It might have been ironic or spiteful the first couple of times, but now
everyone knows exactly what will happen: the post will be modded up, and
a bunch of people will say "me too" and also get modded up. Since
everyone knows that's going to happen, there's no spite or irony,
just idiocy.
"What error correction can in principle help with is that it
the chances that any given peer has data which is of
interest to another peer. In practice this
isn't really a problem, because rarest first
does a very good job of
piece distribution, but error
correction can in principle do as
well as is theoretically
possible, and rarest
first is in fact
less than perfect in
practice."
In other words, Avalanche is perfect in theory and Bittorrent is less
than perfect in practice, but not by a whole lot. He then goes on to
argue that even the theoretical benefits aren't worth the overhead.
Every advantage Avalanche has is speculative. It's very relevant that
they used a bogus demo instead of backing up the speculation. And the
demo was bogus. Tit-for-tat, and throttling in general, isn't an
irrelevant side issue. Ask yourself this: if the file has an original
distributor plus people willing to seed it, how do pieces go missing in
the first place?
First off, criticism of Bush doesn't automatically make it a liberal vs.
conservative issue. Bush seems to enjoy breaking a lot of the rules
that liberals and conservatives both followed until recently. This is
one of them.
Second, there is an enormous difference between a) loudly disagreeing
with someone, and b) using money and authority to get them to change
their position. They're so different, they should be next to each other
in ethics textbooks as examples of the right and wrong way to handle
things.
Third, "The Bell Curve" is not some dry, statistical report that's being
irrationally attacked. It's a book that tried to sell itself on shock
value and pandering. A lot of people were shocked, but that doesn't mean all the
criticism was based on emotion.
I happen to think that IQ is a snake-oil metric. I thought so long
before "The Bell Curve" was published, and so did a lot of other people.
I really don't care if someone has a survey showing that IQ is correlated
with race or "social success," but I will criticize flawed assumptions
about why those correlations exist. Any correlation between race and
success is most likely due to successful parents having the resources to
raise successful kids, and some races being discriminated against. As
far I can tell, IQ measures how experienced you are at taking
standardized tests with contrived questions. It's not surprising or
meaningful that coming from a wealthy family increases that particular
skill.
But that's a side issue. Even if we--the critics of "The Bell
Curve"--were a bunch of irrational leftist windbags, we would merely be saying
the authors are wrong. That's is not the same as getting them to alter
the book by writing them a check or threatening to fire them. That book
wouldn't exist (or would be written very differently) if it proved the
point you were trying to make.
"The only case where anything is
ever deleted is if you drag a folder into a window that already has
a folder with the exact same name. In that case,
the dragged-in folder replaces the one already there. This is true on
OS X, Windows and KDE. Also, all three systems tell
you that the dragged-in folder will replace the one already
there.
"
I don't know about OS X or KDE, but Windows XP merges the two directories.
It overwrites files with conflicting names (and warns you about that)
but it keeps non-conflicting files. It doesn't make sense to wipe out
all the files in the existing directory. For example, suppose I've got ~/dir/
containing file1 and file2 and/mnt/floppy/dir/ containing file2 and
file3. Then I try to copy/mnt/floppy/dir/ to ~/.
cp -R and Windows will both overwrite ~/dir/file2 with/mnt/floppy/dir/file2 and then copy/mnt/floppy/dir/file3 to
~/dir/file3. (I know the paths are wrong for Windows, but you get the
idea.) If OS X or KDE delete ~/dir/file1, they should be ashamed of
themselves. It's so unreasonable I don't think any sort of warning
justifies it. Of course, I'm still not convinced they actually do it
that way . . . you were wrong about Windows.
"If you are an unemployed engineer in the USA, blame not the CEO who
follows a sane economic policy. Blame the farmers and their lobbyists."
I've spent years hearing people give economic
justifications for things--not just on Slashdot, but in also in
person--and I recently broke down and did some research into economics
to see what all the fuss was about. Turns out, there's no such thing as
a "justification" in economics.
As far as I can tell, it boils down to two rules:
Everyone tries to get what they want.
The best way for someone to get what they want depends on what
everyone else is doing.
The End (pretty much).
That means anyone can be blamed for anything, a la Six Degrees of Kevin
Bacon. Anyone can also be defended for anything by pointing out that
they're just looking out for themselves like everyone else.
Pick a group.
Pick a problem.
Use economics to show that the group is to blame for the
problem.
???
Profit!
"Blame farmers for the outsourcing of high-tech jobs" is such a good
example I had to mention it.
"Or how when you have a directory on one drive, say 'MP3s', and you want
to copy it over to your main drive, if there's another MP3s directory
there, it won't ADD the new MP3s to the pile, it will DELETE all the main
directories' MP3s and replace them with the new ones! I've lost PILES of
stuff doing this before I learned that file management SUCKS under OS
X."
Is this for real? I've only used Macs in computer lab/kiosk situations
so I've never done much file management on them. Is this FUD or do Macs
actually work that way? It's so obviously wrong that I have hard time
believing it. A server OS ten years ago, sure, but on a modern desktop?
I think you've misunderstood why this is an embarrassment to Microsoft.
It's not that a server running their code got hacked. It's not that a
server with their name on it got hacked. It's that they hired someone
to run their code for them, but they didn't even perform trivial checks
that it was being done properly.
It's not embarrassing to be hacked. It's embarrassing to be hacked for
lack of your own patches.
"But the vast, vast majority of people using a tool like this are doing
so because it shields their illegal activities."
Based on my experience with other file-transfer methods, I'd guess that
the majority use it because the stuff they want is being distributed through it.
"I have no problem with being anonymous for routine use, but if you can't
even be identified in the face of overwhelming evidence of a crime, backed
by an order from the lawful authorities, something's wrong. At that point,
for everyone who could genuinely take advantage of true anonymity to make
a contribution to society -- and I'm sure these people do exist -- how
many spammers, virus writers, phishers, fraudsters, copyright violators,
organised criminals, paedophiles, and even (really, for once) terrorists
are we letting get away with it?"
I've never bothered with that level of anonymity, but I think it should
be available. The sad fact is, most of those people you've listed don't
bother with it either because they don't need it. They way governments
currently handle them is, I think, evidence that if "hard" anonymity
makes a difference, you're probably being persecuted.
"At the time, some people wanted the page deleted
to protect any innocent people who might have been
listed. The majority wanted the page kept as evidence
against the trolls. I had no opinion either way, and so
let the page remain in accordance with community wishes."
Don't hide behind "community wishes." Did you ask the community before
you published the list? Taking the page down again isn't the same as
never putting it up, and I'm sure Wikipedia contributers know that. Even if the
majority wanted the information out there, there's a reason they have to
go through you to get it--you can't pretend that you have no
responsibility.
"Nobody has ever identified a non-troll account on
that page. No innocent person has complained to me
that they were affected."
How could they? The problem is that you gave their password to a troll.
Even if they started a new account or managed to change their password
before the troll got to it, why would they come to you? What would they
gain by going to Mr. Troll-hunter, confessing that they had a weak
password and trying to convince him that they are not a troll after all. Maybe
you should shoot some people in the face--I bet none of them will
complain to you afterwards either.
What I'd like to know is, did the possibility of innocent victims occur
to you before you published the list? In other words, did you not think
about the possibility, or did you take it on yourself to disregard it?
"The exact same argument applies here. If this goes ahead,
developers won't know when they're writing Mozilla Javascript code,
and when they're writing standards-correct ECMAScript code."
The difference is that it's Javascript, not Java. At around the same
time they were extending Java, Microsoft was also extending Javascript.
No one really complained about that. They even tried to push VBscript
as a replacement that did exactly the same things with different syntax.
Everyone just ignored it.
ECMAScript is meant as a bare-bones embedded language that gets extended
for the specific platform. There's also a standard way of embedding it
into a web browser (from a different standards body), but it started as
a baseline of how the major browsers implemented it and has grown mostly
by adopting vendor extensions that became popular.
Java was designed from the ground up with a fat standard library and
the motto "Write once, run anywhere."
If I'm reading it right, the vulnerability you linked to is one where
the command that runs lynx causes it to send false information to the
web server. I don't think that "user can trick browser into sending
false data to server" belongs in the same category as "server can own
machine running browser."
Of course nothing is perfectly safe, but that's why being safer
is a big deal. (But I don't use lynx.)
"Second, they're moved to federal court not because federal courts are more
business-friendly, but because of procedural differences in state court
vs federal court. State courts tend to be more relaxed in due process
procedures, and award ridiculous damages that are confiscated by private
law firms."
No, the point was that laws and typical awards vary from state to state.
It used to be that you could just pick a state: if a company does
business in five states and screws people in all five of them, you could pick
any one of the five. If one of the five is friendly to plaintiffs,
you'd pick that one. That doesn't mean that all states are
plaintiff-friendly.
You could say that the old way was unfair, but I think if you do
business in a state you should be subject to its laws. It's certainly
more fair than all these companies incorporated in Delaware, where they
have no customers but lots of friendly courts.
Also, it makes no sense to claim that the President can't be responsible
for a law. I don't know how hard he pushed this particular bill,
but he's the most powerful person in the country and the leader of the
majority party. His support makes a huge difference in whether a bill
gets passed, as he or any member of Congress will tell you.
I don't have a problem with users not knowing things. I can just tell
them, and if that doesn't work, the system should be changed so that
they're not the ones in charge of it. Patches, for example, should
probably be handled by the IT department, not the user.
I don't even have a problem with genuinely stupid users. Genuinely
stupid people usually know their limits and stay carefully within them.
What pisses me off are people who turn off their brain because someone
else is paid to take care of the computers. Their attitude is, "Why
should I use my brain when someone else is paid for that? I'll
just believe that this e-mail comes from Bill Gates, click 'OK' without
looking at the other words in front of it, mail my password to everyone,
etc."
"In any case, you've missed the point. The
hard part is not overlflowing the stack, it is changing the instruction
pointer to the address of the malicious code passed in the buffer."
No, you've missed the point. The hard part is writing code that doesn't
fall victim to an overflow. Fill bigBuffer from stdin before calling
overflowMe(), and you've got a sadly realistic example.
"So all that leaves you with is the assertion that somehow ACID is
the special sauce which makes databases tingly.
"I'm sure it is.
But that doesn't, by itself, justify using a database when entirely other
programming approaches
can do the same thing; usually faster, cheaper, and smaller."
Maybe you should re-read the post I was responding to. The AC (you?)
claimed that databases have no "tingle" at all. I pointed out that
there is something of value there: it's not just deadweight overhead
and generic storage. Thanks for taking my side on that one.
Sure, you can get all the features of a database from something that's
not a database, but let's let people make their own price/performance
decisions. (There are some free DBMS's, by the way.)
Looking at this thing, I'd say there's a good chance the judge will kick
it back in his face for lack of specifics. I don't know what's
customary in Indiana price fixing cases, but I've seen other complaints.
They all had numbered paragraphs going into detail about places,
approximate times, cause-and-effect relationships, etc.
If he's accusing people of fixing prices, I'd expect to at least see
some product names and dollar amounts.
This project is considered counter-google by the people doing it. They
figure that if a US company is distributing books from US
libraries, it must be a plot make US books more prevalent than European
books. It's pretty dumb, but it's how some people think.
Once their site is up, Google will serve up links to it like everything
else. The European libraries will quietly forget that they started the
project because they expected the opposite from Google, and we'll
get more books on the Internet.
"[T]here would be much wringing of hands if Linus went to the closed
branch and stopped managing the free one."
There'd be even more if he was hit by a truck and died. Somewhat less
if he quit to become a painter. There's always a chance that the lead
developer will stop being the lead developer.
"Let me lay this out in short sentences. Herbicide resistant crops need
less herbicide."
Why would herbicide resistant crops need less herbicide? You're trying
to kill weeds, right? You haven't changed the weeds, so why would you need
less herbicide? Why would you even bother making the crops resistant to
herbicides if you're going to start using less?
If you want to use more herbicide, I could see maybe using herbicide
resistant crops--maybe the regular crops can't handle the amount of
herbicide you want to use.
Being an engineer isn't an inherited trait; it's something you learn.
Instead of bringing back
eugenics
, lets try to eliminate any artificial
barriers to being an engineer or anything else. Then let anyone of any
gender choose their career.
We should not breed for careers, and we already have an excellent way to
address shortfalls: supply and demand.
Slashdot Mirror
It might have been ironic or spiteful the first couple of times, but now everyone knows exactly what will happen: the post will be modded up, and a bunch of people will say "me too" and also get modded up. Since everyone knows that's going to happen, there's no spite or irony, just idiocy.
In other words, Avalanche is perfect in theory and Bittorrent is less than perfect in practice, but not by a whole lot. He then goes on to argue that even the theoretical benefits aren't worth the overhead.
Every advantage Avalanche has is speculative. It's very relevant that they used a bogus demo instead of backing up the speculation. And the demo was bogus. Tit-for-tat, and throttling in general, isn't an irrelevant side issue. Ask yourself this: if the file has an original distributor plus people willing to seed it, how do pieces go missing in the first place?
. . . a way to filter out +4 and +5 posts that bitch about the moderators? They irritate me as much as trolls do.
Fact check: RMS and his organization don't do either of those things.
First off, criticism of Bush doesn't automatically make it a liberal vs. conservative issue. Bush seems to enjoy breaking a lot of the rules that liberals and conservatives both followed until recently. This is one of them.
Second, there is an enormous difference between a) loudly disagreeing with someone, and b) using money and authority to get them to change their position. They're so different, they should be next to each other in ethics textbooks as examples of the right and wrong way to handle things.
Third, "The Bell Curve" is not some dry, statistical report that's being irrationally attacked. It's a book that tried to sell itself on shock value and pandering. A lot of people were shocked, but that doesn't mean all the criticism was based on emotion.
I happen to think that IQ is a snake-oil metric. I thought so long before "The Bell Curve" was published, and so did a lot of other people. I really don't care if someone has a survey showing that IQ is correlated with race or "social success," but I will criticize flawed assumptions about why those correlations exist. Any correlation between race and success is most likely due to successful parents having the resources to raise successful kids, and some races being discriminated against. As far I can tell, IQ measures how experienced you are at taking standardized tests with contrived questions. It's not surprising or meaningful that coming from a wealthy family increases that particular skill.
But that's a side issue. Even if we--the critics of "The Bell Curve"--were a bunch of irrational leftist windbags, we would merely be saying the authors are wrong. That's is not the same as getting them to alter the book by writing them a check or threatening to fire them. That book wouldn't exist (or would be written very differently) if it proved the point you were trying to make.
I don't know about OS X or KDE, but Windows XP merges the two directories. It overwrites files with conflicting names (and warns you about that) but it keeps non-conflicting files. It doesn't make sense to wipe out all the files in the existing directory. For example, suppose I've got ~/dir/ containing file1 and file2 and /mnt/floppy/dir/ containing file2 and
file3. Then I try to copy /mnt/floppy/dir/ to ~/.
cp -R and Windows will both overwrite ~/dir/file2 with /mnt/floppy/dir/file2 and then copy /mnt/floppy/dir/file3 to
~/dir/file3. (I know the paths are wrong for Windows, but you get the
idea.) If OS X or KDE delete ~/dir/file1, they should be ashamed of
themselves. It's so unreasonable I don't think any sort of warning
justifies it. Of course, I'm still not convinced they actually do it
that way . . . you were wrong about Windows.
I've spent years hearing people give economic justifications for things--not just on Slashdot, but in also in person--and I recently broke down and did some research into economics to see what all the fuss was about. Turns out, there's no such thing as a "justification" in economics.
As far as I can tell, it boils down to two rules:
- Everyone tries to get what they want.
- The best way for someone to get what they want depends on what
everyone else is doing.
The End (pretty much).That means anyone can be blamed for anything, a la Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Anyone can also be defended for anything by pointing out that they're just looking out for themselves like everyone else.
"Blame farmers for the outsourcing of high-tech jobs" is such a good example I had to mention it.
Is this for real? I've only used Macs in computer lab/kiosk situations so I've never done much file management on them. Is this FUD or do Macs actually work that way? It's so obviously wrong that I have hard time believing it. A server OS ten years ago, sure, but on a modern desktop?
I think you've misunderstood why this is an embarrassment to Microsoft. It's not that a server running their code got hacked. It's not that a server with their name on it got hacked. It's that they hired someone to run their code for them, but they didn't even perform trivial checks that it was being done properly.
It's not embarrassing to be hacked. It's embarrassing to be hacked for lack of your own patches.
Based on my experience with other file-transfer methods, I'd guess that the majority use it because the stuff they want is being distributed through it.
I've never bothered with that level of anonymity, but I think it should be available. The sad fact is, most of those people you've listed don't bother with it either because they don't need it. They way governments currently handle them is, I think, evidence that if "hard" anonymity makes a difference, you're probably being persecuted.
Don't hide behind "community wishes." Did you ask the community before you published the list? Taking the page down again isn't the same as never putting it up, and I'm sure Wikipedia contributers know that. Even if the majority wanted the information out there, there's a reason they have to go through you to get it--you can't pretend that you have no responsibility.
How could they? The problem is that you gave their password to a troll. Even if they started a new account or managed to change their password before the troll got to it, why would they come to you? What would they gain by going to Mr. Troll-hunter, confessing that they had a weak password and trying to convince him that they are not a troll after all. Maybe you should shoot some people in the face--I bet none of them will complain to you afterwards either.
What I'd like to know is, did the possibility of innocent victims occur to you before you published the list? In other words, did you not think about the possibility, or did you take it on yourself to disregard it?
The difference is that it's Javascript, not Java. At around the same time they were extending Java, Microsoft was also extending Javascript. No one really complained about that. They even tried to push VBscript as a replacement that did exactly the same things with different syntax. Everyone just ignored it.
ECMAScript is meant as a bare-bones embedded language that gets extended for the specific platform. There's also a standard way of embedding it into a web browser (from a different standards body), but it started as a baseline of how the major browsers implemented it and has grown mostly by adopting vendor extensions that became popular.
Java was designed from the ground up with a fat standard library and the motto "Write once, run anywhere."
If I'm reading it right, the vulnerability you linked to is one where the command that runs lynx causes it to send false information to the web server. I don't think that "user can trick browser into sending false data to server" belongs in the same category as "server can own machine running browser."
Of course nothing is perfectly safe, but that's why being safer is a big deal. (But I don't use lynx.)
Of course. Why would anyone think that the person who doesn't understand is the dumb one?
The tree can also come up with a few reasons not to cut off its limbs. Usually, it's the gardener who wants to cut--so things look nice and neat.
No, the point was that laws and typical awards vary from state to state. It used to be that you could just pick a state: if a company does business in five states and screws people in all five of them, you could pick any one of the five. If one of the five is friendly to plaintiffs, you'd pick that one. That doesn't mean that all states are plaintiff-friendly.
You could say that the old way was unfair, but I think if you do business in a state you should be subject to its laws. It's certainly more fair than all these companies incorporated in Delaware, where they have no customers but lots of friendly courts.
Also, it makes no sense to claim that the President can't be responsible for a law. I don't know how hard he pushed this particular bill, but he's the most powerful person in the country and the leader of the majority party. His support makes a huge difference in whether a bill gets passed, as he or any member of Congress will tell you.
I don't have a problem with users not knowing things. I can just tell them, and if that doesn't work, the system should be changed so that they're not the ones in charge of it. Patches, for example, should probably be handled by the IT department, not the user.
I don't even have a problem with genuinely stupid users. Genuinely stupid people usually know their limits and stay carefully within them.
What pisses me off are people who turn off their brain because someone else is paid to take care of the computers. Their attitude is, "Why should I use my brain when someone else is paid for that? I'll just believe that this e-mail comes from Bill Gates, click 'OK' without looking at the other words in front of it, mail my password to everyone, etc."
No, you've missed the point. The hard part is writing code that doesn't fall victim to an overflow. Fill bigBuffer from stdin before calling overflowMe(), and you've got a sadly realistic example.
Maybe you should re-read the post I was responding to. The AC (you?) claimed that databases have no "tingle" at all. I pointed out that there is something of value there: it's not just deadweight overhead and generic storage. Thanks for taking my side on that one.
Sure, you can get all the features of a database from something that's not a database, but let's let people make their own price/performance decisions. (There are some free DBMS's, by the way.)
Looking at this thing, I'd say there's a good chance the judge will kick it back in his face for lack of specifics. I don't know what's customary in Indiana price fixing cases, but I've seen other complaints. They all had numbered paragraphs going into detail about places, approximate times, cause-and-effect relationships, etc.
If he's accusing people of fixing prices, I'd expect to at least see some product names and dollar amounts.
. . . I no longer have to debunk the sweeping claims of an AC--I can simply provide a link.
This project is considered counter-google by the people doing it. They figure that if a US company is distributing books from US libraries, it must be a plot make US books more prevalent than European books. It's pretty dumb, but it's how some people think.
Once their site is up, Google will serve up links to it like everything else. The European libraries will quietly forget that they started the project because they expected the opposite from Google, and we'll get more books on the Internet.
There'd be even more if he was hit by a truck and died. Somewhat less if he quit to become a painter. There's always a chance that the lead developer will stop being the lead developer.
Why would herbicide resistant crops need less herbicide? You're trying to kill weeds, right? You haven't changed the weeds, so why would you need less herbicide? Why would you even bother making the crops resistant to herbicides if you're going to start using less?
If you want to use more herbicide, I could see maybe using herbicide resistant crops--maybe the regular crops can't handle the amount of herbicide you want to use.
Being an engineer isn't an inherited trait; it's something you learn. Instead of bringing back eugenics , lets try to eliminate any artificial barriers to being an engineer or anything else. Then let anyone of any gender choose their career.
We should not breed for careers, and we already have an excellent way to address shortfalls: supply and demand.