No, they are not. You're just unaware of them. Networks are known to be threat vectors. For many applications, there's no particular benefit to being networked, and considering the risks, it is not uncommon at all to forego the option. We're not talking about your desktop here. We're talking about industrial controllers and the like, of which there are many.
In any case, you are carefully ignoring the fact that I addressed the need for care in a networked environment.
Sigh. Read again. I didn't say evil wasn't done. I said it wasn't done to innocents.
Reservation culture is doing their descendants no favors at all. Constantly moaning about the past isn't doing anyone any good either. Nor is a focus on trying to worship past cultural norms.
They were conquered. Now they will either integrate or suffocate. That's the way of things. It's always been the way of things. You may want to change that (and I would sympathize with that desire) but the fact is, you're not going to change it, and constantly banging one's head against the wall only serves to damage one's head.
I'm saying the current situation is not one that seems to me to call for anything outside of focusing on social integration rather than creating / maintaining special cases if the opportunities and benefits of the currently extant society are to be extended to everyone in a fair and even-handed manner. Because just as the civil war is over, and the revolutionary war is over, the Indian wars are over as well. It's over. But society is not handling it like it's over. That's causing, or is a significant component of, a lot of problems.
I live right next to a large American Indian reservation; about 20 miles. I've done a lot of business with these people, and I've been over there more times than I could possibly count. I can tell you first hand that the majority of problems they experience are not because "the white man", they are because the reservation culture is incredibly toxic, backwards, and insular in almost every facet I've been exposed to. This is also true of the reservation to our west about 100 miles or so. The reason this is so, in my opinion, is because the whole idea of a reservation is toxic in the first place.
Are we to ask them who was killed when they migrated across the land bridge from Asia? Or about internecine warfare prior to the coming of the white man? It seems that they're as much immigrants here in the Americas as are the Europeans; the only difference is they got here before the Europeans did. There's no evidence humans evolved on this continent at all.
What's always been surprising to me about the politically correct take on the Native American's situation is that it pays absolutely no mind to just how vicious and evil the Indians were to each other -- varied by tribe and time, of course, but still, they were all about conquer and murder and etc. before Europeans ever arrived here. Look at how the Aztec managed things, for example. You just haven't lived until you've seen the carved-out skull of a virgin, I tell ya.
Every taking of land -- ever, I suspect -- was done by some fairly active stomping of the locals into the ground or enslaving them, abusing them, etc. by the stronger and/or more technologically sophisticated party (but I repeat myself.)
Characterizing our Native Americans as innocents to whom evil was done doesn't seem to be even close to an accurate representation of history.
Finally, there's only just so much worship of "traditional ways" you can pursue before you've gone and shot yourself right in the foot. That's as much of a problem -- a self-inflicted one -- as anything that actually makes the news. But of course, you can't really say that without coming under some pretty heavy criticism. Not that such a thing could happen here on slashdot, of course.:)
That being said, C requires that the programmer write code perfectly, or else you've got a potential security disaster.
You do realize that not every program is relevant to a network, yes? Or to a system that is exposed to a risk of compromise? Or even running on a system that is connected to a network?
You should also realize that there is absolutely nothing about c that requires the programmer to stick with its zero-terminated string model, or the standard string processing routines, or anything along those lines.
Finally, there's nothing about any language that, if you are exposed to potential compromise WRT the task at hand, relieves the programmer of the responsibility of treating every interaction with the outside world such that the only data that can get in, is the data in the format and of the length you intended to process.
The most important thing about security in programming isn't which language you are using. It is how well you are using it, which is to say, how good you are at, you know, programming.
I'm still interested to hear what kind of answer might issue forth from Kernighan and/or Donovan.
A follow up question is, when I'm not constrained by high performance, I have been using Python 2-series. Does go offer something worthy of the effort to move to it there?
Well, if all of computer language history is any guide, that's going to present an asynchronous performance issue.
I'm a C programmer by choice. I require that the program does what I told it to, when I told it to. Anything else is malbehavior. Data structures are not garbage unless and until I say they are. So, if go follows the example of every other garbage-collected language I've run into thus far, I'd need to disable garbage collection (and most likely anything else that is running off by itself to do things I didn't ask for within the context of what I write.) I'm perfectly satisfied with local variables that are cleaned off with one CPU instruction on procedure exit; that's as automatic a "cleanup" as I care to indulge in.
Also, threading's not all that difficult. I use it all the time in C. I really don't see the big deal, but I'm willing to listen / read why it might be.
So that would be my question: As a C programmer with a deep collection of working, very fast algorithms in my areas of specialization, and a regular, nearly constant need to get as close to the metal as I can get, why would I want to transition to go? Just as an aside, being able to call C from go... go would have to offer something very significant indeed for that to fly. I can already call C from C.
Actually they will if they use Amazon's Kindle. Those always-available books of mine are just standard Kindle books, from Amazon. That's exactly how it works. Download to the device, keep it there as long as you want, read from the device. You can toss them off the device too, get the book back later from "the cloud", but for me, no need. My phone has hundreds of books on it and plenty of room (I'm not into videos even a little bit, so gigs of storage go a very long way for me.) Textbooks, fiction, language books, etc. All right there, can be read anytime, anywhere. Anyone can use this approach, assuming the Kindle ecosystem, which is pretty broad - mac, pc, android, iOS, Blackberry. No linux client I am aware of, though.
There's always the web. This whole "must be in walled journal" thing can be bypassed for pennies. Or for nothing. If they're too lazy or incompetent or actually don't care, then they can deal with the rules like everyone else has to.
Really, again, so what. There are a zillion things you can do on a tablet like this without an internet connection at all, so long as you can get to one *sometimes*.
Download a few books, you don't need a connection to read them. Many games don't require one either. Likewise utility apps.
Tablets are very flexible devices. A constant internet connection is not required to get a great deal out of using one.
I suspect they had every use case possible in mind, even if only inherently or implicitly, that involves low user cost of entry and lowered risk of an economic hit to them no matter what. Because those are the cases that will sell the tablet. If you can afford a better tablet and you feel that'll serve you better in any use case, then that's probably what you'll buy.
The tub and the grandspawn present exactly the same problem: an increased likelihood of potential damage to the device. So a low cost, reasonably functional device is a nice thing to be able to bring to bear.
It's really a pretty nice tablet, too. Decent display, fast enough, and lots of software available. This stuff will almost certainly just keep getting better and less expensive.
You know what actually works well? Cloverleafs. Expensive, though.
Me I want to redesign *everything*.
I'd like to build a town where dwellings and stores are up on pylons like mushroom heads; that allows a huge amount of ground to be devoted to nature as compared to dwellings on the ground. I want them separated from neighboring dwellings by at least 50 feet of open space.
I want transport between/along the dwellings to be a dual purpose line where one half is a monorail with community cars, and one half is a walkway, and I want that up in the air with the dwellings, also on pylons. Nothing on the ground. No streetlights. Just daylight/IR cameras that send sidewalk activity to a central, secure, automated recording location in order to prevent hooligans from becoming a problem. The related records would be freed up for law enforcement only in the case of robbery or assault.
The entire town would be a park. You want transport, you signal for a car, it'll come get you and switch as required to get where you want to go, including the garage outside the town limits where you store your vehicle(s), assuming you even need one (for travel elsewhere, you might want one.)
No vehicles would be allowed on the ground. You can walk there any time. No hunting.
This kind of thing is a black art, practiced only by the darkest of souls, out of the light, in the shadows. Probably while eating black licorice and drinking black coffee.
Come on. You can get a free connection at almost any McDonald's, coffee shop, etc. At least here in the US you can. Buying the tablet doesn't have to mean you must run out and buy an Internet connection.
Aside from that (which is probably a non-issue anyway, as Internet connections aren't exactly rare, tablet or no tablet), this isn't a bad tablet. We bought a couple for the grandspawn and one to use in the tub - far better to drop a $50 tablet in the drink than a more expensive device.
One (sort of) funny thing is that the Kindle app, Amazon's very own reading application, crashes now and then on this tablet. Probably just a bug, but it doesn't do it on my android phone, so... probably a tablet issue. They oughta get on that.:)
What I am saying - specifically - is that there are bad cops, and in addition, any cop that does not arrest or otherwise bring to justice a bad cop that they are aware of is also a bad cop. I am not specifying a percentage in any way, however, I will say that there are far too many, and that at this time, there are enough bad cops that one cannot assume that any encounter with an LEO is an encounter with a good cop.
Their "jobs" were never to break the law. All this whining about pressure on cops is utter BS. If they had been doing their actual jobs, instead of being criminals, they'd be fine. This is simply their own malfeasance coming back to bite everyone -- us and them -- in the ass.
Every cop that breaks the law is a criminal. Every cop that knows about such things and does not turn the criminal in is a criminal accessory. That's cop culture. They think they are above the law, instead of its servants. I have no sympathy for their current situation at all. I do regret that they have been allowed, both by their internal culture and by the courts, to screw the public over so badly. And that the courts, in particular the supreme court, has failed to obey their oaths to uphold the constitution, instead wreaking sophist havoc on its meaning and intent.
I honestly do not think there is any chance at all of fixing this. The downhill slide is too profound; the public almost completely unaware of the issues at hand until they too are caught in the toxic, broken gears of the system. When that happens, they often disappear into the depths of the world's largest imprisonment undertaking. When (if) they come out of that, they're treated as unemployable and sometimes worse.
The "retribution, not rehabilitation" mindset the media has inculcated into the American public and to which their legislators pander, creates a permanent lower class whose only hope for advance is more lawbreaking, and this constrains almost all of those who actually pursue an upwards economic path. The rest are hopeless, and rightfully so. There is little hope to be had.
The root cause is bad legislators, bad law, bad police, and bad courts. There's actually no reason to expect this to work well. Nor does it.
Now the cops are paying for it, a little bit, as the Internet makes public what used to be a quiet secret known only to the cops themselves and their victims. It won't be enough, though. Because it isn't just the cops. The entire system reinforces these results, from top to bottom.
I do the same with charities. Though it's sometimes difficult to find charities that aren't wasting a lot of the funds on ridiculous executive salaries and the like. I agree about the lines need moved, but again, they aren't going to be, or at least no more than represents a token amount.
Arguing for it is a different matter. As I understand it, it has a threshold built into it so that there is a minimum living allowance below which there is no consumption tax (I think they arrange that by providing X$ to the individual which makes up for Y$ of consumption) and that way it's not regressive.
But it's been a while since I looked at it; it never got any traction (no surprise there either way... things are just how the rich like them, and they're not going to change), so I never really managed to gen all that much interest.
Currently, a fan of basic income, but again, I don't think that's going anywhere yet. Not until automation makes significantly more inroads and there simply isn't any other viable option.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they are not. You're just unaware of them. Networks are known to be threat vectors. For many applications, there's no particular benefit to being networked, and considering the risks, it is not uncommon at all to forego the option. We're not talking about your desktop here. We're talking about industrial controllers and the like, of which there are many.
In any case, you are carefully ignoring the fact that I addressed the need for care in a networked environment.
Sigh. Read again. I didn't say evil wasn't done. I said it wasn't done to innocents.
Reservation culture is doing their descendants no favors at all. Constantly moaning about the past isn't doing anyone any good either. Nor is a focus on trying to worship past cultural norms.
They were conquered. Now they will either integrate or suffocate. That's the way of things. It's always been the way of things. You may want to change that (and I would sympathize with that desire) but the fact is, you're not going to change it, and constantly banging one's head against the wall only serves to damage one's head.
No, you're saying that. I didn't.
I'm saying the current situation is not one that seems to me to call for anything outside of focusing on social integration rather than creating / maintaining special cases if the opportunities and benefits of the currently extant society are to be extended to everyone in a fair and even-handed manner. Because just as the civil war is over, and the revolutionary war is over, the Indian wars are over as well. It's over. But society is not handling it like it's over. That's causing, or is a significant component of, a lot of problems.
I live right next to a large American Indian reservation; about 20 miles. I've done a lot of business with these people, and I've been over there more times than I could possibly count. I can tell you first hand that the majority of problems they experience are not because "the white man", they are because the reservation culture is incredibly toxic, backwards, and insular in almost every facet I've been exposed to. This is also true of the reservation to our west about 100 miles or so. The reason this is so, in my opinion, is because the whole idea of a reservation is toxic in the first place.
Are we to ask them who was killed when they migrated across the land bridge from Asia? Or about internecine warfare prior to the coming of the white man? It seems that they're as much immigrants here in the Americas as are the Europeans; the only difference is they got here before the Europeans did. There's no evidence humans evolved on this continent at all.
What's always been surprising to me about the politically correct take on the Native American's situation is that it pays absolutely no mind to just how vicious and evil the Indians were to each other -- varied by tribe and time, of course, but still, they were all about conquer and murder and etc. before Europeans ever arrived here. Look at how the Aztec managed things, for example. You just haven't lived until you've seen the carved-out skull of a virgin, I tell ya.
Every taking of land -- ever, I suspect -- was done by some fairly active stomping of the locals into the ground or enslaving them, abusing them, etc. by the stronger and/or more technologically sophisticated party (but I repeat myself.)
Characterizing our Native Americans as innocents to whom evil was done doesn't seem to be even close to an accurate representation of history.
Finally, there's only just so much worship of "traditional ways" you can pursue before you've gone and shot yourself right in the foot. That's as much of a problem -- a self-inflicted one -- as anything that actually makes the news. But of course, you can't really say that without coming under some pretty heavy criticism. Not that such a thing could happen here on slashdot, of course. :)
You do realize that not every program is relevant to a network, yes? Or to a system that is exposed to a risk of compromise? Or even running on a system that is connected to a network?
You should also realize that there is absolutely nothing about c that requires the programmer to stick with its zero-terminated string model, or the standard string processing routines, or anything along those lines.
Finally, there's nothing about any language that, if you are exposed to potential compromise WRT the task at hand, relieves the programmer of the responsibility of treating every interaction with the outside world such that the only data that can get in, is the data in the format and of the length you intended to process.
The most important thing about security in programming isn't which language you are using. It is how well you are using it, which is to say, how good you are at, you know, programming.
Here's an idea for Dice: before someone is allowed to moderate, they must prove they have a sense of humor. :)
That was my impression.
I'm still interested to hear what kind of answer might issue forth from Kernighan and/or Donovan.
A follow up question is, when I'm not constrained by high performance, I have been using Python 2-series. Does go offer something worthy of the effort to move to it there?
'go' is clearly exactly twice as difficult and complex to write as is 'c' - and there you have it.
Well, if all of computer language history is any guide, that's going to present an asynchronous performance issue.
I'm a C programmer by choice. I require that the program does what I told it to, when I told it to. Anything else is malbehavior. Data structures are not garbage unless and until I say they are. So, if go follows the example of every other garbage-collected language I've run into thus far, I'd need to disable garbage collection (and most likely anything else that is running off by itself to do things I didn't ask for within the context of what I write.) I'm perfectly satisfied with local variables that are cleaned off with one CPU instruction on procedure exit; that's as automatic a "cleanup" as I care to indulge in.
Also, threading's not all that difficult. I use it all the time in C. I really don't see the big deal, but I'm willing to listen / read why it might be.
So that would be my question: As a C programmer with a deep collection of working, very fast algorithms in my areas of specialization, and a regular, nearly constant need to get as close to the metal as I can get, why would I want to transition to go? Just as an aside, being able to call C from go... go would have to offer something very significant indeed for that to fly. I can already call C from C.
You intend to screw with some peas, do you?
Actually they will if they use Amazon's Kindle. Those always-available books of mine are just standard Kindle books, from Amazon. That's exactly how it works. Download to the device, keep it there as long as you want, read from the device. You can toss them off the device too, get the book back later from "the cloud", but for me, no need. My phone has hundreds of books on it and plenty of room (I'm not into videos even a little bit, so gigs of storage go a very long way for me.) Textbooks, fiction, language books, etc. All right there, can be read anytime, anywhere. Anyone can use this approach, assuming the Kindle ecosystem, which is pretty broad - mac, pc, android, iOS, Blackberry. No linux client I am aware of, though.
There's always the web. This whole "must be in walled journal" thing can be bypassed for pennies. Or for nothing. If they're too lazy or incompetent or actually don't care, then they can deal with the rules like everyone else has to.
Nope. I read all the time away from a connection. All the books on my device read just fine.
Really, again, so what. There are a zillion things you can do on a tablet like this without an internet connection at all, so long as you can get to one *sometimes*.
Download a few books, you don't need a connection to read them. Many games don't require one either. Likewise utility apps.
Tablets are very flexible devices. A constant internet connection is not required to get a great deal out of using one.
I suspect they had every use case possible in mind, even if only inherently or implicitly, that involves low user cost of entry and lowered risk of an economic hit to them no matter what. Because those are the cases that will sell the tablet. If you can afford a better tablet and you feel that'll serve you better in any use case, then that's probably what you'll buy.
The tub and the grandspawn present exactly the same problem: an increased likelihood of potential damage to the device. So a low cost, reasonably functional device is a nice thing to be able to bring to bear.
It's really a pretty nice tablet, too. Decent display, fast enough, and lots of software available. This stuff will almost certainly just keep getting better and less expensive.
You know what actually works well? Cloverleafs. Expensive, though.
Me I want to redesign *everything*.
I'd like to build a town where dwellings and stores are up on pylons like mushroom heads; that allows a huge amount of ground to be devoted to nature as compared to dwellings on the ground. I want them separated from neighboring dwellings by at least 50 feet of open space.
I want transport between/along the dwellings to be a dual purpose line where one half is a monorail with community cars, and one half is a walkway, and I want that up in the air with the dwellings, also on pylons. Nothing on the ground. No streetlights. Just daylight/IR cameras that send sidewalk activity to a central, secure, automated recording location in order to prevent hooligans from becoming a problem. The related records would be freed up for law enforcement only in the case of robbery or assault.
The entire town would be a park. You want transport, you signal for a car, it'll come get you and switch as required to get where you want to go, including the garage outside the town limits where you store your vehicle(s), assuming you even need one (for travel elsewhere, you might want one.)
No vehicles would be allowed on the ground. You can walk there any time. No hunting.
As soon as I make my first billion...
This kind of thing is a black art, practiced only by the darkest of souls, out of the light, in the shadows. Probably while eating black licorice and drinking black coffee.
You simply can't trust people like that.
Come on. You can get a free connection at almost any McDonald's, coffee shop, etc. At least here in the US you can. Buying the tablet doesn't have to mean you must run out and buy an Internet connection.
Aside from that (which is probably a non-issue anyway, as Internet connections aren't exactly rare, tablet or no tablet), this isn't a bad tablet. We bought a couple for the grandspawn and one to use in the tub - far better to drop a $50 tablet in the drink than a more expensive device.
One (sort of) funny thing is that the Kindle app, Amazon's very own reading application, crashes now and then on this tablet. Probably just a bug, but it doesn't do it on my android phone, so... probably a tablet issue. They oughta get on that. :)
What I am saying - specifically - is that there are bad cops, and in addition, any cop that does not arrest or otherwise bring to justice a bad cop that they are aware of is also a bad cop. I am not specifying a percentage in any way, however, I will say that there are far too many, and that at this time, there are enough bad cops that one cannot assume that any encounter with an LEO is an encounter with a good cop.
No, that's criminal.
Their "jobs" were never to break the law. All this whining about pressure on cops is utter BS. If they had been doing their actual jobs, instead of being criminals, they'd be fine. This is simply their own malfeasance coming back to bite everyone -- us and them -- in the ass.
Every cop that breaks the law is a criminal. Every cop that knows about such things and does not turn the criminal in is a criminal accessory. That's cop culture. They think they are above the law, instead of its servants. I have no sympathy for their current situation at all. I do regret that they have been allowed, both by their internal culture and by the courts, to screw the public over so badly. And that the courts, in particular the supreme court, has failed to obey their oaths to uphold the constitution, instead wreaking sophist havoc on its meaning and intent.
I honestly do not think there is any chance at all of fixing this. The downhill slide is too profound; the public almost completely unaware of the issues at hand until they too are caught in the toxic, broken gears of the system. When that happens, they often disappear into the depths of the world's largest imprisonment undertaking. When (if) they come out of that, they're treated as unemployable and sometimes worse.
The "retribution, not rehabilitation" mindset the media has inculcated into the American public and to which their legislators pander, creates a permanent lower class whose only hope for advance is more lawbreaking, and this constrains almost all of those who actually pursue an upwards economic path. The rest are hopeless, and rightfully so. There is little hope to be had.
The root cause is bad legislators, bad law, bad police, and bad courts. There's actually no reason to expect this to work well. Nor does it.
Now the cops are paying for it, a little bit, as the Internet makes public what used to be a quiet secret known only to the cops themselves and their victims. It won't be enough, though. Because it isn't just the cops. The entire system reinforces these results, from top to bottom.
I do the same with charities. Though it's sometimes difficult to find charities that aren't wasting a lot of the funds on ridiculous executive salaries and the like. I agree about the lines need moved, but again, they aren't going to be, or at least no more than represents a token amount.
Arguing for it is a different matter. As I understand it, it has a threshold built into it so that there is a minimum living allowance below which there is no consumption tax (I think they arrange that by providing X$ to the individual which makes up for Y$ of consumption) and that way it's not regressive.
But it's been a while since I looked at it; it never got any traction (no surprise there either way... things are just how the rich like them, and they're not going to change), so I never really managed to gen all that much interest.
Currently, a fan of basic income, but again, I don't think that's going anywhere yet. Not until automation makes significantly more inroads and there simply isn't any other viable option.
You missed my point entirely. I wasn't arguing for the fair tax.
I was saying that the system isn't going to change, so stop worrying about it.
The Chernobyl installation used a flawed reactor design and was operated with inadequately trained personnel.
That is not the face of nuclear power. No one sane is suggesting building another reactor like Chernobyl.
Also, if someone wanted to use my back yard for a fission reactor using current designs, I'd be the happiest guy in town. Guaranteed.