I think it is a good rule of thumb that if something isn't funny without a "=)" at the end, it isn't funny at all. That keeps me from making some of the stupid jokes I would make (but not all). Oh well I'm just retreading old worn jokes anyway. Sigh.
It is likely that this is spin. When someone has a job that depends on the future security of a product that is likely next to impossible to make secure without a complete rewrite, what can he do? He has limited budjet, and unrealistic goals. So he makes a 10 year plan, saying that they will be secure in 10 years. He shows progress to his boss, and his boss is happy. He gets to keep his job.
Then, 2 years down the line, he revises his 10 year plan to expire in another 10 years - as long as the deadline is far enough away, he keeps his job, he puts food on the table, and the PR bunnies have something to hop about. This happens all the time in business, particularly publicly held companies. I would be very sceptical about any future Microsoft promises about security.
You may think that its funny that firefox doesn't support Download.Ject technology, but for the rest of us in the real world, how can we offer it as an alternative to explorer? My PHB will just say "Ignignot, I like this FireFox thing you have working on my computer. But I've read in the Wall Street Journal that it doesn't support Download.Ject. I'm afraid we simply can't afford to make this switch."
We need this feature fixed now if not sooner, otherwise we're all going to be stuck using this insecure MS offering!
When will there ever be a feature complete open source internet explorer??
Some get their kicks from polisihing their car over and over, some get theirs from standing in a river in long ridiculous boots and waving a rod around, and some get it from twisting their brains around a piece of C mumbo jumbo
I'd say that the C mumbo jumbo also helps them learn about C. Not just what not to do, but different ways to do the same thing. Maybe it makes some code a nightmare, but later on it might be useful. Not to mention that it must help when debugging someone else's code, or adapting it for your own purposes. This is just like some vocabulary games. They aren't useful in and of themselves, but instead they're working out that part of your brain that deals with them. Your brain improves what you use, so this whole obfuscation thing can be considered C training.
I can just see it now, a cross between Rocky and Hackers where the punk kids trying to Hack the Planet go and train in the Siberian wasteland by writing messed up C code. =D
It is likely that the new chip doesn't produce any more heat than the old one. It is a very simple effect: smaller transistors require less power to operate. Also, if they did consume the same amount of power in a much smaller space they'd end up as slag, no matter what cooling solution used. This means that if they were to make a current chip using the new 30% smaller technology, the result would probably produce about 30% less heat and use that much less power.
I don't really understand what the big deal is comparing the heat outputs of the P4 and Opteron is anyway, it isn't like these are mobile cpu's. I do have an Athlon 64 under the hood now, but heat output has never been a real concern of mine when selecting a cpu. I'll never understand the processor tribalism that has infected some computer users. Just use what's best for the job.
I'm amazed at how someone can acheive such obfuscated code without really trying.
I'm not amazed at all - I pay special attention to my code so that someone else could come in and use it. That doesn't mean they'll be able to just step in and understand everything, it'll be hard no matter what. But if I didn't try, I think everything I made would be unusable by anyone else. In my mind that makes the code worth very little - it is the ability to reuse code that makes it valuable. I've debugged or added features to other people's programs (once in VB / Access, [shudder]) and it can be a nightmare even with comments. I think that most of the time people get into a coding zone and they're able to just chug through 100 lines or more at once, holding the entire program in their head for awhile. The problem is, if you do that you usually don't comment well (if at all). I try to proofread everything I write, putting comments back in, but for most people it isn't worth the effort. "It compiles, runs correctly, I'm done! Time to surf slashdot!"
If you think that European governments are any less influenced by corporations than the American government you are mistaken. They're just funded by different corporations. Also, Europe's monopoly laws are slightly different, so you will have companies prosecuted in the United States that are doing perfectly legal things in Europe, and vice verca. This doesn't mean that one is less influenced by industries. It just means that they're different environments for companies.
This is of course the kind of knee jerk reaction that any programmer would think of when confronted with the problem. You can already see it implemented in windows. Of course, every user's first reaction is to disable the searching because no one cares about fast searches of their computer, and everyone cares about their system resources. So this is a terrible tradeoff.
OTOH I think Hans Reiser has it right, just look at his vision. Built search from the filesystem up, and it will revolutionize how we think of data.
I remember how times have changed... all about how the 1st amendment was oppressing the innocent FBI, it was all geeks fault, and slashbots were violating Bush and Ashcroft etc. Now maybe Da Man can realize not every FBI hero has been oppressed by hackers.
On a more serious note, there is such a thing as innocent until proven guilty, and people shouldn't say that the end justifies the means. We have to protect everyone's rights, even the rights of criminals. I know it sucks, and it would be great if we knew right away if someone was guilty, but in real life this is the only thing that approaches justice.
Is just a coward who thinks there can be no retribution for their actions. Then they go and try to demonstrate their power by doing bad things. Oftentimes social outcasts are targetted (like nerds) because they have few friends to draw support on to provoke a response against the bully. That these same victims are then turning around and doing the same thing online saddens me; it reminds me of people who are still steamed over a few childish words or actions from their pre-college days. In either case some bullies have managed to have a large affect on the person's life, and other people's lives through them. Chances are that by the time they're in their twenties, someone who was a bully in high school has either repented his actions or matured to the point where they would no longer even think of pushing someone around. Some of their victims, OTOH, will still have the persecuted mentality. You'll feel a lot better if you simply forgive people who did you wrong as children. The forgiveness isn't for them, it is for you.
I wouldn't want to be sharing my devices CPU time without compensation
Just because it is possible doesn't mean it will have to be involuntary. Maybe instead you'd be credited small amounts of cpu time from the cell phone company, and at the end of the month see a small reduction in your bill. Maybe if you went around using everyone else's cpu, you'd see a small charge in your bill. But this is somewhat missing the point - think of what it would be like to record a concert from the viewpoint of 100 different people simultaneously, then produce a final recording from that! Or on vacation in Japan, instead of going home with just your photographs of monuments, having all the photos taken at that monument while you were there!
Hahahaha that was rated interesting! That just made my day!
Let's see... the the report is from a Russian source, and the planes were Russian! You must be on to something there! What other parallels can we make^b^b^b^bcome up with? Well my cousin's boyfriend's sister's dad is in the CIA and I heard that Aleksandr Gostev resides in a secret lair where he crashes planes by use of magnets and also destroys whole sections of the internet... with magnets! You sir, are to be commended!
Parody is protected because you are
making fun OF THE SONG.
From Dictionary.com:
A literary or artistic work that imitates the characteristic style of an author or a work for comic effect or ridicule.
It doesn't say it has to make fun of the song, only imitate the style and be funny, sarcastic, or ironic. Not that dictionary.com is the end all resource.
Satire is NOT protected because you are using someones song for an alternate purpose.
Again from dictionary.com: A literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit.
It seems that satire doesn't involve imitation at all. Political satire is a longstanding tradition in both British and American literature, and more recently in cartoons. South Park, for example, is often a satire but not a parody. When they show the Vatican worshiping a spider queen, that's satire, not parody. Satire doesn't have to be protected under copyright because it doesn't have to be derivative. Parody is a case where you take someone else's style and use it to be funny, maybe make fun of the author or the song, maybe make fun of something else. It has to be protected because normally that would be considered plagiarism. The whole point is that it is obviously, intentionally deriviative and they are using the fact of imitation to produce either humor or ridicule.
Its fine with me if they kill off all the underground spamming from zombie'd windows boxes. If all spam originates from a cartel it will be much easier to regulate down to some sort of rational amount of communication. Right now we can't regulate spam because most of it is done outside of the law anyway. Aside from that, if all spam came from one group of people then it would be much easier to filter / block.
I know you were being ironic, but I think it will be missed by most people reading your post.
So: spammers do fit the popular definition of hackers as people who do bad things to other people's computers without their permission. Even leaving aside how sending spam to someone could be construed to be damaging, they almost certainly use zombie hosts to send emails - this is definitely "evil hacking". So for once I hope the FBI and Secret Service go in and take all their computer stuff, then lock them in a room with a large lonely man named bubba.
This is such a clear troll, I wish I had some mod points to push it down. I might be doubtful if it weren't for his inciteful replies later on. Please don't respond to this anymore. We have no need for national tribalism.
. It's only the newest CANDU design that has achieved a slightly negative void coefficient
I looked around on the web (google, wiki) and only the candu product page said much about the advanced candu reactor having a negative void coefficient, and it gave no discernable reason other than lattice structure. I assume from your familiarity you either work building / designing the reactors or work at one of the reactors. How does the advanced design attain a negative void coefficient then? Is the separation between elements of the fuel bundle different?
Is there a reason that this information is being aimed specifically at teenagers? I know an awful lot of adults that could use a good straighforward explaination of this material.
How about households with both parents working and the teenage child(ren) unsupervised from 3:00 - 6:00 pm after school? You don't think there is a reason for them specifically to learn about AV protection etc.? And while this book is aimed at teenagers, I'm sure it would be good for less computer literate adults.
Sorry, by critical I mean "have an uncontrolled, unstable nuclear reaction". I didn't realize that critical was a specific measurement of a nuclear reaction. Serves me right for getting my vocabulary from the entertainment industry. Now that I think about it, the sub/super critical terminology is the same as in differential equations, where you can have underdamped, critically damped, and overdamped systems. Of course the stability is opposite, because underdamped are unstable and critically damped and overdamped are stable, but you get my drift. And since seem to know what you're talking about, I guess I'll refrain from describing why pebble bed reactors can't have an unstable nuclear reaction.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it is a good rule of thumb that if something isn't funny without a "=)" at the end, it isn't funny at all. That keeps me from making some of the stupid jokes I would make (but not all). Oh well I'm just retreading old worn jokes anyway. Sigh.
They could have put a spin on it.
It is likely that this is spin. When someone has a job that depends on the future security of a product that is likely next to impossible to make secure without a complete rewrite, what can he do? He has limited budjet, and unrealistic goals. So he makes a 10 year plan, saying that they will be secure in 10 years. He shows progress to his boss, and his boss is happy. He gets to keep his job.
Then, 2 years down the line, he revises his 10 year plan to expire in another 10 years - as long as the deadline is far enough away, he keeps his job, he puts food on the table, and the PR bunnies have something to hop about. This happens all the time in business, particularly publicly held companies. I would be very sceptical about any future Microsoft promises about security.
You may think that its funny that firefox doesn't support Download.Ject technology, but for the rest of us in the real world, how can we offer it as an alternative to explorer? My PHB will just say "Ignignot, I like this FireFox thing you have working on my computer. But I've read in the Wall Street Journal that it doesn't support Download.Ject. I'm afraid we simply can't afford to make this switch."
We need this feature fixed now if not sooner, otherwise we're all going to be stuck using this insecure MS offering!
When will there ever be a feature complete open source internet explorer??
Like how that old hag in gremlins got shot out of her house on the sup'd up stair climber?
That movie always warms the cockles of my tiny heart.
Some get their kicks from polisihing their car over and over, some get theirs from standing in a river in long ridiculous boots and waving a rod around, and some get it from twisting their brains around a piece of C mumbo jumbo
I'd say that the C mumbo jumbo also helps them learn about C. Not just what not to do, but different ways to do the same thing. Maybe it makes some code a nightmare, but later on it might be useful. Not to mention that it must help when debugging someone else's code, or adapting it for your own purposes. This is just like some vocabulary games. They aren't useful in and of themselves, but instead they're working out that part of your brain that deals with them. Your brain improves what you use, so this whole obfuscation thing can be considered C training.
I can just see it now, a cross between Rocky and Hackers where the punk kids trying to Hack the Planet go and train in the Siberian wasteland by writing messed up C code. =D
It is likely that the new chip doesn't produce any more heat than the old one. It is a very simple effect: smaller transistors require less power to operate. Also, if they did consume the same amount of power in a much smaller space they'd end up as slag, no matter what cooling solution used. This means that if they were to make a current chip using the new 30% smaller technology, the result would probably produce about 30% less heat and use that much less power.
I don't really understand what the big deal is comparing the heat outputs of the P4 and Opteron is anyway, it isn't like these are mobile cpu's. I do have an Athlon 64 under the hood now, but heat output has never been a real concern of mine when selecting a cpu. I'll never understand the processor tribalism that has infected some computer users. Just use what's best for the job.
Please hand in your Geek membership card on your way out.
Do I get to turn in my virgin card as well?? Please say its so!
I'm amazed at how someone can acheive such obfuscated code without really trying.
I'm not amazed at all - I pay special attention to my code so that someone else could come in and use it. That doesn't mean they'll be able to just step in and understand everything, it'll be hard no matter what. But if I didn't try, I think everything I made would be unusable by anyone else. In my mind that makes the code worth very little - it is the ability to reuse code that makes it valuable. I've debugged or added features to other people's programs (once in VB / Access, [shudder]) and it can be a nightmare even with comments. I think that most of the time people get into a coding zone and they're able to just chug through 100 lines or more at once, holding the entire program in their head for awhile. The problem is, if you do that you usually don't comment well (if at all). I try to proofread everything I write, putting comments back in, but for most people it isn't worth the effort. "It compiles, runs correctly, I'm done! Time to surf slashdot!"
If you think that European governments are any less influenced by corporations than the American government you are mistaken. They're just funded by different corporations. Also, Europe's monopoly laws are slightly different, so you will have companies prosecuted in the United States that are doing perfectly legal things in Europe, and vice verca. This doesn't mean that one is less influenced by industries. It just means that they're different environments for companies.
Nah, this is still experimenal. It isn't covered by your HMO like the hookers are.
This is of course the kind of knee jerk reaction that any programmer would think of when confronted with the problem. You can already see it implemented in windows. Of course, every user's first reaction is to disable the searching because no one cares about fast searches of their computer, and everyone cares about their system resources. So this is a terrible tradeoff.
OTOH I think Hans Reiser has it right, just look at his vision. Built search from the filesystem up, and it will revolutionize how we think of data.
Knowing geeks, the only way they'll join the organization is if you rename it to DARE: DARE Abuse Resistance Education. ;-)
I remember how times have changed... all about how the 1st amendment was oppressing the innocent FBI, it was all geeks fault, and slashbots were violating Bush and Ashcroft etc. Now maybe Da Man can realize not every FBI hero has been oppressed by hackers.
On a more serious note, there is such a thing as innocent until proven guilty, and people shouldn't say that the end justifies the means. We have to protect everyone's rights, even the rights of criminals. I know it sucks, and it would be great if we knew right away if someone was guilty, but in real life this is the only thing that approaches justice.
Is just a coward who thinks there can be no retribution for their actions. Then they go and try to demonstrate their power by doing bad things. Oftentimes social outcasts are targetted (like nerds) because they have few friends to draw support on to provoke a response against the bully. That these same victims are then turning around and doing the same thing online saddens me; it reminds me of people who are still steamed over a few childish words or actions from their pre-college days. In either case some bullies have managed to have a large affect on the person's life, and other people's lives through them. Chances are that by the time they're in their twenties, someone who was a bully in high school has either repented his actions or matured to the point where they would no longer even think of pushing someone around. Some of their victims, OTOH, will still have the persecuted mentality. You'll feel a lot better if you simply forgive people who did you wrong as children. The forgiveness isn't for them, it is for you.
I wouldn't want to be sharing my devices CPU time without compensation
Just because it is possible doesn't mean it will have to be involuntary. Maybe instead you'd be credited small amounts of cpu time from the cell phone company, and at the end of the month see a small reduction in your bill. Maybe if you went around using everyone else's cpu, you'd see a small charge in your bill. But this is somewhat missing the point - think of what it would be like to record a concert from the viewpoint of 100 different people simultaneously, then produce a final recording from that! Or on vacation in Japan, instead of going home with just your photographs of monuments, having all the photos taken at that monument while you were there!
Jesus, it must be like throwing a brick down a hallway!
The telescope is four inches wide. I would be horrified to learn you are the same.
Hahahaha that was rated interesting! That just made my day!
Let's see... the the report is from a Russian source, and the planes were Russian! You must be on to something there! What other parallels can we make^b^b^b^bcome up with? Well my cousin's boyfriend's sister's dad is in the CIA and I heard that Aleksandr Gostev resides in a secret lair where he crashes planes by use of magnets and also destroys whole sections of the internet... with magnets! You sir, are to be commended!
Parody is protected because you are making fun OF THE SONG.
From Dictionary.com:
A literary or artistic work that imitates the characteristic style of an author or a work for comic effect or ridicule.
It doesn't say it has to make fun of the song, only imitate the style and be funny, sarcastic, or ironic. Not that dictionary.com is the end all resource.
Satire is NOT protected because you are using someones song for an alternate purpose.
Again from dictionary.com:
A literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit.
It seems that satire doesn't involve imitation at all. Political satire is a longstanding tradition in both British and American literature, and more recently in cartoons. South Park, for example, is often a satire but not a parody. When they show the Vatican worshiping a spider queen, that's satire, not parody. Satire doesn't have to be protected under copyright because it doesn't have to be derivative. Parody is a case where you take someone else's style and use it to be funny, maybe make fun of the author or the song, maybe make fun of something else. It has to be protected because normally that would be considered plagiarism. The whole point is that it is obviously, intentionally deriviative and they are using the fact of imitation to produce either humor or ridicule.
Its fine with me if they kill off all the underground spamming from zombie'd windows boxes. If all spam originates from a cartel it will be much easier to regulate down to some sort of rational amount of communication. Right now we can't regulate spam because most of it is done outside of the law anyway. Aside from that, if all spam came from one group of people then it would be much easier to filter / block.
I know you were being ironic, but I think it will be missed by most people reading your post.
So: spammers do fit the popular definition of hackers as people who do bad things to other people's computers without their permission. Even leaving aside how sending spam to someone could be construed to be damaging, they almost certainly use zombie hosts to send emails - this is definitely "evil hacking". So for once I hope the FBI and Secret Service go in and take all their computer stuff, then lock them in a room with a large lonely man named bubba.
This is such a clear troll, I wish I had some mod points to push it down. I might be doubtful if it weren't for his inciteful replies later on. Please don't respond to this anymore. We have no need for national tribalism.
. It's only the newest CANDU design that has achieved a slightly negative void coefficient
I looked around on the web (google, wiki) and only the candu product page said much about the advanced candu reactor having a negative void coefficient, and it gave no discernable reason other than lattice structure. I assume from your familiarity you either work building / designing the reactors or work at one of the reactors. How does the advanced design attain a negative void coefficient then? Is the separation between elements of the fuel bundle different?
Is there a reason that this information is being aimed specifically at teenagers? I know an awful lot of adults that could use a good straighforward explaination of this material.
How about households with both parents working and the teenage child(ren) unsupervised from 3:00 - 6:00 pm after school? You don't think there is a reason for them specifically to learn about AV protection etc.? And while this book is aimed at teenagers, I'm sure it would be good for less computer literate adults.
Sorry, by critical I mean "have an uncontrolled, unstable nuclear reaction". I didn't realize that critical was a specific measurement of a nuclear reaction. Serves me right for getting my vocabulary from the entertainment industry. Now that I think about it, the sub/super critical terminology is the same as in differential equations, where you can have underdamped, critically damped, and overdamped systems. Of course the stability is opposite, because underdamped are unstable and critically damped and overdamped are stable, but you get my drift. And since seem to know what you're talking about, I guess I'll refrain from describing why pebble bed reactors can't have an unstable nuclear reaction.