Homework assignments are different from real-world code. Homework assignments are rarely built on code written by other people. Homework assignments are rarely checked for robustness against bad inputs; students usually know exactly what sort of input to expect and need not worry about anything else. Homework is usually small -- rarely do you see homework assignments exceed 1000 program statements in any language.
Real world code is not like the code students are assigned in school.
Are you sure you don't disagree with my post? This is the sort of question that I was trying to say is not even relevant:
what if the first time someone is caught they are caught with drives full of child porn?
Does it matter if someone has multiple hard drives full of child abuse imagery? The point I was making was that the censorship of such imagery is meant to target the producers of it, not the consumers or collectors; the theory behind making it illegal, and the only reason such censorship passed constitutional challenges, was that by attacking the consumers the cash flow to the producers would be disrupted, and thus children would be protected from harm. Similarly, the theory behind the sex offender registry is that children might be harmed by people who previously abused children, and parents should know if such people are living or working near their children. Forcing people are arrested for possessing child abuse imagery to register as sex offenders does little to further the goal of protecting children; it neither attacks the supply chain for such imagery nor makes parents aware of the presence of people who have a history of molesting children.
The problem we have here is that the purpose of these laws has been forgotten. Arresting people who possess child abuse imagery has now become a goal in and of itself, without regard to whether or not those people paid for or even deliberately obtained that material, and without regard for the realities of the modern distribution of such material. Sex offender registration covers broad classes of crimes, many of which do not involve children at all, and a quick perusal of the comments on this story reveals just how absurd sex offender registration has become, with even young teenagers -- which is within the age group the registry was meant to protect -- are being forced to registry for life. Whether or not adults really understand the legal ramifications of their actions is not relevant when the law has become that out of control.
Well that really depends on how you look at things. The point of outlawing child abuse imagery is to protect children from the people who make such imagery, not from the people who view it, by attacking the distribution chain. By arresting customers en masse, the theory is that there will be no market for child abuse imagery and thus it will not be made (at least not as frequently).
We could debate, endlessly, whether or not this market-based theory about child sex abuse actually makes sense in today's world. More import, though, is the question of whether or not someone who was convicted of possessing child pornography should be forced to register on a sex offenders list and have their freedoms drastically curtailed. If you did not arrest someone for abusing a child or for seeking out children to abuse, what good does it do to add that person to the registry?
The thing is, flying remains the safest way to travel. You are more likely to die in a car crash than by all airplane incidents combined. Trains are next up on the list of safe ways to travel. Cars are near the bottom of the list, next to "bushwacking through a rainforest."
It also helps that flying is faster than other forms of transportation, at least over long distances. That is why the TSA gets away with their program. If you had to go through TSA-style procedures to drive a car, so many people would stop driving cars that the petroleum and automobile industries would tear their politicians apart until the TSA was disbanded. Unfortunately, people live so far away from their families, and businesses have so little patience for travel delays that other modes of transit just cannot compete with flying. Amtrak is great along the costs, and can really compete with flying between Boston and Washington, DC, but for a cross-country or trans-ocean trip, it's flying or bust.
There should be a TSA, it should try and prevent dangerous shit from getting on aircraft, trains, airports etc.
OK, let's start with the most dangerous thing commonly brought onto a transportation system: cars. Yes, cars, they kill thousands of travelers each yeah. The automobile lobby likes to point out that plenty of responsible car drivers practice good car safety and don't go around killing people, but the rest of us know how dangerous cars are.
See, the best part about dangerous things is that nobody wants to lose the dangerous things they personally like to own, use, and play with. Like firearms. Like knives. Like the lithium ion battery in your laptop.
the TSA as implemented is unlikely to efficiently accomplish any of the broad goals it has.
The TSA is accomplishing its goals, just not the ones they make known to the public. The TSA is showing people who's boss, which was the only goal that ever mattered.
...and we just hope that there is no coolant leak. I suppose that is better than hoping there is no leak and hoping the cooling system remains powered, but really we need systems with better passive safety before we build more nuclear reactors.
Leave us Jews out of this -- we go to great lengths to make conversion difficult, and we don't go around proselytizing to non-Jews, and as long as people let us practice our religion we are happy to live and let live. Just because the two biggest religions in the world are based on spreading the word doesn't mean that all religions are trying to do so.
No, it sounds like a nice way to remind people that the rich, famous, and well-connected are exempt from the rules of life. These celebrities know that their naked photos are high sought after and in some cases worth millions -- so why do they not taken the most basic precautions, like encryption? For most of us "little people," insurance policies won't pay out if we don't lock our doors -- why makes these celebrities so special that they should play by a different set of rules?
Obama has said that marijuana prosecution is low-priority in the past. Then he made a deal with the pharmaceutical industry: their support for the healthcare law, and his administration would increase the prosecution of illegal drugs that compete with pharmaceuticals, including marijuana. By the end of his second year in office, his administration's DEA had performed more paramilitary raids on medical marijuana dispensaries than had been performed in all eight of his predecessor's years in office.
See, when Obama gets things right, he gets credit. He just failed to do so when it comes to the war on drugs, and he is continuing to fail, and there is no indication that he will ever stop doing the wrong thing.
At the end of the day it simply makes me more competitive not only at work but in life as well.
...until someone using amphetamines comes in and beats the pants off you on some intellectual task. That is what you'll see at most colleges and hyper-competitive high schools these days: students using ADHD medications (usually amphetamine drugs like Adderall and Vyvanse) to gain an edge.
There is a common misconception that drugs universally damage a person's ability to do mental work, but it is simply not true. Some drugs, used in therapeutic doses and in careful moderation, can measurable improve focus and raise IQ. Right now, the only legal uses of amphetamines are to lose weight or to "level the playing field," but the black market for pharmaceutical-grade amphetamines is enormous. Even legal prescriptions are given out with surprising ease; psychiatrists do not require terribly much convincing to give an adult or even a teenager an amphetamine prescription. Society is going to have to come to terms with this eventually, or else we will have a situation where only the ruling class has access to drugs that improve cognition (and where they are not arrested for committing felony offenses, which is the situation we have now), which will only further cement their power over the working class (whose access to amphetamines tends to be limited to clandestine methamphetamine producers, whose product is extremely dangerous).
Over the next few decades, you are going to see a lot of new stimulant drugs that improve cognition, and you are going to see a lot of college students using those drugs. Amphetamines have been around for a long time; in addition to new amphetamines, you'll see cathinones (which are not widely know, but which occur naturally in plants that grow in certain African nations and which is brought to the US by African immigrants) and pyrovalerones (of recent fame in "bath salts," which should not be confused with traditional bath salts that have been used for centuries and which are not drugs). We may even see systems developed that can produce drugs automatically, in the privacy of one's home, using formulas that can be downloaded from the Internet.
I'm not saying that you should go out and buy some black market amphetamines or experiment with untested designer drugs. It is not fair, however, to say that staying drug-free gives you a competitive advantage; only staying away from certain drugs gives you an advantage.
Perhaps like, for instance, mentally-unstable individuals able to obtain semi-automatic assault riffle, also legally
You must be referring to the paramilitary police officers that prosecute the war on drugs. They tend to invade homes in the middle of the night using their government issued assault rifles and hand grenades, shooting people and their dogs. What mentally stable person would build a career on that sort of behavior?
That is the majority, at least from what I have seen.
for the most part, people take gun ownership seriously
No, most (civilian, non-police) gun owners take gun safety seriously, cleaning their guns diligently and making sure the action is open and the magazine is removed before they check their targets. Only a minority are out there training for any sort of realistic combat, and even fewer are training frequently enough for it to really matter.
people run through thousands of rounds drilling it in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, they'll only have two assailants and make it out with just a flesh wound.
Must be the same sort of people who think they are going to save their neighborhood from zombies/terrorists. I call it a fantasy, but maybe I am just too cynical...
When your mother or wife gets raped, do you wish she fell into that "mere" 60k?
When your mother or wife is murdered using a black market handgun, will you wish that the gun had never been sold to someone who failed to lock it in a safe?
Killed with a tool they choose to own... vs 20 innocent elementary school kids dead. Yeah, clearly identical situations there.
As opposed to what? You think having armed teachers would be a good idea? Have you ever shot a gun in a stressful situation?
Newsflash: a disorganized group of people with no training in how to fight with a gun would do more harm than good. A crazed gunman is running through the school, and what you are saying would help is if the teachers ran out to fight him -- leaving the kids to fend for themselves in the crossfire. Unless you are advocating for everyone in the US to receive military training (not necessarily a bad idea, but are you willing to pay for that?), don't go around saying that guns will save schoolchildren in such a situation.
The teachers in that school did exactly the right thing: they locked and barricaded the doors, kept as many children out of harms way as possible, and brought in the police -- who do actually have training in how to fight with a gun. I am not a fan of paramilitary police, but if I were asked who I would rather have defending children from a lunatic, I would choose them over people who occasionally shoot guns at the range.
In fact, tens of thousands of guns are stolen each year (can you cite tens of thousands of cases of gun owners successfully stopping crimes each year?):
It would have taken one person trained in how to fight with a gun to stop him. Don't fool yourself into thinking that any person who goes to the shooting range on the weekends is going to be able to take on a heavily armed maniac.
What we need are not laws that prevent people from having guns, but laws that require people to store their handguns safely (and make them liable if they fail to do so and their gun is stolen). Keep your handgun in a safe, and you'll be helping to keep that handgun out of criminal hands. Unfortunately, gun control advocates keep talking about assault rifles, which are rarely used in crimes because they are hard to conceal, hard to surprise people with, and hard to discretely transport.
If we were to admit that Barack Obama is no less fascist than his predecessors over the past few decades (perhaps even further back), we would be forced to commit the ultimate evil: voting third party. Which I did.
Part of the problem with spam fighting is that we are not distributing the spam fighting load. Hashcash distributes the load somewhat, in that it forces spammers to use more resources to send out their message and can slow them down somewhat. A distributed filtering system that allowed people to volunteer CPU time and bandwidth to filter spam (with some system of gaining the trust of an email server) might also work; imagine if hundreds of millions of people were relaying / filtering 100 messages per day.
Blacklists are nice because they reduce server loads. Sure, running a statistical classifier for one user is not so hard, but if you have to process hundreds of millions of messages per day, that is a lot of CPU time spent on spam.
Now, I agree that blacklists are bad, but we do need some system that doesn't require large amounts of CPU time or other resources. Hashcash is interesting here, in that the CPU time is mostly spent by clients; one might be able to slow spam down enough to let a combination of statistical filtering and greylisting take over.
Only if we make it mandatory for the phone company to ship phones with either a built-in, easy-to-find spam filtering option, or phones that allow the user to install spam filtering software unconditionally.
The question is not, "what makes this better than languages that people typically use to write programs that run on servers?" but rather, "What is the benefit of Javascript as a language, and how can it make writing/maintaining applications easier?" or perhaps, "How can using Javascript make me more productive?"
Slashdot Mirror
Homework assignments are different from real-world code. Homework assignments are rarely built on code written by other people. Homework assignments are rarely checked for robustness against bad inputs; students usually know exactly what sort of input to expect and need not worry about anything else. Homework is usually small -- rarely do you see homework assignments exceed 1000 program statements in any language.
Real world code is not like the code students are assigned in school.
...it's just like cold fusion. Always on the horizon.
what if the first time someone is caught they are caught with drives full of child porn?
Does it matter if someone has multiple hard drives full of child abuse imagery? The point I was making was that the censorship of such imagery is meant to target the producers of it, not the consumers or collectors; the theory behind making it illegal, and the only reason such censorship passed constitutional challenges, was that by attacking the consumers the cash flow to the producers would be disrupted, and thus children would be protected from harm. Similarly, the theory behind the sex offender registry is that children might be harmed by people who previously abused children, and parents should know if such people are living or working near their children. Forcing people are arrested for possessing child abuse imagery to register as sex offenders does little to further the goal of protecting children; it neither attacks the supply chain for such imagery nor makes parents aware of the presence of people who have a history of molesting children. The problem we have here is that the purpose of these laws has been forgotten. Arresting people who possess child abuse imagery has now become a goal in and of itself, without regard to whether or not those people paid for or even deliberately obtained that material, and without regard for the realities of the modern distribution of such material. Sex offender registration covers broad classes of crimes, many of which do not involve children at all, and a quick perusal of the comments on this story reveals just how absurd sex offender registration has become, with even young teenagers -- which is within the age group the registry was meant to protect -- are being forced to registry for life. Whether or not adults really understand the legal ramifications of their actions is not relevant when the law has become that out of control.
Well that really depends on how you look at things. The point of outlawing child abuse imagery is to protect children from the people who make such imagery, not from the people who view it, by attacking the distribution chain. By arresting customers en masse, the theory is that there will be no market for child abuse imagery and thus it will not be made (at least not as frequently).
We could debate, endlessly, whether or not this market-based theory about child sex abuse actually makes sense in today's world. More import, though, is the question of whether or not someone who was convicted of possessing child pornography should be forced to register on a sex offenders list and have their freedoms drastically curtailed. If you did not arrest someone for abusing a child or for seeking out children to abuse, what good does it do to add that person to the registry?
The thing is, flying remains the safest way to travel. You are more likely to die in a car crash than by all airplane incidents combined. Trains are next up on the list of safe ways to travel. Cars are near the bottom of the list, next to "bushwacking through a rainforest."
It also helps that flying is faster than other forms of transportation, at least over long distances. That is why the TSA gets away with their program. If you had to go through TSA-style procedures to drive a car, so many people would stop driving cars that the petroleum and automobile industries would tear their politicians apart until the TSA was disbanded. Unfortunately, people live so far away from their families, and businesses have so little patience for travel delays that other modes of transit just cannot compete with flying. Amtrak is great along the costs, and can really compete with flying between Boston and Washington, DC, but for a cross-country or trans-ocean trip, it's flying or bust.
There should be a TSA, it should try and prevent dangerous shit from getting on aircraft, trains, airports etc.
OK, let's start with the most dangerous thing commonly brought onto a transportation system: cars. Yes, cars, they kill thousands of travelers each yeah. The automobile lobby likes to point out that plenty of responsible car drivers practice good car safety and don't go around killing people, but the rest of us know how dangerous cars are.
See, the best part about dangerous things is that nobody wants to lose the dangerous things they personally like to own, use, and play with. Like firearms. Like knives. Like the lithium ion battery in your laptop.
the TSA as implemented is unlikely to efficiently accomplish any of the broad goals it has.
The TSA is accomplishing its goals, just not the ones they make known to the public. The TSA is showing people who's boss, which was the only goal that ever mattered.
...and we just hope that there is no coolant leak. I suppose that is better than hoping there is no leak and hoping the cooling system remains powered, but really we need systems with better passive safety before we build more nuclear reactors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Sanders
Even the NRA shouldn't have a problem with people properly securing their firearms.
Wanna bet? I have spoken to people at the rifle range about this sort of thing; I get two responses to the "keep your guns in a safe" proposal:
Which response do you think the NRA-types are giving?
Leave us Jews out of this -- we go to great lengths to make conversion difficult, and we don't go around proselytizing to non-Jews, and as long as people let us practice our religion we are happy to live and let live. Just because the two biggest religions in the world are based on spreading the word doesn't mean that all religions are trying to do so.
No, it sounds like a nice way to remind people that the rich, famous, and well-connected are exempt from the rules of life. These celebrities know that their naked photos are high sought after and in some cases worth millions -- so why do they not taken the most basic precautions, like encryption? For most of us "little people," insurance policies won't pay out if we don't lock our doors -- why makes these celebrities so special that they should play by a different set of rules?
Free as in no restriction systems, no country codes, no gouging, no differences in release dates between regions, etc.
Obama has said that marijuana prosecution is low-priority in the past. Then he made a deal with the pharmaceutical industry: their support for the healthcare law, and his administration would increase the prosecution of illegal drugs that compete with pharmaceuticals, including marijuana. By the end of his second year in office, his administration's DEA had performed more paramilitary raids on medical marijuana dispensaries than had been performed in all eight of his predecessor's years in office.
See, when Obama gets things right, he gets credit. He just failed to do so when it comes to the war on drugs, and he is continuing to fail, and there is no indication that he will ever stop doing the wrong thing.
At the end of the day it simply makes me more competitive not only at work but in life as well.
There is a common misconception that drugs universally damage a person's ability to do mental work, but it is simply not true. Some drugs, used in therapeutic doses and in careful moderation, can measurable improve focus and raise IQ. Right now, the only legal uses of amphetamines are to lose weight or to "level the playing field," but the black market for pharmaceutical-grade amphetamines is enormous. Even legal prescriptions are given out with surprising ease; psychiatrists do not require terribly much convincing to give an adult or even a teenager an amphetamine prescription. Society is going to have to come to terms with this eventually, or else we will have a situation where only the ruling class has access to drugs that improve cognition (and where they are not arrested for committing felony offenses, which is the situation we have now), which will only further cement their power over the working class (whose access to amphetamines tends to be limited to clandestine methamphetamine producers, whose product is extremely dangerous).
Over the next few decades, you are going to see a lot of new stimulant drugs that improve cognition, and you are going to see a lot of college students using those drugs. Amphetamines have been around for a long time; in addition to new amphetamines, you'll see cathinones (which are not widely know, but which occur naturally in plants that grow in certain African nations and which is brought to the US by African immigrants) and pyrovalerones (of recent fame in "bath salts," which should not be confused with traditional bath salts that have been used for centuries and which are not drugs). We may even see systems developed that can produce drugs automatically, in the privacy of one's home, using formulas that can be downloaded from the Internet.
I'm not saying that you should go out and buy some black market amphetamines or experiment with untested designer drugs. It is not fair, however, to say that staying drug-free gives you a competitive advantage; only staying away from certain drugs gives you an advantage.
Perhaps like, for instance, mentally-unstable individuals able to obtain semi-automatic assault riffle, also legally
You must be referring to the paramilitary police officers that prosecute the war on drugs. They tend to invade homes in the middle of the night using their government issued assault rifles and hand grenades, shooting people and their dogs. What mentally stable person would build a career on that sort of behavior?
Have you ever even met a gun owner?
I am a gun owner.
Yes, you have the casual hunters
That is the majority, at least from what I have seen.
for the most part, people take gun ownership seriously
No, most (civilian, non-police) gun owners take gun safety seriously, cleaning their guns diligently and making sure the action is open and the magazine is removed before they check their targets. Only a minority are out there training for any sort of realistic combat, and even fewer are training frequently enough for it to really matter.
people run through thousands of rounds drilling it in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, they'll only have two assailants and make it out with just a flesh wound.
Must be the same sort of people who think they are going to save their neighborhood from zombies/terrorists. I call it a fantasy, but maybe I am just too cynical...
When your mother or wife gets raped, do you wish she fell into that "mere" 60k?
When your mother or wife is murdered using a black market handgun, will you wish that the gun had never been sold to someone who failed to lock it in a safe?
Killed with a tool they choose to own... vs 20 innocent elementary school kids dead. Yeah, clearly identical situations there.
As opposed to what? You think having armed teachers would be a good idea? Have you ever shot a gun in a stressful situation?
Newsflash: a disorganized group of people with no training in how to fight with a gun would do more harm than good. A crazed gunman is running through the school, and what you are saying would help is if the teachers ran out to fight him -- leaving the kids to fend for themselves in the crossfire. Unless you are advocating for everyone in the US to receive military training (not necessarily a bad idea, but are you willing to pay for that?), don't go around saying that guns will save schoolchildren in such a situation.
The teachers in that school did exactly the right thing: they locked and barricaded the doors, kept as many children out of harms way as possible, and brought in the police -- who do actually have training in how to fight with a gun. I am not a fan of paramilitary police, but if I were asked who I would rather have defending children from a lunatic, I would choose them over people who occasionally shoot guns at the range.
Three examples of guns saving lives? Here are three examples of gun owners being shot with their own gun:
http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/2011/04/mckinney-homeowner-shot-with-h.html/
http://www.wtvy.com/home/headlines/Enterprise_Man_Shot_In_Attempted_Burglary_138608814.html
http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2011/06/21/escalon-police-officer-shot-while-investigating-burglaries/
In fact, tens of thousands of guns are stolen each year (can you cite tens of thousands of cases of gun owners successfully stopping crimes each year?):
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=4534
It would have taken one person trained in how to fight with a gun to stop him. Don't fool yourself into thinking that any person who goes to the shooting range on the weekends is going to be able to take on a heavily armed maniac.
What we need are not laws that prevent people from having guns, but laws that require people to store their handguns safely (and make them liable if they fail to do so and their gun is stolen). Keep your handgun in a safe, and you'll be helping to keep that handgun out of criminal hands. Unfortunately, gun control advocates keep talking about assault rifles, which are rarely used in crimes because they are hard to conceal, hard to surprise people with, and hard to discretely transport.
If we were to admit that Barack Obama is no less fascist than his predecessors over the past few decades (perhaps even further back), we would be forced to commit the ultimate evil: voting third party. Which I did.
Like how that warrantless wiretapping program was shut down?
Part of the problem with spam fighting is that we are not distributing the spam fighting load. Hashcash distributes the load somewhat, in that it forces spammers to use more resources to send out their message and can slow them down somewhat. A distributed filtering system that allowed people to volunteer CPU time and bandwidth to filter spam (with some system of gaining the trust of an email server) might also work; imagine if hundreds of millions of people were relaying / filtering 100 messages per day.
Blacklists are nice because they reduce server loads. Sure, running a statistical classifier for one user is not so hard, but if you have to process hundreds of millions of messages per day, that is a lot of CPU time spent on spam.
Now, I agree that blacklists are bad, but we do need some system that doesn't require large amounts of CPU time or other resources. Hashcash is interesting here, in that the CPU time is mostly spent by clients; one might be able to slow spam down enough to let a combination of statistical filtering and greylisting take over.
Only if we make it mandatory for the phone company to ship phones with either a built-in, easy-to-find spam filtering option, or phones that allow the user to install spam filtering software unconditionally.
The question is not, "what makes this better than languages that people typically use to write programs that run on servers?" but rather, "What is the benefit of Javascript as a language, and how can it make writing/maintaining applications easier?" or perhaps, "How can using Javascript make me more productive?"