I challenge you to delve into my comment history, go on do it. You will find significant periods in my comment history where I am *substantially* more active than the examples you give for Cold Fjord.
Am I a paid forum-manipulator? I wish. It's trivially easy to post a lot of comments even when doing a full days work for an employer.
True, but have you actually viewed Cold Fjord's message history? Even obsessive compulsive people are generally not that focused, nor do they attempt equal parts character assassination, discussion downplay and strawmen. I recently suggested to him that he try focusing more on providing information and let people draw their own conclusions... and he seemed to do that for a while (proving he's a person/people and not a bot) -- but he's never going to escape his posting history as long as he holds on to that account (if he miraculously does, I guess we know who he works for).
That said, he still brings up good items for discussion; so I hope he learns from past mistakes and proves to be more than a forum manipulator.
It was a show vote. Every single one of these representatives have been briefed on these programs multiple times, and are only now crying foul. They just want their names on a piece of legislation that they knew stood no chance of passing, because it documents some separation between themselves and the sinking ship that is the NSA. There's an old adage about rats and sinking ships...
The best thing you can do is keep their feet to the fire. Don't let them get away with washing their hands of this so easily. They're all guilty as sin, and they all need to be held accountable.
Sounds reasonable, except for the fact that they only needed 7 more votes for it to pass, and the voting was bipartisan. When you're dealing with over 400 people, that kind of margin is too slim for knowing there's no chance of it passing.
I think you are overestimating the executive branch. FBI, NSA, DHS are all executive branch, and the exec only has the power to "execute" laws. Congress could pass a law that not only defunds the NSA, but makes its US operations illegal. Bam, theyre gone, and have no power to threaten anyone.
It astounds me that people act like the president is where the power lies. Certainly presidents past and present have made power grabs, but they do not ultimately have the power to defy congress, nor, really, does anyone. Congress can even in extreme situations overrule the supreme court by passing amendments.
You seem to be confusing what they can do legally with what they can do with the tools at their disposal.
Just like you can tell the guy with the brass knuckles that they're illegal and therefore he can't hit you with them, you can discuss passing a law to defund the NSA... but they can be very persuasive I'm sure to the key people needed to kill the vote in why it is not only in the NSA's best interests, but the congressman's best interests NOT to defund the NSA.
I think many want to look at people in these situations in a very black-and-white way. If they're working for NSA then they must know how the information they are handling is being used. And since "we" consider it a bad thing, it must rest heavily on their conscience.
However, I would imagine more people are like myself than not. We come to work, make our widgets, and go home to our families. We don't spend any time worrying about the work itself as long as everything is functioning the way we are being paid to make it function. Using myself as an example, I get paid well with benefits and retirement packages to manage a small network. What the company does is irrelevant. I make my widgets and go home to my family. I'll leave the conscience decision-making for the armchair quarterbacks.
It's not privilege. It's not super pay scales. It's not patriotism. It's a job.
Indeed... if we expand the "How can they sleep at night" a bit, think about the following: How can we sleep at night knowing that our "convenience" possessions are produced with the blood of impoverished nations? How can we sleep at night knowing that our food choices are causing animal suffering, massive deforestation and health problems for the poor? How can we sleep at night after playing the stock market and making a profit at the expense of someone who now has to default on their mortgage? How can we sleep at night knowing that our clothing is made with forced child labor? How can we sleep at night knowing that by wasting a large portion of the natural resources we have access to, we're really gumming things up for future generations? How can we sleep at night when there are people in our area with no social security, no home, no friends, and no help?
And yet we seem to sleep at night just fine. Compared to these issues, some government employees supporting other government employees who have access to metadata about our daily communications seems a bit bland, and easy to sleep on.
When you're getting paid well to perform a task, you naturally begin to view that task in a more positive light. This applies from the bottom of the power pyramid (where the pay is direct and official) all the way to the top (where the pay is indirect and unofficial).
Indeed -- and in a technical arena such as this, where you have access to all sorts of information that the "other side" doesn't have, you also can brush a lot off as "they just don't understand -- if they had the information I had, they'd behave the same way." This of course causes problems when the "other side" can't have access to the information for privacy reasons. The disconnect here is much easier to jump for the human mind than logic dictates.
Most of this is about the misrepresentation of calorie counts, but there are links to other studies and references to other nutritional discrepancies too. The amazing thing is that these studies have been going on since 1998, have been published, and yet nothing seems to be improving yet.
My situatioin's pretty similar to yours -- and Python's still one of my favourite languages (even with the whitespace issues), for the right jobs. I can't count how many people I've had the "real language" debate with:)
And I've seen some amazing software solutions written entirely using the AJAX stack... some stuff I could never imagine doing myself.
That said, "computer programmer" applies just as well to guys who looked in pastebin and connected the dots.
Ingy appears to be limiting "programmer" to people who use a few web-centric scripting languages, which is why I phrased things the way I did. People who learn one language and use it for everything, not having the education to architect, flowchart, document, and THEN choose a language (or have a random one thrust on them by requirements) and move to implementation.
However, if you CPU render 3D graphics, encode high quality video, or do anything else continuously mid-to-heavy on the CPU, you'll soon notice Haswell gives no improvement over Intel's last few generations of parts.
Which is why you're not going to want to buy an ultralight SSD notebook to do this kind of thing.
Really... that's not the sort of thing you use a laptop for as a dedicated machine (sure, in a pinch) -- if you're into crunching big numbers continuously, you want something that can get the job done well -- this is where traditional tower PCs excel.
Maybe one day it'll be possible in a handheld device, but that time isn't yet.
Your house is not the whole world....apples business strategy is failing...however successful it is around your house. The fact that its computers are seeing a drop in sales 22%; 2% and 7% shows it needs a new one.
I think you missed a word. Its computers are seeing a drop in sales growth -- when the growth curve is less than the one for inflation, then I'll start wondering about their long-term profitability.
It's easy to have enormous sales growth year-over-year when you don't have any sales to begin with. The fact that such a mammoth company is still growing their sales never ceases to amaze me. What new markets are they (and all the other device sellers) milking for this continued growth? Or is this just creative accounting?
Man, the 12" PowerBook G4 is still my favorite computer I've owned. Got about 5 years of full-time use out of it. Good portable form-factor, especially for the time, durable, decent battery life.
I eventually moved on because PPC stopped being treated as a first-class citizen, and things like browsers ended up with a huge performance gap, since the modern JS engines didn't get ported to PPC. And new software stopped being available.
> What about all the stuff his foundation does about malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV? > for some his more destructive effects on the computer industry,
Gee you think?!
So this asswipe waits until:
a) his Wife prods him to donate his wealth b) AFTER ripping off and bankrupting several companies.
And you think that is OK??
An true philanthropy would of done it WHILE he was accumulating his wealth not after he is an greedy asshat. Let me know when I can upgrade Windows for $20. Fuck him, Microsoft, and their greed for setting the computer industry back 20 years.
Microsoft is on the long road to being irrelevant. They throw billions of dollars at a problem (Xbox/Xbone, bing, RT, store) trying to get everyone else to drink their "Kool-Aid" (TM). People aren't [that] stupid.
Rumor has it the new thorium reactors will put out 640 kW, which oughta be enough for everybody.
640 kW from my Personal Reactor? That's enough for me.
The average US household consumes about 14,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year. That's 1.6kW/h. So your 640kW reactor will last you 400 hours (just over 2 weeks), and then you'll need a new one:)
Most computer programmers learn one programming language.
I think the technical term usually referred to those programmers is "unemployed". It could be argued that other acceptable terms are, "lazy", "dinosaurs", "students", and "People who switched to a major like Business or Human Resources after they realized Comp Sci was too tough for them."
I don't know a single good programmer who only knows 1 language... Many I know will try to at least get familiarized with a new language 1 or 2 years.
Comparing knowing a number of computer languages to a number of spoken languages is absurd.
Two computer languages is probably closer to the difference in writing a novel in English vs a screenplay in English. It's mostly format and structure for most languages.
Or the difference between the font you'd use for chiseling a sentence into stone vs using an ink and quill to put it on some parchment. The materials always affect the form and the tools used.
I'm not even a developer/programmer, just a lowly network admin, and I know almost dozen languages ( java, c#, c/c++, javascript, bash, perl, ruby, python, php, SQL, vbscript ).
While I'd like to dismiss his claims that most programmers know a single language, I'm forced to accept it as a possibility given the number of apps and their "behavior" that i've had to support.
Well, I notice he said "computer programmers" as opposed to "computer scientists" or "computer architects" or "systems administrators" -- I'd want some stats to back his claim, but I have no problems believing that there's a horde of people out there with no CS degree who taught themselves.Net, BASIC, Objective C, Jacascript, or PHP and consider themselves a "computer programmer" without realizing they're really an interpreter programmer (yes, even ObjC is heavily interpreted).
I often feel like there's a disproportionate number of people who know how to write interpreter directives compared to the number that know how to tell a computer what to do. But then I remember that most of the time, that's all they're expected to do anyway.
Other than going back to assembler (or rather its modern equivalent "C"), there is no way to do what he proposes even if we stay in the imperative class of languages. OO is also possible with C, but no compiler support whatsoever and that means most people cannot do it. Then we have functional languages which cannot reasonably be emulated in C. And we have logical languages, with the same problem. With a bit of a broader focus, CA systems like Mathlab also qualify as "programming environments", and again, they cannot reasonably be emulated in C. And don't even get me started on things like garbage collection, weak pointers, coercion, multiple inheritance, static type safety, dynamic type safety, covariant or conform inheritance (Eiffel), etc.
So while this person may have a fancy (or rather stupid) name, he has no clue about programming and this is about the most stupid thing one could propose.
That's a bit harsh; I run across the same issue when dealing with spoken languages. People keep trying to create one representation that will easily translate into all spoken languages, and you end up with Esperanto, Basic English, and the early Systran and Google machine translators. What this method fails to capture is that different ways of thinking and doing things sometimes need different means of expression.
This doesn't mean that there isn't a place for these limited forms of expression -- you just have to realize their limitations when using them. For instance, you're never going to get a "language agnostic" algorithm to function on both CPU and GPU, in synchronous and asynchronous environments, etc. without a lot of platform specific underlying code that limits the functionality to the point where the abstraction is worthless.
But writing a string parser once and using the code everywhere (or writing a modular certificate validator) is a good idea, as this is stuff everyone generally needs, and they generally pass and retrieve the same kinds of values from it no matter how it's implemented.
It's like some languages don't have a word for Pink. People in those cultures don't think about pink, and it's not really an issue for them. But changing the wording to "light red" in all other languages just for ease of translation is silly.
I fully agree, however, that is far too vague. The government does need access to some information such as census data, social security and related information, or even voter registration. That, and much more, is all controlled by the government and some of it may be public information that no ordinary person would care about them having access to.
The problem is that it is hard to write up a set of rules for what is allowed and what isn't. Too specific and it gets worked around, too vague and it is meaningless or counter-productive.
Easy to fix: just take a page from the insurance broker's playbook and have some "named damages" laws. Any purpose not named is not allowed without a warrant or an amendment. NOT subject to change without notice, and any changes must be submitted as stand-alone bills (that last bit, I'd like to see added to many pieces of legislation).
How exactly is a plant which is at or below ambient going to trigger an infrared motion sensor?
I have a lot of plants that move with the wind, but I've never seen that trigger the motion sensor lighting. Never. The coons and deer, yes. The neighbors' teenagers smoking/drinking in the back corner, yes. Never the wind moving the grass, alfalfa, iris, lilacs, arbor-vita, cottonwoods,....
Residential areas absolutely need lighting. Unless you live without lights you have no grounds to claim other people do not need lights.
How exactly does this comment reply to what I was saying? Of course residential areas need lighting. What they don't need is single-point flood and spot lighting triggered by off the shelf, non-calibrated IR motion sensors.
It sounds like ambient temp and vegetation temp are about the same where you live (arbor-vita and cottonwoods point to this likely being the case) -- in many places, this is not true. The issue isn't so much that the plants themselves have a heat signature, but that they block some other source from hitting the sensor. As they move in the wind, that other source plays across the sensor, triggering the light. But as you point out, that doesn't matter, as there are many other things that aren't security issues that also set it off, especially if it hasn't been properly calibrated and directed.
This entire avenue of discussion is beside the point though, as what I was saying was that there are better, cheaper, more effective non-disruptive alternatives that work just as well or better from a security and navigation standpoint without the random light pollution of motion sensitive flood lights. If you read my comment, you'll also notice that I suggested some strategies.
Better to argue against what I actually said -- that flood lights on motion sensors don't do much to improve security.
And yes, other than the one from my neighbour that shines in my bedroom windows, I do live without motion sensitive flood lights. The entire neighbourhood is lit to the level of dusk light at ground level all night, with glow bulbs and pot lights where necessary.
But let's go with your statement, assuming you meant it in the context of what I actually said -- why do residential areas absolutely need motion sensitive flood lights? What are the proven or even advertised benefits over the solutions I suggested?
Here's what I know about flood lights: 1) they light up an area in a very disruptive way, which could be useful for security, as they make all activities in said area visible... as long as the viewer's eyes are adjusted for that level of light; otherwise it's just a blinding glare. 2) they create shadows, such that if your eyes have adjusted to their light level, you can't see much outside the range of the light, even for up to 10 minutes after the flood light has turned off.
Flood lights have a purpose, and that purpose is to flood an area with high intensity light to approximate daylight in that area, for the purpose of enabling daytime activities within the area covered by the light. They accomplish this extremely well.
For all other purposes, there are better solutions.
I don't think you want an RFID-proof wallet so much as a radio frequency blocking wallet. An RFID-proof wallet would just be silly, because then where would you keep your RFIDs?
What proof-level is RFID rated at anyway? American products are usually low-proof, so an American RFID-proof wallet likely wouldn't provide the kick you'd get from a German RFID-proof wallet.
At last year's BlackHat, a foil gum wrapper on one side of the badge was enough to block transmission.
If this more powerful emitter will somehow get past that, I recommend someone use this technology for beefing up regular readers; not to 3 feet, but at least to get the readers working reliably at 1".
An even better reader design would be to have a cage around the reader that shields the card from most directions when it is presented.
Seriously though, the NSA is directly involved in lying to Congress. Do you think they would have any system that would allow easy discoverability of their misdeeds? I am sure their processes are in place to make any type of lawsuit or congressional oversight as difficult as possible.
Of course, any results this poor fellow would have received anyway would be just pages and pages of blacked out text with the headers and footers as they only "public" information.
Who needs the contents? As we've been arguing with PRISM, the message headers are more than enough to gather a detailed picture. They can always look up the precise NatGeo emails from THEIR side once they get the bigger picture of subject lines, internal people, date/time, message routing, etc.
If I were in charge, and the agency responsible for technological espionage and information security told me they couldn't search through their own emails, I would fire them. Every single one of them. Bam. Agency dissolved, someone go think of a new TLA for the new agency.
Not an option. The NSA has a portfolio of affairs, abuses of power, criminal behavior, tax fraud, drug abuse, etc. on every member of the government. Nobody will oppose those who could end their career in a few keystrokes....Or maybe I'm just paranoid.
I'm sure some oppose those who could end their career in a few keystrokes... you just haven't heard about those people for obvious reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
I challenge you to delve into my comment history, go on do it. You will find significant periods in my comment history where I am *substantially* more active than the examples you give for Cold Fjord.
Am I a paid forum-manipulator? I wish. It's trivially easy to post a lot of comments even when doing a full days work for an employer.
True, but have you actually viewed Cold Fjord's message history? Even obsessive compulsive people are generally not that focused, nor do they attempt equal parts character assassination, discussion downplay and strawmen. I recently suggested to him that he try focusing more on providing information and let people draw their own conclusions... and he seemed to do that for a while (proving he's a person/people and not a bot) -- but he's never going to escape his posting history as long as he holds on to that account (if he miraculously does, I guess we know who he works for).
That said, he still brings up good items for discussion; so I hope he learns from past mistakes and proves to be more than a forum manipulator.
As you might guess, I've a very low opinion of children of live of their parent's copyrighted works.
I have a higher opinion of them than I do of corporations who live off their parent's copyrighted works....
Our culture has invented the Highlander...
It was a show vote. Every single one of these representatives have been briefed on these programs multiple times, and are only now crying foul. They just want their names on a piece of legislation that they knew stood no chance of passing, because it documents some separation between themselves and the sinking ship that is the NSA. There's an old adage about rats and sinking ships...
The best thing you can do is keep their feet to the fire. Don't let them get away with washing their hands of this so easily. They're all guilty as sin, and they all need to be held accountable.
Sounds reasonable, except for the fact that they only needed 7 more votes for it to pass, and the voting was bipartisan. When you're dealing with over 400 people, that kind of margin is too slim for knowing there's no chance of it passing.
I think you are overestimating the executive branch. FBI, NSA, DHS are all executive branch, and the exec only has the power to "execute" laws. Congress could pass a law that not only defunds the NSA, but makes its US operations illegal. Bam, theyre gone, and have no power to threaten anyone.
It astounds me that people act like the president is where the power lies. Certainly presidents past and present have made power grabs, but they do not ultimately have the power to defy congress, nor, really, does anyone. Congress can even in extreme situations overrule the supreme court by passing amendments.
You seem to be confusing what they can do legally with what they can do with the tools at their disposal.
Just like you can tell the guy with the brass knuckles that they're illegal and therefore he can't hit you with them, you can discuss passing a law to defund the NSA... but they can be very persuasive I'm sure to the key people needed to kill the vote in why it is not only in the NSA's best interests, but the congressman's best interests NOT to defund the NSA.
I think many want to look at people in these situations in a very black-and-white way. If they're working for NSA then they must know how the information they are handling is being used. And since "we" consider it a bad thing, it must rest heavily on their conscience.
However, I would imagine more people are like myself than not. We come to work, make our widgets, and go home to our families. We don't spend any time worrying about the work itself as long as everything is functioning the way we are being paid to make it function. Using myself as an example, I get paid well with benefits and retirement packages to manage a small network. What the company does is irrelevant. I make my widgets and go home to my family. I'll leave the conscience decision-making for the armchair quarterbacks.
It's not privilege. It's not super pay scales. It's not patriotism. It's a job.
Indeed... if we expand the "How can they sleep at night" a bit, think about the following:
How can we sleep at night knowing that our "convenience" possessions are produced with the blood of impoverished nations?
How can we sleep at night knowing that our food choices are causing animal suffering, massive deforestation and health problems for the poor?
How can we sleep at night after playing the stock market and making a profit at the expense of someone who now has to default on their mortgage?
How can we sleep at night knowing that our clothing is made with forced child labor?
How can we sleep at night knowing that by wasting a large portion of the natural resources we have access to, we're really gumming things up for future generations?
How can we sleep at night when there are people in our area with no social security, no home, no friends, and no help?
And yet we seem to sleep at night just fine. Compared to these issues, some government employees supporting other government employees who have access to metadata about our daily communications seems a bit bland, and easy to sleep on.
When you're getting paid well to perform a task, you naturally begin to view that task in a more positive light. This applies from the bottom of the power pyramid (where the pay is direct and official) all the way to the top (where the pay is indirect and unofficial).
Indeed -- and in a technical arena such as this, where you have access to all sorts of information that the "other side" doesn't have, you also can brush a lot off as "they just don't understand -- if they had the information I had, they'd behave the same way." This of course causes problems when the "other side" can't have access to the information for privacy reasons. The disconnect here is much easier to jump for the human mind than logic dictates.
Just came back to this. I'm curious, do you know of anyone who's published such tests? I'd be really interested to see something like that.
http://www.expertfoods.com/FAQ/labelaccuracy.php
http://www.inspection.gc.ca/food/action-plan/food-safety-regulatory-forum/presentations/discussion-paper/eng/1369936679236/1369936805623
http://www.cspinet.org/foodlabeling/
http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/label-etiquet/nutrition/res-rech/index-eng.php
http://www.healthline.com/health-blogs/diet-diva/are-food-labels-accurate
http://my.clevelandclinic.org/heart/prevention/nutrition/news/study_food_labels.aspx
http://www.livescience.com/26799-calorie-counts-inaccurate.html
Most of this is about the misrepresentation of calorie counts, but there are links to other studies and references to other nutritional discrepancies too. The amazing thing is that these studies have been going on since 1998, have been published, and yet nothing seems to be improving yet.
My situatioin's pretty similar to yours -- and Python's still one of my favourite languages (even with the whitespace issues), for the right jobs. I can't count how many people I've had the "real language" debate with :)
And I've seen some amazing software solutions written entirely using the AJAX stack... some stuff I could never imagine doing myself.
That said, "computer programmer" applies just as well to guys who looked in pastebin and connected the dots.
Ingy appears to be limiting "programmer" to people who use a few web-centric scripting languages, which is why I phrased things the way I did. People who learn one language and use it for everything, not having the education to architect, flowchart, document, and THEN choose a language (or have a random one thrust on them by requirements) and move to implementation.
However, if you CPU render 3D graphics, encode high quality video, or do anything else continuously mid-to-heavy on the CPU, you'll soon notice Haswell gives no improvement over Intel's last few generations of parts.
Which is why you're not going to want to buy an ultralight SSD notebook to do this kind of thing.
Really... that's not the sort of thing you use a laptop for as a dedicated machine (sure, in a pinch) -- if you're into crunching big numbers continuously, you want something that can get the job done well -- this is where traditional tower PCs excel.
Maybe one day it'll be possible in a handheld device, but that time isn't yet.
I got the 2012 Air when it was released. Since then, my parents each bought one, plus an iMac.
>
http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q1fy13datasum.pdf
http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q2fy13datasum2.pdf
http://images.apple.com/pr/pdf/q3fy13datasum.pdf
Your house is not the whole world....apples business strategy is failing...however successful it is around your house. The fact that its computers are seeing a drop in sales 22%; 2% and 7% shows it needs a new one.
I think you missed a word. Its computers are seeing a drop in sales growth -- when the growth curve is less than the one for inflation, then I'll start wondering about their long-term profitability.
It's easy to have enormous sales growth year-over-year when you don't have any sales to begin with. The fact that such a mammoth company is still growing their sales never ceases to amaze me. What new markets are they (and all the other device sellers) milking for this continued growth? Or is this just creative accounting?
Man, the 12" PowerBook G4 is still my favorite computer I've owned. Got about 5 years of full-time use out of it. Good portable form-factor, especially for the time, durable, decent battery life.
I eventually moved on because PPC stopped being treated as a first-class citizen, and things like browsers ended up with a huge performance gap, since the modern JS engines didn't get ported to PPC. And new software stopped being available.
http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/
It's an Apple product, of course it does.
I read this right below "And does it blend?" followed by "Not individually, but imagine a Beowulf cluster of these...".
Now I've got this image of a cluster of them being blended.
In Soviet Russia, MacBook Airs blend YOU (into Natalie Portman's hot grits)!
Now set us up the bomb! For great justice.
> What about all the stuff his foundation does about malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV?
> for some his more destructive effects on the computer industry,
Gee you think?!
So this asswipe waits until:
a) his Wife prods him to donate his wealth
b) AFTER ripping off and bankrupting several companies.
And you think that is OK??
An true philanthropy would of done it WHILE he was accumulating his wealth not after he is an greedy asshat. Let me know when I can upgrade Windows for $20. Fuck him, Microsoft, and their greed for setting the computer industry back 20 years.
Microsoft is on the long road to being irrelevant. They throw billions of dollars at a problem (Xbox/Xbone, bing, RT, store) trying to get everyone else to drink their "Kool-Aid" (TM). People aren't [that] stupid.
Two words: Dale Carnegie.
He is public about his opinions of ideal population size however.
He's also public about his opinions of population control through education. And that seems to work -- no need for sterilization.
Rumor has it the new thorium reactors will put out 640 kW, which oughta be enough for everybody.
640 kW from my Personal Reactor? That's enough for me.
The average US household consumes about 14,000 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year. That's 1.6kW/h. :)
So your 640kW reactor will last you 400 hours (just over 2 weeks), and then you'll need a new one
Talk about disposable tech....
Most computer programmers learn one programming language.
I think the technical term usually referred to those programmers is "unemployed". It could be argued that other acceptable terms are, "lazy", "dinosaurs", "students", and "People who switched to a major like Business or Human Resources after they realized Comp Sci was too tough for them."
I don't know a single good programmer who only knows 1 language... Many I know will try to at least get familiarized with a new language 1 or 2 years.
Comparing knowing a number of computer languages to a number of spoken languages is absurd.
Two computer languages is probably closer to the difference in writing a novel in English vs a screenplay in English. It's mostly format and structure for most languages.
Or the difference between the font you'd use for chiseling a sentence into stone vs using an ink and quill to put it on some parchment. The materials always affect the form and the tools used.
I'm not even a developer/programmer, just a lowly network admin, and I know almost dozen languages ( java, c#, c/c++, javascript, bash, perl, ruby, python, php, SQL, vbscript ).
While I'd like to dismiss his claims that most programmers know a single language, I'm forced to accept it as a possibility given the number of apps and their "behavior" that i've had to support.
Well, I notice he said "computer programmers" as opposed to "computer scientists" or "computer architects" or "systems administrators" -- I'd want some stats to back his claim, but I have no problems believing that there's a horde of people out there with no CS degree who taught themselves .Net, BASIC, Objective C, Jacascript, or PHP and consider themselves a "computer programmer" without realizing they're really an interpreter programmer (yes, even ObjC is heavily interpreted).
I often feel like there's a disproportionate number of people who know how to write interpreter directives compared to the number that know how to tell a computer what to do. But then I remember that most of the time, that's all they're expected to do anyway.
Other than going back to assembler (or rather its modern equivalent "C"), there is no way to do what he proposes even if we stay in the imperative class of languages. OO is also possible with C, but no compiler support whatsoever and that means most people cannot do it. Then we have functional languages which cannot reasonably be emulated in C. And we have logical languages, with the same problem. With a bit of a broader focus, CA systems like Mathlab also qualify as "programming environments", and again, they cannot reasonably be emulated in C. And don't even get me started on things like garbage collection, weak pointers, coercion, multiple inheritance, static type safety, dynamic type safety, covariant or conform inheritance (Eiffel), etc.
So while this person may have a fancy (or rather stupid) name, he has no clue about programming and this is about the most stupid thing one could propose.
That's a bit harsh; I run across the same issue when dealing with spoken languages. People keep trying to create one representation that will easily translate into all spoken languages, and you end up with Esperanto, Basic English, and the early Systran and Google machine translators. What this method fails to capture is that different ways of thinking and doing things sometimes need different means of expression.
This doesn't mean that there isn't a place for these limited forms of expression -- you just have to realize their limitations when using them. For instance, you're never going to get a "language agnostic" algorithm to function on both CPU and GPU, in synchronous and asynchronous environments, etc. without a lot of platform specific underlying code that limits the functionality to the point where the abstraction is worthless.
But writing a string parser once and using the code everywhere (or writing a modular certificate validator) is a good idea, as this is stuff everyone generally needs, and they generally pass and retrieve the same kinds of values from it no matter how it's implemented.
It's like some languages don't have a word for Pink. People in those cultures don't think about pink, and it's not really an issue for them. But changing the wording to "light red" in all other languages just for ease of translation is silly.
I fully agree, however, that is far too vague. The government does need access to some information such as census data, social security and related information, or even voter registration. That, and much more, is all controlled by the government and some of it may be public information that no ordinary person would care about them having access to.
The problem is that it is hard to write up a set of rules for what is allowed and what isn't. Too specific and it gets worked around, too vague and it is meaningless or counter-productive.
Easy to fix: just take a page from the insurance broker's playbook and have some "named damages" laws. Any purpose not named is not allowed without a warrant or an amendment. NOT subject to change without notice, and any changes must be submitted as stand-alone bills (that last bit, I'd like to see added to many pieces of legislation).
Good way to spread awareness and possible outcomes of drone oversight....
YOU'RE GOING 2 MPH OVER THE SPEED LIMIT! YOU HAVE 3 SECONDS TO DECELERATE!
*1 sec later*
DID I SAY 3? TOO LATE!
*fires hellfire missile*
Well, I presume the drones are calibrated to hit where you'd be in 3 seconds if you failed to decelerate.... so much for the 2 second rule.
How exactly is a plant which is at or below ambient going to trigger an infrared motion sensor?
I have a lot of plants that move with the wind, but I've never seen that trigger the motion sensor lighting. Never. The coons and deer, yes. The neighbors' teenagers smoking/drinking in the back corner, yes. Never the wind moving the grass, alfalfa, iris, lilacs, arbor-vita, cottonwoods, ....
Residential areas absolutely need lighting. Unless you live without lights you have no grounds to claim other people do not need lights.
How exactly does this comment reply to what I was saying? Of course residential areas need lighting. What they don't need is single-point flood and spot lighting triggered by off the shelf, non-calibrated IR motion sensors.
It sounds like ambient temp and vegetation temp are about the same where you live (arbor-vita and cottonwoods point to this likely being the case) -- in many places, this is not true. The issue isn't so much that the plants themselves have a heat signature, but that they block some other source from hitting the sensor. As they move in the wind, that other source plays across the sensor, triggering the light. But as you point out, that doesn't matter, as there are many other things that aren't security issues that also set it off, especially if it hasn't been properly calibrated and directed.
This entire avenue of discussion is beside the point though, as what I was saying was that there are better, cheaper, more effective non-disruptive alternatives that work just as well or better from a security and navigation standpoint without the random light pollution of motion sensitive flood lights. If you read my comment, you'll also notice that I suggested some strategies.
Better to argue against what I actually said -- that flood lights on motion sensors don't do much to improve security.
And yes, other than the one from my neighbour that shines in my bedroom windows, I do live without motion sensitive flood lights. The entire neighbourhood is lit to the level of dusk light at ground level all night, with glow bulbs and pot lights where necessary.
But let's go with your statement, assuming you meant it in the context of what I actually said -- why do residential areas absolutely need motion sensitive flood lights? What are the proven or even advertised benefits over the solutions I suggested?
Here's what I know about flood lights:
1) they light up an area in a very disruptive way, which could be useful for security, as they make all activities in said area visible... as long as the viewer's eyes are adjusted for that level of light; otherwise it's just a blinding glare.
2) they create shadows, such that if your eyes have adjusted to their light level, you can't see much outside the range of the light, even for up to 10 minutes after the flood light has turned off.
Flood lights have a purpose, and that purpose is to flood an area with high intensity light to approximate daylight in that area, for the purpose of enabling daytime activities within the area covered by the light. They accomplish this extremely well.
For all other purposes, there are better solutions.
I don't think you want an RFID-proof wallet so much as a radio frequency blocking wallet. An RFID-proof wallet would just be silly, because then where would you keep your RFIDs?
What proof-level is RFID rated at anyway? American products are usually low-proof, so an American RFID-proof wallet likely wouldn't provide the kick you'd get from a German RFID-proof wallet.
At last year's BlackHat, a foil gum wrapper on one side of the badge was enough to block transmission.
If this more powerful emitter will somehow get past that, I recommend someone use this technology for beefing up regular readers; not to 3 feet, but at least to get the readers working reliably at 1".
An even better reader design would be to have a cage around the reader that shields the card from most directions when it is presented.
.. but ends up as truth.
Seriously though, the NSA is directly involved in lying to Congress. Do you think they would have any system that would allow easy discoverability of their misdeeds? I am sure their processes are in place to make any type of lawsuit or congressional oversight as difficult as possible.
Of course, any results this poor fellow would have received anyway would be just pages and pages of blacked out text with the headers and footers as they only "public" information.
Who needs the contents? As we've been arguing with PRISM, the message headers are more than enough to gather a detailed picture. They can always look up the precise NatGeo emails from THEIR side once they get the bigger picture of subject lines, internal people, date/time, message routing, etc.
If I were in charge, and the agency responsible for technological espionage and information security told me they couldn't search through their own emails, I would fire them. Every single one of them. Bam. Agency dissolved, someone go think of a new TLA for the new agency.
Not an option. The NSA has a portfolio of affairs, abuses of power, criminal behavior, tax fraud, drug abuse, etc. on every member of the government. Nobody will oppose those who could end their career in a few keystrokes. ...Or maybe I'm just paranoid.
I'm sure some oppose those who could end their career in a few keystrokes... you just haven't heard about those people for obvious reasons.