The best part is that the exploit only executes when the traffic is referred by Google
I suppose if this was a hacking site, it would be considered the best part, but it's actually the worst part because it may go unnoticed. Who's side are you on?
Depends on your definition of hacking. At the very least you'd have to give them points for creativity.
They could really clean up by selling ARM laptops (not netbooks) with Ubuntu. There are a few ARM netbooks on the market right now, and no laptops (AFAIK). Normally you'd have real issues finding a niche that this would work for, given Win/x86 dependence, but I think Canonical could make it work for them.
Wasn't there an article on slashdot not so long ago about being able to identify people and their characteristics (the example given was sexuality) based on the groups they are members of? The issue with modern day threats to our privacy isn't the effects of the discrete pieces of data, it's the threat posed by the aggregate.
You could use a watch... or you could use a second N900. The advantage of the N900 is that since it runs Linux, you could totally make a Beowulf cluster of them.
Do one of the above at night. I'd recommend the girlfriend, since the night sky could be quite romantic if it isn't covered with clouds. Oh, and if you're asking for romance advice on/., you're doing it wrong.
Same here, with the caveat that they provide a means of downloading the content and watching it later (e.g. within 48 hours). The reason for this is that some people have separate peak & off-peak quotas, with off-peak occurring during the times when most people are asleep. Even if they did make it available where I live, I only have the quota to use it in off-peak.
I've played Geneforge, and I can definitely attest it has a good story. There are various factions you can join, but as you progress through the series the 'good' factions become the 'bad' ones and vice versa. I also have vague recollection of it working under WINE, though I'd recommend you test the demos under WINE before buying them.
Talk about selection bias. This is how you do it: get 2 coders, engage in conversation. Have one exercise and the other be the control. Hold conversation again 1 month later.
You don't need to look so far back. I'm young enough that my first system ran DOS+Win3.1, which is a little closer to the bare metal then Win 9x. I'd say the closest analogue to the C64 is the graphic calculator. In my area (Vic, Aus) all students need them for their math exams. Most, if not all, of them can be programmed in variants of BASIC. More importantly, said programs can be used in exams, which provides students with an incentive to write/use them. The manual for my TI-89 Titanium had a fairly comprehensive reference section in the back that explained all the constructs (loops, ifs, etc.), so I can easily see someone getting into programming like that.
I think a major problem with modern CS education is that students are taught that pointer math is "unsafe", and end up afraid to even try it. Maybe this is why so much software ends up getting written in java or c#, and my 3 GHz Core 2 doesn't feel any faster then the 2ghz Athlon I had 8 years ago...
Any program is going to be slow if the programmer is an idiot, regardless of the language used. Written properly, C# (I'm not going argue that Java isn't bloated) can achieve near native speeds, and it does support pointers (it just doesn't use them most of the time). For example, pointers are generally required if you're working with images on the pixel level, since the 'safe' methods have way too much overhead associated with locking. What it really comes down to is that students aren't getting taught the fundamentals. Before if you didn't understand the basics you'd get a segfault - now you can actual stumble along because the more modern languages have runtime checks in place.
Being hackable isn't only of benefit to the hackers - it also increases the value of the device to all other users when the hacker (or someone else benefiting from their work) puts a nice interface on it. Truly hackable systems can do things that seem magical to the average user, even if the user doesn't do any hacking themselves. *
* This is supported by anecdotal evidence of how people react when they see what my N900 is capable of. e.g. remotely connecting to my home system (with a VPN) via RDP.
Let's see some numbers. While the US may constitute the largest demographic of slashdotters (and even then I wouldn't be too surprised if the Europeans were pretty close), I highly doubt they constitute a majority.
Pure Al has a hardness of 2.75 on Moh's scale, so it could be scratched with a pocket knife (or almost any other metal, really). You might be confusing it with corundum (Al2O3), which has a hardness of 9.
if programmers wrote programs the way lawyers make laws, a
int x=0; while(x would be written as a 20 pages of code, at least..
Part of this is because each act has to define all the terminology used. So for that example to be fair you'd need to include definitions for int, printf, and all their dependencies.
IAALS (law student) and generally lawyers like whatever makes their job easier. Don't know what it's like in the US, but in Aus we have easily available revised versions, like this one. Take a look and you'll find that most of them try to avoid legalese as much as possible - you should be able to read them without too much difficulty. (This because there was a movement in law reform a few decades ago that focused on laws being written in plain English.) As for case law, it's normally indexed in a legal encyclopedia, or cross referenced in an online database as you've mentioned. It's been said before, but we have programmers for the same reason we have lawyers - the average person lacks the competency to manipulate the system in the manner they desire. People don't need programmers/lawyers for simple tasks (challenging tickets, etc. in the Magistrates' court / email, browsing, installing software), but they do for the more complex ones because the instructions the system receives can't have any ambiguity. The reason the laws are so complex is so that there isn't any ambiguity or inconsistency. Similarly, programming languages appear complex to the average user because they have to issue instructions in a sufficiently simple and non-ambiguous form.
4. The startup time is much longer than that of 2008.
You can thank WPF for that. I took a look at it when it first came out, but even the most trivial app takes 1+ sec to start up, whereas WinForms apps start virtually instantaneously. Amusingly, Qt has had the XML-based GUI representation that Microsoft tried to achieve with WPF for way longer, and it's also reasonably fast.
Slashdot Mirror
The best part is that the exploit only executes when the traffic is referred by Google
I suppose if this was a hacking site, it would be considered the best part, but it's actually the worst part because it may go unnoticed. Who's side are you on?
Depends on your definition of hacking. At the very least you'd have to give them points for creativity.
They could really clean up by selling ARM laptops (not netbooks) with Ubuntu. There are a few ARM netbooks on the market right now, and no laptops (AFAIK). Normally you'd have real issues finding a niche that this would work for, given Win/x86 dependence, but I think Canonical could make it work for them.
Wasn't there an article on slashdot not so long ago about being able to identify people and their characteristics (the example given was sexuality) based on the groups they are members of?
The issue with modern day threats to our privacy isn't the effects of the discrete pieces of data, it's the threat posed by the aggregate.
There's a pretty big difference between opt-in and opt-out.
You must be American
I think we just found a replacement for the long running /. tradition of car analogies.
You could use a watch ... or you could use a second N900. The advantage of the N900 is that since it runs Linux, you could totally make a Beowulf cluster of them.
There's a reason it's the most popular distro. Just because you can do something the hard way, doesn't mean you should.
Do one of the above at night. I'd recommend the girlfriend, since the night sky could be quite romantic if it isn't covered with clouds. /., you're doing it wrong.
Oh, and if you're asking for romance advice on
Same here, with the caveat that they provide a means of downloading the content and watching it later (e.g. within 48 hours). The reason for this is that some people have separate peak & off-peak quotas, with off-peak occurring during the times when most people are asleep. Even if they did make it available where I live, I only have the quota to use it in off-peak.
I've played Geneforge, and I can definitely attest it has a good story. There are various factions you can join, but as you progress through the series the 'good' factions become the 'bad' ones and vice versa. I also have vague recollection of it working under WINE, though I'd recommend you test the demos under WINE before buying them.
Talk about selection bias. This is how you do it: get 2 coders, engage in conversation. Have one exercise and the other be the control. Hold conversation again 1 month later.
Anyone know anything about the AI behind this? Tetris is NP-Complete, so how is it solving it?
Actually, you'd probably just slashdot their enrolments.
We need something new.
How about cold fusion?
You don't need to look so far back. I'm young enough that my first system ran DOS+Win3.1, which is a little closer to the bare metal then Win 9x.
I'd say the closest analogue to the C64 is the graphic calculator. In my area (Vic, Aus) all students need them for their math exams. Most, if not all, of them can be programmed in variants of BASIC. More importantly, said programs can be used in exams, which provides students with an incentive to write/use them. The manual for my TI-89 Titanium had a fairly comprehensive reference section in the back that explained all the constructs (loops, ifs, etc.), so I can easily see someone getting into programming like that.
I think a major problem with modern CS education is that students are taught that pointer math is "unsafe", and end up afraid to even try it. Maybe this is why so much software ends up getting written in java or c#, and my 3 GHz Core 2 doesn't feel any faster then the 2ghz Athlon I had 8 years ago...
Any program is going to be slow if the programmer is an idiot, regardless of the language used. Written properly, C# (I'm not going argue that Java isn't bloated) can achieve near native speeds, and it does support pointers (it just doesn't use them most of the time). For example, pointers are generally required if you're working with images on the pixel level, since the 'safe' methods have way too much overhead associated with locking.
What it really comes down to is that students aren't getting taught the fundamentals. Before if you didn't understand the basics you'd get a segfault - now you can actual stumble along because the more modern languages have runtime checks in place.
Being hackable isn't only of benefit to the hackers - it also increases the value of the device to all other users when the hacker (or someone else benefiting from their work) puts a nice interface on it. Truly hackable systems can do things that seem magical to the average user, even if the user doesn't do any hacking themselves. *
* This is supported by anecdotal evidence of how people react when they see what my N900 is capable of. e.g. remotely connecting to my home system (with a VPN) via RDP.
Say someone pisses in your pool...
How do you get the piss out of the pool?
Maxwell's demon
Considering this is a U.S. website
OK, I'll grant you that much...
most of the readers here are from the U.S.
Let's see some numbers. While the US may constitute the largest demographic of slashdotters (and even then I wouldn't be too surprised if the Europeans were pretty close), I highly doubt they constitute a majority.
Pure Al has a hardness of 2.75 on Moh's scale, so it could be scratched with a pocket knife (or almost any other metal, really). You might be confusing it with corundum (Al2O3), which has a hardness of 9.
Source
if programmers wrote programs the way lawyers make laws, a
int x=0; while(x
would be written as a 20 pages of code, at least..
Part of this is because each act has to define all the terminology used. So for that example to be fair you'd need to include definitions for int, printf, and all their dependencies.
IAALS (law student) and generally lawyers like whatever makes their job easier. Don't know what it's like in the US, but in Aus we have easily available revised versions, like this one. Take a look and you'll find that most of them try to avoid legalese as much as possible - you should be able to read them without too much difficulty. (This because there was a movement in law reform a few decades ago that focused on laws being written in plain English.)
As for case law, it's normally indexed in a legal encyclopedia, or cross referenced in an online database as you've mentioned.
It's been said before, but we have programmers for the same reason we have lawyers - the average person lacks the competency to manipulate the system in the manner they desire. People don't need programmers/lawyers for simple tasks (challenging tickets, etc. in the Magistrates' court / email, browsing, installing software), but they do for the more complex ones because the instructions the system receives can't have any ambiguity. The reason the laws are so complex is so that there isn't any ambiguity or inconsistency. Similarly, programming languages appear complex to the average user because they have to issue instructions in a sufficiently simple and non-ambiguous form.
GIVE HIM THE VEXATIOUS LITIGATION!!!
(posted to avoid caps filter. I wanted it to be yelling)
4. The startup time is much longer than that of 2008.
You can thank WPF for that. I took a look at it when it first came out, but even the most trivial app takes 1+ sec to start up, whereas WinForms apps start virtually instantaneously.
Amusingly, Qt has had the XML-based GUI representation that Microsoft tried to achieve with WPF for way longer, and it's also reasonably fast.