Really, had Lisp been more widely taught, we would be talking about (incf Lisp) rather than C++ when we argue about programming languages. What is taught in school affects programmers' choices about languages and designs more than anything else. Most schools today teach C++ and Java; is it any surprise that these languages or very similar languages are commonly chosen for new projects, even where there are other equally valid choices (say, Clojure instead of Java or OCaml instead of C++)? We are seeing a similar trend with the rise of Python: more schools are teaching it, and it is simultaneously becoming more popular out in industry.
There are certainly exceptions to this, languages that became popular without any schools having taught them, but I think it is hard to argue that what schools teach does not have a major impact on what languages are used.
Child sex abuse imagery is illegal because producing it involves sexually abusing children, not because images of child abuse happen to offend most people. If no children are being abused, then what is the logic for making the cartoons illegal?
As numerous other people have pointed out, the key space for that pattern is tiny -- less than a million keys. Even if it were the case that the phone was encrypted using the screen lock pattern as a key, it would be essentially trivial to crack.
I am not even sure why they would need to brute force anything -- if they can dump the contents of the phone's memory, why not just inspect the contents? Unless I am mistaken, those lock screens are not being used to encrypt the contents of the phone.
One wonders how much your privacy is actually worth.
Privacy violations can be very costly -- it could mean higher insurance rates, higher credit fees or lower credit limits, being denied a better paying job, being denied residence in a particular community, and so forth. People lose power over their lives when information about themselves is revealed to the world, and those who trade in personal information have quite a bit of power.
The problem is that most people simply do not yet understand the strategic nature of personal information. They are still thinking about privacy as if we were living in the 80s, when a PI would have been required to get the sort of information that companies have in their databases today. Depending on how companies abuse their new power of everyone's lives -- and make no mistake, abuses will happen to an increasing degree over the next few years -- people may or may not fight back. For now, though, people are content to live with the "well why would anyone care about who my drinking buddies are?" sort of attitude, and blindly click through the "we can do whatever we want with the information we collect" policies without even reading what they are agreeing to.
AC is better than DC for transporting electricity because you can convert between voltages with just a transformer.
Which was a winning argument in the 19th century, but not anymore. The use of AC entails significant power loses, especially for cables that are immersed in salt water, which is why DC is used in such situations:
My first though was, "Probably the work of contractors." Then I RTFA'd and had it confirmed:
That institutional insecurity, says Alan Paller, researcher director of the SANS Institute, is the result of a private contractor system that actually rewards insecure coding. âoeThe consequences for private sector software writers who write insecure code in commercial software is high costs for patching along with substantial embarrassment for their companies and job insecurity for them,â he says. âoeIn contrast, the consequences for private sector software writers who write insecure code for the government is contract add-ons to fix the problem, and more revenue for their companies and job security for them.â
Hollywood has finally realized they stand a better chance protecting their content, even if only for a short while, by getting rid of all physical media and going with electronic distribution only.
Finally realized that they can try what HBO has been doing with satellite broadcasts for decades now? People used to receive free HBO broadcasts (which were being sent to cable company head ends for distribution to paying cable customers), until HBO encrypted everything and started charging for reception capabilities. Like most of what comes out of Hollywood these days, there is little originality in this effort.
It actually sounds like a good idea for a FLOSS project - a server for automatic transcoding, sharding and streaming of all videos you drop into a watched directory.
Indeed, and I have often wondered if patent issues could be entirely avoided by simply placing the transcoding server in a country that does not respect mathematics^H^H^Hsoftware patents. Unfortunately, the issue here is not technology -- the technology allows Mozilla to just have an H.264 decoder built in to the browser -- but the minefield of patents that surround video codecs. If ever there was a case of innovation being blocked by software patents...
You will never be able to cite Wikipedia in a paper without looking foolish.
This is mainly due to the fact that there is no "stable" Wikipedia -- things change so quickly that citing Wikipedia makes it very difficult for anyone to actually look up whatever you were citing. If there were "snapshots" that were widely distributed, say at the end of each year, one could simply cite those snapshots.
Paper encyclopedias are great for citing because they are frozen in time. They also contain errors that are hard to correct, out of date information that is hard to update, and searching them is not nearly as convenient as searching online encyclopedias. Wikipedia will win in the end because it can be updated and corrected so quickly, and because as you yourself noted, the ability to cite encyclopedias is not terribly important.
You really shouldn't need a lot of fuel when you're in interstellar space
You might need fuel to keep the passengers alive, and that is assuming that we even develop a power system that can provide power long enough to even reach such a planet.
I say pick the Best even if that means a few years of payments.
Except that the standards will be updated in a few years to support the next patent-encumbered format. You are missing the broader picture here: fighting against math^H^H^H^Hsoftware patents.
the US is also hypocritical on this matter, but for right now I feel we're not in the same league as, say, Syria.
Does the US order soldiers to open fire on protesters? No, of course not, we prefer to have our paramilitary police enter homes in the early hours of the morning and shoot people:
Here is the point where you say, "But that is still different, because those people died due to government mistakes!" At the end of the day, however, people were killed by militarized government agents.
I don't know of many (any?) developed countries that aren't currently struggling with issues like this.
So what you are saying is that governments in general have a problem with a network that allows cheap, fast, long-distance and hard-to-control communication between people? Yeah, I guess I cannot really disagree with that: governments want to control everything, and the Internet is a hard thing to control.
Your argument is: ignore everything everywhere when it benefits the citizens? Please, I'm not a defender of corporations, but surely you must see that this is a slippery slope?
Well, if governments are not supposed to work for the benefit of their citizens, then I have to wonder what you think the proper thing for a government to do might be. Where would you suggest that slippery slope leads?
Keep in mind that the governments of the US and of western European nations work very hard to benefit their citizens at the expense of other nations, which is basically how India found itself in this situation. The west became wealthy through the exploitation of other countries; even our poorest citizens have better lives than the citizens of some of the countries we took advantage of. We pushed other countries to adopt certain industrial regulations that our corporations wanted, like copyrights and patents, rather than using our influence to affect changes that would benefit the working class (e.g. better education, better food and water, better living conditions, etc.). If we are willing to let another nation languish in poverty so that we can continue to exploit its labor force, we really cannot complain when other countries ignore corporate profits so that their citizens can get affordable medicines.
At the end of the day, a government that is not doing what benefits its citizens is a government that fails the legitimacy test.
Realistically what are Bayer's options, how do you combat something like this?
Buy off some Indian politicians and get that government back in-line: get that government to stop working for the benefit of its citizens, and to start working for the benefit of foreign corporations.
Slashdot Mirror
3) What they teach in school
Really, had Lisp been more widely taught, we would be talking about (incf Lisp) rather than C++ when we argue about programming languages. What is taught in school affects programmers' choices about languages and designs more than anything else. Most schools today teach C++ and Java; is it any surprise that these languages or very similar languages are commonly chosen for new projects, even where there are other equally valid choices (say, Clojure instead of Java or OCaml instead of C++)? We are seeing a similar trend with the rise of Python: more schools are teaching it, and it is simultaneously becoming more popular out in industry.
There are certainly exceptions to this, languages that became popular without any schools having taught them, but I think it is hard to argue that what schools teach does not have a major impact on what languages are used.
Don't expect me to port existing code to your new language
Who says you need to port anything? If the language has a foreign function interface, you can just maintain the old code and build on top of it.
Child sex abuse imagery is illegal because producing it involves sexually abusing children, not because images of child abuse happen to offend most people. If no children are being abused, then what is the logic for making the cartoons illegal?
it sickens me to see artificially-produced images classified as child pornography
So you're a pedophile?
(That is the reaction I get when I say such things...)
People have been arrested in the US for the very same offense as the guy from TFA -- possession of illegal manga.
Which has always been a problem, and which is why we should be getting things right with smart phones.
Except that we want people to start using their phones in lieu of credit cards.
As numerous other people have pointed out, the key space for that pattern is tiny -- less than a million keys. Even if it were the case that the phone was encrypted using the screen lock pattern as a key, it would be essentially trivial to crack.
I am not even sure why they would need to brute force anything -- if they can dump the contents of the phone's memory, why not just inspect the contents? Unless I am mistaken, those lock screens are not being used to encrypt the contents of the phone.
One wonders how much your privacy is actually worth.
Privacy violations can be very costly -- it could mean higher insurance rates, higher credit fees or lower credit limits, being denied a better paying job, being denied residence in a particular community, and so forth. People lose power over their lives when information about themselves is revealed to the world, and those who trade in personal information have quite a bit of power.
The problem is that most people simply do not yet understand the strategic nature of personal information. They are still thinking about privacy as if we were living in the 80s, when a PI would have been required to get the sort of information that companies have in their databases today. Depending on how companies abuse their new power of everyone's lives -- and make no mistake, abuses will happen to an increasing degree over the next few years -- people may or may not fight back. For now, though, people are content to live with the "well why would anyone care about who my drinking buddies are?" sort of attitude, and blindly click through the "we can do whatever we want with the information we collect" policies without even reading what they are agreeing to.
AC is better than DC for transporting electricity because you can convert between voltages with just a transformer.
Which was a winning argument in the 19th century, but not anymore. The use of AC entails significant power loses, especially for cables that are immersed in salt water, which is why DC is used in such situations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_voltage_direct_current
That institutional insecurity, says Alan Paller, researcher director of the SANS Institute, is the result of a private contractor system that actually rewards insecure coding. âoeThe consequences for private sector software writers who write insecure code in commercial software is high costs for patching along with substantial embarrassment for their companies and job insecurity for them,â he says. âoeIn contrast, the consequences for private sector software writers who write insecure code for the government is contract add-ons to fix the problem, and more revenue for their companies and job security for them.â
Hollywood has finally realized they stand a better chance protecting their content, even if only for a short while, by getting rid of all physical media and going with electronic distribution only.
Finally realized that they can try what HBO has been doing with satellite broadcasts for decades now? People used to receive free HBO broadcasts (which were being sent to cable company head ends for distribution to paying cable customers), until HBO encrypted everything and started charging for reception capabilities. Like most of what comes out of Hollywood these days, there is little originality in this effort.
Meth is a bad, bad drug.
http://www.rxlist.com/desoxyn-drug.htm
It actually sounds like a good idea for a FLOSS project - a server for automatic transcoding, sharding and streaming of all videos you drop into a watched directory.
Indeed, and I have often wondered if patent issues could be entirely avoided by simply placing the transcoding server in a country that does not respect mathematics^H^H^Hsoftware patents. Unfortunately, the issue here is not technology -- the technology allows Mozilla to just have an H.264 decoder built in to the browser -- but the minefield of patents that surround video codecs. If ever there was a case of innovation being blocked by software patents...
You will never be able to cite Wikipedia in a paper without looking foolish.
This is mainly due to the fact that there is no "stable" Wikipedia -- things change so quickly that citing Wikipedia makes it very difficult for anyone to actually look up whatever you were citing. If there were "snapshots" that were widely distributed, say at the end of each year, one could simply cite those snapshots.
Paper encyclopedias are great for citing because they are frozen in time. They also contain errors that are hard to correct, out of date information that is hard to update, and searching them is not nearly as convenient as searching online encyclopedias. Wikipedia will win in the end because it can be updated and corrected so quickly, and because as you yourself noted, the ability to cite encyclopedias is not terribly important.
You really shouldn't need a lot of fuel when you're in interstellar space
You might need fuel to keep the passengers alive, and that is assuming that we even develop a power system that can provide power long enough to even reach such a planet.
Using system codecs is not "polluting the code" -- it's letting the user decide.
It also creates problems for web developers, who are already burdened with supporting multiple incompatible browsers simultaneously.
I say pick the Best even if that means a few years of payments.
Except that the standards will be updated in a few years to support the next patent-encumbered format. You are missing the broader picture here: fighting against math^H^H^H^Hsoftware patents.
For posting a bunch of links, he is being extradited? Well, I guess that is what happens when politicians accept bribes from the copyright lobby...
"We're keeping you from accessing these websites because they say we are corrupt assholes."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikileaks
the US is also hypocritical on this matter, but for right now I feel we're not in the same league as, say, Syria.
Does the US order soldiers to open fire on protesters? No, of course not, we prefer to have our paramilitary police enter homes in the early hours of the morning and shoot people:
http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/drug-war-victim/
Here is the point where you say, "But that is still different, because those people died due to government mistakes!" At the end of the day, however, people were killed by militarized government agents.
I don't know of many (any?) developed countries that aren't currently struggling with issues like this.
So what you are saying is that governments in general have a problem with a network that allows cheap, fast, long-distance and hard-to-control communication between people? Yeah, I guess I cannot really disagree with that: governments want to control everything, and the Internet is a hard thing to control.
If only there, there were another interconnected network ... hmm.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fidonet
Your argument is: ignore everything everywhere when it benefits the citizens? Please, I'm not a defender of corporations, but surely you must see that this is a slippery slope?
Well, if governments are not supposed to work for the benefit of their citizens, then I have to wonder what you think the proper thing for a government to do might be. Where would you suggest that slippery slope leads?
Keep in mind that the governments of the US and of western European nations work very hard to benefit their citizens at the expense of other nations, which is basically how India found itself in this situation. The west became wealthy through the exploitation of other countries; even our poorest citizens have better lives than the citizens of some of the countries we took advantage of. We pushed other countries to adopt certain industrial regulations that our corporations wanted, like copyrights and patents, rather than using our influence to affect changes that would benefit the working class (e.g. better education, better food and water, better living conditions, etc.). If we are willing to let another nation languish in poverty so that we can continue to exploit its labor force, we really cannot complain when other countries ignore corporate profits so that their citizens can get affordable medicines.
At the end of the day, a government that is not doing what benefits its citizens is a government that fails the legitimacy test.
Realistically what are Bayer's options, how do you combat something like this?
Buy off some Indian politicians and get that government back in-line: get that government to stop working for the benefit of its citizens, and to start working for the benefit of foreign corporations.