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Domain: std.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to std.com.
Comments · 370
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Re:sidecutters
Interesting, this very post kept getting hammered by lame lameness filter, but paste into a new reply, and bingo!
Too much repetition? I am wondering if the filter of meaninglessness is doing its thing.
a small pair of sidecutters will always be useful
Did you mean a pair of diagonal cutters? Get something else, there are probably already a lot of dykes in the res hall... Have you considered sex toys?
This poster's name was secretly replaced by Folgers Crystal Meth -
Rockets to space, or guns?While rockets may be useful for putting people into space, don't miss the story of Gerald Bull, the genius Canadian engineer who planned to put satellites into space using a "supergun."
To quote from the website mentioned above:
By the time he was done, he could launch a 180 kg projectile at 3600 m/s, which is about a third of escape velocity. He could hit altitudes of 180 km. That's not orbit, nor is 3600 m/s nearly enough to get things into orbit, but it showed what could be done. The whole project cost in the area of $10 million, chicken feed by missile standards.
He lived an unusual life, to be sure, working for various shady governments, mostly in a simple effort to make his vision reality. His work for Iraq, however, apparently cost him his life. He was assasinated in 1990.
Bull's dream of cheap satellite launches was left unfulfilled. And so the world still pushes all that heavy fuel into space.
He was a true hacker. -
Why I gave up on Apple
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Re:To heck w/ cyberwar
Even if that were true (which I doubt), keep in mind that the US GDP is 1/3 of everybody else's combined. I have a feeling that the percentage-of-national-budget figures are much more balanced, and I wouldn't be surprised if we weren't the leaders in that figure.
It isn't true. The actual figure is the USA defence spend is 40% of the global total.
Dunno what you're getting at here. You can't possibly mean it's 40% of the global total economy, so you must mean that it's 40% of the global total military spending.
And that does not contradict his statement (the veracity of which I can't comment on).
E.g. say there are 10 countries in a hypothetical world. Country #1 (the US equivalent, let's say) has a total GDP of $100, and spends $20 on its military. Country #2 has a total GDP of $30, and spends $10 on its military.
Now, as long as the remaining countries spend no more than $20 combined on their military, and have about $170 GDP, which is entirely feasible, then it's easily shown that Country #1 has 1/3 the GDP of everyone else's combined, yet spends only 20% of its GDP on its military, which puts it behind country #2, which spends 30% of its GDP on its military.
Now, he did say "percentage-of-national-budget figures", which is strictly different from GDP, but I wanted to illustrate that you can't necessarily conclude, from overall totals, how specified elements contributing to the totals relate to each other.
-- cburley , posting anonymously to avoid canceling out his mods earlier this morning, and hoping he didn't get the math wrong.
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Re:Well...
The Internet Worm of 1988 was cutting edge, if not for its technology, then certainly for its widespread damage and novelty:
http://world.std.com/~franl/worm.html
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Re:Not as cool as...
I think you mean this link for a webserver that's really powered by potatos: http://world.std.com/~fwhite/spud/
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Re:spammers or scammers?
What's the point of even clicking the "remove" link?
What's the point of behaving like a civilised being when you're dealing with barbarians? Uh, because you're a civilised being, not a barbarian. I think that applies at any level of human interaction.
I'm confused. I've spent my entire life trying to commit myself to the highest ideals of moral, civilized behavior I can find.
Yet I have yet to come across any requirement that, if someone says I must do X to avoid something I'd prefer to avoid, I must therefore indeed do X.
As far as I can tell, as a moral, civilized being, I am entirely within my rights to assess, for myself, whether the action being suggested/offered (X; in this case, clicking on a "remove" link) will actually serve my interests as advertised.
If I determine that it won't, or at least is less likely to do so than it is to cause other things with which I am even less satisfied, I hold myself entirely guiltless by declining the invitation to do X.
In no way do I consider myself to be even remotely "lowering" myself to their "level" by refusing to click on a link.
Note that I employ somewhat-related "moral logic" in my "rant" against chain-style email, with which not everyone agrees.
I just think that anyone who claims to respect your wishes will respect them fully, not just far enough for you to take some action they outline for you to indicate whether you agree with them, trust them, etc.
Refusing to let others set your agenda for you is not inconsistent with highly moral behavior. And carrying out any agenda set for you by even those you consider to be your moral superiors -- much less known spammers -- offers no assurance that your actions, in carrying out that agenda, will be moral and/or civilized.
So, you might think that you're demonstrating your civility by clicking on the link they offer, but I don't see how you're doing that, and they likely take it as a demonstration of your naivete and/or gullibility.
(Having discovered, after warning explicitly against it, that my wife "responded" to some illegal SPAM faxes by calling the "remove me from the list" toll-free numbers listed on those very faxes -- which resulted in her getting spam-faxed more, of course -- this is a bit of a sore spot for me these days. It's difficult to avoid resenting those who would take advantage of her innocence, though, strictly speaking, it was her gullibility of which they took advantage.)
A very wise person once said something like "Be wise as serpents, and harmless as doves", which I find helpful. Innocence doesn't necessarily imply stupidity, naivete, or gullibility; it coexists quite happily with wisdom.
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Original April Fools - Spam "protection"I wrote the following piece for today, which at least I thought was funny. It's currently bouncing around the story queue in Kuro5hin, but it doesn't look like it'll get to post.
Given What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org), I don't think submitting it to Slashdot as an article is even worth the e-mail.
I'll post it here just for reader enjoyment. I think it's better than many of the stories which WERE posted!
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Spam "protection" - a modest proposal
by Seth Finkelstein
April 1 2002The problem of Spam, i.e. junk e-mail, has been plaguing the net for years. This article makes a modest proposal for spam "protection", in terms of a novel economic analysis leading to the benefit of all concerned.
In economic terms, let's consider why there's profit in spamming (sending large numbers of unsolicited emails). This is due to the "cost-shifting" nature of the spam process. It takes very little effort to send a large number of e-mails. But e-mail is not free (as in beer). In effect, the spammer shifts the expense of the advertising campaign, from the seller, onto ISPs and users:
- The ISP must pay (in resources) to distribute the spammer's ads
- The user must pay (in time) to delete the spammer's ads
But what does this sorting organization do? Its only task is to try to identify spam from real mail. That is, it is paid to try to identify mail sent from spammers. However, since it is in an adversary relationship to the spammers, the spam-gangs have every reason to try to avoid such identification.
There have been some proposals to facilitate identification of spam by legally requiring labels. But that involves government and law. In fact, it's compelled speech! Instead, since the free market is the solution to all problems, the only proper course of action is to provide spammers with an economic incentive to identify themselves. After all, spam identification is the exact product being sold by third parties, so why pay a middle-man? If one is going to pay, for maximum market efficiency, why not pay the source?
In this scheme, the user pays a mailbox "protection fee" to an umbrella group, let's call it the "Spamafia". In return for this "protection", the "Spamafia" provides the user with a simple mailbox checking system which can be run over mail messages. Because this system works in a manner akin to passing items over a net barrier, it might be termed a "racket". So, the "racket" tests each piece of mail. Those mail messages which originate from members of the Spamafia each contain a certification token. In the process of testing the mail, this token is sent back to the Spamafia, and so redeemed to the individual spammer for a small fee, say a penny or so. In return, the user is given assurance that this message is certified as spam, and so can be automatically deleted without fear of losing legitimate mail. In essence, the spammer is given an incentive to also obtain a small amount of money from each smart user by being straightforward, rather than only trying to obtain a larger amount of money by fooling just a few suckers (and annoying everyone else).
The beauty of the system is that everyone has an incentive to participate. The spammers get more money, as the spams can generate income now from both the suckers, and the nonsuckers paying mailbox protection fees. There's no reason to evade spam-detection, in fact the opposite. The more people signed up to the protection racket, the more certification tokens are redeemed. The smart users get to have a workable mailbox, rather than one filled with junk. And they have the "peace of mind" that the mail being deleted is not important. It's the magic of the market at work.
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Good idea, bad idea?Note: I know hardly any of you will read to the bottom of this post, so here's a copy of my sig:
--
m iso socially aware artistic geek pen-pal, m or f, in '1337 edu. jazz, poetry a must.
email me (click my user info for addy) if you're interested.
Now then. Let the games begin.
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First of all, here's a bit of a rant. Let me disagree strongly with Darko Kirovski, the "cryptography [...] researcher at Microsoft" (article) who created the prototype, when he says:
"I don't think you can create a password that is easily memorizable that is 20 characters long," Kirovski said.
Now, I'm just an average slashdot user. I've never worked with anything that is worth so much as protecting my keyboard from being TEMPEST-ed as I type my password. I'm certainly no cryptography expert.
But even *I* know that you can create easily memorizable passwords 20 characters long, and, in fact, far longer.
First of all, let me introduce you all to diceware. Diceware, slashdot. Slashdot, diceware. (How do you do, how do you do).
Now diceware here is run by a guy who knows about security. He's paranoid. He doesn't just "come up" with passwords while trying to avoid using any obvious components -- oh, no, he generates them completely randomly, and accepts whatever he comes up with as his password. So randomly does he generate his passwords, in fact, that he uses casino dice rather than trusting any kind of hardware.
But wait, it gets better.
How does diceware work? Basically, you use dice to choose a group of short English words that, since they're words (or can be treated as words by a human, such as the "word" ijk), are easy to remember.
More specifically, you roll a die five times, and put the five numbers together and find the corresponding word. (For example, if you roll 2, 6, 3, 1, 5, you search the list for 26315 and find that your word is "Frank").
The only caveat is that before using this list, you should manually (or with a program of your own design) check to make sure 1) that no numerical combination is missing and 2) that no word is associated with more than one combination.
In other words, you shouldn't trust the guy who made diceware, and you don't need to. It's just the principal of the thing -- a list of unique items on a one-to-one ratio with a range of numbers, each of the items of which is easier to remember than a mere number. (But, because there are equally many of them, will be equally "random".)
Now let's do a bit of analysis together of how secure this is.
- Since five die rolls can have 7776 possible combinations (6^5), each "word" has an entropy of just over 12.924 bits. (2^12.924 ~ 7776, so that many bits are necessary to represent each combination five die rolls can create).
- Now, one "character", if we take it to mean an integer with values 0 through 255 inclusive, has entropy of 8 bits.
- Therefore, every two diceware words correspond to three completely random bytes.
Now let's rip apart Kirovski's statement that you can't remember 20 characters.
Before we do, let's point out that no one needs 20 characters, since even if you take a "character" to mean just any of the 94 ASCII values that a user can easily type, we'll even exclude the tab and space, this comes to (6.5545888 bits of entropy per one-of-94-characters * 20 characters=) 131.0917 bits of entropy. That's more than 128 bit encryption needs for a secure key! And this includes only the following characters:
! blah " this # lameness $ filter % really & sucks ' don't ( you ) agree * of + course , you - do . / 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 : ; ? @ A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z [ \ ] ^ _ ` a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z { | } ~
Obviously, if you include more in the definition of "character", then the amount of entropy in 20 characters becomes ridiculous.
But for now, let's assume that Kirovski really did mean 20 characters, as I have defined them, or 128 bits of entropy. Is this "easily memorizable"? Sure is, if you use diceware.
For each word, we'll roll a die five times and get 12.92 bits of entropy. This means we need 10 words to get 128 bits.
Here are my results:[4]
65566 35115 24266 14326 54314 63345 41616 12265 44346 56243
I look these up in the word list, and get:
"56 junk elba bleat lard wacky sermon annex one swept"
as my pass-phrase. Is this "easily memorizable"?
Sure is:
- "56k modems are worse junk than what Napoleon had at Elba -- a bleating piece of lard is faster down an incline if you've given it a push, for chrissakes!!" together with the picture of a goat bleating in terror as it rides a chunk of lard down a hill. Also picture the goat in a Napoleon posture (one hoof inside vest) so you remember elba.[5]
- "Wacko tries being a minister: comes up with wacky sermon about how we need to annex canada. I for one think it should be swept under the rug. (the idea advanced by the sermon or canada?
Picture: arm stretching borders of alaska over canda.
It took me less than thirty seconds to come up with vivid pictures for this, then another minute to associate these sentences and pictures with the actual words (bleat for bleating, swept for sweep or sweeping) and if I remind myself of it in a few minutes, then in a few days, then in a week or two, I'll have it known forever. Compare that with memorizing:[6]
JLEwx;+?o9bH`"|6r%Bo
And you see why diceware is a good idea.
The fact that someone who is a supposed expert in this doesn't know about it is in my opinion inexcusable. (Of course, he might know that twenty characters' worth of entropy can easily be made to be memorizable, but his statement does not reflect this.)
Incidentally, it takes me between six and seven seconds to type "56 junk elba bleat lard wacky sermon annex one swept" carefully enough that it's accurate without my checking it as it appears on the screen (I just closed my eyes and did this five times in thirty-one seconds.) And more than twice as long to type the random 20-character word, if I look at the characters as they appear, even though I use every one of those non-alphabetic characters frequently enough to be able to "semi-touchtype it" (might not hit it on the first try, but I know where it is and I don't look at the keyboard -- in fact, I couldn't now because I use a weird international one. [shrug] But semi-touchtyping doesn't help you when you see *'s instead of the characters...)
As for how much security the average person needs (we're not talking 128 bits here):
well, if you consider an 8 character random combinations of A-Z, a-z, and 0-9 that's 5.954196 bits of entropy per letter * 8 letters = 47.6335 bits of entropy, or less than four diceware words' worth. For example,
56 junk elba bleat.
You don't even need spaces (although I find it easier to type with them) since no diceware word includes a space.
Can you believe it, a simple thing like "56 junk elba bleat" being more secure than a completely random 8-letter mixed-case, alphanumeric word? Wow.
Okay, I've run out of steam. That ends my diceware rant, and I'll address this whole nifty picture thing now.
First let me offer these final notes, which didn't fit into my discussion above.
- Note that the 7776 words diceware uses are all short. There are far more than that many common English words, but by including obscure shorter words and semi-words (like numbers), which are less common but equally memorable once you've thought about it / looked it up, the total typing is reduced. However, this leads to:
- Be very sure to accept any words you're given. If you need to look up a word to know what it means, do so. By avoiding words you don't know (rolling again), you reduce entropy.
- Don't change words. If I change "56" to "56k" above, and make that the word in my passphrase, it's not enough that I make sure 56k isn't already one on the list: I need to make sure that none of the other 7776 words are ones I might change to 56k if I roll them. In other words, just don't change words.
Okay. Rant ends here.
........
Back on topic:
From the article: "The key -- images, which tend to make more of an impression on people than strings of text characters."
This is true, but it is equally true that it is more difficult to uniquely identify member of a given set of pictures than it is to identify a member of a given set of words.
Picture the face of the last high school English teacher that taught you. Now, this is a fine part of a password, because you can choose it randomly from a large list of objects (people you know), and you will remember that it's your password. (Or rather, it and a few more like it).
That is, if I told you that of the 2000 people you know, the following eight faces, in that order, are now your password, you will have very little difficulty remembering them and their order.
However, how will you make a selection 8 times from one of 2000 people? Supposing you know their names also, you can alphabetically list four at a time, doing a double-binary search (for example, A-M at the top, M-Z at the bottom, and the right side is the upper half of each of these ranges and the left side is the lower half).
You now need to make 5.482892 selections to select each of your 8 faces. That's 43 mouse clicks, each one followed by scanning four faces.
Of course, this is based on knowing the names associated with each face, and it would be easier just to type those in. In which case we're back to diceware.
If you don't know their names, however, just how will you select from 2000 faces? Well, maybe you can mimic the binary search with a selection from characteristic skin color, eye shape, etc. If you spend a few hours learning "human facial classification", I bet you can select just about any face you recall in eight or nine mouse clicks.
However, I doubt most people would be too keen on learning to input a bunch of characteristic features. (Even if the 2000 people aren't really people, but people from "Guess who?", who have either a large or small nose, either are wearing a hat or aren't, etc.[7])
The more specific method the article mentions, selecting a particular pixel range within a person's face, isn't something that people do on a daily basis (so much as memorizing and recognizing faces is), so I doubt most people could remember whether it's Mary's lower-right lip followed by where a dimple would be on her right cheek, then the middle of her left eyebrow, or the other way around. It's just not doable.
Okay, I need to go now. Enjoy the weekend, all.
~lts.
You can skip step (1) if you make a contract with yourself that if you ever roll a combination that for some reason isn't on the list, you will take the time to make word that is not on the list, and use that instead.
We'll note that hardly anyone uses the full ascii set, including control characters, in their passwords, but I suppose it's possible to use every character besides carriage return (and maybe even that), depending on the implementation.
There are only 96 keyable characters in the ASCII standard before all the international extentions and so forth, which include the tab and the space.
[4] If you want, you can follow along (and see that I didn't artificially select a particularly easy combination):
#include "iostream.h"
#include "stdlib.h"
int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
cout << "Unseeded demo. NON-SECURE!"
(You can add indentation, I remove it because of the lameness filter.)
[5] Napolean's last battleground, I guess. Famous palindrome: "able was I ere I saw elba".
[6] this example from unseeded:
for(int i = 0; i < 20; i++) cout << char(rand() % 94 + '!');
cout << endl;
[7]On an aside, I figured out binary searching all on my own in playing Guess Who as a child. I figured out that the most efficient way of ending up with the opponent's person is, at each question, to pick a characteristic that only exactly half of my remaining choices had -- sometimes this involved making up questions like: "Okay, does your person EITHER have a hat OR a moustache (or both?). Yes or no?"
(Actually, I soon realized that I could get an answer faster by saying "does your person have any of the following:", for that particular form of the question, but that doesn't apply to all boolean expressions I asked).
--
m iso socially aware artistic geek pen-pal, m or f, in '1337 edu. jazz, poetry a must. - Since five die rolls can have 7776 possible combinations (6^5), each "word" has an entropy of just over 12.924 bits. (2^12.924 ~ 7776, so that many bits are necessary to represent each combination five die rolls can create).
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Re:Best password ever
The assertion that you should never write passwords down is not necessarily a good one. When deciding whether to write the password down, determine two things: 1) what damage is done if someone steals my password 2) what damage is done if I forget the password. In most cases of personal encryption, writing it down does little harm.
From the Diceware FAQ:
Should I write down my passphrase?
This is a very important question. Most experts say never write down your passphrase under any circumstances. This approach comes from military doctrine, but military crypto systems are designed in such a way that one person forgetting a passphrase is not a calamity.
I believe most people are more afraid of forgetting their own passphrase than they are of having it stolen. As a result they tend to pick passphrases that are far too weak. I actually did a small survey on this question and the results support my view. See http://world.std.com/~reinhold/passphrase.survey.
a scAlso many people need multiple passphrases for different programs and needs. Remembering them all can be difficult, particularly those that are used infrequently. For most people it is better to pick strong passphrases, write them down and keep them in a very safe place. There may be legal advantages to memorizing your key, however.
I use a Diceware password for my PGP (slightly obfuscated). The password is written unobfuscated in my wallet. I had no difficulty memorizing it, but I might forget it in the future, so I have some insurance.
To anybody and everybody out there with insecure passphrases: Use DiceWare.
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This was my final year project thesis
This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.
NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go
It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML
My favourite bookmarx
PROJect[21 links]
Beginners' Guide[13 links]
Berkeley Linguistics Dept. Course Summaries, general stuffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCryptic IR Vocabulary defined
Explanations of weird words like hypernym zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHow do we produce and understand speech
How Inverted Files are Created - Univeristy of Berkeley zzzzzzzzzzzzzzNLP Univ. of Indiana, very good basics e.g. word sense d
Simple langauge - useful.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWhat is Natural Language Processing, links
What is POS tagging........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguation defined
Word Sense Disambiguation in detail, scroll down far zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguator - LOLITA (tested at MUC-7 and SENSEVAL competition as best)
XML for the absolute beginner
HTML, XML stuff + parsers[19 links]
Apache plug-in that uhhh does stuff with XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzConvert COM to XML
convert XML, HTML to Unix pipeable formats zzzzzzzzzzzzzzconverters to and from HTML
expat XML parser zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHTML Tidy - converts HTML 2 XML + source code!!
Parse DB (RDBMS, whatever) to XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPerl-XML Module List
PHP Manual XML parser functions - what the hell are they talking about, PHP Virtual M... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPublic SGML-XML Software
Pyxie - XML Processor for Python, Perl, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSGML+XML tools.org
The XML Resource Centre - massive number of links zzzzzzzzzzzzzzW4F wrapper - wrapper converts XML to HTML
XFlat - convert flat file into XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML Parsers and other XML stuff
XML.com - Parsers, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML-Data Catalog System - uhhhh looks close
XTAL's general converter - convert anything 2 XML
other Background[8 links]
Is Linux ready for the Enterprise, scalable... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzLinux reliability
Linux Versus Windows NT, Mark(sysinternals bloke) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPC reliability (pcworld)
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSystems benchmarks
TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council zzzzzzzzzzzzzzUnix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena
Proper TREC(-8) QA systems[2 links]
pg. 387 LIMSI-CNRS pretty deep parsing[2 links]
More links....
NLP, IR links - lots to corpii, etc.
pg. 575 U. of Ottawa and NRL (shit system, got 0%)[1 links]
LAKE Lab
pg. 607! University of Sheffield (crap system, but OPEN SOURCE!)[2 links]
GATE - FREE IE app w`source code
LaSIE - ER, coreference, template (cv)
pg. 617 Univ of Surrey (inconclusive matches)[2 links]
System Quirk - Or is this their search system..... Hmmmmmm
Univ of Surrey - pointers (hopefully this is their WILDER search system...)
SMU - Pg. 65[1 links]
Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU
Textract[2 links]
Cymfony - Technology
Textract - State of the Art Information Extraction
Xerox uhhhhh maybe[1 links]
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(OVERVIEW) 1999 TREC-8 Q&A Track Home Page
NLP bloke, Univ Sussex
Tcl-Tk[4 links] Tcl tutorial
Tcl-Tk Contributed Programs Index
Tcl-Tk Resources, sources
TclXML - manipulating XML using Tcl-Tk
Artificial Natural Language - Is this what I'm trying to parse into...
Comparison of Indexers - Prise vs. Inquery vs. MG, etc.
Eagles - Language Engineering Standards
Language Technology Group - lots of modules!
LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, lots of corpora
Lexical Resources
Links 2 resources, indexers.....
Lots of IR stuff, University of uhhh
Managing Gigabytes Indexer
Managing Gigabytes Manuals and stuff
Htdig search system
NLP & IR (NLPIR, NIST) Group
OVERVIEW OF MUC-7-MET-2
Perl XML Indexing - XML search engine type thing
Phrasys Language Processing Software Components (money)
QA HCI bullshit
SIGIR - TREC-type thing, resources
SMART indexer system documentation
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Home Page
The Natural Language Software Registry
Thunderstone IE and IR products
WordNet - FREE DOWNLOADABLE lexical English database
Page created with URL+, nice utility for working with internet shortcuts -
A good description of the Cato Institutefrom this website:http://world.std.com/~mhuben/cato.html
A "libertarian" quasi-academic think-tank which acts as a mouthpiece for the globalism, corporatism, and neoliberalism of its corporate and conservative funders. Cato is an astroturf organization: there is no significant participation by the tiny libertarian minority. They do not fund it or affect its goals. It is a creature of corporations and foundations.
The major purpose of the Cato Institute is to provide propaganda and soundbites for conservative and libertarian politicians and journalists that is conveniently free of reference to funders such as tobacco, fossil fuel, investment, media, medical, and other regulated industries.
Cato is one of the most blatant examples of "simulated rationality", as described in Phil Agre's The Crisis of Public Reason. Arguments need only be plausibly rational to an uninformed listener. Only a tiny percentage will notice that they are being mislead. That's all that's needed to manage public opinion.
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Re:Just say no
This OYE page suggests that it is still possible to purchase the Infinite Visions re-release.
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Supplemental readingIn The Beginning Was The Command Line
A long, incisive, and--in its own way--funny essay by sci-fi author Neal Stephenson. Nominally about the OS wars, it has an interesting analysis of the way our culture has traded in text (books) for media (videos, movies, TV, music, theme parks, etc). It is a different take on many of the issues raised by Fahrenheit 451.
You can get a taste of it from this cookie file.
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Re:alt.gourmand and the USENET Cookbook
Well, THAT brings back memories...
You've got two options:
1. I found an online version of it here.
2. If you really want to recapture the "old school" experience, you can get the original troff sources here - but then you have to go to Finland to find the "recipes" macro package that you need to process them successfully. -
Big deal, did this a few years ago ;-)
I did something similiar a while back (ACK! 6 years alread!) in CMPT 401 (Operating Systems II) at SFU (Simon Fraser University) one of the assignments was to
a) decrypt a RSA encoded message
b) Answer the questions, since the message was an assignment
The twist was that there the message didn't use ASCII, but a smaller subset. A table was provided of character set. E and D were small, so that you could brute-force it if you wanted to.
It's not funny, when you decode the message over a weekend, and realize the instructor didn't properly encode the message
Definately was a cool assignment, though
Example of RSA
http://world.std.com/~franl/crypto/rsa-example.htm l -
Re:Rule 1 of Efficient Lisp: Lisp is not functionaA few notes:
- Common Lisp does not guarantee tail call optimization, but most decent implementations do it.
- Common Lisp does not guarantee a garbage collector either, but again, most implementations gotta do it
- Tail-recursion is nice, but macros like LOOP with the extended syntax are quite powerful. I would say that Common Lisp is better at iteration than most other languages.
- Your implication that Lisp lacks objects is false. In fact you are wrong: not every type in Java is an object (int, char, etc..). In Common Lisp, every type is an object that has its own identity. You should read Kent Pitman's article on the misappropriation of the term "Object- oriented"
- Also you should read the section of the CLHS that discusses CLOS: The Common Lisp Object System, which is far more powerful object-system than the pathetic Java/C++ one: with multimethod dispatch, method combination, and multiple inheritance. If you feel adventurous, read the Art of the Meta Object Protocol (AMOP) which you can buy for ~ $40, which discusses how to implement CLOS while exposing the internals in a controlled fashion; which allows you to modify the behavior of CLOS easily.
- Yes, Common Lisp is not all there is to Lisp but it is the most widely used one today. Consult the Common Lisp HyperSpec for more information: CLHS
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Re:Join the Libertarian Party
Or exercise your mind, read up on the substantial inconsistencies and contradictions in the libertarian philosophy, and then be careful what powers you give the government or corporations.
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Re:Using Missile SilosI'm going to have to disagree with your analysis of missile silos. I won't pretend to be an expert but I have visited a few sites including the Pima Air and Space Musem TITAN missile silo.
The undergroud complex have massive air handling systems, security, and power generation subsystems.
"4ft thick concrete with 2inch rebar every 8inches"
"2 battery backups and a 500HP Diesel generator"
"Everything after the second blast door is isolated from shock"
"100,000-gallon [water] tank"
Anyhow, what your argument fails to address is that if you are building a data center in a missile silo, why would you have to reuse the commodity equipment. Obviously all of the equipment wasn't designed to support thousands of computers, but the point is that the structure can be reused for that purpose with stellar results.
-Jim
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Java Server
I can't wait to see the first Coffee powered server.
After the demise of the potato powered server, it'll be great to see anouther organically powered server.
--Cam -
Not just Russian sci-fi
I am really glad to see the unlikely break of microsoft-flaming and transmeta-worshipping programming schedule on slashdot - especially since it has to do with good books from Eastern-bloc countries. I wil second all recommendations already given for the Strugatsky brothers. Hwever, when I think of Russian sci-fi, the first name that actually comes to mind is Polish.
Stanilsaw Lem, a Polish author who is immensely popular in Russia and many European countries (but, alas, poorly known in the states) is, in my opinion, the most incredible sci-fi author I've ever had the privielege of reading. His books are above and beyond what is commonly referred to as "science fiction" by the people I meet. Lem's prevailing notion is that a laser gun on a spaceship does not make a rehashed soap opera plot into something that may be classified into the science fiction genre.
Lem's books go a full range from hillarious to serious to outright bizarre. His "Memoirs found in a bathtub" was Terry Gilliam's inspiration while the latter was shooting Brazil. Lem's "Solaris" has been made into an amazing movie by Russia's cinematography great Andrei Tarkovsky - and more likely than not, it is available in your local blockbuster or library. I can go on and on, but I figured that if you (the reader) have made it this far down this post, I might as well provide the links and let you figure out if that sounds like something you'd like to read for yourself. So,
Planet Solaris - The Official Lem site
A brief biography and overview of books
If you can read Russian, this contains the translations of the bulk of his work into Russian.
A really good fan site, with overviews of all major works
A short passage from The Cyberiad - one of Lem's most famous collections of short stories
List of Stanislaw Lem's books, sorted by average customer review rating, at amazon
Take care!
PsychoOne -
MX Steam Cannon Launch
The MX-Missile's steam cannon launch already works economically and reliably. Scaling it up should be relatively straight-forward, as long as you avoid the fate of Gerald Bull.
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Procmail is your friendI like the idea of billing spammers since they hit hit my server (you-suck.com) at lot, but I keep my primary email address on one of the more Unix savvy ISP's around.
They maintian a set of shared Procmail filters; basically the idea is we forward all spam received to a special Panix email address, and if its deemed to indeed be spam, they add enough information to the filters so we don't receive any more junk from this particular source.
It seems to come in waves, probably depending upon how much spammers change their tactics, but I don't really get that much spam - overall averaging maybe half dozen out of about fifty or sixty legitimate emails per day.
By contrast I also have a shell account at The World, and don't use procmail there since I've never used nor distributed that email address.
Last week I opened my email there for the first time in about one year and MY GOD!IT WAS FULL OF SPAM!
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Ex Looking Glass folksSean Barrett, the 3rd place winner, used to work for Looking Glass Studios, the game company which produced Thief, Flight Unlimited, the original System Shock, and many more games. He's quite a smart guy, too; he has KnuthBucks.
Dan Schmidt also used to work there, and has entered the IF competition in the past (see this). Looks like he donated some prizes this year.
Has anyone else with pro game dev experience written IF?
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Ex Looking Glass folksSean Barrett, the 3rd place winner, used to work for Looking Glass Studios, the game company which produced Thief, Flight Unlimited, the original System Shock, and many more games. He's quite a smart guy, too; he has KnuthBucks.
Dan Schmidt also used to work there, and has entered the IF competition in the past (see this). Looks like he donated some prizes this year.
Has anyone else with pro game dev experience written IF?
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Re:Precedence and Associativity cause Unreadable C
Re: I haven't done usability testing with programming languages. But I can guess what you'd find if you did:
- One statement per line aids readability.
- 30 lines of short, simple statements are easier to read than 10 longer, more complex lines.
I'm not into hard-and-fast rules but I don't think these two points are radically inconsistent with most style I see observed in Lisp code. Lisp doesn't have a statement concept, but things very like statements do typically occur on their own line. People don't start blocks and put all the subexpressions on one line, though they could. So, to be honest, I have no idea what you're getting at here. I see nothing Lisp does to really push against this issue one way or another. The comment seems equally applicable to C, even though there, too, people by choice tend not to do the thing the language would let them and that you seem to fear.
- A distinction between statements and expressions aids readability.
Of your various "style rules", this is the only one that I could clearly say there's a parting of opinion on. Now, I know parsing reasons for making this distinction. And perhaps there are teaching reasons. But I've never heard it asserted that this was a readability issue and I'd like some exposition here in order to understand your motivation (both so I can reply and also just because I'd be fascinated simply to understand your reasoning on this in general).
There could be a readability issue here, but a priori I don't see one. In fact, my experiences with things like HyperTalk and this statement/expression issue, since there you have to say for each function which kind you are making, is that you often end up with things that are nominally intended to be expressions but that you want to use as statements. So you do "get foo()" just to make an expression into a statement, even though you plan not to use the "it" variable that "get" sets up.
I find the statement/expression distinction to be tedious and pointless as an enforced mechanism. Though in practice, again, Lisp programmers often have certain expressions they tend to think of as kind of statement-like and so tend not to embed in well-styled code. So again I don't see a problem.
- Deeply nested code and structures are confusing.
The ordinary use of block structure, and the commonplace use of separating blocks into separate functions, both practices introduced decades ago in Algol and long-practiced not only in Lisp but in most major languages seems to make the issue of deeply nested code not an issue. I'd need to see an example to know what this was about. I don't think Lisp gets a lot more nested than most other languages. Certainly nothing about the language forces this. Unless you want a language like Basic or Assembly that doesn't allow any nesting, I don't see how to avoid at least the possibility, and beyond that it's all just personal taste and personal practice, not language design. Do you see otherwise?
- Flatness is good.
You know, at MIT on a mid-term exam in compiler design 20 years ago, I actually saw a question that was "Gotos are (a) good (b) bad". I was immediately alerted to the fact that Computer Science should probably be better named Computer Religion, since it's often more filled with unfounded religious dogmatism than with science. I believe goodness and badness are things that have to be context-relative. One can't just stop a sentence after the word "good" or "bad" without establishing a context and have anything other than a statement of religion. It may be that flatness is good for some unspecified purpose, and that if you specified that purpose we could talk about it more. But I won't give you unqualified Good® on no more than you've offered here.
- Meaningful error messages help.
I have to say I don't know where this comes from. Lisp has an error system capability that is unmatched by any other language I've seen, and has the best guidelines for writing error messages that I've seen anywhere also. If you want an abstract overview of its capabilities, see my paper Exceptional Situations in Lisp . It is not possible to make a programmable facility that leaves the programmer any discretion at all and not risk that someone will do something obscure, but (again) you can't blame the language for that. As a rule, Lisp error messages, in part because they are object-oriented, and in part because of the power of Lisp's powerful FORMAT facility for producing formatted output, seem to me to be much better than I get in other languages. So I'm not sure what you're talking about here.
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Re:My criticisms of LISP
Please feel free to drop me a line in email with any suggestions you have on what you need froma book, since I'm working on several and could use your thoughtful input.
By the way, regarding success stories, I think there are several issues here:
First, for some issues where Lisp could be used or a "commodity" language could be used, the market seeks a commodity. You can hardly blame it and I can't either.
Second, for those issues that Lisp could solve and others can't, Lisp has different strengths than other languages and vice versa, so it's hardly surprising its success stories lie in different areas where you might not be looking, so that may not be why you don't see them.
Third, business success stories are about making money, not about promoting Lisp. If Red Hat or some other Linux or open source company went bankrupt, would it be the technology's fault or the managements? But who would get blamed. IBM could fall and people could blame it on the new Linux alliance they have. Scapegoats are handy. This could make the name Linux unpopular. Would it invalidate the tool? I think not. Might businesses who wanted to keep using the tool decide reasonably not to mention the use of the tool when advertising? Quite likely, I think. I know this happens in the Lisp community. Companies that use Lisp want to focus on their business claims in marketing, and can't risk the potential liability of mentioning a name that has become unpopular (note I didn't say "a technology that has become useless").
I think it's been long enough since AI Winter and the attachment of the "bad name" to Lisp and I'm encouraging people to come clean and start to do like Intel does with its "Intel Inside" campaign. People don't think Lisp is being used because they don't see Lisp is being used. You're right this is an impediment. But it's one that hasn't happened casually--there have been good reasons for it--reasons that could befall any technology, not just us.
My company proudly, and at some commercial risk, displays that it uses Lisp. Commercial risk of two kinds. Some people might not like Lisp. And some people might think I'm a starry-eyed Lisp evangelist more intent on pushing the language than solving their business problem. The former is a self-fulfilling prophecy that can only be changed by using Lisp and showing it can be liked. The latter is a challenge to me to make sure I do stay focused on people's business needs first and keep the related Lisp evangelism second.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to plod through this discussion to the point of giving us a chance, and for documenting your thoughts. It's been very interesting to me, and I'm sure to others in our community as well. I know the Lisp marketing departments are reading these conversations even if they are not speaking directly. Well-articulated positions, pro and con, are what they're seeking, and what they've gotten here. -
Re:syntax nothing to be proud of
Macros are a central part of the Common Lisp experience, and if you had a class or book that didn't teach them, it did you (and our community) a disservice by giving you a false sense of what normal programming is like in CL.
As to the size of the language spec, you should probably read my article Don't Judge a Spec by Its Cover which I wrote while the standard was just a draft and lots of people asked questions like these. There are 978 symbols (defined names) in Common Lisp. The ANSI CL spec, whose online incarnation is most easily accessed as the Common Lisp HyperSpec, is about 1195 printed pages. That's an average of about one page per defined name, a lot of which is examples of how to use them. That doesn't seem unreasonable to me on a per-function basis. Perhaps you'd be happier with fewer functions or fewer examples. Or we could have left out the helpful glossary of Lisp terms that provide a normative effect on the community's terminology. That would make the spec smaller.
I personally don't recommend reading the full spec cover to cover. I never have. I recommend reading the opening few chapters on syntax and evaluation, and then thinking of other chapters as libraries that you can read about as you need them. Then again, the spec is not intended to be a tutorial, people just get confused about that because it is (I'm told) more readable than most language specs. If I'd made it more unreadable, most people would never have approached it (as is the case for most other programming languages), and people would judge the language by tutorial texts. Lisp has a great many tutorial textbooks that are much smaller than the spec; the spec's first responsibility was to be a clear and accurate record of the language definition. The prior definition, Steele's Common Lisp: The Language was more brief, but left some things vague that led to portability problems and required more exposition to get right. -
Re:Globalism is not the problem: Government is
The unfortunate fact that the libertarian religion doesn't address is that large and powerful corporations become fascist just as fast as large and powerful governments. One need only see the increasing consolidation of power in the hands of less and less corporations, and their incrasing ability to wage a totally one sided information war against consumers, often taking advantage of people's lack of knowledge in a specific technology that is being sold to them (for example, the myth that is perpetrated by the computer industry that every child needs his/her own computer and high speed internet link in order to do better in school. completely false, but the public have been convinced of it through relentless advertising and the promise of wealth when their child becomes the next "internet start up whiz kid millionaire by 16!").
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Re:Globalism is not the problem: Government is
For god's sake, all of this libertarian nonsense has been debunked time and time again. Please read this and come back when you have something NEW to say.
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Re:Are there non-sucky Fortran compilers for linux
my colleagues who use Fortran (modeling fluid flows and such like) tell me that the GNU fortran compiler is useless.
I very much doubt they said that. They probably said "it's useless for our purposes" or something like that. (In my experience, people who use Fortran for modeling fluid flows aren't so foolish as to generalize from their very narrow personal experience to the entire potential usability of a thing.)
Is it buggy? Not standards compliant? Can any experts enlighten me?
Buggy: not terribly, but it had (and probably still has) a few annoying, well-documented bugs that have proven difficult to fix.
Not standards compliant: if the standard is ANSI FORTRAN 77, that isn't the problem.
What your colleagues might be running into is most likely one of two things, or both: g77 doesn't support some widespread extensions to FORTRAN 77, like Cray pointers; and g77 hasn't, at least until recently, provided sufficient info for the debugger to use to allow a programmer to see things like variables in COMMON or EQUIVALENCE.
Less likely, but not improbably, they're frustrated by other annoyances, like poor performance or even inadequate diagnostics in certain cases. As with most any compiler, performance might be quite good for most users, but terrible, compared to a usable alternative, for some. g77 depends pretty much entirely on the GCC back end plus the f2c run-time libraries (libf2c) to achieve performance, though the g77 front end necessarily makes some "choices" among components of these other chunks of software to try to arrange for the best performance for most uses.
Or maybe they've just converted wholesale to Fortran 90 or beyond, in which case g77 will indeed be useless to them -- clearly not a fault of g77 itself!
Note that I'm considered the original author of g77, though I stopped working on it a couple of years ago. I made many mistakes in my original design and implementation of g77; only a few of these were truly problematic in the long run, but they remain as obstacles to many who've thought they could come in and "fix" certain of g77's problems by exerting a substantive combination of effort and imagination.
There is now a GNU Fortran 95 project underway, which, if your colleagues contribute to in some fashion, might better meet their needs. I'm not sure, but I think they started by ignoring pretty much all the g77-specific code in GCC: probably a wise move.
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Re:First nontrivial program
I think he said on c.l.l that his first nontrivial program was a FORTRAN to LISP compiler. He had been a FORTRAN programmer before he got into LISP, so this was an area where he had quite a bit of knowledge. The paper he presented on this topic is on his web site.
He's discussed this a bit on c.l.l before, but I'm interested in hearing more about it.
-- Rahul Jain -
Re:Step back and think: what makes the terroristsThank you both for your back-and-forth discussion, it was interesting to read!
Note that I don't take the "United We Stand" rhetoric to be necessarily militant -- standing for freedom and human rights does not necessarily mean killing those who oppose such things, even less-so does it mean killing innocents.
I do hope you, sh_mmer, turn out to be right that these attacks aren't futile. I have much more confidence in the focus on the overall success of the mission to generally defang international terrorism now than I did during the Clinton years, but I still don't see much evidence that the US government as a whole is truly committing itself to its fundamental purpose of defending the US from attack. (I don't question the commitment of the military and organizations such as the FBI, but expect that, as the present levels of concern taper off, activities irrelevant to defense and unnecessary for government to undertake will once again occupy most of the attention of members of Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court, who, rather than focusing on defending our nation, tend to prefer playing Santa Claus, or Robin Hood with an Uzi, "nannying" our children in lieu of expecting responsible parenting, and changing the rules of the game of golf.)
What I've long admired about American character (as I perceive it) is the ability of its military and police to focus both effectively and narrowly on a tactical goal without being distracted by hysteria, prejudice, etc. as is more typical of other cultures, especially older ones.
In that sense, an American military or police action is less like a grenade going off, killing anyone in the area, than like a fast-moving train, rolling over anything in its way, but staying on its tracks.
I tend to believe this is the result of the US history of being a society of individual achievement, rights, and responsibility, in which those concerns are typically elevated above those of personal issues such as race, nation of birth, etc.
But this is a challenging time, our military has been through a very challenging time, so I don't assume it will succeed.
For my part, I did publish a proposal for peace that might have made military action unnecessary, but it failed to attract much attention, and I did not propose it as a means to deny the military the support it needed to do its job.
Thanks again for your thoughtful discussion!
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The bad old days...
When I first got on the Net, it was via an Amiga 1000, dialing from Kansas City to Boston to call The World, the first dial-in ISP at 1200 baud. I then moved to Chicago, where I looked around for an ISP, and joined Chinet. This was run by Randy Suess who, with his friend Ward Christensen (who wrote Xmodem) and they created CBBS which launched in 1978, considered to be the first BBS.
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And he calls us whiners...
Oh no, they're more worried about trying to create a good show than trying to be PC to pander to all the whiny wacko liberals who think it's their right to force their views down everyone's throat.
You misspelled "who think it's their right not to have my views forced down their throats" in the preceding. HTH.
Ok, mod me down, I'm not PC
I'm reminded of a quote:
We have now reached the point where every goon with a grievance, every bitter bigot, merely has to place the prefix, 'I know this is not politically correct, but...' in front of the usual string of insults in order to be not just safe from criticism, but actually a card, a lad, even a hero. Conversely, to talk about poverty and inequality, to draw attention to the reality that discrimination and injustice are still facts of life, is to commit the sin of political correctness. Anti-PC has become the latest cover for creeps. It is a godsend for every curmudgeon and crank, from fascists to the merely smug. -- Finian O'Toole, The Irish Times, 5 May 1994
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Re:...Fool me twice, shame on me...
try this
dfjlgnjfjkldjgjfldjgsdfjbjlsfjdjkbnsrtjhbjksn kjsfnjksdfjnfjknjksnjkbskgfbljb -
Radical Proposal For PeaceIn case it has any merit, I've put up a little website containing a pretty radical proposal for how to get out of this jam...check it out.
It's a bit long, about 29K of HTML, but I spent a fair amount of time since Saturday editing it, so it shouldn't be too difficult a read.
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It's not Open Source, but
Liberty Basic is sure fun. It lists not being Visual Basic as a virtue!
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Fuck the Libertarians!
Your political party is crazier than a shithouse rat. Please fuck off and die now. You're consuming resources needed by people without their heads up their ass.
Thank you. -
Writing software is writing...Writing software is writing, and the fact is that most people don't write very well.
Long subroutines are run-on sentences discusses one aspect of this problem.
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Re:Who did that...
this balloon + bullet?
http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/bullets/bullets.h tm l -
Re:The cannon is more interesting
Yes I agree with you. After thinking about it some more I just had to find the name of the gun I was thinking of so I did some more research and found it. The gun was part of HARP (High Altitude Research Project). It achieved about 1/3 of escape velocity. I found a site talking about this and other large guns here and a page talking about Gerald Bull. I just remembered the part about the escape velocity wrong.
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noun: lib�er�tar�i�an
A philosophy of "freedom and liberty", that has been completely debunked.
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Re:\. Hypocritical? Here is the evidence!
So, yes, I agree with the \. editors statement but I wish that they would realize that it follows true on their other topics as well.
Oh, how easily some people miss the subtle hints of irony.
But then again, you should also read the Non-Libertarian FAQ to set your view of the world right (or left, which is right). And travel a bit (according to the rant about "comforts" on your homepage, you are for a big surprise).
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Re:Something that should happen more often.
Ha ha, that was funny! Of course we know worms never infect unix or open source systems !
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Re:My Mother's Practice Would Be High Risk :-)Feel free to point people to my web page on chain email. I have a small, but encouraging, amount of anecdotal evidence that it has managed to encourage a few people to break the habit.
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Re:Encryption
As it happens, I ended up encrypting the piece of paper, such that the only thing that I definitely have to remember is the non-trivial decryption scheme. Of course, I also remember the passwords that I need most often, but for the others my encrypted paper has occasionally worked miracles.
So how do you encrypt a piece of paper? Are you talking about using an encryption program (scanning in that sheet of paper?) or something like cutting it into little confetti-like bits and hiding them around your neighborhood? Actually, that approach is more like steganography.
Has anyone mentioned Diceware already? (Another link here to the same site.) It's the system I like the most, especially because I get to real d6s in the process.
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Re:Any karma whores out there...The sorta portal site for lisp: www.lisp.org
Here is a list of online books and references which I found useful:
- Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation -- David S. Touretzky
- Successful Lisp: How to Understand and Use Common Lisp -- David B. Lamkins
- CLtL2: Common Lisp the Language, 2nd Edition -- Guy L. Steele
- HyperSpec: The ANSI Standard for Common Lisp -- Kent M. Pitman
- CLOS: Common Lisp Object System -- Daniel G. Bobrow et al
- MOP: The Meta Object Protocol
- CLIM2: Common Lisp Interface Manager 2.0
The CLIM perspective, user's guide, and specification.
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microthreads, stackless python
Is there any chance that stackless and microthreads might be integrated into the main python distribution?
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I feel like the RCA dog
Well, perhaps we're looking in the right place, but we just don't know what we've found. Take the sugar that was found in a cloud of gas near the center of our Milky Way. If that isn't a calling card for carbon-based life, I don't know what is. Since we search for electro-magnetic signals we make assumptions that other life will be of a similar tech than us. We are really a fledgling race in our capacity to study the heavens constantly being startled by the phenomena we find in space. It is still too early for us to identify when something is not standard out there. That supernova might just be a distress beacon.
An excellent novel (if a wee bit cycical) dealing with some of the problems of our search for sentient life is His Master's Voice by Stanislaw Lem. He proposes the problem of how to interpret a purposeful signal once we find it. The scientists in the book are attempting to decipher a neutrino stream that they accidently detect coming to us in a repeating pattern for a fixed amount of time. The answers are not entirely satisfying. Do we really have the capacity to think outside our little box?
