It seems to me that at least some of this finger pointing should go towards the idiots who created the circumstance where the item under test was informed it was under test. That presumes an atmosphere of trust that the very idea of "testing for compliance" does not, and should not, incorporate.
I'm not saying VW is blameless in this, or making any statement about the consequences to society or lack thereof. I'm just saying someone, or more than one someone, is culpable as having set up the circumstances where this could even happen.
For example, C is a *horrible* choice if you're writing a simple application that needs to do a bunch of string processing. In many cases, high performance isn't even a consideration, rather than correctness, security, and development speed.
That is only true if you haven't written a string processing library. Which pretty much anyone who is going to address tasks like this will do, presuming they just don't go out and find one already written. Same thing for lists, dictionaries, trees, GEOdata, IPs, etc. Whatever. There's nothing that says one has to use C's built-in model for strings, either. Make a better one. It was one of the first things I did, and I did it in assembler, as soon as I ran into the convention of an EOT embedded in the actual text being the end marker -- I thought it was stupid then, and I didn't think a zero was any smarter when C first came to my attention lo those many decades ago. It's also a bear trap anyone can throw a bear into with regard to vulnerabilities -- one that can be entirely obviated by a decent string handling module.
C isn't a bad language to do *anything* in. It's just a language that requires you to be competent, or better, and to address it through the lens of that competence in order to get enough out of it to make the result and the effort expended worth the candle. And no, if the programmer doesn't write in such a way as to almost always create generally reusable components, I'd not be willing to apply the appellation "competent" to the programmer.
C's key inherent characteristics are portability, leanness and close-to-the-metal speed. It doesn't hold your hand. It's a language for experienced, skilled programmers when we're talking about creating actual products that are expected to perform in the wild. Lean code isn't nearly the issue it used to be, but it's still "nice" to have.
There's no evidence, or even rational theory, that says the "brain" of a 5-week old fetus is any more "human" than a clump of grass. It's alive (well, it was to get that far) but it surely isn't a human being. That takes a great deal more development physically, and frankly, I think it takes a great deal of interaction with parents and the environment as well. Potential? In the normal course of gestation, yes. When you're growing a lump of cells in a dish -- no.
If you have multiple monitors: one desktop, multiple monitors. Works fine. Applications are already in windows. That's perfectly functional isolation. No need for more than one desktop.
I would if they fixed the moderation. No problem. Slashdot at its best is easily the best site on the Internet as far as I'm concerned. It's just rarely able to get there, and specifically because the moderation is for shit. Great anon comments are buried from word one and very rarely brought to light; great logged-in comments get buried by "I disagree" morons; meta-moderation does *zero* to recover these lost comments because the entire effect of meta moderation is on future actions; moderators can't participate except anonymously, which is insane; moderation itself is anonymous so all these bad actors can never be held accountable by the membership.
I've paid for Slashdot in the past, via subscription, but have come to the conclusion that the content I love is hurt so badly by the moderation problems that it just isn't worth it any longer.
Compared to the horrific moderation problems, Slashdot's advertising doesn't even come close as a "gee, how annoying." Although some of the stories they pick... that's clearly advertising, and that is annoying.
The problem is not advertising. The problem is the mechanisms that are in use. Responsible advertising can be done easily -- just source the image or text from your own website. Don't send the user's browser haring all over the intertubes, track them, or otherwise do anything except talk about, and link to, the product being sold.
There are a lot of invested people out there right now that are trying to tell you that ads as they are constituted now, are a good thing, because "that's how content is paid for." This is either disingenuous or bewildered. Content can be paid for without abusing the site visitors. Ads can be served without bringing in other network excursions. No one has to be tracked.
Evil practices we can do entirely without today, without "breaking the internet", include (but are not limited to:
o roll-overs: If I didn't click on it, I DIDN'T WANT IT. Ads, menus, "keywords" -- anything o tracking -- not unless I say you can o network traffic outside of the content provider -- just don't o unnecessarily splitting content over many ad-bearing pages -- I hate you o pop-up "continue to web site in x seconds" -- will not watch, let finish, or click. EVER.
The solution is right in front of all of us. All you have to do as a web site owner is grasp it. You'll instantly have happier visitors, visitors that stay longer, visitors that are MORE likely to click on your ads.
You'd also be VERY smart to ask users to select between text and graphic advertising. Best thing Google ever did was host text ads. Worst thing they ever did was lose focus on them. Learn from that. Let users select text ads if they prefer them. I would be *much* more likely to click on a polite text ad than the sanctimonious garbage the ad companies are inflicting on us these days.
Animals that can do basic addition with small numbers aren't that uncommon, even some small fish can do this, yet I don't think we'd call them semi-intelligent.
Some of them work at my local McDonalds. On a more positive note, they do seem to be fairly consistent in terms of image recognition skills; they almost always poke the right picture on the till.
This is essentially the same argument that says realistic violent video games will produce violent individuals.
Just as with violent individuals, the ones that cause problems were already violent; the person who wants to whip a slave is already defective.
Furthermore, it would appear that the actual result of porn, prostitution, etc., is to reduce adverse events involving real people. Rape statistics go down, etc. The actual result is pretty clearly more along the line of pressure release than pressure enhancement.
You demonstrate some serious shortsightedness in other areas, though.
Backing up to your rocket-ness, as it were, you know that the energy budget is almost the entire problem. In space, there is an unlimited energy supply 24/7. Gathering can be done on any scale, and once the scale becomes automated, surplus energy is a guaranteed result.
This is the end game: Manufacturing problems: material supply: near infinite. Material costs: extremely low, essentially whatever it costs self-maintaining equipment to maintain itself, which -- eventually -- will be nothing. Manufacturing room: unlimited in our terms. Shipment costs -- near zero (unlimited energy, continuous incoming streams of raw materials and outgoing finished products or intermediate materials, etc.)
We can't do this if we stay here. It's not just difficult, it's flat-out impossible. Whereas in space, it's definitely going to be difficult, and you bet it'll be expensive, but the reward is huge beyond the wildest dreams of any sitting economist or world leader today.
The eggs in one basket is also a very serious issue all by itself for anyone who feels that survival as a race is a worthy goal. Not everyone does, of course, but I definitely do.
We need to go. Naysayers need to be beaten with a wet noodle until the understand it.
Yes, inexhaustible natural resources - at an extraordinarily high energy and material cost.
Are you suggesting we'll get to the low energy + material cost state by sitting on our thumbs? There's a huge learning curve here. We either climb it to get to the honey, or we don't get the honey.
We have neither the resources, energy, or know-how to successfully colonize another planet in a way that that colony will be self-sustaining.
Again, are you suggesting we'll get to the "resources, energy and know-how" state by sitting on our thumbs?
Again with the inability to comprehend the vast amounts of energy and material required to make that "endless" space practical. You might as well suggest building colonies on the bottom of the ocean floor - it'd be far more achievable than building a colony on Mars.
First of all, "out there" is not just mars. Second of all, no. The ocean floor has almost none of the benefits space provides.
You keep talking about "endless space" - endless space is also known as a motherfucking 'vacuum'
ok, fine, endless vacuum. It's a challenge. It's not an impossible to breach barrier. And learning to do it, particularly learning to do it space-to-space instead of ground-to-space -- is part of the process. Once we get an industrial base established -- and that's the key here, make no mistake -- costs will drop precipitously. Robotics will drive that too, but there are all manner of advantages for humans "out there."
Yes, creating a viable presence off-planet / in space is very challenging. But no, it isn't something we should -- or really, can afford to -- ignore.
And even if we build a particle accelerator to the fullest capacity of our technology around the equator of the Earth, we still couldn’t reach those energies.
...within the context of currently understood science and technology.
Which is exactly the same contextual caveat Lord Kelvin failed to incorporate in his thinking.
Here's your money quote: Until we know everything, we don't know everything. And I assure you, we don't know everything.
Right, Nothing. Just essentially inexhaustible natural resources, defeating our civilization's all-eggs-in-one-basket issue, endless non-polluting-of-living-environment industrial space, low-grav environments for the disabled and elderly, low and zero-grav industrial environments, endless storage and manufacturing space, CHON, no, nothing at all "out there." Whatever are those "scientists" thinking?!?!?!?
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me that at least some of this finger pointing should go towards the idiots who created the circumstance where the item under test was informed it was under test. That presumes an atmosphere of trust that the very idea of "testing for compliance" does not, and should not, incorporate.
I'm not saying VW is blameless in this, or making any statement about the consequences to society or lack thereof. I'm just saying someone, or more than one someone, is culpable as having set up the circumstances where this could even happen.
That is only true if you haven't written a string processing library. Which pretty much anyone who is going to address tasks like this will do, presuming they just don't go out and find one already written. Same thing for lists, dictionaries, trees, GEOdata, IPs, etc. Whatever. There's nothing that says one has to use C's built-in model for strings, either. Make a better one. It was one of the first things I did, and I did it in assembler, as soon as I ran into the convention of an EOT embedded in the actual text being the end marker -- I thought it was stupid then, and I didn't think a zero was any smarter when C first came to my attention lo those many decades ago. It's also a bear trap anyone can throw a bear into with regard to vulnerabilities -- one that can be entirely obviated by a decent string handling module.
C isn't a bad language to do *anything* in. It's just a language that requires you to be competent, or better, and to address it through the lens of that competence in order to get enough out of it to make the result and the effort expended worth the candle. And no, if the programmer doesn't write in such a way as to almost always create generally reusable components, I'd not be willing to apply the appellation "competent" to the programmer.
C's key inherent characteristics are portability, leanness and close-to-the-metal speed. It doesn't hold your hand. It's a language for experienced, skilled programmers when we're talking about creating actual products that are expected to perform in the wild. Lean code isn't nearly the issue it used to be, but it's still "nice" to have.
This kind of approach doesn't tend to restore the fact that you were finally on level 42 of Junkfood Smash, either.
Gonna have to go through the choppers first, too.
Be that as it may, you failed to address the points that were made, so I wouldn't be too proud of yourself.
Not at five weeks, it doesn't. It's not magic. It's biology.
There's no evidence, or even rational theory, that says the "brain" of a 5-week old fetus is any more "human" than a clump of grass. It's alive (well, it was to get that far) but it surely isn't a human being. That takes a great deal more development physically, and frankly, I think it takes a great deal of interaction with parents and the environment as well. Potential? In the normal course of gestation, yes. When you're growing a lump of cells in a dish -- no.
If you have multiple monitors: one desktop, multiple monitors. Works fine. Applications are already in windows. That's perfectly functional isolation. No need for more than one desktop.
Works great for me -- I have six monitors.
Google sells rankings right now. You can buy your way to the top of any particular search you want.
I would if they fixed the moderation. No problem. Slashdot at its best is easily the best site on the Internet as far as I'm concerned. It's just rarely able to get there, and specifically because the moderation is for shit. Great anon comments are buried from word one and very rarely brought to light; great logged-in comments get buried by "I disagree" morons; meta-moderation does *zero* to recover these lost comments because the entire effect of meta moderation is on future actions; moderators can't participate except anonymously, which is insane; moderation itself is anonymous so all these bad actors can never be held accountable by the membership.
I've paid for Slashdot in the past, via subscription, but have come to the conclusion that the content I love is hurt so badly by the moderation problems that it just isn't worth it any longer.
Compared to the horrific moderation problems, Slashdot's advertising doesn't even come close as a "gee, how annoying." Although some of the stories they pick... that's clearly advertising, and that is annoying.
You just want a free car. C'mon, admit it.
The problem is not advertising. The problem is the mechanisms that are in use. Responsible advertising can be done easily -- just source the image or text from your own website. Don't send the user's browser haring all over the intertubes, track them, or otherwise do anything except talk about, and link to, the product being sold.
There are a lot of invested people out there right now that are trying to tell you that ads as they are constituted now, are a good thing, because "that's how content is paid for." This is either disingenuous or bewildered. Content can be paid for without abusing the site visitors. Ads can be served without bringing in other network excursions. No one has to be tracked.
Evil practices we can do entirely without today, without "breaking the internet", include (but are not limited to:
o roll-overs: If I didn't click on it, I DIDN'T WANT IT. Ads, menus, "keywords" -- anything
o tracking -- not unless I say you can
o network traffic outside of the content provider -- just don't
o unnecessarily splitting content over many ad-bearing pages -- I hate you
o pop-up "continue to web site in x seconds" -- will not watch, let finish, or click. EVER.
The solution is right in front of all of us. All you have to do as a web site owner is grasp it. You'll instantly have happier visitors, visitors that stay longer, visitors that are MORE likely to click on your ads.
You'd also be VERY smart to ask users to select between text and graphic advertising. Best thing Google ever did was host text ads. Worst thing they ever did was lose focus on them. Learn from that. Let users select text ads if they prefer them. I would be *much* more likely to click on a polite text ad than the sanctimonious garbage the ad companies are inflicting on us these days.
No, this is about intelligent life.
Some of them work at my local McDonalds. On a more positive note, they do seem to be fairly consistent in terms of image recognition skills; they almost always poke the right picture on the till.
This
If they are sentient, it should be up to them to say "no more", not to "us."
That's the reason no one has any right to tell you what to do with your own body -- you are sentient.
This is essentially the same argument that says realistic violent video games will produce violent individuals.
Just as with violent individuals, the ones that cause problems were already violent; the person who wants to whip a slave is already defective.
Furthermore, it would appear that the actual result of porn, prostitution, etc., is to reduce adverse events involving real people. Rape statistics go down, etc. The actual result is pretty clearly more along the line of pressure release than pressure enhancement.
I presume, then, that you know rockets.
You demonstrate some serious shortsightedness in other areas, though.
Backing up to your rocket-ness, as it were, you know that the energy budget is almost the entire problem. In space, there is an unlimited energy supply 24/7. Gathering can be done on any scale, and once the scale becomes automated, surplus energy is a guaranteed result.
This is the end game: Manufacturing problems: material supply: near infinite. Material costs: extremely low, essentially whatever it costs self-maintaining equipment to maintain itself, which -- eventually -- will be nothing. Manufacturing room: unlimited in our terms. Shipment costs -- near zero (unlimited energy, continuous incoming streams of raw materials and outgoing finished products or intermediate materials, etc.)
We can't do this if we stay here. It's not just difficult, it's flat-out impossible. Whereas in space, it's definitely going to be difficult, and you bet it'll be expensive, but the reward is huge beyond the wildest dreams of any sitting economist or world leader today.
The eggs in one basket is also a very serious issue all by itself for anyone who feels that survival as a race is a worthy goal. Not everyone does, of course, but I definitely do.
We need to go. Naysayers need to be beaten with a wet noodle until the understand it.
You missed my point. His quote is based upon the current technologies we have to accelerate particles.
Are you suggesting we'll get to the low energy + material cost state by sitting on our thumbs? There's a huge learning curve here. We either climb it to get to the honey, or we don't get the honey.
Again, are you suggesting we'll get to the "resources, energy and know-how" state by sitting on our thumbs?
First of all, "out there" is not just mars. Second of all, no. The ocean floor has almost none of the benefits space provides.
ok, fine, endless vacuum. It's a challenge. It's not an impossible to breach barrier. And learning to do it, particularly learning to do it space-to-space instead of ground-to-space -- is part of the process. Once we get an industrial base established -- and that's the key here, make no mistake -- costs will drop precipitously. Robotics will drive that too, but there are all manner of advantages for humans "out there."
Yes, creating a viable presence off-planet / in space is very challenging. But no, it isn't something we should -- or really, can afford to -- ignore.
TFS title:
Spy Industry Leaders Befuddled Over 'Deep Cynicism' of American Public
Seem to me it could simply have read:
Spy Industry Leaders Befuddled
Which is exactly the same contextual caveat Lord Kelvin failed to incorporate in his thinking.
Here's your money quote: Until we know everything, we don't know everything. And I assure you, we don't know everything.
--me
Underrated. Sadly. But still.
African, or European?
Right, Nothing. Just essentially inexhaustible natural resources, defeating our civilization's all-eggs-in-one-basket issue, endless non-polluting-of-living-environment industrial space, low-grav environments for the disabled and elderly, low and zero-grav industrial environments, endless storage and manufacturing space, CHON, no, nothing at all "out there." Whatever are those "scientists" thinking?!?!?!?