And what about all the free legal distribution of copyrighted content by copyright holders, which in turn can easily be saved as mp3s? It is saying if someone downloads something via P2P they are criminal, but if they save a youtube stream to a file, they are model citizens.
They still break the law but there is no way to catch them doing this (as the download was legal) so what’s the point to scaring potential voters.
Saving a youtube video is illegal? That sounds like bullshit, try getting that to stick in court...
There are two possibilities. If whoever posted the video has the right to distribute it, then you obtained it from a legitimate source: if the copyright owner posted it on a publicly accessible website, then they are offering it to you and can't possibly claim you stole it. How is this different from recording a TV show, which is clearly legal pretty much everywhere? OTOH, If they don't have the right to distribute it, then they are violating copyright, but as far as the downloader is concerned, I have yet to hear of anyone being tried for just unauthorized downloading of copyrighted material (hint: all of the p2p copyright infringement lawsuits were about the re-distribution which is part of the process of a p2p download). Finally, youtube does not use DRM, so you are not violating the prohibition to removing restrictions by saving the video.
I like that when some guy in the US makes a statement, slashdot titles "some guy say..." or maybe "the republicans/democrats say.." etc. But when it happens in some heathen foreign country, the country is personified under the assumption that the reader would not know or care who the speaker is.
Reminds me of a board game called diplomacy I used to play in high school, where during the diplomacy phase you would get up from the table saying something like "can I talk to france"? and then once you were in a quiet corner with France you would try to convince him or her (usually him) that surely an agreement to demilitarize the english channel was in everyone's best interest...
In Pisa, Italy, where it snows once in every 5-10 years, usually with barely enough snow to stick to the ground for a few hours, that is enough to close all the schools for the day.
That's not for lack of salt or snow plows, however... I'm sure they don't have those ready, but it doesn't really matter, as it is not enough snow to cause disruption to road traffic anyhow. It's just that hey! it's snowing!
Warning people to protect themselves in the face of a legitimate threat has unmeasurable value to society, it can save countless lives and reduce the actual property damage resulting from unpreparedness. Crying wolf just teaches people to ignore the warnings.
I remember when in 2004 (the year before Kathrina) I read in the news that the major of New Orleans had ordered a (voluntary) evacuation of the city. Checking in wikipedia, I see this was in preparation for Hurricane Ivan. When I saw that and read a bit about how bad the flooding risk was I thought, wow, I need to visit New Orleans before it goes under. By a combination of circumstances I ended up actually visiting the city in December that year.
However, the wikipedia page on Kathrina does not say anything about this "false alarm" as a contributing cause to the bad handling of Kathrina: the major again declared a voluntary, and then a mandatory evacuation, and Ivan even served as a useful excercise of "contraflow" for the evacuation. The problem it seems was not that people did not take the warning seriously, but that they had either nowhere to go or no way to get there.
Yes, it might lower their stock value, but it will lower all of there stock value; assuming the market gives a crap.
Having an inflated value vanish is normal economics.
Not necessarily: abolishing software patents will reduce the value of some companies (that have a good warchest of such patents and a history of knowing how to use them to print money or quash competition) and increase the value of others (that do not have quite as good a warchest, or even if they do are vulnerable to patent trolls).
Also, it would accelerate the growth of new, innovative companies, which would lead to overall economic growth.
We bought 2 10 inch Kindles and 2 10 inch pocketbooks 903s at our lab, to see if we could use them to read academic papers instead of all those dead trees. Also, a colleague had a 7 inch kindle, so we tried that as well. Most papers we read are PDFs in two-column format, so how well a reader can handle that was perhaps the most important requirement.
The pocketbook is quite nice, and is also a very open device (it's linux and you can run scripts on it etc), and it has WIFI. Other than that, the readers are quite similar: they have a two-column mode that shows you one column at a time and moves forward correctly. This works well for reading papers, and the ability to do full text search directly on the reader is very convenient. However, when you have to look at a piece of text and the table or figure it describes side by side, dead trees win. For this, the 10 inch models are better than the 7 inches, because you can turn the text sideways and see the whole width of the paper (for those wide figures or tables).
However, both the kindle and the pocketbook have insufficient features for annotating pdfs: this means they are not really an option for me when working on a draft or reviewing a paper. Furhtermore, I like to scribble on papers I read, so in the end I mostly used the pocketbook for reading novels rather than papers. In the future I think I will keep reading papers on paper until I can get a non-backlit reader that has good support for annotating the stuff you read by scribbling on the touchscreen... in the meantime I'll probably buy a 7-inch reader for reading fiction.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Script drafts on fire in Sunset Bouleverd production meetings. I watched C-movies glitter in the dark in a 3D multiplex. And all those remakes will be lost in time... like tears in rain... Time to die.
Certainly not TFA. My beef is with the iTunes store - to buy an album here costs AU$17.00 (US$17.63), a huge hike over the $10 price the US enjoys.
If I wanted an iPad, I could always import one from the US, but I can't buy an album from the US iTunes store; they refuse to sell it to me, which is a restriction of trade under Australian law, and something the ACCC has ruled is illegal, at least when applied to physical music media like CDs.
Can't you just proxy your connections though the US?
Virtual servers are cheap or you can buy VPN service.
I think region restrictions on online stores are typically based on your credit card's country, not your IPs...
The setting on FB has been there some time? It's in the account privacy settings under the 'Custom' setup:
"Photos and videos you're tagged in"
You set it to be viewable only by yourself and only you will see what photo's you've been tagged in.
But that means no tags of me at all. I don't want to disable tagging, which is a useful feature, I want to control where I am tagged.
Of course, as with all things FB, they screw it up so that if someone then posts a link to the photo on your wall, the cats out of the bag, but you can prevent others from seeing where you've been tagged.
That's not a problem, posting on my wall by anyone but myself is already disabled (and I like the fact that google+ has no wall).
It's nice that they finally got the standard done. But there's so much junk in there. The C++ committee was dominated by people who wanted to do cool things with templates.
Some years ago, someone figured out that it was possible to abuse the C++ template system into doing arbitrary computations at compile time. This developed a fan club. That fan club has dominated the C++ standards committee, because nobody else cared. So now we have a standard for C++ which supports template-based programming a little better.
Not really. The standard provides improved support for generic programming: things like move contructors which, once in use by the STL, will make all your code a little faster, things like auto typing that make using STL and other templated libraries easier, things like lambdas that make using functional programming with STL algorithms a little easier etc. Generic programming is not template meta-programming, and it is one of the great things about C++ and it's libraries, as I thinkt think any serious C++ user will agree.
And the parts of the new standard that are likely to have the most impact have nothing to do with templates: like the fact it finally provides a standard way of doing concurrency.
Current thinking seems to be that, while template programming is too hard for ordinary programmers, the templates will be written by l33t programmers and then be used by the lower classes. Unfortunately, if anything goes wrong, the end user has to look at the innards of the template to find the problem.
This is something that the new "concepts" are supposed to fix (by providing more informative errors that do not involve template innards, at the price of a little extra work for the library developer). Unfortunately concepts did not make it into this standard. I agree that full-fledged template-meta-programming is a pain to use, but I do not think any of the STL libraries go that far... you have to look around in boost to find extreme implementations of that concept, like boost::matrix, which I would not recommend to the faint of heart.
Note what isn't in the new C++. There's no more memory safety than in the old one. (Fans will say that it's safer if you only use the new features. Now try to call some library that doesn't use them.) So the buffer overflow attacks and crashes will continue.
C++ is the only language to offer hiding without memory safety. Hard-compiled languages from Pascal through Go have hiding with safety, as do all the major scripting languages. C has neither hiding nor safety; the pointer manipulations are right there in the source. There have been safe, hard-compiled languages without garbage collection, most notably Ada and the Modula family. Safety and speed are not incompatible.
If by "safety" you just mean array bounds checks, you can enable bound checks for vector in C++ with a compile-time switch, or implement your own vector subclass that does checks. This may have some performance impact for certain workloads. But that's not the same as real memory safety. I don't think anyone has yet solved the problem of designing a memory safe language without garbage collection. Oh, and according to this benchmark https://days2011.scala-lang.org/sites/days2011/files/ws3-1-Hundt.pdf, Go is about as slow as Java, and is 3x slower than C++.
- precise garbage collection (not that I'm missing it)
Garbage collection does not come free:
- Garbage collectors cause memory usage and CPU overheads. These can vary based on the used algorithms, but they are not negligible, are hard to predict, and are usually not deterministic/real-time. Given C++'s user base that includes users who REQUIRE C-like performance, this means garbage collection can only be an optional feature.
- If a library or piece of code is built to use garbage collection, you cannot use it in a program without garbage collection. You cannot have garbage collection on for part of the program only (or at least, no good solution has been found for this yet). This means that optional garbage collection essentially splits the language into two incompatible dialects.
- As a secondary point, destructors are not just about freeing memory, they also release other resources. With garbage collection, destructors are not called at a predictable point in time, which can cause trouble. This means the Resource-Acquisition-Is-Initialization paradigm that is commonly used by C++ code doesn't work reliably.
PS; What the hell is wrong with formatting of comments? How am I supposed to insert a bulleted list? The FAQ is completely outdated (speaks of multiple comment modes that no longer exist, and normal ul/li tags do not work
First, for those who didn't read TFA, computers play only a small role on a handful of essays. Most of the article is in reference to having a 3rd party grade anonymized tests, rather than leaving it to the professor or TA. During college, I had a job as one of those graders.
We worked for five hours a day in the evening, though we could leave early and get the full pay if we finished all our papers. Most of the tests would be on general topics, but occasionally we'd get tests that required specific knowledge. In those cases, only qualified graders could review them, and we were given cheat sheets to make sure we didn't make factual mistakes. Essays were generally graded on a 1-5 scale (or a 0 if the essay was a blank page or similar). Each essay would be graded by two people, with a third breaking the tie in the event of a disagreement. However, we trained to be extremely consistent in the grading, so disagreements were rare and never more than a one point difference.
A few times a day, we would get fake essays intended to test our grading skills. For example, an essay that was supposed to be a perfect example of a 4 would be given to you with all the rest. If you gave it a 4, you get +1 point. Give it a 3 or 5, you get zero points. Give it a 2 or less, and you lose a point. If you accumulate a lot of points, you get a bonus up to 50% of your pay. If your total score goes too negative, you get fired.
It was a pretty good job, as crappy part-time "work your way through college" jobs go. The best part was whenever we got to grade essays by little kids. They were harder to score accurately -- it's hard to look past the abysmal handwriting and frequent misspellings. But they were frequently adorable and unintentionally hilarious.
It sounds like you were taking this job seriously, and I applaud you for that. However, I would rather have exams be graded by one expert in the field (even though the possibility of bias does exist) than by some student doing a "work your way through college" job, even if there are two of them plus a third in case they disagree.
The classes I have been teaching so far are small enough that we can grade them ourselves without using TAs, and are technical enough that there is not a lot of leeway in grading (compared to, say, a literary criticism essay)... But still, how strict the grading should be for a specific question depends on me knowing what I expect out of a question, what I said about the topic in the lecture, what the course material says about the topic, and what the assignments should have taught about that topic. Then, for partial credit, you can try to guess what the student meant, and whether it reflects at least a partial understanding of the topic. This requires a good understanding of the domain.
I can't say if a computer is better than a human at marking, but in my engineering subjects, when my name was on the test papers I did not get very good grades (actually at least grade lower than expected). But as soon as all the students were given anonymous numbers the grades went up.
(...)Eh, what the hell do I know. I stopped taking classes after I couldn't come up with a good way to echo the feminist sentiment that all women really do have penis envy (...)
Sorry but you are clearly very confused. How is penis envy feminist??? Penis envy is a chauvinistic (that is, the opposite of feminist) concept that Freud came up with at the beginning of the last century. I have the highest respect for Freud and his work, but his main limitation was his total blindness to the social/cultural aspect: He was trying to find biological causes and solutions for what were mostly social and cultural problems, because a) he needed a biological basis to make his work scientific and b) he never questioned the world-view and social order of his society, which was an extremely chauvinistic society. Penis envy is a perfect example of where this kind of bias took him.
Real names make it easy to find people you know on a social network, and to remember the identities of people you connect with on them. Social networks are most valuable for "loose connections" like friends from grade school or non-immediate relatives. You might be interested in their lives, but can't commit the energy or mental capacity to identifying them in the first place or remembering the association function between their pseudonym and their identity.
You or others like you might not care about weak social ties, but (evidently) a vast majority of computer users do.
I use my real name on social networks. But that was my decision, based on the kind of stuff I post. That facebook and google want you to force people to use their real name is simply unacceptable in my opinion. Fortunately, they have no real way of enforcing this policy for now at least.
Google and facebook nowadays try to nudge users to provide a cell phone number, but even if they made that a hard requirement (which would turn off many users) phones can be anonymous as well with prepaid in most countries.
(...) and started over with a false name. I only add those people I trust back on, and I don't post pics of myself and make it clear I don't want to be tagged in their photos either (how I long for a "make it impossible to tag me" feature on FB).
Although no-one has been stalking me, the lack of this feature in FB really pisses me off. That's one of the reasons I have switched to google+, which does allow you to block all tags of you until you have vetted them...
I teach physics at a community college. The Wired article made me curious to see how good the Khan videos were. I went to the Khan Academy web site and viewed this one on Newton's law of gravity. He starts off with some kind of interesting, intellectually stimulating stuff about how gravity is ultimately not something we can explain. (He makes one error, but it's not crucial, and it's prefaced with a modest warning that he's not an expert.) Then he writes down Newton's law of gravity without saying anything about where it comes from, how we know it's true, or whether it's been tested by experiment. Next he spends 6 or 7 minutes, almost the entire video, solving a plug-in problem. After that he has a follow-up lecture in which he solves a problem using ratios.
I have not watched this, or any other of his videos, but to be fair, at least from what the wired article says, khan mostly aims at school- or high school-level topics, so it is no surpise that his physics seems basic to someone teaching physics at college level. From TFA:
Khan’s site is unique in that it’s ruthlessly practical: It’s aimed at helping people master the basics, the humble bread-and-butter equations they encounter in elementary and high school.
So the practical, drilling-based approach is deliberate, and I think it has a place in an education, though it also needs to be complemented with other approaches that go more in depth in the "why" rather than just the how: e.g., the difference between a calculus class where you learn to crunch integrals and differential equations and a mathematical analysis class where you (additionally, it is to be hoped) learn to understand the theory.
I also don't think the US will default. But miss ONE payment on interest, and see how the rating agencies downgrade you and your cost of capital shoots up. All that posturing in congress could get very expensive for the treasury.
On the contrary, Reagan knew what Kennedy (JFK) knew: tax cuts INCREASES private investment, which increases jobs, which adds more TAXPAYERS to the system.
Facebook does not let you prevent people from tagging you in photos. You can remove the tags, but not stop them from appearing in the first place. Google+ lets you configure this, and I have set it so all tags of myself have to be vetted by me.
Facebook is run by someone who calls his customers "dumb fucks" for being so stupid to give him their data.
The thing is, this situation is a rare occurrence for most users, and most will be able to seed greater than 1 most of the time.
You are failing at the exact math that you are replying to. For every person greater than 1.00, there is at least one person less than 1.00. This makes it impossible for most users to be over 1.00 most of the time.
No offense meant, but it seems you also fail at math. In the limit you just need one leecher downloading huge amounts of content from all other users, to keep them all at arbitrarily high share ratios.
So Skype allows group of text-only for their free accounts. Group video chat requires that everyone be a Skype subscriber to get access. Will this limitation continue?
Only one participant needs to be a subscriber (otherwise lack of network effect would make this worthless). I make regular group calls with skype, and we've tried the group video call as well. The bigger problem is that video conferences with 3+ participants don't really seem to work acceptably, with audio and video coming and going and participants being dropped... If the google version works (and I plan to try it out next week as soon as my new fancy webcam arrives), that will make more difference to me than the fact it is free.
Which is most likely to cause a responsive change in the viewer: watching violence, or watching sex/nudity?
We've had article after article on here about how violent video games are not shown to produce violent individuals.
I know Slashdot isn't exactly a bastion of Christian ideals, but surely you can understand that people who hold sex to be sacred don't want their children to be exposed to it in a disrespectful or objectifying context.
I don't care what you hold sacred... as will never be repeated often enough: No one has the right not to be offended. That's what free speech means. And talking about objectification is just hypocrisy: if a videogame, or a tv show showed a woman's breasts in a repsectful, feminist way would it be allowed all of a sudden? I thought not. If you want to keep your kids away from something, that's fine by me, but the responsability of enforcing that is up to you.... don't use that as an excuse to censor the rest of us.
Images of nudity are often burned into an individual's mind; that's a purely biological response.
Only if you live in an environment where nudity is kept hidden and your sexuality is repressed. You should try visiting a sauna in a European country such as austria or finland, where being naked is the normal option for entire families, and no one has any trauma as a consequence.
You don't have to agree that it's wrong to expose children to sex in video games, but surely one can understand that -- barring some exceptional cases -- violence doesn't have nearly the same kind of effect on the mind.
Yeah right, try talking to some people who have seen real violence (as soldiers in a war, or worse as civiians), and see if they have no images burned in their mind...
Slashdot Mirror
I don't need my icons to take up 1/16th of my screen - it's a rather bad use of what I'd like to be productive time.
Ehem.. you talk of productive time... and you are reading slashdot? Worse... you are commenting as well!..
And what about all the free legal distribution of copyrighted content by copyright holders, which in turn can easily be saved as mp3s? It is saying if someone downloads something via P2P they are criminal, but if they save a youtube stream to a file, they are model citizens.
They still break the law but there is no way to catch them doing this (as the download was legal) so what’s the point to scaring potential voters.
Saving a youtube video is illegal? That sounds like bullshit, try getting that to stick in court...
There are two possibilities. If whoever posted the video has the right to distribute it, then you obtained it from a legitimate source: if the copyright owner posted it on a publicly accessible website, then they are offering it to you and can't possibly claim you stole it. How is this different from recording a TV show, which is clearly legal pretty much everywhere? OTOH, If they don't have the right to distribute it, then they are violating copyright, but as far as the downloader is concerned, I have yet to hear of anyone being tried for just unauthorized downloading of copyrighted material (hint: all of the p2p copyright infringement lawsuits were about the re-distribution which is part of the process of a p2p download). Finally, youtube does not use DRM, so you are not violating the prohibition to removing restrictions by saving the video.
I like that when some guy in the US makes a statement, slashdot titles "some guy say..." or maybe "the republicans/democrats say.." etc. But when it happens in some heathen foreign country, the country is personified under the assumption that the reader would not know or care who the speaker is.
Reminds me of a board game called diplomacy I used to play in high school, where during the diplomacy phase you would get up from the table saying something like "can I talk to france"? and then once you were in a quiet corner with France you would try to convince him or her (usually him) that surely an agreement to demilitarize the english channel was in everyone's best interest...
In Pisa, Italy, where it snows once in every 5-10 years, usually with barely enough snow to stick to the ground for a few hours, that is enough to close all the schools for the day.
That's not for lack of salt or snow plows, however... I'm sure they don't have those ready, but it doesn't really matter, as it is not enough snow to cause disruption to road traffic anyhow. It's just that hey! it's snowing!
Warning people to protect themselves in the face of a legitimate threat has unmeasurable value to society, it can save countless lives and reduce the actual property damage resulting from unpreparedness. Crying wolf just teaches people to ignore the warnings.
I remember when in 2004 (the year before Kathrina) I read in the news that the major of New Orleans had ordered a (voluntary) evacuation of the city. Checking in wikipedia, I see this was in preparation for Hurricane Ivan. When I saw that and read a bit about how bad the flooding risk was I thought, wow, I need to visit New Orleans before it goes under. By a combination of circumstances I ended up actually visiting the city in December that year.
However, the wikipedia page on Kathrina does not say anything about this "false alarm" as a contributing cause to the bad handling of Kathrina: the major again declared a voluntary, and then a mandatory evacuation, and Ivan even served as a useful excercise of "contraflow" for the evacuation. The problem it seems was not that people did not take the warning seriously, but that they had either nowhere to go or no way to get there.
Yes, it might lower their stock value, but it will lower all of there stock value; assuming the market gives a crap.
Having an inflated value vanish is normal economics.
Not necessarily: abolishing software patents will reduce the value of some companies (that have a good warchest of such patents and a history of knowing how to use them to print money or quash competition) and increase the value of others (that do not have quite as good a warchest, or even if they do are vulnerable to patent trolls).
Also, it would accelerate the growth of new, innovative companies, which would lead to overall economic growth.
We bought 2 10 inch Kindles and 2 10 inch pocketbooks 903s at our lab, to see if we could use them to read academic papers instead of all those dead trees. Also, a colleague had a 7 inch kindle, so we tried that as well. Most papers we read are PDFs in two-column format, so how well a reader can handle that was perhaps the most important requirement.
The pocketbook is quite nice, and is also a very open device (it's linux and you can run scripts on it etc), and it has WIFI. Other than that, the readers are quite similar: they have a two-column mode that shows you one column at a time and moves forward correctly. This works well for reading papers, and the ability to do full text search directly on the reader is very convenient. However, when you have to look at a piece of text and the table or figure it describes side by side, dead trees win. For this, the 10 inch models are better than the 7 inches, because you can turn the text sideways and see the whole width of the paper (for those wide figures or tables).
However, both the kindle and the pocketbook have insufficient features for annotating pdfs: this means they are not really an option for me when working on a draft or reviewing a paper. Furhtermore, I like to scribble on papers I read, so in the end I mostly used the pocketbook for reading novels rather than papers. In the future I think I will keep reading papers on paper until I can get a non-backlit reader that has good support for annotating the stuff you read by scribbling on the touchscreen... in the meantime I'll probably buy a 7-inch reader for reading fiction.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Script drafts on fire in Sunset Bouleverd production meetings. I watched C-movies glitter in the dark in a 3D multiplex. And all those remakes will be lost in time... like tears in rain... Time to die.
Certainly not TFA. My beef is with the iTunes store - to buy an album here costs AU$17.00 (US$17.63), a huge hike over the $10 price the US enjoys.
If I wanted an iPad, I could always import one from the US, but I can't buy an album from the US iTunes store; they refuse to sell it to me, which is a restriction of trade under Australian law, and something the ACCC has ruled is illegal, at least when applied to physical music media like CDs.
Can't you just proxy your connections though the US?
Virtual servers are cheap or you can buy VPN service.
I think region restrictions on online stores are typically based on your credit card's country, not your IPs...
The setting on FB has been there some time? It's in the account privacy settings under the 'Custom' setup:
"Photos and videos you're tagged in"
You set it to be viewable only by yourself and only you will see what photo's you've been tagged in.
But that means no tags of me at all. I don't want to disable tagging, which is a useful feature, I want to control where I am tagged.
Of course, as with all things FB, they screw it up so that if someone then posts a link to the photo on your wall, the cats out of the bag, but you can prevent others from seeing where you've been tagged.
That's not a problem, posting on my wall by anyone but myself is already disabled (and I like the fact that google+ has no wall).
It's nice that they finally got the standard done. But there's so much junk in there. The C++ committee was dominated by people who wanted to do cool things with templates.
Some years ago, someone figured out that it was possible to abuse the C++ template system into doing arbitrary computations at compile time. This developed a fan club. That fan club has dominated the C++ standards committee, because nobody else cared. So now we have a standard for C++ which supports template-based programming a little better.
Not really. The standard provides improved support for generic programming: things like move contructors which, once in use by the STL, will make all your code a little faster, things like auto typing that make using STL and other templated libraries easier, things like lambdas that make using functional programming with STL algorithms a little easier etc. Generic programming is not template meta-programming, and it is one of the great things about C++ and it's libraries, as I thinkt think any serious C++ user will agree.
And the parts of the new standard that are likely to have the most impact have nothing to do with templates: like the fact it finally provides a standard way of doing concurrency.
Current thinking seems to be that, while template programming is too hard for ordinary programmers, the templates will be written by l33t programmers and then be used by the lower classes. Unfortunately, if anything goes wrong, the end user has to look at the innards of the template to find the problem.
This is something that the new "concepts" are supposed to fix (by providing more informative errors that do not involve template innards, at the price of a little extra work for the library developer). Unfortunately concepts did not make it into this standard. I agree that full-fledged template-meta-programming is a pain to use, but I do not think any of the STL libraries go that far... you have to look around in boost to find extreme implementations of that concept, like boost::matrix, which I would not recommend to the faint of heart.
Note what isn't in the new C++. There's no more memory safety than in the old one. (Fans will say that it's safer if you only use the new features. Now try to call some library that doesn't use them.) So the buffer overflow attacks and crashes will continue.
C++ is the only language to offer hiding without memory safety. Hard-compiled languages from Pascal through Go have hiding with safety, as do all the major scripting languages. C has neither hiding nor safety; the pointer manipulations are right there in the source. There have been safe, hard-compiled languages without garbage collection, most notably Ada and the Modula family. Safety and speed are not incompatible.
If by "safety" you just mean array bounds checks, you can enable bound checks for vector in C++ with a compile-time switch, or implement your own vector subclass that does checks. This may have some performance impact for certain workloads. But that's not the same as real memory safety. I don't think anyone has yet solved the problem of designing a memory safe language without garbage collection. Oh, and according to this benchmark https://days2011.scala-lang.org/sites/days2011/files/ws3-1-Hundt.pdf, Go is about as slow as Java, and is 3x slower than C++.
- precise garbage collection (not that I'm missing it)
Garbage collection does not come free:
- Garbage collectors cause memory usage and CPU overheads. These can vary based on the used algorithms, but they are not negligible, are hard to predict, and are usually not deterministic/real-time. Given C++'s user base that includes users who REQUIRE C-like performance, this means garbage collection can only be an optional feature.
- If a library or piece of code is built to use garbage collection, you cannot use it in a program without garbage collection. You cannot have garbage collection on for part of the program only (or at least, no good solution has been found for this yet). This means that optional garbage collection essentially splits the language into two incompatible dialects.
- As a secondary point, destructors are not just about freeing memory, they also release other resources. With garbage collection, destructors are not called at a predictable point in time, which can cause trouble. This means the Resource-Acquisition-Is-Initialization paradigm that is commonly used by C++ code doesn't work reliably.
PS; What the hell is wrong with formatting of comments? How am I supposed to insert a bulleted list? The FAQ is completely outdated (speaks of multiple comment modes that no longer exist, and normal ul/li tags do not work
Must have missed the part that actually proposes a replacement.
It's in the second link, which is the one that's actually about the blackhat talk, rather than a 4 month old article...
Prevent MITM attacks. Query several notaries and make sure that they fetch and deliver the same certificate you got. OK, I'll buy this.
What if the wifi router at your local coffee shop is the 'man in the middle'? Then he can tweak every copy of the certficate you get.
No. Communication with the notaries is encrypted. The public keys of the notaries that you choose to trust are the root of trust for this system.
First, for those who didn't read TFA, computers play only a small role on a handful of essays. Most of the article is in reference to having a 3rd party grade anonymized tests, rather than leaving it to the professor or TA. During college, I had a job as one of those graders.
We worked for five hours a day in the evening, though we could leave early and get the full pay if we finished all our papers. Most of the tests would be on general topics, but occasionally we'd get tests that required specific knowledge. In those cases, only qualified graders could review them, and we were given cheat sheets to make sure we didn't make factual mistakes. Essays were generally graded on a 1-5 scale (or a 0 if the essay was a blank page or similar). Each essay would be graded by two people, with a third breaking the tie in the event of a disagreement. However, we trained to be extremely consistent in the grading, so disagreements were rare and never more than a one point difference.
A few times a day, we would get fake essays intended to test our grading skills. For example, an essay that was supposed to be a perfect example of a 4 would be given to you with all the rest. If you gave it a 4, you get +1 point. Give it a 3 or 5, you get zero points. Give it a 2 or less, and you lose a point. If you accumulate a lot of points, you get a bonus up to 50% of your pay. If your total score goes too negative, you get fired.
It was a pretty good job, as crappy part-time "work your way through college" jobs go. The best part was whenever we got to grade essays by little kids. They were harder to score accurately -- it's hard to look past the abysmal handwriting and frequent misspellings. But they were frequently adorable and unintentionally hilarious.
It sounds like you were taking this job seriously, and I applaud you for that. However, I would rather have exams be graded by one expert in the field (even though the possibility of bias does exist) than by some student doing a "work your way through college" job, even if there are two of them plus a third in case they disagree.
The classes I have been teaching so far are small enough that we can grade them ourselves without using TAs, and are technical enough that there is not a lot of leeway in grading (compared to, say, a literary criticism essay)... But still, how strict the grading should be for a specific question depends on me knowing what I expect out of a question, what I said about the topic in the lecture, what the course material says about the topic, and what the assignments should have taught about that topic. Then, for partial credit, you can try to guess what the student meant, and whether it reflects at least a partial understanding of the topic. This requires a good understanding of the domain.
I can't say if a computer is better than a human at marking, but in my engineering subjects, when my name was on the test papers I did not get very good grades (actually at least grade lower than expected). But as soon as all the students were given anonymous numbers the grades went up.
What's your name? Adolf Hitler?
(...)Eh, what the hell do I know. I stopped taking classes after I couldn't come up with a good way to echo the feminist sentiment that all women really do have penis envy (...)
Sorry but you are clearly very confused. How is penis envy feminist??? Penis envy is a chauvinistic (that is, the opposite of feminist) concept that Freud came up with at the beginning of the last century. I have the highest respect for Freud and his work, but his main limitation was his total blindness to the social/cultural aspect: He was trying to find biological causes and solutions for what were mostly social and cultural problems, because a) he needed a biological basis to make his work scientific and b) he never questioned the world-view and social order of his society, which was an extremely chauvinistic society. Penis envy is a perfect example of where this kind of bias took him.
Real names make it easy to find people you know on a social network, and to remember the identities of people you connect with on them. Social networks are most valuable for "loose connections" like friends from grade school or non-immediate relatives. You might be interested in their lives, but can't commit the energy or mental capacity to identifying them in the first place or remembering the association function between their pseudonym and their identity. You or others like you might not care about weak social ties, but (evidently) a vast majority of computer users do.
I use my real name on social networks. But that was my decision, based on the kind of stuff I post. That facebook and google want you to force people to use their real name is simply unacceptable in my opinion. Fortunately, they have no real way of enforcing this policy for now at least.
Google and facebook nowadays try to nudge users to provide a cell phone number, but even if they made that a hard requirement (which would turn off many users) phones can be anonymous as well with prepaid in most countries.
(...) and started over with a false name. I only add those people I trust back on, and I don't post pics of myself and make it clear I don't want to be tagged in their photos either (how I long for a "make it impossible to tag me" feature on FB).
Although no-one has been stalking me, the lack of this feature in FB really pisses me off. That's one of the reasons I have switched to google+, which does allow you to block all tags of you until you have vetted them...
I teach physics at a community college. The Wired article made me curious to see how good the Khan videos were. I went to the Khan Academy web site and viewed this one on Newton's law of gravity. He starts off with some kind of interesting, intellectually stimulating stuff about how gravity is ultimately not something we can explain. (He makes one error, but it's not crucial, and it's prefaced with a modest warning that he's not an expert.) Then he writes down Newton's law of gravity without saying anything about where it comes from, how we know it's true, or whether it's been tested by experiment. Next he spends 6 or 7 minutes, almost the entire video, solving a plug-in problem. After that he has a follow-up lecture in which he solves a problem using ratios.
I have not watched this, or any other of his videos, but to be fair, at least from what the wired article says, khan mostly aims at school- or high school-level topics, so it is no surpise that his physics seems basic to someone teaching physics at college level. From TFA:
Khan’s site is unique in that it’s ruthlessly practical: It’s aimed at helping people master the basics, the humble bread-and-butter equations they encounter in elementary and high school.
So the practical, drilling-based approach is deliberate, and I think it has a place in an education, though it also needs to be complemented with other approaches that go more in depth in the "why" rather than just the how: e.g., the difference between a calculus class where you learn to crunch integrals and differential equations and a mathematical analysis class where you (additionally, it is to be hoped) learn to understand the theory.
The US won't "default" no matter what happens.
I also don't think the US will default. But miss ONE payment on interest, and see how the rating agencies downgrade you and your cost of capital shoots up. All that posturing in congress could get very expensive for the treasury.
On the contrary, Reagan knew what Kennedy (JFK) knew: tax cuts INCREASES private investment, which increases jobs, which adds more TAXPAYERS to the system.
Raegan raised taxes three times, according to CNN. http://articles.cnn.com/2011-05-09/opinion/zelizer.reagan.taxes_1_tax-cuts-tax-increases-support-tax-reform?_s=PM:OPINION. The current budget cutting zealots, on the other hand, want to cut expenses while not touching defense, and not touching subsidies to industry (such as ethanol subsidies).
In fact, facebook has bigger privacy problems than google+. Here are a few examples:
Facebook thinks they own your friends list, and actively try to block you from downloading it: http://news.yahoo.com/facebook-blocks-friend-exporter-plugin-053907002.html. Google+, on the other hand, has a "data liberation" tool that lets you download all of your infromation in a few clicks.
Facebook does not let you prevent people from tagging you in photos. You can remove the tags, but not stop them from appearing in the first place. Google+ lets you configure this, and I have set it so all tags of myself have to be vetted by me.
Facebook is run by someone who calls his customers "dumb fucks" for being so stupid to give him their data.
The thing is, this situation is a rare occurrence for most users, and most will be able to seed greater than 1 most of the time.
You are failing at the exact math that you are replying to. For every person greater than 1.00, there is at least one person less than 1.00. This makes it impossible for most users to be over 1.00 most of the time.
No offense meant, but it seems you also fail at math. In the limit you just need one leecher downloading huge amounts of content from all other users, to keep them all at arbitrarily high share ratios.
So Skype allows group of text-only for their free accounts. Group video chat requires that everyone be a Skype subscriber to get access. Will this limitation continue?
Only one participant needs to be a subscriber (otherwise lack of network effect would make this worthless). I make regular group calls with skype, and we've tried the group video call as well. The bigger problem is that video conferences with 3+ participants don't really seem to work acceptably, with audio and video coming and going and participants being dropped... If the google version works (and I plan to try it out next week as soon as my new fancy webcam arrives), that will make more difference to me than the fact it is free.
Which is most likely to cause a responsive change in the viewer: watching violence, or watching sex/nudity? We've had article after article on here about how violent video games are not shown to produce violent individuals. I know Slashdot isn't exactly a bastion of Christian ideals, but surely you can understand that people who hold sex to be sacred don't want their children to be exposed to it in a disrespectful or objectifying context.
I don't care what you hold sacred... as will never be repeated often enough: No one has the right not to be offended. That's what free speech means. And talking about objectification is just hypocrisy: if a videogame, or a tv show showed a woman's breasts in a repsectful, feminist way would it be allowed all of a sudden? I thought not. If you want to keep your kids away from something, that's fine by me, but the responsability of enforcing that is up to you.... don't use that as an excuse to censor the rest of us.
Images of nudity are often burned into an individual's mind; that's a purely biological response.
Only if you live in an environment where nudity is kept hidden and your sexuality is repressed. You should try visiting a sauna in a European country such as austria or finland, where being naked is the normal option for entire families, and no one has any trauma as a consequence.
You don't have to agree that it's wrong to expose children to sex in video games, but surely one can understand that -- barring some exceptional cases -- violence doesn't have nearly the same kind of effect on the mind.
Yeah right, try talking to some people who have seen real violence (as soldiers in a war, or worse as civiians), and see if they have no images burned in their mind...