Not a tech problem, not a tech solution.
Just check your phone when you've arrived or pull over into a parking lot if you're that desperate. Seriously, how hard is that?
Apparently for some people it's a lot harder than you would think; Driver Dies After Posting Facebook Selfie.
True. But things were still pretty basic in the 1980's. On PCs compiling and linking (memory overlays anyone?) could take forever. There was a "conspiracy theory" that compiler/linker suppliers were secretly owned by coffee companies!
You both forgot to mention the BBC had a built in 6502 multipass assembler.
So unlike my spectrum I didn't have to reload the assembler every time I made an error and my code stomped all over ram.
Additionally, you had direct access to OS routines from basic, OSBYTE, OSWORD, OSCLI etc.
The BBC was and still is far ahead of anything else as a teaching machine. Simple enough to understand, complex enough to be useful and enough I/O to put a pi with gertboard to shame even today.
Good point. The built-in assembler was excellent too. The whole BBC Micro project was designed educate people about the computer as a powerful tool they could use, and not just a games machine. And, as you say, they did a damn good job.
The BBC Model B equipped with BBC BASIC was released in 1981. As well as the usual litany of BASIC like features (i.e. goto), it had proper named procedures and functions with local variables, which allowed structured programming. It didn't have proper block structured if though.
Yes indeed. I initially learned to program on a BBC, and I learned a number of good habits in the process.
Ob. quote from Real Programmers.
"Real programmers don't write in FORTRAN. FORTRAN is for pipe stress freaks and crystallography weenies."
Of course, it also says this about BASIC
"Real Programmers don't write in BASIC. Actually, no programmers write in BASIC, after the age of 12."
Leaving aside the fact that OpenSSL is not a "BSD package that kindly ported to Linux", I suggest it's rather more arrogant to assume that the world will rush to replace OpenSSL with Theo De Raadt's LibreSSL when (if) it becomes available.
OpenSSL is not fundamentally broken. It had a bug, albeit one with big consequences. Lots of people depend on OpenSSL and it needs to properly maintained. Paying people to work on opensource projects is nothing new and if this funding supports developers with the necessary cryptographic skills devoting quality time to maintaining OpenSSL then that's a good thing.
I doubt it. In the UK (where there is a well established public health system) employers have been getting increasingly fond of zero-hours contracts over the last few years. If you want to talk "double whammy", these contracts not only do not guarantee you any hours in any given week (hence the name) but you are usually contractually forbidden from working for anybody else; you are supposed to be always "on call". So you aren't working many hours, and you're poor. Oh brave new world!
It also means fostering an environment where juvenile-minded males never grow up into reasonable, professional men, fostering a culture that eventually and surely will spawn a molester or sociopath.
And this doesn't just apply to the business world. You get similar issues in professional team sports, where guys come out of school/college straight into what is essentially a never-ending frat house environment.
Everyone should be armed. Assuming you're not a felon, a weapon should be in every single citizen's possession. Period. No loopholes.
Given that the rest of the western world manages just fine without everybody being tooled up all the time and has significantly lower rates of gunshot fatalities, the obvious question is - Why?
Many eyeballs may make bugs shallower, but those many eyeballs don't really exist. Source availability does not translate to many people examining that source. People, myself included, may like to build to install packages but that's it.
It's not the quantity of eyes, it's the quality that counts. A million script kiddies can read the code and not spot a serious bug. This is particularly true of security/cryptography software.
What we need are intelligent bots to constantly trawl source repositories looking for bugs. People just don't have the time any more.
Before bots, what about unit tests? It seems to me that a decent test suite would have caught what is essentially a buffer overflow.
If you Google "Byte magazine covers", you'll see that the covers often took a certain amount of artistic license. They were designed to be eye-catching on news-stands. But the content was always very good. I'm sure I'm not the only one who was sorry to see it go.
There is no credible evidence that the vaccines are unsafe.
Minor pedantic quibble: some vaccines are unsafe for a very small subset of the population, mainly people with compromised immune systems or severe allergies to components of the vaccines. I'm pretty sure doctors check for this before sticking the needle in. These people are one of the reasons why herd immunity is so important, because the only thing protecting them from certain diseases is the fact that the rest of the population can't act as carriers. Most of us won't be harmed if one of Jenny McCarthy's kids coughs on us, because we've had the shots - but the unlucky few who really can't get vaccinated are screwed.
Fair point. There's always the possibility of allergic reaction with any medication. What I had meant to say was that there was no credible evidence of a causal link between vaccination and, for example, conditions like autism as the anti-vaccine people claim.
Obviously, it would be hugely unethical and pointlessly cruel to advocate the use of vaccines whose risks outweigh their benefits (and, since vaccination for a selection of potentially-serious childhood diseases, as well as less common but more serious diseases, if we have the vaccine available and you are in a suitable risk group, is so enormously common, this is an area of medicine where studying safety both before and after approval is money well spent); but, despite their rhetorical shift, there appears to be no evidence that the 'We don't hate vaccines, we just want safe ones!' groups are actually at all interested in even setting goalposts that vaccines would have to meet to be accepted, much less reviewing evidence as to whether or not existing vaccines do meet those standards.
The sad reality is that the "we just want safe vaccines" claim is a complete red herring. There is no credible evidence that the vaccines are unsafe. There is abundant evidence that not being vaccinated is highly unsafe; not just to you but also to others you might infect. Serious diseases that had been eradicated in the western world have come back, with disastrous consequences (including death) for people who have become infected.
I'm no fan of big-pharma but to claim that this is their fault is ridiculous. The responsibility lies with the anti-vaccine zealots, who persist in ignoring all the evidence in front of them.
For fear of being modded down into oblivion, I'll post anonymously.
"The very existence of cochlear implants wrongly presupposes that a deaf person is in need of fixing."
This just smacks of self-conscious defensiveness. It is wrong.
The BBC has a magazine program for deaf people called "See Hear". A few years ago they had a studio audience discussion about this very topic and one (very angry) young man said he was proud to be deaf, he wanted to marry a deaf girl, and have deaf kids. That's the kind of thinking that perpetuates these "cultures". My head still spins when I think about it.
and I really wanted to see it.
Just tried it again myself. The link works here in both Firefox and Chrome (and through my company's proxy) so it must have been just bad timing when you tried. In that case
Math is like love -- a simple idea but it can get complicated. -- R. Drabek
