Then let me reply directly (read: a poor excuse to top-post).
Michael Sipser's "Introduction to the Theory of Computation." It's easily the best textbook I've ever owned, and had me paging through it well ahead of the pace of the course. It of course doesn't serve nearly the same purpose as K&R and all those other books on practical topics, but for someone who's never been exposed to the theoretical side of CS, it's a wonderful eye-opener.
Apparently the same opinions are shared by most of the other CS students I've talked to.
In the original Star Trek, pretty much every adversary they ever fought could be summed up by an idea or an ideal, and defeated with a natural elemental counter - fighting androids with logical paradoxes, exposing inhuman aliens to human emotion, putting too much air into a balloon, you get the idea. NG did a nice job introducing the Borg as yet another thematic entity that could be fought with wit. Change the shield frequencies before they adjust, explore the cube with impunity because they don't consider you a threat, etc.
Voyager turned that around into a dull human story with dull human elements, especially in the last season or two. Which isn't to say there's not potential there, but Voyager was never any good at exploiting potential.
I remember an episode where the crew faced an incapacitated Borg vessel whose only remaining population consisted of a few drone children (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_(Star_Trek:_Voyager)) It was such an unbelievable let-down. Seven of Nine came in and played a role in the same script they use in every episode: The good guy knows best, the poor confused bastard who has the potential to blow everyone up - or through his inaction can allow everyone to be blown up - will only bring himself to trust another soul at the last moment; then they all forgive and learn, occasionally with a less likeable poor confused bastard getting sacrificed.
By this point in the series, not only was this boring, it was absurd, given that the antagonists were children. What the writers should have done - not that it would be anywhere near the style of the show - is make it a change-up episode. Throw Seven of Nine in there and let her dominate the shit out of everyone else on board, using her superior intelligence, experience, and knowledge of Borg protocol. Relegate that damned conflict between her and the kids to the position of a comic relief sideplot, and have them battle something inanimate like a reactor core leak instead. At least then the writers would have used a fascinating consequence of the characters' positions for something other than a "Please trust me" plot.
And if anyone on the show could pull off a deviation from the formula, it'd be Jeri Ryan. She and Robert Picardo each had more talent individually than the rest of the cast combined.
Bleh. Enough ranting. I'm off to dream of the plots that could've been.
Integrity is a security principle, and that is the sense that they're using the word in the summary. It's pretty much the only definition of the word that makes sense in a computing context. More precisely, we're talking about confidence that the data stored in the system is the same as the data retrieved at a later time. The only difference between this and a more cryptographic sense of the word is that this doesn't attempt to guard against malicious attacks if an adversary had offline access to the disk. (Or so I presume, having not RTFA'd).
Both you and the AC GP missed the point - the problem is that of the imperative programming paradigm versus declarative or something with a single-assignment store.
i = i + 1;
This is a contradiction in algebra, but just fine in imperative languages. You'd have to do a renaming that distinguishes between the old value of i and the new one for it to work like algebra.
No offense, but I don't understand where you got any of that. The author didn't say the iphone stresses C++, he said it's used on it. There's a big difference, as any system you point to that's packed with a diverse set of libraries is basically guaranteed to have something coded in C++.
As for the second part about editorializing, unless I'm horribly mistaken, the *bold* parts of text are the questions, and the standard typeface paragraphs are Stroustrup's reply.
I don't understand what the GP was referring to. Is it the fact that old versions of Windows/Dos didn't run in protected mode or isolate processes from one another, which pretty much precluded stable systems that could tolerate the failure of individual applications? Because if so, I don't believe a delay - if we even accept that there was a "delay" - in the adoption of one critical architectural shift has any bearing on how we judge CS as an engineering discipline.
Curiously enough, the word "bastard" appears at the end of the song:
Don't download this song Or you'll burn in Hell before too long (and you deserve it) Go and by the CD (just buy it) like you know that you should (you cheap bastard!)...
It's too faint to really hear in the MTV version, although you can just make it out on youtube. Would they have censored that on television if it was in the main part of the song?
If I had points and you weren't already at 3 I'd mod you Funny. There are some fucked up theories about contributory liability that get tested in court, like that one recently about hyperlinking to a defamatory page. But I'm pretty sure that mentioning the name of programs that themselves are at worst indirectly responsible for infringement, is not itself illegal. Otherwise we'd be looking at some pretty scary transitivity.
And remember, the services are only illegal if they fall under the Grokster standard of "intent to encourage infringement." Er, yes, I guess Grokster is one of the programs named in the song.
However, with a switch at least one packet always gets through.
Wrong.
I think GP was referring to two packets coming in on two switch ports, both destined for a third. Even if the switch doesn't buffer one of the packets (or frames, whatever the appropriate jargon is for layer 2), it can still send the other one out the third port.
In the case the second incoming packet is dropped and not buffered, I don't see why the switch can't jam the collision line on that port to notify the sender, so long as it detects the situation within the permitted time frame for jamming.
I started playing MAREs, which are based off of MUSEs, in 2002 and continued for two or three years. It was limited to a small community, but I had a lot of fun programming in the engine's scripting language. I developed some clever tricks with the parser and queue-based execution system to get some interesting results, expanding my programming experience (this was around the same time I was learning C/C++).
This culminated in my writing a scripted mapping engine that would take in static geographical data about the layout of rooms, and render it to ascii-text as a graph with asterisks for nodes and dashes/pipes/slashes for pathways. The best part was that I made use of higher-order programming to evaluate an input query for each room, so I could do things like get a graphical representation of the location of all the monsters in a certain area, or incomplete rooms that needed further development.
I wish I was old enough to have gotten into the whole object-oriented text adventure scene back in its heyday.
That is a perfect example of the exact trade-off security-conscious people must deal with.
Suppose that all people who attempt to break a system were entitled to do so if they come forward with their methods. This would allow anyone to commit any number of attempted felonies so long as they were not successful. My own counterargument would be that the person who would exploit these holes for malicious purposes wouldn't come forward and thus would be unstoppable if we assume that they aren't caught.
Still, by prosecuting or at least harassing even good-intentioned trespassers, it serves the purpose of deterring some cross-section of would-be offenders regardless of their intent.
As convincing and well-established that argument is in our world, it doesn't extend indefinitely to the real one. When someone doesn't lock their door, you don't reward the guy who sneaks into everyone's house to prove he can. There are some areas where you know that insecurity exists, and rely on individual prosecution or ignorance (security through obscurity) to make the system maintainable. Near-perfect security is difficult and cumbersome, so why invest in it for anything but the most critical systems?
Katz would do better if he didn't have to explain his jokes in captions or devote so much setup time to an obvious statement.
Breakdown:
1. He flat out loses on the Venn diagram of the Internet. It's far too simple and straightforward. Maybe I'm just spoiled by Munroe's wit and attention to detail, but I don't think I'd find Katz's drawing funny before I started reading xkcd either.
Munroe gets bonus points on this one for referring to the New Yorker in his answer.
2. No comment.
3. First of all, it would have been more acceptable to leave the "B.C." unemphasized and thus more interesting, despite the fact that it still raises the question of whether he's a young-Earth creationist. Second, it would have actually been somewhat creative if he left it assumed to be A.D., so it could at least pretend to be a commentary of sorts on our view of the recent past.
4. This was actually funny. All it needs is a way of introducing the favorite animal/food idea into the comic without actually making it suck. But that would be difficult, so it'd probably be better to leave it as is with the criteria/topic introduced ahead of time. Katz is one-for-four against Munroe.
Putting aside your accidental over-generalization to boomboxes and speakers, I challenge you to defend that point. How am I a risk to myself if the volume is low enough for me to clearly hear traffic? Hell, how am I a risk to myself if the volume is blasting me deaf, so long as I still have vision? And are you arguing that deaf people should not be allowed to cross the street unescorted? I'm assuming you would reply that deaf people have been conditioned by life to be more alert and aware of their surroundings. Yet am I incapable of being alert too, without a lifelong adjustment to functioning without a sense of hearing?
And you put the safety of others at risk as well.
You're talking as if responsibly wearing headphones is an oxymoron. There exist scenarios where listening to headphones at any volume does not impact the safety of myself or others while crossing a street. For instance, a low traffic road at night. Likewise, a more complicated crossing would require more attentiveness, but I fail to see why there is no gradient.
I see no problem with making a law unambiguous, it is patently obvious that far too many people are completely irresponsible with their music players and mobile phones.
I reject this notion that the actions of some should result in legislating the actions of all. You assume that I am incapable of being alert while hearing music, simply because of your own experiences and biases, common though the stereotypes may be. This is like passing judgement on me if I drink while underage, because underage drinking is related to loss of life, property damage, etc. You're condemning me for being "irresponsible" by participating in an action that other people partake in irresponsibly.
Instead of insulting the responsible people by putting them on the same level as the rest, why not selectively prosecute cases that actually involve recklessness? Why not go after the instances of actions that are inherently dangerous, instead of the simplifications and generalizations thereof?
I live in New York State. I heard word a few years ago that they were considering making it a ticketable offense to cross the street while wearing earbuds/headphones, and that measure probably passed by now. I find this disgusting, that while it is perfectly safe to use your eyes to avoid walking in front of a truck, the state would mandate the manner in which people cross regardless of other factors such as the volume of the player.
Now I may be incorrect on the details, maybe I heard a bad summary of the bill, but what sense does it make to specify the ways a person may and may not cross the street? Isn't it enough to simply require people to be "safe", and let the legal system take care of deciding this on a case by case basis?
My father told me a story about sitting next to the speaker at an Iron Butterfly concert. All he could hear for three days was "In Da Gada La Vida" (/ "In the Garden of Eden") over and over again.
I wish rock concerts focused more on balance and less on noise. It's a shame that for the kinds of prices people pay, you can't get the same kind of sound quality you do from a Broadway theater.
Amen. The whole point of the Turing Test was to express a functionalist viewpoint of the world, that two blackboxes with the same interface are morally and philosophically substitutable. And this whole media-fueled notion of the Turing Test as a milestone on the road to machine supremacy just muddles the point.
Sheesh, at this point, why don't they save themselves the trouble of writing a patent claims list and just cite their source code instead? Or if they wanted to obfuscate it, why not claim "a procedure consisting of the following assembly instructions:...".
I wonder how much money I could make writing a routine to translate source code into patent claim descriptions. I smell an esoteric programming language.
Slashdot Mirror
Then let me reply directly (read: a poor excuse to top-post).
Michael Sipser's "Introduction to the Theory of Computation." It's easily the best textbook I've ever owned, and had me paging through it well ahead of the pace of the course. It of course doesn't serve nearly the same purpose as K&R and all those other books on practical topics, but for someone who's never been exposed to the theoretical side of CS, it's a wonderful eye-opener.
Apparently the same opinions are shared by most of the other CS students I've talked to.
Yeah, Borg continuity's a bit messed up.
In the original Star Trek, pretty much every adversary they ever fought could be summed up by an idea or an ideal, and defeated with a natural elemental counter - fighting androids with logical paradoxes, exposing inhuman aliens to human emotion, putting too much air into a balloon, you get the idea. NG did a nice job introducing the Borg as yet another thematic entity that could be fought with wit. Change the shield frequencies before they adjust, explore the cube with impunity because they don't consider you a threat, etc.
Voyager turned that around into a dull human story with dull human elements, especially in the last season or two. Which isn't to say there's not potential there, but Voyager was never any good at exploiting potential.
I remember an episode where the crew faced an incapacitated Borg vessel whose only remaining population consisted of a few drone children (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_(Star_Trek:_Voyager)) It was such an unbelievable let-down. Seven of Nine came in and played a role in the same script they use in every episode: The good guy knows best, the poor confused bastard who has the potential to blow everyone up - or through his inaction can allow everyone to be blown up - will only bring himself to trust another soul at the last moment; then they all forgive and learn, occasionally with a less likeable poor confused bastard getting sacrificed.
By this point in the series, not only was this boring, it was absurd, given that the antagonists were children. What the writers should have done - not that it would be anywhere near the style of the show - is make it a change-up episode. Throw Seven of Nine in there and let her dominate the shit out of everyone else on board, using her superior intelligence, experience, and knowledge of Borg protocol. Relegate that damned conflict between her and the kids to the position of a comic relief sideplot, and have them battle something inanimate like a reactor core leak instead. At least then the writers would have used a fascinating consequence of the characters' positions for something other than a "Please trust me" plot.
And if anyone on the show could pull off a deviation from the formula, it'd be Jeri Ryan. She and Robert Picardo each had more talent individually than the rest of the cast combined.
Bleh. Enough ranting. I'm off to dream of the plots that could've been.
When my Garman boots up, I want it to say, "Last time, on Voyager..."
Integrity is a security principle, and that is the sense that they're using the word in the summary. It's pretty much the only definition of the word that makes sense in a computing context. More precisely, we're talking about confidence that the data stored in the system is the same as the data retrieved at a later time. The only difference between this and a more cryptographic sense of the word is that this doesn't attempt to guard against malicious attacks if an adversary had offline access to the disk. (Or so I presume, having not RTFA'd).
Both you and the AC GP missed the point - the problem is that of the imperative programming paradigm versus declarative or something with a single-assignment store.
i = i + 1;
This is a contradiction in algebra, but just fine in imperative languages. You'd have to do a renaming that distinguishes between the old value of i and the new one for it to work like algebra.
No offense, but I don't understand where you got any of that. The author didn't say the iphone stresses C++, he said it's used on it. There's a big difference, as any system you point to that's packed with a diverse set of libraries is basically guaranteed to have something coded in C++.
As for the second part about editorializing, unless I'm horribly mistaken, the *bold* parts of text are the questions, and the standard typeface paragraphs are Stroustrup's reply.
I don't understand what the GP was referring to. Is it the fact that old versions of Windows/Dos didn't run in protected mode or isolate processes from one another, which pretty much precluded stable systems that could tolerate the failure of individual applications? Because if so, I don't believe a delay - if we even accept that there was a "delay" - in the adoption of one critical architectural shift has any bearing on how we judge CS as an engineering discipline.
If the three letters N-S-A don't mean enough to you to lend this certification a crapload of credibility, you're obviously not terrified enough.
Curiously enough, the word "bastard" appears at the end of the song:
It's too faint to really hear in the MTV version, although you can just make it out on youtube. Would they have censored that on television if it was in the main part of the song?
If I had points and you weren't already at 3 I'd mod you Funny. There are some fucked up theories about contributory liability that get tested in court, like that one recently about hyperlinking to a defamatory page. But I'm pretty sure that mentioning the name of programs that themselves are at worst indirectly responsible for infringement, is not itself illegal. Otherwise we'd be looking at some pretty scary transitivity.
And remember, the services are only illegal if they fall under the Grokster standard of "intent to encourage infringement." Er, yes, I guess Grokster is one of the programs named in the song.
I think GP was referring to two packets coming in on two switch ports, both destined for a third. Even if the switch doesn't buffer one of the packets (or frames, whatever the appropriate jargon is for layer 2), it can still send the other one out the third port.
In the case the second incoming packet is dropped and not buffered, I don't see why the switch can't jam the collision line on that port to notify the sender, so long as it detects the situation within the permitted time frame for jamming.
I started playing MAREs, which are based off of MUSEs, in 2002 and continued for two or three years. It was limited to a small community, but I had a lot of fun programming in the engine's scripting language. I developed some clever tricks with the parser and queue-based execution system to get some interesting results, expanding my programming experience (this was around the same time I was learning C/C++).
This culminated in my writing a scripted mapping engine that would take in static geographical data about the layout of rooms, and render it to ascii-text as a graph with asterisks for nodes and dashes/pipes/slashes for pathways. The best part was that I made use of higher-order programming to evaluate an input query for each room, so I could do things like get a graphical representation of the location of all the monsters in a certain area, or incomplete rooms that needed further development.
I wish I was old enough to have gotten into the whole object-oriented text adventure scene back in its heyday.
That is a perfect example of the exact trade-off security-conscious people must deal with.
Suppose that all people who attempt to break a system were entitled to do so if they come forward with their methods. This would allow anyone to commit any number of attempted felonies so long as they were not successful. My own counterargument would be that the person who would exploit these holes for malicious purposes wouldn't come forward and thus would be unstoppable if we assume that they aren't caught.
Still, by prosecuting or at least harassing even good-intentioned trespassers, it serves the purpose of deterring some cross-section of would-be offenders regardless of their intent.
As convincing and well-established that argument is in our world, it doesn't extend indefinitely to the real one. When someone doesn't lock their door, you don't reward the guy who sneaks into everyone's house to prove he can. There are some areas where you know that insecurity exists, and rely on individual prosecution or ignorance (security through obscurity) to make the system maintainable. Near-perfect security is difficult and cumbersome, so why invest in it for anything but the most critical systems?
Katz would do better if he didn't have to explain his jokes in captions or devote so much setup time to an obvious statement.
Breakdown:
1. He flat out loses on the Venn diagram of the Internet. It's far too simple and straightforward. Maybe I'm just spoiled by Munroe's wit and attention to detail, but I don't think I'd find Katz's drawing funny before I started reading xkcd either.
Munroe gets bonus points on this one for referring to the New Yorker in his answer.
2. No comment.
3. First of all, it would have been more acceptable to leave the "B.C." unemphasized and thus more interesting, despite the fact that it still raises the question of whether he's a young-Earth creationist. Second, it would have actually been somewhat creative if he left it assumed to be A.D., so it could at least pretend to be a commentary of sorts on our view of the recent past.
4. This was actually funny. All it needs is a way of introducing the favorite animal/food idea into the comic without actually making it suck. But that would be difficult, so it'd probably be better to leave it as is with the criteria/topic introduced ahead of time. Katz is one-for-four against Munroe.
That's my new favorite put-down for this country (US), thank you.
Fixed that for you. And for the good of mankind as well.
Bravo, I haven't thought about that poem in a long time.
Putting aside your accidental over-generalization to boomboxes and speakers, I challenge you to defend that point. How am I a risk to myself if the volume is low enough for me to clearly hear traffic? Hell, how am I a risk to myself if the volume is blasting me deaf, so long as I still have vision? And are you arguing that deaf people should not be allowed to cross the street unescorted? I'm assuming you would reply that deaf people have been conditioned by life to be more alert and aware of their surroundings. Yet am I incapable of being alert too, without a lifelong adjustment to functioning without a sense of hearing?
You're talking as if responsibly wearing headphones is an oxymoron. There exist scenarios where listening to headphones at any volume does not impact the safety of myself or others while crossing a street. For instance, a low traffic road at night. Likewise, a more complicated crossing would require more attentiveness, but I fail to see why there is no gradient.
I reject this notion that the actions of some should result in legislating the actions of all. You assume that I am incapable of being alert while hearing music, simply because of your own experiences and biases, common though the stereotypes may be. This is like passing judgement on me if I drink while underage, because underage drinking is related to loss of life, property damage, etc. You're condemning me for being "irresponsible" by participating in an action that other people partake in irresponsibly.
Instead of insulting the responsible people by putting them on the same level as the rest, why not selectively prosecute cases that actually involve recklessness? Why not go after the instances of actions that are inherently dangerous, instead of the simplifications and generalizations thereof?
I live in New York State. I heard word a few years ago that they were considering making it a ticketable offense to cross the street while wearing earbuds/headphones, and that measure probably passed by now. I find this disgusting, that while it is perfectly safe to use your eyes to avoid walking in front of a truck, the state would mandate the manner in which people cross regardless of other factors such as the volume of the player.
Now I may be incorrect on the details, maybe I heard a bad summary of the bill, but what sense does it make to specify the ways a person may and may not cross the street? Isn't it enough to simply require people to be "safe", and let the legal system take care of deciding this on a case by case basis?
My father told me a story about sitting next to the speaker at an Iron Butterfly concert. All he could hear for three days was "In Da Gada La Vida" (/ "In the Garden of Eden") over and over again.
I wish rock concerts focused more on balance and less on noise. It's a shame that for the kinds of prices people pay, you can't get the same kind of sound quality you do from a Broadway theater.
Amen. The whole point of the Turing Test was to express a functionalist viewpoint of the world, that two blackboxes with the same interface are morally and philosophically substitutable. And this whole media-fueled notion of the Turing Test as a milestone on the road to machine supremacy just muddles the point.
Sheesh, at this point, why don't they save themselves the trouble of writing a patent claims list and just cite their source code instead? Or if they wanted to obfuscate it, why not claim "a procedure consisting of the following assembly instructions: ...".
I wonder how much money I could make writing a routine to translate source code into patent claim descriptions. I smell an esoteric programming language.
Yes, I've seen that before. I thought it was claiming to be a universal Turing machine though. Oh well, it is still pretty damn awesome.
I'm disappointed that, in a Slashdot comment page on a topic such as this, no one has yet said these magic three words:
Universal Turing Machine.