Further, you DON'T WANT it to operate by NFC, or anything RF for that matter. RFID, NFC, and other RF technologies have all been broken for some years now. I can't imagine what Apple is thinking, with its Apple Pay, but maybe they think they've gotten around the security holes in NFC. Remains to be seen.
There is plenty of information around about how Apple Pay works. All the communication can be in clear text and recorded by a dozen hackers, it doesn't make a difference, because the actual data sent through the insecure channel is safely encrypted.
A drunk driver is dangerous because they are likely to lose control of their car.
The problem with alcohol is that it clouds your judgment. You are not afraid anymore to do stupid things.
You probably lose control of your car because you were driving to fast for the road, and you drove to fast because you weren't afraid of going through a curve at much to much speed. You probably would have lost control without being drunk, but you wouldn't have got yourself in the situation in the first place.
You don't need the worlds best chess engine to find blunders. A really superior chess engine might get 0.1 points advantage in every pair of moves, and after 30 moves you haven't got a chance. But we are talking here about blunders with 2.0 points disadvantage in one move.
I don't know the details, but if a programmer can be charged for making a program that allows others to use it, among other things, for illegal activities, doesn't this mean that one can charge the workers at a knife factory as well?
His software didn't just allow, among other things, illegal activities. He created software for a company whose whole business was based on illegal activity.
Isn't a programmer an employee doing what he is requested to do - and anyway making programmes does not infringe copyright laws. It seems everyone has to pay a price in this megaupload story, in order to send a strong and threatening message.
"I only followed orders" hasn't worked as an excuse for quite a while. If you write software, you know what it is supposed to do. And if it is used to help with copyright infringement, and you knew it, or you would have known it if you hadn't closed your eyes to it as hard as you could, you are guilty.
It's a trap. If your driving licence is on your phone and you get pulled over, you have to hand over your phone. The cop takes it back to the car, data rapes it and hands it back. Later at the station they can analyse the contents offline, adding your contacts to the database of known associations and your selfies to their facial recognition database.
That makes the assumption that for example Apple is run by total idiots. Paying with Apple Pay doesn't unlock your phone. This could work in a very similar way, instead of a payment terminal the cop has a license card reader, you put your phone on the button, your phone sends the license card data over, and _doesn't_ unlock the phone.
However, if you write C++ code, then this do {... } while (0) thing makes really sense. C++ doesn't like goto's. You can't goto over the constructor of an object. So
if (condition) goto abc;
int i = 0;
abc:...
isn't accepted by the compiler. But a break inside a "loop" is no problem.
The second one may be to make code more debuggable. If there's a single return statement, I can set a breakpoint and check what the function returns. Of course anything that can be done can be overdone.
Actually, most software developers haven't heard of Dijkstra but just figured out that using goto is rarely the best thing to do, or even as good as other solutions.
Dijkstra wrote this at a time where FORTRAN didn't even have an if/else/endif statement. if (x > 0) y += 1; else y -= 1; required two labels and two gotos! No wonder code was hard to read because of goto's. But today nobody would use a goto in this situation, not because of Dijkstra, but because it is an obvious bad idea.
If one just *has* to play the lottery, play only numbers above 31. That will avoid all the birthday numbers, so the chances of splitting go down. There, that's my only lottery strategy. For free!
I don't think it's a good one. Because you are not the only one playing only numbers above 31, so your chances of having to share are higher. You need to pick six random numbers, with a bit higher probability for numbers > 31, medium probability for 13 to 31, and lower probability for 1 to 12.
Only if you believe that like lotteries, car accidents are purely random events. It's the same reason why the airplane vs car argument doesn't resonate very well. In my vehicle, I am mostly in control of any life threatening event. In a plane or lottery you have zero input.
Being in control doesn't make you a better driver. You may be among the 90% of drivers they are better than average, but most likely you are not. And 99% of people causing accidents were in control.
My odds of becoming a millionaire teaching you lot maths are exactly zero, and in that sense the lottery is better.
They are not zero. If you calculate how many children you teach maths, and the chances that one of them becomes a 100 times millionaire, and the chances that that person is so pleased with their excellent maths teacher that they hand over a million dollars, one percent of their fortune (especially if their excellent maths education helped them make the 100 millions), then I'd say your chances are a lot better than one in 175 million.
Unless you buy 2 tickets with the same numbers. Which could make sense because if someone else has the same numbers you will get 2/3 instead of 1/2. Even better: buy 99 tickets with the same numbers. Just the face of that other dude who ends up winning 1% of the jackpot would be well worth the $198 investment.
Are you daft or making fun at people who are bad at maths?
So the first ticket means you get 1/2 of the jackpot. The second ticket only adds 1/6th of the jackpot. The third ticket adds the difference between 3/4 and 2/3 which is just 1/12th. The 99th ticket is worth 1/2500th of the first ticket. Your chances of winning haven't grown, the expected winnings have about doubled. For the same money you could have increased your chances of winning by a factor 99.
No, it's not incorrect. Labeling 1 in 175 million "insignificant" is appropriate. You have a higher chance -- literally -- of dying from a lightning strike. Even higher of slipping in the bathtub and killing yourself.
Assume that instead of paying $1 I'll offer you a free ticket, but you have to drive to my place, pick up the ticket, and drive home. Question: At which distance is it more likely that you get killed during the journey than winning with 1 in 175 million chances?
According to wikipedia, the US average fatal automobile fatality rate was 1.5 per 100 million vehicle-miles for 2000. So 1.5 per 100 million if you drive a mile, or one in 175 million if you drive a total of 670 yards or 335 yards each way.
Yes, you are as likely to die in a car accident as to win if you drive 335 yards each way to pick up a free ticket.
This whole topic is really weirding me out. My dad has always said (well, for at least 20 years or so) that he plays the lottery just for the fantasy of winning. In reply, I often make the same lame joke about being almost as likely to find the winning ticket in the parking lot. We're not so clever, me and my dad.
But your dad got it exactly right. If he spends a dollar or two, and for a week he enjoys the fantasy that he might become a multi-millionaire, then surely that enjoyment was worth paying the dollar (unless he is so much under financial pressure that he must sacrifice something else for it). He could have spent that same money at McDonalds and got less enjoyment plus future health problems.
Your joke _is_ absolutely lame, because the chance of finding a ticket in the parking lot that hasn't been checked and thrown away because it didn't win are very low, so the chance of finding a _winning_ ticket are accordingly much lower.
On a serious note, it is pointless to calculate what the expected value of winning is (huge price multiplied by tiny chance), because what counts is not the amount, but the enjoyment. You don't enjoy 100 million ten times as much as 10 million or 100 times as much as one million or ten thousand times more than $10,000. The enjoyment isn't linear, it's more an a logarithmic scale. It's only linear for small amounts of money. So the expected enjoyment of winning the price is _not_ worth buying a ticket. The only thing worth paying for is the fuzzy warm feeling of having a chance to become rich.
Making a false theft report IS a crime, last time I looked.
In the UK, it gets an awful lot worse if you actually make a claim _who_ stole it (perverting the course of justice, not even being a minister in the government can save you). And of course if you use that false theft report to get money from your insurance, it's insurance fraud.
I still see lots of people selling phones for "parts" and quietly noting that the device is locked and they somehow don't have the password. So people are obviously still stealing phones without knowing they can't actually use them.
There _are_ people who legitimately own for example an iPhone and can't get in. For example if you inherited one. Or bailiffs took someone's valuables away, including the iPhone (don't know how legal that is).
theregister has a photo of this cable, and there is something close to one end that most definitely looks like some active device. At least it has two LEDs which I suppose takes power from the cable which just _must_ reduce the music quality. If they managed to introduce jitter I wouldn't be surprised.
For HDMI, the signal is all digital, but it gets weaker. As long as it is strong enough, it's fine. If it's too weak, the picture is gone.
So you have standards how much the connector on your computer is allowed to distort the signal, how much the receiver on your TV is allowed to distort it, and how much damage the cable is allowed to do. If all three are below the limit, you are guaranteed to be fine. If one or two are above the limit, you may be fine because the damage adds up - rubbish laptop with excellent cable and excellent TV can work.
If you run HDMI over long distances (40 metres to the TV in your garden shed), that's when you need a high quality cable where the loss per metre is low.
And while I cannot imagine anything that a $10,500 ethernet cable could do better than a normal, quality one, any cable has the capability to transmit both a digital signal, and all kinds of electrical noise. So while the digital signal is transmitted perfectly fine, that noise might for example sneak into an amplifier and become audible. There is snake oil, and there are quality and rubbish products.
The test doesn't actually ask you to write a recursive function. It shows you a function and asks you what it does. _That_ is a basic skill that any real-world programmer must master: Look at some code that might be coded badly, and figure out what it does.
The minor detail that the bad code uses recursion is irrelevant. And just like I don't learn bad practices from bad code that I see, I don't think anyone would learn bad programming style from this example. Anyone who can figure out what the code does will know how to get the same result with simpler code.
I don't think it's attempted murder. More like reckless endangerment.
Murder doesn't require intention that someone should die. An action where it is reasonably foreseeable that someone could die, and someone dies as a result, is murder. So if someone had died as a result, it would have been murder (by the person making the phone call. The police officer doing the killing may or may not be guilty of something, depending on the exact events).
If a swatting call that results in death is murder, then a swatting call that doesn't result in death would be attempted murder.
Slashdot Mirror
Further, you DON'T WANT it to operate by NFC, or anything RF for that matter. RFID, NFC, and other RF technologies have all been broken for some years now. I can't imagine what Apple is thinking, with its Apple Pay, but maybe they think they've gotten around the security holes in NFC. Remains to be seen.
There is plenty of information around about how Apple Pay works. All the communication can be in clear text and recorded by a dozen hackers, it doesn't make a difference, because the actual data sent through the insecure channel is safely encrypted.
... Sony has a chance to beat Google! They only need to sell one to a genuine non-developer customer!
A drunk driver is dangerous because they are likely to lose control of their car.
The problem with alcohol is that it clouds your judgment. You are not afraid anymore to do stupid things.
You probably lose control of your car because you were driving to fast for the road, and you drove to fast because you weren't afraid of going through a curve at much to much speed. You probably would have lost control without being drunk, but you wouldn't have got yourself in the situation in the first place.
You don't need the worlds best chess engine to find blunders. A really superior chess engine might get 0.1 points advantage in every pair of moves, and after 30 moves you haven't got a chance. But we are talking here about blunders with 2.0 points disadvantage in one move.
I don't know the details, but if a programmer can be charged for making a program that allows others to use it, among other things, for illegal activities, doesn't this mean that one can charge the workers at a knife factory as well?
His software didn't just allow, among other things, illegal activities. He created software for a company whose whole business was based on illegal activity.
Isn't a programmer an employee doing what he is requested to do - and anyway making programmes does not infringe copyright laws. It seems everyone has to pay a price in this megaupload story, in order to send a strong and threatening message.
"I only followed orders" hasn't worked as an excuse for quite a while. If you write software, you know what it is supposed to do. And if it is used to help with copyright infringement, and you knew it, or you would have known it if you hadn't closed your eyes to it as hard as you could, you are guilty.
he biggest problem I have with this and carrying your insurance on your phone is in order to produce it to authorities you have to unlock your phone.
You have to unlock the phone? Says who?
I like this idea. Yes its prone to hacking. So are paper documents. Who hasn't forged an ID setting their age appropriately to get alcohol? :)
I never needed to. Apparently the country where I grew up was a bit more free than the world's "freest" country.
It's a trap. If your driving licence is on your phone and you get pulled over, you have to hand over your phone. The cop takes it back to the car, data rapes it and hands it back. Later at the station they can analyse the contents offline, adding your contacts to the database of known associations and your selfies to their facial recognition database.
That makes the assumption that for example Apple is run by total idiots. Paying with Apple Pay doesn't unlock your phone. This could work in a very similar way, instead of a payment terminal the cop has a license card reader, you put your phone on the button, your phone sends the license card data over, and _doesn't_ unlock the phone.
However, if you write C++ code, then this do { ... } while (0) thing makes really sense. C++ doesn't like goto's. You can't goto over the constructor of an object. So
...
if (condition) goto abc;
int i = 0;
abc:
isn't accepted by the compiler. But a break inside a "loop" is no problem.
The second one may be to make code more debuggable. If there's a single return statement, I can set a breakpoint and check what the function returns. Of course anything that can be done can be overdone.
Actually, most software developers haven't heard of Dijkstra but just figured out that using goto is rarely the best thing to do, or even as good as other solutions.
Dijkstra wrote this at a time where FORTRAN didn't even have an if/else/endif statement. if (x > 0) y += 1; else y -= 1; required two labels and two gotos! No wonder code was hard to read because of goto's. But today nobody would use a goto in this situation, not because of Dijkstra, but because it is an obvious bad idea.
If one just *has* to play the lottery, play only numbers above 31. That will avoid all the birthday numbers, so the chances of splitting go down. There, that's my only lottery strategy. For free!
I don't think it's a good one. Because you are not the only one playing only numbers above 31, so your chances of having to share are higher. You need to pick six random numbers, with a bit higher probability for numbers > 31, medium probability for 13 to 31, and lower probability for 1 to 12.
Only if you believe that like lotteries, car accidents are purely random events. It's the same reason why the airplane vs car argument doesn't resonate very well. In my vehicle, I am mostly in control of any life threatening event. In a plane or lottery you have zero input.
Being in control doesn't make you a better driver. You may be among the 90% of drivers they are better than average, but most likely you are not. And 99% of people causing accidents were in control.
My odds of becoming a millionaire teaching you lot maths are exactly zero, and in that sense the lottery is better.
They are not zero. If you calculate how many children you teach maths, and the chances that one of them becomes a 100 times millionaire, and the chances that that person is so pleased with their excellent maths teacher that they hand over a million dollars, one percent of their fortune (especially if their excellent maths education helped them make the 100 millions), then I'd say your chances are a lot better than one in 175 million.
Unless you buy 2 tickets with the same numbers. Which could make sense because if someone else has the same numbers you will get 2/3 instead of 1/2. Even better: buy 99 tickets with the same numbers. Just the face of that other dude who ends up winning 1% of the jackpot would be well worth the $198 investment.
Are you daft or making fun at people who are bad at maths?
So the first ticket means you get 1/2 of the jackpot. The second ticket only adds 1/6th of the jackpot. The third ticket adds the difference between 3/4 and 2/3 which is just 1/12th. The 99th ticket is worth 1/2500th of the first ticket. Your chances of winning haven't grown, the expected winnings have about doubled. For the same money you could have increased your chances of winning by a factor 99.
No, it's not incorrect. Labeling 1 in 175 million "insignificant" is appropriate. You have a higher chance -- literally -- of dying from a lightning strike. Even higher of slipping in the bathtub and killing yourself.
Assume that instead of paying $1 I'll offer you a free ticket, but you have to drive to my place, pick up the ticket, and drive home. Question: At which distance is it more likely that you get killed during the journey than winning with 1 in 175 million chances?
According to wikipedia, the US average fatal automobile fatality rate was 1.5 per 100 million vehicle-miles for 2000. So 1.5 per 100 million if you drive a mile, or one in 175 million if you drive a total of 670 yards or 335 yards each way.
Yes, you are as likely to die in a car accident as to win if you drive 335 yards each way to pick up a free ticket.
This whole topic is really weirding me out. My dad has always said (well, for at least 20 years or so) that he plays the lottery just for the fantasy of winning. In reply, I often make the same lame joke about being almost as likely to find the winning ticket in the parking lot. We're not so clever, me and my dad.
But your dad got it exactly right. If he spends a dollar or two, and for a week he enjoys the fantasy that he might become a multi-millionaire, then surely that enjoyment was worth paying the dollar (unless he is so much under financial pressure that he must sacrifice something else for it). He could have spent that same money at McDonalds and got less enjoyment plus future health problems.
Your joke _is_ absolutely lame, because the chance of finding a ticket in the parking lot that hasn't been checked and thrown away because it didn't win are very low, so the chance of finding a _winning_ ticket are accordingly much lower.
On a serious note, it is pointless to calculate what the expected value of winning is (huge price multiplied by tiny chance), because what counts is not the amount, but the enjoyment. You don't enjoy 100 million ten times as much as 10 million or 100 times as much as one million or ten thousand times more than $10,000. The enjoyment isn't linear, it's more an a logarithmic scale. It's only linear for small amounts of money. So the expected enjoyment of winning the price is _not_ worth buying a ticket. The only thing worth paying for is the fuzzy warm feeling of having a chance to become rich.
Making a false theft report IS a crime, last time I looked.
In the UK, it gets an awful lot worse if you actually make a claim _who_ stole it (perverting the course of justice, not even being a minister in the government can save you). And of course if you use that false theft report to get money from your insurance, it's insurance fraud.
I still see lots of people selling phones for "parts" and quietly noting that the device is locked and they somehow don't have the password. So people are obviously still stealing phones without knowing they can't actually use them.
There _are_ people who legitimately own for example an iPhone and can't get in. For example if you inherited one. Or bailiffs took someone's valuables away, including the iPhone (don't know how legal that is).
theregister has a photo of this cable, and there is something close to one end that most definitely looks like some active device. At least it has two LEDs which I suppose takes power from the cable which just _must_ reduce the music quality. If they managed to introduce jitter I wouldn't be surprised.
For HDMI, the signal is all digital, but it gets weaker. As long as it is strong enough, it's fine. If it's too weak, the picture is gone.
So you have standards how much the connector on your computer is allowed to distort the signal, how much the receiver on your TV is allowed to distort it, and how much damage the cable is allowed to do. If all three are below the limit, you are guaranteed to be fine. If one or two are above the limit, you may be fine because the damage adds up - rubbish laptop with excellent cable and excellent TV can work.
If you run HDMI over long distances (40 metres to the TV in your garden shed), that's when you need a high quality cable where the loss per metre is low.
And while I cannot imagine anything that a $10,500 ethernet cable could do better than a normal, quality one, any cable has the capability to transmit both a digital signal, and all kinds of electrical noise. So while the digital signal is transmitted perfectly fine, that noise might for example sneak into an amplifier and become audible. There is snake oil, and there are quality and rubbish products.
He does, which is why everything under the GPL is there voluntarily, placed there by the original author.
There is plenty of BSD code where the original author had no intention of releasing under GPL, and some asshole slapped a GPL license on it.
Yeah, right. Fibonacci wants a recursive implementation. Which has exponential time complexity instead of linear.
The test doesn't actually ask you to write a recursive function. It shows you a function and asks you what it does. _That_ is a basic skill that any real-world programmer must master: Look at some code that might be coded badly, and figure out what it does.
The minor detail that the bad code uses recursion is irrelevant. And just like I don't learn bad practices from bad code that I see, I don't think anyone would learn bad programming style from this example. Anyone who can figure out what the code does will know how to get the same result with simpler code.
I don't think it's attempted murder. More like reckless endangerment.
Murder doesn't require intention that someone should die. An action where it is reasonably foreseeable that someone could die, and someone dies as a result, is murder. So if someone had died as a result, it would have been murder (by the person making the phone call. The police officer doing the killing may or may not be guilty of something, depending on the exact events).
If a swatting call that results in death is murder, then a swatting call that doesn't result in death would be attempted murder.