I'm not going back to GW-BASIC, thanks,

Yes, but those are proven to decrease ticket revenue. Why do you think red light cameras are so much more popular?

Personally, I'd love to see this system running in my town. Traffic control here involves trying to impede drivers and preventing them from reaching the speed limit by forcing all lights to be red by the time you get to them as much as possible. Your choice on a clear road is either to speed, or drive 10 under. It's so pervasive in this city that nobody outside of town or in the surrounding cities likes to drive in this town.

C/C++ don't claim to follow relational data rules like MySQL does. Not only is SQL supposed to error if it can't do *exactly* as the user describes, it's supposed to change nothing if any of the affected rows error. It's not supposed to be allowed to guess if the user tells it to do something ambiguous or nonsensical. It's supposed to be required to throw an error in that case. Indeed, many RDBMSs error on some tasks simply because the result would be non-deterministic.

An RDBMS is not just a fancy key-value store. It's not a series of JSON or XML strings. It's a data entity rule set. Used correctly, it will not allow you to store obviously invalid data, even if the underlying datatypes allow the data as valid types.

Determinism is the real issue here. Imagine a compiler that produced different programs from the same source code. That's not particularly useful, is it? Well, a lot of the behavior that MySQL has let slide indicates that they don't particularly care about being deterministic. It's sloppy, and the one thing DBAs hate is sloppy, unpredictable results.

MySQL is the IE 6 of the database world. It encourages poor developer practice. It allows and even encourages lazy or downright risky developer behavior, when the RDBMS should be the element requiring the developer to think about how he stores his data and consider the ramifications of getting useful data from his system that go beyond his own needs. It has more oddball syntax than any other RDBMS, and is less likely to complain about data integrity and more likely to perform silent truncation or silent modification than even SQLite.

Should diluting a helpful ingredient be considered harmful then?

"Helpful" is not necessarily true. It's possible to have a life-threatening allergy to penicillin.

Additionally, all antibiotics intended for human medical use are legally available only with a prescription in the US.

Quite a powerful capability; but one of those powerful capabilities best handled carefully, kept away from direct sunlight, protected from shocks, and otherwise treated as though it is just waiting to ruin your day.

That sounds like an apt description of a computer in general. Or dynamite. Or banks. Or the government. Or beer.

Personally, I like to point out that the government as tried -- repeatedly -- to count the number of federal laws that exist. It has never succeeded.

One begins to question why ignorance of the law isn't a legitimate defense when the laws cannot even be enumerated.

I'm not a golfer

Yes, obviously. There are no rocks on greens, but there are likely no titanium heads, either. That's where you use the putter. Putters need to have some weight to them since you don't swing them very hard.

You might swing hard with a titanium head club on the tee or on the fairway, but you're unlikely to encounter rocks there, either. You're also unlikely to encounter dry grass.

The problem is when golfers hit into deep rough, which can be far off from the fairway that you're intended to play from. Rough can be largely unmaintained. There can be fallen trees, tall grass, and rocks. It isn't irrigated, so it's likely to be as dry as wild grass. And, no, you may not see sparks on a bright summer day. Daylight in an open field on a clear is quite glaring. Even if you did see the sparks, you may not see any flame. The fire could smolder for hours as a tiny ember before finally flaring to life. That's why you're always told to cover a fire pit with sand before you leave it to ensure it's extinguished, remember?

It sounds like they're billing users with excessive usage when they get compromised. If that's the case, why should Amazon care that someone who had the correct authentication keys installed bitcoin miners? How are they to know that they weren't installed by the owner? As long as AWS as a service isn't impacted directly, I don't see that they'd care.

More than that, they never say they won't terminate instances for potential ToS violations (that's if poor credential practice is even a ToS violation). I just don't expect Amazon to scan all of Github and all other VCS hosts, either. Amazon isn't going to go looking for customers to punish. You don't aim for your own feet.

You didn't read the article, did you? TFS is vague, but so is the article. The article contains no details about the vulnerability. It only contains information about the severity and locations of the attacks. Comments on the article add "Version 2.6.18 appeared to be particularly prevalent." The article is shockingly limited on details.

Slashdot's editors are often appear to be asleep at the wheel, but this time the editors weren't adding anything that wasn't in the original article.

GP is right, but for the wrong reasons. It's not because the number of pixels increases. A screen has the same number of pixels whether it's a single scene or multiple.

The simple answer is because you have two (or more) cameras, and thus, must fully render two separate scenes. That means chewing through your rendering equation twice. Even if the individual scenes are smaller and less detailed, you still have to determine what objects look like from completely different angles, and that means you have to repeat a lot of the work. This is why you see so many games (Halo 4, Minecraft, Serious Sam 3) that have problems with split-screen multiplayer. Even though the resulting scenes have significantly smaller resolutions and significantly reduced detail, you still have to do much of the same work to produce each smaller scene before you start filling the frame buffers.

But they don't believe in evolution, they believe in theistic evolution, that is, evolution guided by god, which is not really evolution. One of the fundamental aspects of evolution is that it does not require a guider, just chemistry, statistics, and time.

But is it particularly important? Sure, Occam is wildly stropping his leather strap about the statement, but if both explanations agree 100% on the outcomes, and agree 100% of the mechanisms of action, and agree 100% on the observations, why does that matter? Does it harm the Universe in some way to say "$UnspecifiedDeity initiated the big bang" instead of "unknowable unknowns initiated the big bang"?

Let's say I have two clocks. One was created by $UnspecifiedDeity at the beginning of the Universe, and then left to run on it's own. The other evolved naturally from the forces of chemistry, statistics, and time. Both clocks are right. Which is a more reliable clock? Do we learn less about time by examining one over the other? Does it matter of there is a clock maker at all as long as the clock tells the right time?

Honestly, to me it's like Stallman complaining about BSD & MIT licensing. You're attacking people who agree with you in nearly everything when there are so many more that don't agree at all.

It sounds like you are describing a god whose existence is indistinguishable from it's non-existense. How would you ever tell if that god exists? Why should anyone believe in it if you can't tell?

You don't. That's why it requires faith.

The response "But that's not rational!" is not a particularly convincing argument when you're talking about belief systems. Religion isn't supposed to be rational. It's supposed to be spiritual. It's supposed to give believers a sense of community, justice, purpose, and well-being -- even if you're a ditch digger. Rationality is particularly poor at that. Rationality tells you people are selfish, that there is no justice, and that any sense of well-being is probably not derived from reality. Spirituality tells you there is value in trying to overcome that.

Uh huh. And students can still reset iPads and take control of them. MDM is shit from any vendor.

Additionally, it doesn't stop Apple CS from responding with the same tired line that iPads are consumer products. My coworker got that answer this week to a complaint.

Hey, thanks for eating my angle brackets, Slashdot. You're the only comment system on the Internet that still thinks that's a good idea to parse user content as tags.

It's not particularly important, honestly. Sure, yes, accuracy is important and nobody will use the thing if it can't be accurate a good bit of the time. However, I can't imagine it would be anything other than a fast consultant. A source for a second opinion. I don't think for a minute that we'll be relying on digital diagnosis for a very long time.

How many Sci-Fi shows have you seen where something like this happens:

Nurse: Doctor, the patient's condition is declining rapidly.
Doctor: I don't understand. Hm. Computer, what is your diagnosis?
Computer: There is a 86.3% likelihood that .
Doctor: Hm. That could be right. Nurse, do to confirm. However, I've got a hunch it's . I'm going to while you do that.

And exposing both. Gratuitously. Whether we want it or not.