Remember the very obvious maxim of Dykstra: testing can only tell you there ARE errors, it can't tell you there AREN'T errors.

Randomly poking at data only find you the very dumbest errors. It takes some real thinking and mulling to realize, hey, if a xml field crosses this buffer boundary, and the last 4-byte Unicode code was cached, it's going to get bashed by the next 3-byte escape code. Or 255 bytes of code-page Yen symbol (255) followed by a 254 will lead to sign-extension and access to an address in the kernel trampoline DLL. Those kind of combinatorial errors are not going to be discovered by random poking at the data.

So they're going to (and have) given everybody a false sense of security, when the basic method can do nothing of the sort. it can only fin errors of the most trivial sort. It can't find errors that thousands of unemployed Russian hackers can dream up of testing for, and it can only FIND errors, not tell you there aren't an unlimited number of remaining errors.

I'm currently reading The Emergence of a Scientific Culture by S. Gaukroger. My interest stems from past readings in epistemology as a study of the methodology of science, and, my interest in Mediterranean death cult religions like Islam, Christianity and Judaism as patriarchal control mechanisms, not unlike induced schizo-affective disorders, that come into play in agrarian societies with controlling oligarchies (monarchies) ensconced in developing urban centres. It's my own take on things that's evolved from trying to understand to what extent corruption is fundamental and necessary to democracy. I'm throwing it out in this thread because I think U.K. libel laws are symptomatic of a transition from class structured, shame-face saving patriarchal societies to modern democracies that have successfully tested empirical findings and common law and are putting aside almost Shamanistic believes that words are effectively magical or Gospel.

Cleisthenes in Ancient Greek history is said to have instituted the first democracy. Sketchily put he did it by breaking up the political clout of existing clans by creating voting blocks that abstracted away from the clan bases and instituted time limits on political offices. He also, IIRC, enforced political participation. I'm sure that somewhere in the Federalist Papers there are presumptions that all of us are corrupt, or subject to corruption, and, the American Founding Fathers instituted articles and laws to form a democracy that reflected their belief in the fundamental corrupt character of us all. I'm trying to formulate a view of modern democracy from the underlying idea that as a political institution democracy best addresses corruption. This sort of links up to Churchill's famous dictum that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others because it best addresses the citizenry and politicians of modern democracies as the worst of all peoples except for all the others, and, this because it best addresses our corruptible natures.

I believe modern democracies with universal suffrage given majority and capacity on the part of it's citizens are the most viable forms of modern government because they've stood the test of history in transitioning from agrarian to post industrial urban societies. British libel laws and things like hate laws have considerable merit but reflect a more industrial/agrarian society where class structure and "face" reflect more primitive belief systems wherein words carry magical import. Going into language goes to far afield but mentioning the "debate" between Newton and Leibniz over the discovery of the Calculus and the tribal wars of industrializing Europe give some character to where I'm trying to go with this stuff.

Archeology has in it's body the idea of a three generation window for viewing past cultures. A generation is somewhere between 20 and 30 years. Three generations give a vivid insight into a culture because grandparents, parents and offspring are a highly sympathetic and even empathetic cluster that transitions cultural values. The U.K., like all viable modern democracies, is transitioning to a new perspective that has as it's foundation empirical findings in Science and tested wisdom in law but still has to deal with the fundamental corrupt nature of our kind.

je m'amuse

I wonder if you've thought that through. So it's wrong to hate a thing that is not easily changed, but okay to hate a thing that the person can change. If this is your guiding principle, what you end up with is a uniform society of conformists. They'll superficially look different (skin color, attire, etc) but any meaningful diversity will end there, because any real diversity of ideas, worldviews and philosophies is now on the "acceptable hatred" list. That's the problem with this notion, and more generally the problem with all of this focus on group identities instead of individuality.

Different people, different needs - even the latest iPhone is (for me personally) a worse choice than an old HTC Universal I had years ago.

People have been saying the writing is on the wall fro Flash for over 10 years.
This is the first device to give it serious momentum.

No, I am not buying one, nor do I want one. I'll wait for this:

http://wepad.mobi/en

My netbook has a 32GB SSD..

The offense was commited in 2004 - you only waited 6 years. (Ten years ago Bill Clinton was in the White House)

While untactful, the AC has a point - you don't run production DB servers on Gentoo.

Second, you ALSO don't run production DB servers on unsupported versions of the software. For development use? Sure. Download PostgreSQL and have fun. It's actually a very good DB that I've been using a lot lately.

HOWEVER, if you plan on putting into use for any important customer? Go to www.EnterpriseDB.com. It's PostgreSQL with commercial support. It's not free, but a support is pretty much a requirement for serious work. These are scenario's where if the system goes down unscheduled AT ALL everyone is pissed. If it's down unscheduled for more than 5 minutes you're getting angry phone calls. If it goes down unscheduled for more than an hour you're looking for a new job. It's a different league.

The treaty only applies to nations, not individuals who purchase something from a nation so I suspect that angle is pretty useless. I'm suspecting a better "he doesn't own anything" angle would be 1) the rover is non-functional or 2) owning a dead rover on the moon is like owning the wreck of a chevy impala on Mars, you'd have a hard time protecting "your" property from the first person who actually made it up there.

So computer scientists fuck up by using prefixes with specific meanings, but it is the other people, reminding them that prefixes are used in a different way, who are introducing the ambiguity?

What an egregious example of revisionism.

The only problem perhaps was that many of the early computing scientists were not conversant with the IS, which is why they fucked up. I am sure no scientist conversant with the IS would have used the prefixes so loosely because he would have been aware of their original meaning.

I've decided to work on my weight recently, and I've been doing calorie counting and splitting my eating across 6 meals at 2.5-3 hour intervals.

You can find lots of estimators online for maintenance calorie levels. A scale costs all of $20, and it is very useful for baking as well.

I don't weigh everything I put into my mouth now, but for a few days I did - nothing at all but water or diet soda went into my mouth weight getting weighed and converted to protein/ fat/ carb/ calorie counts. Now I do this only when I encounter new foods that I anticipate eating often that I'm not familiar with.

My observation - my eyes were SERIOUSLY out of calibration on the typical American diet. Now I'm eating maintenance-20%, and honestly I don't really feel hungry. I certainly don't ever feel stuffed, but it really hasn't been hard to stick to. I've also been exercising.

Most of us here are reasonably OCD, and I've found that an OCD approach to dieting seemed to fit better than anything I've tried in the past. Now I don't need to weigh stuff most of the time, I've been losing weight steadily, and I feel like this is something I could maintain indefinitely without hardship. Sure, only having one cookie for the occasional desert isn't psychologically satisfying, but I don't go around with hunger pains either.

If you have no idea how many calories you're eating, I'd suggest finding out.

Judging inter-societal conflict and history through the same morality used to describe individual behavior makes for great righteous indignation, but poor history.

Human history is a story of cultural migrations full of bloodshed. Every piece of land owned by a society was taken from another society. The Americas were full of warrior tribes and ethos... who were they fighting before the white man arrived? Cortes' invasion was successful because he started an uprising against the last warlike conqueror. Europe was invaded by (at various times) by the Persians, Moors, Goths, Celts, Romans, Mongols, and Turks. Egypt was conquered by the Assyrians, the Greeks, and the Romans.

The European empires are just the most recent technologically and culturally advanced civilization to use that advancement for expansion. You may call it evil, but it is no less evil than any other successful culture.

As for applying that logic to individual actions regarding your neighbors, well that's a whole different lecture on social contracts, and the difference between norms within a societal group and with other societies.

Though the short life expectancy of CDs appears to have been greatly exaggerated, they do have a finite lifespan while music in a more transient form can happily be saved from one hermetically sealed hard disk to the next. Either way, all the CRC checks in the world can't guarantee immortality of any data.

Speaking of transient... I've lived most of my teens going from one place to the next, often losing or giving away my possessions in the process. Those quaint, physical goods meant bullshit to me sleeping in an alley or at so-and-so's couch for the week.

What did comfort me was recovering collections of music from friends I shared with since the days of Napster, an impossibility if relying solely on CDs, regardless of the legality.

I'm an immaterial girl living in an immaterial world. Well, except for my recent journey into my PS3 and buying up used games for it. At least Blu-rays are a little sturdier than DVDs and CDs.

Because nobody except rabid people on either side is confused or affected by the so-called bias of linking to that site to get an AP story (which is accurate and not-so-biased, barring the fact that EVERYONE's biased), perhaps? LOL.