As far as population growth goes, a moderate number of extra deaths can be offset with extra breeding. It only becomes a noticable dip in population growth when the disease is on a very massive scale. After all, today those parts of the world with the least disease and famine are NOT the parts where population growth is highest.
Re:Mmmm.. FUN! And a legal nightmare..
on
Spy v. Spy
·
· Score: 2
/me said:
You also seem to be ignoring the fact that despite the claims made by the snoopware company, WhosWatchingMe does NOT prevent the snoopware from working. It merely lets the person *KNOW* that he's being snooped./you said:
So?
So the claim that it must be disabled in order for snoopware to work is a big fat lie.
The only reason for disabling it is if the employer has a reason to fear employees knowing that they are being watched. (For example, if they *hadn't* signed an agreement about being watched ahead of time, THEN there'd be a reason for the company to hide what they are doing from the employee. Otherwise they have nothing to fear from an employee knowing he is being monitored.
And, there is the problem. The only people who need to hide the fact that they are snooping are those that aren't supposed to be snooping.
Plus, there's the problem from the other end - what if WhosWatchingMe is the legit software put there by the system administrator to detect if security is being breeched with an unauthorized snooper program installed by one of the users, and that snooper program ruins the legitimate WhosWatchingMe program?
The fact of the matter is that any program that deliberately ruins another program PURELY for the purpose of hiding itself from detection, is not a program to be trusted.
Napster and DeCSS don't lie about what they do.
on
Spy v. Spy
·
· Score: 2
The problem is that the software LIES about what it does. This software package is arrogant enough to assume it has the right to destroy part of another program just because that other program has the audacity to tell me about the existence of it.
Napster and DeCSS do exactly what they claim to do. This snoopware contains hidden functionality that is not advertised. The person who installed it might not even know about the hidden functionality.
Everyone seems to be ignoring one very important point here - this isn't a balanced situation. People are acting as if Software A makes Software B fail and Software B makes Software A fail so it's a two-way street. It ISN'T! Software A does NOT make B fail, it merely exposes the existence of B. For this, B retaliates by making A fail altogether.
Re:Mmmm.. FUN! And a legal nightmare..
on
Spy v. Spy
·
· Score: 2
You seem to ignore the fact that this program did this without any warning at all. One program that trashes another one on install, not as a result of a bug but by deliberate design,is a malicious program. Note that until the maker of WhosWatchingMe said something about it, the snoopware company never said anything about what their software did to other software.
You also seem to be ignoring the fact that despite the claims made by the snoopware company, WhosWatchingMe does NOT prevent the snoopware from working. It merely lets the person *KNOW* that he's being snooped. This is a basic right as far as I'm concerned. There's a reason there's all those signs in public places saying, "Warning, these premises are under surveilence" - those signs are legally required.
The only reason for snoopware to disable WhosWatchingMe is to prevent someone from having a basic right to know when someone is listening, and that's a basic right that is ethically more important than the fact that the company owns the computer you install WhosWatchingMe on.
But the sorensen codec *is* good - that's what makes quicktime rock compared to realplayer or WMP. What sucks about it is merely the fact that they didn't bother porting it to anything but the sheep OS'es. But that doesn't make it a bad codec. It's a great codec with crappy availability. I don't see why Sorensen dying would be a good thing. The solution is to see it ported, not to convince people that it should no longer be used.
Actually, the compass is just deliberately mislabelled, I think. It's "N" doesn't mean "this is this the needle's north end", but "this arrow is pointing to the earth's north pole" It's the compass that's labelled backwad.
It's easy enough to test - get a magnet labelled as N and S, and hold it up to the compass and see how it gets affected.
Radiation can damage people in such a way that they don't die immediately, but they get massive health problems several years later that kill them. Like those who had the misfortune of being near the Chernyobyl plant and now have all sorts of cancers and other problems.
How would a culture that didn't have good medicine at the time even *know* that the radiation was causing problems? People must have been dying from undiagnosed health problems all the time anyway, even before the extra radiation.
All we can tell from the evidence really, is that humans survived the event, and that it didn't create a massive dip in population reproduction. That still leaves open the possiblity that people had shortened lifespans during that time (but lived long enough to procreate), and possibly had very painfully unhealthy conditions to contend with.
It takes a heck of a lot of radiation to cause total sterility. As long as that hasn't happened, the race can continue under conditions of extra solar radiation, but it won't be pleasant (and could lead to extra mutations, and thus the possible creation of more human races.)
A GPS unit doesn't know which way you are facing. It can only tell you which way you *were going* by comparing positions as you move., not which way you are looking now.
Also, the whole *point* of backpacking for many people is often the neat sense of "roughing it" by relying on your own self to get things done, and to navigate your way. Having a satallite tell you where you are ruins that fun if such fun is your goal.
And, the notion that magnetic north doesn't need to be marked anymore because we don't need it for navigation is false even if it's true that we really don't need it for navigation anymore. Navigation isn't the only reason to bother keeping track of where magnetic north is. It's a scentifically interesting phenomenon to study, and it's real geographical information so why not put it on a map.
After all, I don't really need to know what the shape of Baffin Island in Northern Canada is, since I'll never be going there, yet there it is, marked on the map? Why? Because the purpose of a map is to show you the geography that's really there, not *just* the subset of it that you find useful. Marking where magnetic north is on a map might not be as useful anymore, but that doesn't mean it should be removed from the map. If the map only contained things I actually found useful, it would be a very vague map. It wouldn't bother telling me, for example, what the ocean depths are, since
I'm not going down there.
I am of the camp that says the definition of the language is a thing independant of the implementation of the language. ISO C is still the same ISO C regardless of whether you compile it with gcc or cc or turbo C, or...
The fact that some have chosen to fix Pascal's built-in language limitations by altering the language itself means that the language they are now compiling is something other than Pascal, that just kinda looks similar to it.
No, this isn't a bad thing, but it's also not entirely true to be calling it "Pascal" anymore.
Modula-2, for example, is Pascal-like, but with some of the problems fixed, and it got a totally new name because of it.
But the irony is that Pascal, the language, is an excellent excercise in unnecessary verbosity. When you combine strong typing with a lack of any way to make a 'type-agnostic' routine, you end up having to verbosely re-code the same damn algorithms over and over and over. Here's the version of my sort that sorts strings - heres the version that sorts integers - here's the version that sorts floating point numbers - here's the version that sorts employee records.... here's the binary tree routines for storing employee records, there's the ones for storing customer records, etc, etc, etc.
Ugh.
Niklaus Wirth invented a language esteemed by acedemic professors, but not terribly useful in actual practice. I find it quite appropriate that he named it after the man who came up with Pascal's Wager - an argument for beliving in god that was hailed by the people who already believe in god, but utterly useless in practical application to its intended audience, those who don't.
On a somewhat related note, I utterly hate the "lines of code" metric as a means of measuring amount of code. Okay, given all the article says about the uselessness of measuring amount of code, occasionally it's still a handy thing to know, like if you want a measure of how long a piece of code is, or perhaps you are trying to strip things down into a simpler form and you'd like to know how much code you actually reduced.
At any rate, once you are in a situation where you want to measure amount of code, USE NUMBER OF TOKENS, not number of lines. (The number of words returned by a dumb word counter tool like the unix "wc" command is probably a good enough approximation to number of syntactical tokens.)
Counting lines is useless in any of the modern languages where all whitespace is treated the same way regardless of whether it's space, tab, or end-of-line. Consider the degenerate cases: //lots of lines
printf
(
"the number is %d\n" ,
foo
) ; // versus just one line:
printf( "the number is %d\n", foo );
If you are trying to reduce complexity, reducing lines of code might not really be doing that - it might just be writing the same amount of code with more obfuscation, giving the opposite of the intended simplifying effect. Counting the number of tokens, or words, would be MUCH better.
Counting lines of code is a leftover from the days when languages were "dumber" and did things like require exact columns in the source code, and not let you throw in whitespace where you like.
The authoring isn't the problem. The playback is. Offering a system that doesn't play on Linux or FreeBSD (unless you count OS X as being FreeBSD), or
anything else that's not Mac or Windows, is NOT a win for open source like the summary falsely claimed - it's using one open source project (the streaming server) to hamper another (the OS'es that can't do quicktime because Apple won't release the Sorensen Codec (and it would be illegal under DMCA to reverse engineer it nowadays even if you could figure out how {damn DMCA}.)
It doesn't matter what the Outlook 2000 update does. ALL software has the following common problem: FIRST the exploit is discovered, THEN LATER it gets patched. Thus to claim that a patch "prevents" the security holes is a claim that cannot possibly be true. There will always be a window of time between discovery and patch during which the system is vulnerable. It cannot be any other way.
The slashdot effect shouldn't hamper DNS lookups. The slashdot effect would only play a role *after* my machine knows the numeric IP address. If anything, the slashdot effect should speed up the DNS lookup if it has any effect at all, becuase it increses the likelyhood that upstream name servers have the name cached from previous users.
I tried the link and my machine can't find the name gnu-friends.org - is this a new DNS entry that just hasn't propigated to around these parts yet, or is something wrong here?
You bandy about the word "prevent" too easily. If thpse updates actually prevented the spread of viruses, there would only need to be one such update. But they keep having to come out with new ones, for some reason - oh yeah, because the previous ones didn't catch everything.
However, yours is not (IMO) the position of the poster I posted in reply to.
I think your impression of what the previous poster was on about is incorrect. You jumped on him for wanting AOL to give up its intellectual property, when it wasn't AOL's property he was talking about. The information being gathered by the browser isn't AOL's. It belongs to the user.
The information I have may be out of date. The last time I tried it, Mozilla was SLLLOOOOWWW, but that was a year ago. But at any rate, the important point was that the claim of Opera being fast had nothing to do with how long it takes to load the program, as the previous poster incorrectly assumed.
poster implies that all windows boxen must have appear to have unique IP addresses to j.random webserver.
Wrong. Such an implication isn't necessary. As long as MOST tend to be that way, that's enough. It doesn't have to be ALL.
You're looking at it from the dynamic vs static IP angle. That's not what I was talking about.
I was talking about the notion that only one person at a time can be on a single host. In the Good Ole Days, that assumption would never fly because most people using the internet were on servers, with more than one person logged in at a time.
The "it" that is definately NOT AOL's property is the information being snooped by them.
It's not the fact that it's done that pisses me off. It's the fact that it's done without telling the customer. It took a person packet sniffing and reverse-engineering it a bit to even *realize* that it's being done. (Let's hope AOL doesn't try to throw the DMCA at him for it).
If AOL would have TOLD ME that they were collecting this information, I probably wouldn't have minded.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as population growth goes, a moderate number of extra deaths can be offset with extra breeding. It only becomes a noticable dip in population growth when the disease is on a very massive scale. After all, today those parts of the world with the least disease and famine are NOT the parts where population growth is highest.
You also seem to be ignoring the fact that despite the claims made by the snoopware company, WhosWatchingMe does NOT prevent the snoopware from working. It merely lets the person *KNOW* that he's being snooped.
So?
So the claim that it must be disabled in order for snoopware to work is a big fat lie. The only reason for disabling it is if the employer has a reason to fear employees knowing that they are being watched. (For example, if they *hadn't* signed an agreement about being watched ahead of time, THEN there'd be a reason for the company to hide what they are doing from the employee. Otherwise they have nothing to fear from an employee knowing he is being monitored.
And, there is the problem. The only people who need to hide the fact that they are snooping are those that aren't supposed to be snooping.
Plus, there's the problem from the other end - what if WhosWatchingMe is the legit software put there by the system administrator to detect if security is being breeched with an unauthorized snooper program installed by one of the users, and that snooper program ruins the legitimate WhosWatchingMe program?
The fact of the matter is that any program that deliberately ruins another program PURELY for the purpose of hiding itself from detection, is not a program to be trusted.
The problem is that the software LIES about what it does. This software package is arrogant enough to assume it has the right to destroy part of another program just because that other program has the audacity to tell me about the existence of it.
Napster and DeCSS do exactly what they claim to do. This snoopware contains hidden functionality that is not advertised. The person who installed it might not even know about the hidden functionality.
Everyone seems to be ignoring one very important point here - this isn't a balanced situation. People are acting as if Software A makes Software B fail and Software B makes Software A fail so it's a two-way street. It ISN'T! Software A does NOT make B fail, it merely exposes the existence of B. For this, B retaliates by making A fail altogether.
You seem to ignore the fact that this program did this without any warning at all. One program that trashes another one on install, not as a result of a bug but by deliberate design,is a malicious program. Note that until the maker of WhosWatchingMe said something about it, the snoopware company never said anything about what their software did to other software.
You also seem to be ignoring the fact that despite the claims made by the snoopware company, WhosWatchingMe does NOT prevent the snoopware from working. It merely lets the person *KNOW* that he's being snooped. This is a basic right as far as I'm concerned. There's a reason there's all those signs in public places saying, "Warning, these premises are under surveilence" - those signs are legally required.
The only reason for snoopware to disable WhosWatchingMe is to prevent someone from having a basic right to know when someone is listening, and that's a basic right that is ethically more important than the fact that the company owns the computer you install WhosWatchingMe on.
But the sorensen codec *is* good - that's what makes quicktime rock compared to realplayer or WMP. What sucks about it is merely the fact that they didn't bother porting it to anything but the sheep OS'es. But that doesn't make it a bad codec. It's a great codec with crappy availability. I don't see why Sorensen dying would be a good thing. The solution is to see it ported, not to convince people that it should no longer be used.
Actually, the compass is just deliberately mislabelled, I think. It's "N" doesn't mean "this is this the needle's north end", but "this arrow is pointing to the earth's north pole" It's the compass that's labelled backwad. It's easy enough to test - get a magnet labelled as N and S, and hold it up to the compass and see how it gets affected.
Face your TV set east - look at it.
Now face it west - look at it.
Notice any change in color? No? Then what makes you think a field shift would affect it?
The real (axis or rotation) north pole is in no country. It's in international waters - or international "ices" to be more precise.
How would a culture that didn't have good medicine at the time even *know* that the radiation was causing problems? People must have been dying from undiagnosed health problems all the time anyway, even before the extra radiation.
All we can tell from the evidence really, is that humans survived the event, and that it didn't create a massive dip in population reproduction. That still leaves open the possiblity that people had shortened lifespans during that time (but lived long enough to procreate), and possibly had very painfully unhealthy conditions to contend with.
It takes a heck of a lot of radiation to cause total sterility. As long as that hasn't happened, the race can continue under conditions of extra solar radiation, but it won't be pleasant (and could lead to extra mutations, and thus the possible creation of more human races.)
And, the notion that magnetic north doesn't need to be marked anymore because we don't need it for navigation is false even if it's true that we really don't need it for navigation anymore. Navigation isn't the only reason to bother keeping track of where magnetic north is. It's a scentifically interesting phenomenon to study, and it's real geographical information so why not put it on a map.
After all, I don't really need to know what the shape of Baffin Island in Northern Canada is, since I'll never be going there, yet there it is, marked on the map? Why? Because the purpose of a map is to show you the geography that's really there, not *just* the subset of it that you find useful. Marking where magnetic north is on a map might not be as useful anymore, but that doesn't mean it should be removed from the map. If the map only contained things I actually found useful, it would be a very vague map. It wouldn't bother telling me, for example, what the ocean depths are, since I'm not going down there.
The fact that some have chosen to fix Pascal's built-in language limitations by altering the language itself means that the language they are now compiling is something other than Pascal, that just kinda looks similar to it.
No, this isn't a bad thing, but it's also not entirely true to be calling it "Pascal" anymore.
Modula-2, for example, is Pascal-like, but with some of the problems fixed, and it got a totally new name because of it.
Ugh.
Niklaus Wirth invented a language esteemed by acedemic professors, but not terribly useful in actual practice. I find it quite appropriate that he named it after the man who came up with Pascal's Wager - an argument for beliving in god that was hailed by the people who already believe in god, but utterly useless in practical application to its intended audience, those who don't.
At any rate, once you are in a situation where you want to measure amount of code, USE NUMBER OF TOKENS, not number of lines. (The number of words returned by a dumb word counter tool like the unix "wc" command is probably a good enough approximation to number of syntactical tokens.) Counting lines is useless in any of the modern languages where all whitespace is treated the same way regardless of whether it's space, tab, or end-of-line. Consider the degenerate cases:
//lots of lines
,
;
// versus just one line:
printf
(
"the number is %d\n"
foo
)
printf( "the number is %d\n", foo );
If you are trying to reduce complexity, reducing lines of code might not really be doing that - it might just be writing the same amount of code with more obfuscation, giving the opposite of the intended simplifying effect. Counting the number of tokens, or words, would be MUCH better.
Counting lines of code is a leftover from the days when languages were "dumber" and did things like require exact columns in the source code, and not let you throw in whitespace where you like.
Sure it's not a copy protection technique, but then again neither is CSS, and that didn't stop them from lying and saying it is.
The authoring isn't the problem. The playback is. Offering a system that doesn't play on Linux or FreeBSD (unless you count OS X as being FreeBSD), or anything else that's not Mac or Windows, is NOT a win for open source like the summary falsely claimed - it's using one open source project (the streaming server) to hamper another (the OS'es that can't do quicktime because Apple won't release the Sorensen Codec (and it would be illegal under DMCA to reverse engineer it nowadays even if you could figure out how {damn DMCA}.)
It doesn't matter what the Outlook 2000 update does. ALL software has the following common problem: FIRST the exploit is discovered, THEN LATER it gets patched. Thus to claim that a patch "prevents" the security holes is a claim that cannot possibly be true. There will always be a window of time between discovery and patch during which the system is vulnerable. It cannot be any other way.
The slashdot effect shouldn't hamper DNS lookups. The slashdot effect would only play a role *after* my machine knows the numeric IP address. If anything, the slashdot effect should speed up the DNS lookup if it has any effect at all, becuase it increses the likelyhood that upstream name servers have the name cached from previous users.
I tried the link and my machine can't find the name gnu-friends.org - is this a new DNS entry that just hasn't propigated to around these parts yet, or is something wrong here?
You bandy about the word "prevent" too easily.
If thpse updates actually prevented the spread of viruses, there would only need to be one such update. But they keep having to come out with new ones, for some reason - oh yeah, because the previous ones didn't catch everything.
I think your impression of what the previous poster was on about is incorrect. You jumped on him for wanting AOL to give up its intellectual property, when it wasn't AOL's property he was talking about. The information being gathered by the browser isn't AOL's. It belongs to the user.
The information I have may be out of date. The last time I tried it, Mozilla was SLLLOOOOWWW, but that was a year ago. But at any rate, the important point was that the claim of Opera being fast had nothing to do with how long it takes to load the program, as the previous poster incorrectly assumed.
poster implies that all windows boxen must have appear to have unique IP addresses to j.random webserver. Wrong. Such an implication isn't necessary. As long as MOST tend to be that way, that's enough. It doesn't have to be ALL.
You're looking at it from the dynamic vs static IP angle. That's not what I was talking about.
I was talking about the notion that only one person at a time can be on a single host. In the Good Ole Days, that assumption would never fly because most people using the internet were on servers, with more than one person logged in at a time.
The "it" that is definately NOT AOL's property is the information being snooped by them.
It's not the fact that it's done that pisses me off. It's the fact that it's done without telling the customer. It took a person packet sniffing and reverse-engineering it a bit to even *realize* that it's being done. (Let's hope AOL doesn't try to throw the DMCA at him for it).
If AOL would have TOLD ME that they were collecting this information, I probably wouldn't have minded.