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What about the kind of person who invented a new operating system because they couldn't have Unix for their personal machine? Maybe even named it after themselves?

Linus named it Freax, and explicitly chose not to name it after himself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux#Naming


:) That is the same guy whose OS professor was claiming his design is obsolete: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanenbaum–Torvalds_debate

I don't think Tanenbaum was Torvalds 'OS professor' though.

Oops, that is my bad: "Different universities: Linus Torvalds studied at the University of Helsinki in Finland, while Andrew Tanenbaum is a computer science professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands."

Thanks for correcting that. I definitely hallucinated that one. I must have misread part of the discussion and made the inference myself. Good to be corrected :)


I found the source of my confusion, I read Tanenbaum's comment: "Writing a new OS only for the 386 in 1991 gets you your second 'F' for this term. But if you do real well on the final exam, you can still pass the course Haha :)" and took it literally and mistakenly inferred the relation, but he was just joking.

And not just dog owners; car drivers are apparently invulnerable to criticism or shame as well. Big SUVs have been demonstrated to kill children; people buy them, they don't care. Driving fast has been demonstrated to kill children; people speed, they don't care. They think it will never happen to them, as they believe themselves to be Good People, and getting to their destination fast in their nice big car is important to them, and any attempt to curtail that an affront to their freedom.

And when they mow children down, as statistically some of them always will, it's then always described as "an accident", as though performed by some capricious god beyond all human control.


Exactly! Cars are not save around children! We should not take cars into schools, shopping malls, parks, playgrounds!

The problem is that protecting children overzealously in the short term can make them more vulnerable in the long term. By attempting to protect them from every concievable risk, real or imagined, you risk preventing them from developing the defences that they will need later in life.

Traffic collisions and drowning are the major causes of death in children in developed countries; not childhood illness, as it was formerly, thanks largely to vaccination. Better road safety - that starts with _you_, car owners! - swimming lessons, and greater adult supervision when children are near water, are the most important things here, not surveillance.

When people do horrific things to children, it is almost never a stranger, but someone close to home, and again surveilling the child will not prevent that.


> Better road safety - that starts with _you_, car owners! -

Regulation and technical improvements can do a lot for road safety

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Killed_on_British_Roads_1...


Using the name "verifier" suggests some sort of formal verification. As far as I can see, this is just a glorified test rig.

I once saw a bug that only happened on Thursdays, and even then only very intermittently, because Thursday was day 0x04 of the week, with a bit that neatly hit a particular flag bit in a data structure that itself was only hit through a combination of pointer aliasing and a timing race. I wonder how this might be expected to cope with that?


You are attacking a straw man here. No-one here is advocating the total central planning of everything, that's been tried in Soviet-style communism and shown to be disastrous. I also agree with you on the basic principle that society should have as few centrally imposed rules as possible.

But some degree of central planning for at least some of society's operations has always been essential to make a civilized society work. Laws, regulations, taxes and subsidies, and natural monopolies such as armed forces, police forces, fire services and wide area road networks, are all centrally planned in modern societies.

Just as communist-style total regulation of everything has always failed, total deregulation has also been shown to fail everywhere it has been tried, as someone will always step into the resulting power vacuum and take control. If you disagree with me on this, please give me an example of a stable anarchist society that does not ride of top of someone else's regulated society.

The only question is where you put the boundaries.

For example: we prevent companies from producing bread with arsenic in it, even if producing it would be more economically efficient for that company. Is this something you would advocate?


Excuse me but did you read to what I was answering ?

Dude straight said, citing from memory: So ? Nothing wrong with it.

And I asked about his definition of central planing.

And I then described central planing from East block - Soviet and rest of occupied countries.

So if someone not see badness in what is most known failure of central planing then this is quite wtf.

And what is your definition of central planning because looks like you do not see difference between "law and regulations" and central planning that already happened on Earth.

But if someone makes boundaries foggy or meaningless then there is lack of sense in discussion.

But actually you must be trolling - how on the Earth universal restrictions in poisoning land in discussion about central planned economy ??


Re-inventing capabilities, 50 years too late. The CAP Computer was running a full hardware-enforced capability system in 1976:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_computer


> we're not serious people

Absolutely. The industry could have moved towards safer languages, better coding methodology and formal verification years ago (see for example MISRA C as at least a partial movement in this direction). It didn't, because it was cheaper not to.


We've had Ada since the 1970s yet it was never widely adopted outside of DoD and even DoD has moved away from it. Why? Whatever that answer may be, and I think it is as much about the novelty-seeking of the software world as anything else, would likely tell us a lot about how we ended up where we are.

The U.S. government could have required all new software for any government-procured system to be written memory-safe languages, thus making it ubiquitous. This could have been phased in slowly with a few years of on-ramp time to allow for industry to acquire the relevant skills.

The DoD tried that with Ada and largely failed. That was with defense contractors whose primary customer mandated it. That was despite Ada being proven to work in its first projects.

The U.S. government had pushed Ada for years and it never worked out. The government was forced to accept C++ because industry was rebelling against ADA, even though ADA was memory safe. Well, Ada did have the ability to be memory unsafe. It was much better by default.

But even in memory-safe languages, compiler bugs are still an issue. The theory is perfect but the implementation is flawed. In such case once the compiler bugs are found, the software would have to be rewritten to compile. For example an 11 year old memory bug was discovered recently in the rust compiler: https://www.penligent.ai/hackinglabs/rust-borrow-checker-bug....

Memory safe languages are not a silver bullet either.


Definitely not a silver bullet (consider also that memory management isn'the only source for vulns), but still much better than C/C++.

I think we'll have flying cars before we have to start focusing on compiler bugs. Most software is already written in memory safe languages and their vulnerabilities are unrelated to memory safety, they're just plain old logic bugs.

No, you are wrong. Rust compiler bug uncovered this month was aboıt memory safety: https://www.penligent.ai/hackinglabs/rust-borrow-checker-bug....

Basically, the borrow checker allowed writing memory unsafe programs without using the keyword unsafe.

Compilers for C, C++ etc. are well established but Rust is a relatively new language. There are many bugs to come just like this.

Using a memory safe language is not a silver bullet for writing memory safe code. The implementation of the memory safe language introduces bugs as well.


You misunderstood, I'm not saying that compiler bugs don't exist or that they're unrelated to memory safety.

I'm saying that these compiler bugs are extremely low on our list of priorities. If we want to eliminate all vulnerabilities in all of software we have about a century worth of logic bugs that are likely more critical and easily exploitable than compiler bugs.


The DoD have even created their own language: ADA. Massive contracts power, but different markets to incentivize.

The distance between the usual consumer/b2b tech startup and the kind of company that sells software to the air force is even bigger than the distance between Google and the kind of company who hires Accenture.


The general interpretation of laws in countries with British-derived legal systems is that firstly, words have the meaning given referenced by the legislation itself, or failing that by a standard legal definition; otherwise words have their literal meaning unless they are ambiguous. If they are ambiguous, then the meaning is usually taken to be that understood by the notional "reasonable man" (and I should also add the meta-note that in most legal contexts, "man" is regarded as meaning "man or woman", except where it explicitly isn't, etc. etc.)

In this case, "vehicle" is defined by Wikipedia (and most other reference works) as "a machine designed for self-propulsion, usually to transport people, cargo, or both", but even that is ambiguous, as is "in the park", so at that point we look for the opinion of the "reasonable man". Whether skateboards, toy cars, horse, surfboards, aircraft above the park, drones etc. meet these definitions is the kind of ambiguity the quiz is looking for.


The problem I'm pointing out here is that it fails to actually explore that ambiguity. The majority cleanly decide that the 3 automobiles are out and everything else is in. There is interesting ambiguity, but it gets thrown out by the context; the context dictates things that are unambiguously vehicles, like boats and bicycles, are actually not violating the rule, because the rule in context actually means automobiles. You cannot explore the ambiguity around the meaning of "vehicle" with a context that dictates you actually meant automobile. At most you can make a point about type theory and type inference, but that was not the point the game was trying to make.

I would also note that the game is not formulated as a law. It is formulated as a colloquial rule - a law would never be presented as "no vehicles in the park". This lends itself to the contextual inference that narrows imprecise wording. If it were instead presented as "Article 5, Section 3: Vehicles are not permitted in the park. [Subsection: definition of vehicle]" it would likely do a better job of getting results that explore the ambiguous bounds of the definition rather than, as it currently does, getting results that clearly delineate at what is unambiguously an automobile rather than at what is unambiguously a vehicle.


I wonder if there is a correlation between "soft-hearted" and "hard-hearted" voters and their answers to the questions. I regard myself as soft-hearted, but answered the questions as literally as I could as that was given explicitly as part of the rules of the game.

I don't think heartedness is particularly relevant, I think it comes down to whether you are able to evaluate logical propositions dispassionately.

I think calling it a "rule" with a "violation" is bringing in some emotional baggage that some people can't see past.

If instead of "does this violate the rule?" the game simply asked "is this a vehicle in the park?" the disagreement would be resolved.

Some people seem to interpret "does this violate the rule?" as asking something more like "is this a vehicle that shouldn't be in the park?", even though the rule doesn't say anything about "should".


> If ... the game simply asked "is this a vehicle in the park?" the disagreement would be resolved.

But the question is not "is this a vehicle in the park," it's "whether or not this situation constitutes 'a vehicle in the park' for the sole purpose of what was the lawmakers' intent when they made a 'no vehicles in the park' rule."

A toy vehicle in the park most definitely is "a vehicle in the park." But prohibiting toys in the park most definitely wasn't the lawmakers' intent.


A toy vehicle is not a vehicle though.

If you think a toy vehicle is a vehicle then you should have answered that the toy car violated the rule.


Nope, I think that toy vehicle is a vehicle, but it does not violate the intent of the rule.

But nothing in the game asks about intent.

More generally, I think that this game is about jurisprudence in general, and interpretation of laws in particular. It’s not about mathematics or group theory. If it was framed as “in preparation for your PhD in statistics, you need to count 1 for each instance of ‘vehicle in the park’ group” I would count 1 for toy vehicle in the park. And for many more, too.

The way the game is framed as “interpretation of the law,” it includes the supposed intent of the law.


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