would they actually be using a physical prism anyway? Seems like a great way to lose a bunch of those precious photons, I'd think it'd be better done mathmatically with rather large computers with lots of bits... if ya think, spectrum analysis on audio has been well within the reach of computers for quite some time, fundamentally I can't imagine it being too different. In which case, infra red, microwave, radiowave, you just need a larger window to analyse to fit enough of the wavelength in.
The light we're seeing comes from a long long time ago, from when the galaxies were actually getting closer. Either that or it's because it's from such a long time ago that stars had only managed to produce the smaller elements and so were bluer because of the lack of oxygen. At least, that's the colour I go when I'm lacking oxygen, I assume galaxies are the same.
It depends what "settling" means... paying damages doesn't grant you license to continue using the works, only complying with the license or obtaining a new license would do that. Once they comply with the license it doesn't matter (in that sense) who it was that brought it to trial. If a new license it obtained, that will only cover the works of the copyright holder who granted the new license, not work done by other people under the previous license.
Different/Same, Difference/Similarity (to play your sig game)
Haha fair play, and cheers, that definitely wasn't a typo, more likely I typed the sentence then changed it (like from "the thing that's different" to "the difference") but missed a word updating it. I know many seem to take offense to corrections, but in my line of work I find it helps to know my mistakes so I can avoid them as it can matter.
"as well as using correct punctuation and capitalization"
Well I'm British, so we use 'capitalisation' not 'capitalization':-p and yes I do prefer to, but no I don't think that's important in the same way. That's just a personal appearance thing, just as one may check themself briefly in a mirror before going out and not wear clothes with a massive food stain on it, because if you look like you've made absolutely no effort, *even* to somebody who's completely 100% nonjudgemental who won't think that means something like "must be a bum", they're still going to see that lack of effort. The same goes with how you choose to communicate, taking a little pride in it can go a long way.
But - as far as the idea of communication goes, it's not the same thing; conveyance of the idea which you intend is the important bit. You'll surely understand what I mean with minor mistakes or while I completely break the rules by starting a sentence with the word 'but'. Breaking the correctness of the language is preferable to being technically correct whilst knowing you're going to be misunderstood because of it, which is the problem the original poster has... he's not saying the term "IT" is technically incorrect (objective), he's saying he doesn't like it (subjective) and feels it gives people the wrong impression, and would prefer a term that doesn't. Nothing wrong with that. There's no point even opening your mouth if you know what you're going to say will be misunderstood, better to just save all the hassle and go with what most conveys the idea from the start.
I see your point... that even though circular saws/are/ tools, and will often be found used in conjunction with screwdrivers and hammers, one wouldn't expect to find them in a 'tool'box; that the classification "a box for tools" tends to imply a certain subset of 'tool', that one would normally find in a toolbox. Someone probably wouldn't think a circular saw would fit in a toolbox, as say, a programmer may not feel fit in the classification of "IT", as refering to the holding classification doesn't normally imply that specific subset when people hear it, and so one may wish to refer more specifically to that subset, to differenciate and convey the correct idea. I like the way you made it, I couldn't have put it better myself!
Sure I understand the idea of a subset, and technically your latter comments are technically correct in the assertion of my mistake, -but- if in common language use a term that can describe a set usually implies a specific subset of that set, and use of that term without further clarification will leave people with that incorrect impression, then it's perfectly natural and reasonable to desire a term that is more accurate. Remember the whole purpose of language is the conveyance of idea, therefore if you feel a term is conveying a different idea to the one you intend, for all intents and purposes it's failing in its use and would betray the meaning you intend, so one would not choose to use it. That's just normal adaptive behaviour.
To counter your NY/USA example, I'm British, and technically Britain lies part of the continent of Europe, but through the seperation to mainland Europe there are some pretty big cultural differences to say the least, leaving British people traditionally not feeling like part of Europe. If you refer to a Brit as European, you're far more likely to get the response "I'm British", than if you did with somebody French, Dutch or Belgian, with their respective nations. The same is true of many countries who're part of continental North or South America, where you'll find people who hate the fact that the term "America(n)" makes people in the rest of the world think USA, and feel the need to point out that they're not from USA.
It's apparently not unusual for a programmer to feel that the term "IT" betrays the meaning for which they desire to use, neither is it unusual for a human being to feel a strong attachment to their identity, particularly parts of their identity that they take pride in, enjoy, feel is important. What I don't understand is the resistance on this site to someone expressing the desire to do something constructive about that, but then I guess as much as it frustrated me, people being rude to somebody just because "technically" the thing they're saying can be viewed as being untrue, which means one can score personal boosts to their own self esteem by putting that person down, I am not New Here(tm), so it's not a surprise. Even if you want to sell somebody you think they're wrong, you can be civilised about it, and discuss things rationally; your post to me, and I'd hope this post back to you, is proof of that.
Apologies for the rant, you seem like you probably already get it:-)
Yes, you can consult a dictionary and see what it says about words, but in the real word, term have extradictionary connotations; they get used to mean specific things, and so they mean specific things to people. You wanna argue that when a term is broken down into its constituent components it can be matched against a specific meaning - well if you have to break it down into its constituent components, it's because the term has different meanings to people other than that, as is the case here, and all you're doing fundamentally is arguing about the meaning of something as it is in a different language. By your definition, anything that combines any form of information with any form of technology can be classed as IT, that doesn't even have to mean a computer... a term so incredibly generic is redundant in a language which purpose is the conveyance of idea, as it no longer does that. And so, the term has meaning greater than the sum of its constituent parts would they be seperate, and has meaning in real life language more specific than to which it you have it defined.
Assuming an unsaturated link, you are of course correct. With a saturated link, or with highly compressable data, light compression can make a difference. Of course it can't increase the speed of light, so I'm still gonna get annoying lag when pressing a key in my ssh client to my server in the states, but tunnelling my smtp/imap/sql/etc connections through that compressed ssh link does make a noticable difference, even with me only using 1% of my available bandwidth.
Oh please come back and post more often, your amazing insights are invaluable. That's just what this site needs more of, people who'll only come out of the woodwork to express how little they understand of somebody's point of view.
What amazes me is when you saw that ol' "comment" box, you could've written anything, you went with "I know what the world needs, more bitterness!".
In this economy where people are losing their homes?!! Wake up, there're people all over the world who've never even experienced a proper home or job, or not dying with their families of starvation. If you can live your life while that's happening, people can live their lives while there's a credit crunch and unemployment. Somebody not trying to make the most of their own life isn't going to fix -anything-.
You're an idiot who thinks that because you don't get something, there must be nothing there to get. You really think that there's nothing that lies outside of your understanding? That if you don't understand why somebody's saying that something "is different", it must not be true, because if it was, you'd already know it? Have you really lived your whole live discovering so very little that you have no concept of 'something that you have not discovered'?
"Computer guy" is pretty much fine... you could manage servers, you could be on the floor keeping office workstations going so that people don't lose access to their accounting information, or you could be a games programmer, they are all computer jobs. But could you call the guys at ID "IT"?
There is a reason why we don't refer to screwdrivers, circular saws and sanding machines all as "hammers". There is a reason why we have different words for "poisonous" and "tasty"... if you're not eating them, then just "berries" might be a sufficient description to you, but language evolves for a reason, we have vocabulary for a reason, description is important. Not understanding the different between two different terms shows you haven't been exposed to it. Not understanding that there could be important differences that may lie outside of what you've been exposed to show narrow mindedness. Personally, I'd rather go with the label of 'petty over my label' than that of 'deliberately ignorant', so I respect even the differences that I don't understand.
Whether you're a programmer or are IT support is not simple a matter of studying something different... you could study software development and end up in IT support, or you could study biology and end up as a programmer. I don't think this is a matter of refering to someone's abilities, it's a matter of refering to what they actually do. If you work for a marketting company, but you just make the tea, it wouldn't really be correct to say "I work in marketing", because you don't, you just happen to work for a company that is in marketing. You wouldn't call the person who supports their IT needs a marketer any more than you'd call those in marketing 'programmers' because they use a computer.
Your knowledge of the subject may leave you having to round down, but that doesn't mean there's no need for accurate description, you don't need to understand the terms to understand the purpose of a little accuracy. Call a British person French, or a Canadian an American, you might live the other side of the world and so a few miles one way or another makes no different to you, but you can always bet that it matters to them. It's hardly a difficult thing to respect.
It's just not very descript, the connotations that the term 'IT' has attached are different to those of 'programmer', at least to myself, and I've no reason to believe I'm unique with that. IT in my experiences will tend to be more office/user facing; easing other peoples use of other peoples products, dealing with word processing, spreadsheets, all that kind of stuff. Programmers create the stuff that the people in IT use.
Personally I find it easy to escape the label of 'IT' by not having a clue how to use Excel or Word leaving me very much being not the person to ask:-) System architecture, coding problems, no sweat, that stuff interests me, so that's the stuff I'm interested in being associated with. I don't look down on people who fix the office printers or get peoples mail clients working with their AV or whatever... I don't look down on teachers, but it doesn't mean I wanna be one or believe that calling me one is an accurate description.
No I don't think it's "them v us", I read your post in the context of the thread it was posted and the messages around it, and as I had seen no external references, it came across as twisting what people were saying here. I also haven't seen the issues of faith school here in the UK, the news outlets make such a big deal over nothing constantly I've given up paying attention to them, so I wouldn't read too much into what they're saying, the style of much of the reporting going on is just horrible, cruel and heartless, representative only of the loud emotional hysterics who're very good at making their numbers seem greater than they are:-/
No what it's saying is that filtering the content to make sure that only certain types of characters (alphabet, punctuation etc) can't be relied on to improve your security, you have to make sure that the incoming data doesn't end up somewhere where it's going to get executed, because once the code is being executed, it can decode the instructions that it couldn't get past the filter in place. Filter for English words only, or filter or UTF8 sequences only, the only difference is the initial machine language vocabulary you have to start with to build your decoder with. And, even if your UTF8 filter does remove some illegal sequences so the code no longer gains shell access, the fact that you're running it could still result in data corruption or crashing the application - not as bad as unauthorised shell access, but it's hardly a great second best.
It won't solve you much though. Firstly, if you've got the ability to dump your string into a bit of memory where it can be executed from, then there's nothing stopping you from using a couple of bitwise operations to modify the code ahead and put the codes in. Secondly, where people do manage to dump a string somewhere it'll be executed it's because something's not checking its inputs, eg, making sure that a string isn't longer than its buffer, such as maybe an image or a compressed chunk of data with a header that's saying it needs less memory than it does, and the software's just blindly taking it at its word and reading/unpacking it in memory overflowing its buffer. You're not going to have an easier time getting people to check their strings for valid UTF8 sequences than to just get them to do basic bounds checking to stop those strings being executed in the first place.
Sites are more likely to filter on IP address than purely the UA string, Google publish them so it's very easy, and far more reliable. At least, that's what I've always done (not to serve different content, just so that I don't add cookieless workaround codes to all the links on the page).
By releasing your creation you are granted the right to control how your works are reproduced and distributed. If someone copies/distributes your works in a way not authorised, then you are deprived of the right to control it. You might not be deprived of your creation (as they only took a copy) but you have been deprived of your right granted to you by law, because you either have control of the copy/distribution or you don't, there is no "we both have it as it's a copy".
All this quibbling over language is really missing the point: RIAA music sucks! Possession should be a crime full stop, no matter how you got hold of it!:-p
"but then, I wouldn't much care one way or another if Apple survived"
What?! But if people couldn't buy Apple computers then if they wanted to be stuck up they'd have to be French! How can you not care one way or the other about that?!!
"Kind of like there are people out there who can think of "better" ways to keep sensitive data safe without encrypting it when transmitting over an untrusted medium?"
No, nothing like that.
"and allow unpadded code to call padded code but not vice-versa"
What about callbacks?
"the padding could in theory be made optional if the instruction contains something with a high-bit set"
So instead of using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, use a different sledgehammer. You do realise that most data/communications isn't pre-limited to 7bit, and can go higher than 8bit when you need to support other alphabets using UTF8/Unicode etc, with much exploitable code having been found in stream processing code (like ssl, compression or image libraries, A/V codecs), and that this rewritten instruction set where you waste 1/8bits per instruction (remember how many of those get processed per second) would do nothing in all those cases, meaning you'd've done all that and you're still not secured by it.
(due to the use of NUL for string termination in the C programming language)
So instead of just using functions where you pass the length of the buffer along with your string pointers so it doesn't overrun, or functions that store the length of the buffer and automatically allocate larger buffers if the string does overrun, you'd prefer to just fill up to half of your memory used for code with zeroes? So that it affects all code, rather than just the code that can potentially cause overflows? Do you really think that's the better solution? Really? Do you really? Really do you?
Ever since the 60s? And that's when reality was invented was it?
Dude I'm from a country where people were hung, drawn and quartered, as much as nostalgia can paint a picture of a rose tinted past, I can find you so many things that show the oposite. But, you cherry pick to support your opinion all you want, using facts "in reality" to prove how "not reality" is somehow better... if it was that much better you wouldn't need this "objective world" but the fact of the matter is you do, truth matters, and playing your platinum denial card will get you nowhere fast, and that's certainly not the humanity I wish to subscribe to. Thankfully, I'm not alone, because reality can be shared:-)
Slashdot Mirror
would they actually be using a physical prism anyway? Seems like a great way to lose a bunch of those precious photons, I'd think it'd be better done mathmatically with rather large computers with lots of bits... if ya think, spectrum analysis on audio has been well within the reach of computers for quite some time, fundamentally I can't imagine it being too different. In which case, infra red, microwave, radiowave, you just need a larger window to analyse to fit enough of the wavelength in.
The light we're seeing comes from a long long time ago, from when the galaxies were actually getting closer. Either that or it's because it's from such a long time ago that stars had only managed to produce the smaller elements and so were bluer because of the lack of oxygen. At least, that's the colour I go when I'm lacking oxygen, I assume galaxies are the same.
I think I need my bed...
It depends what "settling" means... paying damages doesn't grant you license to continue using the works, only complying with the license or obtaining a new license would do that. Once they comply with the license it doesn't matter (in that sense) who it was that brought it to trial. If a new license it obtained, that will only cover the works of the copyright holder who granted the new license, not work done by other people under the previous license.
Riiiight... but if I agreed with you, then I'd be thinking for myself??! No thanks, cuz then we'd both be wrong!
Amen to that!
Different/Same, Difference/Similarity (to play your sig game)
Haha fair play, and cheers, that definitely wasn't a typo, more likely I typed the sentence then changed it (like from "the thing that's different" to "the difference") but missed a word updating it. I know many seem to take offense to corrections, but in my line of work I find it helps to know my mistakes so I can avoid them as it can matter.
"as well as using correct punctuation and capitalization"
Well I'm British, so we use 'capitalisation' not 'capitalization' :-p and yes I do prefer to, but no I don't think that's important in the same way. That's just a personal appearance thing, just as one may check themself briefly in a mirror before going out and not wear clothes with a massive food stain on it, because if you look like you've made absolutely no effort, *even* to somebody who's completely 100% nonjudgemental who won't think that means something like "must be a bum", they're still going to see that lack of effort. The same goes with how you choose to communicate, taking a little pride in it can go a long way.
But - as far as the idea of communication goes, it's not the same thing; conveyance of the idea which you intend is the important bit. You'll surely understand what I mean with minor mistakes or while I completely break the rules by starting a sentence with the word 'but'. Breaking the correctness of the language is preferable to being technically correct whilst knowing you're going to be misunderstood because of it, which is the problem the original poster has... he's not saying the term "IT" is technically incorrect (objective), he's saying he doesn't like it (subjective) and feels it gives people the wrong impression, and would prefer a term that doesn't. Nothing wrong with that. There's no point even opening your mouth if you know what you're going to say will be misunderstood, better to just save all the hassle and go with what most conveys the idea from the start.
I see your point... that even though circular saws /are/ tools, and will often be found used in conjunction with screwdrivers and hammers, one wouldn't expect to find them in a 'tool'box; that the classification "a box for tools" tends to imply a certain subset of 'tool', that one would normally find in a toolbox. Someone probably wouldn't think a circular saw would fit in a toolbox, as say, a programmer may not feel fit in the classification of "IT", as refering to the holding classification doesn't normally imply that specific subset when people hear it, and so one may wish to refer more specifically to that subset, to differenciate and convey the correct idea. I like the way you made it, I couldn't have put it better myself!
Sure I understand the idea of a subset, and technically your latter comments are technically correct in the assertion of my mistake, -but- if in common language use a term that can describe a set usually implies a specific subset of that set, and use of that term without further clarification will leave people with that incorrect impression, then it's perfectly natural and reasonable to desire a term that is more accurate. Remember the whole purpose of language is the conveyance of idea, therefore if you feel a term is conveying a different idea to the one you intend, for all intents and purposes it's failing in its use and would betray the meaning you intend, so one would not choose to use it. That's just normal adaptive behaviour.
To counter your NY/USA example, I'm British, and technically Britain lies part of the continent of Europe, but through the seperation to mainland Europe there are some pretty big cultural differences to say the least, leaving British people traditionally not feeling like part of Europe. If you refer to a Brit as European, you're far more likely to get the response "I'm British", than if you did with somebody French, Dutch or Belgian, with their respective nations. The same is true of many countries who're part of continental North or South America, where you'll find people who hate the fact that the term "America(n)" makes people in the rest of the world think USA, and feel the need to point out that they're not from USA.
It's apparently not unusual for a programmer to feel that the term "IT" betrays the meaning for which they desire to use, neither is it unusual for a human being to feel a strong attachment to their identity, particularly parts of their identity that they take pride in, enjoy, feel is important. What I don't understand is the resistance on this site to someone expressing the desire to do something constructive about that, but then I guess as much as it frustrated me, people being rude to somebody just because "technically" the thing they're saying can be viewed as being untrue, which means one can score personal boosts to their own self esteem by putting that person down, I am not New Here(tm), so it's not a surprise. Even if you want to sell somebody you think they're wrong, you can be civilised about it, and discuss things rationally; your post to me, and I'd hope this post back to you, is proof of that.
Apologies for the rant, you seem like you probably already get it :-)
Yes, you can consult a dictionary and see what it says about words, but in the real word, term have extradictionary connotations; they get used to mean specific things, and so they mean specific things to people. You wanna argue that when a term is broken down into its constituent components it can be matched against a specific meaning - well if you have to break it down into its constituent components, it's because the term has different meanings to people other than that, as is the case here, and all you're doing fundamentally is arguing about the meaning of something as it is in a different language. By your definition, anything that combines any form of information with any form of technology can be classed as IT, that doesn't even have to mean a computer... a term so incredibly generic is redundant in a language which purpose is the conveyance of idea, as it no longer does that. And so, the term has meaning greater than the sum of its constituent parts would they be seperate, and has meaning in real life language more specific than to which it you have it defined.
Assuming an unsaturated link, you are of course correct. With a saturated link, or with highly compressable data, light compression can make a difference. Of course it can't increase the speed of light, so I'm still gonna get annoying lag when pressing a key in my ssh client to my server in the states, but tunnelling my smtp/imap/sql/etc connections through that compressed ssh link does make a noticable difference, even with me only using 1% of my available bandwidth.
Oh please come back and post more often, your amazing insights are invaluable. That's just what this site needs more of, people who'll only come out of the woodwork to express how little they understand of somebody's point of view.
What amazes me is when you saw that ol' "comment" box, you could've written anything, you went with "I know what the world needs, more bitterness!".
In this economy where people are losing their homes?!! Wake up, there're people all over the world who've never even experienced a proper home or job, or not dying with their families of starvation. If you can live your life while that's happening, people can live their lives while there's a credit crunch and unemployment. Somebody not trying to make the most of their own life isn't going to fix -anything-.
You're an idiot who thinks that because you don't get something, there must be nothing there to get. You really think that there's nothing that lies outside of your understanding? That if you don't understand why somebody's saying that something "is different", it must not be true, because if it was, you'd already know it? Have you really lived your whole live discovering so very little that you have no concept of 'something that you have not discovered'?
"Computer guy" is pretty much fine... you could manage servers, you could be on the floor keeping office workstations going so that people don't lose access to their accounting information, or you could be a games programmer, they are all computer jobs. But could you call the guys at ID "IT"?
There is a reason why we don't refer to screwdrivers, circular saws and sanding machines all as "hammers". There is a reason why we have different words for "poisonous" and "tasty"... if you're not eating them, then just "berries" might be a sufficient description to you, but language evolves for a reason, we have vocabulary for a reason, description is important. Not understanding the different between two different terms shows you haven't been exposed to it. Not understanding that there could be important differences that may lie outside of what you've been exposed to show narrow mindedness. Personally, I'd rather go with the label of 'petty over my label' than that of 'deliberately ignorant', so I respect even the differences that I don't understand.
Yeah but you're a girl.
(hehe how lost would my point be here if you actually were)
Whether you're a programmer or are IT support is not simple a matter of studying something different... you could study software development and end up in IT support, or you could study biology and end up as a programmer. I don't think this is a matter of refering to someone's abilities, it's a matter of refering to what they actually do. If you work for a marketting company, but you just make the tea, it wouldn't really be correct to say "I work in marketing", because you don't, you just happen to work for a company that is in marketing. You wouldn't call the person who supports their IT needs a marketer any more than you'd call those in marketing 'programmers' because they use a computer.
Your knowledge of the subject may leave you having to round down, but that doesn't mean there's no need for accurate description, you don't need to understand the terms to understand the purpose of a little accuracy. Call a British person French, or a Canadian an American, you might live the other side of the world and so a few miles one way or another makes no different to you, but you can always bet that it matters to them. It's hardly a difficult thing to respect.
It's just not very descript, the connotations that the term 'IT' has attached are different to those of 'programmer', at least to myself, and I've no reason to believe I'm unique with that. IT in my experiences will tend to be more office/user facing; easing other peoples use of other peoples products, dealing with word processing, spreadsheets, all that kind of stuff. Programmers create the stuff that the people in IT use.
Personally I find it easy to escape the label of 'IT' by not having a clue how to use Excel or Word leaving me very much being not the person to ask :-) System architecture, coding problems, no sweat, that stuff interests me, so that's the stuff I'm interested in being associated with. I don't look down on people who fix the office printers or get peoples mail clients working with their AV or whatever... I don't look down on teachers, but it doesn't mean I wanna be one or believe that calling me one is an accurate description.
No I don't think it's "them v us", I read your post in the context of the thread it was posted and the messages around it, and as I had seen no external references, it came across as twisting what people were saying here. I also haven't seen the issues of faith school here in the UK, the news outlets make such a big deal over nothing constantly I've given up paying attention to them, so I wouldn't read too much into what they're saying, the style of much of the reporting going on is just horrible, cruel and heartless, representative only of the loud emotional hysterics who're very good at making their numbers seem greater than they are :-/
No what it's saying is that filtering the content to make sure that only certain types of characters (alphabet, punctuation etc) can't be relied on to improve your security, you have to make sure that the incoming data doesn't end up somewhere where it's going to get executed, because once the code is being executed, it can decode the instructions that it couldn't get past the filter in place. Filter for English words only, or filter or UTF8 sequences only, the only difference is the initial machine language vocabulary you have to start with to build your decoder with. And, even if your UTF8 filter does remove some illegal sequences so the code no longer gains shell access, the fact that you're running it could still result in data corruption or crashing the application - not as bad as unauthorised shell access, but it's hardly a great second best.
It won't solve you much though. Firstly, if you've got the ability to dump your string into a bit of memory where it can be executed from, then there's nothing stopping you from using a couple of bitwise operations to modify the code ahead and put the codes in. Secondly, where people do manage to dump a string somewhere it'll be executed it's because something's not checking its inputs, eg, making sure that a string isn't longer than its buffer, such as maybe an image or a compressed chunk of data with a header that's saying it needs less memory than it does, and the software's just blindly taking it at its word and reading/unpacking it in memory overflowing its buffer. You're not going to have an easier time getting people to check their strings for valid UTF8 sequences than to just get them to do basic bounds checking to stop those strings being executed in the first place.
Sites are more likely to filter on IP address than purely the UA string, Google publish them so it's very easy, and far more reliable. At least, that's what I've always done (not to serve different content, just so that I don't add cookieless workaround codes to all the links on the page).
By releasing your creation you are granted the right to control how your works are reproduced and distributed. If someone copies/distributes your works in a way not authorised, then you are deprived of the right to control it. You might not be deprived of your creation (as they only took a copy) but you have been deprived of your right granted to you by law, because you either have control of the copy/distribution or you don't, there is no "we both have it as it's a copy".
All this quibbling over language is really missing the point: RIAA music sucks! Possession should be a crime full stop, no matter how you got hold of it! :-p
"but then, I wouldn't much care one way or another if Apple survived"
What?! But if people couldn't buy Apple computers then if they wanted to be stuck up they'd have to be French! How can you not care one way or the other about that?!!
(hehe wonder how quickly this one will go to -1!)
"Kind of like there are people out there who can think of "better" ways to keep sensitive data safe without encrypting it when transmitting over an untrusted medium?"
No, nothing like that.
"and allow unpadded code to call padded code but not vice-versa"
What about callbacks?
"the padding could in theory be made optional if the instruction contains something with a high-bit set"
So instead of using a sledgehammer to crack a walnut, use a different sledgehammer. You do realise that most data/communications isn't pre-limited to 7bit, and can go higher than 8bit when you need to support other alphabets using UTF8/Unicode etc, with much exploitable code having been found in stream processing code (like ssl, compression or image libraries, A/V codecs), and that this rewritten instruction set where you waste 1/8bits per instruction (remember how many of those get processed per second) would do nothing in all those cases, meaning you'd've done all that and you're still not secured by it.
(due to the use of NUL for string termination in the C programming language)
So instead of just using functions where you pass the length of the buffer along with your string pointers so it doesn't overrun, or functions that store the length of the buffer and automatically allocate larger buffers if the string does overrun, you'd prefer to just fill up to half of your memory used for code with zeroes? So that it affects all code, rather than just the code that can potentially cause overflows? Do you really think that's the better solution? Really? Do you really? Really do you?
The idea's full of NULLs!
Ever since the 60s? And that's when reality was invented was it?
Dude I'm from a country where people were hung, drawn and quartered, as much as nostalgia can paint a picture of a rose tinted past, I can find you so many things that show the oposite. But, you cherry pick to support your opinion all you want, using facts "in reality" to prove how "not reality" is somehow better... if it was that much better you wouldn't need this "objective world" but the fact of the matter is you do, truth matters, and playing your platinum denial card will get you nowhere fast, and that's certainly not the humanity I wish to subscribe to. Thankfully, I'm not alone, because reality can be shared :-)