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By the way, 3x3 Chess was strongly solved in 2004.

On the other hand, Claude Shannon has argued about the original game being unsolvable by computers:

"With chess it is possible, in principle, to play a perfect game or construct a machine to do so as follows: One considers in a given position all possible moves, then all moves for the opponent, etc., to the end of the game (in each variation). The end must occur, by the rules of the games after a finite number of moves (remembering the 50 move drawing rule). Each of these variations ends in win, loss or draw. By working backward from the end one can determine whether there is a forced win, the position is a draw or is lost. It is easy to show, however, even with the high computing speed available in electronic calculators this computation is impractical. In typical chess positions there will be of the order of 30 legal moves. The number holds fairly constant until the game is nearly finished as shown ... by De Groot, who averaged the number of legal moves in a large number of master games. Thus a move for White and then one for Black gives about 103 possibilities. A typical game lasts about 40 moves to resignation of one party. This is conservative for our calculation since the machine would calculate out to checkmate, not resignation. However, even at this figure there will be 10120 variations to be calculated from the initial position. A machine operating at the rate of one variation per micro-second would require over 1090 years to calculate the first move!"

Any engineer worth his (or her) salt knows that RPN is the way to numerically solve an equation. The algebraic entry using parentheses is for suckers. So that got me thinking... why not use RPN for equation entry? As usual, I'm late to the game. There is a Mac app here. Sorry, the site is Japanese...

There is a web app here. Seems to work well. You can make pretty big equations quickly, and the result is in tex.

Fourth it ;-)

I have a real Arduino (used in my Drum Master project), as well as a couple of RBBB's, which are basically Arduino clones which fit on a breadboard - see http://moderndevice.com/RBBB_revB.shtml for details / ordering. Both Arduino and the various clones come highly recommended by me. (No association to Modern Device company, other than being a very happy customer).

While I'm sure that FPGA's and other things can be more powerful, the simplicity and ease of use of Arduino and its IDE make it worthwhile for beginners, such as myself.

Cheers

The audio from the dock is always identical to the audio from the headphone connector. See my iPod hacking page at http://thecave.homeunix.org/ipod_hardware.jsp for more information on what I have found regarding iPod touch hardware so far...

Cheers

I am a OSS author (a personal financial program called Buddi, among others). This is released under the GPL, and I accept donations. Since shortly after Buddi was released, people have been selling it, on EBay as well as other semi-reputable dealers.

While I may have missed out on a few donations, the biggest annoyance I have with these people is that they don't sell it as Buddi; they sell it as a generic 'Personal Finance Software' or something. While I don't have a company making money from a well known brand name or anything, I like people knowing what the software is, who made it, etc.

Of course, whenever someone asks for support saying that they bought it, I go ahead and help them, but then mention that Buddi is released for free, and if they paid for it, chances are they were ripped off. I rarely hear any replies after that 8-)

Cheers

Having recently started playing with electronics more myself, I can tell you that it is a very fun hobby. My recommendation is to find a project which you want to do, and work towards that, rather than just studying theory and doing tutorials. While it will cost you more (at least, I tend to make mistakes when doing things for myself, rather than just following instructions), the sense of accomplishment can be very worthwhile. My largest project to date is an electronic drum brain which I designed, prototyped, and soldered myself. In addition to learning the electronics side of it, I also taught myself Python (using that as the slave software to actually play the samples). See http://drummaster.thecave.homeunix.org/ if you are interested.

As for where to get equipment from, I would highly recommend Digikey. They have a good selection, decent prices, and low shipping costs ($8 to Canada for everything I have bought - that, and it is generally arrives the next day!)

Finally, as a software guy myself, I would also recommend the Arduino to start with (this is what was used in the article). It is a very nice bridge between computers and microcontrollers, as it uses a simple C-based language with a good IDE to simplify uploading and compiling. It is powerful enough to do some nice projects with, and yet is simple enough that you can get some simple projects going after just a few minutes / hours. It costs about $35 (less for various non-official versions), and is available from a number of places.

Another great help is to get a circuit simulator, and try playing with simple circuits in software before you buy components. I found a nice Applet based one at http://www.falstad.com/circuit/directions.html

Hope this helps, and best of luck with your soon-to-be new hobby!

Cheers

That's not a Z-machine. This is a Z-machine.

• You don't really believe in creationism. How do I know? Because you don't put your money where your mouth is. Nobody does.
• Um, yeah, mutations can and have been observed to add information.
• Here are a lot more than a handful of examples for you to dispute.

If you make a show about Geek people, you'll have an hour of some guy sitting in a dark room staring at a computer screen reading /.

Doesn't have to be. "2001" and "The Abyss" got their (human) science pretty well right. Sure the aliens did magic stuff - they're supposed to be more advanced than us - but everything the humans did was either known to be possible or were plausible extensions of existing technology. And they were good movies, too.

Of course, just getting the tech (mostly) right isn't any guarantee of good entertainment. E.g. "Antitrust", which even used real I.P. addresses (the satellites are on a private 10.x.x.x subnet) but failed in the plot and characterization area.

Good science fiction assumes one impossible thing, or extends current trends to logical limits, and explores what happens then. You have to get, as the GP suggests, the characterization right - but with science fiction, you also have to get the tech right, and mostly they don't bother. It's a shame, too, because much of the time it doesn't have to be that way.

And your definition of sentient is... ?

Okay, you're either a troll or else you're actually that clueless, since I pointed out a test in the very message you're replying to. Either way, I strongly doubt that you qualify as sentient in my book. :->

Since it's vastly more likely that you are a troll, I'd appreciate it if you could email me and tell me what possible benefit you get from that. I've never understood your kind.

I attribute consciousness and will to the influence of God. In the absence of a deific source of these qualities, I believe them to be illusory traits that happen to be beneficial to the survival of the species.

Consciousness can't be illusory, by definition. (Descartes and all that.) However consciousness arises, there it is. I'm not telepathic, but I'm pretty sure other people are conscious, too. Saying they're 'illusions' is nonsensical. Consciousness is a lot more complicated than many people naively suppose, but that doesn't mean it's an 'illusion'.

Now, I personally think that consciousness arises from the operation of the brain. At the absolute bare minimum, we know that a brain is vitally necessary for human consciousness (see above link), and it may be (I think probably is) sufficient. We don't have to know everything about automotive engineering to be able to tell that if the engine is pulled out, the car won't run.

In the absence of God, I perceive the universe as intrinsically amoral.

The universe isn't conscious, and thus isn't a moral agent, so in that sense it's amoral. But you should read the links I provided if you don't think the interaction between conscious agents and the universe has moral implications. If nothing else, take a look at this one, it addresses that specifically.

if God doesn't exist, then there's no basis for morality

Nope. Wrong.

I'v got a Macintosh Plus [1Mb] ... Seriously, it runs a [small :-] server ... offline:

I've got a Mac SE/30... online. Sure, it can't handle a full Slashdotting, but people clicking in via the comments on Slashdot never made it break a sweat.

But if you want l33t, see the Lisa servers. Those guys get the chicks.

Compiling a small program on my dual 2GHz Athlon... 0.6 seconds. Compiling the same program on the SE/30... over seven minutes. :->

The truth of the matter is that the scientist is not yet sure of the age (though he's reasonably certain that 6,000 years is a bit shy) and the theologian needs to take another pass at his texts because his domain is not that of science.

Gee, I have a link that I can reference, too.

Science is restricted to the laws of the Universe in which we inhabit.

Of course, you're assuming that the "Universe" that we inhabit is a subset of some larger whole, and that it is impossible for us to get any information from the larger superset. I'm not so sure. Our 'subset' used to include just our solar system, and then we figured out the stars weren't just painted on a dome but were actual objects way far away - and the 'subset' then included our galaxy. Then we noticed that some of what we thought were just star clusters were actual galaxies, and our subset got a lot bigger yet.

If the 'superset' has no influence whatsoever on our 'subset', then sure, science can't pick up on it. But then again, by definition that means it has no practical, detectable effect on our 'subset' - and that's the kind of chin Occam's Razor was made to shave.

It seems to me that if man is hardwired with an sense of altruism and a desire to believe in a super-being, there can be no other answer to this question than the existence of a Creator.

Or maybe it's just standard evolution plus game theory.

It doesn't add anything important, but here's the correct link.

It's a waste of space. And if you plug it in and turn it on, it's also a waste of power.

Well, for certain limited purposes they can be useful. I've got a Mac SE/30 running as my vanity page webserver. What exactly are the odds of somebody writing an automatic exploit for an obscure httpd running on a (relatively) obscure OS on an obscure hardware platform? The only way someone's going to break into that thing is with a custom exploit, and there's no point in spending that kind of effort.

Nobody has come yet with some 3D desktop interface that wasn't just eyecandy but actually useful.

I haven't been able to come up with a full desktop interface yet, but I've got some ideas for a 3D filemanager that I think could be useful for certain kinds of users.

No, that's really what I think. See, e.g., here. It's not finished so it's not linked from anywhere. Anyone want to tell me what's trollish about it?

There has to be a willing suspension of disbelief, and frequently Hollywood (and television) assumes that the number of people in the viewership of a particular program is so low it quite happily removes all semblance of reality for that "minority" to the point, not really caring that the entire movie looks utterly ridiculous as a result for that group. What's bizarre to me is how rarely it's necessary for the plot or understandability of the end story for them to do that.

That's bothered me for a long time, too.

If a god builds a universe, it can build in a particular moral code if it so chooses, or even a plethora of moral codes, each applying to different entities in different situations.

If you assume that moral codes are simply prescriptive mandates handed down from on high, then I suppose so. How, exactly, would the 'moralness' of such a 'moral code' be mediated? Could a God create a universe precisely like this one in all observable aspects, with the sole difference being that taking care of human infants was, in fact, evil, and the highest moral good was torturing babies to death instead? What is the specific feature that invests one rule or the other with 'moralness'?

There are alternative, and to my mind far more defensible, ways of developing a 'moral code'.

This is not what Socrates showed at all.

Au contraire, what he pointed out is that there's really only two choices to pick from. Either something is 'good' purely because (the) God(s) will it so, or else some things just are good, and God perfectly recognizes those things that are good. My choice of language about Nazis was not 'biased', it pointed out the logical conclusion of picking the former. In that case, there really is no difference between "Speed Limit 55" and "Thou Shalt Not Kill"; it's just that the latter is backed up by the Biggest Beat Cop Around. It really is just the ultimate case of "Might Makes Right", as my 'torturing babies' case makes above.

The latter choice is, as I point out above, far more defensible. A 'God' could design a universe with various features, and moral codes would arise from the desires and intents of the sentient agents within it interacting with the features of that universe. But that would mean that you could not have a universe that was "identical in all respects except that baby-torturing is good", because the fact that torturing babies is evil is logically compulsory given what humans are and what kind of universe they live in.

The gist of it is this -- we all seem to have some innate sense of morality that transcends culture and societies. (The idea that actions can be right and wrong is pretty much ubiquitous, regardless of whether a particular act is socially acceptable.)

Let me show you an example of that moral sense. Take two tests for me. Here's the first one - a set of cards with letters on one side and numbers on the other. Which cards do you have to flip to determine if the following condition holds: "If there's a D on one side, then there's a 3 on the other.":

D / F / 3 / 7

Okay, now here's another test. You have a set of cards before you. Each card has information about patrons in a bar. On one side is what they are drinking, on another side is their ages.

Drinking wine / Drinking soda / 25 years old / 16 years old

Now, let's say you're the bouncer at that bar. Your job is to make sure that no one under the age of 21 is drinking alcohol. Which of the above cards do you need to flip over to see if that condition is met?

Most people have a lot of trouble with the first test, but find the second test pretty easy. The answer's the same in both cases - the first and the last card. Note that the logical structure is exactly equivalent in both versions. A lot of research has been done on this stuff, and it seems pretty well demonstrated at this point that the reason why the second test is so easy is because it asks people to detect if a social contract is being violated - in other words, it asks people to spot cheating. And people seem to have "hardware accelerated modules" in their brains for doing just that.

Now, can you imagine why social animals, that live in groups, might do well to have such talents? Note that analogous skills have been observed in other relatively intelligent social animals like chimps and dolphins.

So, considering that humans have been around for roughly 100,000 years (and near-human ancestors for a few million years before that), living in pretty much the same environment (physical and social) and facing pretty much the same challenges (physical and social) for all that time... do you think it likely that a 'general moral sense' might develop via evolution?

So, yeah, I don't find that 'shared morality' argument to be terribly convincing for theism.

...then logically you have no reason to comply with society's proscribed values other than avoiding retribution for your anti-social actions.

Um, actually, there might be other alternatives.

If there is a god, particularly the variety of god that most Christians would describe to you, then that god defines what is moral.

You have just smashed headlong into the Euthyphro Problem.

For a broader treatment, see here and here.

If there is a god, particularly the variety of god that most Christians would describe to you, then that god defines what is moral.

You have just smashed headlong into the Euthyphro Problem.

For a broader treatment, see here and here.

Stephen Colbert gave the best answer to this ridiculous argument. Did you go around stabbing yourself with rusty nails after you got your tetanus shot?

Actually, I still like mine better.

It's a hell of a lot cheaper to make paps available to under served women than it is to vaccinate every woman aged 11-26 -- then every 11 year old every year...

Volume might reduce prices, and affect the economics, of course. I didn't see anything in that article (I admit I skimmed it) that discussed the expense of treating cervical cancer. It's rare, yes, but that's still a few thousand women every year (and many of them die), and I never heard that treating cancer was cheap.

But imagine someone came up with a vaccine for tooth decay, and we'll assume it was expensive, too. Would you argue that it's cheaper to provide (assumed less effective) dentistry to 'underserved' kids and adults? (Oh, and you didn't advance the 'moral' argument, but this analogy makes plain how stupid it is. How many people would argue seriously against a 'dental caries' vaccine because you can avoid tooth decay by good behavior, and it might encourage kids to eat more sweets leading to more obesity?)

So the atheist must either claim the absurdity that the universe came from nothing, or he(/she) must acknowledge that there was something that created it.

Too bad it must be one of only those two choices, and there's no possibility of any kind of other option.

Yeah, not to mention Bluefish or Dreamweaver... It's a pretty common concept in web development applications, and I guess MS just decided to be "original" and throw it into an office suite.

Stealing ideas has gotten them this far... why stop now?

The document you linked to... avoids the causality issue by "inventing" backward time travel that is creating alternate (new) reality.

Um, it very specifically says that's one alternative, not the only possibility. Of course, this is Slashdot - who bothers to RTFA? (Oh, and it doesn't claim to have 'invented' it, either.)

What if causality is a local condition and not a global one? Perhaps our intuitive understanding of causality only applies to regions without closed timelike curves, just like our intuitive notions of physics only apply to macroscopic objects moving slowly relative to light. Like a fish that had always lived in a smooth-flowing stream, and never encountered turbulent flow.

And since FTL travel or communication are not possible, it follows that time travel is also not possible. QED.

Gee, you're right! Nobody ever, ever thought of that and proposed ways not precluded by our current understanding of physics to do those things! What strikingly original thinking you display! :->

This is a simple proof of causality that cannot be "circumvented" or "defeated". Nothing can "travel back in time". Period.

Yeah! And time can't slow down when you go close to the speed of light! And things can't act like both a particle and a wave! And particles can't tunnel through barriers they don't have the energy to escape!

For that matter, I'm not at all sure about these magical "fields" that act at a distance. And this whole "germ theory" of disease makes no sense - clearly it's just miasmas!

(Hint: you have not come up with a brand new objection to time travel, or even one that hasn't been answered before.)

Another example of a temporal paradox: Say someone in the year 2050 reads Einstein's works, and somehow builds a time machine based on them. He then travels back in time to 1900, meets Einstein, and ends up inspiring him to create his works. Who came up with the original idea for relativity? It's a paradox.

No, that's not a paradox. A "paradox" is a self-inconsistent set of circumstances - like killing your grandfather before you were born. What you're describing is something different; it is internally consistent, but depends on effects preceeding causes. (I like Andrew Plotkin's term for them - "perpendoxes", because they are orthogonal to paradoxes.)

Of course, that's the definition of time travel - if you don't have "effects preceeding causes" you don't have time travel at all.

It does seem weird that information could be created "out of nothing", but we didn't evolve around time travel. We didn't evolve around relativistic speeds and that seems unlikely and counterintuitive, too. We are used to thinking of things in a linear, cause-and-effect order, but you'd pretty much have to expect unusual things in a situation where that didn't apply.

Note that if you have time travel at all - if you can actually "travel to the past" (or make a photon do it) - then the past must actually exist somewhere. As a matter of fact, in relativity it does - one second ago is physically one light-second away. But that would also mean that the future already exists - since every moment is past to some moments and future to others.

Anyway, here's the lowdown if you want it in excruciating detail.

Another example of a temporal paradox: Say someone in the year 2050 reads Einstein's works, and somehow builds a time machine based on them. He then travels back in time to 1900, meets Einstein, and ends up inspiring him to create his works. Who came up with the original idea for relativity? It's a paradox.

No, that's not a paradox. A "paradox" is a self-inconsistent set of circumstances - like killing your grandfather before you were born. What you're describing is something different; it is internally consistent, but depends on effects preceeding causes. (I like Andrew Plotkin's term for them - "perpendoxes", because they are orthogonal to paradoxes.)

Of course, that's the definition of time travel - if you don't have "effects preceeding causes" you don't have time travel at all.

It does seem weird that information could be created "out of nothing", but we didn't evolve around time travel. We didn't evolve around relativistic speeds and that seems unlikely and counterintuitive, too. We are used to thinking of things in a linear, cause-and-effect order, but you'd pretty much have to expect unusual things in a situation where that didn't apply.

Note that if you have time travel at all - if you can actually "travel to the past" (or make a photon do it) - then the past must actually exist somewhere. As a matter of fact, in relativity it does - one second ago is physically one light-second away. But that would also mean that the future already exists - since every moment is past to some moments and future to others.

Anyway, here's the lowdown if you want it in excruciating detail.

Another example of a temporal paradox: Say someone in the year 2050 reads Einstein's works, and somehow builds a time machine based on them. He then travels back in time to 1900, meets Einstein, and ends up inspiring him to create his works. Who came up with the original idea for relativity? It's a paradox.

No, that's not a paradox. A "paradox" is a self-inconsistent set of circumstances - like killing your grandfather before you were born. What you're describing is something different; it is internally consistent, but depends on effects preceeding causes. (I like Andrew Plotkin's term for them - "perpendoxes", because they are orthogonal to paradoxes.)

Of course, that's the definition of time travel - if you don't have "effects preceeding causes" you don't have time travel at all.

It does seem weird that information could be created "out of nothing", but we didn't evolve around time travel. We didn't evolve around relativistic speeds and that seems unlikely and counterintuitive, too. We are used to thinking of things in a linear, cause-and-effect order, but you'd pretty much have to expect unusual things in a situation where that didn't apply.

Note that if you have time travel at all - if you can actually "travel to the past" (or make a photon do it) - then the past must actually exist somewhere. As a matter of fact, in relativity it does - one second ago is physically one light-second away. But that would also mean that the future already exists - since every moment is past to some moments and future to others.

Anyway, here's the lowdown if you want it in excruciating detail.

I don't think it's possible though, otherwise we would probably be getting messages from the future, wouldn't we?

That's like saying in 1870 that radio waves are impossible because nobody's received any. There weren't any receivers then. Or like saying neutrinos didn't exist before there were detectors for them. It's quite possible that the as soon as we have something that can receive such messages it'll be flooded with spam from the future.

Anyway, I've thought about time travel rather more than anyone probably should, if you're interested. I address that point and a lot of others.

Will the record companies give you the choice? For their perspective, we quote Tommi Kyyrä, of IFPI Finland: "Now, we need to understand that listening to music on your computer is an extra privilege. Normally people listen to music on their car or through their home stereos," said Kyyrä. "If you are a Linux or Mac user, you should consider purchasing a regular CD player."

The music industry won't care about some users protesting about DRM, since their only goal is to turn the whole market into a standardless pay per view system, and they will succeed sooner or later when people get used to the idea of using only specific software and hardware for managing music. With comments like these (original story in finnish mirrored here), it's pretty clear that not only the 'merican music industry seriously wants to assure those responsible for various judicial systems that increasing incompability is the only way to go in the digital age.

While I disagree with your apparent conclusions, I respect someone who doesn't engage in the doublethink most theists seem to. Glad you got something out of it.

If you can travel to the past at all (and to send any kind of signal involves at least sending energy into the past) then the past must physically exist for you to travel to. And we are the future's past. So the future must exist, too. If a photon arrives from the future (relative to the current moment) then you know that photon "will have been" sent. A reasonable inference might be that you "will send" it, but technically all you really know is the photon "will be sent".

Believe me, I've thought about this stuff way too much.

My favorite podcatcher is BashPodder, a minimalist bash script that uses wget to grab enclosures for you. Fast, light, stable, easy to modify. I typically use an iPod shuffle which I charge overnight, so one can also make a script to check if it is mounted, copy or move files to it, and run iPod Shuffle Database Builder.

For better reccomendations, you might give us an idea of which OS you're using, if you have always-on internet, whether you'd prefer to grab content at least once a day or manually (with or without having to manually launch a program or to have a background service/daemon running at all times), and other features you would like in your pod catcher.

What makes you say that? (Be specific.)

At least we can agree that you have no specific logic argument against the existance of a creator.

No, I just have specific logical reasons for believing that, if there were such a creator, it wasn't anything like the Judeo/Christaian/Islamic "God".

I think youmisunderstood about christian's meeting God's standard. The Christian belief does not contend that a Christian's flesh and bones, any aspect concerning their moral behavior, or any aspect of their thoughts or dreams will ever meet God's standard after becoming Christian.

A difference which makes no difference is no difference. But anyway...

You're back to the start - if God allegedly created this universe, then It created things which don't meet Its standards. Which, according to you, could never do so. Deliberately. And then punishes them for it. This isn't 'good' by any recognizable definition. Does kind of fit with 'insane' or 'abusive', though.

A freshman reply would be, "Well that means Christian's can be like Hitler, and still go to Heaven." The short reply is yes.

And, as already addressed on the page, this means that God's standards have nothing to do with anything humans would recognize as 'good' or 'evil'. To quote:

But now we simply have the ultimate case of "might makes right". There's no real difference between "Speed Limit 55" and "Thou shalt not kill" except that presumably God enforces Its rules better. In the end, the people who collaborated with the Nazis had the right idea, they just picked the wrong bully to submit to.

There's nothing special about God's rules, then. It could just has easily have ordered you kill babies (oh, wait... It did: 1 Samuel 15:3, Joshua 10:40) and that would be perfectly 'good'.

Incorrect. It's a principle that leads to internal contradiction, and therefore is false, like any proof from contradiction.

The problem is that it covers ethics (and yeah, the core elements of ethics are pretty common and universal - they kinda have to be, we're all human) but from a very primitive, immature perspective. "Do this because you're told to by someone bigger and tougher than you."

I look at ethics rather differently.

1x Motorola DOCSIS modem.
1x Asus WL-500G Deluxe access point running OpenWRT. This one provides me with WiFi, NAT, firewall, FTP (vsftpd) and WWW (lighttpd). Here it is: http://dimss.homeunix.org/010about.html
1x HP nx9020 laptop. Turned off most of the time.
1x Sagem myX5-2 cellphone.

Someday I will move to a large house. There will be real 19-inch box somewhere in basement.

It's not "better than" SSH. For certain uses it offers better security; for other uses Ostiary is totally inadequate and SSH is a better choice. See this and the first paragraph of the Introduction.

It's not "better than" SSH. For certain uses it offers better security; for other uses Ostiary is totally inadequate and SSH is a better choice. See this and the first paragraph of the Introduction.

A couple of relevant quotes that might cause you to reconsider:

"Is knowledge knowable? If not, how do we know this?" - Woody Allen

"Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle that they are laboring to dethrone, but if they argue without reason, (which, in order to be consistent with themselves, they must do) they are out of the reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument." - Ethan Allen

If you want to play tennis without a net, fine. But in that case, I don't have to play with a net, either, and I can dismiss anything you say with something irrational like "You're just a ham sandwich, and nobody listens to them." By what grounds would you dispute it?

On the other hand, if you do want to stick with reason, consider this.

I agree with you in most features of this argument, except this one. We know that brains are necessary for (human) consciousness, but we just don't know what about the configuration of a human brain is critical. There are odd cases (such as a hydrocephalic with about half the normal brain volume who nevertheless shows no obvious mental impairments) that illustrate how little we really know about this subject. Personally, I'd err on the side of caution and put the provisional limit much earlier.

Go read the site. Mine is safer because it doesn't do nearly as much. SSH is complex because it has to be to do what it does. On the other hand, for many purposes SSH is overkill. At no point did I say that the authors of SSH are "clueless", though I'm tempted to say that about you at this point.

I'm surprised at SSH not having some, you know, way to restrict SSH access to a few IPs. Like a sshd_config directive called RhostsAuthentication.

But what if I'm travelling and don't even know what IP I'll be coming in from?

Also I can't believe OSs nowadays don't have a firewall or something to save you the work of doing something as l33t as that program clearly must be.

Your sarcasm-fu is impressive, but your research-fu is a bit weak. The closest thing to what my program does is port knocking, and that has reliability problems as you increase the security. Not that you, y'know, checked or anything.

Tell ya what, you point out a remotely exploitable hole in Ostiary, and then I'll bow down before you. I'm not going to hold my breath.

Nah, they're probably using an SE/30 like me.