That was sort of my feeling as well. Screw the DMCA, but screw cheaters as well. And screw parents that defend their misbehaving little spawn no matter what they do.
There's also some addition going on there, you know.
Anyhow... the value of the name is sort of an interesting topic, because it's highly contextual. For instance, my name is listed publicly on LinkedIn, along with my job skills, work history, and professional achievements. Obviously, you can't blame LinkedIn for "leaking" this information.
On the other hand, say I were HIV positive and on a treatment list, or a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, or something similarly personal in nature. The release of just my name associated with specific groups could very well be fairly damaging to me. Or even to a lesser extent, I'd be annoyed if Slashdot were hacked and my e-mail were publicly associated with my account name. From there, it wouldn't be hard to determine my real name.
I think that's one problem with the itemized per-item fine schedule. Another is that a monetary fine really only works against private enterprises. Some of the worst leaks have been by government agencies, because those leaks include biometric data, like fingerprints. I'm not sure what you'd do with these agencies.
I was originally going to say "killed off the last dodo in front of class", but I just knew some wise-acre would have pointed out that they'd already be going extinct at that point. Heck, even if there was a single pair, that's not exactly a viable population anymore, right?
Windows 10 is not free now, and in fact was never really free. It was a free upgrade only for already-paid-for versions of Windows, and that offer has long since expired. If you want to install it today on a new machine, it will cost you $120-$200. Buying a Windows license doesn't give you a perpetual lifetime license either. It only gives you a license for the lifetime of your machine.
Microsoft probably realized that the vast majority of people buy a machine and never upgrade Windows. So, they just changed their business model to better fit this reality, and at the same time, made things easier on themselves by ensuring they're only supporting one OS version going forward.
I'm always a bit surprised by the "Windows is free" mantra. Microsoft only eliminated paid updates, which I suspect wasn't a huge money-maker anyhow, and will likely be partially offset by reduced maintenance costs. With those numbers, assuming only half those are desktop PCs, and even with an average of once a decade machine replacement, Microsoft is still likely grossing several billion a year on new license fees alone..
So, you're going to demonstrate the problem of pollution by spreading around plastic pollutants?
Isn't that sort of like demonstrating the value of biodiversity by killing off the last pair of dodo birds in front of class? "But how will the species survive now?"
That's why I specifically mentioned the "goto fail" issue. That tiny bug completely broke SSL/TLS. How could they not be testing basic functionality like that before it's released?
I'll grant that this particular situation might not have been tested, although to me, testing with root and a blank password seems fairly obvious. But this seems like a more widespread problem for Apple and how they test (or don't test) basic functionality. And I'm not talking about using human testers. This should be 100% automated. And that means it happens for every official build for the rest of time.
Check out how in-depth SQLite's testing procedures are, for example: https://www.sqlite.org/testing... This sort of comprehensive testing doesn't eliminate all bugs, of course, but it's highly unlikely that any obvious bugs are going to slip by this test suite. And whenever a bug is found, it's not considered fixed until a regression test is added to the suite that will catch any future incidents of that sort of bug. This is how you build long-term stability into your software.
I'll save my judgement until we see an end to issues like this or "goto fail" after a few years. It was the correct response, but it's easy to say anything that you think people want to hear.
Do you think Apple even does integration or regression testing? I can't imagine "goto fail" would have slipped past if they were, because that's about the most basic "is the functionality working" test you'd start with. That seems like a good place to start.
The higher the level of abstraction in your language, the higher the overhead it will create.
This is exactly why C++ remains popular among those who create large, complex, high-performance applications. C++ is well known for using zero-cost abstractions. That means you get the performance of low-level C code, but can design much safer interfaces and type safety in your code which allow the compiler, not a runtime, to validate that the code is correct and safe.
For certain types of applications, it's an effective compromise between the pragmatism of retaining backwards compatibility with decades-old ecosystems, while at the same time providing better safety and abstractions than C.
C++ is just a mess. There are no real memory management tools
Yeah, except for smart pointers + RAII and the ability to override global, per-class, or even per-object allocators and add whatever sort of memory tooling you can dream up. Other than that, no memory management tools.
The reason we have to say "don't do that" is because C++ remains compatible with C and older version of C++. There are literally billions of lines of existing C++ code out there, and the language committee realizes it can't just snap its finger and order everyone to rewrite all that old code (which is stable, functional, and debugged, btw) because we have something newer and better now.
It's pretty straightforward to write safe, new C++ code if you understand how to use the new features and abstractions. I wrote an entire game / game engine recently using modern C++, and it's amazing how few bugs I've had thanks to recent language improvements and techniques.
I'm not sure where this "large projects can't enforce code discipline" idea comes from. What does he think "coding standards" are, which nearly every major company, organization, or project has? And if someone doesn't understand how to use a smart pointer instead of a raw pointer or avoiding class inheritance hell at this point, then really, they shouldn't be contributing to your C++ projects.
I get it that some people dislike or distrust C++. It's a complex language that's hard to master. They don't like that it makes a lot of compromises in the name of practicality, but that real-world practicality is why many of us use it for large, performance-critical real-world projects. I'd never argue that C++ is the right language for every project. In fact, it's a fairly specialized language at this point. But that level of hyperbole is a bit annoying.
You assume newer is always faster. That's not necessarily so. Internet Explorer got slower and slower with each version. Vista was slower than XP.
And every version of Windows since Vista has been faster and leaner. Firefox, after years of bloating up, just got a substantial speedup.
In these cases, it was determined that *performance* was a feature worth chasing after, and a lot of effort went into optimizing and streamlining code. I certainly agree you can't always assume that newer is faster, but it can be if it's a priority for developers.
Because apparently the edge of the world, what we mistakenly believe to be "Antarctica", is a giant ice ring 150 feet tall that holds all the oceans in, and is zealously guarded by NASA. Eclipses are hand-waved away with some "invisible" object that's blocking light. I don't know how the hell they explain away tides, or the Coriolis effect. GPS satellites are fakes to simply give the *illusion* of being on a globe. All NASA pictures are "Photoshopped", nevermind that the technology to effectively fake photos or video didn't even exist until well after the moon landings. And on and on and on, until the conspiracies are so deep, the conspiracy would involve literally hundreds of thousands of people.
I suspect plenty of flat earthers are people who enjoy taking obviously counter-intuitive positions and trying to figure out how to effectively argue that position. It's probably something like an intellectual game to them, devising hypotheses to disprove what everybody knows to be fact. The rest are self-delusional simpletons who readily believe any pseudo-scientific arguments put in front of them, and simply want to believe that they're the only ones clever enough to have grasped this massive, literally world-wide conspiracy. A deeper examination of flat earthers would probably make for an interesting psychological study and paper.
I wouldn't even bother with rational arguments. I'd bet that not one in a thousand who claim to "seriously believe" in a flat earth would actually stake their life on the correctness of their beliefs. They're just fans of ridiculous conspiracy theories, are contrarian by nature, or are desperate to seek attention (that describes this fellow, I think). The amount of physical evidence you'd have to willfully ignore to maintain such beliefs is somewhat staggering.
I think the "write down these brilliant ideas I'm having while drunk or stoned" occurs to a lot of people. And it always ends disappointingly.
Pretty much all alcohol works the same on me. I just get super happy with obvious physical impairment. I've actually never been able to get forget-what-I'm-doing-and-pass-out smashed, though. I think my body has some sort of built-in limiter, after which I just can't stand drinking any more. So, I've never actually had a hangover, just a slight fuzziness in the morning.
Uber is the company that just keeps giving... all these wonderful headlines, that is. It's sort of amazing what a moral crapfest some companies can be. I mean, I generally consider most corporations to be amoral, but these guys sink way below even that level.
Honestly, I'm just satisfied that we can call these types of algorithms something reasonable (deep learning) instead of the incredibly misleading and far-too-broad term "AI".
I don't know either of these parties, so all I have to go on is what I'm reading now (thx for the link - I read the entire post). You can take this as the observations of a neutral outsider.
I think I might consider the refusal to meet a tactical error on the part of the SFC, because it makes them appear unreasonable. Setting preconditions on a meeting and requiring participants to sign documents promising to "be nice" seems fairly insulting to me, even if someone considers it warranted. I would never sign such documents myself on principle, because the implication is that I need to be held to civility by a piece of paper with my signature on it.
Is it not a possibility to simply walk out of a meeting if it erupts into "shouting and insults"? If the SFC had at least met with SFLC once, and talks had broken down due to less-than-civil behavior, that would have made for a powerful argument in SFC's favor.
On the other hand, there may have been no point to such a meeting except for posturing, if the SFLC was intent on forcing the SFC to change their name, and the SFC had no intention of doing so. As such, they may have been bound to end up here regardless. I will say that the threatening language the SFLC used appeared to try to make organizations associated with the SFC nervous about future legal troubles, and such tactics certainly don't paint them in a very favorable light.
I can't disagree with your analysis, but what do I know? That being said, I had sort of automatically given the moral high ground to SFC until I saw this little tidbit from the SFLC blog:
We have tried repeatedly for almost three years to get a meeting with Karen and Bradley in order to discuss this and other claims we have concerning their and the Conservancy’s activities. In all that time, they have never once agreed to meet with us to hear and discuss our concerns. They have presented transparently dilatory responses, such as being “too busy,” or even “always too busy” when we asked them to set their own time. Sometimes we have not been offered so much as the courtesy of a refusal.
The SFC had posted this:
We were surprised by this spurious action. In our eleven years of coexistence, SFLC has raised no concerns nor complaints about our name, nor ever asked us to change it. We filed our formal answer to SFLC’s action yesterday.
It's a bit hard to bring up these issues if you are refused meetings. What they say may be "technically" true, but if they'd been refusing to have meetings, they had to have a pretty good idea of what those meetings would be about. What a mess. It makes them both look pretty bad at this point, to be honest.
BTW, you can double the size of that area for top sites. When hovering mouse, Click on Edit in upper right corner of the Top Sites area, and select Show More. Not as good as it used to be (thanks Pocket advertising), but at least you have ten sites up top instead of the default five.
Ahahah, were you not around in the 70's and 80's? The Star Wars logo was stuck on anything and everything. Or maybe you just don't remember the Star Wars branded toothbrushes or bed covers. There was nothing tasteful about it.
Slashdot Mirror
That was sort of my feeling as well. Screw the DMCA, but screw cheaters as well. And screw parents that defend their misbehaving little spawn no matter what they do.
There's also some addition going on there, you know.
Anyhow... the value of the name is sort of an interesting topic, because it's highly contextual. For instance, my name is listed publicly on LinkedIn, along with my job skills, work history, and professional achievements. Obviously, you can't blame LinkedIn for "leaking" this information.
On the other hand, say I were HIV positive and on a treatment list, or a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, or something similarly personal in nature. The release of just my name associated with specific groups could very well be fairly damaging to me. Or even to a lesser extent, I'd be annoyed if Slashdot were hacked and my e-mail were publicly associated with my account name. From there, it wouldn't be hard to determine my real name.
I think that's one problem with the itemized per-item fine schedule. Another is that a monetary fine really only works against private enterprises. Some of the worst leaks have been by government agencies, because those leaks include biometric data, like fingerprints. I'm not sure what you'd do with these agencies.
At the very least, there will apparently always be jobs writing about how automation is going to put everyone out of a job.
I was originally going to say "killed off the last dodo in front of class", but I just knew some wise-acre would have pointed out that they'd already be going extinct at that point. Heck, even if there was a single pair, that's not exactly a viable population anymore, right?
Yeesh.
Windows 10 is not free now, and in fact was never really free. It was a free upgrade only for already-paid-for versions of Windows, and that offer has long since expired. If you want to install it today on a new machine, it will cost you $120-$200. Buying a Windows license doesn't give you a perpetual lifetime license either. It only gives you a license for the lifetime of your machine.
Microsoft probably realized that the vast majority of people buy a machine and never upgrade Windows. So, they just changed their business model to better fit this reality, and at the same time, made things easier on themselves by ensuring they're only supporting one OS version going forward.
I'm always a bit surprised by the "Windows is free" mantra. Microsoft only eliminated paid updates, which I suspect wasn't a huge money-maker anyhow, and will likely be partially offset by reduced maintenance costs. With those numbers, assuming only half those are desktop PCs, and even with an average of once a decade machine replacement, Microsoft is still likely grossing several billion a year on new license fees alone..
So, you're going to demonstrate the problem of pollution by spreading around plastic pollutants?
Isn't that sort of like demonstrating the value of biodiversity by killing off the last pair of dodo birds in front of class? "But how will the species survive now?"
"Exactly." /walks out
The point is to *attract* qualified developers, not make them run away screaming.
That's why I specifically mentioned the "goto fail" issue. That tiny bug completely broke SSL/TLS. How could they not be testing basic functionality like that before it's released?
I'll grant that this particular situation might not have been tested, although to me, testing with root and a blank password seems fairly obvious. But this seems like a more widespread problem for Apple and how they test (or don't test) basic functionality. And I'm not talking about using human testers. This should be 100% automated. And that means it happens for every official build for the rest of time.
Check out how in-depth SQLite's testing procedures are, for example: https://www.sqlite.org/testing... This sort of comprehensive testing doesn't eliminate all bugs, of course, but it's highly unlikely that any obvious bugs are going to slip by this test suite. And whenever a bug is found, it's not considered fixed until a regression test is added to the suite that will catch any future incidents of that sort of bug. This is how you build long-term stability into your software.
I'll save my judgement until we see an end to issues like this or "goto fail" after a few years. It was the correct response, but it's easy to say anything that you think people want to hear.
Do you think Apple even does integration or regression testing? I can't imagine "goto fail" would have slipped past if they were, because that's about the most basic "is the functionality working" test you'd start with. That seems like a good place to start.
No computer language is going to help a project programmed by idiots.
The higher the level of abstraction in your language, the higher the overhead it will create.
This is exactly why C++ remains popular among those who create large, complex, high-performance applications. C++ is well known for using zero-cost abstractions. That means you get the performance of low-level C code, but can design much safer interfaces and type safety in your code which allow the compiler, not a runtime, to validate that the code is correct and safe.
For certain types of applications, it's an effective compromise between the pragmatism of retaining backwards compatibility with decades-old ecosystems, while at the same time providing better safety and abstractions than C.
C++ is just a mess. There are no real memory management tools
Yeah, except for smart pointers + RAII and the ability to override global, per-class, or even per-object allocators and add whatever sort of memory tooling you can dream up. Other than that, no memory management tools.
The reason we have to say "don't do that" is because C++ remains compatible with C and older version of C++. There are literally billions of lines of existing C++ code out there, and the language committee realizes it can't just snap its finger and order everyone to rewrite all that old code (which is stable, functional, and debugged, btw) because we have something newer and better now.
It's pretty straightforward to write safe, new C++ code if you understand how to use the new features and abstractions. I wrote an entire game / game engine recently using modern C++, and it's amazing how few bugs I've had thanks to recent language improvements and techniques.
I'm not sure where this "large projects can't enforce code discipline" idea comes from. What does he think "coding standards" are, which nearly every major company, organization, or project has? And if someone doesn't understand how to use a smart pointer instead of a raw pointer or avoiding class inheritance hell at this point, then really, they shouldn't be contributing to your C++ projects.
I get it that some people dislike or distrust C++. It's a complex language that's hard to master. They don't like that it makes a lot of compromises in the name of practicality, but that real-world practicality is why many of us use it for large, performance-critical real-world projects. I'd never argue that C++ is the right language for every project. In fact, it's a fairly specialized language at this point. But that level of hyperbole is a bit annoying.
You assume newer is always faster. That's not necessarily so. Internet Explorer got slower and slower with each version. Vista was slower than XP.
And every version of Windows since Vista has been faster and leaner. Firefox, after years of bloating up, just got a substantial speedup.
In these cases, it was determined that *performance* was a feature worth chasing after, and a lot of effort went into optimizing and streamlining code. I certainly agree you can't always assume that newer is faster, but it can be if it's a priority for developers.
Up until recently, I have been Libertarian. Now, I am GDI.
I'm glad to hear you didn't fall in with that Brotherhood of Nod crowd.
Because apparently the edge of the world, what we mistakenly believe to be "Antarctica", is a giant ice ring 150 feet tall that holds all the oceans in, and is zealously guarded by NASA. Eclipses are hand-waved away with some "invisible" object that's blocking light. I don't know how the hell they explain away tides, or the Coriolis effect. GPS satellites are fakes to simply give the *illusion* of being on a globe. All NASA pictures are "Photoshopped", nevermind that the technology to effectively fake photos or video didn't even exist until well after the moon landings. And on and on and on, until the conspiracies are so deep, the conspiracy would involve literally hundreds of thousands of people.
I suspect plenty of flat earthers are people who enjoy taking obviously counter-intuitive positions and trying to figure out how to effectively argue that position. It's probably something like an intellectual game to them, devising hypotheses to disprove what everybody knows to be fact. The rest are self-delusional simpletons who readily believe any pseudo-scientific arguments put in front of them, and simply want to believe that they're the only ones clever enough to have grasped this massive, literally world-wide conspiracy. A deeper examination of flat earthers would probably make for an interesting psychological study and paper.
I wouldn't even bother with rational arguments. I'd bet that not one in a thousand who claim to "seriously believe" in a flat earth would actually stake their life on the correctness of their beliefs. They're just fans of ridiculous conspiracy theories, are contrarian by nature, or are desperate to seek attention (that describes this fellow, I think). The amount of physical evidence you'd have to willfully ignore to maintain such beliefs is somewhat staggering.
I think the "write down these brilliant ideas I'm having while drunk or stoned" occurs to a lot of people. And it always ends disappointingly.
Pretty much all alcohol works the same on me. I just get super happy with obvious physical impairment. I've actually never been able to get forget-what-I'm-doing-and-pass-out smashed, though. I think my body has some sort of built-in limiter, after which I just can't stand drinking any more. So, I've never actually had a hangover, just a slight fuzziness in the morning.
Uber is the company that just keeps giving... all these wonderful headlines, that is. It's sort of amazing what a moral crapfest some companies can be. I mean, I generally consider most corporations to be amoral, but these guys sink way below even that level.
Honestly, I'm just satisfied that we can call these types of algorithms something reasonable (deep learning) instead of the incredibly misleading and far-too-broad term "AI".
I don't know either of these parties, so all I have to go on is what I'm reading now (thx for the link - I read the entire post). You can take this as the observations of a neutral outsider.
I think I might consider the refusal to meet a tactical error on the part of the SFC, because it makes them appear unreasonable. Setting preconditions on a meeting and requiring participants to sign documents promising to "be nice" seems fairly insulting to me, even if someone considers it warranted. I would never sign such documents myself on principle, because the implication is that I need to be held to civility by a piece of paper with my signature on it.
Is it not a possibility to simply walk out of a meeting if it erupts into "shouting and insults"? If the SFC had at least met with SFLC once, and talks had broken down due to less-than-civil behavior, that would have made for a powerful argument in SFC's favor.
On the other hand, there may have been no point to such a meeting except for posturing, if the SFLC was intent on forcing the SFC to change their name, and the SFC had no intention of doing so. As such, they may have been bound to end up here regardless. I will say that the threatening language the SFLC used appeared to try to make organizations associated with the SFC nervous about future legal troubles, and such tactics certainly don't paint them in a very favorable light.
I can't disagree with your analysis, but what do I know? That being said, I had sort of automatically given the moral high ground to SFC until I saw this little tidbit from the SFLC blog:
We have tried repeatedly for almost three years to get a meeting with Karen and Bradley in order to discuss this and other claims we have concerning their and the Conservancy’s activities. In all that time, they have never once agreed to meet with us to hear and discuss our concerns. They have presented transparently dilatory responses, such as being “too busy,” or even “always too busy” when we asked them to set their own time. Sometimes we have not been offered so much as the courtesy of a refusal.
The SFC had posted this:
We were surprised by this spurious action. In our eleven years of coexistence, SFLC has raised no concerns nor complaints about our name, nor ever asked us to change it. We filed our formal answer to SFLC’s action yesterday.
It's a bit hard to bring up these issues if you are refused meetings. What they say may be "technically" true, but if they'd been refusing to have meetings, they had to have a pretty good idea of what those meetings would be about. What a mess. It makes them both look pretty bad at this point, to be honest.
BTW, you can double the size of that area for top sites. When hovering mouse, Click on Edit in upper right corner of the Top Sites area, and select Show More. Not as good as it used to be (thanks Pocket advertising), but at least you have ten sites up top instead of the default five.
Ahahah, were you not around in the 70's and 80's? The Star Wars logo was stuck on anything and everything. Or maybe you just don't remember the Star Wars branded toothbrushes or bed covers. There was nothing tasteful about it.
Each locked GPU core will also be available after playing an hour. So, it's not like you *have* to pay extra, right?
With 3,840 cores, that should take you a mere 1.8 years to unlock it's full potential, assuming you're playing games full-time.