I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this yet, on Slashdot of all places. How many times have you seen a shitty submission here and comments correcting it? It's practically Slashdot's unofficial slogan: "yeah, the stories are awful, but I come for the comments".
Nobody said lynch mob. That term has a connotation of violence without cause.
No, it doesn't. At all. It means exactly what you are talking about.
I thought reverse engineering the server protocol was perfectly legal.
In theory, yes. In practice, the DMCA can be used to squash interoperable implementations. Look at bnetd, for example. Despite it being a completely separate implementation of the protocol, Blizzard used the DMCA to successfully sue the project maintainers.
Do you realise at all that people die in wars?
Like, people who are not Kim Jong-Un?
>I've only ever been subjected to one, and it doesn't seem to meet any practical definitions of failure.
People dying through poverty brought on by the actions of super-rich isn't a failure in your model of capitalism?
Except, you know, that in other societies women are interested in science and technology.
So no. You are quite simply wrong.
Yep, shure. But that is clearly contra-productive for the whole community
Nothing clear about it whatsoever. It means people can actually make a profit, which means they will actually put in the effort to make things that community will benefit from.
And no, with a few notable but very specific exceptions, you can't really make money off GPL'd software.
Yep. If you start censoring them, then you are effectively doing the job of terrorists by trying to remove freedom.
Real life isn't Star Wars, the terrorists don't win if we "give into the dark side" to fight them. We just lose.
They don't win. They will never be... So, the west has become a police state, with lots of censorship, and they round up anyone who they suspect of disagreeing with their government and send them to re-education camps. That's it boys, we've won. Job done. Lets go home. Not going to happen.
Its important not to conflate "us losing" with "them winning". Because that leads to rhetoric like this... "if we do X, then the terrorists win"... which is nonsense. It's not a win for them. Its not what they are fighting about AT ALL. And it masks what they really ARE fighting about.
We shouldn't lose sight of that.
Censorship is bad, and should be fought for many many reasons, but "doing the job of terrorists" isn't one of them.
This isn't the teaching materials. This is a test question.
You are addressing the original article, and you are right on a test its a perfectly fine question. I agree with your argument.
My post was really just addressing the post I responded too, rather than the original article though, and that was in the context of teaching rather than testing.
If you have an embedded system that does not have a spare register for couinting but has built-ins for jumps, recursion is faster than iteration. If on the other hand you have built-ins for counting iterations, with a JPNZ, loops are more efficient.
That's really more of a compiler optimization issue.
It's like teaching a kid long division using 6000 / 10, and disparaging the example saying, "yeah, but you would never use long division for that." Well, no shit, Sherlock. You're teaching mechanics.
But the mechanics of long division in that example are reduced to trivial busywork. That not a complicated enough example to even really see the mechanics properly.
It'd be like using Newton's method on a sample problem that converges to an absolute final answer after a single iteration, or teaching someone how to calculate the area of a trapezoid and using a square as the example problem to solve. Sure the formula works on a square but its not really instructive.
Application is for another lesson. Maybe even another class.
I'd argue that the solution to a problem is a lot easier to understand if you're given a context where the solution is needed FIRST. Starting with a degenerate problem that reduces to a trivial application serves to obscure the 'point' of the solution method.
I actually have ad block on my phone, but I had the 'allow unobtrusive ads' checked; but that stupid little tab at the bottom of
But that ad wasn't unobtrusive. It was animated, and it wouldn't scroll away (fixed to screen coordinates)... those are the definition of OBTRUSIVE.
soylentnews is supposed to be
Won't help you much if somebody else makes a photo with you in it and tags you, will it?
So some fucking OTA update is going to fail while you're in the middle of driving because it just happened without asking you?
Nice strawman you've constructed. The one car that does OTA updates right now (Tesla) downloads them and then prompts you when to do them, so you can wait until your home in your garage. You don't hear any Tesla owners complaining do you?
Mobile phones are another device with OTA update support. Have you heard a lot of stories where the phone interrupted a 911 call to do an ota update and then failed? No? Because it never happens. The phone says theres an update ready, and waits for you initiate... most of them will even refuse to go if you are low battery, and most recommend you be plugged into a charger for the update... absolutely none ever have just spontaneously decided to update during a call.
This is so incredibly stupid as to defy belief.
Why manufacture imaginary problems to be outraged about; there are plenty of real problems in the world. But OTA updates isn't one of them.
Sure, if they want to maintain their own fork that nobody uses, they can do that.
Old programmers never die, they just become managers.
