>there were many countries that were actually ruled by the church elders, our founding fathers did not want this, so they added it to the constitiution. It was in no way meant to take all religion out of the government
What the founding fathers believed and/or wanted is completely irrelevant. They weren't Gods, deities, or ubermensch. They weren't perfect. They did a pretty damn good job, but their 18th century world view was completely different from how we see the world today.
The key to our nation's success has been the ability to adapt with the times. Slavish devotion to what the "founding fathers" believed would mean:
1) Women don't get to vote. 2) Women can't hold public office. 3) First two also hold for men of non-western-European descent. 4) Slavery is still legal (not all, but many held slaves). 5) Men who don't own fifty acres of property can not vote.
and on and on. My point is not that the founding fathers were "evil"; they lived in a different world. My point is, you can't mindlessly invoke the founding fathers as the final arbitors of every issue. You have to think, to reason about the issue in today's society, how to best preserve the principles of freedom and tolerance that Americans love. THAT is the real lesson to be learned from the founding fathers: an enlightened society can tackle any problem equitably.
"No society can make a perpetual constitution or even a perpetual law... The earth belongs ot the living and not to the dead." -- Thomas Jefferson
The Declaration of Independence can't be unconstitutional: it's not a legal document. All it does is inform the world that we are free of English rule, with a long list of grievances against the king.
The DoI establishes no form of government. It defines no laws. The body of the DoI can't be used as evidence or precedent in a court case. Further the DoI predates the Constitution by 13 years, so the Continental Congress that produced the DoI can't be subject to it. Constitutionality simply doesn't apply.
You might as well declare the Articles of Confederation unconstitutional.
"It's like he's a pipe, and all kinds of stuff goes in at this end and a continuous output of optimized strategy comes out the other end."
Bill Gates IS a pipe. The "all kinds of stuff" that goes into him is pizza, chicken, pasta, lobster, bread - the list goes on and on. I'm not sure I'd call what comes out the other end "optimized strategy" though.
'Increased security' is a red herring. The airlines have been pushing towards better passenger identification for years, for one reason: they HATE people reselling tickets! They want everyone that flies to have to buy tickets directly from them so they can jack up the prices. Otherwise they'll have speculators buying large numbers of tickets at the cheapest rates and reselling them later below the airline's current price.
This terrorist garbage is just the excuse they needed to push through their dream system. Who cares if the biometrics are only 99% accurate? It may do nothing to stop terrorists, but it'll sure kill those pesky resale markets for good!
C'mon, are you serious or just trolling? I have a hard time believing the former, but here goes...
Of course people _can_ adapt to many different technologies, but that doesn't mean the experience is particularly enjoyable.
Fashioning spears out of sticks and flint is very time-consuming, but at one time it put food on the table. Nobody goes around making lithic tools anymore because they have better ways to spend their time now.
Likewise, many people have better things to do than fumble around with arcane computer technology. Some have trouble using a mouse, which isn't a particularly intuitive device. Others just don't want to be bothered fighting the machine to get what they want done.
While we may be adaptable, we take to some motions/idioms easier than others. That's the whole point of human-centric: making things more natural.
>Can anyone fault my reasoning? It seems to me that both start equal on average, but open source will tend to have the bugs removed more quickly.
In the paper, Dr. Anderson takes this into account. Say both open and closed source start with the same number of bugs. In a given amount of time, open source has more bugs removed from it. If bugs were eliminated at a constant rate, your argument would make sense, as open source would reach a bug-free state quicker.
However, bugs are not discovered at a constant rate. Easy bugs are found quickly, and subtle bugs take longer to find. The reliability growth models reflect this: it's more useful to think in terms of the *density* of bugs than the total *number* of bugs.
So no matter how long you test and remove bugs, there will always be some bugs remaining. In open source, more total bugs will have been found. But finding the remaining bugs will be easier for an attacker (than a closed-source program with the same number of bugs), since he can look through the source code. Closed source, more bugs, but harder to find each one.
Anderson's claim is that the two factors - ease of finding bugs, and number of bugs remaining - cancel each other out in an ideal world. The attacker spends the same amount of effort finding a bug in each case. The real question he poses is, how close does this ideal model approximate real-world conditions?
Everyone parrots the media, saying "If we change, the terrorists won." Bullshit. Was Osama sitting in his cave saying, "We will make the Americans enjoy fewer freedoms. We will push them more towards a police state. That will bring glory to Allah."
Hell no. The bastards are thinking "We will destroy the evil Western pigs! We will force them out of the MidEast, force them to abandon Israel! The Holy Land will be ours again!" They couldn't give a flying f@#% whether Americans end up with more or less privacy and freedom. As long as we get the hell out of the MidEast.
That's not to say I support encroachments on our freedoms; I'm very much against it. But the argument about terrorists winning is specious.
"Exasperatingly, software vendors deliver buggy, badly designed products with incomprehensible help files -- and then charge high fees for the inevitable customer service calls."
1. Write buggy software 2. Charge extravagantly for tech support 3. PROFIT!!!
>Even if it's a perfect copy [of me], it's not worth the risk.
Hollywood scrambled today to introduce the anticipated Corporeal Copy Protection Bill (CCPB) on Capitol Hill. The bill requires all copies of teleported matter to contain access control technology that prevents reconstituting by unauthorized parties.
"With analog teleporters, copies of celebrities degrade over time, keeping celebrity piracy at manageable levels," said an alarmed Jack Valenti of the MPAA. "With this new technology, anyone can download their own perfect Natalie Portman off the net.
"Miss Portman's body is the legal property of the MPAA. We suffer irreparable financial harm if she suddenly appears in every amateur, indie, porno, and home movie on the planet."
Breaking from the MPAA's stance, Universal promised to offer cheap digital downloads of popular celebrities. Their initial catalog will include Roseanne Barr, Camryn Manheim, and "Mimi" from the Drew Carey show.
Exactly. There is an unbridgeable chasm between software engineering and more traditional types of engineering: the environment.
In civil enginering, mechanical engineering, etc, the engineer is given a very specific set of environmental conditions the structure will operate in.
This works because the range of operating conditions is small and enumerable. You know the temperature outside will always be within a certain small range, the wind will never blow harder than a certain speed, the humidity will be between X and Y percent, etc. The same goes if the operating environment is under water, inside a combustion engine, in a blast furnace, ad naseum.
With software it's a completely different story. The environment is far too complex and variable to establish such requirements. There's no way to reliably predict the conditions general pc software will operate in. Only in very restricted and controlled environments is this possible: embedded device controllers, real-time automated systems, and the like.
Biological engineering has the same problem. You hear stories about a beetle imported to some island because they devour such-and-such a weed, but then it turns out the beetle would rather munch on the island's major cash crop and the economy is decimated. Perhaps that's not "biological engineering" in the strict sense (I think of gene manipulation), but it's a similar idea.
>MS should have and could have thrown much more resources at the problem to make sure it got fixed within a week
You seem to have forgetten Brook's Law: throwing more programmers onto a late project makes it even later. Corollary: The more people you throw at something, the more time you spend on communication just to keep everyone up to date.
Except for this method to be valid, the rhinos sampled have to be chosen at random. Given the difficulties of finding and capturing wild animals, the methodology can't be applied very well to biological samples.
Nothing wrong with the method, just odd that it's known as the Rhino Problem.
>Mythic maintained that (as per their EULA) they owned their virtual world and all property in that world.
Without details of the actual court ruling I can't be sure, but this doesn't sound so unreasonable. The virtual world is being hosted by Mythic's servers, right? Claiming ownership of data residing on their own servers is not so far-fetched. If they want to rent out time and virtual 'property' as part of the Terms of Service for connecting to their servers, that's their prerogative. After all, running those servers does cost Mythic resources. If you want to use their servers, you agree to their terms; otherwise, you play offline, on competing servers, or not at all. It sounds like a Terms of Service issue, not a EULA one.
All this is *very* different from sanctioning EULAs in general. In most situations, you're not connecting to or storing data on the vendor's server. I could not imagine Microsoft laying a successful legal claim to all the Word documents ever generated by Microsoft Office.
Likewise, I can't see this decision being extended to cover every EULA term ever devised. It seems like a very circumscribed case dealing with a very specific issue: who owns the data on Mythic's servers? I suspect even if Mythic's EULA never mentioned ownership of virtual property, the court would still have ruled in Mythic's favor.
Of course this is all just guesswork on my part. IANAL.
I can't answer the question in its full generality, but I can discuss another way to teach introductory C++.
Accelerated C++: Practical Programming By Example by Koenig and Moo ISBN 0-201-70353-X
I have to admit I've never actually read it, being a seasoned C++ programmer already, but it comes highly recommended from several well-respected authors. From what I gather, it introduces C++ programming by focusing on content and results rather than syntax. Using the STL and the Standard Library, you can accomplish complex tasks quickly and easily without bogging down in the details of how algorithms and data structures are implemented.
Why is this a good thing? Certainly if you're going to have a career in programming, you need to learn the details of building a linked list or a sort algorithm. But many majors in other sciences only take one or two introductory programming courses. It's better they should learn how to write something useful than the arcane intricacies of function pointers and storage duration qualifiers.
Even for CS majors, I would argue this approach is beneficial. It provides much greater feelings of accomplishment at the crucial introductory stage. Beginning programmers shouldn't even be messing with raw pointers or static arrays; they're highly unsafe and require a lot of attention to details which beginners don't comprehend.
The comments run the gamut from shrewd to moronic to insane to genius. You have to go about a third of the way down to reach the posts on piracy generalities rather than specific measures.
The most interesting post is from Andrew Cross (3/5 down, no anchors to link to). In part, he says:
"we certainly don't think that listening to the radio is piracy, for thet matter recording music off the radio is not considered picracy and neither is video-taping MTV... Clearly music companies see these forms of music distribution as marketting as opposed to piracy, and in some ways I think that the copy protection issue with software is similar."
Actually I've gotten a good deal of Alexandrescu's Loki library to compile with MSVC, not exactly the most compliant compiler in the world. Sure everything based on typelists is missing, but I've got Singletons, Object Factories, Smart Pointers -- some good stuff.
You can't go nuts with things like template template parameters, but I've managed to design some complicated policy-based classes of my own that work with MVSC.
This book does an excellent job of covering the strengths, weaknesses, and pitfalls of using the STL.
Among the STL's (and C++ standard library's) deficiencies are lack of generalized functors, hash containers, smart pointers (the only type included, auto_ptr, is not very useful), and thread libraries. All these and more are addressed by third-party libraries such as Boost (boost.org) and Loki.
All these features are under consideration for inclusion in the next C++ Standard (C++ 0x) being worked on now. The Boost libraries in particular are strong candidates for inclusion in the next Standard; if not, something very close to them should be in there.
That's not quite true. It's true that a one-time pad has a very low probability of being "broken", i.e. of recovering the message sent. You can always break any cryptosystem by simply guessing the message that was sent. If the original message was n bits long, you have a 1/2^n probability of being correct.
The difference between one-time pads and other cryptosystems is that with others you can conceivably recover the message with 100% certainty if you have access to enough computing resources (such as being able to brute-force the key). Of course any good cryptosystem makes it hard to enough to recover the message that it becomes impossible within the limits of available computing resources.
Instead of fighting the system with moral arguments or legal battles, bring it down from the inside. Anonymous reporting means they can't trace reports back to a source, so just flood the site with false reports. Sifting through tons of garbage to find the genuine reports will make the enterprise unprofitable.
Slashdot Mirror
>there were many countries that were actually ruled by the church elders, our founding fathers did not want this, so they added it to the constitiution. It was in no way meant to take all religion out of the government
What the founding fathers believed and/or wanted is completely irrelevant. They weren't Gods, deities, or ubermensch. They weren't perfect. They did a pretty damn good job, but their 18th century world view was completely different from how we see the world today.
The key to our nation's success has been the ability to adapt with the times. Slavish devotion to what the "founding fathers" believed would mean:
1) Women don't get to vote.
2) Women can't hold public office.
3) First two also hold for men of non-western-European descent.
4) Slavery is still legal (not all, but many held slaves).
5) Men who don't own fifty acres of property can not vote.
and on and on. My point is not that the founding fathers were "evil"; they lived in a different world. My point is, you can't mindlessly invoke the founding fathers as the final arbitors of every issue. You have to think, to reason about the issue in today's society, how to best preserve the principles of freedom and tolerance that Americans love. THAT is the real lesson to be learned from the founding fathers: an enlightened society can tackle any problem equitably.
"No society can make a perpetual constitution or even a perpetual law... The earth belongs ot the living and not to the dead." -- Thomas Jefferson
>because laws are just an enforcement of morals.
Right. We all remember the 9th commandmant: Thou shalt not jaywalk.
The Declaration of Independence can't be unconstitutional: it's not a legal document. All it does is inform the world that we are free of English rule, with a long list of grievances against the king.
The DoI establishes no form of government. It defines no laws. The body of the DoI can't be used as evidence or precedent in a court case. Further the DoI predates the Constitution by 13 years, so the Continental Congress that produced the DoI can't be subject to it. Constitutionality simply doesn't apply.
You might as well declare the Articles of Confederation unconstitutional.
"It's like he's a pipe, and all kinds of stuff goes in at this end and a continuous output of optimized strategy comes out the other end."
Bill Gates IS a pipe. The "all kinds of stuff" that goes into him is pizza, chicken, pasta, lobster, bread - the list goes on and on. I'm not sure I'd call what comes out the other end "optimized strategy" though.
'Increased security' is a red herring. The airlines have been pushing towards better passenger identification for years, for one reason: they HATE people reselling tickets! They want everyone that flies to have to buy tickets directly from them so they can jack up the prices. Otherwise they'll have speculators buying large numbers of tickets at the cheapest rates and reselling them later below the airline's current price.
This terrorist garbage is just the excuse they needed to push through their dream system. Who cares if the biometrics are only 99% accurate? It may do nothing to stop terrorists, but it'll sure kill those pesky resale markets for good!
C'mon, are you serious or just trolling? I have a hard time believing the former, but here goes...
Of course people _can_ adapt to many different technologies, but that doesn't mean the experience is particularly enjoyable.
Fashioning spears out of sticks and flint is very time-consuming, but at one time it put food on the table. Nobody goes around making lithic tools anymore because they have better ways to spend their time now.
Likewise, many people have better things to do than fumble around with arcane computer technology. Some have trouble using a mouse, which isn't a particularly intuitive device. Others just don't want to be bothered fighting the machine to get what they want done.
While we may be adaptable, we take to some motions/idioms easier than others. That's the whole point of human-centric: making things more natural.
I can't wait to jedi mind trick one of these things.
"These aren't the files your looking for"
Error: move aborted: files not found
"You can go about your business. Move along."
Resuming job [537]: wget -r http://www.autopr0n.com
>Can anyone fault my reasoning? It seems to me that both start equal on average, but open source will tend to have the bugs removed more quickly.
In the paper, Dr. Anderson takes this into account. Say both open and closed source start with the same number of bugs. In a given amount of time, open source has more bugs removed from it. If bugs were eliminated at a constant rate, your argument would make sense, as open source would reach a bug-free state quicker.
However, bugs are not discovered at a constant rate. Easy bugs are found quickly, and subtle bugs take longer to find. The reliability growth models reflect this: it's more useful to think in terms of the *density* of bugs than the total *number* of bugs.
So no matter how long you test and remove bugs, there will always be some bugs remaining. In open source, more total bugs will have been found. But finding the remaining bugs will be easier for an attacker (than a closed-source program with the same number of bugs), since he can look through the source code. Closed source, more bugs, but harder to find each one.
Anderson's claim is that the two factors - ease of finding bugs, and number of bugs remaining - cancel each other out in an ideal world. The attacker spends the same amount of effort finding a bug in each case. The real question he poses is, how close does this ideal model approximate real-world conditions?
> unless the government will pony up the cash.
Which is to say, unless WE pony up the cash.
Everyone parrots the media, saying "If we change, the terrorists won." Bullshit. Was Osama sitting in his cave saying, "We will make the Americans enjoy fewer freedoms. We will push them more towards a police state. That will bring glory to Allah."
Hell no. The bastards are thinking "We will destroy the evil Western pigs! We will force them out of the MidEast, force them to abandon Israel! The Holy Land will be ours again!" They couldn't give a flying f@#% whether Americans end up with more or less privacy and freedom. As long as we get the hell out of the MidEast.
That's not to say I support encroachments on our freedoms; I'm very much against it. But the argument about terrorists winning is specious.
"Exasperatingly, software vendors deliver buggy, badly designed products with incomprehensible help files -- and then charge high fees for the inevitable customer service calls."
1. Write buggy software
2. Charge extravagantly for tech support
3. PROFIT!!!
>The "make your compliment a commodity" idea is great.
I thought compliments were already a commodity. People say things like "You look great" and "Nice pants" quite often without even charging for it.
>Even if it's a perfect copy [of me], it's not worth the risk.
Hollywood scrambled today to introduce the anticipated Corporeal Copy Protection Bill (CCPB) on Capitol Hill. The bill requires all copies of teleported matter to contain access control technology that prevents reconstituting by unauthorized parties.
"With analog teleporters, copies of celebrities degrade over time, keeping celebrity piracy at manageable levels," said an alarmed Jack Valenti of the MPAA. "With this new technology, anyone can download their own perfect Natalie Portman off the net.
"Miss Portman's body is the legal property of the MPAA. We suffer irreparable financial harm if she suddenly appears in every amateur, indie, porno, and home movie on the planet."
Breaking from the MPAA's stance, Universal promised to offer cheap digital downloads of popular celebrities. Their initial catalog will include Roseanne Barr, Camryn Manheim, and "Mimi" from the Drew Carey show.
Exactly. There is an unbridgeable chasm between software engineering and more traditional types of engineering: the environment.
In civil enginering, mechanical engineering, etc, the engineer is given a very specific set of environmental conditions the structure will operate in.
This works because the range of operating conditions is small and enumerable. You know the temperature outside will always be within a certain small range, the wind will never blow harder than a certain speed, the humidity will be between X and Y percent, etc. The same goes if the operating environment is under water, inside a combustion engine, in a blast furnace, ad naseum.
With software it's a completely different story. The environment is far too complex and variable to establish such requirements. There's no way to reliably predict the conditions general pc software will operate in. Only in very restricted and controlled environments is this possible: embedded device controllers, real-time automated systems, and the like.
Biological engineering has the same problem. You hear stories about a beetle imported to some island because they devour such-and-such a weed, but then it turns out the beetle would rather munch on the island's major cash crop and the economy is decimated. Perhaps that's not "biological engineering" in the strict sense (I think of gene manipulation), but it's a similar idea.
>MS should have and could have thrown much more resources at the problem to make sure it got fixed within a week
You seem to have forgetten Brook's Law: throwing more programmers onto a late project makes it even later. Corollary: The more people you throw at something, the more time you spend on communication just to keep everyone up to date.
Except for this method to be valid, the rhinos sampled have to be chosen at random. Given the difficulties of finding and capturing wild animals, the methodology can't be applied very well to biological samples.
Nothing wrong with the method, just odd that it's known as the Rhino Problem.
>Mythic maintained that (as per their EULA) they owned their virtual world and all property in that world.
Without details of the actual court ruling I can't be sure, but this doesn't sound so unreasonable. The virtual world is being hosted by Mythic's servers, right? Claiming ownership of data residing on their own servers is not so far-fetched. If they want to rent out time and virtual 'property' as part of the Terms of Service for connecting to their servers, that's their prerogative. After all, running those servers does cost Mythic resources. If you want to use their servers, you agree to their terms; otherwise, you play offline, on competing servers, or not at all. It sounds like a Terms of Service issue, not a EULA one.
All this is *very* different from sanctioning EULAs in general. In most situations, you're not connecting to or storing data on the vendor's server. I could not imagine Microsoft laying a successful legal claim to all the Word documents ever generated by Microsoft Office.
Likewise, I can't see this decision being extended to cover every EULA term ever devised. It seems like a very circumscribed case dealing with a very specific issue: who owns the data on Mythic's servers? I suspect even if Mythic's EULA never mentioned ownership of virtual property, the court would still have ruled in Mythic's favor.
Of course this is all just guesswork on my part. IANAL.
A spokesman confirmed that 'Unbreakable Linux' machines will ship without any I/O devices and be encased in a 10 foot cube of concrete.
> mmmm, sweet, sticky goodness.
My pc already brings me sweet, sticky goodness. Oh wait, you're not talking about pr0n...
I can't answer the question in its full generality, but I can discuss another way to teach introductory C++.
Accelerated C++: Practical Programming By Example
by Koenig and Moo
ISBN 0-201-70353-X
I have to admit I've never actually read it, being a seasoned C++ programmer already, but it comes highly recommended from several well-respected authors. From what I gather, it introduces C++ programming by focusing on content and results rather than syntax. Using the STL and the Standard Library, you can accomplish complex tasks quickly and easily without bogging down in the details of how algorithms and data structures are implemented.
Why is this a good thing? Certainly if you're going to have a career in programming, you need to learn the details of building a linked list or a sort algorithm. But many majors in other sciences only take one or two introductory programming courses. It's better they should learn how to write something useful than the arcane intricacies of function pointers and storage duration qualifiers.
Even for CS majors, I would argue this approach is beneficial. It provides much greater feelings of accomplishment at the crucial introductory stage. Beginning programmers shouldn't even be messing with raw pointers or static arrays; they're highly unsafe and require a lot of attention to details which beginners don't comprehend.
At least that's my opinion, I could be wrong.
Funny, I _just_ finished reading a large discussion of software licensing and anti-piracy measures over on Joel On Software:
u lt . sp?cmd=show&ixPost=8271
... Clearly music companies see these forms of music distribution as marketting as opposed to piracy, and in some ways I think that the copy protection issue with software is similar."
http://discuss.fogcreek.com/joelonsoftware/defa
The comments run the gamut from shrewd to moronic to insane to genius. You have to go about a third of the way down to reach the posts on piracy generalities rather than specific measures.
The most interesting post is from Andrew Cross (3/5 down, no anchors to link to). In part, he says:
"we certainly don't think that listening to the radio is piracy, for thet matter recording music off the radio is not considered picracy and neither is video-taping MTV
Actually I've gotten a good deal of Alexandrescu's Loki library to compile with MSVC, not exactly the most compliant compiler in the world. Sure everything based on typelists is missing, but I've got Singletons, Object Factories, Smart Pointers -- some good stuff.
You can't go nuts with things like template template parameters, but I've managed to design some complicated policy-based classes of my own that work with MVSC.
Two words: Effective STL (ISBN 0-201-74962-9)
This book does an excellent job of covering the strengths, weaknesses, and pitfalls of using the STL.
Among the STL's (and C++ standard library's) deficiencies are lack of generalized functors, hash containers, smart pointers (the only type included, auto_ptr, is not very useful), and thread libraries. All these and more are addressed by third-party libraries such as Boost (boost.org) and Loki.
All these features are under consideration for inclusion in the next C++ Standard (C++ 0x) being worked on now. The Boost libraries in particular are strong candidates for inclusion in the next Standard; if not, something very close to them should be in there.
>It is true that a one-time pad is not breakable.
That's not quite true. It's true that a one-time pad has a very low probability of being "broken", i.e. of recovering the message sent. You can always break any cryptosystem by simply guessing the message that was sent. If the original message was n bits long, you have a 1/2^n probability of being correct.
The difference between one-time pads and other cryptosystems is that with others you can conceivably recover the message with 100% certainty if you have access to enough computing resources (such as being able to brute-force the key). Of course any good cryptosystem makes it hard to enough to recover the message that it becomes impossible within the limits of available computing resources.
Instead of fighting the system with moral arguments or legal battles, bring it down from the inside. Anonymous reporting means they can't trace reports back to a source, so just flood the site with false reports. Sifting through tons of garbage to find the genuine reports will make the enterprise unprofitable.