Eh, Clark was also really big on the idea that humanity is being kept from its rightful dreams by inferior people, and if we just got rid of them everything would be fine.
That is the magic sauce that a lot of sci-fi needs to work, the idea if we just get the right kind of people, leave the wrong kind behind, everything will actually work. It is actually a rather creepy meme since the flip side of it is speaks to the author's (and reader's) quiet belief that the world would work if we could just get rid of _those_ people. No surprise that this pattern came out of authors working from eugenic arguments in the 1800s, softened up over the decades.
The permafrost is widely distributed, but there is still very little water, and one would have to process a great deal of surface material to get enough to use.
Yeah, but when you are starting with the assumption that we will 'master genetic engineering' and that life can live anywhere, jupiter is not that big of a next leap.
A 'little imagination' is part of the problem. It does not take much to come up with ideas that sound interesting, but a little more imagination usually finds the problems with them. Helium 3? well, I know movies and books love the idea, but it remains to be seen if it can be economically extracted or if it even has economic utility. Goods meant for consumption in space? What benefit does building industrial infrastructure so far out,a way from any potential markets, have? And what are these markets outside 'people who live on the moon?' What could the moon produce to justify the expense of maintaining a colony there that can not be done cheaper on earth?
Riches is the key word here. People took those chances because it was not that expensive to throw people at the problem and the wealth it could generate was staggering. Mars, not so much.
Which cuts to the heart of the problem : what exactly is the point of building there? Outside 'well, there is gravity!', the planet doesn't really have much making it worth being there and you end up living in a high cost sealed environment that you might as well just build on earth and cover the walls in pictures of mars.
Ahm, it really isn't human nature outside science fiction. When you talk to economists, anthropologists, people who actually study human nature rather than wax poetic about it, the prospects for a martian colony vanish pretty quickly. There just are not enough good reasons to do it outside fulfilling fantasies, and when one actually looks at what is involved in maintaining a self sufficient colony (hint : you can't do it with a couple of 3d printers and some magic mining machines), it gets crushed pretty quickly.
The only reason Antarctica remains an international research park is that there has been so little interest in colonizing it. Law and treaties follow what people want to do, and quickly get abandoned if there is a push to do otherwise.
On the other hand, people taking fantasy technology as a given are real problem in science. Just because technology does not exist but you want it to doesn't mean it someday will.
The thing about engineering problems is they still have to contend with the question of what is and is not possible, but are even more constrained in their options than purely theoretical. The limits of engineering hit LONG before the limits of ideal physics.
It is a certain intermediate level of power that really does it though. Facebook has gotten big, big enough to be a target and needs to navigate water with bigger sharks that notice it. So too weak to ignore such alliances, too strong to be ignored.
It actually is a nice language, and a lot of what was great about it made it into later language like C++ and Java... but it was also a very tedious language to work in. Good to learn, annoying to actually build things with.
One way to think about it: we have already gone through that period of 'the closer you get the faster it comes together', and now we are 'mostly there', with little details and application to still cover.
*nod* one way of looking at it : we went from being 'mostly wrong' to 'mostly right' in a pretty short period of time. Thus there was a period of great discovery, but now we are entering an era of far more incremental improvements. People kinda hoped that 'science' would be an infinitely exponential line of discoveries, but there is a good chance it is more asymptopic than anything else.
Ah. While I was reading it in more the 'student learning' way, acceptance that when writing a program there will be times when it successfully compiles but then goes down hard when actually executing. Compared to, say, when writing in Python the chances of actually _crashing_ in a way that the program hard exits back to the prompt is a lot more rare, esp if excluding simple unhandled exception type crashes.
But yeah, Ada is a perfect example of previous attempts to address these shortcomings, but the cost of using it outweighed the benefits of the stricter environment.
Sounds like the person is trying to describe a stack smash to me. I do not think they were talking about a segmentation fault, but instead overwriting something in their own memory space that then causes a crash.
I think the solution would be closer to 'right tool for the job'. The problem with C/C++ is you have to work to make it safe, as opposed to something like Python where you have to work to make it unsafe, at least in terms of the type of vulnerabilities the OP is addressing. I think a lot of the problem comes from C/C++ being used too often for too many types of problems, problems that do not really gain from the amount of control the languages give you but do suffer from needing to take thoughtful explicit steps to make it safe.
Unfortunately, this also requires management to be proactive since even if a developer or two are willing to address the shortcomings, if you don't have technical barriers to stop bad behavior you need to use social/process barriers instead. Even saying 'ok, for this project we are using this more secure string/memory/whatever library', you have to keep an eye on everyone so that they use it.
There is a an important key point here, any language that can do what C/C++ do will have those same problems, but one can ask if C/C++ is really the right tool for a lot of stuff it is being used for.
This is why I love languages that can compile or otherwise mesh together. Use C/C++ for the places where the flexibility and access really pay off, and then switch to more restricted languages by default for most tasks.
Slashdot Mirror
And the failure of their dreams is always the moral failure of lesser people.
Eh, Clark was also really big on the idea that humanity is being kept from its rightful dreams by inferior people, and if we just got rid of them everything would be fine.
That is the magic sauce that a lot of sci-fi needs to work, the idea if we just get the right kind of people, leave the wrong kind behind, everything will actually work. It is actually a rather creepy meme since the flip side of it is speaks to the author's (and reader's) quiet belief that the world would work if we could just get rid of _those_ people. No surprise that this pattern came out of authors working from eugenic arguments in the 1800s, softened up over the decades.
The permafrost is widely distributed, but there is still very little water, and one would have to process a great deal of surface material to get enough to use.
Yeah, but when you are starting with the assumption that we will 'master genetic engineering' and that life can live anywhere, jupiter is not that big of a next leap.
A 'little imagination' is part of the problem. It does not take much to come up with ideas that sound interesting, but a little more imagination usually finds the problems with them. Helium 3? well, I know movies and books love the idea, but it remains to be seen if it can be economically extracted or if it even has economic utility. Goods meant for consumption in space? What benefit does building industrial infrastructure so far out,a way from any potential markets, have? And what are these markets outside 'people who live on the moon?' What could the moon produce to justify the expense of maintaining a colony there that can not be done cheaper on earth?
Riches is the key word here. People took those chances because it was not that expensive to throw people at the problem and the wealth it could generate was staggering. Mars, not so much.
Which cuts to the heart of the problem : what exactly is the point of building there? Outside 'well, there is gravity!', the planet doesn't really have much making it worth being there and you end up living in a high cost sealed environment that you might as well just build on earth and cover the walls in pictures of mars.
Ahm, it really isn't human nature outside science fiction. When you talk to economists, anthropologists, people who actually study human nature rather than wax poetic about it, the prospects for a martian colony vanish pretty quickly. There just are not enough good reasons to do it outside fulfilling fantasies, and when one actually looks at what is involved in maintaining a self sufficient colony (hint : you can't do it with a couple of 3d printers and some magic mining machines), it gets crushed pretty quickly. The only reason Antarctica remains an international research park is that there has been so little interest in colonizing it. Law and treaties follow what people want to do, and quickly get abandoned if there is a push to do otherwise.
On the other hand, people taking fantasy technology as a given are real problem in science. Just because technology does not exist but you want it to doesn't mean it someday will.
Wel, yeah. As hype increases people talk more about the subject, thus one hears dissenting opinions more often than when it is out of the news cycle.
The thing about engineering problems is they still have to contend with the question of what is and is not possible, but are even more constrained in their options than purely theoretical. The limits of engineering hit LONG before the limits of ideal physics.
It is a certain intermediate level of power that really does it though. Facebook has gotten big, big enough to be a target and needs to navigate water with bigger sharks that notice it. So too weak to ignore such alliances, too strong to be ignored.
It actually is a nice language, and a lot of what was great about it made it into later language like C++ and Java... but it was also a very tedious language to work in. Good to learn, annoying to actually build things with.
Not only renamed it, but created a new office they can give out as a favor.
One way to think about it: we have already gone through that period of 'the closer you get the faster it comes together', and now we are 'mostly there', with little details and application to still cover.
*nod* one way of looking at it : we went from being 'mostly wrong' to 'mostly right' in a pretty short period of time. Thus there was a period of great discovery, but now we are entering an era of far more incremental improvements. People kinda hoped that 'science' would be an infinitely exponential line of discoveries, but there is a good chance it is more asymptopic than anything else.
Ah. While I was reading it in more the 'student learning' way, acceptance that when writing a program there will be times when it successfully compiles but then goes down hard when actually executing. Compared to, say, when writing in Python the chances of actually _crashing_ in a way that the program hard exits back to the prompt is a lot more rare, esp if excluding simple unhandled exception type crashes.
Imbue its users with a continued desire to live?
But yeah, Ada is a perfect example of previous attempts to address these shortcomings, but the cost of using it outweighed the benefits of the stricter environment.
I don't know, I am not sure I would hire a programer who tried to claim that their programs never crashed when they were a student writing them.
Sounds like the person is trying to describe a stack smash to me. I do not think they were talking about a segmentation fault, but instead overwriting something in their own memory space that then causes a crash.
This wasn't even news in the 1970s. This is a very old and very well understood problem, with solutions that are nearly as old.
I think the solution would be closer to 'right tool for the job'. The problem with C/C++ is you have to work to make it safe, as opposed to something like Python where you have to work to make it unsafe, at least in terms of the type of vulnerabilities the OP is addressing. I think a lot of the problem comes from C/C++ being used too often for too many types of problems, problems that do not really gain from the amount of control the languages give you but do suffer from needing to take thoughtful explicit steps to make it safe.
Unfortunately, this also requires management to be proactive since even if a developer or two are willing to address the shortcomings, if you don't have technical barriers to stop bad behavior you need to use social/process barriers instead. Even saying 'ok, for this project we are using this more secure string/memory/whatever library', you have to keep an eye on everyone so that they use it.
There is a an important key point here, any language that can do what C/C++ do will have those same problems, but one can ask if C/C++ is really the right tool for a lot of stuff it is being used for.
This is why I love languages that can compile or otherwise mesh together. Use C/C++ for the places where the flexibility and access really pay off, and then switch to more restricted languages by default for most tasks.