Another reason is that the Windows architecture, unlike Linux or the BSD core of OS X, was never designed to be used in network or multiuser settings and even now that NT-based systems are the norm the old DOS mentality prevails. A large number of the exploits in Windows are based on the ability to embed executable code in pretty much anything that should not have executable code in it -- word processor documents, emails, etc.
It's not hard at all to find whatever flavor of UNIX system you want in huge concentrations; sites such as Yahoo and Google run huge farms of them, for instance, as do most research institutions. If one of these was to be infected with a worm you can be sure it'd spread pretty quickly.
As a good number of regular slashdot readers are no doubt aware, full source code to Linux, Apache, etc. is available to anyone and they are more secure than their counterparts for this reason. If access to the source code for Cisco routers makes it possible to write a whole bunch of backbone-targeting virii that would really drop my opinion of Cisco routers considerably.
If you actually read the article, the exploit was not big deal either; some guy just distributed a trojan'd SSH client to a bunch of people and collected their passwords and then ran a bunch of rootkits. Nothing to see here.
I'm sure that a terrorist who is willing to spend several years of his life training and then kill himself in an attack is more than willing to find someone who looks something like himself, put a couple bullets through his head, and take his national ID. The only thing that any measure of this sort does is give people a false sense of security that dulls their caution should a real security incident occur.
You know what a national ID will do? It will prevent underage kids from buying liquor and tobacco for themselves (they'll have to ask Uncle Jim for that), it'll lower the quality of life for Mexican illegals (who are rapidly becoming the backbone of a large sector of the American economy), and it'll detract from *real* security expenditures. It's exactly like the lanyards that are supposed to "prevent school shootings" by magically preventing shootings by people who are supposed to be in school in the first place.
I was just suggesting this as a solution to spamming awhile back; if it's really that expensive to businesses, wouldn't it be more economical for them to arrange to have spammers assasinated? I'm serious about this -- if people are cool with paying Mafia kickbacks to their sanitation company, wouldn't they be willing to pay for something which will save them quite a lot more money?
If such a job were available I'd personally be going through sharpshooter training right now.
I find the assertion that TV science fiction is now as good as golden-age stories by Asimov and Bradbury to be absurd.
As to Card's motivations, he's spent a lot of his career refuting the objectivist ideas in science fiction (roughly, that American society in the 1950's was the "natural" state of human life) by depicting viable cultures with different moralities and structures -- indeed, this is arguably the core of his work, from "Unaccompanied Sonata" to "Enders Game" to his historical novels about the early days of the Mormon religion. Star Trek is probably a bit too "here and now" for his tastes.
This is a bit offtopic, but I'd advise everyone to avoid doing business with TigerDirect. I ordered the parts for my current computer from them and a great number of them didn't work properly. Worse, most of the warranties are "in-kind;" i.e. "Your RAM doesn't work? That's okay, send it back and we'll send you more RAM that doesn't work."
I also had to go out and buy a USB mouse because if I plug in devices in both PS/2 ports the computer won't boot properly, and the SATA hard drive I bought from them worked for all of two days before breaking.
None of these are compatibility issues, by the way; I replaced the defective Tiger parts with the same brand parts from a reputable local store (where they were more expensive) and the computer worked. The reason Tiger's prices are so low is that they sell factory seconds, meaning parts which didn't pass the company's quality inspection, so most of the stuff you buy from TigerDirect is non-functioning.
Whatever Fermat's proof was, we can be pretty sure that it was wrong. He was in the habit of making a lot of guesses like this and sometimes claiming to have a proof when he didn't (i.e. when he said he'd proved something that wasn't true).
Qualify for what? If you're saying that they can't go to college because they're not U.S. citizens, think about that for a moment. Was everyone at your college a U.S. citizen? Probably not. International students are still eligible for financial aid, whether they're from Asia or Mexico.
I attended a lecture by Peter Norvig, old-school AI researcher and now director of Google's search quality. He mentioned that occasionally they will try some new feature out by randomly showing it to 1% of their visitors, or showing it for a couple minutes, and seeing whether they get any positive or negative feedback. It seems like a pretty good idea. Between that and the nofollow attribute, they have a lot of very good out-of-left-field solutions to what could otherwise be viewed as *huge* CS/HI/business problems.
For one who bemoans the quality of others' writing, Mr. Gorman is a surprisingly poor writer -- phrases such as "absurd icing on absurd cakes" would never make it past a competent editor, or even to the front page of most blogs. And that's not even counting his needlessly tautological "I am not against it, and... am rather for it," or the grammatically questionable "The luddite label is because... " (This construction is technically correct if you believe that it's an existential clause -- i.e. if the word "is" means "exists" in this context, rather than functioning as a linking verb. Feel free to insert your own Monicagate joke here.) Most jarringly, however, are the pathetic attempts at humor scattered throughout which reveal that in this area Mr. Gorman really hasn't, to pardon the expression, done his research. I would reccomend he read at least some amount of witty intellectual discourse before attempting to write in this style again. He has very little excuse not to -- presumably he can find books by Swift, Voltaire, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and many other great authors on the shelves of his own library!
A floating point number still has a machine-imposed byte limit on the number of decimal places it represents. In fact, you can just interpret the n-byte float as an n-byte int to convert to an integer with zero loss of precision.
Of course, you can use GMP or the like the represent arbitrarily long floats, which can subsequently be converted into arbitrarily large integers.
"If you don't want to use it, keep using base 10."
The patent covers *every* value of N, including 10. Under this patent you are no longer allowed to convert a "geographically-oriented number" into a decimal (or binary) integer representation.
"Decimal degrees and degrees/minutes/seconds don't require [picking a precision beforehand]."
They do exactly that -- it's a base ten integer, a base sixty integer, and then a base sixty real.
Converting a floating point number to an integer Converting that integer to a base-N string
The following line of code therefore infringes on this patent if we assume that f is a float or double variable containing that f is contained in a "geographically-oriented string," perhaps one such as "Forest covers 2.1% of Afghanistan."
printf("%d\n", (long int) (100000000000.0 * f));
The multiplication/typecast converts a float to an integer, and printf converts an integer to a base-N string. In this case N = 10, but that's nothing special; recall that uuencoding converts a base-256 integer to a base-64 integer. This patent is entirely frivolous.
This is not justification for a patent. I cite Atlantic Works vs Brady, 1882.
"It was never the object of patent laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax on the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of unknown liability lawsuits and vexatious accounting for profits made in good faith."
Latitude and Longitude are normally expressed as base sixty rationals, so changing to base thirty integers isn't particularly innovative. This would never win a court case strictly; however, Microsoft has the money to keep this in court all the way to the U.S. Supreme court, so it would take a large amount of money to contest.
"It's a Turing-complete language, you see, highly useful for people who want to solve the Halting Problem..."
As will be learned in an introductory course in computer science, a key property of the Halting Problem is that it cannot be solved by a language which is only Turing-complete (isomorphic to a Turing machine). There is thus a strong inclination to believe that you do not, in fact, know what the halting problem is and have just inserted a term which you have at some point heard used in conjunction with Turing machines into your essay in a failed attempt to impart a touch of intellectual sophistication. This calls the rest of the piece into question as well; how many times did you gamble on something you didn't understand an manage to produce a brief allusion which is not visibly incorrect?
"... results that look distinctly worse than if you'd used MS Word..."
If your assertion is that Times New Roman and Courier are better-looking than Computer Modern, you're putting yourself at odds with industry and academia alike. It's a noble attempt to take up the mantle of Gallileo, but you must remember than in order to be persecuted for being right one must first be right.
TeX is the best mathematical typesetting system available today, and is used for all major mathematical journals for this reason. As TeX is generally used to produce postscript output, it's quite easy to make use of any postscript font one wishes, but computer modern should really suffice in most cases.
"Like Schubert's Unfinished Symphony..."
The first movement of Shubert's unfinished symphony stands on its own, almost as a sort of program piece, and this is why the symphony is so popular. Nobody expects a third movement, and indeed very few particularly care for the second.
Having shown a complete lack of the most basic knowledge in relation to mathematics, computers, music, literature, and several other areas of knowledge, you should strongly consider returning to school and completing your high school degree in order to help you form coherent, relevant essays if you wish to further pursue book criticism.
I think it'd be a lot easier if google just blacklisted everyone who was ever caught doing bad SEO (link farming, blog spamming, misleading keywords, and the like) by name, domain, company, etc., and refused to ever show any link to any page they were affiliated with. As a private company, they can take whatever retribution they want, especially considering that many SEO practices are designed specifically to lower the relevance of Google's search results by promoting inferior links.
The only new instrument at the concert was the GuitarBot; the other instruments have been around for quite a long time. I was hoping that a robotic guitar would sound something like a real guitar; instead, it sounded considerably worse than a MIDI guitar. And it's not like it's a new, different sound; it just sounds like complete crap.
It sounds like whoever designed this robot just got bored of it and decided to abandon the project as soon as it could play notes. This is reminiscent of the attitude that's all too prevalent in software today -- if it compiles, ship it -- that causes most software to be so horribly bug-laden.
"...while men are less capable in say art and literature?"
Really? Men like Shakespeare and Donne and Goethe and Swift, Mark Twain, and John Updike? Or did you mean men like Michaelangelo, da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Picasso?
Off the top of my head I can think of dozens of women who are among the most important scientists and mathematicians ever to live -- Marie Curie, Rosalyn Franklin, Sophie Germain, Emmy Noether, and Sofia Kovalevskaya come to mind, and I'm sure that I'd be able to come up with several more if I knew anything at all about chemistry or physics.
I cannot think of an important female artist or writer at the moment.
Remember Harvest Moon? The plot of the game was that you take over a farm for two years. The majority of the gameplay involved running around and individually harvesting every single little carrot, tomato, etc. and putting it in your "delivery" crate, although there was also some interaction with the young ladies in the adjacent town (you could get married, at which point the only difference in the game was that your wife would feed you breakfast in the morning and you would randomly have children.
And actually, the game was pretty entertaining. Way better than The Sims, because it wasn't entirely a "reality" game; the characters' personalities were scripted, which is what made it entertaining.
"The wholesale looting of others [sic] intellectual property is a very destructive thing. Of those 13,000 titles you can very sure that among them were titles by the non-industry powerhouses."
I don't believe this at all. Those 13,000 titles probably consisted of every song ever recorded by Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, and various other "musicians," seventeen versions of Photoshop + crack, and various popular games.
I'd add that the situation you describe has *nothing* to do with what the FBI is doing, and further that the FBI will *never* help out with such situations if things keep going the way they are, because the vast majority of piracy is against the recording and motion picture industries, and if our law enforcement agencies go after that they'll never get around to helping out the little guys.
As an aside, it's well-known and statistically obvious that file-sharing has been an enormous boon to the recording industry; thousands upon thousands of people who previously didn't pay much attention to music got hooked by the simplicity of downloading from their computers, and their new interest in music has been driving large numbers of new sales.
Building robotics can be really frustrating; it generally involves working on teams which are too large. Ideally you want 1-3 people working on a robot; any more and you get to the too-many-cooks syndrome REALLY fast. For budget reasons, however, this generally isn't feasible.
Also, Battle Bots doesn't really involve autonomous robotics or computers at all; it's basically a 1980's-era RF car ($20 from radio shack) with really big motors. The aspects of robotics which are interesting from a computer standpoint are somewhat mundane from a blow-things-up standpoint.
Video games are rapidly becoming more popular than sex among high school students, while Battle Bots is stuck on the Comedy Channel; I think programming games is the way to go.
Everyone says that "everyone supported Apple against Real," but as I recall it, nobody did. Other than the actual writeup on the Slashdot frontpage, every single comment that I saw was in support of Real and open standards.
Slashdot Mirror
Another reason is that the Windows architecture, unlike Linux or the BSD core of OS X, was never designed to be used in network or multiuser settings and even now that NT-based systems are the norm the old DOS mentality prevails. A large number of the exploits in Windows are based on the ability to embed executable code in pretty much anything that should not have executable code in it -- word processor documents, emails, etc.
It's not hard at all to find whatever flavor of UNIX system you want in huge concentrations; sites such as Yahoo and Google run huge farms of them, for instance, as do most research institutions. If one of these was to be infected with a worm you can be sure it'd spread pretty quickly.
As a good number of regular slashdot readers are no doubt aware, full source code to Linux, Apache, etc. is available to anyone and they are more secure than their counterparts for this reason. If access to the source code for Cisco routers makes it possible to write a whole bunch of backbone-targeting virii that would really drop my opinion of Cisco routers considerably.
If you actually read the article, the exploit was not big deal either; some guy just distributed a trojan'd SSH client to a bunch of people and collected their passwords and then ran a bunch of rootkits. Nothing to see here.
I'm sure that a terrorist who is willing to spend several years of his life training and then kill himself in an attack is more than willing to find someone who looks something like himself, put a couple bullets through his head, and take his national ID. The only thing that any measure of this sort does is give people a false sense of security that dulls their caution should a real security incident occur.
You know what a national ID will do? It will prevent underage kids from buying liquor and tobacco for themselves (they'll have to ask Uncle Jim for that), it'll lower the quality of life for Mexican illegals (who are rapidly becoming the backbone of a large sector of the American economy), and it'll detract from *real* security expenditures. It's exactly like the lanyards that are supposed to "prevent school shootings" by magically preventing shootings by people who are supposed to be in school in the first place.
I was just suggesting this as a solution to spamming awhile back; if it's really that expensive to businesses, wouldn't it be more economical for them to arrange to have spammers assasinated? I'm serious about this -- if people are cool with paying Mafia kickbacks to their sanitation company, wouldn't they be willing to pay for something which will save them quite a lot more money?
If such a job were available I'd personally be going through sharpshooter training right now.
I find the assertion that TV science fiction is now as good as golden-age stories by Asimov and Bradbury to be absurd.
As to Card's motivations, he's spent a lot of his career refuting the objectivist ideas in science fiction (roughly, that American society in the 1950's was the "natural" state of human life) by depicting viable cultures with different moralities and structures -- indeed, this is arguably the core of his work, from "Unaccompanied Sonata" to "Enders Game" to his historical novels about the early days of the Mormon religion. Star Trek is probably a bit too "here and now" for his tastes.
This is a bit offtopic, but I'd advise everyone to avoid doing business with TigerDirect. I ordered the parts for my current computer from them and a great number of them didn't work properly. Worse, most of the warranties are "in-kind;" i.e. "Your RAM doesn't work? That's okay, send it back and we'll send you more RAM that doesn't work."
I also had to go out and buy a USB mouse because if I plug in devices in both PS/2 ports the computer won't boot properly, and the SATA hard drive I bought from them worked for all of two days before breaking.
None of these are compatibility issues, by the way; I replaced the defective Tiger parts with the same brand parts from a reputable local store (where they were more expensive) and the computer worked. The reason Tiger's prices are so low is that they sell factory seconds, meaning parts which didn't pass the company's quality inspection, so most of the stuff you buy from TigerDirect is non-functioning.
Actually, they responded by DDOSing the site a couple days before this hit slashdot.
Whatever Fermat's proof was, we can be pretty sure that it was wrong. He was in the habit of making a lot of guesses like this and sometimes claiming to have a proof when he didn't (i.e. when he said he'd proved something that wasn't true).
Qualify for what? If you're saying that they can't go to college because they're not U.S. citizens, think about that for a moment. Was everyone at your college a U.S. citizen? Probably not. International students are still eligible for financial aid, whether they're from Asia or Mexico.
I attended a lecture by Peter Norvig, old-school AI researcher and now director of Google's search quality. He mentioned that occasionally they will try some new feature out by randomly showing it to 1% of their visitors, or showing it for a couple minutes, and seeing whether they get any positive or negative feedback. It seems like a pretty good idea. Between that and the nofollow attribute, they have a lot of very good out-of-left-field solutions to what could otherwise be viewed as *huge* CS/HI/business problems.
For one who bemoans the quality of others' writing, Mr. Gorman is a surprisingly poor writer -- phrases such as "absurd icing on absurd cakes" would never make it past a competent editor, or even to the front page of most blogs. And that's not even counting his needlessly tautological "I am not against it, and ... am rather for it," or the grammatically questionable "The luddite label is because... " (This construction is technically correct if you believe that it's an existential clause -- i.e. if the word "is" means "exists" in this context, rather than functioning as a linking verb. Feel free to insert your own Monicagate joke here.) Most jarringly, however, are the pathetic attempts at humor scattered throughout which reveal that in this area Mr. Gorman really hasn't, to pardon the expression, done his research. I would reccomend he read at least some amount of witty intellectual discourse before attempting to write in this style again. He has very little excuse not to -- presumably he can find books by Swift, Voltaire, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and many other great authors on the shelves of his own library!
A floating point number still has a machine-imposed byte limit on the number of decimal places it represents. In fact, you can just interpret the n-byte float as an n-byte int to convert to an integer with zero loss of precision.
Of course, you can use GMP or the like the represent arbitrarily long floats, which can subsequently be converted into arbitrarily large integers.
"If you don't want to use it, keep using base 10."
The patent covers *every* value of N, including 10. Under this patent you are no longer allowed to convert a "geographically-oriented number" into a decimal (or binary) integer representation.
"Decimal degrees and degrees/minutes/seconds don't require [picking a precision beforehand]."
They do exactly that -- it's a base ten integer, a base sixty integer, and then a base sixty real.
Converting a floating point number to an integer
Converting that integer to a base-N string
The following line of code therefore infringes on this patent if we assume that f is a float or double variable containing that f is contained in a "geographically-oriented string," perhaps one such as "Forest covers 2.1% of Afghanistan."
printf("%d\n", (long int) (100000000000.0 * f));
The multiplication/typecast converts a float to an integer, and printf converts an integer to a base-N string. In this case N = 10, but that's nothing special; recall that uuencoding converts a base-256 integer to a base-64 integer. This patent is entirely frivolous.
This is not justification for a patent. I cite Atlantic Works vs Brady, 1882.
"It was never the object of patent laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufactures. Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvement, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax on the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of unknown liability lawsuits and vexatious accounting for profits made in good faith."
Latitude and Longitude are normally expressed as base sixty rationals, so changing to base thirty integers isn't particularly innovative. This would never win a court case strictly; however, Microsoft has the money to keep this in court all the way to the U.S. Supreme court, so it would take a large amount of money to contest.
"It's a Turing-complete language, you see, highly useful for people who want to solve the Halting Problem..."
As will be learned in an introductory course in computer science, a key property of the Halting Problem is that it cannot be solved by a language which is only Turing-complete (isomorphic to a Turing machine). There is thus a strong inclination to believe that you do not, in fact, know what the halting problem is and have just inserted a term which you have at some point heard used in conjunction with Turing machines into your essay in a failed attempt to impart a touch of intellectual sophistication. This calls the rest of the piece into question as well; how many times did you gamble on something you didn't understand an manage to produce a brief allusion which is not visibly incorrect?
"... results that look distinctly worse than if you'd used MS Word..."
If your assertion is that Times New Roman and Courier are better-looking than Computer Modern, you're putting yourself at odds with industry and academia alike. It's a noble attempt to take up the mantle of Gallileo, but you must remember than in order to be persecuted for being right one must first be right.
TeX is the best mathematical typesetting system available today, and is used for all major mathematical journals for this reason. As TeX is generally used to produce postscript output, it's quite easy to make use of any postscript font one wishes, but computer modern should really suffice in most cases.
"Like Schubert's Unfinished Symphony..."
The first movement of Shubert's unfinished symphony stands on its own, almost as a sort of program piece, and this is why the symphony is so popular. Nobody expects a third movement, and indeed very few particularly care for the second.
Having shown a complete lack of the most basic knowledge in relation to mathematics, computers, music, literature, and several other areas of knowledge, you should strongly consider returning to school and completing your high school degree in order to help you form coherent, relevant essays if you wish to further pursue book criticism.
I think it'd be a lot easier if google just blacklisted everyone who was ever caught doing bad SEO (link farming, blog spamming, misleading keywords, and the like) by name, domain, company, etc., and refused to ever show any link to any page they were affiliated with. As a private company, they can take whatever retribution they want, especially considering that many SEO practices are designed specifically to lower the relevance of Google's search results by promoting inferior links.
I like how you have a link in your sig directly beneath the "no link" URL.
The only new instrument at the concert was the GuitarBot; the other instruments have been around for quite a long time. I was hoping that a robotic guitar would sound something like a real guitar; instead, it sounded considerably worse than a MIDI guitar. And it's not like it's a new, different sound; it just sounds like complete crap.
It sounds like whoever designed this robot just got bored of it and decided to abandon the project as soon as it could play notes. This is reminiscent of the attitude that's all too prevalent in software today -- if it compiles, ship it -- that causes most software to be so horribly bug-laden.
"...while men are less capable in say art and literature?"
Really? Men like Shakespeare and Donne and Goethe and Swift, Mark Twain, and John Updike? Or did you mean men like Michaelangelo, da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Picasso?
Off the top of my head I can think of dozens of women who are among the most important scientists and mathematicians ever to live -- Marie Curie, Rosalyn Franklin, Sophie Germain, Emmy Noether, and Sofia Kovalevskaya come to mind, and I'm sure that I'd be able to come up with several more if I knew anything at all about chemistry or physics.
I cannot think of an important female artist or writer at the moment.
Remember Harvest Moon? The plot of the game was that you take over a farm for two years. The majority of the gameplay involved running around and individually harvesting every single little carrot, tomato, etc. and putting it in your "delivery" crate, although there was also some interaction with the young ladies in the adjacent town (you could get married, at which point the only difference in the game was that your wife would feed you breakfast in the morning and you would randomly have children.
And actually, the game was pretty entertaining. Way better than The Sims, because it wasn't entirely a "reality" game; the characters' personalities were scripted, which is what made it entertaining.
"The wholesale looting of others [sic] intellectual property is a very destructive thing. Of those 13,000 titles you can very sure that among them were titles by the non-industry powerhouses."
I don't believe this at all. Those 13,000 titles probably consisted of every song ever recorded by Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, and various other "musicians," seventeen versions of Photoshop + crack, and various popular games.
I'd add that the situation you describe has *nothing* to do with what the FBI is doing, and further that the FBI will *never* help out with such situations if things keep going the way they are, because the vast majority of piracy is against the recording and motion picture industries, and if our law enforcement agencies go after that they'll never get around to helping out the little guys.
As an aside, it's well-known and statistically obvious that file-sharing has been an enormous boon to the recording industry; thousands upon thousands of people who previously didn't pay much attention to music got hooked by the simplicity of downloading from their computers, and their new interest in music has been driving large numbers of new sales.
Building robotics can be really frustrating; it generally involves working on teams which are too large. Ideally you want 1-3 people working on a robot; any more and you get to the too-many-cooks syndrome REALLY fast. For budget reasons, however, this generally isn't feasible.
Also, Battle Bots doesn't really involve autonomous robotics or computers at all; it's basically a 1980's-era RF car ($20 from radio shack) with really big motors. The aspects of robotics which are interesting from a computer standpoint are somewhat mundane from a blow-things-up standpoint.
Video games are rapidly becoming more popular than sex among high school students, while Battle Bots is stuck on the Comedy Channel; I think programming games is the way to go.
Everyone says that "everyone supported Apple against Real," but as I recall it, nobody did. Other than the actual writeup on the Slashdot frontpage, every single comment that I saw was in support of Real and open standards.
Umm, it's hard to not pay royalties for something which is distributed to anyone for free...