Posts by jwenting

change this

private float d = 2.0f, sum = 1.0f, term = 0.0f;

It's very bad practice to declare multiple variables on a single line, never do it!

Seems to me you don't understand much about socket communications.

Programs don't create ports, they open sockets on ports. That's easy enough to do in Java, any book on network programming in Java will tell you how (and you'd better study such books as otherwise you're in for a load of performance and security problems no matter what programming language you use).

These people killed for their religion because they didn't understand their religion as the founders of that religion intended.
That's a problem with many religions, Islam is certainly not alone in that.

The wackos in Waco were similar for example, and I doubt there's anything in the bible dictating that people that aren't Christians according to some strict definition should be burned alive or tortured to death.

By not studying other religions yet forming an opinion about them you're on very shaky ground.

And as to your last question to Catweazle, if you don't see how first stating that god created Adam after he created the animals and later stating that god created the animals after creating Adam to keep Adam company I must severely question your power of reason.

of course, but illiteracy makes the problem that much larger.

Someone who can read can read for himself where it says that one should not kill oneself after all, while someone who cannot has to rely on the words of a person in authority who tells him that killing oneself in order to kill heretics ensures a place in heaven.

I've a similar experience with a 4000 series Satellite. After about a year the motherboard died (which was replaced under warranty), a year later the battery started to go (I ditched it eventually as I rarely used the machine on battery anyway).
The latch for the lock broke off at about the same time, or rather it failed for no apparent reason.

Current models do look more sturdy, but I'd stay away from their lower priced offerings still.

I don't give a crap about other religions other than my own. Especially the muslim religion. What kind of religion teachers their followers to drive airplanes into buildings and kill thousands? Ohh wait, it was because they were promised something by their God, right? ppffffff what a bunch of crap. The only thing they got was to burn in hell.

If you'd taken the care to study other religions (and especially Islam in this case) you'd have found that Islam specifically prohibits suicide as well as the harming of Jews and Christians.
Sadly many influential Islamic leaders have political agendas (as do many religious leaders elsewhere) and can draw on a large base of people who like you don't study religious texts (even their own), instead taking the word of those leaders as being the will of god. In the Islamic world that's made worse by a large percentage of illiterate believers.

cud: ball of partially digested vegetable matter regurgitated by hooved animals.

What's that to do with Java?

You're wrong bj. They DO pray to the same god. Jesus, in case you're wondering, is NOT god (despite being portrayed as such incorrectly by many American church groups).
If you think Jesus is god you're the one who is gravely wrong in your belief system.

You obviously also don't understand the first thing about Islam. Islam sees Jesus as second only to Muhammed as the greatest prophets of god (whom they call Allah and the Jews call Jahweh which Christians often pronounce as Jehovah).
Islam also recognises the bible as one of their holy books next to the q'uran and I think the torah as well.

I'd rather believe as being accurate the sayings of a single person penned down by a scribe during that person's life than the ramblings of a thousand people combined and translated (with all the resulting errors) dozens if not hundreds of years later after being passed on by word of mouth (with the resulting errors and interpretations).

As it is I don't hold either account to be factual or accurate. The bible to me reads like a soap opera more often than not and an allegorical story most of the rest of the time.
There are blatant inconsistencies between the books, if it's so accurate how do you explain those?

Not quite. If the government didn't take those taxes to provide things like law enforcement and national security each citizen would have to provide that for himself.

I won't go into the debate as to whether the government is making efficient (government, efficient, don't make me laugh) use of that money, but not all of it is wasted.
At the very least it keeps some dangerous megalomaniacs off the street and in meeting rooms (they're called politicians).

wrong :)
Nuclear reactors use nuclear fission (the splitting of heavy isotopes into lighter ones), stars use nuclear fusion (the combination of light isotopes into heavier ones).

If you use a one-way encryption algorithm like MD5 there's precious little chance of it being decrypted (as the algorithm doesn't support it).

I know someone in China is doing work towards decrypting MD5 but it's so far not a threat (at most their method will give you an idea where to look for the password, some hints towards its composition).

that depends on your operating system.
At the least you must restart your terminal windows and Java based applications for them to see the change.

what are you trying to achieve?
Is the password entered by the users and the program checks it (with the users getting a new password mailed every week)?
If so the solution is simple: save the password in the form of an MD5 hash and compare the MD5 hash of the password the user enters with the hashed password you stored.
That way the application never knows the password at all (as it will get the hash from the generator, also removing the risk of a man in the middle attack fetching the unencrypted password during transmission).

No language is completely safe from decompilation, and network attacks can catch your passwords being transmitted also independently from the language used.

You can add further safeguards in your Java environment like custom classloaders that use an encrypted table of hash codes (or more likely serial version IDs) of your classes and compare those with the ones calculated from the actual classfiles to check whether there has been tampering, classfile encryption, etc. etc. but of course nothing is ever completely safe from the dedicated cracker.

What you always (in any environment) need to ask yourself is how much effort/money is the worth of your data security and how to best spend it.
Often the conclusion will be that there's no real need to go further than a stern license and removing debugging information from the compiled code.
In a high security environment you'll often find …

remember the practice is illegal in many countries, and illegal for minors (which appear to be a large proportion of the visitors here) in many more.

Asif, Server_crash, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism all pray to the same god. Islam and Christianity are both offshoots of Judaism in fact, with Islam being hundreds of years younger.
In fact, Islam is now (at an intellectual and spiritual level) where Christianity was during the Crusades (so the early to mid middle ages in Europe, around 700-800 years ago) and Judaism was somewhere around 2000-2500 years ago.

All 3 are heavily fractured, and suffer from severe infighting among these factions/sects (which makes them less dangerous to the outside world because a lot of effort is spent in killing each other which would otherwise be directed in joint efforts to kill people adhering to other (or no) religion.

The problem with the competition between the Republicans and the "Democrats" in the US isn't that they're too different, it's that they're too similar (at least in program, the hardcore members tend to shift to the left of right to either the "dems" or the Republicans).
If there were fundamental differences between the party programs there would be far less fighting for the electorate as it would be clear who most of the population would favour. As it is most people don't see any difference between the party programs in the areas they care about, so the only way the parties can go to get those people to vote for them is by trying to make the other guy look bad in comparison on grounds which have nothing to do with the party programs at all (like military records).
I doubt the situation will evolve into armed conflict, but I do expect an upheaval of the political system in the US and the appearance of one or more other parties as people on the fringes of the current parties get disenfranchised and seek true representation.

In my opinion there are 2 possibilities:
1) ALL religions are partially right (and I don't mean all sects deriving from a single religion like Roman Catholics and Lutherans, they're different sectarian groups of Judaism as is Islam), but groups praying to different gods altogether like Judaism and Budhism. Their exclaiming that their god(s) are/is the only one(s) can be explained by seeing gods as basically being as self-centered as a top and denying the existence of their peers.

or 2) (and that's what I follow) that ALL religions are wrong and there are no gods in existence at all (at least not in the way that religions describe them).
Remember that to someone from the Roman era we would seem to posess godlike powers. With our machines we can kill at distances they couldn't even dream of, our medicine has miraculous powers of healing which would seem godlike at the beginning of the 20th century let alone the beginning of the 1st, etc. etc.
A species with time travel or interstellar travel would be more advanced still, them appearing to a society like the one in Judea during the Roman era (or earlier, when Judaism started) would make these people be seen as gods.
Not saying that's what happened but it's a possibility. Also remember that people tend to explain away things they don't understand not as being natural phenomena they don't understand (because not understanding is not a nice feeling) but as miracles …

yeah. Not sure where the name Lotto comes from but:
Nike is the goddess (as well as a contraction of the names of the company founders)
Reebok is Afrikaans for a species of antelope
Adidas again is a contraction of the names of the company founders

but it will effect your life.

Not really. If the world ends so does my life (if it hadn't before). Therefore how the world ends won't effect my life, it'll be over one way or another.

That was a good book up until the second half.

That's why it's ALMOST as interesting :cheesy:

yup. Add a DNA profile and it gets even better.

you mean those freaking homework questions that require only a little freaking bit of effort to get a freaking simple solution for? ;)

If you have hardware with a JVM built into it (which is possible) you can indeed write the rest in Java.

(s)he's need an exam in advanced gobbledegook to understand your post. Not that I understood much of it, except the words "exam", "course", and "studying"...

ah, the conspiracy theorists are now using the bible?

Nice reading, almost as interesting as the Da Vinci Code. Almost as capturing as the movie End of Days.

The theory of evolution is a masterfully planned deception to let man forget about morals.

I've always seen it the other way around.
Religion brings with it the option of explaining away the most horrific crimes as having been ordered to you by a god.
That's what brought the crusades, the Spanish inquisition, the PLO suicide bombers, the wholesale slaughter of opponents by the Iranian ayatollahs.
And those are just a few examples, on a smaller scale many religious nutcases have committed heinous crimes and claimed their god made them do it.
In some cases they were even released on the basis of such testimony, and many more got more lenient sentences than they would have otherwise.

thumbprints are relatively easy to fake. That's why airports are moving to iris scan technology. It's not quite impossible to fake but a lot harder than a thumbprint.

Well, I'll have to go along with those, however, with a mix of country and classical to round out the taste buds. I know, I'm weird...

I love country. Sadly it's nigh on impossible to get here (the last country music show on radio was cancelled 20 years ago and that one ran from 11PM to midnight on a mono station, the situation in stores is no different...) so it's extremely hard to know what's out there worth buying online.

Any suggestions appreciated.

That's one option for shortrange applications like security checkpoints.
That data can be compared with centrally stored photographs of the people and other data to identify them no problem.

But how to make sure the data you get from someone over the phone or over the internet (for example) is indeed coming from that person and not someone else?

It always disappoints me when I see people who dont believe in "Almighty God" :sad: .

The problem with an almighty deity is that you can do anything you want and claim it's proper because if it wasn't the deity would have prevented it.

That's why I don't believe in them. If they existed for example they'd have prevented the people here who state such things/created don't exist from writing such. The very fact that such statements can be made proves that almighty deities don't exist :cheesy:

As Terry Pratchett states in his books (set in a world where the gods are real): if you want to make heretical remarks be sure to have a metal roof over your head to deflect the lightning bolts.

Too true, but you can't force religion on people. I'm not saying you're trying to, but it's just...the way you said it.

Many religions are quite good at it actually.
Give people the choice to get religion or loose their heads and then be sure to let them know their dedication will be held to high standards constantly and you'll see how quickly they get religion.

The most fanatical warriors in the (Muslim) Ottoman empire were converted Christians for example.

and yes, I know I'm paranoid.
But remember: just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you

Both. If your data security isn't watertight when transmitting the authentication code/data you can never know if said data is coming from a legitimate source.

The one time pad can be both a code and encryption method.
But if you can't guarantee that only the person who should have it has the pad you can't know for sure that the code that is encrypted with it is coming from the person it should be coming from.

Like I stated, the only reason I can see it bust is if a LOT of people at once get forced to sell for some reason (most likely because they can't afford to pay skyhigh mortgages because they all at the same time loose their jobs and the mortgage companies are at that precise moment looking for cash infusions and demand instant payments) while at the same time there's few people looking for houses (because they can't afford to buy most likely or are wary to because their own job situation is insecure).
Something like that happened on a small scale a few years ago but it was at the time not enough to cause prices to drop (it did cause a marked reduction in the rate at which prices were increasing though).
At this time (at least in this country) there's a surplus of midrange houses combined with a shortage of lowend and highend houses. This causes houses in the €220-300.000 range to be slowly dropping in price (but no more than a few tenths of a percent a year) for the first time in decades (house prices here are astronomical as it is, that price gets you a 100sq.m. house with maybe a small garden and if you're lucky a carport or reserved parking spot on the road).

an interface can't implement anything. If it could you'd have an abstract class.
Something like

public interface MyInterface extends Serializable, List implements Comparable {
  public int compareTo(Object o) {
    // implementation code
  }

  public void myMethod();
}

isn't an interface is...

Scientists call evolution theory a theory only because there has been no incontrovertible proof that no other systems are possible.
That's not the same as there being no evidence that evolution happens.

Creationists flatly deny evolution (at least many of them, there appear to be some who take the view that something created a starting point from scratch and that evolution took care of the rest from there on).

According to the bible the earth is only a few thousand years old (can't remember where I found the references to that, someone calculated the exact age at something like 4000 years based on biblical references) and came into existence fully formed (God created the heavens and the earth... etc.) with all the current species (and a few that have since gone extinct like the dodo and thylacine).
There is no explanation at all for things like dinosaur bones (except some people jokingly stating that god put them there to keep the archeologists busy thinking in the wrong direction).

Classes can extend only 1 other class (as well as implementing any number of interfaces).
Interfaces can extend any number of other interfaces (but can't implement anything obviously).

So you can have something like

public interface MyInterface extends List, Serializable, Comparable {
//... method declarations
}

rest and relaxation :p

2 weeks of no computers, no having to be at the office at 0730, no people dumping bug reports on my desk.

I've been waiting for the market to crash for almost a decade now so I can afford to buy a house...

While house prices aren't rising as sharply as they used to a few years ago (and in some categories even seem to be in a very slow decline) I don't see a crash developing.
For that to happen the economy would have to collapse so hard that the majority of people who now own property will be forced to sell it with few people capable of paying the current high prices. If that happens I doubt I'll be in a position to even pay the lower prices that will result so I still won't benefit.

It's the hardware code returned from a keyboard.
I used to have a mapping table somewhere but I doubt it would still be valid as it was for old XT keyboards (the ones with the function keys on the left side and no separate cursor keys).

Here's an article from Microsoft that might provide some help if you're writing for Windows: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/input/w2kscan-map.mspx

No single system relying on constant data is ever totally secure.

Using biometric data in combination with one time encryption pads may be the only thing that really works but how to get those one time pads to the users without chance of them being compromised?

while at the same time Europe seems to be entering the deep freeze with current temperatures some 5-10 degrees below average for the time of year.

It's becoming ever more clear that there are climatic cycles at work that have a periodicity of 50-100 years, these on top of the shorter el Nino cycle and even longer cycles we haven't been able to identify yet.
At the same time it's becoming ever more clear that the "model" favoured by the "global warming" scaremongerers is fundamentally flawed. Their so-called hockeystick model collapses when treering data obtained from a single grove of pines somewhere in the western US is removed from the dataset, leading to the conclusion that there's something specific to either that specific area or those specific trees rather than the entire world.
It also collapses when the data is viewed over a longer period (centuries instead of decades), meaning that the observed increase in temperatures hinted at by the model isn't weird at all and such periodic increased and following decreases happen despite human activity (as these are observed well before the industrial revolution) rather than because of it.

As to predicting the movement of cellestial objects: that can be calculated far in advance.
The trajectory corrections performed show that indeed this isn't 100% accurate as there are many objects out there that have an influence on each other that we haven't yet found.

The chance we will at some point in the future be hit by something BIG is 100%. We've been hit with surprising regularity in the past after all and things are still hitting us constantly.
The most recent large hit was the Tunguska event. This levelled forests for several hundred square kilometers in the early 20th century.
It has been estimated that was caused by an asteroid only a few cubic meters in size, the things NASA is tracking and looking for in the current program are hundreds of times larger. These will when they hit cause MEEs (mass extinction events, dinosaur killers) and leave craters hundreds of kilometers in diameter. But even a smaller thing like the Tunguska object can devastate a city if they drop on it, these things hit about once every 200 years on average if not more often yet noone is looking for them.

Unix will suffer its own version of the Y2K problem in 2038. Because of the way it represents dates internally as an integer it will in 2038 roll over.
This doesn't affect 64 bit versions but those are still (and will likely be by then) not universally used (given that there are still 30 year old Unix machines operating today, 32 bit machines purchased now will likely be in operation in 2038).

However,the blame should not be on religion. Religion was not and is not meant to operate in that way. It's those people who needs to be blamed, not the religion

Depends on how you look at it maybe.
When a religion states certain things which can be scientifically proven to be incorrect to be fact by virtue of being the word of a deity, a word which cannot be denied, that religion suppresses science.
After all, scientists proving that those religious claims are false are guilty of herecy.
Most religions proscribe extreme penalties for herecy up to and including death. So unless you want to die for science (and that for the fact of pursuing a certain scientific path, not for publishing your findings) you'd better stay out of that scientific field.
Such was the case with Galileo. The bible claims the earth is the center of the universe. When interpreted literally (rather than on philosophical basis) this means that anyone proving that the earth rotates around the sun (and thus is not the center as the center is stationary) is a heretic.

uh, the first virusses ran on Unix computers in the 1970s...

They were intentionally created and non-mallicious (except for slowing down network traffic). Their goal was to spread updates to software automatically to all users whereever they might be. Problem was they were too effective at spreading :)

The first recorded mallicious virus for DOS was created unintentionally when a university student in Jeruzalem made a programming mistake.

HF Java is an excellent book but doesn't prepare you for the exam. The certification study guide will prepare you very well indeed if you have a decent knowledge of the core language which Hf Java will provide.

Oh, you got the names almost right except it's Kathy (with a K, not a C).

A public class needs to have the same name as the java file it's contained in.
A class must also be public in order to be able to run as a program AND have a main method with the correct signature.

Southern Spain for 2 weeks of R&R.

for example, if t is the flag (not the Thread of course). Using a boolean is of course more natural, or maybe an int if you want to have more than 2 states.