues; identity is a big problem gone unnoticed a lot of the time.
Bonjour ad-hoc is a wonderful thing; its surprising somebody didn't think about how poisoning it would be a problem.... its highly likely this was known from the beginning but the issues not made clear to the people who were coding network services who didn't think about identity issues outside of basic authentication; identity is often only thought in terms of authentication and nothing deeper than that.
This likely means a solution will be SSH style logging of servers -- but passive as they are detected and notifications when a connection involves a mismatched identity-- and bitching again because of apple devices recording every service they discover over wifi... Just like SSH, this will pose a risk when somebody connects the 1st time and that happens to be the spoof and not the real server (I don't know if a spoofed SSHD can compromise your password... it must be a risk if they put in the server signature system; sure, if you use keys instead of a password its a moot point, but that is a mess to setup account keys for everybody.)
This revisits the identity issues with SSL online which is similar; trusting 1 3rd party business to identify/verify websites because SSL encryption is not enough if you are talking to a spoof. (hopefully apple doesn't address this the same way because they'd make themselves a 'free' monopoly signer.)
just think about encoding nightmares! reading the data problem is not too hard to solve even if we claw back from the stone age; the real problem is how to decode the data and then how to process it.
I can imagine them getting stumped on the DOC files they are trying open; the jpegs have to be even more difficult.
You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!
The apes don't win against humans; the humans do in themselves first.
Security discussions often end up lacking the details needed for real progress. People who know better rarely seem to be involved from what I've seen. Knowledgeable need to speak up and educate the policy makers.
SSL is just fine for communication; identity it is as only as good as the signers -- which are not so good and just in it for the easy money. Browsers make money from being in the con game which also causes progress to be slowed. The best identity solution I have seen so far leverages the existing tech and is a Firefox add-on already: http://perspectives-project.org/
Me, I've been bugging my state officials (you should too) that we need the government involved as a signing authority. Not because its flawless (I bet it out performs the private signers easily) but because every BUSINESS already must register their corporation (LLC too) and they should get more than just a TAX ID and some paper. They should get a signed cert. This can be be used for multiple things not just SSL certs which support multiple signers. At least then one can see that a gov has recognized their corp in addition to whatever other signers are involved.
All the above uses existing tech. If you want to get into identity and encryption for the next generation, then I would suggest decoupling different forms of security not only in discussions but also in the implementations. Nothing says that one can't have an identity system verify the keys used for any form encryption-- the two do not need to be combined as if they were addressing the same problem..
Senator obama back around 2006 was sounding quite different and projected about the size of the debt we are in today, minus a few trillion that managed to get added on from later events.
What makes one wonder is just how big of a mess this really is to those with inside information. I don't think much of people's opinions since the press in the USA is incompetent so most people are just too ignorant. Then you have better informed and educated people (like myself) who are not aware of a great deal needed to fully asses the situation like Obama is. Do I trust him, maybe... do I trust him to do the right thing, NO! Can I expect the republicans to generally be wrong all the time, yes. democrats? most likely, yes.
What I find funny is how the most powerful nation on earth is nearly powerless against the BANKSTERS and their credit rating stooges. What congress did was unconstitutional; the debt ceiling limit is not legal. period. Americans are screwed because they are too stupid to realize a budget surplus just means you have some money to pay down your debts-- they think its a signal for more tax cuts. 70+% of the debt is PAST compounded unpaid debt.
Trickle down economics continues under new smokescreens and it continues to fail no matter how much corporate and bankster backing it gets; it even is undermining the field of economics and no matter how warped things get, this economic religion will not work.
Democrats have either been bought or suckered; the republicans are already bought out or are true believers. Social Security and Medicare are NOT entitlements but yet that is how we now refer to them. They are not broke; never will be, the payout just goes down. The Banksters are robbing you all and you don't have a clue... A sucker born every second.... about 1.1 are born in the usa per second last I checked.
Because the C language construct for strings likely would have been like Pascal-- with the 1st byte indicating the extremely short length of 255 characters. This forces that size limit upon you.
I wouldn't say C strings are complex; C doesn't really do much for strings. It does character arrays which are actually byte arrays but were called chars because in those days characters were only 1 byte in size; char was picked to be a byte. (at least as a kid I didn't have a byte data type.) I can think of the compiler only formatting strings constants into this format-- all the other stuff is standard library functions for working with strings; not the language technically but the built-in run-time library (which could have all string functions removed or replaced with pascal styled ones.)
char should have been byte; the string terminator convention could have been a typedef of the byte data type. It only would have made it slightly easier to migrate to 2 byte chars if this was the case. char must remain 1 byte in size. To do serious strings today you must use a massive unicode library with a complex data type and that could be implemented either way.
Anyhow the point is-- a buffer is whatever size you want; a data type which contains it's own length locks you into the definition of that data type for the life of its use.
Length has some speed advantages and some limitations. One can see how cool a tight bit of assembly which handled any size and was more reusable would be favored and seem suitable for promotion over something more involved and requiring more labor to scale.
The one byte "mistake" would help with some problems but it would still exist in other forms. Any terminating data stream is going to have these issues and like I said, it is quite likely that developers would have used it to get around language string length constraints; not to mention all the other uses for terminators outside of strings.
You are missing this general point in the details of his simple example.
There are examples of where goto is beneficial that are more complex and the gains are more than just saving an additional variable test and additional variable.
BTW, conditionals still have impact today when you blow your long instruction pipeline on a bad branch prediction... especially if you have many branches nested near each other where the branch prediction quickly becomes useless. Blowing 20 cycles on a conditional doesn't bother most people anyhow; but I'm just mentioning it so somebody doesn't think 1 more flag test case is only just 2 more ops.
I argue that exceptions are an evolved form of goto; just as a while loop is an evolved form of goto (jump on condition). The language provides an abstraction for a goto situation that prevents some human error and limits a lot of flexibility but it is worth it for the labor saved as well as the portability; which is why we have while loops and then had exception handling; it may not have been in C but C++ forced the need for exceptions to solve the issue of nested constructor errors (I can't think of a better solution to that problem.) When I was a kid, I wanted some sort of jump dispatch table like an evolved switch statement, exceptions partially fit the bill but for complex nests of conditionals (if / else) exceptions didn't work so great.
Logic is not a hierarchy, it is a graph (as in C.S.) and C's constructs as well as many other languages fail to represent these graphs; requiring work around solutions which can add more overhead, complexity, and confusion due to their indirect mapping of the logic. Perhaps a state machine definition syntax would facilitate this? (but editing would probably be just as or more confusing... fancy editors however could generate editable graphs from such a definition.) The state of the machine would be your position in the logic graph. The right tools could make this really powerful... we've been using ascii text-only languages for far too long... we could at least leverage some unicode features... for example: union, intersection (sets), Pi, almost equal, less than or equal, root, not (instead of !), ratio (for fractions; the division op is saved for when it is cast into another type)
If you want to avoid these problems do not support "technologies" that lock you in even if the dealer gives you free samples and is friendly -- it is only to get you addicted, then you are at their mercy.
Oracle may make MS look nicer but moving from 1 megacorp who can screw you at a whim to another one isn't a step away from the problem... MS messed up a whole lot for the planet for a long time; worst. track. record. ever. Nothing says that MS doesn't cause a nightmare later on; they are already making a bunch of idiotic claims against linux and any obvious idea that runs on a cell phone they could skew a patent to cover. MS isn't interested in C# right now, just like SUN was ok with Java and many things for a long time... and look what happened. I'm not saying MS will merge with Oracle and become super evil (that is possible) but they merely can decide to use their power over you with a whim of the CEO (or in this case, a chair throwing fit.)
A good reason to keep the link and article up--- for sending to IE users!