Of course, one problem with america's armed citizenry is that non-US citizens are the one group muggers can easily identify as definitely _not_ carrying a gun. So that gives them all the more incentive to go after tourists.
I'm guessing that, since US giun laws are carried out on a state by state level, for the most part it's even pretty tough for Americans from other states to take guns when they go on holiday within the Union.
So the upshot is, when a state like Florida brings in concealed carry laws, they may get a measure of increased safety for their own citizens, at the expense of increased risk to those from out-of-state. Good job Florida's economy doesn't rely much on tourism, then.
So, on top of all the valuables the guy's already carrying, you want him to invest in an expensive piece of lethal hardware, to give the muggers an even juicier target to steal - one that, once it makes it onto the black market, will do considerably more damage than a stolen iPod.
Either that, or you expect him to actually shoot anyone who tries to mug him. Now, I have no love for muggers - I've only been mugged once, it was unpleasant, and the bastard who did it to me deserves jail time - but I don't think he deserved a potentially fatal gunshot wound, and don't think I'd have been able to supply him with one before he pulled his knife or gun and, being a lot more desperate and with a lot less to lose than me, scared me into dropping the gun too.
US 'grilling' seems to have two meanings - there's the George Foreman sense - which we Brits would tend to call 'griddling'; and there's the outdoor sense, which in britain we call 'barbecuing'. Occasionaly, British people will use phrases like 'cooked over a grill', or 'flame grilled', to describe grilling in the American sense.
When we say grill, we mean what you call broiling.
"He looked in all of his jeans' pockets", however, is probably grammatically correct, but frankly nowadays jeans can be thought of as an adjective when applied to pockets, and you could more effectively render that thought via a sentence like
"He looked in all of his jeans pockets"
(Actually, I think the first version vaguely implies that he's looking in the pockets of all of his jeans, whereas the second one suggests that he is looking in all of the pockets of his jeans - which is a curious distinction to draw from an apostrophe, but grammar can be funny that way, and it shows that any list you ever come across of 'how apostrophes work' is generally going to be woerfully inadequate)
Similarly, I have no idea why the assumption is that the license under discussion belongs to the Creative Commons and should therefore be described as the Creative Commons' License - that would be rather like demanding that the GPL be called GNU's Public License. It's a license, its class is 'Creative Commons', so it's a Creative-Commons License, much as the GPL is a public license of class GNU. The sentence in the post should probably have read "... version 2.0 of the Creative-Commons Licenses", in that case.
It's pretty common for proper nouns qualifying common nouns get rendered as adjectives like this, rather than as possessives. Consider "Microsoft operating system", "London restaurants", or, perhaps most relevantly, given the plural, "United States foreign policy", or "Macdonalds hamburgers".
"...if your biggest threat is an attacker reading the binary db image from disk..."
Where are your offsite backups stored? Who has access to them? How are they transferred? I know of several companies whose database backups are physically taken to the bank by junior sysadmin staff - what if they were mugged, or their car was stolen while the backups were in transit? If you use an electronic solution to transfer your backups to a datawarehouse facility, who has access to your backup images on disk?
If someone wanted to read database contents, the offsite backup would be an obvious point of attack... and then you might wish you'd used physical file encryption on your database.
But... that would have stopped me from being able to write code like this:
10 LET a$ = INKEY$() 20 LET b = ASC(a$) 30 GOTO b 32 PRINT "you pressed -space-" 33 PRINT "you pressed -!-"... 126 PRINT "you pressed -~-" 130 END
Run renum on that and see what a mess it makes...
More seriously, I hated renum routines because when you've got nicely spaced out subroutines set up at memorable lines like 1000, 2000, 5000, 10000, and so on, once you've run renum they end up at 430, 470, 520 and so on. Still, you could always get round that by having a few lines at the top of your code declaring things like:
100 LET SUB_HANDLE_INPUT = 1000
and your subroutine calls look like:
160 GOSUB SUB_HANDLE_INPUT
then when you renumbered, and that sub turned up at line 540, you just edit line 100 and change the value of SUB_HANDLE_INPUT.
I guess the point is, a form of structured programming's quite achievable in BASIC - you can pass subroutine locations around in variables - even do a crude kind of function-pointer-arithmetic, which might even allow you to code rudimentary 'classes' in it. It was definitely a fun language to stretch the boundaries of.
Combine several of those boxes into one with this: The XDA II.
Phone (with GSM and GPRS), camera, PDA (okay, so it's a PocketPC, but that's not as bad as it used to be), bluetooth; GPS available, or alternatively you could switch in a memory stick full of music.
The technology's almost where you want it to be...
Okay, so there's a quantity of potential magnetic energy locked up in a permanent magnet. He's created a motor that, every second, uses a chunk of wall socket energy to extract a bit of this magnetic energy, and convert it into kinetic energy. As you say, this may well be true, and is certainly not a violation of thermodynamics. Whether the amount of kinetic energy is actually greater than or less than the amount of wall socket energy needed to extract it is by the by, from a thermodynamic point of view. But what is interesting is how much energy it takes to create the permanent magnet in the first place.
I guess you can, theoretically, create magnets by just leaving a chunk of magnetizable material in the earth's magnetic field, stealing a bit of the earth's core's kinetic energy in order to create magnets - but this does take time. You coiuld just dig up chunks of iron that have been exposed to the earth's magnetic field for a long time and use those, but they're not very good permanent magnets, and this would be a kind of 'magnetic fossil fuel', with only a finite, depletable supply in existence. Or you can generate them using electromagnetic fields - which of course require more of that wallsocket energy.
Point is, these little stores of energy aren't free, the energy in them has to come from somewhere. And unless you can make the magnets at the motor factory more efficiently than you can extract the magnetic energy from the magnet in the motor itself (which will be pretty hard, principally because of entropy gradients), you'd be better off just using a conventional electric motor, cutting out the middle man, and using the wallsocket energy directly to make kinetic energy.
Taxes aren't about paying for the things on which they are levied. When I buy something from the store and pay sales tax, that sales tax isn't paying for the item I purchased - it's paying for the existence of the government. When I pay tax on my income, that's not paying for the provision of my services - it's paying for the government again. So, just because I paid a copmpany for some LAN equipment, and the electricity company some money for the electricity to power it, makes NO DIFFERENCE to whether or not the government can tax it. the government can tax what it likes, when it likes, up to whatever level the people can stand, or demand, according to its political and fiscal inclinations. Hell, way back when, in my country, they used to tax people for having windows (not Windows, although that's not such a bad idea...) on their houses - not at the point of sale, but annually - just because it was as good an indication as any of the wealth of a house owner.
Taxation is just a way for governments to pull a little bit of money out of the economy as it moves round. Remember, money isn't created or destroyed (At least not by taxation), simply handed from one person to another. When I hand some money to a shopkeeper, he has to give a bit of it to the government. When I own assets, like houses, which have a certain value, the government takes that to mean I have a bit of cash available, and asks to take a bit of it each year. When I do work for someone and they pay me, I have to give a bit of that to the government. But all that money comes back out of the government once again (albeit unevenly distributed so that a lot of it ends up in the private bank accounts of large investors in big public suppliers, but a large proportion ends up as wages of teachers, payments to suppliers of tarmac, welfare payments, and so on - point is, it flows round the economy in much the same way as the bit of the money you spend that doesn't go to the government did).
All taxation is is friction. It slows the rush of money round the economy and diverts some of it according to overarching social need, rather than individual preferences.
Well, that isn't so weird if you think about it. Companies are taxed in most places on their profits; it's usually called corporation tax or something similar. But if the only way you counted profits was to, once a year, check each company's bank balance and take away a percentage of it, it wouldn't take companies long to figure out that, just before you come round to check their bank balance, they can use all their money to buy a bunch of stuff, zeroing their bank balance, and ending up instead with just a bunch of office equipment, then sell the stuff the next month, and get pretty much all their money back.
So, most tax officials figured that it was best to tax the company on the total value of all its realisable assets. So, if you own a bunch of office equipment, you get to pay tax on that too - simply because you own it.
I reckon if you can find a state that doesn't tax business assets, you'd find it would be the registered tax address of a lot of companies who don't even do business there, and that all of those companies books would show that they had very small bank balances, but rather more office furniture and real estate assets than they need just to get their job done...
Missing the whole damned point, which is that port knocking doesn't require an open port.
There are ways to avoid replay attacks, however, without opening a port - or at least make them less effective. One that springs to mind would be to vary the ports knocked according to the source IP address doing the knocking. Take the four byte source IP address, combine with several bytes of shared secret key, apply a hash algorithm such as MD5, divide up into two-byte chunks, and use them as a sequence of port numbers to knock.
The port knock sequence is then ONLY valid for requests from a particular IP address, and won't work if replayed blindly from a different IP address (there is, of course, a performance cost on the server - every rejected connection attempt needs to be examined to see if it is a valid start to a port knock sequence for the originating IP address).
This means a malicious third party can't easily construct a port knock sequence for their own IP address, because they would need to know the secret key. IP spoofing is possible, but inclusion of a sequence number in the hashed data would make it tough for a replay to succeed under IP spoofing.
Only attacks I could see working would be a port flooding DOS that ties up the server on calculating hashes for random port activity (but that's no worse than what's possible on an open server), or an 'interference' attack, where you interfere with someone's connection sequence by sending spoofed packets from their IP address to random ports - preventing them from connecting.
Oh, and of course once the knock is accepted and the port is opened... that's when you're really vulnerable.
3) It will break some applications (more than.info already did possibly)
When will people learn that the correct end to a valid internet domain regex isn't [a-zA-Z]{2,3}? Not only is there.info, there's.coop,.aero,.name,.museum, and going way way back there's always been.arpa (yes, it does still exist, and yes it's still routable).
A sound scientific argument - based, unfortunately, on the unproven assertion that the only part of a soundwave that's of interest to the human ear is that part composed of superimposed sinewaves with frequencies up to and including 22KHz.
Yes, it's true that humans can't 'hear' pure sinewaves at frequencies exceeding about 20KHz, but the mechanisms in the human ear that convert mechanical vibrations into electrochemical responses in the brain and then into conscious sensations or emotions are... well... not exactly trivial. Just because when you turn the frequency dial up, there's a point for every person where they say 'nope, can't hear it any more' doesn't mean there's no signal processing going on.
Your definition of 'English style' must be somewhat different to mine. And I'm English.
You said: In an English-style parliamentary democracy, a party that gets 3% of the overall vote gets 3% of the legislative seats, and legislators don't have districts that they are responsible for (unless the party assigns them one after the fact)
That sounds like a pure PR parliamentary system to me, along the lines of some European parliaments, but most of those have some form of localised representation. Perhaps you're thinking of the German Bundestag, or the Polish system.
The 'mother of all parliaments', the British parliament (there is no English parliament, although there is a Scottish one, and a Welsh assembly. The Northern Ireland assembly is in something of a mess right now...) consists of two houses - an upper house of lifetime political appointees, judges and bishops called the House of Lords (the less said about which the better), and a lower house (and the main legistative chamber), called the House of Commons, consisting of elected representatives of local constituencies called members of parliament - MPs. In each constituency the MP is the candidate who receives the most votes - what is known as the 'first past the post' system (note, you don't need the support of the majority of constituents to be their MP - just more votes than any of your rivals - thus it's possible for a party to come second in every seat in the country to candidates of two other parties, polling a larger proportion of the vote than either of the other parties overall, and not receive a single seat in parliament). To form a government, a political party typically needs to win at least half of the constituency seats. Although if no party were in that position, the largest party would need the support of one or more smaller parties to form a coalition government, in practice there have only rarely been coalition governments in british history, and they have tended to be weak. Since the government can call an election whenever it feels like it, coalitions have tended to be shortlived and replaced with majority governments in short order.
So, in the British parliament, a party that gets three percent of the overall vote either gets no seats at all (in the majority of cases), or, if these 3% of the votes are concentrated in a very small geographical area, may be able to win several parliamentary seats - hell, if there were enough parties to choose from, you could theoretically win over half the parliamentary seats and form the government with just 3% of the popular vote.
MPs represent (theoretically) their geographical constituency, as well as, of course, (in practice) the companies of which they are directors, the trade unions which support them, or their government department, if they are one of the 200 or so members of parliament who are appointed to government positions.
No idea what this 'English-style' parliamentary democracy you're talking about is... it sounds like a nice idea:)
Maybe you'll take this advice in the spirit it's intended, maybe you'll just get more riled up...
Spelling well is a courtesy to others. It does you no end of good in your personal and professional life to be able to express your thoughts clearly using the conventions of written language that are implicitly and unambiguously understood by your audience, be it a college tutor, a manager, a girlfriend, or a bunch of strangers who you're trying to communicate with through an online discussion board. If you feel you have a problem with spelling, there's a simple way to get better at it: Read more.
And not just stuff you find online - read edited material. Books, newspapers, stuff that's been subjected to scrutiny by people who care about the conventions of spelling, grammar and punctuation. It'll help, trust me. And it'll do you a lot more good than just having a chip on your shoulder about all those jerks who keep complaining about your spelling.
Read it a little more carefully. The poster you're attacking wasn't repeating the gambler's fallacy, as I'm sure you believed they were.
The gambler's fallacy is simple: It's the belief that since 'it will all even out in the end', if you have a run of bad luck, it has to be countered by a run of good luck. In more specific terms, it's the belief that after a run of heads, a coin's more likely to come up tails because things have to come out fifty fifty in the long run.
This is, of course, rubbish, and you would be right to point out the stupidity of anyone who believed such nonsense.
However, our friend the original poster was not making this point. What he's actually saying is that if you're playing a game at a dollar a go, and when a coin comes up heads, you win two bucks, and when it comes up tails you lose your dollar, if you've already lost five bucks, the chances of you winning it back and coming out ahead in the long run are pretty low - a lot lower than your chances of coming out behind overall. Similarly, if you're five bucks ahead of the game, you may as well keep playing, because there's no magic karmic wheel that's going to come round and insist that you lose five dollars to even things out; the coin has no memory, and in the long run, you're likely to still be ahead of the game in the end.
In other words, 'quit while your ahead' is bad advice in a game with no house margin.
I'm not an American, but I have seen one on TV. Quite a lot of them, in fact, and I've noticed that many of them spend much of their time waving a badge and spouting the name of a three letter agency which gives them special jurisdiction in some field or other. So I believe I can say with the full authority given to a subject of the Hollywood cultural empire that the hunting down of counterfeiters is not an FBI responsibility, but rather falls into the hands of the Secret Service, or at least those parts of it which aren't busy protecting the president.
Why do I know this stuff, when I'd have trouble telling you which British police organisation is responsible for tracking down counterfeiters of sterling currency?
Possibly for the same reason that when I go and see a film in a British cinema today, I have to sit through an FBI warning against copying any film or film-related-article that I am privileged to witness during my time in the auditorium. What interest the FBI has in my behaviour is a little beyond me...
Hmmm. The paintjob. Yes, it is pretty, isn't it. but... I don't know if you've ever noticed, but automotive paint scratches. Really really easily. And you have to wash it with soap and water and wax it to keep the showroom shine. And greasy finger marks look really bad on a fresh waxed surface. Okay, so your laptop's not going to be exposed to some of the dirt and grime a car gets - but over time, laptops do pick up dirt, and get dragged in an out of laptop bags, and slid across desks, and have stuff piled on top of them.
I'm really not sure it's a good idea to paint a laptop with car paint...
Re:Why does C# have redundant syntax?
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How C# Was Made
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· Score: 2, Informative
Actually, it's worse than you think...
int i = new int(1);
No heap allocation has occurred, we've just allocated an int32 on the stack and dumped the output of the int32 constructor into it. That new keyword is really just an indicator that tells us we're calling a constructor.
And how about this:
int[] ints = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5};
That just allocated a new heap object, and there's no new keyword in sight...
(Before anyone argues that that's just like string s = "hello", it isn't... string literals are constants, they're pulled out of the interned string pool when they're referenced. Array literals like the one above are created in bytecode on the fly.)
Re:your entire view is wrong
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How C# Was Made
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· Score: 1
Odd that you talk about OO programming as involving stacks of method calls... that sounds more like procedural, function-pointer-led thinking than OO, interface-led thinking to me.
Let me break this out into terms I understand. Let's say methods P and R belong to a class, C. C implements interface I, defined in a thirdparty library. I declares the signature of method R. The library also defines another class, D, which has a method, Q, which takes as an argument an object of type I.
So, we have an instance of C, and its method P has been called. This code calles Q on an instance of D, passing in itself as an argument of type I. Because Q knows the I interface, it can call R(), so it does. R() throws an exception, expecting it to somehow make its way back to P()... and that's where it breaks down.
What right does R() have to assume that the code anywhere above it in the callstack comes from the same library? Why can't it have been code in a completely different library that instantiated C, and called Q()? So why should R be allowed to throw any exceptions at all that Q doesn't know about? This is what Java's typed, checked exceptions give you - the ability for the interface I to declare what exceptions implementing code is allowed to throw.
I don't see how you can end up in the situation you described without the method Q having some interest in the behavior of R...
Re:What did they miss about checked exceptions
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How C# Was Made
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Oh, he understands, alright. Object oriented programming is all about exposing clean programming interfaces, and what exceptions your objects' methods throw are as much a part of those interfaces as their parameter lists and return types. The point of interfaces is that they abstract you away from implementation. When I call a method called getWeatherForecast(), I want it to return me the weather forecast, or throw me a WeatherNotAvailableException. I don't want it to sometimes throw a DbException because it had to go and talk to a database, or sometimes an IOException because it's reading from a cached file, or sometimes throw a NetException because it's talking through a socket, or sometimes throw a SoapException because it's trying to reach a web service. None of these things are of any possible interest to my code - I have no interest in considering how that component is going about its business of getting me a weather forecast. Were you never taught to consider objects as black boxes? The implementation of an object's method is not the concern of the calling code, and that is why we wrap exceptions. All the time. Now, it may be that the WeatherNotAvailableException might have some information attached to it that could be of use to a human troubleshooting the source of the lack of availability - but this information should be contextually relevant. Randomly propagating exceptions from inside the black box of a method are not contextually useful. so, I call getWeatherForecast() and I get back a SocketException: 'The host could not be found'. Great. That's meaningless to my code. It doesn't know what host the method was trying to reach, nor is it really interested. A WeatherNotAvailableException saying 'The weather service at http://weather.example.com/ could not be reached' would be a lot more useful.
Ah, now there's a fuel solution they hadn't considered. Did you have some sort of hot-air solution in mind, or are we talking about extracting all of his hydrogen?
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Of course, one problem with america's armed citizenry is that non-US citizens are the one group muggers can easily identify as definitely _not_ carrying a gun. So that gives them all the more incentive to go after tourists.
I'm guessing that, since US giun laws are carried out on a state by state level, for the most part it's even pretty tough for Americans from other states to take guns when they go on holiday within the Union.
So the upshot is, when a state like Florida brings in concealed carry laws, they may get a measure of increased safety for their own citizens, at the expense of increased risk to those from out-of-state. Good job Florida's economy doesn't rely much on tourism, then.
So, on top of all the valuables the guy's already carrying, you want him to invest in an expensive piece of lethal hardware, to give the muggers an even juicier target to steal - one that, once it makes it onto the black market, will do considerably more damage than a stolen iPod.
Either that, or you expect him to actually shoot anyone who tries to mug him. Now, I have no love for muggers - I've only been mugged once, it was unpleasant, and the bastard who did it to me deserves jail time - but I don't think he deserved a potentially fatal gunshot wound, and don't think I'd have been able to supply him with one before he pulled his knife or gun and, being a lot more desperate and with a lot less to lose than me, scared me into dropping the gun too.
US 'grilling' seems to have two meanings - there's the George Foreman sense - which we Brits would tend to call 'griddling'; and there's the outdoor sense, which in britain we call 'barbecuing'. Occasionaly, British people will use phrases like 'cooked over a grill', or 'flame grilled', to describe grilling in the American sense.
When we say grill, we mean what you call broiling.
Well, yes, because there's no posessive there.
"He looked in all of his jeans' pockets", however, is probably grammatically correct, but frankly nowadays jeans can be thought of as an adjective when applied to pockets, and you could more effectively render that thought via a sentence like
"He looked in all of his jeans pockets"
(Actually, I think the first version vaguely implies that he's looking in the pockets of all of his jeans, whereas the second one suggests that he is looking in all of the pockets of his jeans - which is a curious distinction to draw from an apostrophe, but grammar can be funny that way, and it shows that any list you ever come across of 'how apostrophes work' is generally going to be woerfully inadequate)
Similarly, I have no idea why the assumption is that the license under discussion belongs to the Creative Commons and should therefore be described as the Creative Commons' License - that would be rather like demanding that the GPL be called GNU's Public License. It's a license, its class is 'Creative Commons', so it's a Creative-Commons License, much as the GPL is a public license of class GNU. The sentence in the post should probably have read "... version 2.0 of the Creative-Commons Licenses", in that case.
It's pretty common for proper nouns qualifying common nouns get rendered as adjectives like this, rather than as possessives. Consider "Microsoft operating system", "London restaurants", or, perhaps most relevantly, given the plural, "United States foreign policy", or "Macdonalds hamburgers".
"...if your biggest threat is an attacker reading the binary db image from disk..."
Where are your offsite backups stored? Who has access to them? How are they transferred? I know of several companies whose database backups are physically taken to the bank by junior sysadmin staff - what if they were mugged, or their car was stolen while the backups were in transit? If you use an electronic solution to transfer your backups to a datawarehouse facility, who has access to your backup images on disk?
If someone wanted to read database contents, the offsite backup would be an obvious point of attack... and then you might wish you'd used physical file encryption on your database.
But... that would have stopped me from being able to write code like this:
...
10 LET a$ = INKEY$()
20 LET b = ASC(a$)
30 GOTO b
32 PRINT "you pressed -space-"
33 PRINT "you pressed -!-"
126 PRINT "you pressed -~-"
130 END
Run renum on that and see what a mess it makes...
More seriously, I hated renum routines because when you've got nicely spaced out subroutines set up at memorable lines like 1000, 2000, 5000, 10000, and so on, once you've run renum they end up at 430, 470, 520 and so on. Still, you could always get round that by having a few lines at the top of your code declaring things like:
100 LET SUB_HANDLE_INPUT = 1000
and your subroutine calls look like:
160 GOSUB SUB_HANDLE_INPUT
then when you renumbered, and that sub turned up at line 540, you just edit line 100 and change the value of SUB_HANDLE_INPUT.
I guess the point is, a form of structured programming's quite achievable in BASIC - you can pass subroutine locations around in variables - even do a crude kind of function-pointer-arithmetic, which might even allow you to code rudimentary 'classes' in it. It was definitely a fun language to stretch the boundaries of.
Combine several of those boxes into one with this: The XDA II.
Phone (with GSM and GPRS), camera, PDA (okay, so it's a PocketPC, but that's not as bad as it used to be), bluetooth; GPS available, or alternatively you could switch in a memory stick full of music.
The technology's almost where you want it to be...
Then any CDs you've collected will have been collected since your childhood, right?
So your point is...?
Okay, so there's a quantity of potential magnetic energy locked up in a permanent magnet. He's created a motor that, every second, uses a chunk of wall socket energy to extract a bit of this magnetic energy, and convert it into kinetic energy. As you say, this may well be true, and is certainly not a violation of thermodynamics. Whether the amount of kinetic energy is actually greater than or less than the amount of wall socket energy needed to extract it is by the by, from a thermodynamic point of view. But what is interesting is how much energy it takes to create the permanent magnet in the first place.
I guess you can, theoretically, create magnets by just leaving a chunk of magnetizable material in the earth's magnetic field, stealing a bit of the earth's core's kinetic energy in order to create magnets - but this does take time. You coiuld just dig up chunks of iron that have been exposed to the earth's magnetic field for a long time and use those, but they're not very good permanent magnets, and this would be a kind of 'magnetic fossil fuel', with only a finite, depletable supply in existence. Or you can generate them using electromagnetic fields - which of course require more of that wallsocket energy.
Point is, these little stores of energy aren't free, the energy in them has to come from somewhere. And unless you can make the magnets at the motor factory more efficiently than you can extract the magnetic energy from the magnet in the motor itself (which will be pretty hard, principally because of entropy gradients), you'd be better off just using a conventional electric motor, cutting out the middle man, and using the wallsocket energy directly to make kinetic energy.
Just how do you think taxation actually works?
Taxes aren't about paying for the things on which they are levied. When I buy something from the store and pay sales tax, that sales tax isn't paying for the item I purchased - it's paying for the existence of the government. When I pay tax on my income, that's not paying for the provision of my services - it's paying for the government again. So, just because I paid a copmpany for some LAN equipment, and the electricity company some money for the electricity to power it, makes NO DIFFERENCE to whether or not the government can tax it. the government can tax what it likes, when it likes, up to whatever level the people can stand, or demand, according to its political and fiscal inclinations. Hell, way back when, in my country, they used to tax people for having windows (not Windows, although that's not such a bad idea...) on their houses - not at the point of sale, but annually - just because it was as good an indication as any of the wealth of a house owner.
Taxation is just a way for governments to pull a little bit of money out of the economy as it moves round. Remember, money isn't created or destroyed (At least not by taxation), simply handed from one person to another. When I hand some money to a shopkeeper, he has to give a bit of it to the government. When I own assets, like houses, which have a certain value, the government takes that to mean I have a bit of cash available, and asks to take a bit of it each year. When I do work for someone and they pay me, I have to give a bit of that to the government. But all that money comes back out of the government once again (albeit unevenly distributed so that a lot of it ends up in the private bank accounts of large investors in big public suppliers, but a large proportion ends up as wages of teachers, payments to suppliers of tarmac, welfare payments, and so on - point is, it flows round the economy in much the same way as the bit of the money you spend that doesn't go to the government did).
All taxation is is friction. It slows the rush of money round the economy and diverts some of it according to overarching social need, rather than individual preferences.
Well, that isn't so weird if you think about it. Companies are taxed in most places on their profits; it's usually called corporation tax or something similar. But if the only way you counted profits was to, once a year, check each company's bank balance and take away a percentage of it, it wouldn't take companies long to figure out that, just before you come round to check their bank balance, they can use all their money to buy a bunch of stuff, zeroing their bank balance, and ending up instead with just a bunch of office equipment, then sell the stuff the next month, and get pretty much all their money back.
So, most tax officials figured that it was best to tax the company on the total value of all its realisable assets. So, if you own a bunch of office equipment, you get to pay tax on that too - simply because you own it.
I reckon if you can find a state that doesn't tax business assets, you'd find it would be the registered tax address of a lot of companies who don't even do business there, and that all of those companies books would show that they had very small bank balances, but rather more office furniture and real estate assets than they need just to get their job done...
Missing the whole damned point, which is that port knocking doesn't require an open port.
There are ways to avoid replay attacks, however, without opening a port - or at least make them less effective. One that springs to mind would be to vary the ports knocked according to the source IP address doing the knocking. Take the four byte source IP address, combine with several bytes of shared secret key, apply a hash algorithm such as MD5, divide up into two-byte chunks, and use them as a sequence of port numbers to knock.
The port knock sequence is then ONLY valid for requests from a particular IP address, and won't work if replayed blindly from a different IP address (there is, of course, a performance cost on the server - every rejected connection attempt needs to be examined to see if it is a valid start to a port knock sequence for the originating IP address).
This means a malicious third party can't easily construct a port knock sequence for their own IP address, because they would need to know the secret key. IP spoofing is possible, but inclusion of a sequence number in the hashed data would make it tough for a replay to succeed under IP spoofing.
Only attacks I could see working would be a port flooding DOS that ties up the server on calculating hashes for random port activity (but that's no worse than what's possible on an open server), or an 'interference' attack, where you interfere with someone's connection sequence by sending spoofed packets from their IP address to random ports - preventing them from connecting.
Oh, and of course once the knock is accepted and the port is opened... that's when you're really vulnerable.
3) It will break some applications (more than .info already did possibly)
.info, there's .coop, .aero, .name, .museum, and going way way back there's always been .arpa (yes, it does still exist, and yes it's still routable).
When will people learn that the correct end to a valid internet domain regex isn't [a-zA-Z]{2,3}? Not only is there
A sound scientific argument - based, unfortunately, on the unproven assertion that the only part of a soundwave that's of interest to the human ear is that part composed of superimposed sinewaves with frequencies up to and including 22KHz.
Yes, it's true that humans can't 'hear' pure sinewaves at frequencies exceeding about 20KHz, but the mechanisms in the human ear that convert mechanical vibrations into electrochemical responses in the brain and then into conscious sensations or emotions are... well... not exactly trivial. Just because when you turn the frequency dial up, there's a point for every person where they say 'nope, can't hear it any more' doesn't mean there's no signal processing going on.
Case not proven, I'm afraid.
Yeah, what with all the DJ prattle and advertising noise, the quantity of music signal is pretty low...
Your definition of 'English style' must be somewhat different to mine. And I'm English.
:)
You said: In an English-style parliamentary democracy, a party that gets 3% of the overall vote gets 3% of the legislative seats, and legislators don't have districts that they are responsible for (unless the party assigns them one after the fact)
That sounds like a pure PR parliamentary system to me, along the lines of some European parliaments, but most of those have some form of localised representation. Perhaps you're thinking of the German Bundestag, or the Polish system.
The 'mother of all parliaments', the British parliament (there is no English parliament, although there is a Scottish one, and a Welsh assembly. The Northern Ireland assembly is in something of a mess right now...) consists of two houses - an upper house of lifetime political appointees, judges and bishops called the House of Lords (the less said about which the better), and a lower house (and the main legistative chamber), called the House of Commons, consisting of elected representatives of local constituencies called members of parliament - MPs. In each constituency the MP is the candidate who receives the most votes - what is known as the 'first past the post' system (note, you don't need the support of the majority of constituents to be their MP - just more votes than any of your rivals - thus it's possible for a party to come second in every seat in the country to candidates of two other parties, polling a larger proportion of the vote than either of the other parties overall, and not receive a single seat in parliament). To form a government, a political party typically needs to win at least half of the constituency seats. Although if no party were in that position, the largest party would need the support of one or more smaller parties to form a coalition government, in practice there have only rarely been coalition governments in british history, and they have tended to be weak. Since the government can call an election whenever it feels like it, coalitions have tended to be shortlived and replaced with majority governments in short order.
So, in the British parliament, a party that gets three percent of the overall vote either gets no seats at all (in the majority of cases), or, if these 3% of the votes are concentrated in a very small geographical area, may be able to win several parliamentary seats - hell, if there were enough parties to choose from, you could theoretically win over half the parliamentary seats and form the government with just 3% of the popular vote.
MPs represent (theoretically) their geographical constituency, as well as, of course, (in practice) the companies of which they are directors, the trade unions which support them, or their government department, if they are one of the 200 or so members of parliament who are appointed to government positions.
No idea what this 'English-style' parliamentary democracy you're talking about is... it sounds like a nice idea
Maybe you'll take this advice in the spirit it's intended, maybe you'll just get more riled up...
Spelling well is a courtesy to others. It does you no end of good in your personal and professional life to be able to express your thoughts clearly using the conventions of written language that are implicitly and unambiguously understood by your audience, be it a college tutor, a manager, a girlfriend, or a bunch of strangers who you're trying to communicate with through an online discussion board. If you feel you have a problem with spelling, there's a simple way to get better at it: Read more.
And not just stuff you find online - read edited material. Books, newspapers, stuff that's been subjected to scrutiny by people who care about the conventions of spelling, grammar and punctuation. It'll help, trust me. And it'll do you a lot more good than just having a chip on your shoulder about all those jerks who keep complaining about your spelling.
Read it a little more carefully. The poster you're attacking wasn't repeating the gambler's fallacy, as I'm sure you believed they were.
The gambler's fallacy is simple: It's the belief that since 'it will all even out in the end', if you have a run of bad luck, it has to be countered by a run of good luck. In more specific terms, it's the belief that after a run of heads, a coin's more likely to come up tails because things have to come out fifty fifty in the long run.
This is, of course, rubbish, and you would be right to point out the stupidity of anyone who believed such nonsense.
However, our friend the original poster was not making this point. What he's actually saying is that if you're playing a game at a dollar a go, and when a coin comes up heads, you win two bucks, and when it comes up tails you lose your dollar, if you've already lost five bucks, the chances of you winning it back and coming out ahead in the long run are pretty low - a lot lower than your chances of coming out behind overall. Similarly, if you're five bucks ahead of the game, you may as well keep playing, because there's no magic karmic wheel that's going to come round and insist that you lose five dollars to even things out; the coin has no memory, and in the long run, you're likely to still be ahead of the game in the end.
In other words, 'quit while your ahead' is bad advice in a game with no house margin.
I'm not an American, but I have seen one on TV. Quite a lot of them, in fact, and I've noticed that many of them spend much of their time waving a badge and spouting the name of a three letter agency which gives them special jurisdiction in some field or other. So I believe I can say with the full authority given to a subject of the Hollywood cultural empire that the hunting down of counterfeiters is not an FBI responsibility, but rather falls into the hands of the Secret Service, or at least those parts of it which aren't busy protecting the president.
Why do I know this stuff, when I'd have trouble telling you which British police organisation is responsible for tracking down counterfeiters of sterling currency?
Possibly for the same reason that when I go and see a film in a British cinema today, I have to sit through an FBI warning against copying any film or film-related-article that I am privileged to witness during my time in the auditorium. What interest the FBI has in my behaviour is a little beyond me...
Hmmm. The paintjob. Yes, it is pretty, isn't it. but... I don't know if you've ever noticed, but automotive paint scratches. Really really easily. And you have to wash it with soap and water and wax it to keep the showroom shine. And greasy finger marks look really bad on a fresh waxed surface. Okay, so your laptop's not going to be exposed to some of the dirt and grime a car gets - but over time, laptops do pick up dirt, and get dragged in an out of laptop bags, and slid across desks, and have stuff piled on top of them.
I'm really not sure it's a good idea to paint a laptop with car paint...
Actually, it's worse than you think...
int i = new int(1);
No heap allocation has occurred, we've just allocated an int32 on the stack and dumped the output of the int32 constructor into it. That new keyword is really just an indicator that tells us we're calling a constructor.
And how about this:
int[] ints = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5};
That just allocated a new heap object, and there's no new keyword in sight...
(Before anyone argues that that's just like string s = "hello", it isn't... string literals are constants, they're pulled out of the interned string pool when they're referenced. Array literals like the one above are created in bytecode on the fly.)
Odd that you talk about OO programming as involving stacks of method calls... that sounds more like procedural, function-pointer-led thinking than OO, interface-led thinking to me.
Let me break this out into terms I understand. Let's say methods P and R belong to a class, C. C implements interface I, defined in a thirdparty library. I declares the signature of method R. The library also defines another class, D, which has a method, Q, which takes as an argument an object of type I.
So, we have an instance of C, and its method P has been called. This code calles Q on an instance of D, passing in itself as an argument of type I. Because Q knows the I interface, it can call R(), so it does. R() throws an exception, expecting it to somehow make its way back to P()... and that's where it breaks down.
What right does R() have to assume that the code anywhere above it in the callstack comes from the same library? Why can't it have been code in a completely different library that instantiated C, and called Q()? So why should R be allowed to throw any exceptions at all that Q doesn't know about? This is what Java's typed, checked exceptions give you - the ability for the interface I to declare what exceptions implementing code is allowed to throw.
I don't see how you can end up in the situation you described without the method Q having some interest in the behavior of R...
Oh, he understands, alright. Object oriented programming is all about exposing clean programming interfaces, and what exceptions your objects' methods throw are as much a part of those interfaces as their parameter lists and return types. The point of interfaces is that they abstract you away from implementation. When I call a method called getWeatherForecast(), I want it to return me the weather forecast, or throw me a WeatherNotAvailableException. I don't want it to sometimes throw a DbException because it had to go and talk to a database, or sometimes an IOException because it's reading from a cached file, or sometimes throw a NetException because it's talking through a socket, or sometimes throw a SoapException because it's trying to reach a web service. None of these things are of any possible interest to my code - I have no interest in considering how that component is going about its business of getting me a weather forecast. Were you never taught to consider objects as black boxes? The implementation of an object's method is not the concern of the calling code, and that is why we wrap exceptions. All the time. Now, it may be that the WeatherNotAvailableException might have some information attached to it that could be of use to a human troubleshooting the source of the lack of availability - but this information should be contextually relevant. Randomly propagating exceptions from inside the black box of a method are not contextually useful. so, I call getWeatherForecast() and I get back a SocketException: 'The host could not be found'. Great. That's meaningless to my code. It doesn't know what host the method was trying to reach, nor is it really interested. A WeatherNotAvailableException saying 'The weather service at http://weather.example.com/ could not be reached' would be a lot more useful.
erm... tetra means '4'. As in tetrahedron...
> the Bush fueled military
Ah, now there's a fuel solution they hadn't considered. Did you have some sort of hot-air solution in mind, or are we talking about extracting all of his hydrogen?