Um... Isn't quite a bit of software "insecure" by default?
In short: No.
Long answer: IE seems to actually have saner defaults now. It still has the occasional buffer overflow that gives full access to the system.
I currently use IE. I don't get spyware. It's called proper security settings.
One of my proper security settings, while on Windows, is to use Firefox for all web browsing, only resorting to IE Tab for Windows Update.
Again, it's got to do with IE inevitably having some security hole that doesn't care what "security settings" you have.
Maybe part of the current belief you can't secure your browser is fostered by the anti-spyware companies.
Maybe. These are also the same people who would have you never install Linux.
As far as this "test" or whatever it was supposed to be goes; I imagine that if I wanted to compile a virus and run it with the root account on a linux machine I could get it infected too. See? Linux is insecure.
Well, as far as I can tell, this wasn't supposed to prove that anything was insecure.
For the record, I am not missing a ton of webpage functionality either.
That implies you're missing something. What, exactly, have you disabled in your security settings?
I can browse the web with Javascript enabled, Java enabled, Flash enabled, even a couple of nice extensions like Adblock and the Web Developer Toolbar.
If you're missing one of those things, I'd see that as a possible reason to prefer Firefox.
I use it because it's already on my machine and does everything I want it to
You must not want web standards to work properly.
Or, a more relevant question: Most good web browsers these days are less than a ten meg download. Firefox: 4.9 megs. Opera: 4.6 megs. Most IE updates are more than that, but more importantly, with a decent connection, it should take you less than ten minutes -- more like 3-5 minutes, at worst -- to download and install another browser. So, "already on my machine" doesn't seem like a valid reason to me, if you know of better alternatives.
As for me, I use tabbed browsing and Google Browser Sync, among other things, that don't exist in the current version of IE, that I never thought I'd need, but I would be helpless without them now. IE will be stealing... er, implementing these, eventually, but it still won't be anywhere close with web standards, and I still doubt it will be secure, whether or not you use "proper security settings."
It either is 80% or is not 80%. It is NOT like 80%.
While what you say may be true of the browser window itself, I doubt CmdrTaco actually measured it. Thus, 80% is a guess, and saying "like 80%" means "appears to be approximately 80%, but I don't really know."
What would you rather he say in this situation?
Am I the only one irrated by this?
I hope so. I hope you're the only one so hypersensative to the word that like==blond. Save your pedantry for where it's really warranted, like misuse of apostrophies!
I was a god at our school for essentially creating a portable Firefox and installing Flash on it. During Senior Thesis class, we had free reign over the computer lab to work on our thesis, and we spent most of it playing flash games. Maybe not the same games -- we played games like the Black Knight and whack-the-penguin -- but we played them nonetheless.
Well, and Doom. We also played networked Doom off of USB flash drives. But you get the point.
The critical difference in security though is not what the user can do (as he or she is probably running as administrator anyway) but what can be done without their permission.
You're talking about real security. On Windows, we still have "security" like anti-virus, which is designed to assume that the user doesn't have a clue.
Not stopping someone from doing something they have to agree to (no matter how nefarious the wording is).
The trick is making sure they know what they're agreeing to. If you have to agree to install an ActiveX extension from Microsoft in order to get your Windows Updates, and it prompts you whether to trust it (and says it's signed by Microsoft), that's fine. But if a random porn site can do the same thing, and claim to be Microsoft, then we have a problem. If you have a 3 paragraph essay in your "are you sure" dialog, no one is going to read it, and most people will click "allow" anyway.
Thus, the process of agreeing or disagreeing, and indeed the wording, is a crucial part of security. But I still don't think anti-virus should exist.
Now, if only I was fast enough to find a Star Trek equivalent to the Magrathea factory floor. Unfortunately, someone will probably beat me to that, too, with an episode that actually shows an auction house that big...
Oh well, Hitchhiker's doesn't have quite the stigma of Trekkie.
At least solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, ethanol, etc are all possible at the plant (or in your house). It may be expensive, but we could actually switch them over to clean energy. You can't do that at all if everyone's driving gas cars.
It is a connection, not authorized by the user, possibly giving the full HTTP-headers as well.
I fail to see how my HTTP headers constitute a privacy issue. Oh no, the blocklists know I can accept gzip encoding, and that I prefer English! Somebody stop the thought police!
Assuming you can trust Google not to be lying, Google Browser Sync will do what you want. It won't store them on a server under your control, but it will encrypt them before they ever hit Google. Syncs bookmarks, passwords, and history.
I'll bet that by the time you make a reasonably standard JavaScript toolkit for local apps -- as in, NOT AJAX -- Ruby, which is already at least as powerful, will probably have a decent VM, and be approaching reasonably fast. Python and Perl will have moved on.
If, by that time, we have a reasonably working Perl6, it will absolutely smoke anything JavaScript can do -- I'd want to be able to embed Perl6 in AJAX programs. Remember, the Perl6 guys were well aware of JavaScript, and many other languages and paradigms, when they started designing. This means Perl6 will be more powerful than JavaScript, but it will also be faster, and we'll still have CPAN.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Burden is on you to RTFM if you want to claim it does.
Loop unrolling is not always a good thing. It reduces the sheer number of instructions to be performed, but at the expense of memory. Using more memory means more cache misses.
Yes, it's obvious that they don't move at the speed of light. However, it's also obvious that George Lucas didn't have a clue, or felt like completely ignoring the laws of physics. They are still called "turbolasers", and "lightsaber" certainly suggests that it's made of light, laser or not -- and let's not forget the crystals used to focus the energy. There are many things that simply don't make sense here in that context -- light does not collide, so lightsabers couldn't block a blaster bolt or another lightsaber; light moves at the speed of light; light does not shine at full intensity for about a meter before stopping for no apparent reason. Anything to the contrary is people retconning Star Wars to attempt to make it match some laws of physics, because lightsabers are cool.
I'll admit one thing: Lightsabers are cool, and I wish they could actually exist.
As for phasers, they do affect things other than organic matter. We've seen phasers kill robots, temples, enemy ships, and other inanimate objects, not to mention cut slowly through a door in the same way as a lightsaber would. It seems like a phaser simply vaporises whatever it's convenient to think of as a single, solid object, and if that doesn't work, they act as real lasers should. The same can be said of transporters. And this, too, suffers the same pathetic attempts to make a space opera -- admittedly a cool-looking one -- at least plausible in physical reality.
Really, you should start by actually understanding what technology and physics we know of which are close to what you want to create. Try to make it realistic before you start. Otherwise, you're going to have the same stupid mistakes, like hearing explosions in space, and people will either willfully ignore them (because they enjoy the show) or attempt to explain them away in some strange and complex way. In fact, almost any attempt to explain them scientifically is going to ruin whatever made them cool in the first place -- remember the Force? One word: midichlorians.
And then there are the unintended consequences. For instance, if midichlorians are all it takes, why don't the Jedi have a human breeding program, similar to the Bene Gesserit? Why don't the Jedi attempt genetic engineering, or find a way to inject large amounts of midichlorians into someone who isn't force-sensitive at all? Why hasn't anyone created force technology, either utilizing midichlorians or the principle behind them? Why do we rarely have force-sensitive creatures that aren't even vaguely humanoid -- a sith Rancor, for instance? You can avoid the whole discussion by leaving the Force the way it was in the original Trilogy -- a completely mystical, unexplained, virtually unknown power.
Ah, well. For every handwave Lucas gives to well-established laws of physics, there are at least as many plot holes in Star Trek that are relatively unrelated to its equally vigorous handwaving of physics.
Plotting a course takes the Enterprise crew about 2 an a half seconds. It can take a minute or two for Han or Chewie.
The Picard manouever is actually quite adequate. Warp in, beam over the antimatter, warp out. It just seems likely that they wouldn't have to stop at all.
Also, the Enterprise seems to have a full range of sublight speed. Star Wars ships definitely have one top speed for sublight, and one for light speed. Thus, while the TIEs are easily more maneuverable, the Enterprise is simply faster.
And all this is ignoring the question of how much turbolaser fire the Enterprise's shields can take, or whether they can effectively do "fair" combat. They could easily be within transport range and phaser range but well out of range of the turbolasers, and the phasers should be more than a match for the TIE fighters, seeing as they actually move at light speed and have quite a range, meaning by the time a TIE would get close enough, he'd likely already be destroyed.
There is also the question of just how much damage the Enterprise's phasers and torpedoes (a different kind of torpedo) could do to the Death Star directly. I think this is what most people think of when they call this a debate. But here, assuming the Enterprise can withstand 10 seconds or so of turbolaser fire, they simply have to move in and phaser/torpedo out any turrets in their area -- assuming they need to get that close -- and then proceed with the beaming over of the antimatter.
However, I didn't want to go there, because considering Kirk runs his ship like an Iowa tractor, it seems unlikely that he or his crew would have fast enough reflexes to do any of this, or that any of them would be smart enough to program the computer to do it for them. Also, it's not really relevant -- no TIE is going to get close enough in the 3-5 seconds it would take to beam over the antimatter, plot the course, and warp back out, and I seriously doubt they would have to get within range of the turbolasers if they can beam through miles of atmosphere and miles of solid rock in the same trip. Assuming a TIE did, worst that happens is a little bit of damage (one pass won't do a lot), which will be repaired by the next episode.
There is also the argument that the Enterprise still exists, after ten seasons, while the Death Star has been blown up at least twice now, once before it was even finished. Of course, I don't think it's the same Enterprise for TNG as it is for TOS, but I do think the Enterprise stood up to more than just a few rebels with a mysterious force. That said, Vader was never taken hostage, and was at least faithful to Padme before he went completely psychotic.
I think Enterprise vs Death Star was settled long ago. Just for the record:
The original Death Star did not have any kind of energy shield. I've also never seen the Death Star go faster than light, although I presume it must, in order to travel from planet to planet -- regardless, anything faster than light in Star Wars must enter hyperspace to do so, which is difficult, takes a lot of calculations and preparation.
The Enterprise can go Warp 8 easily, and actually be maneuverable at that speed. If Luke can fly fast enough in his X-Wing to be a problem for the Death Star's turbolaser turrets, the Enterprise should be able to easily dodge anything the Death Star can throw at it, including the superlaser and TIE fighters. But they don't have to fly along a narrow trench and use the Force to aim a pair of proton torpedoes down an exhaust shaft. They can simply orbit at warp 2 or 3 so as to avoid blaster fire, just longe nough to beam over a small chunk of antimatter from the warp drives, assuming they have any power left. And when antimatter and matter collide...
They don't need to beam any significant amount over, either. They should be more than close enough to hit some critical systems -- and they don't need many bothans to die to give them a technical schematic, they can simply scan it and have Spock figure out where to aim it. If they can set off a chain reaction, it should give them more than enough time to warp away, enable shields, and watch the fireworks.
Now, the Force could possibly present a problem here, but assuming it is actually Enterprise vs Death Star, there aren't likely to be any force sensitive people on board the Enterprise for Vader to influence. It would probably be tricky to aim a mind trick from that far away, but even if he could, the crew of the Enterprise has handled various forms of mind control before. And the whole thing will likely be over before Vader can so much as figure out that the Captain's name is James T. Kirk.
Supposing that a Jedi (or dark Jedi, or Sith) could get on board the Enterprise, of course, it becomes an entirely different story. The crew of the Enterprise has exactly as much hand-to-hand combat training as Austin Powers: "Judo...CHOP!" Annakin Skywalker, once actually aboard, could slice through half the crew before Red Alert sounded, and the other half before Uhura could send a distress call. The Vulcan Nerve Pinch requires that you actually manage to touch the enemy's shoulder, and I somehow think Spock would have trouble doing it once Annakin sliced off his hands.
No, the things that have yet to be determined is the paradox of a battle between the Red Shirts, who always die a moment after appearing, and the Stormtroopers, who can't hit the broad side of a planet. There are exceptions, though -- Stormtroopers can hit often enough to tragically wound someone important, and Scotty, as Someone Important, is guaranteed to not die, even though he's a red shirt. Thus, I think Scotty would be tragically wounded, but would win the fight and then go on to be treated back to health by McCoy.
Star Wars and Trek both have obvious flaws. The weapons are always fun -- in Star Wars we have the laser that magically stops just far enough out to make a sword, and the laser that shoots a bolt of laser light that travels slowly enough for a human to dodge. In Trek, you have individual implausible episodes -- if you can dodge a phaser blast because you're supposedly moving so fast, how can you see anything if the phaser moves at the speed of light? How does a phaser set to stun do exactly enough damage to knock someone out, but set to kill, it somehow magically figures out where a person is, and vaporises just the person, not the ground under them?
Anyway, this could've been a much longer rant, but the point is: Ok, maybe the Gorn was cool-looking, but why even bother to mention bumpy-forehead-of-the-week if your solution is the Gorn? He's biped, with two arms, he's reptillian, with insectoid eyes -- basically, he's just stitched together from a few things we know of on Earth. He's hardly something that would've evolved completely independently -- we have stranger life-forms on Earth anyway.
Gorn may be fan service, but he's hardly an interesting alien. You want an interesting alien, look at some of the TOS energy beings, or maybe the silicon-based creature. But one thing Star Wars got at least somewhat closer to right -- most aliens look much more interesting than the Gorn, even in the original Star Wars.
As for Gorn being somehow better than Klingons, I think Worf is at least as intelligent as the Gorn, and I can't say who would win a fair fight. Besides, the Gorn was trapping Kirk -- that's not saying much. If it was Riker down on that planet, it might be a different story.
Funny, I don't think TOS had much of a storyline, either. Or at least, they were too cowardly to ever bother changing it. The biggest change I've seen so far (I'm on Episode 20 of Season 3) is replacing Mr. Desau (or however you spell it) with Mr. Checkov. I mean, most TV shows get a little cowardly with their main characters after awhile, but come on! Stargate at least lets a few gods die, even if they get replaced. O'Niell gets promoted. Teal'c grows hair, loses symbiote. Even TNG: Riker grows a beard for the second season. In TOS, it would seem that things are about to change, but the weirder the episode, the harder they flail at the end to try to wrap things up and get back to normal.
Or not. Quite often, the "ending" feels like someone just shouted "Time!" and they completely leave the problem unsolved.
I'm not saying you're wrong about Enterprise, I haven't seen it, but I think when most people criticise new Trek, they forget just how bad the old Trek could be. Frankly, I'd welcome even a lame storyline by now, provided it actually changes even a little bit.
You just described the original pilot episode, which is technically canon, as it was re-shown in the series proper. Spock served under Captain Pike before he served under Captain Kirk. Which also makes a prequel with both Kirk and Spock just that much more annoying.
The point is that humans are supposedly inventive enough to create new weapons, sometimes faster than the Borg can adapt.
What's always been disappointing for me is how the Borg are slow, stupid, and robotic. Yes, it's creepy, but the Strogg managed to be creepy, while still being realistically mobile and actually scary. The Flood are creepy, scary, and actually more mobile than the Chief, who's arguably much more mobile than Picard. The Strogg are also perhaps more realistic -- good, old-fashioned bullet wounds are going to hurt flesh, reanimated corpse or not. I guess the Borg just have personal shields now, to make that impossible?
But seriously, unless I've missed something important, any idiot should be able to outrun the Borg on foot. Why are they scary, again?
SMB over AppleShare? Maybe for you and me. At work, I discovered that SMB didn't work on my Powerbook, because they were using CIFS, which wasn't supported natively (or I didn't know about it). CIFS is the right solution for Windows clients, or for Linux clients with a Windows server, because SMB is horribly limited -- things like the 2 gig limit on file sizes. I asked the network admin about it, and he set up something -- on the Windows server -- to allow me to access it as an Apple shared FS of some sort.
Yes, go for open standards which are supported between platforms, in case you have to switch. But I'd argue that the cost of switching if one platform fails is less than the cost of maintaining multiple platforms just in case one fails.
And I would guess that most companies which don't go 100% to one platform would dearly like to. I know one company I worked at would've loved to go 100% Debian or Ubuntu, but had to keep Windows on all the desktops to run things like FileMaker. The one I'm currently at is almost 100% Windows -- I'm one of two people I know of who have a Mac, and I also have a small Linux server there, only for my own use. Since I'm the one admining my Mac/Linux stuff, it doesn't bother them, but if their admin had to service my machine, I'm sure he'd rather it be Windows. Another small company in town is 100% Apple, except for one Windows machine in the corner.
In my opinion, most of these companies wish there were more open standards for them to draw on, so that they could go entirely one platform.
As for a TV station, I wouldn't ever consider using Windows to do the actual broadcasting. If they have some people who are hooked on Outlook, fine, their loss if they fsck up their own workstation, but I'd run Linux for both the storage and the broadcast. I would consider alternatives, like BSD, maybe even a Mac, but I probably wouldn't bother, if I could make Linux work. And here, I think it can.
Pardon any inaccuracies, I'm most of the way through TOS, but I've only seen the first season of TNG.
Contrary to popular belief, Kirk can make his ship orbit a planet in both directions, at the same time, just not in the same universe.
Picard actually tries to follow the Prime Directive and his orders. Kirk doesn't bother, but it does exist during one or two TOS episodes.
Call it harassment, but Kirk at least gets a kiss now and then. Picard only has vague sexual tension, awkward situations, and jaded memories.
Kirk can strip down to his waist and wrestle people. But then, Picard doesn't have to.
Picard has never been played by an Elvis impersonator.
Picard has lavish comforts, including a Holodeck and a computer that sounds like a human female. Kirk has Chess and a computer that sounds like a Binar female.
Picard boldly goes where no one has gone before. Kirk goes where no man has gone before, to pick up women.
Picard has to deal with strange, alien forms of life. Kirk has to deal with humans with pointy ears, angled eyebrows, ludicrous amounts of eyeshadow, and evil-looking goatees.
Even people who have never heard of Picard have heard of "Beam me up, Scotty," and "He's dead, Jim." Saying "Beam me up, LaForge" or "He's dead, Jean-Luc" just sounds stupid.
Kirk wears real pants. Picard wears a spandex jumpsuit.
Imagine Kirk and Picard circling, phasers drawn. Picard lowers his weapon and says "Real men don't need phasers." Kirk drops his phaser. Picard stuns Kirk with his phaser, then beams him to the brig. Picard saves honor for things that really matter, not chest-beating stupidity.
That said, if some alien influence drove Kirk insane, he'd look good beating his chest. Do the same to Picard, and it may scar us for life.
Kirk possibly discovered the Q (The Squire of Gothos). Picard outsmarts Q on numerous occasions.
I don't think Picard has ever called it "The Spaceship Enterprise." Scotty would be ashamed.
Kirk's first officer can mind-meld, nerve-pinch, and "estimate" with more accuracy than the computer. Picard's first officer looks kind of like Chuck Norris, and only after the first season. Unfortunately, in a fair fight, Riker cannot win through sheer intimidation, as Spock has no emotions, and doesn't know who Chuck Norris is anyway.
Kirk's token alien guy is Spock. Picard's token alien guy is Worf. Any questions?
And yes, I know Spock has taken out "Klingons". But they were not Klingons, they were just evil humans with funny eyebrows, evil goatees, and chain mail. Worf does not need chain mail.
I understand their frustration, but since we don't want to say "Personal video recorder", we need a shorter name. I wish we could just say "MythTV", but PVR seems a reasonable compromise -- and in any case, no one has any idea what these mean, either.
What bugs me is that most users, when they get sick of acronyms, end up either inventing new words, misusing existing words, or using the names of specific products. It's at the point now where most people don't know what a web browser is. I say, "Like Internet Explorer," and they go "Oh! I get it!" I suppose that's better than the people who aren't aware of Internet Explorer, only the big Windows XP button that says "Internet".
My father now thinks "VPN" means "remote desktop", because he uses a VPN to secure his remote desktop connection. Most teens don't seem to be aware of "IM", only AOL, MSN, or Yahoo, making it sometimes annoying to explain Google Talk, but (of course) they grasp the concept of iChat instantly.
So, while acronyms aren't helping, I think users are always going to be confused, and tech moves too fast to always be inventing creative names -- and when we do have good names, people complain about how open source projects have such weird names. Well, hey, at least you can pronounce them -- that's better than you can say for most acronyms. I think some go out of their way to be obnoxious -- thttpd, lighttpd...
Really? I am totally curious to hear at what point you discover that this has happened -- that you've made it worse.
It's difficult to pinpoint it. It has something to do with changes to one part requiring changes to another. I think I actually realize it as it's happening, but I have to make this change, so maybe I can make another change to try to regain what it was that worked...
And three or four revisions later, I can't remember exactly how I wrote it initially, but I know it was better.
True of both programming and writing, although I can usually fix it in a program. However, I've been using version control more rigorously in my programs, and I will likely be using it in my writing also.
And I said to myself, wait a minute -- I've probably read a dozen O'Reilly books, etc. That's what I did every time I wanted to learn Perl, or C, or whatever. Why not do the same thing with English?
Well, I never read an O'Reilly book on C. I read a much more tutorial-like book on C++, but C is much simpler -- once I knew it, I barely needed a reference. My only problem would be vocabulary, so all I really need at that point is to practice it, and to look up new library functions in the man page.
Perl, though, I have actually read at least one O'Reilly book on. I also frequently had to turn to documentation like the perl OO tutorial when learning a new concept, because it seems every one of the More Than One Way To Do It is always a completely different Way To Do It than in any other language.
I think the difference is that C has very simple syntax, whereas Perl syntax is full of quirks. Thus, to write C, I only need the equivalent of a dictionary, whereas to write Perl, I need the equivalent of a style guide. At first glance, it would seem that English is like Perl, but in reality, not so much:
Most "rules" are really more like guidelines.
As much as Perl claims to "do what I mean", both Perl and C have unambiguous rules for how every bit of syntax is interpreted, and these rules are not always obvious to a human. English, as you say, does not have hard and fast rules. It is much more important to write something readable than to write something in the "best" way possible. In fact, if the shortest, most vivid, most eloquent way of expressing something uses a word that your audience isn't likely to have heard, it may be better to write more simply.
That is why I don't care to improve my vocabulary. As for things like grammar and sentence structure, I still believe the best way to improve these is to practice. Although I do occasionally try to learn maddening things like when to use colons or semicolons, I don't think my audience will much care, especially when the rules are so subjective.
But maybe it's just that if you can honestly say that you read it in a book that you're supposed to do it a certain way, it lets you proceed with more confidence and spend less time thinking how to write?
I don't spend a lot of time thinking how to write.
I hardly spend any time thinking about the mechanics of sentence structure. I focus on higher-level organizing and actual content. So, for instance, I focus more on whether I'm going to make my character have red eyes, how brightly they'll glow, etc, and on whether I want to spend much time on their eyes, or focus more on their cloak of shadows. I don't really spend any time deciding how to describe the eyes, gnashing my teeth over whether to compare them to embers or hot coals. I give hardly a thought to questions like "his eyes glow like embers" or "the glow of his eyes was oddly like embers" or "embers were like the glow of his eyes" -- maybe I don't use the best possible structure, but when I consciously try to examine different ones, each seems more retarded than the last, and I realize that I got it right the first time.
Even so, if Firefox as a whole is malicious there is no way of stoping it misusing whatever rights you give it.
This is true, but Firefox is a prime candidate for this kind of fine-grained permission. Firefox has extensions. It's entirely possible that there are some parts of Firefox I trust absolutely, and other parts I'd rather not trust at all.
I was aware of Windows Vista when I described my system. And in security, "nitpicking" is a good thing. You can't just say "po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe", when it comes to, say, rsh vs ssh.
Thanks for clarifying, though. I'm surprised they were that thorough.
Slashdot Mirror
In short: No.
Long answer: IE seems to actually have saner defaults now. It still has the occasional buffer overflow that gives full access to the system.
One of my proper security settings, while on Windows, is to use Firefox for all web browsing, only resorting to IE Tab for Windows Update.
Again, it's got to do with IE inevitably having some security hole that doesn't care what "security settings" you have.
Maybe. These are also the same people who would have you never install Linux.
Well, as far as I can tell, this wasn't supposed to prove that anything was insecure.
That implies you're missing something. What, exactly, have you disabled in your security settings?
I can browse the web with Javascript enabled, Java enabled, Flash enabled, even a couple of nice extensions like Adblock and the Web Developer Toolbar.
If you're missing one of those things, I'd see that as a possible reason to prefer Firefox.
You must not want web standards to work properly.
Or, a more relevant question: Most good web browsers these days are less than a ten meg download. Firefox: 4.9 megs. Opera: 4.6 megs. Most IE updates are more than that, but more importantly, with a decent connection, it should take you less than ten minutes -- more like 3-5 minutes, at worst -- to download and install another browser. So, "already on my machine" doesn't seem like a valid reason to me, if you know of better alternatives.
As for me, I use tabbed browsing and Google Browser Sync, among other things, that don't exist in the current version of IE, that I never thought I'd need, but I would be helpless without them now. IE will be stealing... er, implementing these, eventually, but it still won't be anywhere close with web standards, and I still doubt it will be secure, whether or not you use "proper security settings."
While what you say may be true of the browser window itself, I doubt CmdrTaco actually measured it. Thus, 80% is a guess, and saying "like 80%" means "appears to be approximately 80%, but I don't really know."
What would you rather he say in this situation?
I hope so. I hope you're the only one so hypersensative to the word that like==blond. Save your pedantry for where it's really warranted, like misuse of apostrophies!
That may not be what this study is about, but I'd estimate far more than 5 out of 50. I would guess they tend to avoid you, though.
I was a god at our school for essentially creating a portable Firefox and installing Flash on it. During Senior Thesis class, we had free reign over the computer lab to work on our thesis, and we spent most of it playing flash games. Maybe not the same games -- we played games like the Black Knight and whack-the-penguin -- but we played them nonetheless.
Well, and Doom. We also played networked Doom off of USB flash drives. But you get the point.
You're talking about real security. On Windows, we still have "security" like anti-virus, which is designed to assume that the user doesn't have a clue.
The trick is making sure they know what they're agreeing to. If you have to agree to install an ActiveX extension from Microsoft in order to get your Windows Updates, and it prompts you whether to trust it (and says it's signed by Microsoft), that's fine. But if a random porn site can do the same thing, and claim to be Microsoft, then we have a problem. If you have a 3 paragraph essay in your "are you sure" dialog, no one is going to read it, and most people will click "allow" anyway.
Thus, the process of agreeing or disagreeing, and indeed the wording, is a crucial part of security. But I still don't think anti-virus should exist.
Now, if only I was fast enough to find a Star Trek equivalent to the Magrathea factory floor. Unfortunately, someone will probably beat me to that, too, with an episode that actually shows an auction house that big...
Oh well, Hitchhiker's doesn't have quite the stigma of Trekkie.
At least solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal, ethanol, etc are all possible at the plant (or in your house). It may be expensive, but we could actually switch them over to clean energy. You can't do that at all if everyone's driving gas cars.
I fail to see how my HTTP headers constitute a privacy issue. Oh no, the blocklists know I can accept gzip encoding, and that I prefer English! Somebody stop the thought police!
Assuming you can trust Google not to be lying, Google Browser Sync will do what you want. It won't store them on a server under your control, but it will encrypt them before they ever hit Google. Syncs bookmarks, passwords, and history.
I'll bet that by the time you make a reasonably standard JavaScript toolkit for local apps -- as in, NOT AJAX -- Ruby, which is already at least as powerful, will probably have a decent VM, and be approaching reasonably fast. Python and Perl will have moved on.
If, by that time, we have a reasonably working Perl6, it will absolutely smoke anything JavaScript can do -- I'd want to be able to embed Perl6 in AJAX programs. Remember, the Perl6 guys were well aware of JavaScript, and many other languages and paradigms, when they started designing. This means Perl6 will be more powerful than JavaScript, but it will also be faster, and we'll still have CPAN.
I'm pretty sure it doesn't. Burden is on you to RTFM if you want to claim it does.
Loop unrolling is not always a good thing. It reduces the sheer number of instructions to be performed, but at the expense of memory. Using more memory means more cache misses.
Yes, it's obvious that they don't move at the speed of light. However, it's also obvious that George Lucas didn't have a clue, or felt like completely ignoring the laws of physics. They are still called "turbolasers", and "lightsaber" certainly suggests that it's made of light, laser or not -- and let's not forget the crystals used to focus the energy. There are many things that simply don't make sense here in that context -- light does not collide, so lightsabers couldn't block a blaster bolt or another lightsaber; light moves at the speed of light; light does not shine at full intensity for about a meter before stopping for no apparent reason. Anything to the contrary is people retconning Star Wars to attempt to make it match some laws of physics, because lightsabers are cool.
I'll admit one thing: Lightsabers are cool, and I wish they could actually exist.
As for phasers, they do affect things other than organic matter. We've seen phasers kill robots, temples, enemy ships, and other inanimate objects, not to mention cut slowly through a door in the same way as a lightsaber would. It seems like a phaser simply vaporises whatever it's convenient to think of as a single, solid object, and if that doesn't work, they act as real lasers should. The same can be said of transporters. And this, too, suffers the same pathetic attempts to make a space opera -- admittedly a cool-looking one -- at least plausible in physical reality.
Really, you should start by actually understanding what technology and physics we know of which are close to what you want to create. Try to make it realistic before you start. Otherwise, you're going to have the same stupid mistakes, like hearing explosions in space, and people will either willfully ignore them (because they enjoy the show) or attempt to explain them away in some strange and complex way. In fact, almost any attempt to explain them scientifically is going to ruin whatever made them cool in the first place -- remember the Force? One word: midichlorians.
And then there are the unintended consequences. For instance, if midichlorians are all it takes, why don't the Jedi have a human breeding program, similar to the Bene Gesserit? Why don't the Jedi attempt genetic engineering, or find a way to inject large amounts of midichlorians into someone who isn't force-sensitive at all? Why hasn't anyone created force technology, either utilizing midichlorians or the principle behind them? Why do we rarely have force-sensitive creatures that aren't even vaguely humanoid -- a sith Rancor, for instance? You can avoid the whole discussion by leaving the Force the way it was in the original Trilogy -- a completely mystical, unexplained, virtually unknown power.
Ah, well. For every handwave Lucas gives to well-established laws of physics, there are at least as many plot holes in Star Trek that are relatively unrelated to its equally vigorous handwaving of physics.
Plotting a course takes the Enterprise crew about 2 an a half seconds. It can take a minute or two for Han or Chewie.
The Picard manouever is actually quite adequate. Warp in, beam over the antimatter, warp out. It just seems likely that they wouldn't have to stop at all.
Also, the Enterprise seems to have a full range of sublight speed. Star Wars ships definitely have one top speed for sublight, and one for light speed. Thus, while the TIEs are easily more maneuverable, the Enterprise is simply faster.
And all this is ignoring the question of how much turbolaser fire the Enterprise's shields can take, or whether they can effectively do "fair" combat. They could easily be within transport range and phaser range but well out of range of the turbolasers, and the phasers should be more than a match for the TIE fighters, seeing as they actually move at light speed and have quite a range, meaning by the time a TIE would get close enough, he'd likely already be destroyed.
There is also the question of just how much damage the Enterprise's phasers and torpedoes (a different kind of torpedo) could do to the Death Star directly. I think this is what most people think of when they call this a debate. But here, assuming the Enterprise can withstand 10 seconds or so of turbolaser fire, they simply have to move in and phaser/torpedo out any turrets in their area -- assuming they need to get that close -- and then proceed with the beaming over of the antimatter.
However, I didn't want to go there, because considering Kirk runs his ship like an Iowa tractor, it seems unlikely that he or his crew would have fast enough reflexes to do any of this, or that any of them would be smart enough to program the computer to do it for them. Also, it's not really relevant -- no TIE is going to get close enough in the 3-5 seconds it would take to beam over the antimatter, plot the course, and warp back out, and I seriously doubt they would have to get within range of the turbolasers if they can beam through miles of atmosphere and miles of solid rock in the same trip. Assuming a TIE did, worst that happens is a little bit of damage (one pass won't do a lot), which will be repaired by the next episode.
There is also the argument that the Enterprise still exists, after ten seasons, while the Death Star has been blown up at least twice now, once before it was even finished. Of course, I don't think it's the same Enterprise for TNG as it is for TOS, but I do think the Enterprise stood up to more than just a few rebels with a mysterious force. That said, Vader was never taken hostage, and was at least faithful to Padme before he went completely psychotic.
I think Enterprise vs Death Star was settled long ago. Just for the record:
The original Death Star did not have any kind of energy shield. I've also never seen the Death Star go faster than light, although I presume it must, in order to travel from planet to planet -- regardless, anything faster than light in Star Wars must enter hyperspace to do so, which is difficult, takes a lot of calculations and preparation.
The Enterprise can go Warp 8 easily, and actually be maneuverable at that speed. If Luke can fly fast enough in his X-Wing to be a problem for the Death Star's turbolaser turrets, the Enterprise should be able to easily dodge anything the Death Star can throw at it, including the superlaser and TIE fighters. But they don't have to fly along a narrow trench and use the Force to aim a pair of proton torpedoes down an exhaust shaft. They can simply orbit at warp 2 or 3 so as to avoid blaster fire, just longe nough to beam over a small chunk of antimatter from the warp drives, assuming they have any power left. And when antimatter and matter collide...
They don't need to beam any significant amount over, either. They should be more than close enough to hit some critical systems -- and they don't need many bothans to die to give them a technical schematic, they can simply scan it and have Spock figure out where to aim it. If they can set off a chain reaction, it should give them more than enough time to warp away, enable shields, and watch the fireworks.
Now, the Force could possibly present a problem here, but assuming it is actually Enterprise vs Death Star, there aren't likely to be any force sensitive people on board the Enterprise for Vader to influence. It would probably be tricky to aim a mind trick from that far away, but even if he could, the crew of the Enterprise has handled various forms of mind control before. And the whole thing will likely be over before Vader can so much as figure out that the Captain's name is James T. Kirk.
Supposing that a Jedi (or dark Jedi, or Sith) could get on board the Enterprise, of course, it becomes an entirely different story. The crew of the Enterprise has exactly as much hand-to-hand combat training as Austin Powers: "Judo...CHOP!" Annakin Skywalker, once actually aboard, could slice through half the crew before Red Alert sounded, and the other half before Uhura could send a distress call. The Vulcan Nerve Pinch requires that you actually manage to touch the enemy's shoulder, and I somehow think Spock would have trouble doing it once Annakin sliced off his hands.
No, the things that have yet to be determined is the paradox of a battle between the Red Shirts, who always die a moment after appearing, and the Stormtroopers, who can't hit the broad side of a planet. There are exceptions, though -- Stormtroopers can hit often enough to tragically wound someone important, and Scotty, as Someone Important, is guaranteed to not die, even though he's a red shirt. Thus, I think Scotty would be tragically wounded, but would win the fight and then go on to be treated back to health by McCoy.
A walking lizard-man who's smart. That's it.
Star Wars and Trek both have obvious flaws. The weapons are always fun -- in Star Wars we have the laser that magically stops just far enough out to make a sword, and the laser that shoots a bolt of laser light that travels slowly enough for a human to dodge. In Trek, you have individual implausible episodes -- if you can dodge a phaser blast because you're supposedly moving so fast, how can you see anything if the phaser moves at the speed of light? How does a phaser set to stun do exactly enough damage to knock someone out, but set to kill, it somehow magically figures out where a person is, and vaporises just the person, not the ground under them?
Anyway, this could've been a much longer rant, but the point is: Ok, maybe the Gorn was cool-looking, but why even bother to mention bumpy-forehead-of-the-week if your solution is the Gorn? He's biped, with two arms, he's reptillian, with insectoid eyes -- basically, he's just stitched together from a few things we know of on Earth. He's hardly something that would've evolved completely independently -- we have stranger life-forms on Earth anyway.
Gorn may be fan service, but he's hardly an interesting alien. You want an interesting alien, look at some of the TOS energy beings, or maybe the silicon-based creature. But one thing Star Wars got at least somewhat closer to right -- most aliens look much more interesting than the Gorn, even in the original Star Wars.
As for Gorn being somehow better than Klingons, I think Worf is at least as intelligent as the Gorn, and I can't say who would win a fair fight. Besides, the Gorn was trapping Kirk -- that's not saying much. If it was Riker down on that planet, it might be a different story.
Funny, I don't think TOS had much of a storyline, either. Or at least, they were too cowardly to ever bother changing it. The biggest change I've seen so far (I'm on Episode 20 of Season 3) is replacing Mr. Desau (or however you spell it) with Mr. Checkov. I mean, most TV shows get a little cowardly with their main characters after awhile, but come on! Stargate at least lets a few gods die, even if they get replaced. O'Niell gets promoted. Teal'c grows hair, loses symbiote. Even TNG: Riker grows a beard for the second season. In TOS, it would seem that things are about to change, but the weirder the episode, the harder they flail at the end to try to wrap things up and get back to normal.
Or not. Quite often, the "ending" feels like someone just shouted "Time!" and they completely leave the problem unsolved.
I'm not saying you're wrong about Enterprise, I haven't seen it, but I think when most people criticise new Trek, they forget just how bad the old Trek could be. Frankly, I'd welcome even a lame storyline by now, provided it actually changes even a little bit.
Right. Who wants to bet they'll forget The Menagerie and the fact that Spock served under Captain Christopher Pike before he served under Kirk?
You just described the original pilot episode, which is technically canon, as it was re-shown in the series proper. Spock served under Captain Pike before he served under Captain Kirk. Which also makes a prequel with both Kirk and Spock just that much more annoying.
The point is that humans are supposedly inventive enough to create new weapons, sometimes faster than the Borg can adapt.
What's always been disappointing for me is how the Borg are slow, stupid, and robotic. Yes, it's creepy, but the Strogg managed to be creepy, while still being realistically mobile and actually scary. The Flood are creepy, scary, and actually more mobile than the Chief, who's arguably much more mobile than Picard. The Strogg are also perhaps more realistic -- good, old-fashioned bullet wounds are going to hurt flesh, reanimated corpse or not. I guess the Borg just have personal shields now, to make that impossible?
But seriously, unless I've missed something important, any idiot should be able to outrun the Borg on foot. Why are they scary, again?
SMB over AppleShare? Maybe for you and me. At work, I discovered that SMB didn't work on my Powerbook, because they were using CIFS, which wasn't supported natively (or I didn't know about it). CIFS is the right solution for Windows clients, or for Linux clients with a Windows server, because SMB is horribly limited -- things like the 2 gig limit on file sizes. I asked the network admin about it, and he set up something -- on the Windows server -- to allow me to access it as an Apple shared FS of some sort.
Yes, go for open standards which are supported between platforms, in case you have to switch. But I'd argue that the cost of switching if one platform fails is less than the cost of maintaining multiple platforms just in case one fails.
And I would guess that most companies which don't go 100% to one platform would dearly like to. I know one company I worked at would've loved to go 100% Debian or Ubuntu, but had to keep Windows on all the desktops to run things like FileMaker. The one I'm currently at is almost 100% Windows -- I'm one of two people I know of who have a Mac, and I also have a small Linux server there, only for my own use. Since I'm the one admining my Mac/Linux stuff, it doesn't bother them, but if their admin had to service my machine, I'm sure he'd rather it be Windows. Another small company in town is 100% Apple, except for one Windows machine in the corner.
In my opinion, most of these companies wish there were more open standards for them to draw on, so that they could go entirely one platform.
As for a TV station, I wouldn't ever consider using Windows to do the actual broadcasting. If they have some people who are hooked on Outlook, fine, their loss if they fsck up their own workstation, but I'd run Linux for both the storage and the broadcast. I would consider alternatives, like BSD, maybe even a Mac, but I probably wouldn't bother, if I could make Linux work. And here, I think it can.
Pardon any inaccuracies, I'm most of the way through TOS, but I've only seen the first season of TNG.
And yes, I know Spock has taken out "Klingons". But they were not Klingons, they were just evil humans with funny eyebrows, evil goatees, and chain mail. Worf does not need chain mail.
I understand their frustration, but since we don't want to say "Personal video recorder", we need a shorter name. I wish we could just say "MythTV", but PVR seems a reasonable compromise -- and in any case, no one has any idea what these mean, either.
What bugs me is that most users, when they get sick of acronyms, end up either inventing new words, misusing existing words, or using the names of specific products. It's at the point now where most people don't know what a web browser is. I say, "Like Internet Explorer," and they go "Oh! I get it!" I suppose that's better than the people who aren't aware of Internet Explorer, only the big Windows XP button that says "Internet".
My father now thinks "VPN" means "remote desktop", because he uses a VPN to secure his remote desktop connection. Most teens don't seem to be aware of "IM", only AOL, MSN, or Yahoo, making it sometimes annoying to explain Google Talk, but (of course) they grasp the concept of iChat instantly.
So, while acronyms aren't helping, I think users are always going to be confused, and tech moves too fast to always be inventing creative names -- and when we do have good names, people complain about how open source projects have such weird names. Well, hey, at least you can pronounce them -- that's better than you can say for most acronyms. I think some go out of their way to be obnoxious -- thttpd, lighttpd...
It's difficult to pinpoint it. It has something to do with changes to one part requiring changes to another. I think I actually realize it as it's happening, but I have to make this change, so maybe I can make another change to try to regain what it was that worked...
And three or four revisions later, I can't remember exactly how I wrote it initially, but I know it was better.
True of both programming and writing, although I can usually fix it in a program. However, I've been using version control more rigorously in my programs, and I will likely be using it in my writing also.
Well, I never read an O'Reilly book on C. I read a much more tutorial-like book on C++, but C is much simpler -- once I knew it, I barely needed a reference. My only problem would be vocabulary, so all I really need at that point is to practice it, and to look up new library functions in the man page.
Perl, though, I have actually read at least one O'Reilly book on. I also frequently had to turn to documentation like the perl OO tutorial when learning a new concept, because it seems every one of the More Than One Way To Do It is always a completely different Way To Do It than in any other language.
I think the difference is that C has very simple syntax, whereas Perl syntax is full of quirks. Thus, to write C, I only need the equivalent of a dictionary, whereas to write Perl, I need the equivalent of a style guide. At first glance, it would seem that English is like Perl, but in reality, not so much:
As much as Perl claims to "do what I mean", both Perl and C have unambiguous rules for how every bit of syntax is interpreted, and these rules are not always obvious to a human. English, as you say, does not have hard and fast rules. It is much more important to write something readable than to write something in the "best" way possible. In fact, if the shortest, most vivid, most eloquent way of expressing something uses a word that your audience isn't likely to have heard, it may be better to write more simply.
That is why I don't care to improve my vocabulary. As for things like grammar and sentence structure, I still believe the best way to improve these is to practice. Although I do occasionally try to learn maddening things like when to use colons or semicolons, I don't think my audience will much care, especially when the rules are so subjective.
I don't spend a lot of time thinking how to write.
I hardly spend any time thinking about the mechanics of sentence structure. I focus on higher-level organizing and actual content. So, for instance, I focus more on whether I'm going to make my character have red eyes, how brightly they'll glow, etc, and on whether I want to spend much time on their eyes, or focus more on their cloak of shadows. I don't really spend any time deciding how to describe the eyes, gnashing my teeth over whether to compare them to embers or hot coals. I give hardly a thought to questions like "his eyes glow like embers" or "the glow of his eyes was oddly like embers" or "embers were like the glow of his eyes" -- maybe I don't use the best possible structure, but when I consciously try to examine different ones, each seems more retarded than the last, and I realize that I got it right the first time.
But of course, even high-level choices a
This is true, but Firefox is a prime candidate for this kind of fine-grained permission. Firefox has extensions. It's entirely possible that there are some parts of Firefox I trust absolutely, and other parts I'd rather not trust at all.
I was aware of Windows Vista when I described my system. And in security, "nitpicking" is a good thing. You can't just say "po-tay-toe, po-tah-toe", when it comes to, say, rsh vs ssh.
Thanks for clarifying, though. I'm surprised they were that thorough.