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From Slashdot | Terrorist Recognition Handbook

Re:Identifying terrorist doesn’t solve the problem (Score:4, Insightful)

by forgotten_my_nick (802929) on Wednesday May 07, @03:27PM (#23328388)

> core problem of terrorist. You catch or kill one and
> there is ten more to replace him.

While you are correct somewhat here your premise as how to combat it is flawed.

When dealing with terrorism you need to determine why those ten would want to replace him. For example if you were fire a missile into a market during its busy hours to kill one terrorist and maim/kill many bystanders. Actions like that is what grows more terrorists.

Even if you don’t do this then the actions tend to be related to civil rights abuses. Terrorism is normally the weapon of the desperate against an opposing force. If they are on our side then we call them “freedom fighters”.

Ignoring the middle east the best example of this is Northern Ireland. Prior to the civil rights abuses in Northern Ireland the IRA didn’t really have any real following. Sure you still get the gangsters and loons joining, but those who would normally define as rational/sane would of been in the minority if at all. It took actions from the British like Internment and Bloody Sunday to really get the ranks of the IRA up. That lead to 30 years of violence.

Once civil rights abuses were addressed in Northern Ireland the violence and support went away. It is not gone. You will always have some level of people who will disagree with actions. But the point is to stop the recruits. That you can’t fight with weapons.

From Slashdot | MPAA is Awarded $110 Million In TorrentSpy Case

Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)

by abscissa (136568) on Wednesday May 07, @08:22PM (#23331882)

To put this is some perspective, the US has offered Burma (Myanmar) $3m in aid.

Re:Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)

by icedevil (450212) on Wednesday May 07, @08:28PM (#23331952)
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TFA mentions that the MPAA was awarded $30,000 per infringement. So following your lead the US thinks the people of Burma are worth $30 per person (assuming the 100,000 figure is somewhat accurate.)

A wicked idea to pay them back (Score:5, Funny)

by Weaselmancer (533834)
on Wednesday May 07, @10:08PM (#23332704)

Give them three pirated Britney Spears albums. Apparently that’s worth about $110 million according to the RIAA.

Re:Perspective (Score:5, Insightful)

by Anpheus (908711) on Wednesday May 07, @09:23PM (#23332424)

The era of perpetual copyright was brought on by a few individuals that refused to invent and create any longer, and instead sought to make money indefinitely off the nostalgic value of their works.

I’m looking at you, Disney.

And to you, c6gunner, I’m not saying that copyright shouldn’t exist, but perhaps… the original 14 year timeframe was adequate. The film, Iron Man, made $100,000,000 in three days of sales, in 14, 50, or well over one hundred years can Hollywood justify why it needs to retain the sole distribution rights to something that was envisioned by someone who has already died? (Referring to the 100+ year copyright terms most countries have these days.)

Re:LOL (Score:5, Informative)

by arkhan_jg (618674) on Thursday May 08, @03:26AM (#23334614)

Vicarious copyright infringement is actually a specific offence of indirect copyright infringement in the US. It’s where someone has a direct financial interest in the infringing actions being committed by another and has the ability to control it, even if they do not know that the infringement is taking place and do not directly take part in it.

The other form of indirect infringement, contributory infringement, requires (1) knowledge of the infringing activity and (2) a material contribution — actual assistance or inducement — to the alleged piracy.

These are the laws that were used to bring down napster. In the US, because of these laws, running a tracker is actually pretty illegal. It’s assisting others to breach copyright even if you yourself don’t, and the tracker itself has no copyrighted material.

And yes, google should be worried. By indexing the content of sites such as torrentspy, they potentially open themselves up to the same charges. They bought youtube specifically to get in on the lawsuit by viacom, so they could help affect the judgement.

Note, one of the big differences with the piratebay is that sweden does not have offences of contributary or vicarious copyright infringement, so running a tracker is legal there.

From Slashdot | Twitter Reportedly May Abandon Ruby On Rails

Does a clean architecture matter? (Score:5, Interesting)

by BadAnalogyGuy (945258) <BadAnalogyGuy@gmail.com> on Friday May 02, @11:51AM (#23275608)

I have an argument with a coworker frequently about architectural orthogonality vs performance. I fall on the “architecture should be clean and easy to understand and maintain” side of the argument and he falls on the “speed, memory, and response time at all cost” side.

What is more important? Is developer time and productivity over the software lifetime more valuable than CPU cycles? If the price of that productivity imposes a maximum limit on performance, how much optimization should be undertaken?

It’s a hard question to answer. On the one hand employees are expensive and hardware is cheap. On the other hand, you can’t simply forego developing for performance just because of some religious belief that architecture should be clean.

Re:Does a clean architecture matter? (Score:4, Insightful)

by samkass (174571) on Friday May 02, @01:12PM (#23276740)
Homepage Journal

While system responsiveness is often a product of optimization, scalability rarely is. When a system can scale across orders of magnitude, it’s because of a clean, maintainable architecture that allowed components to be completely revamped and swapped in, identified and eliminated high-polynomial (or worse) growth patterns, and allowed more developers to be spun up on it fast enough to keep up with demand.

On the other hand, if you spend all day pondering the ultimate architecture, you’ll never ship and if you do you won’t meet requirements. Learning where those tradeoffs are is all about experience and is why the engineers with over a decade of real world experience earn more.

Re:Does a clean architecture matter? (Score:4, Insightful)

by bill_kress (99356) on Friday May 02, @05:41PM (#23280078)

Premature Optimization is the root of all evil.

I’ve never seen anything saying otherwise.

Follow any of these sets of rules:

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RulesOfOptimization [c2.com]
http://schwern.org/~schwern/talks/What_Works/What_Works/slide016.html [schwern.org]
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jch/java/rules.html [cmu.edu]

Or my version–
1) Don’t optimize, no really, don’t.
2) If you absolutely have to, write it unoptimized, test it, write it optimized, then:
2a) If the first is anywhere in the ballpark, throw away the second,
2b) If the second has enough of a proven, documented speed gain to get you past some accept/no accept barrier, comment out the slower one, but keep it so the next guy can follow the “Good” code.

If you don’t document exactly what you did in the code and why, I’m going to refactor it into something readable the second I see it.

Also–know how to program. Choosing a linked list instead of an array list for an insertion sort is just programming correctly. It’s not an optimization.

-1 offtopic… Just wanted to help the parent out with his cow-orker.

From Slashdot | DARPA Sponsors a Hunt For Malware In Microchips

logically impossible (Score:3, Funny)

by Ralph Spoilsport (673134) *
on Thursday May 01, @10:16AM (#23262852)
Journal

USgov: OK Mister smarty pants commie chip maker! PROVE TO ME that YOU”RE NOT putting malware into your chips!

ChipMaker: Sorry, I can’t do that.

USgov: And WHY NOT???

ChipMaker: Because it’s logically impossible you retarded oaf. You can’t prove a negative.

USGov: But if you DON’T then we will have to TAKE ACTION!

ChipMaker: Oh, jeez… like what? You bumbling fuckhead!

USGov: we will STOP BUYING CHIPS from you! We will build them ourselves!

ChipMaker: Sorry, Wally, but you’re not going to get that past your neoliberal internal trade agreements. I can see it now: “USGov goes into Chip Making”… Intel, AMD, and IBM would crack a loaf in their pants and sue. No, you’ll have to subcontract to them, and they will have to set up a multijillion dollar fab plant in the USA that is populated by expensive american workers, and suddenly every laptop made for the USGov will be slower and more expensive than any other laptop on the market. Good move, Ace. Lemme know how that works out for ya.

USGov: buh buh buh WE NEED SECURITY!!!!

ChipMaker: look, dumbass, we make chips. We don’t care what they go in, we don’t care what they do, we just make chips. Test them all you want, you’re not going to find anything, because we really don’t give a shit. Now, if the ultraparanoid wing of your wingnut contingent can’t swing with that, tought shit.

USGov: it would be SO much better if you simply PROVE THAT YOU’RE NOT putting bad things in our chips.

chipMaker: (sigh). How’s this, USGov, just shut the fuck up, and get with the program.

USGov: But WE HAVE TO PROTECT OUR FREEDOMS!!!!

ChipMaker: WHEN were your FREEDOMS ever attacked? Some crazy fucking nutjobs from a loosely organised international political crime syndicate flew some planes into your buildings. They didn’t attack your freedom, they just wanted you to get your jarheads out of Saudi Arabia. And then you invaded Iraq. “I’d like to know when Iraq attacked your freedoms - I’d like to know what day it was when the Iraqi Invasion Force stormed your beaches and dumped hot lead into your freedoms, because I must been on vacation that day in someplace called REALITY.” Your paranoid abuse of logic is THE SAME. And we, the Rest Of The World, are getting sick and fucking tired of your penny ante tirades that end up getting thousands of people killed. So, for the jillionth time: NO, We Can’t PROVE that our chips are not full of malware, because you CAN’T PROVE A NEGATIVE. You can test all you want, but you will never be 100% sure, and thusly, you’re an idiot for demanding it. Heck - even if you build them yourself, you have no proof, as some employee might etch a wee corner of the chip to cause a computer to make fart noises and blit every other frame to the screen with an image of Jesus butt raping Mohammed, but only on even numbered Tuesdays.

USGov: BUT WE WANT SECURITY!!! We want to PROTECT OUR FREEDOMS!!!

ChipMaker: OK, OK, you fucking moron: “I solemnly swear, cross my heart and hope to die, that there is no bad stuff on any of the chips we make. Promise. Now, is that better?”

USGov: YOU ARE A GREAT ALLY!!! I feel so much more secure now.

RS

We have always been at war with Oceania.

From Slashdot | Orson Scott Card Blasts J.K. Rowling’s Lawsuit

Re:The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Score:5, Insightful)

by MightyMartian (840721) on Thursday May 01, @03:29PM (#23267028)
Journal

Actually, there was little or nothing that Shakespeare could have done in his time to prevent someone writing a play called Humlet Duke of Dinmark. And yet Shakespeare did alright financially (well enough to build a theater), and, in fact, has been regarded for much of that time as being not only one of the greatest writers in the English language, but in the entire history of our species. That his plays have been cribbed by later playwrights, writers and into the modern age movie and TV show creators has not diminished his reputation.

The idea that a writer could make fanastical amounts of money (and let’s be honest here, there are only a handful of authors that have had the kind of success Rowlings has had) simply by writing is a pretty new one. Do you think Homer got royalties every time a copy of the Illiad was produced? Do you think the Akkadian kings went after people that made copies of the Gilgamesh epic, or added their own bits to it? The story of world literature is one of works being added to, chronicled and sometimes even being outright stolen (the Hebrews did it when they ripped off big chunks of the Sumero-Akkadian creation and cosmographical myths). Do you think world literature over the five or six thousand years that it has existed (many times longer if you count oral transmission of stories) has suffered because for the overwhelming majority of that time authors had little or no protection against plagiarism and unauthorized derivative works?

From Slashdot | Linux System Programming

Thou shalt not ignore warnings (Score:5, Informative)

by mi (197448) <mi+slashdot@aldan.algebra.com> on Monday April 14, @03:19PM (#23068006)
Homepage

Build your code with -Wall -Werror (or your compiler’s equivalent). Once you clean up all the crud, that pops up, crank it up with -W -Wno-unused-parameter -Wstrict-prototypes -Wmissing-prototypes -Wpointer-arith. Once there — add -Wreturn-type -Wcast-qual -Wswitch -Wshadow -Wcast-align and tighten up by removing the no in -Wno-unused-parameter. The -Wwrite-strings is essential, if you wish your code to be compiled with a C++ compiler some day (hint: the correct type for static strings is “ const char *“).

For truly clean code, add -Wchar-subscripts -Winline -Wnested-externs -Wredundant-decls.

The people, who wrote and maintain the compiler, are, most likely, several levels above you in understanding programming in general and C-programming in particular. Ignoring the advice their code generates is foolish on your part…

As a minimum, solved warnings will make your code more readable by reducing/eliminating the “Why is he doing this?” questions. More often than not, they point out bugs you would otherwise spend hours chasing with a debugger later.

And they make your code more portable. But if you don’t understand, why a warning is generated — ask around. Don’t just “shut it up”. For example, initializing a variable at declaration is usually a no-no. If the compiler thinks, the variable may be used before being initialized, scrutinize your program’s flow. If you can’t figure out, it may some times be better to disable this one warning temporarily with -Wno-uninitialized to move on, instead of shutting it up for ever by a bogus “= 0” or some such…

The book may well say something about respecting warnings, but the review does not, which is a shame.

From Slashdot | Google Crawls The Deep Web

Anecdote from Google (Score:5, Funny)

by arrrrg (902404) on Wednesday April 16, @06:12PM (#23096424)

When I interned at Google, someone told me a funny anecdote about a guy who emailed their tech support insisting that the Google crawler had deleted his web site. At first, I think he was told that “Just because we download a copy of your site, doesn’t mean your local copy is gone.” (a’la obligatory bash [bash.org].) But, the guy insisted, and finally they double checked and his site was in fact gone. Turns out that it was a home-brewed wiki-style site, and each page had a “delete” button. The only problem was, the “delete” button sent its query via GET, not POST, and so the Google spider happily followed those links one-by-one and deleted the poor guy’s entire site. The Google guys were feeling charitable and so they sent him a backup of his site, but told him he wouldn’t be so lucky the next time, and he should change any forms that make changes to POSTs — GETs are only for queries.

So, long story short, I wonder how Google will avoid more of this kind of problem if they’re really going off the deep end and submitting random data on random forms on the web. Like the above guy, people may not design their site with such a spider in mind, and despite their lack of foresight this could kill a lot of goodwill if done improperly.

From Slashdot | Adults Too Quick to Dismiss Educational Gaming?

Also check out Number Munchers…

And there is a HUGE market for them (Score:3, Insightful)

by Frenchy_2001 (659163) on Wednesday April 09, @08:00PM (#23019190)

Educational Gaming is *ALREADY* here and it’s already making a killing in the market, not only for kids but particularly for adults.
Some of the best sellers on the Nintendo DS could easily be classified as Edutainment. Games like Brain Age, Flash Focus or Brain Coach are all games that will also teach you to use your abilities. More recently, games like my French/Spanish Coach or My Word Coach are designed to improve your mastery of your language or start on a new one.
Those “games” work by making the necessary repetition of teaching (especially for language) less tedious than “classic” methods. After all, it does not really matters how little Johnny learnt to associate head with cabeza, it just needs to be drilled into his mind until the association is automatic. If it takes simple games to take the tedious part away, I’m all for it. I personally “play” My Spanish Coach and this has been the easiest method for me to get motivated and learn that language (YMMV).
The DS has been a revolution on that front, seen as a very nice gadget by lots of adults on top as a game console for kids. The touch screen interface blends the genre and allows new type of software for such a cheap gadget (~$100, far cheaper than a pda and much wider spread).

Check some of the games available on DS. Lots of choices.

From Slashdot | Richard Dawkins to Appear on Doctor Who

…also check out Richard Dawkins at TED.

Re:Atheists, Come Out! (Score:5, Interesting)

by Reality Master 101 (179095) <RealityMaster101NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday April 08, @09:22AM (#22999326)
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People talk about Christianity like it’s the Nazi party, like it’s this horrible machine that people are indoctrinated into.

I don’t mean this to me inflammatory — I really don’t — but a LOT of Christianity really is like the Nazi party. Not to say they’re putting atheists into ovens, but the hatred of atheists in mainstream Christianity is unbelievable. I would guess you live in one of the more enlightened parts of the country.

I was reading this story [go.com] recently, and it was absolutely shocking. These are mainstream citizens, not some wacko cult. And it really isn’t all that unusual. Google for “atheist persecution” sometime.

Your response will probably be that these aren’t “real” Christians, but I maintain you can’t separate the two. Polls show that your tolerance is by far in the minority of Christians. Mainstream Christianity has a burning hatred of atheists. I really believe that if a Hitler arose in the United States and called for the rounding up and extermination of atheists, there would be way more support for the policy than you’re willing to admit.

Most atheists are perfectly willing to “live and let live”, but the majority of Christians aren’t. It’s not just annoying proselytizing, it’s out and out persecution. I could give you long lists of links of examples, but I have a feeling you’re not ready to accept how out of control fundamentalism has gotten in the United States.

On a personal note, I don’t admit to being an atheist in Real Life anymore. It’s just not worth the hassle. It’s easier just to say I believe in God without any details, and just define God as, “that natural process that created the universe.” I’m pretty sure my in-laws would probably be horrified, though I doubt they would out-and-out disown the family.

Re:Dawkins may may a renowned evolutionary biologist (Score:5, Insightful)

by Alsee (515537) on Tuesday April 08, @03:03AM (#22997434)
Homepage

I never really understood atheism anyway. They mock theists for their faith, but there’s certainly no way to prove that there’s not a god

July, 1998
A juror in Judge Esmond Faulks’ court in Newcastle upon Tyne, England, eagerly asked the judge for the defendant’s date of birth so he could draw up a star chart to help him decide the case. He was removed.

There ya go. Presuming that you agree it was *appropriate* to forcibly eject that juror, presuming you consider that juror mockable and perhaps even a dangerous loony-toon, now you completely understand atheism.

To elaborate, probably half the other people on the jury read their horoscopes during lunch. Silly, irrational, but Mostly Harmless entertainment value so long as they don’t take it seriously and start fucking over other people based upon their faith in magical messages from the sky.

-

Re:Dawkins may may a renowned evolutionary biologist (Score:3, Insightful)

by professionalfurryele (877225) on Tuesday April 08, @04:30AM (#22997842)

Atheism as you present it is a straw man. No one is saying that there definitely is no incredibly abstract god whose only properties are that it exists and that in some way this god causes the universe to exist.

However most theistic individuals don’t believe in that kind of god. They believe in a god who impregnates virgins, who brings people back from the dead, who has a chosen people die by the millions in camps, who has something against people who eat pigs, who hates women, whose retirement plan for suicidal mass murderers is a bed full of maidens.

Weak atheists are people who say there probably is not a god. Strong atheists say there is no god. Most atheists lie somewhere on this spectrum. You are picking the most extreme version of atheism, the kind not even Dawkins subsribes to, and are using that as a straw man.

However, I can say with a considerable degree of certainty the Christian God does not exist. Nor does the Jewish God. Nor do any of the Hindu Gods. I can say this in the same way I can say with a considerable degree of certainty that werewolves and unicorns do not exist.

Only insane atheists who I would denounce as logically flawed claim with absolute certainty there is no god. However the Gods of the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims, the Hindus and the Zoroastrians are just as absurd as Zeus ever was, and I have considerable confidence in saying they do not exist.

What is more, most theists agree with the last assertion, assuming you drop their specific god from the list. We are all atheists, it is just that some of us are atheists about more gods than others.

From Slashdot | Study Shows Males Commonly Mistake Sexual Intent

Re:wrong (Score:4, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 30, @01:34PM (#22913214)

I think you underestimate the subtlety of your signals. If someone brushes against me, I usually assume it was accidental and say, “excuse me.” Smiles are useless; too many possible meanings. Like I have this ridiculous beard (its a “work in progress”), so lots of people smile when they look at me. (Some even point and laugh. Children are scared. But I digress ;)

Whispering something in my ear is a pretty good one, depending on what you say. “Hey, wanna go make out?” would certainly get my attention, and I probably wouldn’t misinterpret it. Though for clarification I might respond, “Maybe. Who with?” ;)

Blatant is certainly better. No chick has every gotten me by being subtle. I’m way too clueless for that. I don’t think it has so much to do with a lack of confidence, but rather a lack of socialization. I spent way too much of my adolescence in front of a computer screen instead of outside flirting with girls. Now 20 years later, I barely talk to people. I have the confidence to walk up and introduce myself; I just don’t know how to have conversations. For me everything boils down to problem solving, so if someone asks me a question my answers tend toward closure. My “goal” is to solve the conversation (ie. find its ending).

I suppose I could just change my goal to trying to see how long I can just keep talking on and on about nothing. You know, like women. ;)

(clearly I’m missing something.)

Re:wrong (Score:5, Funny)

by nizo (81281) * on Sunday March 30, @10:32AM (#22911666)
Homepage Journal

See here is the problem: women give ambiguous signals, while men don’t. But wait: men are the ones with the problem. For those of us men who are married, is this starting to sound at all familiar???

Subconscious flirting (Score:5, Insightful)

by Lorien_the_first_one (1178397) on Sunday March 30, @09:37AM (#22911340)

But consider this:

Women will often flirt with a man just for attention. I’ve met women who simply didn’t even know what they were doing was interpreted as flirting. And when I confronted them with this observation, they gave this crazymaking attitude like “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. I was just being friendly.” Yeah, right.

Philipino women are a great example of behavior that can easily be mistaken for flirting. I’ve never been more confounded by any other culture. The world “no” just isn’t in their immediate vocabulary.

Women from American culture can flirt just out of anger. Anyone remember that song, “I know What Boys Like” [youtube.com] by the Waitresses? That song spelled it out loud and clear.Women were tired of feeling as if they were being oppressed by men. So they used their power against the men.

Those are just two of the reasons that I’ve found for the confusion on the part of the women. I know why I’ve been confused before: I was single. Now that I’m married, that confusion is pretty much gone. I know where I stand with my wife.

It takes two to tango. It’s not just that men have blurry vision. Women have fuzzy behavior, too.

Concious lying. (Score:4, Interesting)

by Scrameustache (459504) on Sunday March 30, @12:52PM (#22912866)
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Women will often flirt with a man just for attention.

Very, very true. There’s a girl I know, very pretty, very flirty. If you give her enough attention, she’ll eventually start mentioning her boyfriend. I asked her about it, she says if people know she has a boyfriend right away they don’t come over and talk as much. She does it on purpose, and takes offense at the suggestion that this isn’t right.

Afraid not. You’ve actually met women who were really good actresses.

Yeah right indeed. I’ve had “that wasn’t flirting!” applied to telling me to come closer, feeding me something with her hand and softly brushing my lip with her finger… the denial came AFTER that led to some good, sweaty fun. Apparently, she never made any signals (yeah right), it was all me (sure), and the soft caress on my lip was nothing but innocent accidental contact (do I look that gullible?).

Re:Or, on the other hand… (Score:5, Interesting)

by mcvos (645701) on Sunday March 30, @06:53AM (#22910626)

An interesting follow up would be to look at men and womens abilities to communicate their emotional states to others of the same sex, and also broaden the range of “intents” studied towards the opposite sex.

That’s exactly what I was thinking. If men understand the sexual intentions of other men, and women don’t understand the sexual intentions of other women, then it’s clearly the women who don’t communicate clearly. If women understand each other but men don’t, then it’s men who are obvlivious. If men understand each other and women understand each other, but men don’t understand women and vice versa, then it’s the “women from Venus, men from Mars” thing”. And if everybody has trouble understanding other people’s sexual intentions, then people in general are unclear or oblivious about sexual intentions.

It’s that men from Mars, women from Venus thingy.

That depends on the findings of the follow-up study.