A recent study revealed the startling conclusion that 50% of US residents have below average cognitive abilities.

racist, narcissistic, caste-based hiring practices to gain jobs they're in no way qualified for in a country thousands of miles from home

Hmm... Iranian? Chinese? Slavic? Israeli? Strange, none of them seem to quite meet your description.


Sounds like you are referring to people of one particular country.

Hmm, yes. Yes, it does sound like you have one particular country in mind. Clearly, one of you has a race card in play, but you might want to check the instant replay before you stick your neck out too far on this one...

It's a bit more to it than that. It's actually done with a new opcode in the underlying JVM, which allows them to implement those classes without having to construct new inner classes for each. There were cases where large numbers of nearly-identical inner classes were costing too much memory in certain parts of the JVM, and the new opcode makes that more efficient. (This was more a problem for Scala than for Java itself.)

But yeah, from a Java perspective, it's just syntactic sugar for anonymous inner classes. It's a particularly nice piece of syntactic sugar, since it makes the code more robust to certain kinds of changes by eliminating redundancy. You could, for example, change the name of the implemented class or the name of the method without breaking every lambda. Plus, it's nice to have that redundancy gone: a good IDE could resolve some of it for you but it makes the code more verbose than is strictly required.

There, I sure can't help ya. I found it pretty interesting; it's more relevant to my interests than much of what Slashdot has done of late. But you're absolutely right that there's a whole passel of science of equal interest that gets ignored, while fluff that I find uninteresting (or worse) gets there day after day.

I originally thought that Slashdot had the most insightful scientific and technical commentary on the web. The articles of moderate interest were greatly enhanced by other scientists with a close familiarity. I've found that to be substantially worse for the past couple of years, and I don't think that's the usual rose-colored-glasses about "the good old days" that makes every popular web site seem to degenerate over time. I believe that the quality of commenters is worse.

Which is to say... I have no idea why this article got picked out. I'd have liked to have seen better commentary that would put it in better context. I personally would rather see more like this, not less, but that's just my taste. I can't conceive of what's driving the editing selections, and I do think that they, too, are worse than formerly.

The worst industrial disaster in US history occurred in 1947 when a series of explosions killed 581 people, including all but one member of the Texas City fire department.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

The initial blast was also one of the largest non-nuclear explosion in US history.

(Emphasis added). That's the basis of egotism, also known as childishness.

When it operates in politics, you wind up with imbecilic laws like Prohibition and the current War on Drugs. The basis is, "*I* don't want to do that, therefore no one else should ever be allowed to do that either!"

Does anyone else remember this site years ago, back when occurrences of it on Slashdot were relatively rare events?

*I* don't personally use that many. In fact I have never needed anything close to 100.

I'm also not automatically hostile to someone who says they do. They have their reasons, and no number of tabs they use on their own equipment is going to infringe on the way I personally want to use my own browser.

So I just don't see a problem here. With a guy who says he uses so many tabs, that is. The flimsy excuse for hostility, on the other hand ... it's a means by which you are shaming yourself. The prevalence of this attitude is destroying Slashdot much faster than the Beta redesign. When so many users engage in this, it tends to repel those who want to converse like adults. Remember that the userbase and the discussions are what actually bring you to this site. Anyone can get a copy of the Slashcode and get some cheap Web hosting.

That would be much more accurate if you said "No True Scotsman" and not "Straw Man".

Observation: about a year ago, Slashdot users finally discovered, in a collective groupthink style, that there was such a thing as the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. Since then, they have tried to invoke it in every possible conversation, even where it does not apply. Conclusion: there are a lot of insecure nerds who are eager to show off their perceived superior intelligence. Since they are driven by insecurity, they do this not by creating or contributing anything of their own, but by trying to invent flaws in what others say. The other guy made a mistake if you just wish for it hard enough!

I'll give an example. A while back, I personally had some imbecile jump on this bandwagon in response to a post of mine. I mentioned that people who call themselves Christians but then commit acts of violence, for flimsy reasons and without provocation, are not in fact practicing Christianity. Some fool cried "hehe I guss there is No True Scotsman then huh?!" while patting himself on the back fiercely. Apparently this fool decided that knowing nothing about the teachings of Jesus Christ does not actually disqualify him from commenting on the subject. After all, he knew in his twisted little heart that I was wrong, and that only he was clever enough to invent the reason why.

This infantile fevered-ego shit is killing Slashdot much faster than a shitty Beta redesign ever could hope to do. It's just far less trendy to protest it.

I know someone who actually did that ... with a sledgehammer.

I asked him if that was an expensive outburst. He said yes. I asked him if it was gratifying. He said "you have no idea".

Exactly. Unless it's an experiment to see how well peer review works, putting it in Nature is pretty stupid. You're pretty much guaranteeing that people will try to reproduce your work and you'll be exposed. You can probably get away with it if you put it in a less prestigious journal, but if people start citing it then there's a good chance that someone will try to reproduce it, especially when the novelty of the article is that it's an easy way of doing a thing that loads of people want to do. And if it isn't read and cited enough that people want to reproduce it, it's pretty worthless (from a research career perspective) as a publication...

Mod parent up.

This judge has dealt with this issue in other cases, and in fact had previously told the government exactly what it should do in order to avoid the 4th Amendment problems of general warrants. FTA:

"[In a previous ruling, the Court] warned the government to “adopt stricter search parameters in future applications” or the Court would be "unwilling to issue any search and seizure warrants for electronic data that ignore the constitutional obligations to avoid ‘general’ electronic warrants.” Facebook Opinion, 2013 WL 7856600, at *8. The Court recommended several different approaches, including key word searches, using an independent special master to conduct searches, or segregating the people who are performing the search from those who are conducting the investigation.""

The government attorneys in this case are hopefully looking for a new gig. You don't ignore a judge and feed him boilerplate when he's already on to you.

You should set it up so their only ingress is through a reverse ssh tunnel outward. Preferably secured with a key you send to them so their reused passwords aren't the only thing keeping people out. You should also restrict it by IP range to whatever machine they're coming from.

I like to think I would do better today than I did back then - My primary role involves coding, not network hardening. I just tend to get ownership of Linux boxes because, surprisingly, not many folks in the business world (even in IT) know it all that well.

That said, you have to understand the pure obstinacy of some of these vendors - As in, still using Telnet and actively refuse to use SSH (because they had a harder time pre-breaking it, and protested that most of their customers couldn't handle the idea of using preshared keys to authenticate). As in, threw a fit that required me to defend just blocking them at the firewall to not just my boss, but the owner of the company, and painted me as completely paranoid (at least that stopped and I got to gloat for a few days when we finally got hacked - Though I got to spend the 70-hour weekend rebuilding the machine so the company could function come Monday morning... yay).

Partially, no need - You can literally Google "linux $program root password" and get all the names you want.

But more, because I sadly no longer consider this behavior unusual (it floored me the first time I saw it, as I said - I consider it almost standard procedure, now). Vendors look at Linux as an exploitable free resource, a base platform they don't need to license, complete with an impressive collection of development tools. Except Linux has all these pesky permissions, heck, it doesn't even like letting you in without a password, so the first "project" these jokers embark upon consists of gutting the security from Linux.

So not much point in shaming individual companies, for a problem endemic to an entire industry.

If you don't think Lamport has made a real difference already, then either you have no idea who he is, or you don't think computers are very important.