Re: subject for investigation
Baader-Meinhof? What do German terrorists have to do with it?
487 publicly visible posts • joined 23 Aug 2008
You're not actually disagreeing with me, because you say there was "computer science". The poster I replied to claimed to have started in computing before there was "computer science", which means no later than 1953 (and I suspect that the term wasn't invented for Cambridge's Dip. Comp. Sci. but is actually older).
It's changing the type system. Instead of relying on documentation to know whether a value can be null or not, the type will be explicit about whether it can be null or not, and if it can be null then you'll have to handle the null vs non-null cases or get a compile-time error.
I don't know how Twitter's backend is architected, but it's conceivable that non-parameterised queries and queries with predictable parameters (such as the one specifically referred to, whose only parameter is the user ID) could be fetches of pre-generated documents.
Look at who in the current cabinet *does* have a law degree (Raab, Braverman, Dowden) and ask yourself whether it's really useful. Braverman is particularly interesting: quite aside from the extremely recent scandals about security violations and her ministry keeping asylum seekers in illegal conditions, she was Attorney General in September 2020 when the UK government said it was going to break international law "in a limited way".
They both have their uses. In particular, the ability to use PuTTY without installing was great when I was travelling for several months and had to ssh back to my home machine from random web cafés to check my mail.
(Obviously there was some risk involved, but I assessed that the risk of web café operators being savvy enough to not only log the keyboard but also sniff the keyfile on my USB stick or launch a hacked PuTTY when I tried to run the one on my USB stick was low enough to be acceptable).
I agree that your first post made a good point, and that your doping example was pertinent, but I think you're missing Anonymous Coward's point. You said (direct quote) "the Russians have done a lot of hacking email archives around controversial subjects in order to either cause general trouble or distract from their own wrongdoings." AC's point, as I understand it, is (rephrased):
We live in an era when the PM can hold a press conference about new laws, and break them himself within a couple of hours of the press conference; when photographic evidence leaks, he blatantly lies about it and gets away with lying about it. How can a leak of some e-mails in which about political campaigners allegedly coordinate lying to the public be controversial against such a background?
I have an Android app of the Oxford Spanish-English dictionary which cost 15 GBP back about 12 (?) years ago when I got my first Android phone and which I have used far more than my hardback copy of the same dictionary (acquired 14 years ago for a similar price). I also paid for Locus Map after using the free version for several years, because I wanted to support the developers.
When I moved to Spain, I considered getting a moped but I wasn't sure whether I'd need to do some equivalent of CBT. I searched the web for something like (in Spanish) "What do I need to ride a moped in Spain?", and the best answer by far was on Yahoo! Answers: "Your mother's blessing".
When my Dad was a teacher in East Africa, one of his additional duties was to visit the bank in the nearby city and collect the wages for the entire school. He used to carry the money in his shoe, not to avoid bribes but to avoid pickpockets. All was well until the time he got on the bus back and discovered that he had no money in his pockets, so he had to pull off his shoe there and then.
I was once offered a half-time job producing a series of similar bespoke programs. I expressed my surprise, explained the principle of code/data separation, talked through the real requirements, and spent three months producing a single configurable program which put my client's previous vendors out of six months' billing per annum for (if they were half-way competent and had done essentially the same thing behind the client's back) about three days' work.
I think that the cynic is you is wrong. Twitchers may well tend to introversion, and may try to keep talking to a minimum to avoid scaring more paranoid birds, but we tend to cluster around the places with good lines of sight to the interesting ones, and most of us will try to explain where to look if someone can't spot it.
I think that reasoning is a bit too glib. The guarantee given by end-to-end encryption is that the data which passes through routers and servers (so roughly layer 2 or 3 in the OSI model) is encrypted by keys which are not available to the people who run the routers and servers, but encryption itself belongs in a higher layer. However, that higher layer is arguably layer 6 rather than layer 7. Which layer should count as the cutoff between rest and transit?
Would you ban the use of pure nitroglycerine in mining just because dynamite does the job effectively and is far safer? Hell, yes! Sometimes appropriate use of tools means recognising that the old tool is so dangerous that the only sensible thing to do is to use newer, safer tools.
You advocate manually extending the struct and adding manual checks every time it's used, but you haven't made an argument for why that's better than switching to a language which does that for you automatically, eliminating the entire class of errors.
There are a couple of things which make it more complicated than that.
First rate university courses consist of more than lectures: there's also interaction with lecturers or teaching assistants.
And lecture courses don't stand alone: they're integrated into a dependency system which allows the lecturer to make valid assumptions about what the students ought to already know. So a given lecture course at one university might spend the last third or half building towards some important result which will be a prerequisite for an advanced course the next year, but at another university which doesn't offer the same advanced course the corresponding intermediate course might be structured very differently.
There is value in heterogeneity and in allowing students to choose a course which suits their interests and capacities.
One of the physics teachers in my secondary school had a demo where he shocked a volunteer using a capacitor charged from a battery. I naïvely volunteered and gave a tremendous shriek; he confessed to me a few years later that he checked afterwards and discovered that he'd miscalculated the capacitance and given me a bigger shock than intended. He followed up with the first XV rugby player who had volunteered in an earlier class and discovered that, although he was too tough to show pain, he had a numb arm for a few hours. So I can well believe that someone with a dodgy heart could be killed by the surprise.
I remember back in about 2000, the first time I tried to top up my pay-as-you-go phone. I duly purchased a 10 quid top-up card from the supermarket, scratched off the opaque coating over the secret code, and tried to follow the instructions. But the instructions wanted me to enter the secret code followed by the hash key, and I couldn't find the output of a one-time function applied to the secret code anywhere on the card... It took a call to the operator's support line and much mutual confusion to figure that one out.
Or you could just combine it in hardware by having larger pixels for a cheaper, better sensor. It's like the megahertz race in personal computers when anything off the shelf had a CPU which supported a really high clock speed and so little RAM that it spent all of its time swapping.
I can't think of many, but there was an incident a few years ago where I had a couple of calls from a 20-or-so digit number which was obviously some spammy call centre; a few months later I discovered that it was in fact a court trying to notify me of something important. And hospital waiting lists are another one: you can go months between being put on the list and getting the phone call to tell you your number's come up, and I don't want to take every potentially spam call in that interval.
I note that Spain is one of the countries where they're launching, and I think that's partly due to cultural differences. In Spain no-one leaves a message. The culture here is that if someone phones you and you don't answer, the ball is now in your court and you should phone back to find out what it was about.
When politics and language get mixed up, things can get very interesting.
Many people know that in the north-east of Spain there's a region, Catalonia, with a substantial* independence movement and its own language, Catalan. Fewer people know that Catalan actually has three main dialect groups: east Catalan (spoken in Barcelona, and hence the "prestige" dialect), Balearic (spoken in the islands of the same name), and west Catalan, spoken in a large area of rural Catalonia and most of the southerly neighbour of Catalonia, the Valencian Community.
Now, as far as Valencian politicians are concerned, Valencian is a separate language to Catalan. As far as Valencian linguists are concerned, Valencian is another name for Catalan. When the Valencian government established its own Academy, the academicians wrote a dictionary which defined Valencian as Catalan and were nearly sacked for it.
To throw an additional spanner in the works, Valencian academics (in general, not just linguists) were used to taking their lead from the older Barcelona-based Academy. Valencian as taught in schools and, especially, universities is much closer to what you'd hear on the streets in Barcelona (more influenced by French) than in Valencia (more influenced by Spanish). So there is also a non-party-political pressure group which tries to get official Valencian to reflect street Valencian rather than the east Catalan dialect: i.e. to promote the real situation that Valencian is an identifiable dialect of Catalan.
* As of the past 10 or so years.