The Venezuelan regime treats every problem as a nail to be hammered, so it THINKS the Internet shutdown will help them.
I was in Egypt when the government shut down the internet for several days to prevent protests, prior to the ousting of Mubarak. It was a very short-sighted move: to a great extent, the only thing keeping a lot of people off the streets was Facebook - take that away, and people's only option (for information and/or entertainment) is to go outside...
Forgot to mention those guys showed that such an algorithm that "works" for all valid proofs is not just difficult but mathematically impossible.
No, that's not actually what they proved; it is perfectly possible to prove a given algorithm works for all possible inputs, and even that a proof checker works for all valid proofs. There are certainly things that they proved impossible (e.g. a writing a program that can provide a proof for any true mathematical statement, or that can determine if two arbitrary programs are equivalent), but those don't apply here.
Prove that the algorithm works. That's your proof.
Gödel and Turing make strong cases that proving the algorithm works for some inputs that are correct proofs doesn't count as proof it will work for all correct proof inputs. So no, even if you "prove the algorithm works" it is not the same as a rigorous mathematical proof.
Not true - proving the algorithm works is the same as a rigorous mathematical proof, if you prove mathematically and rigorously that the algorithm works. (The comment about running the algorithm a number of times was simply to guard against the proven-correct algorithm producing a wrong result due to a machine malfunction.)
True bug free programs have been proven to be mathematically impossible - it's an NP-complete program.
Nonsense. For one thing, "NP-complete" doesn't mean "mathematically impossible" - it just means that large problems may take a very long (but nonetheless finite) time to solve. And there's nothing mathematically impossible about bug-free programs - they're hard to come by in practice for non-trivial problems, but the limitation is human rather than mathematical.
And to address your earlier comments: it's true that there may be bugs in the OS, the compiler or even the CPU - but in the context of the analogy, that's like having a fault in the wall's foundations - the bricklayer wouldn't be expected to be accountable for those (assuming another contractor was responsible for laying them...)
Could you point out any specifics? I had a look at a few files, and didn't see anything outrageous... but maybe I just got lucky; what sort of thing do you consider so bad about it?
Not forgetting that Israel is the only country in the region that will accept almost anyone if they're willing to be productive members of society, and sometimes not even then. How's that working out in Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Iraq? Right. If you're not muslim, not a chance.
I know plenty of non-Muslims who have moved to, and live and work in, Egypt.
if you're female and under the age of 14 and not married yet you're probably getting too old.
Really? The problem I've heard most about is that pervasive unemployment means that young people can't afford to get married...
Have you actually been to the countries you're talking about?
The lazy assed "I don't want to do my own research" author.
Of course he's going to have to make some choices. But when making such choices, it's helpful to have a feel for how well the devices work in practice, for the intended use: I've had plenty of devices in the past that, according to their specs at least, were perfect - but ended up being frustratingly deficient in some way. Reading online reviews can help with this to some extent, but they tend not to focus on (say) programming as a use case - so I can imagine that input from slashdotters would be very valuable here. (It's also really helpful for pointing out phones/other devices that the author may not have considered, that don't necessarily come up in a typical web search...)
"You agree that by submitting content to our service, you are granting a non-revokable, perpetual license to said content."
In which case you don't own it.
I'm not sure that follows. It's quite possible to own some land, but for someone else to have (say) a right of way over it - either that you've granted yourself, or that has arisen some other way. Such a right of way doesn't stop you using the land agriculturally, building on it, selling it, granting rights over it to other people, or forbidding third parties to use the land. You don't, however, have the power to revoke the right of way.
In such a situation, you are still the owner of the land, legally and in an everyday sense. Some people would argue that the situation with data is the same - you may remain the owner, but someone else can still have rights over it.
I agree that it's completely wrong here, but it's not necessarily meaningless: you could legitimately say "The energy consumption was increasing at a rate of 1kW/hr"...
I can tell you've never tried to make an inkjet printer from scratch. Dispensing fractions of a milliliter needed for high DPI is hard and building the hardware for it is equally hard.
The only DIY feasible printing technology is pen-plotters.
I've seen a number of DIY inkjet printers - e.g. this one - that use ink cartridges from commercial printers. This works because some ink cartridge designs effectively have the print head built into the cartridge. While this still leaves you dependent on the printer manufacturer for the cartridges, you still (theoretically) gain from the fact that your printer won't refuse to print if (say) one colour runs out, or if you refill with off-brand ink, or for some other arbitrary reason - since this logic is generally implemented in the printer rather than in the cartridge.
That is great as a "nice to have" on the router, but it is bad advice as a solution over just buying a printer that has networking built in.
Why so? Printers with ethernet tend to be more expensive than those with just USB. Are you suggesting that if one has a capable router already, one should pay extra for no real gain in functionality?
Yes, if an only if your router includes "print server" as an advertised feature.
No, not if and only if: don't forget "...or you can install Linux on it". For example, my Netgear router has a USB port, but was not advertised as being a print server - but it was very easy to put OpenWRT on it, install CUPS, and now the printer works nicely on the network.
Any one who can log in to your unix/linux account, (or any one who can read your ~/.ssh folder, if you are dumb enough to leave it group/world readable) can steal your ssh keys and pretend to be you and log in to all machines in the known hosts file.
Ummm... no, because my private keys are encrypted with passphrases.
About that license, for the sake of (my) curiosity - it is paid on tv-set basis (one por TV), or por watching eyes basis (one por house's living people)?
Neither - it is per household. So if you have 10 people in your house, and 10 TVs, you will pay 1 TV licence fee.
Slashdot Mirror
The Venezuelan regime treats every problem as a nail to be hammered, so it THINKS the Internet shutdown will help them.
I was in Egypt when the government shut down the internet for several days to prevent protests, prior to the ousting of Mubarak. It was a very short-sighted move: to a great extent, the only thing keeping a lot of people off the streets was Facebook - take that away, and people's only option (for information and/or entertainment) is to go outside...
Forgot to mention those guys showed that such an algorithm that "works" for all valid proofs is not just difficult but mathematically impossible.
No, that's not actually what they proved; it is perfectly possible to prove a given algorithm works for all possible inputs, and even that a proof checker works for all valid proofs. There are certainly things that they proved impossible (e.g. a writing a program that can provide a proof for any true mathematical statement, or that can determine if two arbitrary programs are equivalent), but those don't apply here.
Gödel and Turing make strong cases that proving the algorithm works for some inputs that are correct proofs doesn't count as proof it will work for all correct proof inputs. So no, even if you "prove the algorithm works" it is not the same as a rigorous mathematical proof.
Not true - proving the algorithm works is the same as a rigorous mathematical proof, if you prove mathematically and rigorously that the algorithm works. (The comment about running the algorithm a number of times was simply to guard against the proven-correct algorithm producing a wrong result due to a machine malfunction.)
True bug free programs have been proven to be mathematically impossible - it's an NP-complete program.
Nonsense. For one thing, "NP-complete" doesn't mean "mathematically impossible" - it just means that large problems may take a very long (but nonetheless finite) time to solve. And there's nothing mathematically impossible about bug-free programs - they're hard to come by in practice for non-trivial problems, but the limitation is human rather than mathematical.
And to address your earlier comments: it's true that there may be bugs in the OS, the compiler or even the CPU - but in the context of the analogy, that's like having a fault in the wall's foundations - the bricklayer wouldn't be expected to be accountable for those (assuming another contractor was responsible for laying them...)
Have a look for yourself. It's like a bad joke.
Could you point out any specifics? I had a look at a few files, and didn't see anything outrageous... but maybe I just got lucky; what sort of thing do you consider so bad about it?
Also, you can still use the BBC website even if you don't pay taxes,
True - the licence fee (it's not strictly a tax) is only paid if you use a TV or watch live streaming.
how do you think foreigners view it?
When you're viewing the BBC News website from outside the UK, it shows adverts (and different content).
Go across the street, there's another Starbucks hiring.
Don't have stats for Starbucks, but at another well-known coffee chain, it might not be quite as easy as you think...
Not forgetting that Israel is the only country in the region that will accept almost anyone if they're willing to be productive members of society, and sometimes not even then. How's that working out in Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Iraq? Right. If you're not muslim, not a chance.
I know plenty of non-Muslims who have moved to, and live and work in, Egypt.
if you're female and under the age of 14 and not married yet you're probably getting too old.
Really? The problem I've heard most about is that pervasive unemployment means that young people can't afford to get married...
Have you actually been to the countries you're talking about?
The lazy assed "I don't want to do my own research" author.
Of course he's going to have to make some choices. But when making such choices, it's helpful to have a feel for how well the devices work in practice, for the intended use: I've had plenty of devices in the past that, according to their specs at least, were perfect - but ended up being frustratingly deficient in some way. Reading online reviews can help with this to some extent, but they tend not to focus on (say) programming as a use case - so I can imagine that input from slashdotters would be very valuable here. (It's also really helpful for pointing out phones/other devices that the author may not have considered, that don't necessarily come up in a typical web search...)
Combine the gpp author's name & his typo using detergent instead of deterrent.
Err... what makes you think that that was a typo? Ajax was a detergent (before it was ever a web technology); that was the point...
Sure it does.
"You agree that by submitting content to our service, you are granting a non-revokable, perpetual license to said content."
In which case you don't own it.
I'm not sure that follows. It's quite possible to own some land, but for someone else to have (say) a right of way over it - either that you've granted yourself, or that has arisen some other way. Such a right of way doesn't stop you using the land agriculturally, building on it, selling it, granting rights over it to other people, or forbidding third parties to use the land. You don't, however, have the power to revoke the right of way.
In such a situation, you are still the owner of the land, legally and in an everyday sense. Some people would argue that the situation with data is the same - you may remain the owner, but someone else can still have rights over it.
He's always insisted that his qmail binaries get installed under /var/qmail,
Not true. He used to, but he has since placed qmail in the public domain, so you can do whatever you want.
1KW/hr is a meaningless unit.
I agree that it's completely wrong here, but it's not necessarily meaningless: you could legitimately say "The energy consumption was increasing at a rate of 1kW/hr"...
The UK's been a pathetic lapdog of the US since the 80s with Thatcher cow-towing to Reagan.
Why was she towing a cow? Couldn't it move by itself? (or did you mean kowtowing ;-) )?
I can tell you've never tried to make an inkjet printer from scratch. Dispensing fractions of a milliliter needed for high DPI is hard and building the hardware for it is equally hard.
The only DIY feasible printing technology is pen-plotters.
I've seen a number of DIY inkjet printers - e.g. this one - that use ink cartridges from commercial printers. This works because some ink cartridge designs effectively have the print head built into the cartridge. While this still leaves you dependent on the printer manufacturer for the cartridges, you still (theoretically) gain from the fact that your printer won't refuse to print if (say) one colour runs out, or if you refill with off-brand ink, or for some other arbitrary reason - since this logic is generally implemented in the printer rather than in the cartridge.
That is great as a "nice to have" on the router, but it is bad advice as a solution over just buying a printer that has networking built in.
Why so? Printers with ethernet tend to be more expensive than those with just USB. Are you suggesting that if one has a capable router already, one should pay extra for no real gain in functionality?
Yes, if an only if your router includes "print server" as an advertised feature.
No, not if and only if: don't forget "...or you can install Linux on it". For example, my Netgear router has a USB port, but was not advertised as being a print server - but it was very easy to put OpenWRT on it, install CUPS, and now the printer works nicely on the network.
It should have read: "Why can't ewe just tow the line and give him free rain?
The "reign" was already wrong - the correct word would have been "rein". Not quite as much fail as at first sight?
Shame the government has to waste money paying people to play Farmville,
Err, you do know the Ordnance Survey entirely funds itself from selling maps/map data, and gives a proportion of its profits to the Treasury?
Any one who can log in to your unix/linux account, (or any one who can read your ~/.ssh folder, if you are dumb enough to leave it group/world readable) can steal your ssh keys and pretend to be you and log in to all machines in the known hosts file.
Ummm... no, because my private keys are encrypted with passphrases.
Why not just type :set showmode? Or better yet, add set showmode to your .exrc file so it's on all the time.
Ah yes, that's the first thing a new user of the program will think of doing. Totally discoverable, and not opaque at all ;-p
That is hilarious. Most "conservatives" I know have no respect for authority.
Often what they're in favor of is you being respectful of their authority ;-)
(of course this applies to politicians of more than one affiliation...)
About that license, for the sake of (my) curiosity - it is paid on tv-set basis (one por TV), or por watching eyes basis (one por house's living people)?
Neither - it is per household. So if you have 10 people in your house, and 10 TVs, you will pay 1 TV licence fee.
That's not enough you have to own nothing capable of receiving tv signal
You don't even need a licence if you have a TV, as long as you don't watch it (you can even listen to the radio on it if you like).
You can't print ceramic (at least not within the next decade). Source: any basic metallurgy class.
Really?