I'm mucking up the data by saying, "I'm bland and I like nothing and I'm the kind of person who sits around reading the fine print, so the terms of any loan or mortgage offered need to be a lot more devious than average or be built around especially high up-front fees.
There, you've been successfully bucketed for the full-court-press. They don't want to waste this effort on everybody, it would let the cat out of the bag sooner rather than later, and it costs too much. But concerning just the right customer profile, it's worth the bother, if they offer you a mortgage or loan at all.
The small percentage of people with nothing better to do than game the system (and with the skills required to do so successfully) by profiling themselves into a favourable bucket are just a minute footnote to the cost of doing business. Oh, and I presume your network of friends consists entirely of other people with the same profile, and no boundary condition to the rest of the Facebook population, or they'll get you on network analysis.
I'm bland and inconsequential, but many of my friends aren't. If I ever went there, which I won't, I'd be so busted no matter what I posted on my own account.
Forcing the spammers to turn their missives into alphabet gibberish is ultimately the dominant game-theoretic strategy, unless you believe there are legions of people out there determined to puzzle out the alphabetic mess with great intellect and determination and lip movement in order to obtain their beloved superunplasticizers, which they're too dumb to obtain by less tortuous means.
Present company excluded, I think there's a long term shortage of people who are intelligent, determined, and clueless all at the same time (everyone can now pause momentarily to see if that works out as a compliment; basically I'm saying we're a select group here.)
Filtering works a heck of a lot better than your average bike lock, and most people still lug around one of those.
What you can argue successfully is that there is a game theoretic incentive to defect from the expense of maintaining your own filter on your own ISP, and freeload on the coattails of the spam reduction achieved by everyone else working hard to tilt the economics against spam profit.
Just because there's a psychopathic element to your argument doesn't make it wrong. On the other hand, some of this debate is being carried out among people who aren't stuck at "what's in it for MEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!" and we're not buying your argument from where we sit.
The kids are OK. We've got a 2^19 UID actually making sense while typing long paragraphs replete with capital letters and many other symbols reserved for passwords but rarely employed.
The problem with the granting process is that the scientists become so inured to the process, they begin to think their wild-ass call-to-action save-the-planet promotional paragraph is part of the scientific process itself, rather than an ass-pluck social nicety / funding necessity. Scientists sometimes have a lot of trouble grasping that a great deal of what they do to make their science possible isn't automatically science by association.
Ass-pluck is the stock in trade of economists and statisticians, not scientists. I don't know why we let most scientists blather on about twenty year risk assessments. Most of them can't even settle a dinner tab. Fancy posters of the global carbon cycle (with plenty of conspicuous blanks for the terms we're still discovering), that's what a scientist is good for in this debate.
Consensus in science is ordinarily a hundred year process, except when there's money in it alongside a handy brink. Memorize this: science describes, grant applications predict, and never the twain shall meet on the domain of a human system.
This other thing is science + social activism. There's no guarantee that a good scientist has better than average ass-pluck as a social activist, and I would say on the whole they're trained rather badly for the combined function, excepting Dr Strangelove, who clearly had special gifts of insight and improvisation.
I never quite got this scope creep whereby scientists, who normally take a hundred years to agree on anything substantial, became so deeply vested in futurology, but it seems to have been quickly accomplished by running around screaming "we're all going to die!"
They might be right. That doesn't make it science per traditional criteria.
If people had all the CPU power they needed, they would all still be on Pentium4's.
One of the noisiest and least power efficient CPUs to ever make it to mass market. Enron *loved* those CPUs. As the guy said, "Burn, baby, burn!"
CPU requirements for most applications have not increased all that fast in the meantime, except the ones recoded from C++ into JavaScript, or the heavy-duty applications (math, engineering, visualization, adenoidal frittering).
Software developers optimize their software relative to some percentile performance point among their anticipated user base. Performance inflation is to some degree self-fulfilling prophecy.
Just about everyone I know who writes I with angel wings (*I*) feels the need for a overclock-unlocked extreme edition. It hasn't been invented yet and you need it already. OK, we get it. Now let's return to robust statistics such as the median and the mode.
Llano is confusing the hell out of people because it spans incompatible boxes. The product line will make a lot more sense when it gets an additional memory channel at the high end.
Whether optimization burns all information concerning the order of local declarations really depends upon the compiler.
Generally, there's not a lot to be gained by scrambling the order of stack layout. Some short term variables might be moved into registers and have no stack allocation. So optimization deprives you of complete information. But the order of variables on the stack for the variables assigned to the stack could well remain fairly constant, even with optimizations enabled.
Compilers are a formal decision procedure. I wish my optimizer was so potent as to successfully hide this.
There's a recent TED talk where the speaker deduces the writing order of the Indus language by observing symbols crammed into the left margin a la the old joke:
Plan ahea
d
Bon voyage on your mission to tear this guy a new one.
When your business model is to convince people to surrender their marginal economic energies to *rent* the job of grinding away at the accumulation of a fictitious fiat currency, there's only so many ways to skin the cat.
It's quite possible Blizzard planned this out long ago. I don't know why this is painted as a reactive move. Surely they surmised at the outset that eventually the mania would crest. Their server capacity charges are likely far less now than when the game originally rolled out. Parameters change.
The big pharmaceuticals employ similar strategies when drugs go off patent. One is the expansion pack reformulation of the same stupid thing, at three times the price. The other is to make pacts with the generic manufacturers to roll into generic status with a progressive price decline, rather than cold turkey last year's wonder drug 12 tabs for a dollar.
Or is is more likely that the purveyors of WoW are just as myopic as the Warcrack addicts on the grounds that it takes one to snow one.
Besides, not having to run in circles every time Congress decides to twiddle the dates would put people out of work and that's the last thing we need in this economy.
Congratulations, you've just won a contract valued at 4 weeks of "running in circles" paying $100 per hour next time Congress twiddles the dates. This will spare you having to take out a second mortgage for the expanded deck and hot tub. Hope your spouse is the patient type and accepts that you'll be in good coin any day now for the big splurge, where any day now is some four digit year beginning most likely beginning with 2.
A watched politician never twiddles the desired knob.
Everything you're saying is dead on. What you didn't add is the obvious mitigation: Firefox might deign to tell you how many of your add-ons will break as a result of clicking yes to the touted upgrade of the moment.
This fabulous upgrade is incompatible with 10 of your current add-ons. [x] BREAK EVERYTHING NOW [ ] MAYBE LATER
In a sane regulatory system, this could be a perfectly respectable modus operandi. In the first analysis, it's not cost effective to quantify the safety risk of thousands of small failures that haven't even happened yet, and might never happen.
When real issues do show up, you can go back and flesh out the safety model in greater detail, investing relatively large funds to characterize specific degradations. You would hope that the initial safety envelope, which is a broad blanket by nature, would have been fairly conservative.
You would also expect that the outcome would often be that we can tolerate degradation X, but only if other parameters U, V, and Z are monitored more vigilantly and held within narrower ranges. Eventually the exponential growth of small compliance should reach the point where the facility is non-economic, and it gets shut down on the preponderance of vigilance rather than any specific dramatic failure mode or burst pipe.
We're all here rushing to judgment on the assumption that the escalating burden is DC dinner accounts rather than ballooning safety inspection check-lists. Fair enough. Sad though that the political expectations are so low that everyone dons their sunglasses before taking even one objective glance.
Anyone clinging to the notion of an "unoptimized" compiled language is using language as a weapon rather than a tool for thought.
How anyone still believes C is faster than C++ is beyond me. C is very nearly a proper subset of C++. This would put C and C++ on par, if C++ only added RTTI and exceptions and virtual pointers to the C language stew.
But in fact, C++ adds compile time code reduction through the template facility, operating at a higher level of abstraction than the compiler can access, because the abstraction captures additional programmer intent.
I guess a sufficiently determined programmer can hand compile Boost:Spirit to C code if the dude has nothing better to do than win a language war.
I was speaking recently with an irrigation specialist who described a 100 hectare irrigation project where the intake fouling problem has been solved by removing the intake filter. The crafty farm hand reported that the pump was now generating maximum pressure. Problem solved, from that perspective. Unfortunately, he didn't have a handy dial to report that no water was flowing. 100 hectares of replaced drip hose later, the pressure had gone way down again. You just can't win.
In these language wars, there's never a shortage of people rushing in to unclog the intake filter.
The quirks in C# are like a subset of the quirks in C++.
Almost every quirk in C++ goes away if you sacrifice the right dead chicken. Divining the error message entrails when you abuse Boost.Spirit (to name just one) is what separates the chicken gurus from the chicken giblets. Is religion a subset of mysticism, or is it the other way around?
Not so long ago, "portable" was a subset of Windows machines. Subsets in the real world don't work the way they teach you in set theory.
For a project two years back my shop contracted a GUI specialist who coded the application in Silverlight. He did a good job, within the constraints of the technology (forcing your non-technical users to install a not-entirely-benign slab of whale meat). It was completed on time to specification, unlike almost any other product here. Yet subsequently there were management recriminations that we ever went down this path, due to end user reluctance to embrace the whale, and also the expense of finding future developers for light maintenance.
What I said at the time was "if he gets the database schema right, someday if Microsoft loses the plot we can rinse and repeat".
I never found out what problems Silverlight solves. I understood its existence only in terms of competitive dynamics and it was never clear whether it was *something* or just anything it needed to be this week or this year.
I went to the Microsoft Silverlight web page when the technology was proposed for this project, read the text until I puked and/or passed out with nausea, and that's the last technical insight I've gained. If Silverlight has any technical merit--and that seems to be a frequent claim--there's a reason no-one understands this who hasn't actually coded with it: it's the Microsoft way.
Does anyone else here see the parallel with "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf"? Will Silverlight live to see its fifth birthday or will alcoholic rage erupt in a mushroom cloud of unspeakable blackness? Stay tuned for the next development in this exciting family drama.
What they care about is mean time between purchase at full retail value for the same product every other short-attention-span twitch spender is buying that week.
Even when I gamed a lot, I only bought the epic titles and beat them to death. My passing from the gaming demographic went unnoticed by the marketroids.
The rule of thumb is that bad money drives out good. When the idiot demographic pays too much for bad content, the companies soon lose interest in making the good content.
I'm sure I just opened myself up for contradiction by epic counter-example. I rest my case.
Read the happiness literature on novelty saturation, then estimate the supply/demand curve intersection involving those who haven't.
Your rich uncle dies and leaves you $30 million but *only* if you complete medical school by a set date, but he didn't understand the timeline and set the date too soon to be realistic *unless* you connive your entrance *before* you've had time to master the entrance exam.
Of course, you could just walk into any admissions dept. with a lawyer attesting to the legitimacy of the will and the funds behind it, and explain how *very* generous you feel toward your prospective alma mater if the conditions of success were expedited. Young people sometimes take rules too seriously.
A person's response to specific circumstances doesn't always dictate ethics over the long run, although most people who take this for granted discover otherwise.
I'm not sure their medical careers are ruined. Pharmaceutical firms are always on the lookout for highly motivated sales reps capable of banalizing bonhomie with the white smocks on tropical fishing expeditions. They'd probably be good at holding one hand under the deck chair while passing themselves off as rabid fans of any college football team in America the good doctors happen to name.
If you can compress the data stream from the packet contents to just the lengths of the packets and still recover the word stream, that suggests two things: A) vocal inflection is worth 100 words per syllable, and B) you're not compressing enough in the first place. Yet there's a reason why compression sucks: the low latency requirement. Compression over 5 minute speech blocks would blow this side channel away.
Were it not for the human tension of a conversation amounting to a group of people mutually waiting to speak (sometimes not so well), this wouldn't be so much of a problem in the first place.
Skeptic: My, what short packets you have! Skype: All the better to interrupt you with. Skeptic: What a juicy side-channel that makes. Skype: Facebook rocks. Shut up and keep talking. I know it's you Alice, under that Hood.
I don't think Microsoft developers could have caused such a mess
Another possibility is that some skype sysadmin was teetering on the brink of hysterical depression at the looming prospect of answering to The Beast. It's not as if religious sentiment is unheard of in matters technological. Consider the Pope of Cupertino or emacs/vi.
It must be a sweet mental shortcut to filter the world through condign causation. There's a fairly active brain center for doling out the blue juice which rarely considers second order effects. That's for other brain regions to consider, if they get any glucose at all. I suffer from the condition known as lateral thinking, where all my brain centers get glucose at the same time, whether I want this or not. I try not to get into small-pie pissing matches against the more singularly motivated, since I tend to lose these battles due to my congenital mental profligacy. Never more than half my brain mans the cannons.
If it weren't for the upside of "be elsewhere" when the shit hits the fan, lateral thinkers such as myself would have become Darwin's fish food long ago. The constrictive mental model of all effects through condign causation isn't much use in beating a prudent retreat.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Yes, but that predates the invention of chat rooms. We're supposed to be geeks here, but the mental style "1, 2, 3, many" is being trotted out in numerous posts suggesting American prisons are on some comparable tier with Chinese prisons.
By the standards of a free society, the state of the American prison system is a travesty beyond words. We're not judging Chinese prisons by the standards of a free society. Unfortunately, there's not much room for nuanced thought after the needle swings to "life is cheap". I attended an all-candidates meeting recently where the tough-on-crime incumbent was asked "out of the additional spending on prisons, what will be done for the people in prison suffering from mental illness?" The word "pedophile" was uttered in his leading phrase. That's that, then. This is a code phrase for "after you get voted off the island, you're human garbage". Life is contingently cheap. But don't worry, right-thinking people know where to draw the line, and no one has ordered shipping containers full of Chinese machetes (that we know of).
If I were a cartoonist, I'd be drawing a patient waking up in the outskirts of a well-sourced, opulent OR after a successful liver transplant musing to himself "I feel a sudden urge to indulge in petty economic activity".
We should feel a lot more collective disgust at the state of incarceration in America (coming soon to a Canadian province near you). Nya nya nya pedophile can't hear you. Happily, the incumbent went down in flames, but not every election ends on a high note.
I bet you won't find it predicted in Astounding back in the 1940s that we'd have robotic fetchers by the year 2010.
Somebody in Chicago invented time travel back in 1940, zipped 70 years forward to see how humans and AI were getting along, saw the library, returned to the time of origin, then destroyed the machine, since the future was too sad to contemplate.
s/Hastings/Hastie from my previous post. Hastings is one of my in-laws, when I was trying to comment on out-laws.
My hands were a bit preoccupied by Tibshirani having the syllable "shi" same as Satoshi which nearly tripped me up yesterday, because my brain is determined to spell Satochi.
Why does "shi" is Tibshirani look right, when "shi" in Satoshi looks like a complete put-on I pondered as my hands mangled Hastie's name.
"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
That quote alone was worth winning the war, for which America was justifiably proud. Gosh it's hard to remember that far back.
All my life I struggled to identify myself on the liberal/conservative axis. It wasn't until I read Tibshirani and Hastings on PCA that I figured it out. The choice of principal component is often rather arbitrary when you have a cluster of aligned traits. In other words, the axis of ideology can be projected in many different ways, most of which are valid to the same approximate degree. When you subtract out whichever one you pick first, you've grabbed most of the explanatory power of the entire bundle.
One meme about conservatism is that it is more threat sensitive. I don't agree with that. Conservatism is more sensitive to threats from without. Liberals are more concerned from threats from within. In one case, you want to defeat the Nazis; in the other case your wish your own society not to become the Nazis by succumbing to the same Patriotic tendencies.
Even programs like OpenSSH (with your precious BSD heritage) have had their fair share of vulnerabilities in the past.
Clue me in, what is the "fair share" for a program such as OpenSSH? A zero-day on OpenSSH is the rough equivalent of raising the Libyan flag at the center of the Pentagon.
I can't stand the thinking that buffer overflows are a fact of life. Only if you believe that shoddy workmanship is a fact of life. Subtle edge cases in a tricky protocol account for maybe 1% of the buffer overflows out there. The majority are copy first, ask questions later. There are plenty of these people out there programming computers; very few of these people are accepted into med school. The root cause of most buffer overflows in commercially important applications with large, well-resourced development teams is the network effect. There's a hideous pressure to be first, rather than right, or solid and tight.
Imagine if PC Magazine back in the fat 1980s had a penetration testing department that stamped "did not qualify" on every beta software product tested where any serious failure mode was tripped. But no, if the software could do one important function correctly 10% faster than the next piece of software (by hook or by crook), it was stamped "editor's choice".
In sports forums where there is serious discussion about prospects, this is ridiculed as "saw him good". There's always a contingent out there drooling over the next hockey jesus with the flashy stick move who leaks the puck in his own end ten times per shift, and wailing with incomprehension over why the professional hockey minds have his ass stapled to the bench or racking up demotion miles to a lower league.
The only difference is that in software, your pimply hockey jesus is referred to as the next "killer app". A certain type of consumer is busy drooling over the 30 second highlight reel without any real concern over whether the kid is willing to learn how to play a two-way game for sixty minutes.
Dude, your illness argument depends upon furnishing a proof (or at least a compelling argument) that schizophrenic tendencies in human social units is not a positive survival adaptation over any major stretch of the last six million years.
No bite out of your apple; you've swallowed it whole. And while you're at it, I would enjoy an epilogue on the cruelty of children and their massive mental investment in mob psychology by the age of seven.
There's an intrinsic value to a currency which is hard to trace and hard to tax and liquid across international borders. Satoshi engineered a nice exit strategy for himself. I don't know why you call it "gamed". It's a damn sight more clever than anything Bezos ever patented.
Most of Satoshi's personal profits will ultimately come from the robber barons of the black economy, such as Nigerian 419 scammers. Is that a bad thing? For pillaging the Philippine nation, there's the Swiss banking system; for everything else, there's Bitcoin.
I know this is a bit too abstract for many, but an accurate and reliable and relatively private score-keeping system is an intrinsic good in human affairs. It doesn't need to be backed by any other form of value.
What the ultimate market cap in Libertarian cachet?
RPN is not a notation. It's a straightforward implementation of stack-based expression evaluation.
In RPN (restricted to binary operators) any sequence is valid where at each binop the number of preceding operands is greater than the number of operators.
R = v1 v2 binop1 v3 binop2 v4 binop3; R = v1 v2 binop1 v3 v4 binop2 binop3;... R = v1 v2 v3 v4 binop1 binop2 binop3;
In linear notation, without parentheses, your ordering options are limited:
R = v1 binop1 v2 binop2 v3 binop3 v4;
Linear order implies structure from syntax. RPN implies structure from order. So does human language, in an effort to make communication more effective.
How many idioms in English have matched delimiters? None modulo common usage, n'est pas?
Slashdot Mirror
There, you've been successfully bucketed for the full-court-press. They don't want to waste this effort on everybody, it would let the cat out of the bag sooner rather than later, and it costs too much. But concerning just the right customer profile, it's worth the bother, if they offer you a mortgage or loan at all.
The small percentage of people with nothing better to do than game the system (and with the skills required to do so successfully) by profiling themselves into a favourable bucket are just a minute footnote to the cost of doing business. Oh, and I presume your network of friends consists entirely of other people with the same profile, and no boundary condition to the rest of the Facebook population, or they'll get you on network analysis.
I'm bland and inconsequential, but many of my friends aren't. If I ever went there, which I won't, I'd be so busted no matter what I posted on my own account.
Forcing the spammers to turn their missives into alphabet gibberish is ultimately the dominant game-theoretic strategy, unless you believe there are legions of people out there determined to puzzle out the alphabetic mess with great intellect and determination and lip movement in order to obtain their beloved superunplasticizers, which they're too dumb to obtain by less tortuous means.
Present company excluded, I think there's a long term shortage of people who are intelligent, determined, and clueless all at the same time (everyone can now pause momentarily to see if that works out as a compliment; basically I'm saying we're a select group here.)
Filtering works a heck of a lot better than your average bike lock, and most people still lug around one of those.
What you can argue successfully is that there is a game theoretic incentive to defect from the expense of maintaining your own filter on your own ISP, and freeload on the coattails of the spam reduction achieved by everyone else working hard to tilt the economics against spam profit.
Just because there's a psychopathic element to your argument doesn't make it wrong. On the other hand, some of this debate is being carried out among people who aren't stuck at "what's in it for MEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!" and we're not buying your argument from where we sit.
The kids are OK. We've got a 2^19 UID actually making sense while typing long paragraphs replete with capital letters and many other symbols reserved for passwords but rarely employed.
The problem with the granting process is that the scientists become so inured to the process, they begin to think their wild-ass call-to-action save-the-planet promotional paragraph is part of the scientific process itself, rather than an ass-pluck social nicety / funding necessity. Scientists sometimes have a lot of trouble grasping that a great deal of what they do to make their science possible isn't automatically science by association.
Ass-pluck is the stock in trade of economists and statisticians, not scientists. I don't know why we let most scientists blather on about twenty year risk assessments. Most of them can't even settle a dinner tab. Fancy posters of the global carbon cycle (with plenty of conspicuous blanks for the terms we're still discovering), that's what a scientist is good for in this debate.
Consensus in science is ordinarily a hundred year process, except when there's money in it alongside a handy brink. Memorize this: science describes, grant applications predict, and never the twain shall meet on the domain of a human system.
This other thing is science + social activism. There's no guarantee that a good scientist has better than average ass-pluck as a social activist, and I would say on the whole they're trained rather badly for the combined function, excepting Dr Strangelove, who clearly had special gifts of insight and improvisation.
I never quite got this scope creep whereby scientists, who normally take a hundred years to agree on anything substantial, became so deeply vested in futurology, but it seems to have been quickly accomplished by running around screaming "we're all going to die!"
They might be right. That doesn't make it science per traditional criteria.
One of the noisiest and least power efficient CPUs to ever make it to mass market. Enron *loved* those CPUs. As the guy said, "Burn, baby, burn!"
CPU requirements for most applications have not increased all that fast in the meantime, except the ones recoded from C++ into JavaScript, or the heavy-duty applications (math, engineering, visualization, adenoidal frittering).
Software developers optimize their software relative to some percentile performance point among their anticipated user base. Performance inflation is to some degree self-fulfilling prophecy.
Just about everyone I know who writes I with angel wings (*I*) feels the need for a overclock-unlocked extreme edition. It hasn't been invented yet and you need it already. OK, we get it. Now let's return to robust statistics such as the median and the mode.
Llano is confusing the hell out of people because it spans incompatible boxes. The product line will make a lot more sense when it gets an additional memory channel at the high end.
Whether optimization burns all information concerning the order of local declarations really depends upon the compiler.
Generally, there's not a lot to be gained by scrambling the order of stack layout. Some short term variables might be moved into registers and have no stack allocation. So optimization deprives you of complete information. But the order of variables on the stack for the variables assigned to the stack could well remain fairly constant, even with optimizations enabled.
Compilers are a formal decision procedure. I wish my optimizer was so potent as to successfully hide this.
There's a recent TED talk where the speaker deduces the writing order of the Indus language by observing symbols crammed into the left margin a la the old joke:
Plan ahea
d
Bon voyage on your mission to tear this guy a new one.
When your business model is to convince people to surrender their marginal economic energies to *rent* the job of grinding away at the accumulation of a fictitious fiat currency, there's only so many ways to skin the cat.
It's quite possible Blizzard planned this out long ago. I don't know why this is painted as a reactive move. Surely they surmised at the outset that eventually the mania would crest. Their server capacity charges are likely far less now than when the game originally rolled out. Parameters change.
The big pharmaceuticals employ similar strategies when drugs go off patent. One is the expansion pack reformulation of the same stupid thing, at three times the price. The other is to make pacts with the generic manufacturers to roll into generic status with a progressive price decline, rather than cold turkey last year's wonder drug 12 tabs for a dollar.
Or is is more likely that the purveyors of WoW are just as myopic as the Warcrack addicts on the grounds that it takes one to snow one.
Congratulations, you've just won a contract valued at 4 weeks of "running in circles" paying $100 per hour next time Congress twiddles the dates. This will spare you having to take out a second mortgage for the expanded deck and hot tub. Hope your spouse is the patient type and accepts that you'll be in good coin any day now for the big splurge, where any day now is some four digit year beginning most likely beginning with 2.
A watched politician never twiddles the desired knob.
Everything you're saying is dead on. What you didn't add is the obvious mitigation: Firefox might deign to tell you how many of your add-ons will break as a result of clicking yes to the touted upgrade of the moment.
This fabulous upgrade is incompatible with 10 of your current add-ons.
[x] BREAK EVERYTHING NOW
[ ] MAYBE LATER
If there was even a 1% tax on proposed settlement size, the amount of bluster in these figures would collapse by an order of magnitude.
Imagine if it cost $63m to file a claim in the court system for $6.3b in damages.
We all know Ellison is going to ask for $2b/inch whenever he can get away with it, if there's no price for grasping.
In a sane regulatory system, this could be a perfectly respectable modus operandi. In the first analysis, it's not cost effective to quantify the safety risk of thousands of small failures that haven't even happened yet, and might never happen.
When real issues do show up, you can go back and flesh out the safety model in greater detail, investing relatively large funds to characterize specific degradations. You would hope that the initial safety envelope, which is a broad blanket by nature, would have been fairly conservative.
You would also expect that the outcome would often be that we can tolerate degradation X, but only if other parameters U, V, and Z are monitored more vigilantly and held within narrower ranges. Eventually the exponential growth of small compliance should reach the point where the facility is non-economic, and it gets shut down on the preponderance of vigilance rather than any specific dramatic failure mode or burst pipe.
We're all here rushing to judgment on the assumption that the escalating burden is DC dinner accounts rather than ballooning safety inspection check-lists. Fair enough. Sad though that the political expectations are so low that everyone dons their sunglasses before taking even one objective glance.
taking advantage of a large crowd of people containing a large contingent of drunken brats from the suburbs
The drunken brats deserve one night in the clink for not having the wits to disperse. The professional arsonists deserve a lot more.
Anyone clinging to the notion of an "unoptimized" compiled language is using language as a weapon rather than a tool for thought.
How anyone still believes C is faster than C++ is beyond me. C is very nearly a proper subset of C++. This would put C and C++ on par, if C++ only added RTTI and exceptions and virtual pointers to the C language stew.
But in fact, C++ adds compile time code reduction through the template facility, operating at a higher level of abstraction than the compiler can access, because the abstraction captures additional programmer intent.
I guess a sufficiently determined programmer can hand compile Boost:Spirit to C code if the dude has nothing better to do than win a language war.
I was speaking recently with an irrigation specialist who described a 100 hectare irrigation project where the intake fouling problem has been solved by removing the intake filter. The crafty farm hand reported that the pump was now generating maximum pressure. Problem solved, from that perspective. Unfortunately, he didn't have a handy dial to report that no water was flowing. 100 hectares of replaced drip hose later, the pressure had gone way down again. You just can't win.
In these language wars, there's never a shortage of people rushing in to unclog the intake filter.
The quirks in C# are like a subset of the quirks in C++.
Almost every quirk in C++ goes away if you sacrifice the right dead chicken. Divining the error message entrails when you abuse Boost.Spirit (to name just one) is what separates the chicken gurus from the chicken giblets. Is religion a subset of mysticism, or is it the other way around?
Not so long ago, "portable" was a subset of Windows machines. Subsets in the real world don't work the way they teach you in set theory.
For a project two years back my shop contracted a GUI specialist who coded the application in Silverlight. He did a good job, within the constraints of the technology (forcing your non-technical users to install a not-entirely-benign slab of whale meat). It was completed on time to specification, unlike almost any other product here. Yet subsequently there were management recriminations that we ever went down this path, due to end user reluctance to embrace the whale, and also the expense of finding future developers for light maintenance.
What I said at the time was "if he gets the database schema right, someday if Microsoft loses the plot we can rinse and repeat".
I never found out what problems Silverlight solves. I understood its existence only in terms of competitive dynamics and it was never clear whether it was *something* or just anything it needed to be this week or this year.
I went to the Microsoft Silverlight web page when the technology was proposed for this project, read the text until I puked and/or passed out with nausea, and that's the last technical insight I've gained. If Silverlight has any technical merit--and that seems to be a frequent claim--there's a reason no-one understands this who hasn't actually coded with it: it's the Microsoft way.
Does anyone else here see the parallel with "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf"? Will Silverlight live to see its fifth birthday or will alcoholic rage erupt in a mushroom cloud of unspeakable blackness? Stay tuned for the next development in this exciting family drama.
What they care about is mean time between purchase at full retail value for the same product every other short-attention-span twitch spender is buying that week.
Even when I gamed a lot, I only bought the epic titles and beat them to death. My passing from the gaming demographic went unnoticed by the marketroids.
The rule of thumb is that bad money drives out good. When the idiot demographic pays too much for bad content, the companies soon lose interest in making the good content.
I'm sure I just opened myself up for contradiction by epic counter-example. I rest my case.
Read the happiness literature on novelty saturation, then estimate the supply/demand curve intersection involving those who haven't.
Your rich uncle dies and leaves you $30 million but *only* if you complete medical school by a set date, but he didn't understand the timeline and set the date too soon to be realistic *unless* you connive your entrance *before* you've had time to master the entrance exam.
Of course, you could just walk into any admissions dept. with a lawyer attesting to the legitimacy of the will and the funds behind it, and explain how *very* generous you feel toward your prospective alma mater if the conditions of success were expedited. Young people sometimes take rules too seriously.
A person's response to specific circumstances doesn't always dictate ethics over the long run, although most people who take this for granted discover otherwise.
I'm not sure their medical careers are ruined. Pharmaceutical firms are always on the lookout for highly motivated sales reps capable of banalizing bonhomie with the white smocks on tropical fishing expeditions. They'd probably be good at holding one hand under the deck chair while passing themselves off as rabid fans of any college football team in America the good doctors happen to name.
If you can compress the data stream from the packet contents to just the lengths of the packets and still recover the word stream, that suggests two things: A) vocal inflection is worth 100 words per syllable, and B) you're not compressing enough in the first place. Yet there's a reason why compression sucks: the low latency requirement. Compression over 5 minute speech blocks would blow this side channel away.
Were it not for the human tension of a conversation amounting to a group of people mutually waiting to speak (sometimes not so well), this wouldn't be so much of a problem in the first place.
Skeptic: My, what short packets you have!
Skype: All the better to interrupt you with.
Skeptic: What a juicy side-channel that makes.
Skype: Facebook rocks. Shut up and keep talking. I know it's you Alice, under that Hood.
I don't think Microsoft developers could have caused such a mess
Another possibility is that some skype sysadmin was teetering on the brink of hysterical depression at the looming prospect of answering to The Beast. It's not as if religious sentiment is unheard of in matters technological. Consider the Pope of Cupertino or emacs/vi.
It must be a sweet mental shortcut to filter the world through condign causation. There's a fairly active brain center for doling out the blue juice which rarely considers second order effects. That's for other brain regions to consider, if they get any glucose at all. I suffer from the condition known as lateral thinking, where all my brain centers get glucose at the same time, whether I want this or not. I try not to get into small-pie pissing matches against the more singularly motivated, since I tend to lose these battles due to my congenital mental profligacy. Never more than half my brain mans the cannons.
If it weren't for the upside of "be elsewhere" when the shit hits the fan, lateral thinkers such as myself would have become Darwin's fish food long ago. The constrictive mental model of all effects through condign causation isn't much use in beating a prudent retreat.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Yes, but that predates the invention of chat rooms. We're supposed to be geeks here, but the mental style "1, 2, 3, many" is being trotted out in numerous posts suggesting American prisons are on some comparable tier with Chinese prisons.
By the standards of a free society, the state of the American prison system is a travesty beyond words. We're not judging Chinese prisons by the standards of a free society. Unfortunately, there's not much room for nuanced thought after the needle swings to "life is cheap". I attended an all-candidates meeting recently where the tough-on-crime incumbent was asked "out of the additional spending on prisons, what will be done for the people in prison suffering from mental illness?" The word "pedophile" was uttered in his leading phrase. That's that, then. This is a code phrase for "after you get voted off the island, you're human garbage". Life is contingently cheap. But don't worry, right-thinking people know where to draw the line, and no one has ordered shipping containers full of Chinese machetes (that we know of).
If I were a cartoonist, I'd be drawing a patient waking up in the outskirts of a well-sourced, opulent OR after a successful liver transplant musing to himself "I feel a sudden urge to indulge in petty economic activity".
We should feel a lot more collective disgust at the state of incarceration in America (coming soon to a Canadian province near you). Nya nya nya pedophile can't hear you. Happily, the incumbent went down in flames, but not every election ends on a high note.
I bet you won't find it predicted in Astounding back in the 1940s that we'd have robotic fetchers by the year 2010.
Somebody in Chicago invented time travel back in 1940, zipped 70 years forward to see how humans and AI were getting along, saw the library, returned to the time of origin, then destroyed the machine, since the future was too sad to contemplate.
s/Hastings/Hastie from my previous post. Hastings is one of my in-laws, when I was trying to comment on out-laws.
My hands were a bit preoccupied by Tibshirani having the syllable "shi" same as Satoshi which nearly tripped me up yesterday, because my brain is determined to spell Satochi.
Why does "shi" is Tibshirani look right, when "shi" in Satoshi looks like a complete put-on I pondered as my hands mangled Hastie's name.
In the unsurpassed words of Hermann Goering as cribbed from http://quotes.liberty-tree.ca/
"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."
That quote alone was worth winning the war, for which America was justifiably proud. Gosh it's hard to remember that far back.
All my life I struggled to identify myself on the liberal/conservative axis. It wasn't until I read Tibshirani and Hastings on PCA that I figured it out. The choice of principal component is often rather arbitrary when you have a cluster of aligned traits. In other words, the axis of ideology can be projected in many different ways, most of which are valid to the same approximate degree. When you subtract out whichever one you pick first, you've grabbed most of the explanatory power of the entire bundle.
One meme about conservatism is that it is more threat sensitive. I don't agree with that. Conservatism is more sensitive to threats from without. Liberals are more concerned from threats from within. In one case, you want to defeat the Nazis; in the other case your wish your own society not to become the Nazis by succumbing to the same Patriotic tendencies.
Even programs like OpenSSH (with your precious BSD heritage) have had their fair share of vulnerabilities in the past.
Clue me in, what is the "fair share" for a program such as OpenSSH? A zero-day on OpenSSH is the rough equivalent of raising the Libyan flag at the center of the Pentagon.
I can't stand the thinking that buffer overflows are a fact of life. Only if you believe that shoddy workmanship is a fact of life. Subtle edge cases in a tricky protocol account for maybe 1% of the buffer overflows out there. The majority are copy first, ask questions later. There are plenty of these people out there programming computers; very few of these people are accepted into med school. The root cause of most buffer overflows in commercially important applications with large, well-resourced development teams is the network effect. There's a hideous pressure to be first, rather than right, or solid and tight.
Imagine if PC Magazine back in the fat 1980s had a penetration testing department that stamped "did not qualify" on every beta software product tested where any serious failure mode was tripped. But no, if the software could do one important function correctly 10% faster than the next piece of software (by hook or by crook), it was stamped "editor's choice".
In sports forums where there is serious discussion about prospects, this is ridiculed as "saw him good". There's always a contingent out there drooling over the next hockey jesus with the flashy stick move who leaks the puck in his own end ten times per shift, and wailing with incomprehension over why the professional hockey minds have his ass stapled to the bench or racking up demotion miles to a lower league.
The only difference is that in software, your pimply hockey jesus is referred to as the next "killer app". A certain type of consumer is busy drooling over the 30 second highlight reel without any real concern over whether the kid is willing to learn how to play a two-way game for sixty minutes.
Moral of the story: you get what you drool over.
Dude, your illness argument depends upon furnishing a proof (or at least a compelling argument) that schizophrenic tendencies in human social units is not a positive survival adaptation over any major stretch of the last six million years.
No bite out of your apple; you've swallowed it whole. And while you're at it, I would enjoy an epilogue on the cruelty of children and their massive mental investment in mob psychology by the age of seven.
There's an intrinsic value to a currency which is hard to trace and hard to tax and liquid across international borders. Satoshi engineered a nice exit strategy for himself. I don't know why you call it "gamed". It's a damn sight more clever than anything Bezos ever patented.
Most of Satoshi's personal profits will ultimately come from the robber barons of the black economy, such as Nigerian 419 scammers. Is that a bad thing? For pillaging the Philippine nation, there's the Swiss banking system; for everything else, there's Bitcoin.
I know this is a bit too abstract for many, but an accurate and reliable and relatively private score-keeping system is an intrinsic good in human affairs. It doesn't need to be backed by any other form of value.
What the ultimate market cap in Libertarian cachet?
RPN is not a notation. It's a straightforward implementation of stack-based expression evaluation.
In RPN (restricted to binary operators) any sequence is valid where at each binop the number of preceding operands is greater than the number of operators.
R = v1 v2 binop1 v3 binop2 v4 binop3; ...
R = v1 v2 binop1 v3 v4 binop2 binop3;
R = v1 v2 v3 v4 binop1 binop2 binop3;
In linear notation, without parentheses, your ordering options are limited:
R = v1 binop1 v2 binop2 v3 binop3 v4;
Linear order implies structure from syntax. RPN implies structure from order. So does human language, in an effort to make communication more effective.
How many idioms in English have matched delimiters? None modulo common usage, n'est pas?