If he discovers that all your validation is on the client side
Sigh. The valid point that one should do server side validation is not a counterargument to the point that preventing invalid user input is far better than correcting it. Validation on the client side e.g. a MS-style calendar widget does not stop one from doing server-side checks against intensionally malformed input.
Will slashdot ever drag itself into the year 2003 and provide the ability to edit posts?
Hopefully and probably never. It's too open to abuse, and lord knows that some chump here would get his kicks abusing it.
How to abuse it is simple: I make a post saying something agreeable, say "Windoze sux, Linux rox". Symbolic replies with "I Agree!". I edit my post to read "Symbolic sucks donkeys".
For all practical purposes physical resources are infinite
Right, so the USA doesn't care at all about middle-east oil 'cos there's infinite amounts of it in Texas. Not.
Sun has an essentially infinite amount of energy
Which is coming our way at a set, finite rate.
Even the productivity of agriculture has been increasing exponentially over the history of civilization.
Uh, I call bullshit on that one. There is a finite amount of land area available, and a suprisingly large fraction of it is used by us already. You can increase yields, what 3 or 4 times over by increasingly drastic tactics like growing GM crops and strong pesticides. You call that unlimited? far from it.
Do not make the clasic mistake of mistaking the early stages of an S-curve for an exponential graph. In nature there are limits to everything, and when you get near them, things level off.
Mathematically speaking, "practically infinite" is a contradiction in terms.
It's amazing what gets marked as "Insightful" around here.
Indeed it is. C and C++ programs are good in their place, but are not the right tool for every job. Java and C# (excuse me if I can't make a big whoop of the distinction right now) often are.
BTW, you do know how C# blocks use of unitialised object references or do you just like throwing insults?
Building a self-aware machine is going to be a bit more difficult than just hooking together a masssive beowolf cluster and hitting it with lightning
Absolutely. Everybody knows that software doesn't write itself. Doing this is going to provide decades of gainfull employment to swarms of grad students.
Penrose is no idiot, but when he says that he is out of his area of knowledege and way out of his depth.
Very, very short version of arguments against: 1) By application Godel's theorem, you can't make a theorem-proving machine which is guaranteed to prove any mathematical theorem. Yet human mathematicians prove theorems. Rebutal: human mathematicians usually eventually prove even difficult theorems, but they don't come with guarantees either. A heursitic incomplete search may do as well.
2) "human thought cannot be simulated by any computation" - ie you can't build, using only ordinary household molecules, something that works as well as a human brain. Rebutal: So what's a human brain made from then?
IDE drives have been around for a long time, and will be around for a long time from now on, even when SATA becomes standard issue on motherboards. Hell, floppy drives are still around...
Uh, I think you're answering the wrong question. Sure, new mobos still have IDE controllers as well as SATA. But the odds of new boxes shipping with IDE hard drives fitteed is rapidly falling. And if I read the parent post right, depite your protestations that IDE, Like COM port and floppy controller will still be there, the owners of boxes like this will be plum out of luck.
Yeah, so they can open the box up and add an obsolete hd, blah blah blah, goodbye to 90% of the consumer market.
So I am actually running a nice new machine right now with SATA hard drives. Assembling it (well, the HD part of the assembly anyway) was a pleasure and so far it has been fast, quiet and reliable. Does this mean that I can't run Linux on this box?
A number? Not right away it isn't. If I read it in as a string, it isn't a number until I do a few things to make SURE it's a number.
I think I see your point, but you are in a weakly typed language here. You are trying to make sure if it is a valid number or not. The intension of the variable is to hold a number, not a general string, despite the fact that it can also hold erroneous values. So give it a i prefix, validate it and move on.
Ok, I read in a number as a string. Then I use it as a number. Then I format it using a regexp. Then I print it as a string. What is it, a number, or a string?
It's a number.
As the other guy pointed out, if your variable contained the value "iamatard" then things would be going wrong.
LOTR was made with the best effects available, including new stuff. If the effects don't look primitive in 20 years time I'd be very surprised
I'm not sure of that. There is a point were it stops making a difference, and it's indistinguishable from real. IMHO LotR a milestone- is at that point (mostly - don't mention the ents). It is the end of special-effects-as-special-effects, you know, stuff that you look at and go "hey, that's pretty special". After a while the brain adjusts and you just accept that Gandalf is twice as tall as Frodo and it seems normal not special.
From here on, it gets cheaper. In 20 years time, I expect to see a couple of guys in a garage doing effects that good. Of course, as the making-of features on the LotR:FotR DVD brings home is that enormous detail requires enormous effort. Literally hundreds of man-years of work went into the costumes, sets and so on.
, I really have to wonder if machines with locked-in BIOS sets are going to suffer the same fate as DIVX discs, Microsoft's "Bob,"... technology graveyards
If Joe Punter is going to buy a computer to surf up email on the interweb, how concerned is he going to be that it cannot run "lee-nucks" whatever that is? He already knows it's got Microsoft's software on it, like it should. So it's got a "BIOS" too. Right.
When MS has so much market share, many consumers will sadly not have an issue with this.
If you left your house door open and somebody entered and made a mess in your house (or worse!) then who is to blame? Who is at fault?
I never get tired of saying this, because it never stops being pertinent:
No matter how big a moron you are, no matter if you leave your front door wide open, then thief who walks in and takes your stuff is still a thief, still guilty in the eyes of the law, and still deserves to be put away.
If you believe otherwise, you're not far off from the "women who wear short skirts have no case if they get raped" school of thought.
Perhaps fact is too strong a word. However, go over to salon.com (click through the stupid ad) and find a recent article in the life section entitled "Falling down".
You also cannot deny that inequality in the western world is on the increase - that is, money is being made, but the trend is for a smaller fraction of people to make a larger fraction of it. This is a dangerous social trend, to say nothing of the moral issues.
I agree with that. You really are thinking outside the capitalist box, unlike NineNine (the poster that I replied to). However we should try to make sure that "abolish work for most" is not the same as "mass unemployment and destitution while a few get very rich". If nothing else, the latter will lead to more crime and social disorder. States have toppled because of social situations like that.
Efficiency, in the long run, *does* produce wealth.... wealth is most definitely being created.
Absolutely. And Bill Gates gets most of it.
As was mentioned in the article (which you of course did read) the fact that efficiency puts people out of work is a problem which is not going to go away. It will get worse.
Nope, wrong. the post about Anders Heijelsbeg was correct. Kahn and Co just put an IDE on A.H's compiler then and marketed it very well, to thier mutual benefit.
Re:Microwave the couch
on
NYT on RFID
·
· Score: 3, Funny
You mean you don't have a jiggawatt microwave gun?
If you do have a microwave gun, please make damn sure you get the cat off the couch before you use it.
Self-interest is rarely the main driving force in our life.
One thing that seperates thinking humans from animals is our ability to delay gratification, to do something that has no reward now, in order to get a reward later (e.g. work late), or to avoid somethign that would be nice now, in order to avoid a penalty later (e.g. don't overeat).
I would say that long-term enlightened self-interest is usually the main driving force in our lives
No offence, but you might be on the wrong track. Quality not quantity. This article talks particularly about microwave radiation. Do you know how much of that the sun puts out, and how much makes it down to sea level? Neither no I. You got any data for your statements?
Then point being, if in our evolutionary history, we were not exposed to these levels of this kind of invisible light, then it is entirely possible that it can damage us in ways that we have no defences against.
But if it were the other way around, and Indian people coming to this country were suddenly forbidden to work here, imagine the uproar that would cause among Slashdotters!
I'm imagining it....
business as usual...
utter silence ensues.....
Heck, I'm on an EU passport, and *I* don't have the right to work in the USA. This is perfectly normal practice worldwide - I'm not saying it's right, just commonplace.
So why does this bit of humour get a + insightfull moderation?
Slashdot Mirror
If he discovers that all your validation is on the client side
Sigh. The valid point that one should do server side validation is not a counterargument to the point that preventing invalid user input is far better than correcting it. Validation on the client side e.g. a MS-style calendar widget does not stop one from doing server-side checks against intensionally malformed input.
In short, do both.
Will slashdot ever drag itself into the year 2003 and provide the ability to edit posts?
Hopefully and probably never. It's too open to abuse, and lord knows that some chump here would get his kicks abusing it.
How to abuse it is simple: I make a post saying something agreeable, say "Windoze sux, Linux rox". Symbolic replies with "I Agree!". I edit my post to read "Symbolic sucks donkeys".
For all practical purposes physical resources are infinite
Right, so the USA doesn't care at all about middle-east oil 'cos there's infinite amounts of it in Texas. Not.
Sun has an essentially infinite amount of energy
Which is coming our way at a set, finite rate.
Even the productivity of agriculture has been increasing exponentially over the history of civilization.
Uh, I call bullshit on that one. There is a finite amount of land area available, and a suprisingly large fraction of it is used by us already. You can increase yields, what 3 or 4 times over by increasingly drastic tactics like growing GM crops and strong pesticides. You call that unlimited? far from it.
Do not make the clasic mistake of mistaking the early stages of an S-curve for an exponential graph. In nature there are limits to everything, and when you get near them, things level off.
Mathematically speaking, "practically infinite" is a contradiction in terms.
It's amazing what gets marked as "Insightful" around here.
Indeed it is. C and C++ programs are good in their place, but are not the right tool for every job. Java and C# (excuse me if I can't make a big whoop of the distinction right now) often are.
BTW, you do know how C# blocks use of unitialised object references or do you just like throwing insults?
Building a self-aware machine is going to be a bit more difficult than just hooking together a masssive beowolf cluster and hitting it with lightning
Absolutely. Everybody knows that software doesn't write itself. Doing this is going to provide decades of gainfull employment to swarms of grad students.
Penrose is no idiot, but when he says that he is out of his area of knowledege and way out of his depth.
Very, very short version of arguments against:
1) By application Godel's theorem, you can't make a theorem-proving machine which is guaranteed to prove any mathematical theorem. Yet human mathematicians prove theorems. Rebutal: human mathematicians usually eventually prove even difficult theorems, but they don't come with guarantees either. A heursitic incomplete search may do as well.
2) "human thought cannot be simulated by any computation" - ie you can't build, using only ordinary household molecules, something that works as well as a human brain. Rebutal: So what's a human brain made from then?
IDE drives have been around for a long time, and will be around for a long time from now on, even when SATA becomes standard issue on motherboards. Hell, floppy drives are still around...
Uh, I think you're answering the wrong question. Sure, new mobos still have IDE controllers as well as SATA. But the odds of new boxes shipping with IDE hard drives fitteed is rapidly falling. And if I read the parent post right, depite your protestations that IDE, Like COM port and floppy controller will still be there, the owners of boxes like this will be plum out of luck.
Yeah, so they can open the box up and add an obsolete hd, blah blah blah, goodbye to 90% of the consumer market.
So I am actually running a nice new machine right now with SATA hard drives. Assembling it (well, the HD part of the assembly anyway) was a pleasure and so far it has been fast, quiet and reliable. Does this mean that I can't run Linux on this box?
turn off your friggin' cell phone.
That will not help completely. You and your car are still visible to the passive radar using the signals from cell masts.
Read the article.
A number? Not right away it isn't. If I read it in as a string, it isn't a number until I do a few things to make SURE it's a number.
I think I see your point, but you are in a weakly typed language here. You are trying to make sure if it is a valid number or not. The intension of the variable is to hold a number, not a general string, despite the fact that it can also hold erroneous values. So give it a i prefix, validate it and move on.
Ok, I read in a number as a string. Then I use it as a number. Then I format it using a regexp. Then I print it as a string. What is it, a number, or a string?
It's a number.
As the other guy pointed out, if your variable contained the value "iamatard" then things would be going wrong.
LOTR was made with the best effects available, including new stuff. If the effects don't look primitive in 20 years time I'd be very surprised
I'm not sure of that. There is a point were it stops making a difference, and it's indistinguishable from real. IMHO LotR a milestone- is at that point (mostly - don't mention the ents). It is the end of special-effects-as-special-effects, you know, stuff that you look at and go "hey, that's pretty special". After a while the brain adjusts and you just accept that Gandalf is twice as tall as Frodo and it seems normal not special.
From here on, it gets cheaper. In 20 years time, I expect to see a couple of guys in a garage doing effects that good. Of course, as the making-of features on the LotR:FotR DVD brings home is that enormous detail requires enormous effort. Literally hundreds of man-years of work went into the costumes, sets and so on.
, I really have to wonder if machines with locked-in BIOS sets are going to suffer the same fate as DIVX discs, Microsoft's "Bob," ... technology graveyards
If Joe Punter is going to buy a computer to surf up email on the interweb, how concerned is he going to be that it cannot run "lee-nucks" whatever that is? He already knows it's got Microsoft's software on it, like it should. So it's got a "BIOS" too. Right.
When MS has so much market share, many consumers will sadly not have an issue with this.
You're reinvented Merzbow
If you left your house door open and somebody entered and made a mess in your house (or worse!) then who is to blame? Who is at fault?
I never get tired of saying this, because it never stops being pertinent:
No matter how big a moron you are, no matter if you leave your front door wide open, then thief who walks in and takes your stuff is still a thief, still guilty in the eyes of the law, and still deserves to be put away.
If you believe otherwise, you're not far off from the "women who wear short skirts have no case if they get raped" school of thought.
I read the paper. It really was nothing new, nothing groundbreaking. It read just like so many stories before.
Stating the obvious is not Plagarism. Plagarism means copying someone else's words. Got evidence for that?
You also cannot deny that inequality in the western world is on the increase - that is, money is being made, but the trend is for a smaller fraction of people to make a larger fraction of it. This is a dangerous social trend, to say nothing of the moral issues.
Only so long as it is seen as a problem
I agree with that. You really are thinking outside the capitalist box, unlike NineNine (the poster that I replied to). However we should try to make sure that "abolish work for most" is not the same as "mass unemployment and destitution while a few get very rich". If nothing else, the latter will lead to more crime and social disorder. States have toppled because of social situations like that.
Efficiency, in the long run, *does* produce wealth. ... wealth is most definitely being created.
Absolutely. And Bill Gates gets most of it.
As was mentioned in the article (which you of course did read) the fact that efficiency puts people out of work is a problem which is not going to go away. It will get worse.
Philip Kahn created Turbo Pascal
Nope, wrong. the post about Anders Heijelsbeg was correct. Kahn and Co just put an IDE on A.H's compiler then and marketed it very well, to thier mutual benefit.
You mean you don't have a jiggawatt microwave gun?
If you do have a microwave gun, please make damn sure you get the cat off the couch before you use it.
You're a sick sick man.
Serously though, PostgreSQL's feature set (i.e. real sql) shows up MySQL for the toy that it is.
Self-interest is rarely the main driving force in our life.
One thing that seperates thinking humans from animals is our ability to delay gratification, to do something that has no reward now, in order to get a reward later (e.g. work late), or to avoid somethign that would be nice now, in order to avoid a penalty later (e.g. don't overeat).
I would say that long-term enlightened self-interest is usually the main driving force in our lives
No offence, but you might be on the wrong track. Quality not quantity. This article talks particularly about microwave radiation. Do you know how much of that the sun puts out, and how much makes it down to sea level? Neither no I. You got any data for your statements?
Then point being, if in our evolutionary history, we were not exposed to these levels of this kind of invisible light, then it is entirely possible that it can damage us in ways that we have no defences against.
Oh, come off it, only an illiterate shit would fall for this.
That. Doesn't. Make. It. Right.
I'm imagining it
business as usual ...
utter silence ensues .....
Heck, I'm on an EU passport, and *I* don't have the right to work in the USA. This is perfectly normal practice worldwide - I'm not saying it's right, just commonplace.
So why does this bit of humour get a + insightfull moderation?