Code can be self-documenting. Comments are for explaining why you did the things you did (that is, not for explaining that "a++;" means "increment a") and for explaining something clever or sneaky (if I manage to optimize a paragraph down to a line, I'll write a paragraph of comments explaining how).
Using meaningful names is IMO the single most important thing for clarity. Some people seem to like Humpty Dumpty's approach of using words to mean whatever they want and paying them extra on the weekend; then they cant remember what's going on when they themselves look at the code six months later.
The whole culture of telling everything about yourself all the time is relatively new. We're talking about this on/. where we talk, sometimes, more openly than we would in person; lots of people reveal things on "social media" and are then surprised when some unexpected person actually reads what they revealed. Before this instant publicity existed, and with a less liberal culture, it's not really surprising that things were kept quieter, and that the shock when it was revealed was that someone had broken the secrecy rather than that the things happened in the first place. (Think of Watergate, or Roosevelt's wheelchair, or Kennedy's extracurricular activities.) OTOH that's why you have intelligence analysts (not necessarily spies) who find the loose ends and piece them together into the story.
People getting all bent over UIs is always funny to me. I could care less where the address bar or tabs are.
I'll put that in reverse: I've gotten used to where things are, so I'm ticked off when the developers feel the need to screw around with them and confuse me. They want to make it rearrange-able, fine; just leave it the **** alone as the default.
I work in embedded code that has to use hard-coded addresses and special references. If you write something once, it's unique. When you have to cut-paste-modify it once, no problem. If you have to cut-paste-modify it a second time for a third purpose, it's time to think about a macro or a subroutine or *something*.
I agree if your intent is "don't overcomplicate from the beginning", but keeping things parallel / symmetrical just makes things clearer.
No question the bad guy is the bad guy. But also no question that the good guys are supposed to take reasonable precautions against ignorance or stupidity. If the system was open to a real bad guy, then it was equally open to a script kiddie who hit that IP address by accident. That's more like leaving your car running with the doors open while it's parked on the street in midtown.
If it has no on-board power or control, does it make sense to call it a "robot"? It might be a useful demonstration of "simple legs we could put on a walking robot", and demonstrate that comparatively simple motive devices could move it in the same linear way that gravity does, but I think "robot" is stretching the envelope . . . on the bottom.
Similarly, how do you know it really worked if everyone knows the schedule? Everyone turns on their alarms at 2 whether they hear upstream or not, and says it was successful. If it was "some random minute between 2PM and 2:30PM", maybe chosen with the roll of a 20-sided die at 2PM, it would be a more realistic test.
As for "real vs. fake" - "This is not a drill" sounds great in movies and TV, but you do *not* want to hear it in real life. Ever.
Just like every talk show, and most Daily Show or Colbert Report interviews, and just about anything else that independently employed people do. Like him or hate him, may we all be as sharp at 80!
Mea culpa - oversimplified for effect. Let's compromise: he wanted to make something cool that people would be willing to pay for, hence becoming successful. Jobs' difference is that he made things that were so cool that people WANTED, nay, were HAPPY to pay for them.
Point is that he made things, and made a company to make those things, and hired many other people to help make those things. Things were made, and value was created that did not exist before, in the real world.
The financial industry claims that it creates value, but most of the "equity" business involves repackaging existing value and somehow adding a profit far beyond the amount of value added. When the difference between price and value becomes obvious to the naked eye, it's called a "bubble" and blamed on the people who were talked into believing in it rather than being blamed on the hucksters who did the talking. If you sell snake oil you're a fraud, but if you sell securities in a snake oil business you're perfectly fine . . . which I believe is part of the problem.
Wouldn't it just point to their mobile phone instead, which is contracted to a real name and credit card / money? As opposed to using an open access point with a limited-use netbook that has a MAC address but no personal data?
which, now that I think of it, is an excuse to go buy another toy . . .
Greed is not the problem. It's the short-term-ness of the greed that is the problem. I'll bet Steve Jobs wanted to be rich, and he *built* a company, with risk capital and investment from others.
No, sorry, Madoff victims weren't all rich and they didn't get their money back, and probably won't. A cousin of mine lost all of the intended college savings for three kids that his parents had put aside with their investment advisor in a supposedly managed account; turns out the advisor was "investing" with Madoff.
I agree with you about the rest, though - there are so many equally obvious cases of fraud that somehow don't rate punishment.
One of the security aspects of Multics was the limit on available programming languages. This was carried into Prime Minicomputer's Primos which restricted normal programming to PL/1 and Cobol. If you can't directly access memory, you can't hack the OS.
I can imagine how they have such a minuscule effect on us that it's virtually impossible for us to detect it.......they by and large go straight through us or get absorbed and re-emitted as heat. They don't knock electrons out of their orbits, and so can't effect biological tissue.
My MS is CS, not bio, so maybe this is a stupid question: If you can detect radio waves with an antenna and an electronic circuit, they're not going straight through and they're not turning to heat. So *could* biological tissue detect them somehow? Sort of the way your eyes detect EM radiation, and your skin reacts to UV?
We're still figuring out how the brain works; we wouldn't even know how to tell if we're affecting it in minor and annoying ways. Obvious damage, yes, of course, but just enough background hum to be irritating . . . or distracting . . .
My wife is allergic to an antibiotic that is "generally recognized as safe". It's not in her mind, it's in the emergency room medical records and on her medicalert bracelet. She's been in shock because it can be used as a preservative without specific labeling. It's a rare problem that would never have been noticed 100 years ago - or else she would have died of "unknown causes".
Humans can have varying degrees of audible pitch perception, from "perfect pitch" through practical tone-deafness. Perfect pitch is uncommon.
In the electromagnetic spectrum, humans can have varying degrees of color perception, mostly involving missing perception but possibly involving *shifted* perception (relative to the typical norm, that is). Some humans are known to react more quickly to ultraviolet radiation - there are large evolutionary groups of them. Albinos of all species are extremely vulnerable to ultraviolet; they really are, as someone said facetiously, allergic to sunlight (admittedly because of a larger deficiency in their systems).
Is it possible that some subset of humans really ARE sensitive to the increased EM radiation that society has been using and/or to the EM noise caused by electronics? It doesn't seem to bother most of us . . . or if it does, it's like a background hum that we tune out and ignore. But maybe these people should be tested to see if there is something real here.
Let's face it, torture is unreliable (even before being nebulously immoral). One would think that by now there would have been more research on a drug or tool or other non-destructive way to loosen people's tongues. Of course it doesn't get you the *truth*, it just gets you honesty about what the person *believes* to be true. (Christopher Anvil, forgot the name of the story, had a mind-reader find out the hard way that reading people's minds didn't make him omniscient; it made him omni-opinient.)
And Jack Bauer would have been out of work much faster . . . See also "Veridicator" (H. Beam Piper), "fast-penta" (Lois McMaster Bujold), probably dozens of others.
Who needs encryption when it's a point-to-point phone call, governed by much older TELEPHONE laws about tapping and interception rather than new uncertain data laws? Yes, there are intermediaries, but they're still supposed to comply with the phone standards. You're right about receiving to an email gateway; but as long as someone's receiving to a local fax machine, or computer fax modem, it's only on their machine. Notice I'm not saying it's *better*; I'm saying it has its place (and its legal precedents) and I can understand people hanging on to it.
Even presuming the cases of vacination causing autism were not bullshit, it'd still be worse to not vaccinate all our kids - more would end up dead than would end up autistic.
The problem is that statistics doesn't work at the small scale, and people's understanding of risk doesn't either. It would be nice to say X% of children in our society will wind up autistic and society will be ready to handle the situation (hopefully for very small X); in the real world if it's YOUR kid then you have a 100% screwed up future to deal with and it's all your own problem, and that is the risk that people calculate against.
I'm even more concerned about more subtle effects. I believe that we're raising an entire generation of kids many of whom have a small degradation from where they would have been without high fevers as babies. What if we have been knocking 3 or 4 percent off the IQ of, say, 3/4 of the kids who got these shots so early? Maybe the constant dumbing-down of academic testing and school results is because we've been dumbing-down the people.
Yes, I got vaccinated as a *kid*. Today they give it to you as a *baby*. My son had a high fever for two days, which can't have done him any good, and we believe did him some harm; of course, he was so young that there's not much evidence for *proving* anything one way or the other at the time. I believe a lot of the hesitation would be alleviated by going back to the older protocol of waiting for some of these intense shots until children are four or five years old and their systems can handle it better, plus you have more evidence of development and abilities so you can make a better assessment of whether there is any change.
Florham Park, NJ. Floor rumbled. General comments: "We don't get those heavy trucks any more!" (since manufacturing stopped at this plant) . . . until people realized it was going on a lot longer. NY skyscrapers sway more in the wind, but they don't rumble like this.
. . . without some help. There was always someplace hard enough (or tricky/gimmicky enough) that I couldn't get past it, and eventually I just plain gave up. Then I gave up on video gaming, period, and went back to RPGs and board games with people.
Slashdot Mirror
Code can be self-documenting. Comments are for explaining why you did the things you did (that is, not for explaining that "a++;" means "increment a") and for explaining something clever or sneaky (if I manage to optimize a paragraph down to a line, I'll write a paragraph of comments explaining how).
Using meaningful names is IMO the single most important thing for clarity. Some people seem to like Humpty Dumpty's approach of using words to mean whatever they want and paying them extra on the weekend; then they cant remember what's going on when they themselves look at the code six months later.
The whole culture of telling everything about yourself all the time is relatively new. We're talking about this on /. where we talk, sometimes, more openly than we would in person; lots of people reveal things on "social media" and are then surprised when some unexpected person actually reads what they revealed. Before this instant publicity existed, and with a less liberal culture, it's not really surprising that things were kept quieter, and that the shock when it was revealed was that someone had broken the secrecy rather than that the things happened in the first place. (Think of Watergate, or Roosevelt's wheelchair, or Kennedy's extracurricular activities.) OTOH that's why you have intelligence analysts (not necessarily spies) who find the loose ends and piece them together into the story.
People getting all bent over UIs is always funny to me. I could care less where the address bar or tabs are.
I'll put that in reverse: I've gotten used to where things are, so I'm ticked off when the developers feel the need to screw around with them and confuse me. They want to make it rearrange-able, fine; just leave it the **** alone as the default.
I work in embedded code that has to use hard-coded addresses and special references. If you write something once, it's unique. When you have to cut-paste-modify it once, no problem. If you have to cut-paste-modify it a second time for a third purpose, it's time to think about a macro or a subroutine or *something*. I agree if your intent is "don't overcomplicate from the beginning", but keeping things parallel / symmetrical just makes things clearer.
No question the bad guy is the bad guy. But also no question that the good guys are supposed to take reasonable precautions against ignorance or stupidity. If the system was open to a real bad guy, then it was equally open to a script kiddie who hit that IP address by accident. That's more like leaving your car running with the doors open while it's parked on the street in midtown.
If it has no on-board power or control, does it make sense to call it a "robot"? It might be a useful demonstration of "simple legs we could put on a walking robot", and demonstrate that comparatively simple motive devices could move it in the same linear way that gravity does, but I think "robot" is stretching the envelope . . . on the bottom.
Same thought - I remember toys like this in my cereal boxes as a kid. They walk down a slant as long as it's neither too shallow or too steep.
Similarly, how do you know it really worked if everyone knows the schedule? Everyone turns on their alarms at 2 whether they hear upstream or not, and says it was successful. If it was "some random minute between 2PM and 2:30PM", maybe chosen with the roll of a 20-sided die at 2PM, it would be a more realistic test. As for "real vs. fake" - "This is not a drill" sounds great in movies and TV, but you do *not* want to hear it in real life. Ever.
Just like every talk show, and most Daily Show or Colbert Report interviews, and just about anything else that independently employed people do. Like him or hate him, may we all be as sharp at 80!
Mea culpa - oversimplified for effect. Let's compromise: he wanted to make something cool that people would be willing to pay for, hence becoming successful. Jobs' difference is that he made things that were so cool that people WANTED, nay, were HAPPY to pay for them.
Point is that he made things, and made a company to make those things, and hired many other people to help make those things. Things were made, and value was created that did not exist before, in the real world.
The financial industry claims that it creates value, but most of the "equity" business involves repackaging existing value and somehow adding a profit far beyond the amount of value added. When the difference between price and value becomes obvious to the naked eye, it's called a "bubble" and blamed on the people who were talked into believing in it rather than being blamed on the hucksters who did the talking. If you sell snake oil you're a fraud, but if you sell securities in a snake oil business you're perfectly fine . . . which I believe is part of the problem.
One professional-level office worker and one housewife. Not rich.
Wouldn't it just point to their mobile phone instead, which is contracted to a real name and credit card / money? As opposed to using an open access point with a limited-use netbook that has a MAC address but no personal data?
which, now that I think of it, is an excuse to go buy another toy . . .
Greed is not the problem. It's the short-term-ness of the greed that is the problem. I'll bet Steve Jobs wanted to be rich, and he *built* a company, with risk capital and investment from others.
No, sorry, Madoff victims weren't all rich and they didn't get their money back, and probably won't. A cousin of mine lost all of the intended college savings for three kids that his parents had put aside with their investment advisor in a supposedly managed account; turns out the advisor was "investing" with Madoff.
I agree with you about the rest, though - there are so many equally obvious cases of fraud that somehow don't rate punishment.
One of the security aspects of Multics was the limit on available programming languages. This was carried into Prime Minicomputer's Primos which restricted normal programming to PL/1 and Cobol. If you can't directly access memory, you can't hack the OS.
I can imagine how they have such a minuscule effect on us that it's virtually impossible for us to detect it. ......they by and large go straight through us or get absorbed and re-emitted as heat. They don't knock electrons out of their orbits, and so can't effect biological tissue.
My MS is CS, not bio, so maybe this is a stupid question: If you can detect radio waves with an antenna and an electronic circuit, they're not going straight through and they're not turning to heat. So *could* biological tissue detect them somehow? Sort of the way your eyes detect EM radiation, and your skin reacts to UV?
We're still figuring out how the brain works; we wouldn't even know how to tell if we're affecting it in minor and annoying ways. Obvious damage, yes, of course, but just enough background hum to be irritating . . . or distracting . . .
My wife is allergic to an antibiotic that is "generally recognized as safe". It's not in her mind, it's in the emergency room medical records and on her medicalert bracelet. She's been in shock because it can be used as a preservative without specific labeling. It's a rare problem that would never have been noticed 100 years ago - or else she would have died of "unknown causes".
Humans can have varying degrees of audible pitch perception, from "perfect pitch" through practical tone-deafness. Perfect pitch is uncommon.
In the electromagnetic spectrum, humans can have varying degrees of color perception, mostly involving missing perception but possibly involving *shifted* perception (relative to the typical norm, that is). Some humans are known to react more quickly to ultraviolet radiation - there are large evolutionary groups of them. Albinos of all species are extremely vulnerable to ultraviolet; they really are, as someone said facetiously, allergic to sunlight (admittedly because of a larger deficiency in their systems).
Is it possible that some subset of humans really ARE sensitive to the increased EM radiation that society has been using and/or to the EM noise caused by electronics? It doesn't seem to bother most of us . . . or if it does, it's like a background hum that we tune out and ignore. But maybe these people should be tested to see if there is something real here.
Let's face it, torture is unreliable (even before being nebulously immoral). One would think that by now there would have been more research on a drug or tool or other non-destructive way to loosen people's tongues. Of course it doesn't get you the *truth*, it just gets you honesty about what the person *believes* to be true. (Christopher Anvil, forgot the name of the story, had a mind-reader find out the hard way that reading people's minds didn't make him omniscient; it made him omni-opinient.)
And Jack Bauer would have been out of work much faster . . . See also "Veridicator" (H. Beam Piper), "fast-penta" (Lois McMaster Bujold), probably dozens of others.
Who needs encryption when it's a point-to-point phone call, governed by much older TELEPHONE laws about tapping and interception rather than new uncertain data laws? Yes, there are intermediaries, but they're still supposed to comply with the phone standards.
You're right about receiving to an email gateway; but as long as someone's receiving to a local fax machine, or computer fax modem, it's only on their machine.
Notice I'm not saying it's *better*; I'm saying it has its place (and its legal precedents) and I can understand people hanging on to it.
At my wife's company, the top executives each have a fax in their office. Fax is point-to-point because a phone call is point-to-point.
The newstaper didn't bother with local storage; it was all being uploaded live all the time. As long as you have connectivity, of course.
Even presuming the cases of vacination causing autism were not bullshit, it'd still be worse to not vaccinate all our kids - more would end up dead than would end up autistic.
The problem is that statistics doesn't work at the small scale, and people's understanding of risk doesn't either. It would be nice to say X% of children in our society will wind up autistic and society will be ready to handle the situation (hopefully for very small X); in the real world if it's YOUR kid then you have a 100% screwed up future to deal with and it's all your own problem, and that is the risk that people calculate against.
I'm even more concerned about more subtle effects. I believe that we're raising an entire generation of kids many of whom have a small degradation from where they would have been without high fevers as babies. What if we have been knocking 3 or 4 percent off the IQ of, say, 3/4 of the kids who got these shots so early? Maybe the constant dumbing-down of academic testing and school results is because we've been dumbing-down the people.
Yes, I got vaccinated as a *kid*. Today they give it to you as a *baby*. My son had a high fever for two days, which can't have done him any good, and we believe did him some harm; of course, he was so young that there's not much evidence for *proving* anything one way or the other at the time. I believe a lot of the hesitation would be alleviated by going back to the older protocol of waiting for some of these intense shots until children are four or five years old and their systems can handle it better, plus you have more evidence of development and abilities so you can make a better assessment of whether there is any change.
Florham Park, NJ. Floor rumbled. General comments: "We don't get those heavy trucks any more!" (since manufacturing stopped at this plant) . . . until people realized it was going on a lot longer. NY skyscrapers sway more in the wind, but they don't rumble like this.
. . . without some help. There was always someplace hard enough (or tricky/gimmicky enough) that I couldn't get past it, and eventually I just plain gave up. Then I gave up on video gaming, period, and went back to RPGs and board games with people.