Of the many education systems worldwide, the finest is widely reputed (by many comparative reviews) to be that of Finland. Not necessarily because teachers there are so incredibly well paid, but because their profession commands RESPECT.
No it doesn't. Education, however, does. Finland was Russia's (and before that Sweden's) economically abused agrarian colony until the first World War, got pummeled heavily by Stalin in second, and had to pay huge tribute for the crime of not surrendering. That tribute had to be paid largely in industrial products. This prompted industrialization and made educated people very valuable, since a nation of a few million people kinda has to care about effectiveness of labour.
As a practical example, consider the cost of university level education in Finland and America. According to usastudyguide.com the cost of tuition in the United States is between $5,000 to $25,000, and this doesn't include room and board or additional fees. In Finland, in Tampere University, it's 44,50 euros ($60) per year. On top of that, the state pays part of your living expenses plus around 200 euros per month of social security, and usually a single meal per day on top of that in University's cafe.
In other words, in the United States higher education is a luxury that costs you $100,000+ to get, while in Finland it's considered so valuable to society that it actually pays you to get it. Everything else follows from that difference in attitudes.
Cue a thousand libertarians missing the point and ranting about socialism in their responses.
Well, people who buy porn are clearly stupid freaks, since you can get all you can consume and more online for free, and often far sexier stuff than "professional" movies, so such people should be registered because they are clearly sex addicts who can't be satisfied by anything, and thus potential sex offenders.
We also need a register for people who feel the need to "cutely" misspell or half-censor porn, fuck, shit, or any other "bad" word. Not because these people are dangerous or anything, but just so the rest of us can find someone to feel superior to in a hurry when we're feeling down, you balless wimp.
That depends on what they hate you for. Some people do indeed hate people for their ideology. It's happened quite often in history. You think the Jews' problem was something other than what Hitler believed, not what the Jews believed? Or France, for that matter?
One of the reasons Hitler got into power in the first place was that he promised to overturn the completely unreasonable and punitive towards Germany peace treaty of WWI. One of the reasons why no one tried to stop him before it was too late was that the victors of that war had a guilty conscience over the same treaty.
And your example is flawed in other ways too. For example, Hitler didn't pick Jews arbitrarily; he picked them because they were the terrorists/commies/witches of their time, widely believed to be trying to destroy Western civilization for some vague nefarious ideological reasons. It was easy for Hitler to fan that fear, and to convince people the Jews were trying to destroy their lifestyle and would never stop, so the people needed to give him the power to deal with the problem; in other words, exactly the same shit as we are having nowadays.
Pulling out the "terrorists just hate the US because of what the US has done" should be based on what the said terrorist has said, not based on what we think the US does wrong.
Don't most of them name some specific real or perceived wrong as their motivation? Osama, for example, took exception to US troops in Middle-East.
But I don't think we can assume terrorists would stop hating the US if the US fixed things they did wrong.
They would, however, have a lot harder time recruiting people willing to die just to take Americans with them.
Now, if he wants to avoid using a filesystem so he can gain extra overhead (think no FAT tables, no redundant tables, no file information like size and location pointers) then *that* is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and ext2fs is a great starting point.
If you're using Linux, as ext2fs would suggest, simply fopen() "/dev/hda1" (or "dev/hdb3" or whatever) and you're done. An OS that treats everything as a file is sometimes very convenient:).
I've got my own sense of right and wrong, and don't need anyone telling me what I should or should not do.
Unfortunately for you, lots of other people share your views, so they'll ignore you telling them they shouldn't tell you what to do, since their own sense of right and wrong tells them it's right to tell you what's right.
Left-foot breaking, motor breaking and manual transmission are all useful professional techniques.
And just what does that have to do with the average driver, to whom the car is designed? And manual transmission isn't a technique, it's a technology.
Because I just assume that I can become the best in the world, if I just want it enough.
This delusion is exactly why cars need to have all safety features possible.
Many of us drive the same car both on road and on track. Are you saying we should be required to have two separate cars?
No, just two different driving styles. And maybe, just maybe, you could disengage the engine power cutoff and all other such devices when going racing and re-engage it when returning to public roads. Because, after all, it's pretty unreasonable to demand that all cars should be made with the needs of racers in mind.
How the idea of "drive by wire" became popular is beyond me.
Because it allows better control of engine running parameters, which in turn allows lower fuel usage and emissions and greater power, at least in theory.
Steering, braking, throttle, and gear selection should never be done fully by electronics and remain in the drivers hands...along with the ability to kill power to the engine for that matter.
You can easily cut power to the engine any time you wish. Just turn the ignition key to "off" position. You are right about steering and braking, these must work even if a computer fucks up. Dunno about gear selection - frankly, I'd love to automate it so I wouldn't need to worry about them, and there's very little if any safety gain to be able to change them by hand, because the car's speed and engine speed must match with the gear's ratio to engage it anyway.
If this is indeed the case, putting bigger brakes on the cars will just increase the cost of ownership for those of us who _can_ drive.
I can drive, and prefer brakes that can lock the wheel on dry asphalt at highway speeds.
In any case, these are hybrid cars where the electric engine is doing the actual turning of wheels, right? The solution is simple then: just put a switch underneath the bake pedal that physically disconnects power to the engine when the brake is depressed.
Does it matter if you're bankrupt to the tune of 10,000 dollars or to the tune of 10 million?
Yes, because a lot fewer people are going to go bankrupt over 10,000 dollars than 10 million. And 10,000 dollars is something most people can pay off, given some time, while 10 million means you're spending the rest of your life in debt slavery.
"loser pays" helps poor people a lot more than rich people.
Poor people are always going to be screwed in the court of law, no matter what. The only way to prevent that is to have the state pay all legal costs of both loser and winner; but that has so many obvious ways to abuse the sytem it's not even funny.
Unfortunately, we don't have a "loser pays" legal system in the U.S.
"Loser pays" doesn't really help, because 1) the loser has to be determined before payment can occur, so you still need money up front to defend yourself and 2) it allows the richer side to rise the stakes by throwing more and more money on their attack/defence, making lawsuits even more risky for Joe Average.
WTF is all I can say to you. I didn't oppose him? I kept my girlfriend from voting for him by telling her what I saw in what he said and did. And she wasn't the only one. Just because I oppose him doesn't mean I will vote for someone else I oppose either, as that isn't logical.
If you opposed all candidates then keeping your girlfriend voting for one of them did absolutely nothing.
As for me, yea I would do all of those things, seriously.
Sure you would. You'd risk your life if the situation arose. You just aren't cut out for the boring stuff, like, say, collecting names to put a candidate you can agree on the ballot, or joining or finding a party to steer it towards a less bad direction, or whatever. You won't give a little bit of your time, but you're certainly willing to give it all.
I consider myself a patriot, which is dangerous to say in this day and age considering the threat of "domestic" terrorism. (read reason to detain Americans as is done to those in Guantanamo)
Right. Calling yourself a patriot on Slashdot is you living dangerously. I'm sure there's a man in black reading this conversation right now, ticking items and updating your score ever closer to the mark where you'll disappear. "Talk his girlfriend out of voting for Obama, did he? Strrrrike one! Oh wait, he didn't vote for anyone 'cause he doesn't like any of 'em? Strrrrike two!" Better be careful there buddy, you're treading a minefield.
Seriously, are you nuts? Or so full of unwarranted self-importance that you think anyone pays attention to someone who can't even get off his ass to vote? Sorry to burst your bubble, but complaining to your girlfriend that all of the candidates suck doesn't make you a threat to anyone.
As far as your sympathy, I don't want it. How about giving yourself some for being a judgmental asshole though?
I might be a judgmental asshole... but I voted. So when all is said and done, I've done something and you've just said you would. Thus I fart in your general direction, loudmouth.
Now go cry to your girlfriend that I suck and she shouldn't add me to her friends, or man up and add me to your foe list, so you can get some experience in voting. It might not be much, but it's still better than just whining about me online.
If they could stop all the child porn and stop all illegal downloads then i'd be all for it, but only if they can stop _only_ child porn, and _only_ illegal downloads, without any 'collatoral damage' of legal material.
You do realize that the ability to stop "illegal downloads" would basically mean the ability to censor anything, right? The only difference between "illegal" and "legal" download is that someone in authority says one is allowed and one isn't. So I for one will continue doing everything in my power to undermine the ability of any authority to stop free speech.
As for child porn, that's a subset of "illegal downloads", so the same applies. However, it's worth noting that I haven't seen it, and in fact it has been absent to the point where I'm convinced it's just another idiotic hysteria for mentally unstable parents to angst about. But assuming for the sake of argument that there is a significant amount of the stuff to be found on the Internet... So what? Isn't it better that perverts spend their evenings jacking off to pornography than going out to hunt?
I am, of course, assuming we're talking about actual child porn here, rather than 17-year olds flashing their tits on a webcam.
I didn't vote for Obama, hell I didn't even vote. Crap like this is why.
You figured Obama would pull some "crap", so you didn't oppose him, despite having a consequence- and cost-free way of doing that? I fail to follow your logic here.
"Yes we can!" - take over your Internets?
Well, since it seems that his opponents can't even be bothered to haul their arse a few blocks over to the closest voting place... yeah, I guess he can.
Let me clarify that. You didn't have to stand against the Persian army with your 299 comrades. You didn't have to engage in sabotage against the Nazi army in occupied France. You didn't have to express a political opinion that could get you fired. All you had to do was haul your ass a few blocks away to cast a vote that could not be traced back to you. But you failed to do even that. And now you complain that the guy you imply to have known to be up to no good but couldn't be bothered to oppose is doing what you feared he would? Sorry, but you aren't getting any sympathy from me.
A coward I might pity, a greedy miser I might despise, but for you, all I can say is: "WTF?"
They contended that most stomach ulcers were caused by the bacteria they had isolated and Marshall dramatically demonstrated this by drinking some of the cultures and getting very sick.
Drinking bacterial culture makes you ill, therefore most stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria, therefore climate change is not real / is real and is caused / is not caused by humans.
That's pretty good summary about how these discussions usually go, IMHO. This is the cancer that's killing science.
You mean like MMO's? They run pretty good, and they do a lot more with the world and players than a system like this for a single player game would need to do.
You do realize that MMOs require a lot of server power, do you? They can get away with it because they charge a monthly cost, while there's no way in Hell anyone's going to pay monthly to play a single-player game. And even actual MMOGs get pirated.
This whole story is about how and why the DRM will work. It's kind of funny someone always comes along with "it will be cracked" without understanding any of the fundamentals behind how the game copy protections work.
They don't. That's just it. Any DRM scheme will boild down to "if (some_condition_is_met()) run_game(); else complain();". Since a general-purpose computer will run any program given to it, it's always possible to alter the game so that some_condition_is_met() will simply return true.
As for this particular scheme, it's likely unworkable due to cost, but even if it's implemented, it can be cracked by including a saveserver with the cracked game, or altering the code that sends serialized data over the network to write it to disk instead. Doing so also makes the cracked version clearly superior to the store-bought one.
I'm just waiting them to take this one little step further - stream parts of the game code, textures or other data from server (something not used often). Spread it randomly around the game and it becomes almost impossible to build a working crack.
Wrong. All you need in that case is cracking the part that authenticates the server, cache all the content, and pack the game with the cached content and your own server which serves said content. Since the pirate version will get everything from local cache, and the retail version won't, the pirate version will be even more superior to the retail version than usual.
As an added bonus the publisher will have to foot the bill for the server and connection that streams the code, textures and other stuff.
In my defense, I will point out that this proves exactly my point: His code is so unreadable (=unmaintainable), that I introduced an error when trying to clean it up.
Your defense doesn't hold water. If you don't understand what code does, don't try to clean it up; and whether or not you understood his code, yours is open to SQL injection attack and thus wrong.
Also, if you have trouble reading simple if statement in a for loop... Well. Maybe you shouldn't be writing Web apps?
At this point the major pirate groups have a better reputation than game publishers. I'd never install anything that wasn't disinfected by Razor 1911 or other trustworthy republisher first. Hell, even store-bought CDs might be dangerous, so better stick to mp3s.
DRM is basically about infect software with a trojan, and cracking is about removing it.
They also can't beam things to or from the ship when their shields are up, but there are a few times when they are able to calibrate the transporter to beam through enemy shields. If they can do that, can't they calibrate the transporters to work through their own shields?
No, because the laws of physics in Trek universe aren't stable, but change unpredictably from time to time. The locals have adapted to that and update their thinking without even noticing; those of us outside the continuum perceive changes as discontinuity.
It's amazing how widespread that phenomena is. This universe seems to be the only one with stable and self-consistent enough set of physics that you can apply them to problems logically. Here, if you can bypass enemy shields, you can bypass your own; in Trekverse, that phenomenom only works on enemy shields, and even then inconsistently, and the locals have evolved in such a way as to see nothing strange in that. It is truly a testament to the power of evolution that sentient beings can function - even build an interstellar empire - in such a chaotic mess of a world.
Use procedures/views where possible and never allow dynamically created queries.
Unfortunately, there are situations where you have to use dynamically created queries. For example, to the best of my knowledge, queries like "SELECT item FROM table WHERE keyword IN ($1, $2, $3...)" can't be written to accept an arbitrary number of keywords without constructing the query string dynamically. Of course you can and should still use positional parameters, so it's not like this causes a vulnerability.
Using views, on the other hand, has absolutely nothing to do with protecting against injection attacks; they're simply the SQL equivalant of functions. Ditto for stored procedures. After all, SQL injection is about messing with the parsing stage of the query, rather than the dispatch or execution states.
Slashdot Mirror
"As of this moment"? Hasn't Paypal been doing this for years?
Why anyone still does business with them is beyond my understanding.
Ignorance is ominpartisan, universal, and perhaps even more than that; for "against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain."
Quote not attributed for reasons of consistency ;).
No it doesn't. Education, however, does. Finland was Russia's (and before that Sweden's) economically abused agrarian colony until the first World War, got pummeled heavily by Stalin in second, and had to pay huge tribute for the crime of not surrendering. That tribute had to be paid largely in industrial products. This prompted industrialization and made educated people very valuable, since a nation of a few million people kinda has to care about effectiveness of labour.
As a practical example, consider the cost of university level education in Finland and America. According to usastudyguide.com the cost of tuition in the United States is between $5,000 to $25,000, and this doesn't include room and board or additional fees. In Finland, in Tampere University, it's 44,50 euros ($60) per year. On top of that, the state pays part of your living expenses plus around 200 euros per month of social security, and usually a single meal per day on top of that in University's cafe.
In other words, in the United States higher education is a luxury that costs you $100,000+ to get, while in Finland it's considered so valuable to society that it actually pays you to get it. Everything else follows from that difference in attitudes.
Cue a thousand libertarians missing the point and ranting about socialism in their responses.
[picard_facepalm.jpg] Stop posting!
Well, people who buy porn are clearly stupid freaks, since you can get all you can consume and more online for free, and often far sexier stuff than "professional" movies, so such people should be registered because they are clearly sex addicts who can't be satisfied by anything, and thus potential sex offenders.
We also need a register for people who feel the need to "cutely" misspell or half-censor porn, fuck, shit, or any other "bad" word. Not because these people are dangerous or anything, but just so the rest of us can find someone to feel superior to in a hurry when we're feeling down, you balless wimp.
One of the reasons Hitler got into power in the first place was that he promised to overturn the completely unreasonable and punitive towards Germany peace treaty of WWI. One of the reasons why no one tried to stop him before it was too late was that the victors of that war had a guilty conscience over the same treaty.
And your example is flawed in other ways too. For example, Hitler didn't pick Jews arbitrarily; he picked them because they were the terrorists/commies/witches of their time, widely believed to be trying to destroy Western civilization for some vague nefarious ideological reasons. It was easy for Hitler to fan that fear, and to convince people the Jews were trying to destroy their lifestyle and would never stop, so the people needed to give him the power to deal with the problem; in other words, exactly the same shit as we are having nowadays.
Don't most of them name some specific real or perceived wrong as their motivation? Osama, for example, took exception to US troops in Middle-East.
They would, however, have a lot harder time recruiting people willing to die just to take Americans with them.
If you're using Linux, as ext2fs would suggest, simply fopen() "/dev/hda1" (or "dev/hdb3" or whatever) and you're done. An OS that treats everything as a file is sometimes very convenient :).
Um... What?
Yeah, it's know as the hard disk controller chip ;).
Good thing you don't need to steer much at highway speeds, eh?
Unfortunately for you, lots of other people share your views, so they'll ignore you telling them they shouldn't tell you what to do, since their own sense of right and wrong tells them it's right to tell you what's right.
No, just two different driving styles. And maybe, just maybe, you could disengage the engine power cutoff and all other such devices when going racing and re-engage it when returning to public roads. Because, after all, it's pretty unreasonable to demand that all cars should be made with the needs of racers in mind.
How the idea of "drive by wire" became popular is beyond me.
Because it allows better control of engine running parameters, which in turn allows lower fuel usage and emissions and greater power, at least in theory.
Steering, braking, throttle, and gear selection should never be done fully by electronics and remain in the drivers hands...along with the ability to kill power to the engine for that matter.
You can easily cut power to the engine any time you wish. Just turn the ignition key to "off" position. You are right about steering and braking, these must work even if a computer fucks up. Dunno about gear selection - frankly, I'd love to automate it so I wouldn't need to worry about them, and there's very little if any safety gain to be able to change them by hand, because the car's speed and engine speed must match with the gear's ratio to engage it anyway.
I can drive, and prefer brakes that can lock the wheel on dry asphalt at highway speeds.
In any case, these are hybrid cars where the electric engine is doing the actual turning of wheels, right? The solution is simple then: just put a switch underneath the bake pedal that physically disconnects power to the engine when the brake is depressed.
Yes, because a lot fewer people are going to go bankrupt over 10,000 dollars than 10 million. And 10,000 dollars is something most people can pay off, given some time, while 10 million means you're spending the rest of your life in debt slavery.
Poor people are always going to be screwed in the court of law, no matter what. The only way to prevent that is to have the state pay all legal costs of both loser and winner; but that has so many obvious ways to abuse the sytem it's not even funny.
"Loser pays" doesn't really help, because 1) the loser has to be determined before payment can occur, so you still need money up front to defend yourself and 2) it allows the richer side to rise the stakes by throwing more and more money on their attack/defence, making lawsuits even more risky for Joe Average.
If you opposed all candidates then keeping your girlfriend voting for one of them did absolutely nothing.
Sure you would. You'd risk your life if the situation arose. You just aren't cut out for the boring stuff, like, say, collecting names to put a candidate you can agree on the ballot, or joining or finding a party to steer it towards a less bad direction, or whatever. You won't give a little bit of your time, but you're certainly willing to give it all.
Right. Calling yourself a patriot on Slashdot is you living dangerously. I'm sure there's a man in black reading this conversation right now, ticking items and updating your score ever closer to the mark where you'll disappear. "Talk his girlfriend out of voting for Obama, did he? Strrrrike one! Oh wait, he didn't vote for anyone 'cause he doesn't like any of 'em? Strrrrike two!" Better be careful there buddy, you're treading a minefield.
Seriously, are you nuts? Or so full of unwarranted self-importance that you think anyone pays attention to someone who can't even get off his ass to vote? Sorry to burst your bubble, but complaining to your girlfriend that all of the candidates suck doesn't make you a threat to anyone.
I might be a judgmental asshole... but I voted. So when all is said and done, I've done something and you've just said you would. Thus I fart in your general direction, loudmouth.
Now go cry to your girlfriend that I suck and she shouldn't add me to her friends, or man up and add me to your foe list, so you can get some experience in voting. It might not be much, but it's still better than just whining about me online.
You do realize that the ability to stop "illegal downloads" would basically mean the ability to censor anything, right? The only difference between "illegal" and "legal" download is that someone in authority says one is allowed and one isn't. So I for one will continue doing everything in my power to undermine the ability of any authority to stop free speech.
As for child porn, that's a subset of "illegal downloads", so the same applies. However, it's worth noting that I haven't seen it, and in fact it has been absent to the point where I'm convinced it's just another idiotic hysteria for mentally unstable parents to angst about. But assuming for the sake of argument that there is a significant amount of the stuff to be found on the Internet... So what? Isn't it better that perverts spend their evenings jacking off to pornography than going out to hunt?
I am, of course, assuming we're talking about actual child porn here, rather than 17-year olds flashing their tits on a webcam.
You figured Obama would pull some "crap", so you didn't oppose him, despite having a consequence- and cost-free way of doing that? I fail to follow your logic here.
Well, since it seems that his opponents can't even be bothered to haul their arse a few blocks over to the closest voting place... yeah, I guess he can.
Let me clarify that. You didn't have to stand against the Persian army with your 299 comrades. You didn't have to engage in sabotage against the Nazi army in occupied France. You didn't have to express a political opinion that could get you fired. All you had to do was haul your ass a few blocks away to cast a vote that could not be traced back to you. But you failed to do even that. And now you complain that the guy you imply to have known to be up to no good but couldn't be bothered to oppose is doing what you feared he would? Sorry, but you aren't getting any sympathy from me.
A coward I might pity, a greedy miser I might despise, but for you, all I can say is: "WTF?"
Drinking bacterial culture makes you ill, therefore most stomach ulcers are caused by bacteria, therefore climate change is not real / is real and is caused / is not caused by humans.
That's pretty good summary about how these discussions usually go, IMHO. This is the cancer that's killing science.
You do realize that MMOs require a lot of server power, do you? They can get away with it because they charge a monthly cost, while there's no way in Hell anyone's going to pay monthly to play a single-player game. And even actual MMOGs get pirated.
They don't. That's just it. Any DRM scheme will boild down to "if (some_condition_is_met()) run_game(); else complain();". Since a general-purpose computer will run any program given to it, it's always possible to alter the game so that some_condition_is_met() will simply return true.
As for this particular scheme, it's likely unworkable due to cost, but even if it's implemented, it can be cracked by including a saveserver with the cracked game, or altering the code that sends serialized data over the network to write it to disk instead. Doing so also makes the cracked version clearly superior to the store-bought one.
Wrong. All you need in that case is cracking the part that authenticates the server, cache all the content, and pack the game with the cached content and your own server which serves said content. Since the pirate version will get everything from local cache, and the retail version won't, the pirate version will be even more superior to the retail version than usual.
As an added bonus the publisher will have to foot the bill for the server and connection that streams the code, textures and other stuff.
Your defense doesn't hold water. If you don't understand what code does, don't try to clean it up; and whether or not you understood his code, yours is open to SQL injection attack and thus wrong.
Also, if you have trouble reading simple if statement in a for loop... Well. Maybe you shouldn't be writing Web apps?
I don't buy games from a store because I don't want Securom, Starforce or other software doing malicious alteration of my system.
At this point the major pirate groups have a better reputation than game publishers. I'd never install anything that wasn't disinfected by Razor 1911 or other trustworthy republisher first. Hell, even store-bought CDs might be dangerous, so better stick to mp3s.
DRM is basically about infect software with a trojan, and cracking is about removing it.
No, because the laws of physics in Trek universe aren't stable, but change unpredictably from time to time. The locals have adapted to that and update their thinking without even noticing; those of us outside the continuum perceive changes as discontinuity.
It's amazing how widespread that phenomena is. This universe seems to be the only one with stable and self-consistent enough set of physics that you can apply them to problems logically. Here, if you can bypass enemy shields, you can bypass your own; in Trekverse, that phenomenom only works on enemy shields, and even then inconsistently, and the locals have evolved in such a way as to see nothing strange in that. It is truly a testament to the power of evolution that sentient beings can function - even build an interstellar empire - in such a chaotic mess of a world.
Unfortunately, there are situations where you have to use dynamically created queries. For example, to the best of my knowledge, queries like "SELECT item FROM table WHERE keyword IN ($1, $2, $3...)" can't be written to accept an arbitrary number of keywords without constructing the query string dynamically. Of course you can and should still use positional parameters, so it's not like this causes a vulnerability.
Using views, on the other hand, has absolutely nothing to do with protecting against injection attacks; they're simply the SQL equivalant of functions. Ditto for stored procedures. After all, SQL injection is about messing with the parsing stage of the query, rather than the dispatch or execution states.