Whenever Radio Shack asked me for my address I just said I wasn't interested in giving it to them. But a friend of mine did one better... he always wrote down the address of the White house and signed it Mickey Mouse. And the sales person dutifully entered it into the computer, no questions asked.

-Matt

Python's string library isn't remotely what I'd call "overweight", but its strings are immutable. Some algorithms that are quick in other languages are slow in Python, and some operations that are risky in other languages (like using strings for hash keys) are trivial (and threadsafe) in Python. But regardless of the language involved, it's always a good idea to have a bare minimum of knowledge about it before you do something completely stupid.

So true.

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Slip Slidin' Away

I wonder how carcinogenic this stuff is...

That is not a correct description. Lower frequency radio waves are no less 'quantum' or 'classical' than higher frequency radio waves. AM radios can penetrate objects primarily because they have a wavelength on the order of 400 meters (up to around 1 MHz), whereas FM radios have a wavelength of only a few meters (through around 100 MHz). The longer wavelength of AM effectively allows the radio wave to bypass even relatively large objects such as mountains.

The same effect can be seen even within your house if you have a dual-band WIFI router. The 2.4 GHz band is able to penetrate walls and go around corners and reach the second floor far more easily than the 5 GHz band can.

-Matt

What morons. Sorry, but they are. They are writing to a file through the operating system which means that it is being spooled out to disk asynchronously, so obviously piecemeal writes are going to be faster because they will run concurrently with the string generation algorithm. Plus their 'writes' are probably being buffered in ram anyway.

Writes to files generally do not stall programs. These people are morons.

-Matt

In both cases of the experiment, the disk is used, therefore the experiment cannot test whether doing something in memory is faster than doing something on disk.

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It's a flawed experiment.

There was an article a few years ago about how Congressmen judged popular support. I don't know how true it is now, but back then most of them got under ten letters for any given bill. Anything that got 100 was judged to be really important to their constituents. Basically, if everyone on Slashdot who is a registered voter in the USA actually bothered contacting their representatives (a form letter doesn't count, those are ignored, but a couple of short paragraphs will be counted as a separate mail) then they'd be perceived as representing popular opinion.

Sounds like a good way for Uber to end up in a lot of courts. If they thought that the lawsuits for violating various taxi laws were bad, wait until they see the ones for violating every variant implementation of the EU data protection directive...

Or at least their certs removed from valid CA Root lists that, for example, Mozilla uses. If not, why not? A trust has been breached.

So some CTO decides to take a visual arts litmus test which admittedly does not work, modify it in arbitrary ways, and then apply it to the software engineering field to determine whether or not a project will fail.

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I have to agree with the previous poster who said, "Seriously, this is the dumbest thing ever. Just make the code work."

Yup, go on a diet and never go off that diet, i.e., change your lifestyle. :)

If you "go on a diet" you are defeated before you even start.

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If you want to lose weight, you have to go into the process with the goal of changing your lifestyle permanently, otherwise the weight will return when you finish the diet.

Go into the weight loss process with the right mindset - a permanent change of what and how you eat, along with any changes in your activity regimen.

The reason most people regain the wieght they lose on a diet is that they view a diet as something temporary, which it is.

Don't go on a diet (Hacker's Diet or otherwise), but do make a permanent change to your lifestyle.

Stop saying "heat" as well. Heat in this context is nothing but low-frequency light.

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So the headline should read...

Malware that was installed on computers uses light to send data to other computers similarly loaded with malware.

But that doesn't make for a page-hit-generating headline.

The lack of seatbelts makes sense. If you're on a spaceship that can accelerate quickly enough to turn everyone into a fine paste and relies on inertial dampeners (adjustments of the artificial gravity) to prevent this, then there aren't many situations where you'll need a seatbelt: either the inertial dampeners are preventing you from needing them, or you're dead. The problem is that the drama needed the ship to seem to shake. It's the same issue as feeling the ship warm up as you get close to a star: it makes for good drama, but the difference between 'humans are comfortable' and 'humans are on fire' is tiny compared to the difference between 'humans are comfortable' and 'nuclear fusion is happening' - it's far more likely that the shields would work fine and no one would be discomforted right up until the point where much of the ship vaporised.