Until then any talk of "ending the war" is as silly as claiming you can tear down a dam because the river stopped flowing. It stopped flowing because of the dam.
Eh, the idea was that once the Iraqis had built up their own dam, slightly downstream from the US-built temporary dam, that we could remove the US dam and let the Iraqi dam take over.
Unfortunately, it looks like the Iraqi dam was made out of paper-mache...
Both Fortran and Cobol allow you to pass slices of a string to a subroutine or anything else, the syntax is in each case stringvar (x:y) although the meaning of y is different. In Fortran it is (from:to) and in Cobol it is (from:bytecount).
When I was learning we used Algol68 and - although I have not used it for a good 35 years - most other languages come up wanting when compared.
I'm from a different generation. When I was learning things there were attempts made to make languages somewhat failsafe by avoiding ambiguity. Then I saw the C syntax.
- if (a = b) assigns the contents of b to a and executes the code following if b <> 0. Who the hell thought that would be a good idea?
- sizeof(string) (I may have got the name of the function wrong) returns the length of a single byte rather than the length of the entire string. Who the hell thought that would be a good idea?
- strings terminated by a binary zero rather than their physical size. Who the hell thought that would be a good idea?
Kids grew up with this idiocy, I program in Fortran, Cobol, even Assembler to avoid that mess. Oh, and buffer-overruns have been a serious security problem for years now. Well what a f****** surprise.
these are from the government officials who answer to people who were telling us a few years ago that the VA was the model of ideal healthcare delivery
The problem with the VA is that it had to handle a large influx of veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, and there was no corresponding influx of resources to handle them. I don't know if the VA model was 'ideal' or not, but any system will hit the wall at some point if you keep increasing the load factor and never increase its resources.
This. There's likely trillions of dollars invested in IPv4 that is going to be around for decades. Consider the Internet like highways and train track widths - we're stuck with it for a very long time.
I'm probably missing the point, but isn't NDN just a way to do content-addressable lookup of data? And if so, why would we need to throw out IPv4 in order to use it? We already have lots of examples of that running over IPv4 (e.g. BitTorrent, or Akamai, or even Google-searches if you squint).
Is there some particular quality of an "automated driving system" that will make it signficantly more reliable than a home computer? I'm sure the auto manufacturers will try their best to avoid bugs, but then again Apple and Microsoft also try their best.
There are plenty of not so time critical scenarios where some sort of manual override is needed and those aren't going to go away even when we trust the software to do all the driving
No worries -- to handle those scenarios, we'll download the app and steer the car using our phone. Bluetooth FTW!
Between companies using 10 year old Linux kernels, to having unpatchable systems, or just having really bad understandings of security, I've come to conclude this is the norm.
... and a hacked prosthetic arm is the worst possible kind of security breach -- the hackers could literally hold your neck for ransom.
Besides, weren't there apps that do this that folks could purchase of their own free will?
There are, but the feature doesn't work as a theft deterrent unless almost everybody has it. If only a few people have it, thieves will steal phones anyway, because the likelihood is they can resell most of the phones they steal. If/when we get to the point where almost all phones auto-brick after they are stolen, cell-phone thieves will lose their profit incentive and move on to something else.
I'd be amazed if it was.
My experience is that OpenOffice has less features but they work better. They (OO) also seem to be to be more interested in MS compatibility than LO is. I find that particular fork rather regrettable but Oracle would never have divested themselves of OpenOffice if they had not seen themselves becoming irrelevant.
So if we do something in C++ then there's an added 50% "C++ Tax" just to find the 500,000 memory leaks and such.
Just wanted to say that if you are careful to use a smart-pointer class (e.g. shared_ptr) rather than raw C-style pointers to hold dynamically allocated objects, 99% of your memory leaks (and other object-lifetime-managment related problems) will "magically" go away -- and without the overhead or random execution-pauses seen in languages that rely on a garbage collector.
YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! OH, DAMN YOU! GODDAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!
(this text brought to you by the Lameness filter, which wishes to remind you that using too many caps is like yelling)
Would 2014 America hold up seat belt installation for ten years just to make sure they are totally, exactly, 100% safe?
Really, you're don't see the difference in added risk between (a computer taking over sole responsibility for the control of a 2500-pound, 65-mile-an-hour car, in all possible traffic conditions), and (adding a strip of reinforced fabric to the cockpit)?
When was the last time your seat belt stopped working due to a buffer overrun? Contrariwise, when was the last time your home computer did something wrong or unexpected?
Drone target-selection via popular vote on Reddit in 3, 2, 1....
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand
