While I'm inclined to agree with you, some argue that congress did in fact declare war on Iraq, but they chose to change the language a bit so it would be more palatable. A War by any other name...
But religion doesn't reciprocate, and the whole "debate" about evolution isn't the first time various churches have tried to force their religion to substitute for science in the classroom.
That's because many religious ideas are so weak that they do not survive well in the "free marketplace of ideas." Consequently, they require special isolationist protections (an identifying characteristic of cults and brainwashing, BTW). You must isolate your flock else they find out how nuts your ideas really are. Movement to institutionalize religious protectionism I think effectively demonstrates just how bankrupt some of these religious ideas are. As Benjamin Franklin said:
"When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not do so, and God chooses not to do so, so that its professors are obliged to call for the help
of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being
a bad one."
When someone finds something "offensive" to their religion, it simply underscores where that religion has no logical counterargument for that thing-- it cannot rationally justify it's problem with the offence, so it must attempt cover up the idea by crying religious "foul," as if we are all playing with a set of rules that claim that no idea can be too baldly irrational as long as it's source is someone's religion
If a truly free country does not include freedom from religion, then the reverse must also be true-- religion is also not free from criticism, contradiction, ridicule or any other forms of irreligious proclamation.
It is this very sort of religious protectionism that is at odds, less with evolution than it is with the concept of a public or common education. Such forms of education are fundamentally incompatible with the arbitrary constraints of foolish superstitions.
The article's about personal software firewalls, not personal hardware firewalls. Furthermore, the fact that personal software firewalls are useless and buggy is not really a new discovery.
Yeah, but reminding people of that often is not a bad idea...
Yes isn't this a wonderful situation we're in. On the one hand, there are the terrorists who wish to rather randomly inflict harm on us. On the other hand, there's the fearful and/or incompetent voters and, by extension, their representatives. When deciding which one presents a greater threat, one must ask, who yeilds the greater power? How compentent is its direction? Do we not need protection from the consequences of the actions of both sides? Simply because the intent of a government is to protect its populace doesn't mean its actions won't produce new and potentially greater threats. Should we ignore unfortunate outcomes simply because the intents were good? Should we then say nothing, even if we can see such outcomes in the works?
A majority of Americans are exceedingly superstitious, and to the superstitious, intent trumps outcome and competency is unquestioned. It is the knee-jerk belief system of those too lazy to think.
Those who want to sell us a centralized internet conveniently forget why the internet was created in the first place and why even before that the old centralized configurations were traded in for decentralized computing in the '70s and '80s. But it's always lucrative to sell you all new stuff, and if you're a server manufacturer there's not much profit margin in P2P...
The problem with a collaboration such as this is Microsoft won't really be serious about it. If Moore tells Microsoft the real facts about Microsoft security and what they will likely need to do about it, in that truth are mostly things Microsoft really doesn't want to hear and they will just go into denial about it. Moore will end up frustrated, his contributions falling on deaf ears...
On the other hand, in the meantime Microsoft will have distracted a potential foe, and Moore will have made some $$$, but anyone thinking the result will be any more than that is unrealistically optimistic...
Re: pinapple-- one trick is to try to pull out one of the smaller inner leaves of the top-- if it gives way easily it's likely ripe, if it holds fast it's still green...
Most fruit you can tell if you know how. Talk to a farmer. Many fruits get softer around the stem when they're ripe (Pears as a good example), and there are a lot of other ways...
If these ripeness stickers are for the end buyer and not the stores, this is just one more contribution to the lameness of the general public-- rather than teach them how to tell if a fruit is ripe they have to look at a sticker? What I want is a sticker that tells me how green the darn thing was when it was picked-- as the greener it was generally the less taste it will have. Consequently, I buy most of my fruits and vegetables at farmer's markets where things aren't usually picked quite so green.
Doesn't work on my Motorola e815 either, which isn't a "big" cell phone... In fact, it looks like it doesn't work with any Verizon phone as Verizon is insistent on using Brew so they can charge for the apps. Can't have any free apps going around on their phone now, can we? Verizon's approach is to go after coverage, features be damned-- as what good are features if coverage sucks? Consequently, they have the best coverage and the worst feature set...
My original impression of "self-checkout" was similar to this. However, it has since become pretty obvious to me that it is costing these stores (at least the groceries) more money than it is saving them, and not even including the lack of impulse-buy as mentioned in the OP. They still need staff to monitor the systems and the customers, the systems cost more money and there is the additional expense of training and maintenance. Some clueless exec got the "bright" idea these things could bust the unions and save some checker payroll $$$, but it sure looks to me that they've been paying and paying for this and it has not been a net win.
It's true that many people can't figure them out and end up getting them locked up-- so they need constant assistance. Also, with too little supervision, sleight-of-hand pilfering could make it past the cameras so you gotta pay at least one person to baby sit them at all times.
Consequently, the few times I'm in such stores, rather than boycott them I actually make a point to use them, as I figure the longer these stores think people are using them and this thing might actually save them some money, the worse it will ultimately be for them. I figure the greatest act of protest against these things is really, to utilize them and thereby prolong the store's agony. If everyone boycotted them from the get go they'd take them out immediately and not waste any more money on them-- why should they get off so easy after having come up with such a collosally bad idea, and actually implemented it?
Seems like it would really be ground breaking if Vista would isolate the OS from the apps & data effectively enough that you could do a complete reinstall of the OS without having to reinstall your apps or data. I've attempted to do that with Linux, just by keeping stuff I add later out of the root partition, putting things in/usr/local/bin, ctc.., though I've had to keep up to date a script that I use which will reapply any OS tweaks I've added since install (mostly configuration adjustments). And in Linux, you have to keep every old version of every library you've ever linked with pretty much for ever anyway, in order to keep old apps working (or you could link everything static I suppose), so it's mostly possible to do this under Linux but it's by no means automatic.
If Vista could make that a no-brainer it would be at least one thing I can think of that might make me consider upgrading to it. That, and the ability to absolutely enforce a restricted input focus so apps or the OS absolutely cannot steal input focus away from you while you're typing, except for imminent crisis warnings which would be limited to immediate data loss-- system crashing, out of disk space, etc.. I'd pay extra $$$ for that last feature, on any OS...
It's painful to consider, but I'm actually considering voting Democrat in the upcoming elections to help put the Democrats in the majority of at least one, but ideally two, houses of Congress. I don't want to enable them to pursue liberal agendas, but maybe at least they'll have the balls to keep the President under the rule of law via impeachment. Apparently the Republican Congress/Senate that I voted for last time is unwilling to perform their duties in this area. I'm going to want to take a shower after I leave the voting booths this time.
Yes, quite some time ago it became pretty obvious to me that gridlock in Washington is a Good Thing(TM).
If the President illegally ordered wiretaps, it's a Very Big Deal.
Or did and then covered it up... Let's not forget that a previous Republican president was forced to resign over just such a thing in order to avoid being impeached?
I wonder how a "deep throat" will fare these days...
So the question on the table to the people who belive in the Constitution is this: how do we convince the people who are this afraid of terrorists that a totalitarian state is not the solution to terrorism?
I wish I knew the answer to this. What's truly ironic is that creation of totalitarian states appears to be actually the goal of these particular terrorists, turning us AND them into ones, and given that, it looks like they're achieving that goal and our gov't is completely obliging and oblivious.
The upshot was that the M2 code was measurably faster, smaller, and on examination better optimized.
Optimized for speed, or space?
I'd like to know more about what the problem was, how the M2 solved it, how the C coders solved it, etc., before deciding what such a test supposedly means. At the very least it might teach some C coders some better techniques.
C is a relatively low-level language, and that is its advantage, IMHO. However, it is harder to code in a lower level language, requires more experience and knowledge of the compiler and the hardware. It's the next best thing to a good macro assembler and enough time to work on it.:-)
On the other hand, it is true that modern processors have capabilities that most programmers are unaware and do not understand the effects it and their compiler will have on their coding constructs. This was not true originally, when many programmers were familiar with the machine language of the processor they were coding for, even when writing in C.
When "hello world" in a modern language produces a binary that is tens or hundreds of K in size however, I can't help thinking that "optimization" has come to mean "optimized to waste memory and CPU time so that dealers can sell processor and memory upgrades."
As a sanity check on the "new high-level languages are better" concept, pick a recent highly rated demo from http://scene.org/ and recode it in your favorite new language-- then compare the size & performance and see how things fare. When your language consistently comes out ahead then I'll likely agree...
The chickens are coming home to roost. The anti-virus model is essentially untenable-- akin to closing the barn doors after the horses have escaped. Anti-virus only works if you get the anti-virus signature updates before you get the virus attack-- but the signatures cannot be produced until the virus is encountered in the wild, by which time it has likely mutated into something new. AV is only capable of protecting against *old* viruses. Far better preventatives are a good network firewall, a good executable firewall, and to eliminate significant transmission vectors such as HTML email, local-client based email, ActiveX, etc.
In addition, there is a conflict-of-interest in anti-virus vendors, who we have seen recently turn to chicken-little and boy-who-cried wolf techniques in order to bolster their flagging revenues.
The advent of Vista is raising a big question mark WRT the role of future anti-virus programs on the Microsoft platform. I fully expect more fevered FUD from AV vendors, including plenty of "Vista is also vulnerable" claims -- simply consider the source...
Documentation is certainly the biggest weakness of Open Source IMHO. Almost every library I've seen of useful functions considers an auto-generated class tree and/or couple of demo programs as "documentation." I'd be embarrassed to release something like that, but I guess I'm in the minority...
The second weakness I'm finding out is projects that the original developers have essentially abandoned. You find forums that have recent posts by people asking questions about it but noone with any answers....
Is the fact that if you can tell the DVD player to edit out the "naughty" bits, you can tell it to edit out the adverts-- and THAT is more specifically connected to revenue beyond just the price of the DVD. Plus, now the adverts are imbedded in the movie itself-- what if clearplay edits out the section that displays a condom brand-- when the manufacturer of the condom specifically paid for the exposure based on sales projections... The manufacturer is going to want a refund on his ad rate if the title is a big seller in the ClearPlay market, as he may not be getting the exposure he paid for...
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm inclined to agree with you, some argue that congress did in fact declare war on Iraq, but they chose to change the language a bit so it would be more palatable. A War by any other name...
Certainly-- science cannot study something that has no coherent definition. Only a religion can do that.
Ok wait...if religion is rock and science is paper what's scissors?
politics.
Actually, no. It's reality.
But religion doesn't reciprocate, and the whole "debate" about evolution isn't the first time various churches have tried to force their religion to substitute for science in the classroom.
That's because many religious ideas are so weak that they do not survive well in the "free marketplace of ideas." Consequently, they require special isolationist protections (an identifying characteristic of cults and brainwashing, BTW). You must isolate your flock else they find out how nuts your ideas really are. Movement to institutionalize religious protectionism I think effectively demonstrates just how bankrupt some of these religious ideas are. As Benjamin Franklin said:
"When a religion is good, I conceive it will support itself; and when it does not do so, and God chooses not to do so, so that its professors are obliged to call for the help of the civil power, 'tis a sign, I apprehend, of its being a bad one."
When someone finds something "offensive" to their religion, it simply underscores where that religion has no logical counterargument for that thing-- it cannot rationally justify it's problem with the offence, so it must attempt cover up the idea by crying religious "foul," as if we are all playing with a set of rules that claim that no idea can be too baldly irrational as long as it's source is someone's religion
If a truly free country does not include freedom from religion, then the reverse must also be true-- religion is also not free from criticism, contradiction, ridicule or any other forms of irreligious proclamation.
It is this very sort of religious protectionism that is at odds, less with evolution than it is with the concept of a public or common education. Such forms of education are fundamentally incompatible with the arbitrary constraints of foolish superstitions.
The article's about personal software firewalls, not personal hardware firewalls. Furthermore, the fact that personal software firewalls are useless and buggy is not really a new discovery.
Yeah, but reminding people of that often is not a bad idea...
That'll get them to open up quick...
Tell that to the radio stations. They almost never play complete albums...
Don't forget:
6. The Recording Industry has exerted monopolistic and unfair control over the advertising channel (radio, especially, e.g., payola).
Yes isn't this a wonderful situation we're in. On the one hand, there are the terrorists who wish to rather randomly inflict harm on us. On the other hand, there's the fearful and/or incompetent voters and, by extension, their representatives. When deciding which one presents a greater threat, one must ask, who yeilds the greater power? How compentent is its direction? Do we not need protection from the consequences of the actions of both sides? Simply because the intent of a government is to protect its populace doesn't mean its actions won't produce new and potentially greater threats. Should we ignore unfortunate outcomes simply because the intents were good? Should we then say nothing, even if we can see such outcomes in the works?
A majority of Americans are exceedingly superstitious, and to the superstitious, intent trumps outcome and competency is unquestioned. It is the knee-jerk belief system of those too lazy to think.
Configure an auto-search bot on your computer that runs a dictionary of random phrases through-- changing the signal-to-noise threshold...
Those who want to sell us a centralized internet conveniently forget why the internet was created in the first place and why even before that the old centralized configurations were traded in for decentralized computing in the '70s and '80s. But it's always lucrative to sell you all new stuff, and if you're a server manufacturer there's not much profit margin in P2P...
...I'm gonna wrap myself in tinfoil...
The problem with a collaboration such as this is Microsoft won't really be serious about it. If Moore tells Microsoft the real facts about Microsoft security and what they will likely need to do about it, in that truth are mostly things Microsoft really doesn't want to hear and they will just go into denial about it. Moore will end up frustrated, his contributions falling on deaf ears...
On the other hand, in the meantime Microsoft will have distracted a potential foe, and Moore will have made some $$$, but anyone thinking the result will be any more than that is unrealistically optimistic...
He who looks to software for his excitement needs to GET A LIFE...
Re: pinapple-- one trick is to try to pull out one of the smaller inner leaves of the top-- if it gives way easily it's likely ripe, if it holds fast it's still green...
Most fruit you can tell if you know how. Talk to a farmer. Many fruits get softer around the stem when they're ripe (Pears as a good example), and there are a lot of other ways...
If these ripeness stickers are for the end buyer and not the stores, this is just one more contribution to the lameness of the general public-- rather than teach them how to tell if a fruit is ripe they have to look at a sticker? What I want is a sticker that tells me how green the darn thing was when it was picked-- as the greener it was generally the less taste it will have. Consequently, I buy most of my fruits and vegetables at farmer's markets where things aren't usually picked quite so green.
Doesn't work on my Motorola e815 either, which isn't a "big" cell phone... In fact, it looks like it doesn't work with any Verizon phone as Verizon is insistent on using Brew so they can charge for the apps. Can't have any free apps going around on their phone now, can we? Verizon's approach is to go after coverage, features be damned-- as what good are features if coverage sucks? Consequently, they have the best coverage and the worst feature set...
My original impression of "self-checkout" was similar to this. However, it has since become pretty obvious to me that it is costing these stores (at least the groceries) more money than it is saving them, and not even including the lack of impulse-buy as mentioned in the OP. They still need staff to monitor the systems and the customers, the systems cost more money and there is the additional expense of training and maintenance. Some clueless exec got the "bright" idea these things could bust the unions and save some checker payroll $$$, but it sure looks to me that they've been paying and paying for this and it has not been a net win.
It's true that many people can't figure them out and end up getting them locked up-- so they need constant assistance. Also, with too little supervision, sleight-of-hand pilfering could make it past the cameras so you gotta pay at least one person to baby sit them at all times.
Consequently, the few times I'm in such stores, rather than boycott them I actually make a point to use them, as I figure the longer these stores think people are using them and this thing might actually save them some money, the worse it will ultimately be for them. I figure the greatest act of protest against these things is really, to utilize them and thereby prolong the store's agony. If everyone boycotted them from the get go they'd take them out immediately and not waste any more money on them-- why should they get off so easy after having come up with such a collosally bad idea, and actually implemented it?
Seems like it would really be ground breaking if Vista would isolate the OS from the apps & data effectively enough that you could do a complete reinstall of the OS without having to reinstall your apps or data. I've attempted to do that with Linux, just by keeping stuff I add later out of the root partition, putting things in /usr/local/bin, ctc.., though I've had to keep up to date a script that I use which will reapply any OS tweaks I've added since install (mostly configuration adjustments). And in Linux, you have to keep every old version of every library you've ever linked with pretty much for ever anyway, in order to keep old apps working (or you could link everything static I suppose), so it's mostly possible to do this under Linux but it's by no means automatic.
If Vista could make that a no-brainer it would be at least one thing I can think of that might make me consider upgrading to it. That, and the ability to absolutely enforce a restricted input focus so apps or the OS absolutely cannot steal input focus away from you while you're typing, except for imminent crisis warnings which would be limited to immediate data loss-- system crashing, out of disk space, etc.. I'd pay extra $$$ for that last feature, on any OS...
It's painful to consider, but I'm actually considering voting Democrat in the upcoming elections to help put the Democrats in the majority of at least one, but ideally two, houses of Congress. I don't want to enable them to pursue liberal agendas, but maybe at least they'll have the balls to keep the President under the rule of law via impeachment. Apparently the Republican Congress/Senate that I voted for last time is unwilling to perform their duties in this area. I'm going to want to take a shower after I leave the voting booths this time.
Yes, quite some time ago it became pretty obvious to me that gridlock in Washington is a Good Thing(TM).
If the President illegally ordered wiretaps, it's a Very Big Deal.
Or did and then covered it up... Let's not forget that a previous Republican president was forced to resign over just such a thing in order to avoid being impeached?
I wonder how a "deep throat" will fare these days...
So the question on the table to the people who belive in the Constitution is this: how do we convince the people who are this afraid of terrorists that a totalitarian state is not the solution to terrorism?
I wish I knew the answer to this. What's truly ironic is that creation of totalitarian states appears to be actually the goal of these particular terrorists, turning us AND them into ones, and given that, it looks like they're achieving that goal and our gov't is completely obliging and oblivious.
The upshot was that the M2 code was measurably faster, smaller, and on examination better optimized.
Optimized for speed, or space?
I'd like to know more about what the problem was, how the M2 solved it, how the C coders solved it, etc., before deciding what such a test supposedly means. At the very least it might teach some C coders some better techniques.
C is a relatively low-level language, and that is its advantage, IMHO. However, it is harder to code in a lower level language, requires more experience and knowledge of the compiler and the hardware. It's the next best thing to a good macro assembler and enough time to work on it. :-)
On the other hand, it is true that modern processors have capabilities that most programmers are unaware and do not understand the effects it and their compiler will have on their coding constructs. This was not true originally, when many programmers were familiar with the machine language of the processor they were coding for, even when writing in C.
When "hello world" in a modern language produces a binary that is tens or hundreds of K in size however, I can't help thinking that "optimization" has come to mean "optimized to waste memory and CPU time so that dealers can sell processor and memory upgrades."
As a sanity check on the "new high-level languages are better" concept, pick a recent highly rated demo from http://scene.org/ and recode it in your favorite new language-- then compare the size & performance and see how things fare. When your language consistently comes out ahead then I'll likely agree...
The chickens are coming home to roost. The anti-virus model is essentially untenable-- akin to closing the barn doors after the horses have escaped. Anti-virus only works if you get the anti-virus signature updates before you get the virus attack-- but the signatures cannot be produced until the virus is encountered in the wild, by which time it has likely mutated into something new. AV is only capable of protecting against *old* viruses. Far better preventatives are a good network firewall, a good executable firewall, and to eliminate significant transmission vectors such as HTML email, local-client based email, ActiveX, etc.
In addition, there is a conflict-of-interest in anti-virus vendors, who we have seen recently turn to chicken-little and boy-who-cried wolf techniques in order to bolster their flagging revenues.
The advent of Vista is raising a big question mark WRT the role of future anti-virus programs on the Microsoft platform. I fully expect more fevered FUD from AV vendors, including plenty of "Vista is also vulnerable" claims -- simply consider the source...
Documentation is certainly the biggest weakness of Open Source IMHO. Almost every library I've seen of useful functions considers an auto-generated class tree and/or couple of demo programs as "documentation." I'd be embarrassed to release something like that, but I guess I'm in the minority...
The second weakness I'm finding out is projects that the original developers have essentially abandoned. You find forums that have recent posts by people asking questions about it but noone with any answers....
Is the fact that if you can tell the DVD player to edit out the "naughty" bits, you can tell it to edit out the adverts-- and THAT is more specifically connected to revenue beyond just the price of the DVD. Plus, now the adverts are imbedded in the movie itself-- what if clearplay edits out the section that displays a condom brand-- when the manufacturer of the condom specifically paid for the exposure based on sales projections... The manufacturer is going to want a refund on his ad rate if the title is a big seller in the ClearPlay market, as he may not be getting the exposure he paid for...