I find a hexadecimal dump utility to be an easy starter project for a new language. You have to learn how that language handles file I/O, the program will be short, probably under 20 lines, and the utility can actually be useful. Can also whip up a program to do the reverse. Occasionally I've worked on bare bones UNIX systems like old versions of HP-UX that didn't have all kinds of handy utility programs, but did at least have a C compiler.
Reality dictates this, not me. Copying cannot be controlled. Copying is easier than ever now, and will become easier yet. Can't make money off a tollbooth when everyone can so easily avoid it. Have to fund the endeavors some other way. Change the business model. That's change, not abandon business altogether. Artists don't have to become Communists. But they will have to use other means to earn money for their efforts.
Nor should we want a toll on copying. Communication and sharing made us what we are, built our civilization. Don't give that right up! A world in which copying can be somehow magically controlled is a far worse world than the one we actually live in.
A pity that so many people are fighting reality so hard, messing up lives and holding us all back.
Wow, this old objection? Again? Well, since it got modded so high, let's again mention some of the ways to make money from art, without copyright.
Patronage
Kickstarter
Indiegogo
Humble Bundle
National Endowment for the Arts
universities and colleges
and the old fashioned kind, the rich and the nobility.
Work for Hire
Advertising
Merchandising
Endorsements
And, could do something like the ASCAP does. Anyone doing a public performance or display of someone's work has to pay the artist. This requirement can be set up without copyright. Control of copying is the wrong tool for that job. Instead, have a standardized Performance Fee, that does not require any permission, and can even be paid out of the public purse from funds collected for that purpose. Artists cannot stop someone from using work they created or derived, they have only the right to collect a fee whenever publicly known usage happens. Should also set the fees on a log scale, so that popular artists don't end up hogging most of the pie. Pay less per use as popularity rises.
RMS supports some form of copyright. I still think copyright is an idea that is long past its time, if it was ever a good idea. Copyright and patents should be killed off, preferably by Constitutional Amendment. More specifically, the monopoly exclusion part of copyright and patent law should be repealed. No more exclusive rights.
I think what RMS is really interested in is one effect of copyright, not the whole package. That good part of copyright is, in my opinion, not worth the vast harm of all the other effects of copyright law. Is there no way to defend the freedoms of free software without copyright? Perhaps an EULA? Or if not that, how about a new law? For instance, I certainly don't want plagiarism to be legal. We can outlaw plagiarism without outlawing copying. Should be possible to outlaw other undesirable behavior without a blanket ban on all forms of copying.
I was wondering if there were still any genuine MS fans, or whether MS has become so uncool that all they have left are paid shills and resentful, locked in users who dream of jumping straight into the smothering embrace of another closed world because Apple looks sexier right now. MS hasn't been the least cool since the 90s, with, as you point out, the possible exception of Windows 2000 and XP despite the activation crap. Your love of MS is nostalgia for the old.
Anyway, you probably can install later versions of Windows 100 years from now. Just need an emulator and a crack, and they are out there. In the future, it might be the only way to install the likes of Windows 7. That's the way it is now for many old Apple II games. The companies that produced them have moved on or gone out of business. The only usable version of the game is the cracked one.
This is an important point that should not be lightly passed over. Do uploaders harm society? Your comment appears to take it as a given that the answer is "yes". All your points about punishment and rehab may be relevant, if that's true. You say that punishment is not effective. Why isn't it effective? I suggest it is because in this instance the deed for which punishment is being meted out should not be a crime.
If uploaders do not harm society, then the situation is very different. In that case, the law is outdated, wrong, cruel, and a tool of evil oppressors. Those who are sowing confusion and preventing the laws from being reformed have their own obvious agenda of maintaining a status quo that unfairly enriches them at the expense of everyone else. Where is our digital public library? And punishment looks not like justice, but mere brutality, and will not convince anyone. As arguments go, punishment is one of the weakest. Certainly exposes the establishment as ideologically bankrupt. Their other arguments, that artists will starve and we'll not have any more art, and that copying is stealing, are being seen more and more as plain wrong. All they have left are threats. Threats and punishments don't make Christians out of unbelievers and heretics, they just drive heresy underground.
What's with people trotting out the "looks ugly" criticism? That means you can't think of anything else, anything just a little more substantive, to criticize?
Ah, but it is bad. Maybe not razor blades, Cobol, or XSLT, but bad enough. When there is or could be a more succinct, clearer way to express something, it quickly becomes tiresome to use an inferior method. Even if that inferior method is only a very little inferior, even when the extra syntax seems small and trivial, it's still bad.
One problem with hash_add(hash,key,value) is that the parameter order is arbitrary. The function could as easily have been written to take the parameters in another order, like hash_add(key,value,hash). Consider fprintf() and fputs(). The programmer cannot tell which order is correct without some external reference, be that documentation, the source code, or memory. Another problem is that we know the function takes 3 parameters. For a fixed number of parameters, there is no need for parentheses, except that C needs them to distinguish function names from variable names. The parentheses are in fact sigils, making C no better than Perl. Otherwise, the C code could be hash_add hash,key,value;
I never had much trouble combining and passing large data structures around in Perl, but then I was already a veteran C/C++ coder when I began working in Perl. Sometimes I would use a print statement to check that I was passing what I wanted to pass. But yes, newbies would struggle, much like they struggle with the infamous C pointer syntax. I could instead use Python, if you like.
Yes, I know Perl is thought messy thanks to sigils and dense regular expressions. But the hash syntax is positively clean compared to how C++ has to do it: $h{key}=value, vs something like h.add(key,value);. And C? Even worse with something like hash_add(&h,key,value), unless the programmer knows how to work with pointers to functions, and wants to use that to make the code more like C++.
Or think of it this way. C is so bad that it makes Perl look clean and neat.
In 1987, university budgets and aged professors made for an experience that was not much faster. PCs were a precious resource. Grad students got PC AT clones (286s) and undergrads sometimes got the use of an old PC XT clone.
But at least one old professor didn't believe in PCs, so for his classes students shared an IBM mainframe (a 3090 as I recall) with admin. We had green screen terminals, but results were printed and the printout placed in 1 of 100 pigeonholes, according to the last 2 digits of your SSN. Admin had 2 levels of priority on mere students. The system increased the priority of an unrun job every 3 hours, so between 8 AM and 5PM, it took 6 hours for us to get back the results of a job run. After hours, performance was on the whole much better, but could still vary. Might get a result in a few minutes, or might still have to wait an hour or more. Couldn't continue working after midnight. University budgets dictated that computer labs had to close for the night. Each dorm had 2 or 3 terminals available all night long, but there you couldn't get back any printouts. You didn't want any evening classes, as that cut into the best times to use the mainframe. Weekends were good, if you didn't mind giving up the best times for a little leisure.
The reusability and modularity of C and C++ has always been poor, and, though improved, still is. C is good for making your own linked list functions, not so good for using libraries containing those functions. We've persevered in spite of that, and created hundreds of libraries in C. But it's still a mess.
The STL is fine as far as it goes, but, for example, it simply cannot integrate something like Perl's hashing abilities and regular expressions as well as Perl itself. The programmer can sort of approach the cleanliness of the Perl syntax by making clever use of C++'s operator overloading, but among the problems with that is that there are a small number of operators available for overloading. The programmer cannot create new operators. Better to retreat to the messy function call syntax. That is, instead of something like c=a+b; it's c=add(a,b);
And the function call syntax has its own limitations. Unless the coders include the library for variable numbers of parameters (printf being the go to example of such a function), they're stuck with fixed numbers of parameters. Having to do prototyping is another annoyance. Surely computers have progressed to the point that it is not a huge imposition to ask a compiler to make 2 passes through the source code, or store the data types of the parameters of a call to an as yet unknown function, to resolve forward references itself instead of burdening the programmers with that chore? But even if those 2 limitations are addressed, calls are still like having to do math with prefix notation and still be forced to use parentheses everywhere even when the number of parameters are fixed, rather than a choice of prefix, infix, or postfix notation with some operator precedence so that it isn't necessary to surround absolutely everything with parentheses. In that respect, C is no advance at all over Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses.
Another resuability problem was name collision between different libraries. Two libraries with a "sort" function, for instance. To deal with this, it became the custom to prepend the library name to every function name. Now we have namespaces.
Not true. The article made an unfair comparison. Read the editorial comment at the end. Coal plants release more radiation into the environment because the waste from nuclear power plants is not released into the environment. Radioactive waste is stored, and only a small amount of radiation escapes from storage as long as there is not an accident. If the waste from a nuclear power plant were dumped into the environment, they'd put out far more radioactive pollution than coal ever could.
When there is an accident, nuclear plants can leave areas contaminated and unsafe for centuries. Coal plants cannot do that kind of damage. And there will be accidents, not because we don't know how to run a nuclear plant safely, but because we can't be trusted to do so. Chernobyl was excused as the incompetence and corruption of a typical Communist dictatorship. But Fukushima has no such excuse. Nuclear plant management feels pressure to cut costs, and starts cutting corners even before the plant is built. Safety features like walls get cheapened by never building them as high as they should have been. Soon they're neglecting maintenance and inspections, Emergency equipment may not be in working order, if it exists at all. The ranks of management may become filled with cronies and hacks who do not understand the risks they are taking, and who don't care either.
More aerodynamic cars stay cleaner. Lot of the dirt never reaches the surface of such a car.
Maybe this paint is neat, but it's a fancy, high tech solution to a problem that already has a low cost, money saving, low tech solution. A solution that, thus far, manufacturers and the public are ignorant of or prejudiced against. Never ceases to amaze me how people can declare aerodynamic shapes "ugly" and use that as the excuse to refuse to have anything to do with it. One rabid Mustang fan I know is even prejudiced against things like vortex generators on the trailing edges of truck trailers, because they're "ugly". As if a rectangular corrugated grey box isn't already butt ugly, and anyone cares about the looks of them anyway.
No doubt the confusion comes from the fact that raising water with a vacuum pump does require pressure. People learned some centuries ago that atmospheric pressure can't raise water more than about 10 feet. Simple siphons are commonly started with vacuum pumping.
If the top of the siphon is too high for a vacuum pump, some other method must be used, but the siphon action will work at much greater heights because, as the article points out, the siphon action itself does not depend on pressure. What are the height limits, I wonder? Redwood trees are about as tall as trees can get with the capillary action method they use to raise water. I expect siphons work at much greater heights than that.
I was thinking that a game element like crafting should be more "programmable". The range of possibily is not mere 100s of potion mixes that the designers can and maybe have to go through and work out beforehand. There would be far too many programs to exhaustively check them all, even for all the players. No one could be sure what the limits are, and that a still more efficient way to achieve some effect remains undiscovered.
Making a system that is too big to be exhaustively analyzed carries the unavoidable risk that it can unbalance the game. Game designers usually go for the conservative option, and settle for something that is safe and dull.
She skipped right past the first parts of game design to focus on minutae. Made good points, but about implementation details, not game design.
What game designers must do before worrying about doors is, well, design. What is the game about? Killing bad guys? Racing against competitors? Collecting money or points? Solving puzzles? Exploring worlds? Building things? The tricky part is picking the mechanisms. The question isn't which doors are supposed to open or have windows, it's whether doors are an appropriate and fun method to make reaching the goals, whatever they are, challenging without being impossible. Or they are a necessary evil to deal with limitations.
To find out if a game play element is possible and balanced and fun requires analysis and testing. It can be done in an agile way, making some elements, testing the game play, then making changes. For one example of unbalanced games, can look way back to the early Ultima games. In Ultima 2 and 3, the heroes were so powerful they could easily kill all the non-player characters in an entire city, without consequence, because to reduce memory usage on the computers of that era, the design simply loaded the initial state every time a city was entered. (Not that they couldn't have easily set aside just one bit, an "evil bit", to track whether the heroes were no longer heroes, but for whatever reason, they didn't.) Consequently, an easy way to get more money was kill the enitre town and take all the treasure, exit then reenter and do it all over again, until the player was satisified with the haul of loot. Tedious but effective. Not what the designers wanted, I'm sure, but they did go so far as to make the best of the problem by making a few towns especially juicy to loot. Ultima 3 especially was criticized for being too easy.
Or, design is often done in an ad hoc manner. As an example, many fantasy MMORPGs have a crafting system which the players can use to make equipment. These are a sideline to the main goals of progressing through the fantasy world, doing quests and gaining levels. The way MMORPGs implement it, crafting is dull, tedious, and limited. The players can't employ imagination to create novel items, they are restricted to a small set of fixed recipes. The game designers couldn't allow much latitude on crafting, or the players could and would make items so powerful that they completely unbalance the main game. It'd be rather like crafting and using machine guns, while the rest of the fantasy world continues to use swords and bows. Or the whole fanatsy world advances, and then it's not fantasy anymore. A crafting system that is just a little more realistic could inadvertently allow such things. After all, in real life, what stopped the people of the Middle Ages from having guns? Lack of knowledge, nothing more. The players will all know about modern technology, and will not be held back through ignorance, so the game designers have to resort to other methods. Science Fiction is not much help. A crafting system that allows novelty could likely still be used to break the game.
Commodity networking for anything more complicated than a switch has been garbage for years. To keep the price down, the manufacturers are brutal about reducing CPU specs and speed, then pushing them to their absolute limit so they're constantly in danger of overheating. They cut the RAM to the minimum as well. They also spend as little as possible developing and debugging the firmware.
And they lie. They like to try to sneak changes past the public by keeping the model numbers the same while totally changing the innards. They will change only the "revision" number, as if the total redesign was only a minor change, and not print this on the box. I once bought the famous Linksys WRT54G, and found it was junk. Couldn't even ping reliably through a wired connection, never mind wireless. My old router (a Netgear RP114, no wireless capability) worked fine, so it was definitely not anything else. I found out why. When I bought it, Linksys had just moved from revision 4 to revision 5. Revision 4 was the good one, with Linux. Revision 5 had half the RAM and was running a very buggy firmware on VxWorks.
Just a guess, but from my own experiences, maybe as many as 1/3 of the routers out there are so poorly made that they never work properly or well, or if they do, they don't last long, dying from overheating in the first year. Including that Linksys WRT54G revision 5, I've taken many a router back within the first 3 days because they just did not work, even after updating them with the latest firmware offered on the vendor's website. Of the ones that do work, sometimes have had to work hard to make configuration changes through their web interface. The web pages sometimes do not load properly because the router suffered a brief instant of overheating, perhaps, or because of a bug, hard to say. The Trendware routers I've seen have particularly bad interfaces that make Metro look nice by comparison. I could put up with that, if they at least worked well, but no. The latest piece of junk I'm having to deal with is an Arris DG860, supplied by Time Warner, which figures. It will drop wireless connections for no apparent reason, and may start working again a moment later, or may need to be reset by power cycling it.
Yes, the article is sensationalist. While EMP could be a real problem, a bigger problem is that any attack that could generate a big enough EMP to knock out the electronics over half a continent would likely cause much worse problems, like World War III and Nuclear Winter. Even if it only costs a little bit, is it worth the effort to guard against EMP? Computer security is another area that you have to constantly ask if it's worth the trouble, and will proposed measures actually help? Yes, we've had many embarrassing security breaches, but that could be better if the alternative is to spend so much on security that it's cheaper to suffer the occasional breach. However I think the consensus is that we would spend less if we invested a little more in security.
Also, we have a lot of other, worse problems we're not doing much about either. Climate Disruption. Asteroid impact. And as for healthcare, how about the AIDS denial in South Africa?
We have also noted for some time that we have a lot of infrastructure that's vulnerable to terrorism. Terrorists could blow up a few critical bridges (or maybe just close a couple of lanes), poison water supplies (maybe by peeing in them), bomb stadiums when a big game is on, torch oil refineries and terminals, and no doubt many other things. Why hasn't this happened? Is it that they're trying but our security services are unsung heroes who have already foiled dozens of plots we never heard about? Or more like that the threat isn't that big, as the effort it takes to pull off something like that is more than is appreciated?
I wonder if zeroing out memory can go even deeper than the OS. Like, why not have RAM that can zero itself on command? Just turn off the DRAM refresh for a fraction of a second, and viola!
Memory moves have been made much faster by bypassing the CPU, for instance with hard drives with the DMA mode rather than PIO mode. So they are using a DMA from a/dev/zero device or more like a 4k page of zeroes to a range of memory? What you're describing sounds like an excellently lazy method. Zero newly allocated the memory when it is the object of a pagefault, not eagerly when allocated. Though nowhere near as bad as a PIO (or just PO?) method of pushing zeros out of the CPU and into memory, I'm guessing that is still a small performance hit. Is it?
Oh yes, Tax Act tries to use that to prod you to upgrade from the free version. In the free version, you can't print to a file, you can only print to a printer. This is easily gotten around with a utility like PDFCreator.
PDFCreator can't help with tax websites that won't let you efile unless you pay, but it can get you around ones that try to hold your data hostage and not allow you to save to disk, only to paper.
From the start, the design of C emphasized speed and efficiency over all else. "Trust the programmer" was one of the mottoes. If the programmers are doing something weird, assume they know what they're doing, and maybe print a warning, but allow it. C was, by design, weakly typed, and minimalist, especially when it comes to checking for errors because such checks take time.
Often, we've seen efforts to improve C's safety that were eventually sidelined because they were a performance hit. The iostream library is safer, but much slower than stdio. Which one do people prefer? stdio! C libraries are full of routines that do not do bounds checking, for the sake of performance and simplicity. gets() is an infamous one. The language itself is so easy to to use insecurely. Pointers can be set to point absolutely anywhere, and those places both read and written at will. If the OS, with help from modern CPU memory management facilities, didn't set boundaries and kill programs whenever they stepped over the bounds, there'd be nothing to stop them.
Another idea was adding instructions to dynamic memory allocation to do memory wipes. Before freeing the memory, the computer was instructed to zero it out. This resulted in as much as a 10% performance hit, and was quickly abandoned. Wiping memory has been proposed at the OS level as well. But there are always apps that don't need that because they aren't doing anything sensitive.
That brings up a big problem with the article. Where should responsibility for security lie? With the OS? I think trying improve a language's security is the wrong approach. That's what they sort of tried to do with Java. It's like trying to prevent bank robberies by securing the steering wheels of all potential getaway vehicles. Yes, make languages easier to use and less prone to bugs, but don't specifically target security.
Try Tax Act. The free version will nag you to upgrade, but you don't have to, and they no longer put income limits on the efiling.
Limits were always one of the many stupid things the IRS did. The IRS wants everyone to efile, not send in paper, becuase it saves them money. Then they try to charge extra for efiling, which drove people to file paper. Also heard that the chances of being audited are lower for paper filings, another reason not to efile. I didn't know about being forced to go with paper to deal with identity theft, but it figures. We've never had that problem, and we've always gone with whichever way was cheaper. We were not going to pay an additional $15 or whatever the charge was, to efile.
Yeah, I've experienced that. They owed my parents a refund, and didn't pay the full amount. No explanation was given, not even so much as a note saying that they were keeping back some money. We checked and rechecked the figures, could find nothing wrong, and thought it must be a mistake on their end.
Took several calls to figure things out. It wasn't a mistake in their math. The previous year, my parents changed banks, and had problems updating the information with EFTPS, the US govt's electronic tax payment system. They tried to take money from the wrong bank, and penalized my parents for that. The penalty wasn't $30, like a bank might charge, no, it was 2% of the amount they tried to withdraw. Makes the banks look friendly and reasonable by comparison. They waited nearly a whole year between imposing and collecting the penalty. Make it more difficult to learn what the issue was.
It's hard to guess what to fear the most, with all the conflicting information and the certainty that organizations have concealed and buried information, and blocked studies. Cigarettes have been known to help smokers keep their weight down, and some become obese after quitting. We know nicotine is addictive, and we know the entire tobacco industry lied to congress about it. We know they embraced propaganda and lies as a mere tool for furthering their business, and they show no concern about their reputation, acting as if they really believe they are behaving ethically. The worst part is that the public has grudgingly allowed this behavior out of a sense of indifference and powerlessness.
Other industries have sat up and taken notice. They have embraced ther own programs of willful ignorance and disinformation. Big Oil and Coal sought to discredit facts about Global Warming. Wall Street has done its utmost to stop markets from being policed, and is still doing it even after the disastrous downturns known as the Dot Com Crash and the Great Recession. The Telecoms Industry is still pining for the glory days of Ma Bell, trying to take control of the Internet in the same way that Ma Bell used to control the telephone network, hoping to wreck network neutrality rules. Big Media, Big Pharma, and the likes of Monsanto and Microsoft are in bed together over intellectual property laws, spreading as much confusion as possible over the issue, with perhaps "copying = stealing" being the most notorious lie.
History is not much comfort. Big Tobacco didn't invent anything new with their "doubt is our product" disinformation and propaganda campaign, they merely improved and adapted to new communcation channels. In the past we've had notorious incidents such as the Radium Girls. People used not to even know what radioactivity was, then didn't understand for years how toxic and dangerous radiation is. We know much better know, but we still dabble in nuclear power in neglectful and unsafe ways. It's not that nuclear power can't be used safely, it's that it won't be. Can people be trusted to run a nuclear power plant responsibly? Not to cut corners, build inadequately, skimp on safety, defer maintenance, delay inspections? In the wake of Fukushima, it seems the answer may be "no". Asbestos was another recklessly used substance. Then there are the pesticides and herbicides DDT and Agent Orange and the chemical known as dioxin and their damaging effects, as told in Silent Spring.
Those are only the biggest, most well-known lies. Bisphenol A has finally been subjected to the glaring light of negative publicity, but there are many others, phthalates for one. Bisphenol S may not be much safer, being more stable under heat and light, but still too good at mimicking estrogen once loose. How about lead in faucets? We've known that lead is toxic for years, but incredibly, we're still using it to deliver not just any water, but drinking water! They've rationalized the use of lead as safe because it is alloyed with other metals, and claimed not to leach out. The industry has cozened regulators into accepting tests that are far too forgiving and unrealistic. What few honest studies there are about the matter that haven't been squashed and suppressed suggest that they are wrong, and lead does leach out, and in enough quantity to cause health problems. Mercury in dental fillings also leaches out. At least we've stopped the use of leaded gasoline.
Jenny McCarthy is a muckraker, but it is the background of lies and deceit that empowered her.
Microsoft makes an especially good example of the results of ignoring security for convenience. Does AT&T deserve leniency and approval for trying to make life convenient? Not when they could have easily had the same convenience with real security.
Why should the law jump when AT&T whistles? Consider this scenario. Alice leaves the door to her business unlocked, and the lights on, and Steve observes this. Steve sends a fake invitation to Bob for an after hours party at Alice's business. Bob goes, and enters. For some extra fun, Steve also tells Bob where some food is, and that he should help himself to it. Alice throws a fit and calls the police. Now what? Obviously, it's overzealous to arrest Bob for trespassing and looting. The police might do so anyway, for several reasons. Maybe they have to follow a policy that emphasizes getting control of every situation as fast as possible, and so they burst in with guns drawn, scream at Bob and throw him to the floor, and tazer and handcuff him for good measure. Maybe Bob was stupid, should've been suspicious and knocked first, or not gone at all? But that's expecting a lot of Bob. If Alice had simply locked the doors, Bob would've been unable to walk in, and the entire incident would've come to nothing. Alice should shoulder some responsiblity for not making things as clear as easily possible to Bob. No, a "no trespassing" or "closed" sign with hours is not good enough, not when it is so easy to just lock the door. A locked door is the clearer, more universal message, and very easy to do. Not everyone reads the same language, and some can't read at all.
The process of obtaining the PII was sufficiently complicated as to make it readily apparent that the information obtained was not for public consumption.
No, it isn't safe to assume that. Add one more thing to the scenario above. Steve programs a web page to hide all the complexity, so that Bob can't readily tell he has stumbled into something private. Again, it is so easy to stop both Bob and Steve by just locking the door.
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I find a hexadecimal dump utility to be an easy starter project for a new language. You have to learn how that language handles file I/O, the program will be short, probably under 20 lines, and the utility can actually be useful. Can also whip up a program to do the reverse. Occasionally I've worked on bare bones UNIX systems like old versions of HP-UX that didn't have all kinds of handy utility programs, but did at least have a C compiler.
Reality dictates this, not me. Copying cannot be controlled. Copying is easier than ever now, and will become easier yet. Can't make money off a tollbooth when everyone can so easily avoid it. Have to fund the endeavors some other way. Change the business model. That's change, not abandon business altogether. Artists don't have to become Communists. But they will have to use other means to earn money for their efforts.
Nor should we want a toll on copying. Communication and sharing made us what we are, built our civilization. Don't give that right up! A world in which copying can be somehow magically controlled is a far worse world than the one we actually live in.
A pity that so many people are fighting reality so hard, messing up lives and holding us all back.
Wow, this old objection? Again? Well, since it got modded so high, let's again mention some of the ways to make money from art, without copyright.
And, could do something like the ASCAP does. Anyone doing a public performance or display of someone's work has to pay the artist. This requirement can be set up without copyright. Control of copying is the wrong tool for that job. Instead, have a standardized Performance Fee, that does not require any permission, and can even be paid out of the public purse from funds collected for that purpose. Artists cannot stop someone from using work they created or derived, they have only the right to collect a fee whenever publicly known usage happens. Should also set the fees on a log scale, so that popular artists don't end up hogging most of the pie. Pay less per use as popularity rises.
RMS supports some form of copyright. I still think copyright is an idea that is long past its time, if it was ever a good idea. Copyright and patents should be killed off, preferably by Constitutional Amendment. More specifically, the monopoly exclusion part of copyright and patent law should be repealed. No more exclusive rights.
I think what RMS is really interested in is one effect of copyright, not the whole package. That good part of copyright is, in my opinion, not worth the vast harm of all the other effects of copyright law. Is there no way to defend the freedoms of free software without copyright? Perhaps an EULA? Or if not that, how about a new law? For instance, I certainly don't want plagiarism to be legal. We can outlaw plagiarism without outlawing copying. Should be possible to outlaw other undesirable behavior without a blanket ban on all forms of copying.
I was wondering if there were still any genuine MS fans, or whether MS has become so uncool that all they have left are paid shills and resentful, locked in users who dream of jumping straight into the smothering embrace of another closed world because Apple looks sexier right now. MS hasn't been the least cool since the 90s, with, as you point out, the possible exception of Windows 2000 and XP despite the activation crap. Your love of MS is nostalgia for the old.
Anyway, you probably can install later versions of Windows 100 years from now. Just need an emulator and a crack, and they are out there. In the future, it might be the only way to install the likes of Windows 7. That's the way it is now for many old Apple II games. The companies that produced them have moved on or gone out of business. The only usable version of the game is the cracked one.
if someone harms society
This is an important point that should not be lightly passed over. Do uploaders harm society? Your comment appears to take it as a given that the answer is "yes". All your points about punishment and rehab may be relevant, if that's true. You say that punishment is not effective. Why isn't it effective? I suggest it is because in this instance the deed for which punishment is being meted out should not be a crime.
If uploaders do not harm society, then the situation is very different. In that case, the law is outdated, wrong, cruel, and a tool of evil oppressors. Those who are sowing confusion and preventing the laws from being reformed have their own obvious agenda of maintaining a status quo that unfairly enriches them at the expense of everyone else. Where is our digital public library? And punishment looks not like justice, but mere brutality, and will not convince anyone. As arguments go, punishment is one of the weakest. Certainly exposes the establishment as ideologically bankrupt. Their other arguments, that artists will starve and we'll not have any more art, and that copying is stealing, are being seen more and more as plain wrong. All they have left are threats. Threats and punishments don't make Christians out of unbelievers and heretics, they just drive heresy underground.
If it works better, it's beautiful.
What's with people trotting out the "looks ugly" criticism? That means you can't think of anything else, anything just a little more substantive, to criticize?
not exactly razor blades to the eye
Ah, but it is bad. Maybe not razor blades, Cobol, or XSLT, but bad enough. When there is or could be a more succinct, clearer way to express something, it quickly becomes tiresome to use an inferior method. Even if that inferior method is only a very little inferior, even when the extra syntax seems small and trivial, it's still bad.
One problem with hash_add(hash,key,value) is that the parameter order is arbitrary. The function could as easily have been written to take the parameters in another order, like hash_add(key,value,hash). Consider fprintf() and fputs(). The programmer cannot tell which order is correct without some external reference, be that documentation, the source code, or memory. Another problem is that we know the function takes 3 parameters. For a fixed number of parameters, there is no need for parentheses, except that C needs them to distinguish function names from variable names. The parentheses are in fact sigils, making C no better than Perl. Otherwise, the C code could be hash_add hash,key,value;
I never had much trouble combining and passing large data structures around in Perl, but then I was already a veteran C/C++ coder when I began working in Perl. Sometimes I would use a print statement to check that I was passing what I wanted to pass. But yes, newbies would struggle, much like they struggle with the infamous C pointer syntax. I could instead use Python, if you like.
Yes, I know Perl is thought messy thanks to sigils and dense regular expressions. But the hash syntax is positively clean compared to how C++ has to do it: $h{key}=value, vs something like h.add(key,value);. And C? Even worse with something like hash_add(&h,key,value), unless the programmer knows how to work with pointers to functions, and wants to use that to make the code more like C++.
Or think of it this way. C is so bad that it makes Perl look clean and neat.
In 1987, university budgets and aged professors made for an experience that was not much faster. PCs were a precious resource. Grad students got PC AT clones (286s) and undergrads sometimes got the use of an old PC XT clone.
But at least one old professor didn't believe in PCs, so for his classes students shared an IBM mainframe (a 3090 as I recall) with admin. We had green screen terminals, but results were printed and the printout placed in 1 of 100 pigeonholes, according to the last 2 digits of your SSN. Admin had 2 levels of priority on mere students. The system increased the priority of an unrun job every 3 hours, so between 8 AM and 5PM, it took 6 hours for us to get back the results of a job run. After hours, performance was on the whole much better, but could still vary. Might get a result in a few minutes, or might still have to wait an hour or more. Couldn't continue working after midnight. University budgets dictated that computer labs had to close for the night. Each dorm had 2 or 3 terminals available all night long, but there you couldn't get back any printouts. You didn't want any evening classes, as that cut into the best times to use the mainframe. Weekends were good, if you didn't mind giving up the best times for a little leisure.
The reusability and modularity of C and C++ has always been poor, and, though improved, still is. C is good for making your own linked list functions, not so good for using libraries containing those functions. We've persevered in spite of that, and created hundreds of libraries in C. But it's still a mess.
The STL is fine as far as it goes, but, for example, it simply cannot integrate something like Perl's hashing abilities and regular expressions as well as Perl itself. The programmer can sort of approach the cleanliness of the Perl syntax by making clever use of C++'s operator overloading, but among the problems with that is that there are a small number of operators available for overloading. The programmer cannot create new operators. Better to retreat to the messy function call syntax. That is, instead of something like c=a+b; it's c=add(a,b);
And the function call syntax has its own limitations. Unless the coders include the library for variable numbers of parameters (printf being the go to example of such a function), they're stuck with fixed numbers of parameters. Having to do prototyping is another annoyance. Surely computers have progressed to the point that it is not a huge imposition to ask a compiler to make 2 passes through the source code, or store the data types of the parameters of a call to an as yet unknown function, to resolve forward references itself instead of burdening the programmers with that chore? But even if those 2 limitations are addressed, calls are still like having to do math with prefix notation and still be forced to use parentheses everywhere even when the number of parameters are fixed, rather than a choice of prefix, infix, or postfix notation with some operator precedence so that it isn't necessary to surround absolutely everything with parentheses. In that respect, C is no advance at all over Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses.
Another resuability problem was name collision between different libraries. Two libraries with a "sort" function, for instance. To deal with this, it became the custom to prepend the library name to every function name. Now we have namespaces.
Not true. The article made an unfair comparison. Read the editorial comment at the end. Coal plants release more radiation into the environment because the waste from nuclear power plants is not released into the environment. Radioactive waste is stored, and only a small amount of radiation escapes from storage as long as there is not an accident. If the waste from a nuclear power plant were dumped into the environment, they'd put out far more radioactive pollution than coal ever could.
When there is an accident, nuclear plants can leave areas contaminated and unsafe for centuries. Coal plants cannot do that kind of damage. And there will be accidents, not because we don't know how to run a nuclear plant safely, but because we can't be trusted to do so. Chernobyl was excused as the incompetence and corruption of a typical Communist dictatorship. But Fukushima has no such excuse. Nuclear plant management feels pressure to cut costs, and starts cutting corners even before the plant is built. Safety features like walls get cheapened by never building them as high as they should have been. Soon they're neglecting maintenance and inspections, Emergency equipment may not be in working order, if it exists at all. The ranks of management may become filled with cronies and hacks who do not understand the risks they are taking, and who don't care either.
More aerodynamic cars stay cleaner. Lot of the dirt never reaches the surface of such a car.
Maybe this paint is neat, but it's a fancy, high tech solution to a problem that already has a low cost, money saving, low tech solution. A solution that, thus far, manufacturers and the public are ignorant of or prejudiced against. Never ceases to amaze me how people can declare aerodynamic shapes "ugly" and use that as the excuse to refuse to have anything to do with it. One rabid Mustang fan I know is even prejudiced against things like vortex generators on the trailing edges of truck trailers, because they're "ugly". As if a rectangular corrugated grey box isn't already butt ugly, and anyone cares about the looks of them anyway.
No doubt the confusion comes from the fact that raising water with a vacuum pump does require pressure. People learned some centuries ago that atmospheric pressure can't raise water more than about 10 feet. Simple siphons are commonly started with vacuum pumping.
If the top of the siphon is too high for a vacuum pump, some other method must be used, but the siphon action will work at much greater heights because, as the article points out, the siphon action itself does not depend on pressure. What are the height limits, I wonder? Redwood trees are about as tall as trees can get with the capillary action method they use to raise water. I expect siphons work at much greater heights than that.
I was thinking that a game element like crafting should be more "programmable". The range of possibily is not mere 100s of potion mixes that the designers can and maybe have to go through and work out beforehand. There would be far too many programs to exhaustively check them all, even for all the players. No one could be sure what the limits are, and that a still more efficient way to achieve some effect remains undiscovered.
Making a system that is too big to be exhaustively analyzed carries the unavoidable risk that it can unbalance the game. Game designers usually go for the conservative option, and settle for something that is safe and dull.
She skipped right past the first parts of game design to focus on minutae. Made good points, but about implementation details, not game design.
What game designers must do before worrying about doors is, well, design. What is the game about? Killing bad guys? Racing against competitors? Collecting money or points? Solving puzzles? Exploring worlds? Building things? The tricky part is picking the mechanisms. The question isn't which doors are supposed to open or have windows, it's whether doors are an appropriate and fun method to make reaching the goals, whatever they are, challenging without being impossible. Or they are a necessary evil to deal with limitations.
To find out if a game play element is possible and balanced and fun requires analysis and testing. It can be done in an agile way, making some elements, testing the game play, then making changes. For one example of unbalanced games, can look way back to the early Ultima games. In Ultima 2 and 3, the heroes were so powerful they could easily kill all the non-player characters in an entire city, without consequence, because to reduce memory usage on the computers of that era, the design simply loaded the initial state every time a city was entered. (Not that they couldn't have easily set aside just one bit, an "evil bit", to track whether the heroes were no longer heroes, but for whatever reason, they didn't.) Consequently, an easy way to get more money was kill the enitre town and take all the treasure, exit then reenter and do it all over again, until the player was satisified with the haul of loot. Tedious but effective. Not what the designers wanted, I'm sure, but they did go so far as to make the best of the problem by making a few towns especially juicy to loot. Ultima 3 especially was criticized for being too easy.
Or, design is often done in an ad hoc manner. As an example, many fantasy MMORPGs have a crafting system which the players can use to make equipment. These are a sideline to the main goals of progressing through the fantasy world, doing quests and gaining levels. The way MMORPGs implement it, crafting is dull, tedious, and limited. The players can't employ imagination to create novel items, they are restricted to a small set of fixed recipes. The game designers couldn't allow much latitude on crafting, or the players could and would make items so powerful that they completely unbalance the main game. It'd be rather like crafting and using machine guns, while the rest of the fantasy world continues to use swords and bows. Or the whole fanatsy world advances, and then it's not fantasy anymore. A crafting system that is just a little more realistic could inadvertently allow such things. After all, in real life, what stopped the people of the Middle Ages from having guns? Lack of knowledge, nothing more. The players will all know about modern technology, and will not be held back through ignorance, so the game designers have to resort to other methods. Science Fiction is not much help. A crafting system that allows novelty could likely still be used to break the game.
Commodity networking for anything more complicated than a switch has been garbage for years. To keep the price down, the manufacturers are brutal about reducing CPU specs and speed, then pushing them to their absolute limit so they're constantly in danger of overheating. They cut the RAM to the minimum as well. They also spend as little as possible developing and debugging the firmware.
And they lie. They like to try to sneak changes past the public by keeping the model numbers the same while totally changing the innards. They will change only the "revision" number, as if the total redesign was only a minor change, and not print this on the box. I once bought the famous Linksys WRT54G, and found it was junk. Couldn't even ping reliably through a wired connection, never mind wireless. My old router (a Netgear RP114, no wireless capability) worked fine, so it was definitely not anything else. I found out why. When I bought it, Linksys had just moved from revision 4 to revision 5. Revision 4 was the good one, with Linux. Revision 5 had half the RAM and was running a very buggy firmware on VxWorks.
Just a guess, but from my own experiences, maybe as many as 1/3 of the routers out there are so poorly made that they never work properly or well, or if they do, they don't last long, dying from overheating in the first year. Including that Linksys WRT54G revision 5, I've taken many a router back within the first 3 days because they just did not work, even after updating them with the latest firmware offered on the vendor's website. Of the ones that do work, sometimes have had to work hard to make configuration changes through their web interface. The web pages sometimes do not load properly because the router suffered a brief instant of overheating, perhaps, or because of a bug, hard to say. The Trendware routers I've seen have particularly bad interfaces that make Metro look nice by comparison. I could put up with that, if they at least worked well, but no. The latest piece of junk I'm having to deal with is an Arris DG860, supplied by Time Warner, which figures. It will drop wireless connections for no apparent reason, and may start working again a moment later, or may need to be reset by power cycling it.
Yes, the article is sensationalist. While EMP could be a real problem, a bigger problem is that any attack that could generate a big enough EMP to knock out the electronics over half a continent would likely cause much worse problems, like World War III and Nuclear Winter. Even if it only costs a little bit, is it worth the effort to guard against EMP? Computer security is another area that you have to constantly ask if it's worth the trouble, and will proposed measures actually help? Yes, we've had many embarrassing security breaches, but that could be better if the alternative is to spend so much on security that it's cheaper to suffer the occasional breach. However I think the consensus is that we would spend less if we invested a little more in security.
Also, we have a lot of other, worse problems we're not doing much about either. Climate Disruption. Asteroid impact. And as for healthcare, how about the AIDS denial in South Africa?
We have also noted for some time that we have a lot of infrastructure that's vulnerable to terrorism. Terrorists could blow up a few critical bridges (or maybe just close a couple of lanes), poison water supplies (maybe by peeing in them), bomb stadiums when a big game is on, torch oil refineries and terminals, and no doubt many other things. Why hasn't this happened? Is it that they're trying but our security services are unsung heroes who have already foiled dozens of plots we never heard about? Or more like that the threat isn't that big, as the effort it takes to pull off something like that is more than is appreciated?
I wonder if zeroing out memory can go even deeper than the OS. Like, why not have RAM that can zero itself on command? Just turn off the DRAM refresh for a fraction of a second, and viola!
Memory moves have been made much faster by bypassing the CPU, for instance with hard drives with the DMA mode rather than PIO mode. So they are using a DMA from a /dev/zero device or more like a 4k page of zeroes to a range of memory? What you're describing sounds like an excellently lazy method. Zero newly allocated the memory when it is the object of a pagefault, not eagerly when allocated. Though nowhere near as bad as a PIO (or just PO?) method of pushing zeros out of the CPU and into memory, I'm guessing that is still a small performance hit. Is it?
Oh yes, Tax Act tries to use that to prod you to upgrade from the free version. In the free version, you can't print to a file, you can only print to a printer. This is easily gotten around with a utility like PDFCreator.
PDFCreator can't help with tax websites that won't let you efile unless you pay, but it can get you around ones that try to hold your data hostage and not allow you to save to disk, only to paper.
From the start, the design of C emphasized speed and efficiency over all else. "Trust the programmer" was one of the mottoes. If the programmers are doing something weird, assume they know what they're doing, and maybe print a warning, but allow it. C was, by design, weakly typed, and minimalist, especially when it comes to checking for errors because such checks take time.
Often, we've seen efforts to improve C's safety that were eventually sidelined because they were a performance hit. The iostream library is safer, but much slower than stdio. Which one do people prefer? stdio! C libraries are full of routines that do not do bounds checking, for the sake of performance and simplicity. gets() is an infamous one. The language itself is so easy to to use insecurely. Pointers can be set to point absolutely anywhere, and those places both read and written at will. If the OS, with help from modern CPU memory management facilities, didn't set boundaries and kill programs whenever they stepped over the bounds, there'd be nothing to stop them.
Another idea was adding instructions to dynamic memory allocation to do memory wipes. Before freeing the memory, the computer was instructed to zero it out. This resulted in as much as a 10% performance hit, and was quickly abandoned. Wiping memory has been proposed at the OS level as well. But there are always apps that don't need that because they aren't doing anything sensitive.
That brings up a big problem with the article. Where should responsibility for security lie? With the OS? I think trying improve a language's security is the wrong approach. That's what they sort of tried to do with Java. It's like trying to prevent bank robberies by securing the steering wheels of all potential getaway vehicles. Yes, make languages easier to use and less prone to bugs, but don't specifically target security.
Try Tax Act. The free version will nag you to upgrade, but you don't have to, and they no longer put income limits on the efiling.
Limits were always one of the many stupid things the IRS did. The IRS wants everyone to efile, not send in paper, becuase it saves them money. Then they try to charge extra for efiling, which drove people to file paper. Also heard that the chances of being audited are lower for paper filings, another reason not to efile. I didn't know about being forced to go with paper to deal with identity theft, but it figures. We've never had that problem, and we've always gone with whichever way was cheaper. We were not going to pay an additional $15 or whatever the charge was, to efile.
Yeah, I've experienced that. They owed my parents a refund, and didn't pay the full amount. No explanation was given, not even so much as a note saying that they were keeping back some money. We checked and rechecked the figures, could find nothing wrong, and thought it must be a mistake on their end.
Took several calls to figure things out. It wasn't a mistake in their math. The previous year, my parents changed banks, and had problems updating the information with EFTPS, the US govt's electronic tax payment system. They tried to take money from the wrong bank, and penalized my parents for that. The penalty wasn't $30, like a bank might charge, no, it was 2% of the amount they tried to withdraw. Makes the banks look friendly and reasonable by comparison. They waited nearly a whole year between imposing and collecting the penalty. Make it more difficult to learn what the issue was.
It's hard to guess what to fear the most, with all the conflicting information and the certainty that organizations have concealed and buried information, and blocked studies. Cigarettes have been known to help smokers keep their weight down, and some become obese after quitting. We know nicotine is addictive, and we know the entire tobacco industry lied to congress about it. We know they embraced propaganda and lies as a mere tool for furthering their business, and they show no concern about their reputation, acting as if they really believe they are behaving ethically. The worst part is that the public has grudgingly allowed this behavior out of a sense of indifference and powerlessness.
Other industries have sat up and taken notice. They have embraced ther own programs of willful ignorance and disinformation. Big Oil and Coal sought to discredit facts about Global Warming. Wall Street has done its utmost to stop markets from being policed, and is still doing it even after the disastrous downturns known as the Dot Com Crash and the Great Recession. The Telecoms Industry is still pining for the glory days of Ma Bell, trying to take control of the Internet in the same way that Ma Bell used to control the telephone network, hoping to wreck network neutrality rules. Big Media, Big Pharma, and the likes of Monsanto and Microsoft are in bed together over intellectual property laws, spreading as much confusion as possible over the issue, with perhaps "copying = stealing" being the most notorious lie.
History is not much comfort. Big Tobacco didn't invent anything new with their "doubt is our product" disinformation and propaganda campaign, they merely improved and adapted to new communcation channels. In the past we've had notorious incidents such as the Radium Girls. People used not to even know what radioactivity was, then didn't understand for years how toxic and dangerous radiation is. We know much better know, but we still dabble in nuclear power in neglectful and unsafe ways. It's not that nuclear power can't be used safely, it's that it won't be. Can people be trusted to run a nuclear power plant responsibly? Not to cut corners, build inadequately, skimp on safety, defer maintenance, delay inspections? In the wake of Fukushima, it seems the answer may be "no". Asbestos was another recklessly used substance. Then there are the pesticides and herbicides DDT and Agent Orange and the chemical known as dioxin and their damaging effects, as told in Silent Spring.
Those are only the biggest, most well-known lies. Bisphenol A has finally been subjected to the glaring light of negative publicity, but there are many others, phthalates for one. Bisphenol S may not be much safer, being more stable under heat and light, but still too good at mimicking estrogen once loose. How about lead in faucets? We've known that lead is toxic for years, but incredibly, we're still using it to deliver not just any water, but drinking water! They've rationalized the use of lead as safe because it is alloyed with other metals, and claimed not to leach out. The industry has cozened regulators into accepting tests that are far too forgiving and unrealistic. What few honest studies there are about the matter that haven't been squashed and suppressed suggest that they are wrong, and lead does leach out, and in enough quantity to cause health problems. Mercury in dental fillings also leaches out. At least we've stopped the use of leaded gasoline.
Jenny McCarthy is a muckraker, but it is the background of lies and deceit that empowered her.
Microsoft makes an especially good example of the results of ignoring security for convenience. Does AT&T deserve leniency and approval for trying to make life convenient? Not when they could have easily had the same convenience with real security.
Why should the law jump when AT&T whistles? Consider this scenario. Alice leaves the door to her business unlocked, and the lights on, and Steve observes this. Steve sends a fake invitation to Bob for an after hours party at Alice's business. Bob goes, and enters. For some extra fun, Steve also tells Bob where some food is, and that he should help himself to it. Alice throws a fit and calls the police. Now what? Obviously, it's overzealous to arrest Bob for trespassing and looting. The police might do so anyway, for several reasons. Maybe they have to follow a policy that emphasizes getting control of every situation as fast as possible, and so they burst in with guns drawn, scream at Bob and throw him to the floor, and tazer and handcuff him for good measure. Maybe Bob was stupid, should've been suspicious and knocked first, or not gone at all? But that's expecting a lot of Bob. If Alice had simply locked the doors, Bob would've been unable to walk in, and the entire incident would've come to nothing. Alice should shoulder some responsiblity for not making things as clear as easily possible to Bob. No, a "no trespassing" or "closed" sign with hours is not good enough, not when it is so easy to just lock the door. A locked door is the clearer, more universal message, and very easy to do. Not everyone reads the same language, and some can't read at all.
The process of obtaining the PII was sufficiently complicated as to make it readily apparent that the information obtained was not for public consumption.
No, it isn't safe to assume that. Add one more thing to the scenario above. Steve programs a web page to hide all the complexity, so that Bob can't readily tell he has stumbled into something private. Again, it is so easy to stop both Bob and Steve by just locking the door.