Eddings writing style is more chatty and reveals more of the ole' internal dialog. His characters are generally all very likeable and he follows them through book after book after book. I really liked Eddings a lot when I was younger, but I think I'd find his writing to be a bit too clumsy now that I'm more well exposed to non-sci-fi books. I don't stand by that though, I should probably read some of it again. What's clear is that Eddings, for some, is just about the most "immersive" fantasy author. In other words, don't start reading unless you are going to finish. I can't tell you how many times as a teen I started reading an Eddings book
on Friday night and had to finish by Sunday. Couldn't put the damned thing down.
As somebody who has employed contractors at my company, I would say I wouldn't recommend it. We hired them because we were in a bind early on in our company's history. They were awful workers, didn't invest anything in the quality of their code and wasted a lot of time and tried to bill us for it. We ended up scrapping most of the code they wrote and I instituted a no-contractor policy at my company. I'm not the only person who's been burned by contractors, and most saavy company's won't deal with them. Why? It's just not cost effective. I can hire three full time, dedicated software engineers for what it costs to hire one decent contractor. And with the full time person we can worry about results and quality. With the contractor, we spend more time worrying about their honesty in billing.
Anyway, there will always be some big companies that don't care about bleeding money through their arses. But the first people to go in economic downturn are the biggest line items on engineering budgets. The contractors. A good quality full-time software engineer I will fight to the death to keep around, because they are extremely valuable assets to the company and our development effort. Other managers feel the same way.
Also, a MAJOR point that you MUST realize. A lot of us who do hiring at software firms will simply throw away the resumes of people who have been doing mostly contract work. Why? They have an ingrained salary expectations that are unreasonable. And they tend to have the attitude that they can bail as soon as they become disinterested or they are mildly displeased with something. These are not the people you want working on your team.
Anyway, just my opinion and the hiring practices I follow. That does not represent my company's official policy or anything like that. But there are a lot of others who share my experiences and my opinion. And while there are some great contractors out there, there are tons more who are highly incompetent opportunists. And the people doing contract work who are employed by low-end contract/consulting firms are even worse.
Nah, when it's next to your head it's probably an inch away from brain cells, through some skull and skin. In your pocket or on your hip it's only adjacent to your hip bone. It's usually (at least for me) at least 5-6 inches away from my family jewels. At that distance, thanks to inverse square, microwave exposure is tiny. I might end up with hip-cancer, but that sounds kinda unlikely... hip tissue isn't particularly microwave susceptible, I would imagine.
Also parody protects this. Libel and slander laws are strange (the standards are based on civil law not criminal law mostly). Different from perjury or fraud which are criminal. I don't know how the police can sue under these statutes. Doubtful they can.
Furthermore, public figures or organizations may be parodied. This is upheld by lots of case law. Remember the pope screwing his mother or something like that in a cartoon in Hustler? Larry Flynt's right to print that was upheld because no reasonable person would perceive it as anything other than parody (i.e. not the actual truth). The exact standard is a bit tricky, but the basic intention is pretty clear in the law. I don't care how vile or obscene this guy's website was, it was probably protected. Even copyright "infringement" doesn't exist in parody-land. Only if the guy was actively trying to deceive people about who he was could he actually face any consequences, but definitely not under the law they charged him with.
You know, you suffer from the common misunderstanding about freeness. I actually do have friends producing Free software that is FAR from free. Enterprise applications, built on top of reusable GPLed components. Extending and selling their services. This actually can work, and it can empower small shops to compete on a level ground with the big boys.
In any case, I make more than enough money. I enrich myself every day at work, producing rather non-Free and non-free software which we sell to companies, big and small, for a few hundred thousand dollars a pop, or run as an ASP for several 10s of grands a month.
In short, I spend a lot of time enriching myself. If my business work involves mostly enriching myself, the other people at my company and our VCs, then so be it. When I come home I like to work on projects that enrich all of us in a different community (we humans are very tribalistic by nature, you know). This other community is the community of *nix hackers and users, people who appreciate software as an art and a craft, people who appreciate technical accomplishments on their own merit.
So I don't really see the huge difference here. It's all just a matter of what enriches you and your life, and how you perceive yourself in the tribalistic/social framework.
First paragraph: correct, but obnoxious. There is indeed a set of consequences of quantum theory that includes wave-particle duality, although it is not a fundamental assumption of quantum theory.
Second paragraph: correct, the original poster is being silly. But when you say spin can be either up or down and that the state space is 2D, you of course realize that information in a quantum computation can be represented in a superposition state, which can then be manipulated to result in a particular discrete observable given a particular result.
Third paragraph: the original poster is talking out of his ass, true. The "speedup" is the result of the fact that a QC algorithm can effectively run a large number of "computations" in parallel, in Hilbert space, resulting an answer in far fewer steps. Of course, only some problems are "quantum computationally feasible" in the sense of taking far fewer steps to solve in a QC process than in a conventional algorithm (Schnor, Grover, etc. are a couple of algorithms that would be particularly useful and nifty if we had a big enough QC to solve them in practical situations). Similar in nature to the various P* complete etc. ways of describing problems that are polynomial time under parallel processing, etc.
Listen, shitforbrains, there was no website and no license to read. There was just a splash page. And this excerpt of license shit. How the hell do you know that "The webplayer software is what was shipped on the box" unless you have the full text of all licensing information included with the package? If you do, please post it all and not an irrelevant, contextless excerpt.
And what the hell does this mean: "ANY form of linux code that is licensed". How the hell can you tell what "Webplayer Software" means? There is plenty of commercially licensed application software. Webplayer Software in this context could just as well mean an X desktop environment that sits there displaying shit. This is perfectly legitimate.
If you have any content to share, please do so, if you are going to insult me with no clue, shut the fuck up.
You used the right words, a pleasant melange of "consumer" and "investor" and "divest". That is
likely to at least make it one level up the ladder when they get feedback like that.
Need some big names with big mouths smacking them down, and a petition or two signed by a few thousand folks using the word "boycott". That _is_ the way to make a difference.
Bascially, yes. Most technology companies have a CTO who is prominent within the organization due to their role. They also probably have a director of IS or a VP of IS who fulfills the internal IT functions within the organization.
A big company with both old and new economy components may have both a CIO and a CTO.
A company with only a CIO is probably not a technology company per se (i.e. they do not directly sell technology products or services to customers, but technology is only incidental to their business).
At companies where the business _is_ the technology, the CTO generally has the prominent role. At most other businesses, the CTO, if one is present, is a technology person with business experience who does is basically the uber architect for tech projects within the company and fights with/argues with/bitchifies him or herself to the CIO.
At some level, you're more likely to find a CTO in a technology company that actually vends and produces technology products, because the CTO is in charge of guiding the technology used by the company in those products or services.
A CIO is generally in charge of information systems (IS) and IT deployment within an enterprise, perhaps also with the groups in charge of integrating or connecting that to other systems.
In reality, I have met very smart and very stupid CTOs. But while I haven't interacted with very many CIOs, those I've had any experience at all with have universally been PHBs in the worst possible way.
Mind you, my experience is mostly in the software industry, with companies in the range of 20 to 500 people (i.e. small and mid-small sized companies). Also, you have to realize that basically a company can create roles as they want and asign people to those roles. If the CTO is too smart and the CEO can't deal with him because he understands nothing about what's going on, he might hire a CIO who's a complete moron and make the CTO report to him. Then if the CTO isn't a complete loser he'll quit and say fuck this shit.
If that was the case they'd document their extensions and try to get as many third parties as possible to use their extensions.
Generally they modify and extend without documenting, or in a way that is not "better" but incompatible. An extended set of options is always nice, but trying to cause a rift between standard Kerberos and Win2k Kerberos, there's just no excuse.
You can innovate and still play nice with standards, or at least try to make your innovations into standards.
The product has no cost for unlicensed use, though. The cost is "free" but only in association with the use of the product under the GPL. Unless, like some projects, there is a precedent for relicensing under a non-GPL license (i.e. allowing use in a closed source product), then there is no actual basis for determining cost of product.
I'm fairly sure that term there is illegal in that it violates case law based definitions of property rights and contract law.
For one thing it says "this contract which defines a customer-provider relationship lets us do something with your property in perpetuity even after you terminate our contract". That is bullshit and I don't believe it would stand up in court anywhere. It's your property, you can let them in or not as you please. If they have a problem (i.e. they are leasing you equipment that you don't own and you won't return) they can sue you for it, but that doesn't give them the legal right to break into your home and take it.
And since the buggers never asked, you get to make up your own number and convince the judge that that's a reasonable one. Probably based on how much work you say it was to implement and how much extra cost that would have incurred on the project to do it themselves. Easily you could convince them that a few hundred grand is fair. Then treble that and add in punitive. Hehehe....
First of all, they aren't distributing it any more (go to www.virginconnectme.com and check out the message). So that makes it hard for me to figure out whether there was a GPL violation or not (no more info on the damned thing at all).
Second of all, it's not clear that the webplayer software was anything but an application running on top of GNU/Linux/XFree86. They may or may not have ever touched kernel code. They don't have to distribute application code under the GPL. It would be nice of them if they did, but we have no right to demand that.
If they made modifications or linked to GPLed software directly from their code (and we all know that "linking" is a touchy issue even within the Free Software/Open Source community, since we often don't even agree on what linking means), then their code must be released. If they wrote application code that runs on an Open Source operating system (The Webplayer Software described above in the license), they can license it however they want.
If they are using a stock Linux kernel, I see no realistic need for them to rerelease it, but I suppose they should at least put it up on their FTP site and say "this is the kernel source tree we are using in our device".
Assuming the worst is a bad tactic, a bit of pleasantry and explaining what can and can't be kept secret, and they will usually comply.
Re:HEDP Re:uh, in an army group? Re:Pacemakers?
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EMP Artillery Shells
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· Score: 2
Has to do with direction of explosion force, heat and duration of explosion. I'm not an expert, by any means, but if you think about it, anti-tank artillery or ammunition are basically small explosive packages that burn with very high intensity heat (several thousand degrees) to literally penetrate through armor and then ignite/blow up whatever's inside.
Those same rounds would be fairly ineffective against personnel (oh, they'd kill people obviously, just not as many as you could otherwise). What you want with squishy targets is an explosion that maximizes concussive force and shrapnel distribution over a larger area. You just want to get in the right general area and take out everything adjacent. Napalm, cluster bombs - things like this can kill large number of infantry, but your average tank just wouldn't notice them at all.
Hmm. You're giving a really inadequate analogy. A physical safety device does not aim to do anything other than soften a blow. Likewise, misuse of a seatbelt can be more harmful than no use at all, much like encryption. Furthermore, an airbag can deploy in a low speed crash and give you a black eye. I suppose these analogies are lame too, but no worse than the original one.
There are known protocols and methodologies for secure communications that are immune to MITM-type attacks. Unfortunately, all of them are either inconvenient or impossible over an open, insecure communications medium like the Internet - this is simply a feature of the network architecture and design. If it's used carefully (i.e. the people factor here), it can be secure, but the nature of the medium is to be insecure. If you want a truly secure medium, don't use a public, massively accessible packet switching network. Use an isolated quantum encryption protected channel or some other system designed for security, that takes security out of the hands of the user.
In any case, I think one of the other posters made a good point on the distinction between protocol and implementation. The protocol is no perfect but is pretty good, much like the airbag protocol. It can be all-but-advanced-idiot proof in a good implementation. But a poor implementation can put even a sophisticated user in harms way, just like a shitty airbag can bust you in the nose. And while the government regulates airbag quality, nobody is going to regulate SSH or SSL implementations (side note: why does the government give a shit about your physical safety but not at all about your data's security).
Well, I agree with a lot of what you say. But I disagree about the 99% of the time it is their own fault. I think you may be misunderstanding or inaccurately remembering some things.
When I was in junior high school I was severely taunted, teased and picked on by certain people, for no good reason. Primarily, it was a function of the fact that I was in a lower-middle income area, and these people were uneducated, ignorant and had the wrong values instilled in them by their families. I was smarter than almost everyone in my school at the time. There were a handful of other particularly intelligent folks at my school (two of them ended up with me at Harvard, one at U Cal Berkeley).
Then I moved (twice actually) and ended up at a private school in New York, surrounded by upper-middle and upper class people who valued education and success. They still gave shit to kids who were smart-asses, people who were obnoxious were still disliked. But I wasn't hated for my intelligence and I DIDN'T HAVE TO HIDE IT. Not flaunting it is one thing. Actively concealing it is another entirely.
I went on to do quite well at this school, as at others before. I was still in the top 5% of this school intellectually, but I was accepted by a lot of people socially, and I tried to avoid being arrogant or obnoxious about it, but never had to nor wanted to hide it.
My point is this: being in a healthy environment where you can express yourself and not dumb yourself down is wonderful, and being arrogant will always make people dislike you. But being surrounded by morons who are themselves arrogant and obnoxious and project their frustration and anger onto you is a hostile environment which fosters the kind of arrogance you refer to (it's hard when your self-esteem is constantly shot down not to hold on to the one thing you KNOW you have over everybody around you).
In any case, a pleasant mix of arrogance and humility, and knowing when to use both in a maximally effective fashion has allowed me to get extremely far in the world, much farther than IQ alone would ever have carried me.
That's what XHTML, the successor to HTML 4.01, is for. Brings HTML 4.01 in compliance with the slightly stricter XML syntax, i.e. no hanging tags (which are sorta like hanging chads, only they look like ) which are now represented as . Other than that it's remarkably similar, but it's parsable by a standard XML parser according to the XHTML DTD. Most standard XML parsers can't read HTML (earlier versions of it, that is) unless they have been kludged for HTML support.
A better analogy would be if I left my tractor in the shed with a key in it and the shed door open, and you walked into the shed, took my tractor and ran somebody over with it. A tractor is an agricultural tool that can be used to kill somebody. An mail server is a communications tool that can be used to spam someone. A gun is primarily a tool for damaging or destroying things, which could be targets or could be people, but generally they were invented to kill. Email was not made to spam.
Re:Programmers Make Computers Slower Year by Year
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Netscape 6 Vs. 4.7x
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· Score: 1
Yup, you're exactly on target. I couldn't agree more. That's why I separate the stuff I produce at work and the stuff I produce on my own time. I _try_ to do things the right way at work, but it's hard when you get screamed at almost every day (I'm in management in addition to being a techie, so I not only write code but also manage those who do, so I get bitched out by basically everybody all the time at my company). So feel sympathy. It is a fucking cruel world. I only wish what customers really cared about was the quality of the software they receive. But they don't. Why? Because they have fucking mediocre project managers who don't _want_ the project to work, they just want somebody to point a finger at when it doesn't work. Fuck em all, I'm gonna make my money and hopefully work on more enjoyable projects on my own time.
The satellites are named after the atomic structure of the element Iridium. There are as many Iridium satellites as the atomic number of Iridium, the element, and therefore of electrons circling around an iridium atom (it looks like a bunch of satellites circling around a planet, which is the nucleus... if you smoke enough weed).
Re:Programmers Make Computers Slower Year by Year
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Netscape 6 Vs. 4.7x
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· Score: 2
Coding is taking less and less effort, not more.
You're right. But schedules are more and more insane to keep up with the competition. Developers aren't lazier. We do far more with far smaller teams than anybody could have done 10 years ago. We can do this because we can use tools with large, prebuilt APIs like Java that aren't always the most efficient or the fastest.
Now, anyone who has ever done any development will tell you that you have to treat performance as a feature in any application. You can demand more performance optimization or design for performance, but it will cost you other features or it will cost you schedule or both. Please see any elementary book or course material on software engineering or tradeoffs in the software development process to help understand this.
The tools of today do allow for what you brand as "laziness". But I believe that developers just have more options these days to meet the absurd demands placed on them by people who have no clue about the technology (whether these are PHBs, clients, marketing morons or what have you) who demand more and more other features in shorter periods of time.
Anyway, I'm not trying to defend the Netscape engineers... they've pretty much fucked up in every way possible. And Microsoft is habitually responsible for massive code and feature bloat. But please don't generalize this to include all software developers.
Slashdot Mirror
Eddings writing style is more chatty and reveals more of the ole' internal dialog. His characters are generally all very likeable and he follows them through book after book after book. I really liked Eddings a lot when I was younger, but I think I'd find his writing to be a bit too clumsy now that I'm more well exposed to non-sci-fi books. I don't stand by that though, I should probably read some of it again. What's clear is that Eddings, for some, is just about the most "immersive" fantasy author. In other words, don't start reading unless you are going to finish. I can't tell you how many times as a teen I started reading an Eddings book on Friday night and had to finish by Sunday. Couldn't put the damned thing down.
As somebody who has employed contractors at my company, I would say I wouldn't recommend it. We hired them because we were in a bind early on in our company's history. They were awful workers, didn't invest anything in the quality of their code and wasted a lot of time and tried to bill us for it. We ended up scrapping most of the code they wrote and I instituted a no-contractor policy at my company. I'm not the only person who's been burned by contractors, and most saavy company's won't deal with them. Why? It's just not cost effective. I can hire three full time, dedicated software engineers for what it costs to hire one decent contractor. And with the full time person we can worry about results and quality. With the contractor, we spend more time worrying about their honesty in billing.
Anyway, there will always be some big companies that don't care about bleeding money through their arses. But the first people to go in economic downturn are the biggest line items on engineering budgets. The contractors. A good quality full-time software engineer I will fight to the death to keep around, because they are extremely valuable assets to the company and our development effort. Other managers feel the same way.
Also, a MAJOR point that you MUST realize. A lot of us who do hiring at software firms will simply throw away the resumes of people who have been doing mostly contract work. Why? They have an ingrained salary expectations that are unreasonable. And they tend to have the attitude that they can bail as soon as they become disinterested or they are mildly displeased with something. These are not the people you want working on your team.
Anyway, just my opinion and the hiring practices I follow. That does not represent my company's official policy or anything like that. But there are a lot of others who share my experiences and my opinion. And while there are some great contractors out there, there are tons more who are highly incompetent opportunists. And the people doing contract work who are employed by low-end contract/consulting firms are even worse.
Nah, when it's next to your head it's probably an inch away from brain cells, through some skull and skin. In your pocket or on your hip it's only adjacent to your hip bone. It's usually (at least for me) at least 5-6 inches away from my family jewels. At that distance, thanks to inverse square, microwave exposure is tiny. I might end up with hip-cancer, but that sounds kinda unlikely... hip tissue isn't particularly microwave susceptible, I would imagine.
Furthermore, public figures or organizations may be parodied. This is upheld by lots of case law. Remember the pope screwing his mother or something like that in a cartoon in Hustler? Larry Flynt's right to print that was upheld because no reasonable person would perceive it as anything other than parody (i.e. not the actual truth). The exact standard is a bit tricky, but the basic intention is pretty clear in the law. I don't care how vile or obscene this guy's website was, it was probably protected. Even copyright "infringement" doesn't exist in parody-land. Only if the guy was actively trying to deceive people about who he was could he actually face any consequences, but definitely not under the law they charged him with.
In any case, I make more than enough money. I enrich myself every day at work, producing rather non-Free and non-free software which we sell to companies, big and small, for a few hundred thousand dollars a pop, or run as an ASP for several 10s of grands a month.
In short, I spend a lot of time enriching myself. If my business work involves mostly enriching myself, the other people at my company and our VCs, then so be it. When I come home I like to work on projects that enrich all of us in a different community (we humans are very tribalistic by nature, you know). This other community is the community of *nix hackers and users, people who appreciate software as an art and a craft, people who appreciate technical accomplishments on their own merit.
So I don't really see the huge difference here. It's all just a matter of what enriches you and your life, and how you perceive yourself in the tribalistic/social framework.
I believe that is a bug that has been fixed in the latest nightly builds. It probably just didn't make it into 0.7 which branched about 2 weeks ago.
First paragraph: correct, but obnoxious. There is indeed a set of consequences of quantum theory that includes wave-particle duality, although it is not a fundamental assumption of quantum theory. Second paragraph: correct, the original poster is being silly. But when you say spin can be either up or down and that the state space is 2D, you of course realize that information in a quantum computation can be represented in a superposition state, which can then be manipulated to result in a particular discrete observable given a particular result. Third paragraph: the original poster is talking out of his ass, true. The "speedup" is the result of the fact that a QC algorithm can effectively run a large number of "computations" in parallel, in Hilbert space, resulting an answer in far fewer steps. Of course, only some problems are "quantum computationally feasible" in the sense of taking far fewer steps to solve in a QC process than in a conventional algorithm (Schnor, Grover, etc. are a couple of algorithms that would be particularly useful and nifty if we had a big enough QC to solve them in practical situations). Similar in nature to the various P* complete etc. ways of describing problems that are polynomial time under parallel processing, etc.
And what the hell does this mean: "ANY form of linux code that is licensed". How the hell can you tell what "Webplayer Software" means? There is plenty of commercially licensed application software. Webplayer Software in this context could just as well mean an X desktop environment that sits there displaying shit. This is perfectly legitimate.
If you have any content to share, please do so, if you are going to insult me with no clue, shut the fuck up.
Need some big names with big mouths smacking them down, and a petition or two signed by a few thousand folks using the word "boycott". That _is_ the way to make a difference.
A big company with both old and new economy components may have both a CIO and a CTO.
A company with only a CIO is probably not a technology company per se (i.e. they do not directly sell technology products or services to customers, but technology is only incidental to their business).
At companies where the business _is_ the technology, the CTO generally has the prominent role. At most other businesses, the CTO, if one is present, is a technology person with business experience who does is basically the uber architect for tech projects within the company and fights with/argues with/bitchifies him or herself to the CIO.
A CIO is generally in charge of information systems (IS) and IT deployment within an enterprise, perhaps also with the groups in charge of integrating or connecting that to other systems.
In reality, I have met very smart and very stupid CTOs. But while I haven't interacted with very many CIOs, those I've had any experience at all with have universally been PHBs in the worst possible way.
Mind you, my experience is mostly in the software industry, with companies in the range of 20 to 500 people (i.e. small and mid-small sized companies). Also, you have to realize that basically a company can create roles as they want and asign people to those roles. If the CTO is too smart and the CEO can't deal with him because he understands nothing about what's going on, he might hire a CIO who's a complete moron and make the CTO report to him. Then if the CTO isn't a complete loser he'll quit and say fuck this shit.
If that was the case they'd document their extensions and try to get as many third parties as possible to use their extensions.
Generally they modify and extend without documenting, or in a way that is not "better" but incompatible. An extended set of options is always nice, but trying to cause a rift between standard Kerberos and Win2k Kerberos, there's just no excuse.
You can innovate and still play nice with standards, or at least try to make your innovations into standards.
The product has no cost for unlicensed use, though. The cost is "free" but only in association with the use of the product under the GPL. Unless, like some projects, there is a precedent for relicensing under a non-GPL license (i.e. allowing use in a closed source product), then there is no actual basis for determining cost of product.
For one thing it says "this contract which defines a customer-provider relationship lets us do something with your property in perpetuity even after you terminate our contract". That is bullshit and I don't believe it would stand up in court anywhere. It's your property, you can let them in or not as you please. If they have a problem (i.e. they are leasing you equipment that you don't own and you won't return) they can sue you for it, but that doesn't give them the legal right to break into your home and take it.
And since the buggers never asked, you get to make up your own number and convince the judge that that's a reasonable one. Probably based on how much work you say it was to implement and how much extra cost that would have incurred on the project to do it themselves. Easily you could convince them that a few hundred grand is fair. Then treble that and add in punitive. Hehehe....
First of all, they aren't distributing it any more (go to www.virginconnectme.com and check out the message). So that makes it hard for me to figure out whether there was a GPL violation or not (no more info on the damned thing at all).
Second of all, it's not clear that the webplayer software was anything but an application running on top of GNU/Linux/XFree86. They may or may not have ever touched kernel code. They don't have to distribute application code under the GPL. It would be nice of them if they did, but we have no right to demand that.
If they made modifications or linked to GPLed software directly from their code (and we all know that "linking" is a touchy issue even within the Free Software/Open Source community, since we often don't even agree on what linking means), then their code must be released. If they wrote application code that runs on an Open Source operating system (The Webplayer Software described above in the license), they can license it however they want.
If they are using a stock Linux kernel, I see no realistic need for them to rerelease it, but I suppose they should at least put it up on their FTP site and say "this is the kernel source tree we are using in our device".
Assuming the worst is a bad tactic, a bit of pleasantry and explaining what can and can't be kept secret, and they will usually comply.
Has to do with direction of explosion force, heat and duration of explosion. I'm not an expert, by any means, but if you think about it, anti-tank artillery or ammunition are basically small explosive packages that burn with very high intensity heat (several thousand degrees) to literally penetrate through armor and then ignite/blow up whatever's inside.
Those same rounds would be fairly ineffective against personnel (oh, they'd kill people obviously, just not as many as you could otherwise). What you want with squishy targets is an explosion that maximizes concussive force and shrapnel distribution over a larger area. You just want to get in the right general area and take out everything adjacent. Napalm, cluster bombs - things like this can kill large number of infantry, but your average tank just wouldn't notice them at all.
Hmm. You're giving a really inadequate analogy. A physical safety device does not aim to do anything other than soften a blow. Likewise, misuse of a seatbelt can be more harmful than no use at all, much like encryption. Furthermore, an airbag can deploy in a low speed crash and give you a black eye. I suppose these analogies are lame too, but no worse than the original one.
There are known protocols and methodologies for secure communications that are immune to MITM-type attacks. Unfortunately, all of them are either inconvenient or impossible over an open, insecure communications medium like the Internet - this is simply a feature of the network architecture and design. If it's used carefully (i.e. the people factor here), it can be secure, but the nature of the medium is to be insecure. If you want a truly secure medium, don't use a public, massively accessible packet switching network. Use an isolated quantum encryption protected channel or some other system designed for security, that takes security out of the hands of the user.
In any case, I think one of the other posters made a good point on the distinction between protocol and implementation. The protocol is no perfect but is pretty good, much like the airbag protocol. It can be all-but-advanced-idiot proof in a good implementation. But a poor implementation can put even a sophisticated user in harms way, just like a shitty airbag can bust you in the nose. And while the government regulates airbag quality, nobody is going to regulate SSH or SSL implementations (side note: why does the government give a shit about your physical safety but not at all about your data's security).
When I was in junior high school I was severely taunted, teased and picked on by certain people, for no good reason. Primarily, it was a function of the fact that I was in a lower-middle income area, and these people were uneducated, ignorant and had the wrong values instilled in them by their families. I was smarter than almost everyone in my school at the time. There were a handful of other particularly intelligent folks at my school (two of them ended up with me at Harvard, one at U Cal Berkeley).
Then I moved (twice actually) and ended up at a private school in New York, surrounded by upper-middle and upper class people who valued education and success. They still gave shit to kids who were smart-asses, people who were obnoxious were still disliked. But I wasn't hated for my intelligence and I DIDN'T HAVE TO HIDE IT. Not flaunting it is one thing. Actively concealing it is another entirely.
I went on to do quite well at this school, as at others before. I was still in the top 5% of this school intellectually, but I was accepted by a lot of people socially, and I tried to avoid being arrogant or obnoxious about it, but never had to nor wanted to hide it.
My point is this: being in a healthy environment where you can express yourself and not dumb yourself down is wonderful, and being arrogant will always make people dislike you. But being surrounded by morons who are themselves arrogant and obnoxious and project their frustration and anger onto you is a hostile environment which fosters the kind of arrogance you refer to (it's hard when your self-esteem is constantly shot down not to hold on to the one thing you KNOW you have over everybody around you).
In any case, a pleasant mix of arrogance and humility, and knowing when to use both in a maximally effective fashion has allowed me to get extremely far in the world, much farther than IQ alone would ever have carried me.
Templates, my friend. I work in Java all the time and I still find it frustrating as hell that there are no templates.
That's what XHTML, the successor to HTML 4.01, is for. Brings HTML 4.01 in compliance with the slightly stricter XML syntax, i.e. no hanging tags (which are sorta like hanging chads, only they look like ) which are now represented as . Other than that it's remarkably similar, but it's parsable by a standard XML parser according to the XHTML DTD. Most standard XML parsers can't read HTML (earlier versions of it, that is) unless they have been kludged for HTML support.
A better analogy would be if I left my tractor in the shed with a key in it and the shed door open, and you walked into the shed, took my tractor and ran somebody over with it. A tractor is an agricultural tool that can be used to kill somebody. An mail server is a communications tool that can be used to spam someone. A gun is primarily a tool for damaging or destroying things, which could be targets or could be people, but generally they were invented to kill. Email was not made to spam.
Yup, you're exactly on target. I couldn't agree more. That's why I separate the stuff I produce at work and the stuff I produce on my own time. I _try_ to do things the right way at work, but it's hard when you get screamed at almost every day (I'm in management in addition to being a techie, so I not only write code but also manage those who do, so I get bitched out by basically everybody all the time at my company). So feel sympathy. It is a fucking cruel world. I only wish what customers really cared about was the quality of the software they receive. But they don't. Why? Because they have fucking mediocre project managers who don't _want_ the project to work, they just want somebody to point a finger at when it doesn't work. Fuck em all, I'm gonna make my money and hopefully work on more enjoyable projects on my own time.
The satellites are named after the atomic structure of the element Iridium. There are as many Iridium satellites as the atomic number of Iridium, the element, and therefore of electrons circling around an iridium atom (it looks like a bunch of satellites circling around a planet, which is the nucleus... if you smoke enough weed).
Coding is taking less and less effort, not more.
You're right. But schedules are more and more insane to keep up with the competition. Developers aren't lazier. We do far more with far smaller teams than anybody could have done 10 years ago. We can do this because we can use tools with large, prebuilt APIs like Java that aren't always the most efficient or the fastest.
Now, anyone who has ever done any development will tell you that you have to treat performance as a feature in any application. You can demand more performance optimization or design for performance, but it will cost you other features or it will cost you schedule or both. Please see any elementary book or course material on software engineering or tradeoffs in the software development process to help understand this.
The tools of today do allow for what you brand as "laziness". But I believe that developers just have more options these days to meet the absurd demands placed on them by people who have no clue about the technology (whether these are PHBs, clients, marketing morons or what have you) who demand more and more other features in shorter periods of time.
Anyway, I'm not trying to defend the Netscape engineers... they've pretty much fucked up in every way possible. And Microsoft is habitually responsible for massive code and feature bloat. But please don't generalize this to include all software developers.