Apple released a browser that had a security hole. Google exploited the security hole. If OpenSSH ships with a vulnerability that allows someone to get root access on my server, should the OpenSSH team or the attacker be prosecuted?
It's a browser vulnerability, yes. Apple should fix it, absolutely. However, the existence of security holes has never been a valid defence for exploiting them. If it were, then there would be almost no computer-related crimes...
My thought too. I'm currently freelance, so I typically work under 20 hours a week. I'm going up to 37 in a couple of months, starting a research job, but I'll mainly be 'working' on things I do for fun in my spare time anyway, so I doubt it will feel too much like work. I saw a study a few years ago that said that your peak hourly productivity is at about 20 hours per week. After about 35 hours, the decrease in hourly productivity means that you're achieving less overall than you would be at 20 hours. Working longer makes you feel more like you're working, but it doesn't actually increase what you achieve, except for short periods.
Judging by languages that have succeeded over the past 20 years, I would say that the main factor in success is a large company pushing the language. It seems that the average programmer is swayed by marketing just as much as much as anyone else. Then, beyond a certain threshold, network effects kick in. If you want to interoperate with another project, life is easier if you use the same programming language.
I've seen the same problem on short-haul flights in the USA where they don't charge extra for baggage. The problem is that they do take a long time to unload it, so if you put your baggage into the hold you have to wait for up to an hour to leave the airport, while if you take it with you you can be out in under 10 minutes. It's less of a problem for international flights, because you typically have to queue to go through customs anyway and so they've unloaded your baggage by the time you're ready for it.
That said, last time I flew back from the USA, I did manage to get onto a bus home from Heathrow 20 minutes after the plane touched down...
You obviously don't remember the '90s very well. Multimedia was the selling point. Remember the MPC1 and MPC2 specs? Every computer came with a CD ROM drive and a sound card. A lot didn't come with a modem. Windows 95 even shipped without a web browser, but you can bet most computers from the time were bundled with Encarta, Thompson or similar. In 1993, you could probably have put most of the contents of the web on a single CD.
A digital bit-for-bit copy of a movie has almost the same value as the original dvd/bluray/stream
Or more. After all, it's probably going to be easier to transcode and use if it isn't on a medium where the reader enforced DRM. Playing back a ripped DVD has several advantages over playing back the original. For example, if I pause the movie for a few minutes and the disk spins down, I get a stutter when I resume with the DVD. I don't with the ripped version, even if it's a bitwise copy. If the machine goes into power-saving mode, the player needs to reauthenticate with the drive, and often fails so the movie skips back to the start with a DVD. It doesn't with the ripped version, even with the CSS intact, because the encryption is handled entirely in software. So, from the perspective of a user, the copy is more valuable...
Even then, from a US perspective, I couldn't afford to live in any city when I was dirt poor. Is it different in the UK?
Yes. I was paying £350/month before I bought a house. That was for renting a largish two bedroom flat with a reasonable garden in Swansea - not exactly a huge city, but a reasonable sized one with 232,500 people). It was about 30-40 minutes walk (or 10 minutes on a bus) from the city centre and on a bus route that went to the industrial estates on the edge of town in one direction and to Cardiff in the other direction. Rents are cheaper outside of town, but not by enough to justify the cost of a car. Running costs for a car are easily double the difference in rent between living within walking distance of place where you can work and living outside a town or city.
So to have to have the above requirement is absolutely un-reasonable
And yet, it's been the law for a long time (not sure when, but before I was born) and no one seems to have a problem with it. Trailers that are going to be switched between multiple towing vehicles just have somewhere to attach a numberplate and the towing vehicles carry one to attach to whatever they're towing.
Why not just take caffeine pills instead then? That said, caffeine is a terrible stimulant to use if you actually need to wake up: most people build up a tolerance for it over a few weeks, a few months at most, and after that it's not waking you up at all, it's just removing the lethargy caused by withdrawal.
It's partly that, it's also that people try to sell decaffeinated coffee for the same price as normal coffee. Because the decaffeination process is expensive, they achieve this by buying the cheapest beans possible. If you buy really cheap coffee beans, it tastes about the same as decaf.
Same here. I enjoy a large cup of freshly ground coffee in the mornings. Caffeine has very little effect on me after I've been drinking coffee regularly for a few days, but the withdrawal headaches if I don't have any for a couple of days are incapacitating. I'd love to drink caffeine free coffee with the same taste.
Statistics for burglaries per 100,000 people, using the most recent figures I could find (2006):
USA: 714.4
Holland: 427.5
Looks like those guns are doing a great job of protecting you. It's almost as if a culture that regards force as a valid solution to disputes encourages crime...
Mostly useable - zooming out is not easy (is there any way of just zooming out? The only way I found in a quick browse was to scroll to something bigger and click on it). Aside from that, it's pretty nice. Once they add more data to it, I expect it will be really nice. Not totally revolutionary - I've seen interfaces vaguely like this before, in CD-based teaching tools and museums - but definitely nice.
Really? I own Diablo II and the Lord of Destruction expansion. I played a lot in LAN games and in single player. Requiring online for single player is a deal breaker for me. I won't be buying Diablo 3.
You needed to be careful with these schemes, because a lot of them meant leasing your roof for a long time, which was in violation of most mortgage agreements. It's also possible to get loans to cover them - the FIT will cover the repayments and you get to keep the generated electricity.
The password was 8 characters, upper case, lower case, number and symbols. It was written down on the letter I got from them when I set up the account. I had to enter it every time I connected to the Internet (most days, sometimes more than once).
You might want to recheck the link. It says that 1500 French words are used in most children's literature. It does say that 500 make up 90% of any given text, but it also says that you need thousands to get to 95%. Additionally, it says:
Most French speakers use under 5,000 words.
3,000 are used regularly by any given person
30,000 - 50,000 are in common usage
In short, the link you posted provides numbers that agree with what I said, not what you said...
TFA started responding to me, and some salient facts appeared. First, the difference between the privacy and non-privacy options were supplying an email address and mobile phone number (no word on whether either had to be valid) and permission to spam the email address. Second, the items in question were cinema tickets, which means that this discount is 5-10%. I'd probably take that - it takes a few seconds to set up a new mail alias that I can delete if it starts to get too spammy.
Were they really measuring how much customers were willing to pay to avoid having this information stored, or were they measuring how much they were willing to pay to avoid having to type it all in? TFA seems slashdotted at the moment, so I can't tell if this is answered, but if you're buying something online then you already need to provide delivery address and credit card details, so there isn't much extra privacy you can get. Not having to type in a load of information is worth a small amount, but it only takes a minute, so not very much.
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Popular? Maybe not. Used? Hell yes. The amount of C# code that's written is staggering, as are the number of jobs advertised using it.
Apple released a browser that had a security hole. Google exploited the security hole. If OpenSSH ships with a vulnerability that allows someone to get root access on my server, should the OpenSSH team or the attacker be prosecuted?
It's a browser vulnerability, yes. Apple should fix it, absolutely. However, the existence of security holes has never been a valid defence for exploiting them. If it were, then there would be almost no computer-related crimes...
My thought too. I'm currently freelance, so I typically work under 20 hours a week. I'm going up to 37 in a couple of months, starting a research job, but I'll mainly be 'working' on things I do for fun in my spare time anyway, so I doubt it will feel too much like work. I saw a study a few years ago that said that your peak hourly productivity is at about 20 hours per week. After about 35 hours, the decrease in hourly productivity means that you're achieving less overall than you would be at 20 hours. Working longer makes you feel more like you're working, but it doesn't actually increase what you achieve, except for short periods.
Judging by languages that have succeeded over the past 20 years, I would say that the main factor in success is a large company pushing the language. It seems that the average programmer is swayed by marketing just as much as much as anyone else. Then, beyond a certain threshold, network effects kick in. If you want to interoperate with another project, life is easier if you use the same programming language.
I've seen the same problem on short-haul flights in the USA where they don't charge extra for baggage. The problem is that they do take a long time to unload it, so if you put your baggage into the hold you have to wait for up to an hour to leave the airport, while if you take it with you you can be out in under 10 minutes. It's less of a problem for international flights, because you typically have to queue to go through customs anyway and so they've unloaded your baggage by the time you're ready for it.
That said, last time I flew back from the USA, I did manage to get onto a bus home from Heathrow 20 minutes after the plane touched down...
You obviously don't remember the '90s very well. Multimedia was the selling point. Remember the MPC1 and MPC2 specs? Every computer came with a CD ROM drive and a sound card. A lot didn't come with a modem. Windows 95 even shipped without a web browser, but you can bet most computers from the time were bundled with Encarta, Thompson or similar. In 1993, you could probably have put most of the contents of the web on a single CD.
A digital bit-for-bit copy of a movie has almost the same value as the original dvd/bluray/stream
Or more. After all, it's probably going to be easier to transcode and use if it isn't on a medium where the reader enforced DRM. Playing back a ripped DVD has several advantages over playing back the original. For example, if I pause the movie for a few minutes and the disk spins down, I get a stutter when I resume with the DVD. I don't with the ripped version, even if it's a bitwise copy. If the machine goes into power-saving mode, the player needs to reauthenticate with the drive, and often fails so the movie skips back to the start with a DVD. It doesn't with the ripped version, even with the CSS intact, because the encryption is handled entirely in software. So, from the perspective of a user, the copy is more valuable...
Even then, from a US perspective, I couldn't afford to live in any city when I was dirt poor. Is it different in the UK?
Yes. I was paying £350/month before I bought a house. That was for renting a largish two bedroom flat with a reasonable garden in Swansea - not exactly a huge city, but a reasonable sized one with 232,500 people). It was about 30-40 minutes walk (or 10 minutes on a bus) from the city centre and on a bus route that went to the industrial estates on the edge of town in one direction and to Cardiff in the other direction. Rents are cheaper outside of town, but not by enough to justify the cost of a car. Running costs for a car are easily double the difference in rent between living within walking distance of place where you can work and living outside a town or city.
I don't live in the UK ... I know that car is just not optional
Then you'd be wrong. I live in the UK, will be 30 in a couple of months, and have never owned a car, nor felt the need to own one.
So to have to have the above requirement is absolutely un-reasonable
And yet, it's been the law for a long time (not sure when, but before I was born) and no one seems to have a problem with it. Trailers that are going to be switched between multiple towing vehicles just have somewhere to attach a numberplate and the towing vehicles carry one to attach to whatever they're towing.
Why not just take caffeine pills instead then? That said, caffeine is a terrible stimulant to use if you actually need to wake up: most people build up a tolerance for it over a few weeks, a few months at most, and after that it's not waking you up at all, it's just removing the lethargy caused by withdrawal.
It's partly that, it's also that people try to sell decaffeinated coffee for the same price as normal coffee. Because the decaffeination process is expensive, they achieve this by buying the cheapest beans possible. If you buy really cheap coffee beans, it tastes about the same as decaf.
Same here. I enjoy a large cup of freshly ground coffee in the mornings. Caffeine has very little effect on me after I've been drinking coffee regularly for a few days, but the withdrawal headaches if I don't have any for a couple of days are incapacitating. I'd love to drink caffeine free coffee with the same taste.
Looks like those guns are doing a great job of protecting you. It's almost as if a culture that regards force as a valid solution to disputes encourages crime...
Mostly useable - zooming out is not easy (is there any way of just zooming out? The only way I found in a quick browse was to scroll to something bigger and click on it). Aside from that, it's pretty nice. Once they add more data to it, I expect it will be really nice. Not totally revolutionary - I've seen interfaces vaguely like this before, in CD-based teaching tools and museums - but definitely nice.
Really? I own Diablo II and the Lord of Destruction expansion. I played a lot in LAN games and in single player. Requiring online for single player is a deal breaker for me. I won't be buying Diablo 3.
You needed to be careful with these schemes, because a lot of them meant leasing your roof for a long time, which was in violation of most mortgage agreements. It's also possible to get loans to cover them - the FIT will cover the repayments and you get to keep the generated electricity.
The password was 8 characters, upper case, lower case, number and symbols. It was written down on the letter I got from them when I set up the account. I had to enter it every time I connected to the Internet (most days, sometimes more than once).
In short, the link you posted provides numbers that agree with what I said, not what you said...
You might change your mind after you look at the prices for a commercial H.264 license...
TFA started responding to me, and some salient facts appeared. First, the difference between the privacy and non-privacy options were supplying an email address and mobile phone number (no word on whether either had to be valid) and permission to spam the email address. Second, the items in question were cinema tickets, which means that this discount is 5-10%. I'd probably take that - it takes a few seconds to set up a new mail alias that I can delete if it starts to get too spammy.
It's completely different. You see, our hats are white, while their hats are black.
Were they really measuring how much customers were willing to pay to avoid having this information stored, or were they measuring how much they were willing to pay to avoid having to type it all in? TFA seems slashdotted at the moment, so I can't tell if this is answered, but if you're buying something online then you already need to provide delivery address and credit card details, so there isn't much extra privacy you can get. Not having to type in a load of information is worth a small amount, but it only takes a minute, so not very much.
Why is that doublethink? Do you think use and distribution of derived works are the same?