The very idea of "obscenity" is something which is not objectively harmful but merely offends some people's sensibilities. Allowing "obscene" material to be censored is antithetical to the very idea of free speech. It is not the same as yelling "Fire" in a crowded theatre. Obscene material is almost always material which offenders a bunch of religious people, and they've used this idiotic idea to censor out ideas or material they don't like, even though no real harm is done by them.
Leaving it up to the community to define obscenity gives communities basically a carte blanche to censor whatever they want and violate federally-guaranteed rights. Applying "I can't tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it" to a legal system is simply insane. Laws by their very definition must have some sort of objective standard to live up to. Obscenity is a purely subjective standard, and it has no place in this legal system.
More than that, wouldn't Alabama not respecting New York's descriptions of obscenity violate the Full Faith and Credit clause? If a competent jurisdiction says that it's not obscene, don't other jurisdictions have to respect that?
Even if this is real, he hasn't won the contest yet. The rules require not only that XP boot, but it must also dual-boot with Mac OS X. The user must be presented with the option of which OS to run at boot-time, and narf2006 hasn't done that yet.
I don't think you're taking allocation and freeing seriously enough. Students, especially ones who learned the basics in Java or another "do it all for me" language, generally have a difficult time with pointers. My school, for example, just switched the two basic programming courses from C++ over to Java. The algorithms course is taught in C++ and gets into memory management and pointer programming fairly deeply. I worked with a guy who took the programming courses in Java, and he had absolutely no idea what was going on in C++ with respect to pointers. You're a low-level C programmer, so pointers are probably like fruit to you. But there are plenty of students out there who can't make sense of them, and it's not entirely their own fault.
Getting the basics in C or C++ gives students the tools they need to pick up pretty much any other procedural language. Someone fluent in C++ can pick up Java in a day or two. Someone fluent in Java has to learn entirely new concepts (like direct access to memory) in order to pick up C++ or C.
I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, but from my personal experience, if I'd learned Java first instead of C++, I would've had a bitch of a time learning how to program in Objective-C / Cocoa, which is how I make my bread and butter currently. But really, I think that as far as problem-solving methodology goes, students should go through what the field of computer science has gone through. Start out with structured programming and then realize that there are certain problems that it cannot solve easily. Then introduce them to object-oriented programming so they can have a basis through which to appreciate it. I count being able to write a purely structured program as a good thing.
It depends on what you're trying to teach the person. If you want to teach someone how to write programs using programming languages, then yes, things like VisualBasic will probably be good starting points. But if you want to teach someone the fundamentals of computer programming, including proper memory management, efficient use of resources and how the compiler is going to see the human-readable code, then I think that C is still the best introductory programming language out there.
Basically, I'm saying that students of computer science shouldn't start off with VisualBasic. But if you're a hobbyist or a network engineering type who needs to be able to write working scripts and stuff like that, sure, VisualBasic is as good as any other ultra-high-level language, I suppose.
Under logic, a video game whose installer won't run on a system with anything less than a GeForce FX-series card is "DRMed".
DRM has to do with enforcing copyright protections. Apple didn't drop support for older machine models because of copyright; they did it because it's a pain in the ass to support them.
If all it does is look at the local hard disks then why even bother parsing the word files? It would be much more efficient to just copy all the word files and then use some kind of filtering program once you got home. Now if it were to scan a large network there might be an advantage to checking the files individually before copying the whole file since you might not have to read the whole file before skipping it but even still doing the parsing prior to copying to the iPod wouldn't be how I would go about it. A 60 GB iPod can hold a LOT of word documents and preprocessing them all seems like a waste in my opinion.
I don't disagree. But this guy's basically trying to get attention, so he wrote a program that he can kinda-sorta say scans specifically for "classified" or "sensitive" documents, even if his method is a simple keyword search.
Here's what I'm betting actually happened. This guy wrote a program that does some basic and not-very-remarkable parsing of Word files on C: and copies whatever it finds to the iPod. Then he used Windows Auto-run to automatically execute it when the iPod was plugged in. Ooooh, wow, impressive.
Even if you were able to create a program that actually ran on the iPod's operating system, which by all indications, you can't, that program certainly wouldn't have access to the files of a computer it was connected to. The iPod OS can't even read or write NTFS, for Christ's sake. It's HFS+ or FAT32, period. Either way, this guy did not write a program "for the iPod". He wrote a program (probably in VisualBasic or something like that) that any first-year computer science program could write and then used a not-too-clever trick to get it to launch automatically. That method won't even work on Mac OS X, since there is no auto-run "feature" for removable media.
The only reason no one ever did it before was because it's not a scenario people would take seriously. Simple security measures like disabling auto-run and limiting executable permissions to a specific set of programs would nip this "vulnerability" in the bud.
It does not have 'helper apps'? It does not start the program bittorrent when download a.torrent? Does it run a plugin when the page states it to do it, like when you enter the site 'trailers.apple.com'?
Uh, well yeah, it supports plug-ins. But that's not what you asked. When I download an MP3, it doesn't automatically open in iTunes.
Today, a psychologist has just confirmed that if you posit an outlandishly stupid to John Dvorak and give only the weakest of supporting arguments, he'll run with it, get it published, and it'll appear on Slashdot. This finding will be published in numerous reputable psychology journals.
Yeah, because nothing encourages billions in R&D investment like socializing the results. I don't know about you, but I like seeing new cures for dangerous illnesses. I'd like to think that our rush to end one particular scourge didn't destroy our ability to fight others.
Pharmaceutical companies make billions of dollars per quarter in pure profit, with their R&D budgets being dwarfed by their advertising budgets. Even if their profits were cut in half, their R&D would be totally unaffected. In other words, despite all this blustering about socialized medicine and price controls stifling their ability to compete, they could easily take a hit and charge less for their drugs here in the States. But they don't, because their products are necessary for our survival and well-being, and we'll pay whatever we have to. Why do you think that there hasn't been a mass boycott of oil and gasoline lately? Because people would freeze to death or not be able to get to work.
There is no "invisible hand" with these people. They've formed a cartel to make sure that there are no market checks on themselves.
And to those who would suggest "fairly compensating" them for the stolen patent: isn't that the whole purpose of the market? Any pharma company who expects to make $X from their research, but only gets $X/5 because the government decides to "liberate" the work, will not make the same mistake again.
Oooh no, you mean they'll only make $1 billion in profit per quarter instead of $5 billion? Oh Heavens NO! Whatever will the CEOs do?!
Whether you think medicine-for-profit is right or wrong is immaterial; that's what we have under the current system. Take away the profit and you take away the medicine as well, and I think that's the far worse crime.
The crime is the pharmaceutical industry colluding against the interests of the consumer. The United States is the only country which does not cap prescription drug prices, so Pfizer and their ilk gouge our citizenry to maintain their insane profit levels and bribe Congressmen and Senators (sorry, I meant "lobby") to keep things that way. They are corporations; it's not their job to protect human life or rights. Their only concern is to make money, and they'll step on whoever and whatever they can to do so. That's why the government has to step in from time to time to keep them in line. If the drug company CEOs have to live without a new yacht for a year so that the world can be rid of AIDS, I'd say that's a more than fair trade-off.
No there is not a unix version of Photoshop. Photoshop is a carbon app not a cocoa app. Adobe is pretty not happy about the rewrite coming to make it work on intel Macs because there are no Carbon APi's for Intel OS X.
Wrong. Apple has ported the Carbon API to x86 OS X. Otherwise the Finder wouldn't be a universal binary. Adobe is unhappy because they finally have to move to Photoshop over to Xcode.
and Havning had to use Filmgimp now Cinepaint http://www.cinepaint.org/ (lol and the status of that link should tell you something. I can tell you that having used photoshop since version 2.0 that gimp sucks to use. I mean jesus there is not even a keyboard short cut to change the brush size. (maybe now but in 2003 I couldn't find it nor was one listed in the docs.) I mean come on how basic a thing is that? OK mark me a troll.
I don't know about troll, but you're certainly misinformed.
What does that have to do with your claim that Jesus promised to kill everyone when he returns?
Take a look at Matthew 25:31-46. Even chapter 24. Those are supposedly Jesus' own words about what will happen when he comes back.
You are making certain claims about Christian apocalyptic literature and the place it holds in religious teachings. You are describing a doctrine that is a unique creation of American Evangelicals, and then pretending that all christians believe that, and that they always have. The facts say otherwise.
At the heart of it, it doesn't really matter what most Christians believe. You're right; a good chunk of Christians are reasonable people who've never read the Bible. (This is why they simply assume that it's full of amazing spiritual teachings.) But the religion itself, which comes from the Bible, is seriously violent. It's pretty much a death cult obsessed with human sacrifice.
You are making two contrary claims here. You say that the Bible has a very definite, specific morality that is despicable, but on the other hand, you say that interpreting what the Bible is impossible, its just picking and choosing. Does that mean that by reading of a despicable morality in the Bible, you are picking and choosing to create something that you like, to be used as a rhetorical weapon against people you disagree with?
As a whole, the Bible's morality is despicable. While there are specifics which may or may not be consistent, the overall message is clear: Pleasing God is the most important thing, even at the cost of your fellow human beings' lives. There are no verses which deviate from this basic message.
There are some nice things in there, but hardly anything that other philosophers hadn't come up with centuries beforehand.
Well yeah that's a good point. A related question is why does God communicate solely by means of words?
According to the Bible, he didn't always. Hell, he and Moses would have conversations regularly. But it's no coincidence that the drop-off of divine events and miracles correlates with the rise of science, reason and critical thought. The simple answer is that he's a fictional being, like all the other gods and spirits people have come up with over the years.
Jesus never claimed that his works were an absolute authority either, having never written any. And of course the Jews believe that the Mosaic law only applies to Jews.
Yeah, but his followers recorded what he said, and Jesus went around claiming he was God's son. He also said that there was no way to God except through him.
Here's a quotation from Artistotle: 'For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.' Aristotle held that some races (and women) were naturally inferior to the Greeks, so slavery was natural. By your standard, one racist passage makes it a racist book, regardless of the social context of the time. But you say that no-one worships Aristotle, so its ok. What if people started worshipping him? Would that be a reason to condemn Aristotle, ban his works and burn every copy?
Yes, by my standard, it's a racist book. When did I advocate burning every copy of anything? Why do you assume that I would have a difficult time with Aristotle being a racist and his works reflecting that? I don't know if you're a Christian or not, but I've often encountered similar reactions from Christians I was arguing with about this kind of stuff. They assume that if I don't believe in the Bible as an infallible spiritual authority, I must believe in something else as an infallible spiritual authority. So they say things like, "Well so-and-so said some racist things too! I suppose you think he's a racist?" YES! Of course! I have no problems applying my standards across t
No, I'm correcting an error you made. You said Jesus himself said he would kill everyone who didn't believe in him when he returns. That is simply wrong.
Luke 10:10 is pretty clear that cities who do not receive Jesus' message will be worse off than Soddom and Gammorah.
The Eastern Orthodox Church doesn't, they don't include it in their Bible. Amillenialism is the official Catholic and mainline Protestant dogma, established by St. Augustine in the 4th century. It teaches that the Book of Revelation is allegorical or possibly refers to Roman Emperors, the Antichrist is a metaphor and not a real person. From religioustolerance.org: "Events described in The Olivet Discourse (Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21) and in most of the book of Revelation are seen as occurrences which have already happened, or which are symbolic in nature and not to be taken literally." What you mistakenly call the dogma of all of Christianity is one particular interpretation created in the 19th century by American fundamentalists. For someone so committed to the scientific method, you have a remarkable disdain for facts.
What "facts"? All we have here is a book whose claims cannot be substantiated in any way. And if major churches like the Catholic Church consider Revelation as divine inspiration, then you've got at least half of Christendom that adheres to that as well.
The Bible is a book, not a person, it has no morality.
That's a load of crap. When a book preaches about how you should lead your life, it has an internal moral system. The Bible's morality is distorted and frankly despicable.
What the Bible teaches is an addition/subtraction affair, because it has a mixed and ambiguous set of teachings that are open to interpretation.
If a book can't maintain internal consistency, then it's not a matter of "interpretation"; it's a matter of which parts you like better.
The question here is not whether we can pull out some verses of the Bible that can be interpreted to support immoral acts, but whether Christian churches make that interpretation, and whether it makes up a substantial part of their teachings. Additionally, Christian theology is heavily influenced by ancient Greek philosophy.
No, those passages overtly support massively unethical and immoral acts. The only "interpretation" involved is whether or not you want to go beyond the black-and-white text on the page. And for a book that's supposedly handed down from an almighty god, no one's given a satisfactory explanation as to why he would choose to be so contradictory or why he would be so cryptic.
The works of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle make up what we might call the unofficial scriptures, and they too have been used to justify various acts we now consider to be immoral. For example, the Great Chain of Being. If you want to implicate our culture's ancient roots for perpetrating various evil things, why do you stop with the Bible? It is very clear the that Great Chain of Being justifies slavery, that it has been used that way and that is a Platonic idea. Do you denounce Plato?
Yeah, no shit, Sherlock. The difference is that Plato never claimed that his works were an absolute authority, nor do people worship Plato.
Oh, but one passage explicitly rejecting racism is nullified by one that encourages racism?
Having a passage that supports racism makes it a racist book. What the hell is so hard to understand about this?
You are claiming that this specific verse substantially influences Christian behavior and morality, but that contradicts historical Christian anti-semitism.
Since the Jews themselves supposedly condemned Jesus to death, there's plenty of justification in the Bible for hating them. The refused to accept their own messiah. Why wouldn't God be angry with them?
Of course. Exodus is a phenomenal display of this supposedly loving God being excessively theatrical and sadistic with human life. Why would an all-powerful God go through cursing the Egyptians with ten plagues when he could've just waved his magic wand? The only explanation is that he's a cruel monster. Exodus itself even says that God "hardened Pharaoh's heart" so that he would refuse to let the Israelites go! When fundamentalist Christians conclude that God is vengeful and cruel, they are absolutely, 100% correct, according to the Bible.
You seem awfully sure of that. Matthew 24 and Luke 17/18 have Jesus speaking about his return, but he says nothing about killing everyone or sending them to hell and the display is described as 'with power and great glory'. Maybe you are thinking of Revelation, but that is a record of a vision, not the words of Jesus. And according to Wikipedia: 'Protestant founder Martin Luther considered Revelation to be "neither apostolic nor prophetic" and stated that "Christ is neither taught nor known in it"'.
So you pick and choose which parts of the Bible you like. That's fine. But the religious establishments themselves, including the Catholic Church, have officially recognized Revelation as divinely-inspired.
Do those passages actually exist? You haven't shown that they do. Its true that God is said to have committed infanticide and various horrible things, but you don't say where it commands believers to engage in the same acts as a matter of policy. God also let his son die - do you interpret that to mean that the Bible teaches us to let our children die?
Not from that, no. But you're forgetting that God told Abraham to sacrifice his only son just to test how faithful he was. So yes, God is very much okay with killing children. He destroyed the populations of Soddam and Gammorah by raining down fire. (And by the way, Lot, the only "righteous man" in the city, offers to throw his daughters into a mob to be raped in place of the two angels who came to visit him.) As for intolerance and racism in the Bible, there you go.
On the specific topic of racism, the parable of the Good Samaritan is notable because for the Jews of the time, Samaritans were a despised ethnic and religious minority group. Do you admit that this parable exists in Christian literature, and that it is a clearly anti-racist message? Let's assume for now that you are right that there are racist passages in the Bible, or that some passages could be interpreted in that light. At best, you might be able to conclude that the Bible is ambiguous on racism, but you are making a much stronger claim that the Bible is clearly racist. Furthermore, this is a very bizzare reductive claim, that the level of racism in a society is determined by what is written in their holy books and if holy books were different (or didn't exist at all), racism would not exist.
Exodus 19:5 explicitly states that God favors the Israelites over all other people. The Bible is not "ambiguous" on racism. Why do you think slavery stuck around in the Americas for so long? It was economically convenient, and slave-owners could justify their actions with the Bible. Morality is not an addition / subtraction kind of affair. One passage explicitly condoning racism is not "nullified" or canceled out by one that encourages tolerance. If you murder someone, you are and always will be a murderer; it doesn't matter how much charity you give.
I assume that all Christians are not good people. I assume that all Christians accept they are quite flawed and unworthy of God's love and mercy and only thanks to Christ are Christians saved. Without Christ, Christians are a pretty sad lot. I believe that I personally am sinful and justly deserving of God's eternal wrath...but I am thankful that God is willing to forgive me anyway.
Sophistry. Being a flawed human being and being a good person are not mutually exclusive. As for you thinking you deserve the wrath of a God who apparently impulsively flooded the entire planet and killed everything... that is unfortunate. You're probably a decent person in real life.
Okay, there was the Old Testament. This was the Law. No man (but Christ) can come to God under the Law. We are too sinful to maintain it. Certainly, there is much to be learned from studying the Old Testament, atrocities and all.
Wait, so the atrocities in the Old Testament are humanity's fault? God ordered most of them! Hell, he committed a few himself!
Then came Jesus, given to the world to bear the cost of our sins so that we may inherit the kingdom of Heaven. Jesus alone was the only human who could meet the requirements of the Law and come into Heaven thusly. He alone was perfect and without sin. His New Testament is that nobody comes to God but through Him. He alone bore the burden of our sins.
That's very poetic, but it makes no sense. God comes down to Earth to lift a curse that he himself put on us? Why not just snap his fingers and make it all better? Isn't he omnipotent? Why all the theatrics? Could it be because Jesus was ripped off of earlier Messiah stories?
I am frustrated by people spouting all the "look at all the bad things that happened in the Old Testament" nonsense. Yes, look at it. There were a lot of atrocities. What's the point of the Old Testament even existing? To show what happens when we try to live according to the Law, our sinfulness, our disconnect from God. The New Testament is what Christians follow and must believe if they are in fact Christians. If one believes the Old Testament, devoid of the New Testament, I would posit that one is roughly following Judaism, not Christianity. Christ's teachings are that the Law is important, but it was the Old way...but the way we cannot follow. He brings the New way to God. He says, "follow me" and His teachings are peace, love, forgiveness, helping those less fortunate than ourselves, etc. Jesus did not spend much time among the religious leaders of His time...He spent it with the poor, the sick, the needy, the weak. His message is most definitely one of tolerance, peace, and forgiveness. And the message of the New Testament is *very much* tied up in showing the fulfillment of prophecy in the Old Testament while rendering the Law moot. Major churches teach Christianity this way...but sinful people (Christians and all) have been getting it wrong since the beginning (which is why things like the Reformation, etc. happened. Martin Luther in his day was called a heretic by the Catholic church...but he was a driving force behind early Protestantism.
Yes, when we try to live by the laws of the Old Testament, everything gets fucked up. But God himself gave those laws to us, and they are clear as day. He himself ordered many massive slaughters in the Old Testament. He even created a slave class out of the Sons of Ham. Humanity isn't perfect, but we're nothing near the monster the Judeo-Christian God is.
Now, does that mean my interpretation or anyone else's is proven any more valid? Of course not. I believe my way, others believe differently. One of my favorite verses in the Bible is the lead up to the story of the Good Samaritan. The key bit that I think many people overlook is when Christ answers the question "What must one do to inherit eternal life?" with "What is written in the Law? How readest thou?
You are so ridiculously incorrect that it's not even amusing. I know, this is Slashdot, and we've become used to this sort of thing. The Bible doesn't say a single thing about "hate gays, hate other religions, hate sex, hate the darkies". Not once. Sorry, bub. Jesus repeatedly demonstrated that it was more important to love than it was to enforce the law. An example of this is when the pharisees looked to condemn him for healing a man on the sabbath (in the OT, it is unlawful to perform any work on the sabbath). At no point was the message to "hate" anyone for anything. Regardless of whether homosexuality is a sin or not, we are told to love each other (friends and enemies both).
Clearly you've never read the Bible. Check out Leviticus sometime. Look at how God himself sends the Angel of Death to commit mass infanticide when he could've just teleported the Israelites out of Egypt. This is not a loving God. Jesus himself promised to come back one day and, in a bloody display, kill everyone and sentence those who didn't believe in him to an eternity of torture. Boy, look at how much he loves everyone.
Must the muslims accept what happen to the World Trade Center? I don't see either as needing acceptance. If I bomb fundamentalist Christians in the name of Durandal64, is it your problem? You clearly seem to not like them and I took it to mean that you thought the world would be a better place without them. Please accept my actions as they were done in your name.
My problem would be that I never told you to do any such thing, nor have I ever claimed to be an infallible authority. The Qur'an, on the other hand, does. Have you ever read these "holy books"? The Qur'an in particular is clear in its message that holy war against the enemies of Islam is not only permissible but encouraged. Can you not see the difference between criticism and a call to war? Seriously, I'm sorry if you're a believing Christian who doesn't want to face the realities of his religion's history, but it's not my fault.
Was Ptolemy not a scientist? Did he not get the whole solar system completely wrong? Does that invalidate all of science? No, but you learn from it that sometimes scientists are wrong. The same goes for Christians. Big whoop.
Ptolemy didn't follow the modern scientific method. Your analogy is flawed. Science and religion are polar opposites in their approaches to problem-solving that it's difficult to draw parallels between them. You haven't addressed the core point that the Bible encourages racist behavior. You simply deny that these passages even exist. The difference is that science eventually showed Ptolemy's model to be wrong and moved on. You can't show "infallible" scriptures to be wrong.
You really don't get the Bible or the religion. Sure, you can pull out one liners and short stories, but when you take them out of the context of the entire thing, they're useless. It's not surprising that you don't get it. I don't, either. Jesus three times told his disciples (who followed him around constantly and heard everything he said) that they didn't get it.
Under what contexts are the murder of thousands of innocent children acceptable? Or unleashing biological weapons on the entire Egyptian population? Or disrupting their water supply? Do you not see the parallels between Moses' actions and modern-day terrorism?
Won't ever happen. It's part of the story of God's relationship with man. It's a part that you don't seem to understand, but that doesn't make it wrong or morally abhorrent. It's neither of those things.
Please explain what part of divinely-sponsored terrorism I need to "understand".
The idea of "true Christianity" is quite frankly, religiously ego-centric and insulting. It's a form of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. You assume that all Christians must be good people just by virtue of being Christians. Therefore, being Christian is virtuous.
I won't deny that the progressive forms of Christianity are far more desirable and tolerant than fundamentalist Christianity, but insofar as adherence to the religion itself, the fundamentalists have plenty of Biblical basis for their points of view, far more than the progressives. Fundamentalists read the Bible, look at the actual black-and-white text and do what it says: hate gays, hate other religions, hate sex, hate the darkies and try and save everyone else's soul. Progressives simply pretend that those parts of the Bible don't exist and pay attention only to Jesus (who never explicitly said that the Old Testament was wrong, in error or should be ignored). And that's fine. Progressive Christians who can recognize their religion's need to co-exist with societal norms are common and reasonable people for the most part.
But what's bad is pretending that their take on Christianity is the only valid one. They start from the assumption that Christianity must be tolerant and loving and interpret the Bible from that framework, completely disregarding history and the text on the page. I'm sorry, but reasonable Christians have to simply accept that there are some real atrocities in their religion's history and that there was valid grounding in their holy scriptures for them. Pretending that people like the Inquisitors didn't believe in God is just absurd, to be honest. In the Middle Ages, religion was literally entrenched in everyone's life. You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who exists today who believes as strongly as the peasants, inquisitors, lords or anyone back then did. Those people had unquestioning faith. Saying that they weren't Christians belies a staggering ignorance of history.
I'll give credence to this "true Christianity" claim when major churches start putting their money where their mouths are and declare the racist, sexist, morally abhorrent parts of the Bible invalid. If they truly value the principles of being loving and tolerant, they'll acknowledge that no God who with those characteristics could have possibly inspired someone to write the Book of Leviticus. Until then, they want to have their cake and eat it to: pretend that they have the divine words from God and simultaneously ignore those words whenever it's not convenient or societally acceptable.
Veering offtopic here, but: NP can certainly be used to refer to the order of magnitude of the runtime for the algorithm. Simply put, all of the problems in the NP-Complete class don't (currently) have precise solutions for anything less than a superpolynomial time requirement relative to their input-- and hence the need for faster, sloppier heuristics and approximations.
Well personally, I've never heard it used to describe running time. Nor have I ever heard the term "NP-safe" or have any idea what it could mean. Anyway, I don't think Chloe was referring to running time in the quote. When was the last time you told someone to use an "O(log N)" algorithm for something? It's generally implied that you want to use the fastest algorithm allowable within constraints.
And would facial recognition even fall into the NP domain?
They've always put invalid IP's in the show, probably to stop people from actually going to those IP's. Just ask Mark Hammil about what can happen when your phone number is put in a movie.:)
The more glaring errors in the show come when Chloe is running around the office just spouting jargon off. Like in last night's episode, someone made a comment about modifying a header file to grant privileges. Chloe also mentioned an "NP-safe" algorithm for facial recognition in one episode. (NP is a classification of problems, not algorithms.)
One thing I have always liked about the show is that they tend to use real interfaces on their computers, not some stylized slideshow. When Jack looks up the computer's IP address in the exchange you mention, he actually goes to the proper place in Mac OS X: the Network preference pane. Everything is laid out exactly as it should be. He opens Palmer's memoirs with the actual version of Microsoft Word for OS X.
What the hell is so unbelievable about Jobs' claims? The old PowerBooks sat on a 167 MHz bus with a processor architecture that was barely on life support. So now you've got a dual-core processor on a PCIe bus architecture and a 667 MHz FSB. 3x faster is certainly not an implausible claim. Same goes for the iMac. If a single-core Yonah is approximately comparable to a single-core G5, then 2x faster for a Core Duo over the single-core G5 isn't terribly unbelievable either. The upper limits of 4x faster and 3x faster might be stretching it a bit, but I'm sure there are benchmarks out there where this is the case. When you give a range like that, you're giving exactly that: a range.
And by the way, Apple's now trashing their own product now. As far as I'm concerned, it's a victimless crime.:)
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The very idea of "obscenity" is something which is not objectively harmful but merely offends some people's sensibilities. Allowing "obscene" material to be censored is antithetical to the very idea of free speech. It is not the same as yelling "Fire" in a crowded theatre. Obscene material is almost always material which offenders a bunch of religious people, and they've used this idiotic idea to censor out ideas or material they don't like, even though no real harm is done by them.
Leaving it up to the community to define obscenity gives communities basically a carte blanche to censor whatever they want and violate federally-guaranteed rights. Applying "I can't tell you what it is, but I know it when I see it" to a legal system is simply insane. Laws by their very definition must have some sort of objective standard to live up to. Obscenity is a purely subjective standard, and it has no place in this legal system.
More than that, wouldn't Alabama not respecting New York's descriptions of obscenity violate the Full Faith and Credit clause? If a competent jurisdiction says that it's not obscene, don't other jurisdictions have to respect that?
Even if this is real, he hasn't won the contest yet. The rules require not only that XP boot, but it must also dual-boot with Mac OS X. The user must be presented with the option of which OS to run at boot-time, and narf2006 hasn't done that yet.
I don't think you're taking allocation and freeing seriously enough. Students, especially ones who learned the basics in Java or another "do it all for me" language, generally have a difficult time with pointers. My school, for example, just switched the two basic programming courses from C++ over to Java. The algorithms course is taught in C++ and gets into memory management and pointer programming fairly deeply. I worked with a guy who took the programming courses in Java, and he had absolutely no idea what was going on in C++ with respect to pointers. You're a low-level C programmer, so pointers are probably like fruit to you. But there are plenty of students out there who can't make sense of them, and it's not entirely their own fault.
Getting the basics in C or C++ gives students the tools they need to pick up pretty much any other procedural language. Someone fluent in C++ can pick up Java in a day or two. Someone fluent in Java has to learn entirely new concepts (like direct access to memory) in order to pick up C++ or C.
I don't necessarily disagree with what you're saying, but from my personal experience, if I'd learned Java first instead of C++, I would've had a bitch of a time learning how to program in Objective-C / Cocoa, which is how I make my bread and butter currently. But really, I think that as far as problem-solving methodology goes, students should go through what the field of computer science has gone through. Start out with structured programming and then realize that there are certain problems that it cannot solve easily. Then introduce them to object-oriented programming so they can have a basis through which to appreciate it. I count being able to write a purely structured program as a good thing.
It depends on what you're trying to teach the person. If you want to teach someone how to write programs using programming languages, then yes, things like VisualBasic will probably be good starting points. But if you want to teach someone the fundamentals of computer programming, including proper memory management, efficient use of resources and how the compiler is going to see the human-readable code, then I think that C is still the best introductory programming language out there.
Basically, I'm saying that students of computer science shouldn't start off with VisualBasic. But if you're a hobbyist or a network engineering type who needs to be able to write working scripts and stuff like that, sure, VisualBasic is as good as any other ultra-high-level language, I suppose.
Under logic, a video game whose installer won't run on a system with anything less than a GeForce FX-series card is "DRMed".
DRM has to do with enforcing copyright protections. Apple didn't drop support for older machine models because of copyright; they did it because it's a pain in the ass to support them.
Here's what I'm betting actually happened. This guy wrote a program that does some basic and not-very-remarkable parsing of Word files on C: and copies whatever it finds to the iPod. Then he used Windows Auto-run to automatically execute it when the iPod was plugged in. Ooooh, wow, impressive.
Even if you were able to create a program that actually ran on the iPod's operating system, which by all indications, you can't, that program certainly wouldn't have access to the files of a computer it was connected to. The iPod OS can't even read or write NTFS, for Christ's sake. It's HFS+ or FAT32, period. Either way, this guy did not write a program "for the iPod". He wrote a program (probably in VisualBasic or something like that) that any first-year computer science program could write and then used a not-too-clever trick to get it to launch automatically. That method won't even work on Mac OS X, since there is no auto-run "feature" for removable media.
The only reason no one ever did it before was because it's not a scenario people would take seriously. Simple security measures like disabling auto-run and limiting executable permissions to a specific set of programs would nip this "vulnerability" in the bud.
Today, a psychologist has just confirmed that if you posit an outlandishly stupid to John Dvorak and give only the weakest of supporting arguments, he'll run with it, get it published, and it'll appear on Slashdot. This finding will be published in numerous reputable psychology journals.
There is no "invisible hand" with these people. They've formed a cartel to make sure that there are no market checks on themselves. Oooh no, you mean they'll only make $1 billion in profit per quarter instead of $5 billion? Oh Heavens NO! Whatever will the CEOs do?! The crime is the pharmaceutical industry colluding against the interests of the consumer. The United States is the only country which does not cap prescription drug prices, so Pfizer and their ilk gouge our citizenry to maintain their insane profit levels and bribe Congressmen and Senators (sorry, I meant "lobby") to keep things that way. They are corporations; it's not their job to protect human life or rights. Their only concern is to make money, and they'll step on whoever and whatever they can to do so. That's why the government has to step in from time to time to keep them in line. If the drug company CEOs have to live without a new yacht for a year so that the world can be rid of AIDS, I'd say that's a more than fair trade-off.
Take a look at Matthew 25:31-46. Even chapter 24. Those are supposedly Jesus' own words about what will happen when he comes back.
At the heart of it, it doesn't really matter what most Christians believe. You're right; a good chunk of Christians are reasonable people who've never read the Bible. (This is why they simply assume that it's full of amazing spiritual teachings.) But the religion itself, which comes from the Bible, is seriously violent. It's pretty much a death cult obsessed with human sacrifice.
As a whole, the Bible's morality is despicable. While there are specifics which may or may not be consistent, the overall message is clear: Pleasing God is the most important thing, even at the cost of your fellow human beings' lives. There are no verses which deviate from this basic message.
There are some nice things in there, but hardly anything that other philosophers hadn't come up with centuries beforehand.
According to the Bible, he didn't always. Hell, he and Moses would have conversations regularly. But it's no coincidence that the drop-off of divine events and miracles correlates with the rise of science, reason and critical thought. The simple answer is that he's a fictional being, like all the other gods and spirits people have come up with over the years.
Yeah, but his followers recorded what he said, and Jesus went around claiming he was God's son. He also said that there was no way to God except through him.
Yes, by my standard, it's a racist book. When did I advocate burning every copy of anything? Why do you assume that I would have a difficult time with Aristotle being a racist and his works reflecting that? I don't know if you're a Christian or not, but I've often encountered similar reactions from Christians I was arguing with about this kind of stuff. They assume that if I don't believe in the Bible as an infallible spiritual authority, I must believe in something else as an infallible spiritual authority. So they say things like, "Well so-and-so said some racist things too! I suppose you think he's a racist?" YES! Of course! I have no problems applying my standards across t
Sophistry. Being a flawed human being and being a good person are not mutually exclusive. As for you thinking you deserve the wrath of a God who apparently impulsively flooded the entire planet and killed everything ... that is unfortunate. You're probably a decent person in real life.
Wait, so the atrocities in the Old Testament are humanity's fault? God ordered most of them! Hell, he committed a few himself!
That's very poetic, but it makes no sense. God comes down to Earth to lift a curse that he himself put on us? Why not just snap his fingers and make it all better? Isn't he omnipotent? Why all the theatrics? Could it be because Jesus was ripped off of earlier Messiah stories?
Yes, when we try to live by the laws of the Old Testament, everything gets fucked up. But God himself gave those laws to us, and they are clear as day. He himself ordered many massive slaughters in the Old Testament. He even created a slave class out of the Sons of Ham. Humanity isn't perfect, but we're nothing near the monster the Judeo-Christian God is.
The idea of "true Christianity" is quite frankly, religiously ego-centric and insulting. It's a form of the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. You assume that all Christians must be good people just by virtue of being Christians. Therefore, being Christian is virtuous.
I won't deny that the progressive forms of Christianity are far more desirable and tolerant than fundamentalist Christianity, but insofar as adherence to the religion itself, the fundamentalists have plenty of Biblical basis for their points of view, far more than the progressives. Fundamentalists read the Bible, look at the actual black-and-white text and do what it says: hate gays, hate other religions, hate sex, hate the darkies and try and save everyone else's soul. Progressives simply pretend that those parts of the Bible don't exist and pay attention only to Jesus (who never explicitly said that the Old Testament was wrong, in error or should be ignored). And that's fine. Progressive Christians who can recognize their religion's need to co-exist with societal norms are common and reasonable people for the most part.
But what's bad is pretending that their take on Christianity is the only valid one. They start from the assumption that Christianity must be tolerant and loving and interpret the Bible from that framework, completely disregarding history and the text on the page. I'm sorry, but reasonable Christians have to simply accept that there are some real atrocities in their religion's history and that there was valid grounding in their holy scriptures for them. Pretending that people like the Inquisitors didn't believe in God is just absurd, to be honest. In the Middle Ages, religion was literally entrenched in everyone's life. You would be hard-pressed to find anyone who exists today who believes as strongly as the peasants, inquisitors, lords or anyone back then did. Those people had unquestioning faith. Saying that they weren't Christians belies a staggering ignorance of history.
I'll give credence to this "true Christianity" claim when major churches start putting their money where their mouths are and declare the racist, sexist, morally abhorrent parts of the Bible invalid. If they truly value the principles of being loving and tolerant, they'll acknowledge that no God who with those characteristics could have possibly inspired someone to write the Book of Leviticus. Until then, they want to have their cake and eat it to: pretend that they have the divine words from God and simultaneously ignore those words whenever it's not convenient or societally acceptable.
Seriously? That's fucking awful. Why not just use group.h? That's what it's there for.
Obviously not enough. CTU has moved to Dells for seasons 4 and 5. In season 3, they had G5's. :)
Yep. My school uses 172.16.x.x for our internal printers.
And would facial recognition even fall into the NP domain?
They've always put invalid IP's in the show, probably to stop people from actually going to those IP's. Just ask Mark Hammil about what can happen when your phone number is put in a movie. :)
The more glaring errors in the show come when Chloe is running around the office just spouting jargon off. Like in last night's episode, someone made a comment about modifying a header file to grant privileges. Chloe also mentioned an "NP-safe" algorithm for facial recognition in one episode. (NP is a classification of problems, not algorithms.)
One thing I have always liked about the show is that they tend to use real interfaces on their computers, not some stylized slideshow. When Jack looks up the computer's IP address in the exchange you mention, he actually goes to the proper place in Mac OS X: the Network preference pane. Everything is laid out exactly as it should be. He opens Palmer's memoirs with the actual version of Microsoft Word for OS X.
Watch the god damn keynote. He explicitly says, "This isn't going to be true for all benchmarks".
What the hell is so unbelievable about Jobs' claims? The old PowerBooks sat on a 167 MHz bus with a processor architecture that was barely on life support. So now you've got a dual-core processor on a PCIe bus architecture and a 667 MHz FSB. 3x faster is certainly not an implausible claim. Same goes for the iMac. If a single-core Yonah is approximately comparable to a single-core G5, then 2x faster for a Core Duo over the single-core G5 isn't terribly unbelievable either. The upper limits of 4x faster and 3x faster might be stretching it a bit, but I'm sure there are benchmarks out there where this is the case. When you give a range like that, you're giving exactly that: a range.
:)
And by the way, Apple's now trashing their own product now. As far as I'm concerned, it's a victimless crime.