Thinking that the lack of ability to directly manipulate pointers makes better programs strikes me as very much like thinking that non-removable training-wheels would make better bicycles.
Also I cannot help but laugh when I see people calling C++ a "low level" language. You realise the original "high-level" language was Assembler?
If they put forth a claim that can be falsified, and it is, then the belief in that claim is wrong.
To which I must add, if they put forth a claim that can NOT be falsified, it is a religious belief. It's fine to have religious beliefs, but only as long as you are ready to allow other people to have their own religious beliefs. Even when those beliefs contradict your own.
You first paragraph is great. The second is insane.
Any language which gives the programmer the power to write a good program, also gives the power to write a poor one. A language which was 'immune to exploitation' would be a language which was impossible to write a decent (non-trivial) program in as well. It would be so crippled that nothing of consequence could be done without invoking incredible overhead and redirection costs.
Security is the job of the system architect first, the coder second, the user third. To create a system where all three can neglect their responsibility without consequence all three would have to be essentially neutered in favour of a god-like compiler that, even if perfectly executed, would still produce the most bloated object code imaginable. And then what happens when someone finds a flaw in the compiler itself? Instead of vulnerabilities affecting a single program, they would affect a whole class of programs, and even better, a class of programs likely exempted from normal oversight and limitations since they are presumed secure.
The only entities that would benefit from that would be the hardware manufacturers (since you would need incredible hardware to run any non-trivial program produced in this way) and the crackers.
That was the one part of the question that makes no sense to me. I have the same issues and was hoping to find some good answers posted, but then I notice that the question is pre-rigged to exclude the best answers!
Face it, searching a file system for relevant documents is one of those tasks where the best tool for the job is always going to be a command line. It doesnt have to be "arcane" but then that seems to be a word that is (mis)used solely by anti-command-line people to refer to any command line, not just those that are unnecessarily complex or difficult for humans to parse.
The irony is they are technically correct, but practically wrong, and the reason for the disconnect is that they have over the past couple centuries abused the word 'regulation' till it's almost unrecognisable.
While Ubuntu is off on its own, Slackware always seems to manage to do things the standard way. So you actually learn Linux, and are fine on whatever arbitrary distro, or even a BSD, if you start with Slack. Whereas if you start with Ubuntu you just learn to rely on their stuff, which doesnt work when you try to switch.
But why on earth should video playback, of all things, be made part of the OS?
This is how Windows and OSX try to do it, and it's stupid. The integrated players (WMP and QuickTime) are pretty awful, and even if they werent, there privileged position in the OS just causes problems anyway. I use VLC on every platform and certainly dont want or need these inferior players. Firefox IIRC bundles ffmpeg internally, which seems like a fairly reasonable way to do things. Of course it would be nice if Firefox would figure out how to detect and use the up-to-date copy of ffmpeg on the system already, instead of insisting on maintaining its own, but there are obviously quite a few obstacles to doing that in a sane, cross-platform way, so their solution works fine for me. The last thing I would want to see would be for them to copy IE and Safari by using WMV/Quicktime.
Slack has some benefits if only because you s/"end up having to"/"don't need to fix a ton of breakage before you can" compile from scratch in most cases, which can be instructional.
Impossible? Little, if anything, of course. All based on the same upstreams, and source is available for all.
But Ubuntu has a very nasty habit of making lots of normal, easy tasks extremely difficult, in their quest to make a windows-replacement for people that hate computers and dont want to learn anything. Bypassing all the GUI crap so you can actually get some work done or just get a clue what is actually going on can easily take a lot more time than just wiping it out and installing Slackware.
he did this thing: after the reichstagsbrand (what some people say it's like americas 9/11) the "notstandsgesetz" was made. it lasted for his legislature period, which was till he was dead. http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notstandsgesetz i'm sorry there's no english version, but i'm sure you can bing/google it yourself. no native speaker, sorry for my errors
I am honestly horrified by the degree to which 'scientism' (by which I mean religious awe of those identified as 'scientists' and unquestioning faith in whatever doctrine they promulgate) seems to be crowding out even the most fundamental sorts of scientific thinking, to the degree that when you say 'science' the listener very often does not have any appropriate associations for the word at all. There is no real concept of scientific method, experimentalism, rigorous hypothesis testing - none of that registers at all on many people. Instead when you say science they equate this with having the same sort of blind, unquestioning faith in what someone wearing a lab coat says that an earlier generation would have shown to the opinions of the guy with the funny hat and reversed collar. They dont understand you at all when you point out that most people who wear those white coats arent scientists, but technicians - they imagine the difference to be something like the difference between a priest and a bishop. They havent caught up to the 21st century, or the 20th, or the 19th... they simply continue the same old stone age thinking with reverence transferred to a new and improved priesthood.
However flattering it is for the guys wearing the lab coats, they, at least, should know better, and have a duty to understand that this is nonsense and to correct it. Too often they seem instead to become accustomed to it and really start acting, and thinking, like a priesthood instead. But real science doesnt happen within the confines of orthodoxy, and cannot exist in the realm of dogma. Skepticism is the root of all scientific knowledge, not faith. I really worry that we as a collective whole are sliding backwards into a new dark age as a result.
they could have i) decided there was something wrong (eg. chemical treatment) with these particular trees and excluded these trees only. ii) decide that a small number of anomalous trees invalidated dendrochronology and throw out all tree-ring data or iii) excluded that data from the years which included the anomalous tree ring data given that the instrumental record rendered it unnecessary anyway.
For religious functionaries, sure, the options would be something like that. Just 'decide' what dogma is correct, throw out whatever doesnt fit, and go with it - that's what priests do.
Science, however, doesnt work like that. If you start by arbitrarily picking out 3 hypothesis (from the essentially infinite number possible) and then proceed to simply 'decide' which one to go with, you absolutely are not doing science.
Your "i)" - Chemical treatments result in anomalous readings for specific samples? That's a testable hypothesis. Go test it. Dont just 'decide' you like it without proof. Don't just "hide" the data because you "decided" in your head that it had to be that. You go get the data and you test your hypothesis and you dont jump to any conclusions without testing it.
Your "ii)" - This is patent nonsense. Dendrochronology is in no danger here - only the mass of additional assumptions that were piled on top of it in order to use tree-ring sequences as temperature proxies. Clearly somewhere in those assumptions there is some error. Your "i)" is one possibility, but not the only one by any means.
Whenever you invent a new instrument the first thing you have to do is, check it for accuracy. And not just in a perfunctory manner, but thoroughly. And with the instrument in question (using tree-ring records as a proxy for real temperatures) it's immediately apparent that the data can be analysed in two sets. The vast majority of it is very, very difficult to check for accuracy, for lack of a more reliable record from those times to compare it to. Only at the very late end of these sequences is there another source of data which is arguably reliable enough to serve as a validation of the technique. Ok, fine, validate it against those figures, it's less than ideal but once we see it matches there, we at least have some reason to presume it accurate all the way back. Only when it's checked it doesnt validate against that data after all!
And their response is your "iii)" - just throw out the data that doesnt fit the hypothesis. "The instrumental data rendered it unecessary anyway." Unecessary for what? For scaring the bejesus out of the population and rallying political support for the measures these so-called researchers support? Well, sure. But if the goal instead were to actually generate valid scientific data then that part of the sequence is not "unecessary" in fact it's crucial, it's the most important part!
You can keep spinning like a top till you get dizzy and fall down, the fact remains that when these people ran into data that didnt fit their conclusion, their response was to "hide" it, not to investigate. Their credibility as scientists died the moment that came out. It's truly sad that so many of us these days are so scientifically illiterate that people continue to pay any attention to their pronouncements.
I can only assume you are referring to the "hide the decline" comments in the stolen emails, regarding the substitution of more reliable thermometer data for less reliable tree ring temperature proxy data. It seems that an unfortunately phrased text snippet can outweigh a strong body of rigorous observation and logical argument.
That's an extremely dishonest way to describe it. You make it sound like they threw out the less reliable data set and kept the good one, wow! what a great idea huh?!?!
In fact they used that tree ring data without caveat for most of the chart, then silently omitted it near the end of the sequence, substituting data from the other set only for those years where the data from the first set didnt fit their hypothesis. Then they labeled the chart so it looked like a single, reliable data set produced the whole sequence, and presented it to the world as such.
Posts like yours show a disturbingly casual disregard for any semblance of truth.
I find this line deliciously ironic. Perhaps you are not acquainted with the phenomenon of psychological projection?
They arent the same thing, but that doesnt mean they are unrelated. The one makes an excellent test of the other. If for instance your "standard" is encumbered so as to disadvantage/discourage/prevent an open source implementation of it, then it is definitely not an open standard in any meaningful sense of the phrase, and probably doesnt deserve to be called a "standard" period.
In the case of h.264 the MPEG-LA and its members contributed their technologies and processes to the pool to build many of the wonderful products we like today.
Uhh no. If they had "contributed" these things that would imply waiving their patent privileges, which they explicitly and intentionally did not do. They didnt contribute squat. They seeded the purported standard with bits to maintain an abusive position over the market instead. And as for the rest, speak for yourself, "we" do not like them one bit.
Many have stated in the past that a number of WebM's algorithms are very similar to those of h.264
All codecs use algorithms that are very similar to other codecs. No matter how many times you reïnvent the wheel, it will still be round.
Googles actions today are not for you or for me. They are for the positive gain of Google as well as the negative impact on all of Google's competitors.
Certainly they take action for their own interests. But a negative impact on all their competitors? No, that isnt accurate at all. It's a negative impact only on those competitors that are using h.264 patents to prevent competition. There is a big world out there full of competitors that are empowered by any move which weakens the cartel's position, regardless of motivation.
That is not correct. A commonwealth citizen resident in the UK can vote in UK elections, and are even able to stand for elections, to sit in Parliament, and so forth.
We censor profanity on tv and in songs all the time.
I am really going to have to take exception to the word "we" here. I certainly have not and would not do such a thing.
I suspect what you mean is that the powers that control TV and radio in the U.S.A. do this all the time. That would be correct. The UK has a similar practice, but generally speaking it's not something you expect from a developed, secular country. If by "we" you mean the readers of slashdot, you should realise that many of us do live in developed, secular countries and this isnt something 'we' do. It's something we would expect to happen in Saudi Arabia or Iran.
Bad analogy++. It's more like if UPS not only charges the shipper their standard rate, but then starts shaking down the receiver for more $ as well, with the threat that if they dont pay then their shipments will arrived damaged and/or late on a regular basis.
I am guessing it is British Telecom from the context, but who knows?
The web address linked in the summary doesnt lead to a webpage, no text, no links, nothing but a request that I load some huge SWF monstrosity. No thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
Thinking that the lack of ability to directly manipulate pointers makes better programs strikes me as very much like thinking that non-removable training-wheels would make better bicycles.
Also I cannot help but laugh when I see people calling C++ a "low level" language. You realise the original "high-level" language was Assembler?
To which I must add, if they put forth a claim that can NOT be falsified, it is a religious belief. It's fine to have religious beliefs, but only as long as you are ready to allow other people to have their own religious beliefs. Even when those beliefs contradict your own.
You first paragraph is great. The second is insane.
Any language which gives the programmer the power to write a good program, also gives the power to write a poor one. A language which was 'immune to exploitation' would be a language which was impossible to write a decent (non-trivial) program in as well. It would be so crippled that nothing of consequence could be done without invoking incredible overhead and redirection costs.
Security is the job of the system architect first, the coder second, the user third. To create a system where all three can neglect their responsibility without consequence all three would have to be essentially neutered in favour of a god-like compiler that, even if perfectly executed, would still produce the most bloated object code imaginable. And then what happens when someone finds a flaw in the compiler itself? Instead of vulnerabilities affecting a single program, they would affect a whole class of programs, and even better, a class of programs likely exempted from normal oversight and limitations since they are presumed secure.
The only entities that would benefit from that would be the hardware manufacturers (since you would need incredible hardware to run any non-trivial program produced in this way) and the crackers.
That was the one part of the question that makes no sense to me. I have the same issues and was hoping to find some good answers posted, but then I notice that the question is pre-rigged to exclude the best answers!
Face it, searching a file system for relevant documents is one of those tasks where the best tool for the job is always going to be a command line. It doesnt have to be "arcane" but then that seems to be a word that is (mis)used solely by anti-command-line people to refer to any command line, not just those that are unnecessarily complex or difficult for humans to parse.
The irony is they are technically correct, but practically wrong, and the reason for the disconnect is that they have over the past couple centuries abused the word 'regulation' till it's almost unrecognisable.
That one is broken too.
While Ubuntu is off on its own, Slackware always seems to manage to do things the standard way. So you actually learn Linux, and are fine on whatever arbitrary distro, or even a BSD, if you start with Slack. Whereas if you start with Ubuntu you just learn to rely on their stuff, which doesnt work when you try to switch.
But why on earth should video playback, of all things, be made part of the OS?
This is how Windows and OSX try to do it, and it's stupid. The integrated players (WMP and QuickTime) are pretty awful, and even if they werent, there privileged position in the OS just causes problems anyway. I use VLC on every platform and certainly dont want or need these inferior players. Firefox IIRC bundles ffmpeg internally, which seems like a fairly reasonable way to do things. Of course it would be nice if Firefox would figure out how to detect and use the up-to-date copy of ffmpeg on the system already, instead of insisting on maintaining its own, but there are obviously quite a few obstacles to doing that in a sane, cross-platform way, so their solution works fine for me. The last thing I would want to see would be for them to copy IE and Safari by using WMV/Quicktime.
Impossible? Little, if anything, of course. All based on the same upstreams, and source is available for all.
But Ubuntu has a very nasty habit of making lots of normal, easy tasks extremely difficult, in their quest to make a windows-replacement for people that hate computers and dont want to learn anything. Bypassing all the GUI crap so you can actually get some work done or just get a clue what is actually going on can easily take a lot more time than just wiping it out and installing Slackware.
If you want them to actually learn anything, I'd get rid of Ubuntu and use Slackware.
The third alternative would be to simply stop the provocative rhetoric and let them be.
The main problem with all the conspiracy theorists is they arent skeptical enough, of their own theories that is.
I believe the appropriate English-language article would be German Emergency Acts.
I am honestly horrified by the degree to which 'scientism' (by which I mean religious awe of those identified as 'scientists' and unquestioning faith in whatever doctrine they promulgate) seems to be crowding out even the most fundamental sorts of scientific thinking, to the degree that when you say 'science' the listener very often does not have any appropriate associations for the word at all. There is no real concept of scientific method, experimentalism, rigorous hypothesis testing - none of that registers at all on many people. Instead when you say science they equate this with having the same sort of blind, unquestioning faith in what someone wearing a lab coat says that an earlier generation would have shown to the opinions of the guy with the funny hat and reversed collar. They dont understand you at all when you point out that most people who wear those white coats arent scientists, but technicians - they imagine the difference to be something like the difference between a priest and a bishop. They havent caught up to the 21st century, or the 20th, or the 19th... they simply continue the same old stone age thinking with reverence transferred to a new and improved priesthood.
However flattering it is for the guys wearing the lab coats, they, at least, should know better, and have a duty to understand that this is nonsense and to correct it. Too often they seem instead to become accustomed to it and really start acting, and thinking, like a priesthood instead. But real science doesnt happen within the confines of orthodoxy, and cannot exist in the realm of dogma. Skepticism is the root of all scientific knowledge, not faith. I really worry that we as a collective whole are sliding backwards into a new dark age as a result.
For religious functionaries, sure, the options would be something like that. Just 'decide' what dogma is correct, throw out whatever doesnt fit, and go with it - that's what priests do.
Science, however, doesnt work like that. If you start by arbitrarily picking out 3 hypothesis (from the essentially infinite number possible) and then proceed to simply 'decide' which one to go with, you absolutely are not doing science.
Your "i)" - Chemical treatments result in anomalous readings for specific samples? That's a testable hypothesis. Go test it. Dont just 'decide' you like it without proof. Don't just "hide" the data because you "decided" in your head that it had to be that. You go get the data and you test your hypothesis and you dont jump to any conclusions without testing it.
Your "ii)" - This is patent nonsense. Dendrochronology is in no danger here - only the mass of additional assumptions that were piled on top of it in order to use tree-ring sequences as temperature proxies. Clearly somewhere in those assumptions there is some error. Your "i)" is one possibility, but not the only one by any means.
Whenever you invent a new instrument the first thing you have to do is, check it for accuracy. And not just in a perfunctory manner, but thoroughly. And with the instrument in question (using tree-ring records as a proxy for real temperatures) it's immediately apparent that the data can be analysed in two sets. The vast majority of it is very, very difficult to check for accuracy, for lack of a more reliable record from those times to compare it to. Only at the very late end of these sequences is there another source of data which is arguably reliable enough to serve as a validation of the technique. Ok, fine, validate it against those figures, it's less than ideal but once we see it matches there, we at least have some reason to presume it accurate all the way back. Only when it's checked it doesnt validate against that data after all!
And their response is your "iii)" - just throw out the data that doesnt fit the hypothesis. "The instrumental data rendered it unecessary anyway." Unecessary for what? For scaring the bejesus out of the population and rallying political support for the measures these so-called researchers support? Well, sure. But if the goal instead were to actually generate valid scientific data then that part of the sequence is not "unecessary" in fact it's crucial, it's the most important part!
You can keep spinning like a top till you get dizzy and fall down, the fact remains that when these people ran into data that didnt fit their conclusion, their response was to "hide" it, not to investigate. Their credibility as scientists died the moment that came out. It's truly sad that so many of us these days are so scientifically illiterate that people continue to pay any attention to their pronouncements.
That's an extremely dishonest way to describe it. You make it sound like they threw out the less reliable data set and kept the good one, wow! what a great idea huh?!?!
In fact they used that tree ring data without caveat for most of the chart, then silently omitted it near the end of the sequence, substituting data from the other set only for those years where the data from the first set didnt fit their hypothesis. Then they labeled the chart so it looked like a single, reliable data set produced the whole sequence, and presented it to the world as such.
I find this line deliciously ironic. Perhaps you are not acquainted with the phenomenon of psychological projection?
Because global warmists and fundamentalist "creation science" shills use exactly the same thought processes, and recruitment tactics.
They arent the same thing, but that doesnt mean they are unrelated. The one makes an excellent test of the other. If for instance your "standard" is encumbered so as to disadvantage/discourage/prevent an open source implementation of it, then it is definitely not an open standard in any meaningful sense of the phrase, and probably doesnt deserve to be called a "standard" period.
Uhh no. If they had "contributed" these things that would imply waiving their patent privileges, which they explicitly and intentionally did not do. They didnt contribute squat. They seeded the purported standard with bits to maintain an abusive position over the market instead. And as for the rest, speak for yourself, "we" do not like them one bit.
All codecs use algorithms that are very similar to other codecs. No matter how many times you reïnvent the wheel, it will still be round.
Certainly they take action for their own interests. But a negative impact on all their competitors? No, that isnt accurate at all. It's a negative impact only on those competitors that are using h.264 patents to prevent competition. There is a big world out there full of competitors that are empowered by any move which weakens the cartel's position, regardless of motivation.
That is not correct. A commonwealth citizen resident in the UK can vote in UK elections, and are even able to stand for elections, to sit in Parliament, and so forth.
As an Australian citizen he is also a Commonwealth Citizen.
Umm, no. Copyright, as the name suggests, governs copying, not use.
I am really going to have to take exception to the word "we" here. I certainly have not and would not do such a thing.
I suspect what you mean is that the powers that control TV and radio in the U.S.A. do this all the time. That would be correct. The UK has a similar practice, but generally speaking it's not something you expect from a developed, secular country. If by "we" you mean the readers of slashdot, you should realise that many of us do live in developed, secular countries and this isnt something 'we' do. It's something we would expect to happen in Saudi Arabia or Iran.
Bad analogy++. It's more like if UPS not only charges the shipper their standard rate, but then starts shaking down the receiver for more $ as well, with the threat that if they dont pay then their shipments will arrived damaged and/or late on a regular basis.
I am guessing it is British Telecom from the context, but who knows?
The web address linked in the summary doesnt lead to a webpage, no text, no links, nothing but a request that I load some huge SWF monstrosity. No thanks.