If you read a bit more carefully, you might discover you actually agree with the essence of the AC post. 'The guy doing the SWATting' does not refer to the police officer pulling the trigger (well, not very likely, though that'd be an interesting way of getting away with murder...).
Security engineering and awareness training aren't mutually exclusive: what's needed is a pragmatic balance between the two. Never try to use technology to solve people problems.
For instance, fraud detection is something people always will have an edge in, thanks to several millennia of social evolutionary pressures. But they won't be infallible, and will be more efficient if technology can filter out the worst distractions. Neither is complete without the other. The question is where we get the most bang for the buck realistically, and there Bruce has several points, without having shown the utter futility of any kind of end user training.
The problem with your C99 comparison that, by comparison, a random bit of C99 code does trivial things described in great detail, whereas an equivalent bit of modern C++ code is able to execute orders of magnitude more business logic. Don't get me wrong: C99 is great for close-to-the-iron bit twiddling and severely resource constrained execution environments, but C++11 is able to offer equivalent performance, the ability to tackle complex problems and vastly greater expressiveness.
There is of course one major caveat: C++ requires more experience of the programmer to produce maintainable code. Otherwise, you are even more likely to end up with unmaintainable gibberish than you are in C99. But against poor programmers the gods themselves debug in vain.
I wasn't aware that sucking up to the rich and mighty was exclusively predicated on hereditary feudalism. That's a relief. Let's everybody go tell their bosses exactly how we feel about them!
Democracies start to fail when people realize that they can vote for more money for themselves. As long as the entitlements keep rolling in, there will be more people ready to vote themselves some more free gubment cheese.
I used to think along these lines, but the self-confessed contrarian David Brin got me thinking, damn him! On the contrary, there are plenty of examples of voters accepting short term pain in order to deal with problems. While abuses exist in every system, the claim that there is an inexorable downwards slope would be more credible with some, y'know, proof.
Why would my car need a two-way comm channel on the Internet? I can possibly see reporting but accepting input? Why?
For providing entertainment and map, weather and traffic updates. That shouldn't be able to spill into the controls, but you never know.
Not to mention enabling higher power profiles for the ECM's on a rental basis: selling such value added services directly to consumers has been something of a holy Grail for the car industry. If they could only lock out those pesky chip trimming shops.... The possibility for remote sabotage is one reason such services haven't taken off yet.
There is a lot to be said for learning a second language in order to understand your own language better, and to realize its deep structures and biases. In the evolution of English, much of the Germanic structure of Old English was eroded away, and the resulting language lost much of its surface logic.
My take is that English speakers benefit from learning a more obviously structured language, and that learning about the structure in itself helps with the programming mindset. To be an effective programmer, after all, you do not only need to be able to make the computer/compiler/interpreter understand you: your code must also be understood by those who integrate with it and maintain it. Thus, all communications skills also contribute to programming skills.
Therefore, my suggestion, only partially tongue-in-cheek, is to study Latin. While you won't find a lot of Romans to speak with nowadays, much less program with, and although other languages exist that also have a great deal of surface structure, the teaching of Latin has always been highly focused on grammar and structure, and a lot of excellent teaching resources exist in many languages.
If you talk about Nobel prizes, could you please remind a forgetful Swede how many are awarded in mathematics or software engineering? Or is research strictly a speaking only something that happens in physics, chemistry, medicine.... or literature... or (snrk) in (giggle) economics (bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!)?
bacause they aren't hype/trends followers. They will not tell you to rewrite your whole system in Ruby
Speak for yourself.
I'll do it. And you'll come out way ahead. Ruby is a great language.
The implicit context was that experienced developers won't rewrite an entire system for the sake of using the latest greatest technology. If you think otherwise, I'd suggest that you have managed to absorb years while avoiding experience.
Paper & ballot boxes require traceable levels of effort to forge. Electronic voting systems promise the easy automation of large-scale vote theft. Which may be coming this very day to an election close to you...
Cryptography? Hardly, unless every voter is able to verify the cryptographic algorithms and hardware themselves. Paper, ballot boxes: that's the acme of voting technology.
Did you read the same studies? The negative effect of mandatory laws are that they discourage biking, Apart from the large scale health effects, when bicyclists are rarer, car drivers are less used to dealing with them. There are safety paradoxes with bike helmets (much like with seatbelts) in that they tend to increase risk taking: however, none of the studies I've seen referenced show that the increased risk taking outweighs the safety gains.
I've cycled to work for over 20 years and never worn a helmet. In that time, I've been knocked off twice by stupid car drivers. A helmet would have made no difference at all on either occasion.
Of course, had you hit your head, you probably wouldn't be posting this. The anthropic principle as applied to safety... or why anecdotal evidence is a contradiction in terms.
I used to bike helmetless everywhere, but started wearing one five years ago, since I feel safer if my wife does, and don't want to be a hypocrite. It's not that high price to pay for a slightly reduced risk. Mandatory helmet laws, however, are counterproductive. I seem to recall a similar analysis a couple of years back.
What a depressing view of human potential. A child born may be a problem, true, but also has the potential to come up with any number of solutions. And, yes, how is an unsubstantiated claim that a whole swathe of people delimited by region and religion are 'not that intelligent' not racist?
Take a look at the facts instead. With decreasing poverty, overall birth rates tend to decrease, Arab countries included. Whilst war tends to increase birthrates and long term population densities.
Bertrand, Lord Russel, actually. None of your mistering, please!
I think you should celebrate your monarchy there, not here. The USA elects the members of its upper chamber, and Canada's (geologically speaking) going that way too. Adult men here are rightfully called mister (among other things). No offense intended toward Bertrand, of course.
So, what do you guys think of Lord Black now? I like the guy.
Veering quickly even more off-topic: 'here' being where, exactly? Y'know, there's this li'l ol' thing called the Internet and ain't just located in the good ole US of A....
BTW: not my feudal system. But we Swedes occasionally attempt to be polite and adapt to other cultures: even to brash Americans. Perhaps you'd care to try it, sometimes?
A large structure capable of artificial gravity: yep, those should be concave. O'Neill cylinders, wheels, tori, bolas,
Providing artificial gravity for a hollow earth would require some pretty funky super-physics, though... fine tuned control over space-time-curvature, perhaps? Exotic matter is still a hypothesis, though; and the energies required would probably make building an ordinary planet seem cheap.
South - good.
North - US says they I bad, I really don't know for sure though.
Good heavens, you "don't know for sure"? What would it take to convince you: the current Kim roasting babies on live TV? Do you even listen to much less read any news from that part of the world?
They need to find him and then he can spend the rest of his life locked in his parents' basement. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what will happen if they don't catch him.
<pathos>Will no-one think of the parents?</pathos>
Slashdot Mirror
If you read a bit more carefully, you might discover you actually agree with the essence of the AC post. 'The guy doing the SWATting' does not refer to the police officer pulling the trigger (well, not very likely, though that'd be an interesting way of getting away with murder...).
Security engineering and awareness training aren't mutually exclusive: what's needed is a pragmatic balance between the two. Never try to use technology to solve people problems.
For instance, fraud detection is something people always will have an edge in, thanks to several millennia of social evolutionary pressures. But they won't be infallible, and will be more efficient if technology can filter out the worst distractions. Neither is complete without the other. The question is where we get the most bang for the buck realistically, and there Bruce has several points, without having shown the utter futility of any kind of end user training.
The problem with your C99 comparison that, by comparison, a random bit of C99 code does trivial things described in great detail, whereas an equivalent bit of modern C++ code is able to execute orders of magnitude more business logic. Don't get me wrong: C99 is great for close-to-the-iron bit twiddling and severely resource constrained execution environments, but C++11 is able to offer equivalent performance, the ability to tackle complex problems and vastly greater expressiveness.
There is of course one major caveat: C++ requires more experience of the programmer to produce maintainable code. Otherwise, you are even more likely to end up with unmaintainable gibberish than you are in C99. But against poor programmers the gods themselves debug in vain.
I wasn't aware that sucking up to the rich and mighty was exclusively predicated on hereditary feudalism. That's a relief. Let's everybody go tell their bosses exactly how we feel about them!
Democracies start to fail when people realize that they can vote for more money for themselves. As long as the entitlements keep rolling in, there will be more people ready to vote themselves some more free gubment cheese.
I used to think along these lines, but the self-confessed contrarian David Brin got me thinking, damn him! On the contrary, there are plenty of examples of voters accepting short term pain in order to deal with problems. While abuses exist in every system, the claim that there is an inexorable downwards slope would be more credible with some, y'know, proof.
Why would my car need a two-way comm channel on the Internet? I can possibly see reporting but accepting input? Why?
For providing entertainment and map, weather and traffic updates. That shouldn't be able to spill into the controls, but you never know.
Not to mention enabling higher power profiles for the ECM's on a rental basis: selling such value added services directly to consumers has been something of a holy Grail for the car industry. If they could only lock out those pesky chip trimming shops.... The possibility for remote sabotage is one reason such services haven't taken off yet.
Lastly, if a structured, grammatical language is desired then might I suggest Music? :)
Of course, every programmer should be fluent in at least first order predicate logic, but I took that for a given!
There is a lot to be said for learning a second language in order to understand your own language better, and to realize its deep structures and biases. In the evolution of English, much of the Germanic structure of Old English was eroded away, and the resulting language lost much of its surface logic.
My take is that English speakers benefit from learning a more obviously structured language, and that learning about the structure in itself helps with the programming mindset. To be an effective programmer, after all, you do not only need to be able to make the computer/compiler/interpreter understand you: your code must also be understood by those who integrate with it and maintain it. Thus, all communications skills also contribute to programming skills.
Therefore, my suggestion, only partially tongue-in-cheek, is to study Latin. While you won't find a lot of Romans to speak with nowadays, much less program with, and although other languages exist that also have a great deal of surface structure, the teaching of Latin has always been highly focused on grammar and structure, and a lot of excellent teaching resources exist in many languages.
If you talk about Nobel prizes, could you please remind a forgetful Swede how many are awarded in mathematics or software engineering? Or is research strictly a speaking only something that happens in physics, chemistry, medicine.... or literature... or (snrk) in (giggle) economics (bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!)?
bacause they aren't hype/trends followers. They will not tell you to rewrite your whole system in Ruby
Speak for yourself.
I'll do it. And you'll come out way ahead. Ruby is a great language.
The implicit context was that experienced developers won't rewrite an entire system for the sake of using the latest greatest technology. If you think otherwise, I'd suggest that you have managed to absorb years while avoiding experience.
Paper & ballot boxes require traceable levels of effort to forge. Electronic voting systems promise the easy automation of large-scale vote theft. Which may be coming this very day to an election close to you...
Cryptography? Hardly, unless every voter is able to verify the cryptographic algorithms and hardware themselves. Paper, ballot boxes: that's the acme of voting technology.
And that would somehow be bad... or perhaps even funny?
How does science explain psychics? Auras, the afterlife, the power of prayer?
Easily.
Did you read the same studies? The negative effect of mandatory laws are that they discourage biking, Apart from the large scale health effects, when bicyclists are rarer, car drivers are less used to dealing with them. There are safety paradoxes with bike helmets (much like with seatbelts) in that they tend to increase risk taking: however, none of the studies I've seen referenced show that the increased risk taking outweighs the safety gains.
Agreed.
I've cycled to work for over 20 years and never worn a helmet. In that time, I've been knocked off twice by stupid car drivers. A helmet would have made no difference at all on either occasion.
Of course, had you hit your head, you probably wouldn't be posting this. The anthropic principle as applied to safety... or why anecdotal evidence is a contradiction in terms.
I used to bike helmetless everywhere, but started wearing one five years ago, since I feel safer if my wife does, and don't want to be a hypocrite. It's not that high price to pay for a slightly reduced risk. Mandatory helmet laws, however, are counterproductive. I seem to recall a similar analysis a couple of years back.
What a depressing view of human potential. A child born may be a problem, true, but also has the potential to come up with any number of solutions. And, yes, how is an unsubstantiated claim that a whole swathe of people delimited by region and religion are 'not that intelligent' not racist?
Take a look at the facts instead. With decreasing poverty, overall birth rates tend to decrease, Arab countries included. Whilst war tends to increase birthrates and long term population densities.
Bertrand, Lord Russel, actually. None of your mistering, please!
I think you should celebrate your monarchy there, not here. The USA elects the members of its upper chamber, and Canada's (geologically speaking) going that way too. Adult men here are rightfully called mister (among other things). No offense intended toward Bertrand, of course.
So, what do you guys think of Lord Black now? I like the guy.
Veering quickly even more off-topic: 'here' being where, exactly? Y'know, there's this li'l ol' thing called the Internet and ain't just located in the good ole US of A....
BTW: not my feudal system. But we Swedes occasionally attempt to be polite and adapt to other cultures: even to brash Americans. Perhaps you'd care to try it, sometimes?
Bertrand, Lord Russel, actually. None of your mistering, please!
A large structure capable of artificial gravity: yep, those should be concave. O'Neill cylinders, wheels, tori, bolas,
Providing artificial gravity for a hollow earth would require some pretty funky super-physics, though... fine tuned control over space-time-curvature, perhaps? Exotic matter is still a hypothesis, though; and the energies required would probably make building an ordinary planet seem cheap.
Why would we send a probe instead?
Because canned primates and their support structures increases mass astronomically.
capable of artificial gravity,
You want some faster than light travel with that? Or perhaps telekinesis?
Inertia expressed as centripetal force will do just fine, thanks.
South Korea.
South - good. North - US says they I bad, I really don't know for sure though.
Good heavens, you "don't know for sure"? What would it take to convince you: the current Kim roasting babies on live TV? Do you even listen to much less read any news from that part of the world?
Nope, that was thallium.
They need to find him and then he can spend the rest of his life locked in his parents' basement. Which, come to think of it, is pretty much what will happen if they don't catch him.
<pathos>Will no-one think of the parents?</pathos>