Slashdot Mirror

Maybe it chose the wrong place to land, but we may never know...

Job selection on the basis of certain desirable genetic characteristics is already common in the military and sports

Uh, yeah, after testing the individual's performance, which is a function of their genetic makeup, but is also a product of the very complex interactions these genes have with each other and their regulatory systems.

If you want a detailed genetic view of how someone behaves you'll need probably most of their genome including non-coding regions as well as an idea of the modification of those nucleotides for epigenetic control of expression. You'll also need to model to the nth degree how certain mutations affect the performace of a given molecule and how that affect cascades down into other parts of their biology. After you've modelled all of this, there'll still be massive leeway in behaviour and performance based on personal experiences and lifestyle factors.

This research is called 'maverick' in Gartner parlance, meaning it has a somewhat low probability and is still years out

Yes, it very much falls into XKCD's 25+ years out group.

Sure, why not?

I'm still certain that TPTB had hired the Bernie "supporters" that were causing problems at Trump rallies.

Always remember that Trump and Clinton both are working for TPTB. Look at all the whinging in this discussion that the attack caused. I'd say that's a moderately successful distraction.

MY major party is good, and YOUR major party is bad. Never mind they're THE SAME PARTY! Wake up sheeple!

I think the sheeple would be better than letting TPTB take this where ever they're taking it. Sheeple 2016! Wake them from their 10,000 year slumber!

Oblig xkcd.

Also, it turns out "Randall Munroe" is just the name the Matrix gave to its future-predicting algorithm.

Appropriate XKCD:
https://xkcd.com/908/

I forget the number of the one where he gets his website corrupted and just asks his users to fix the database though.

Because I haven't seen this posted yet: https://xkcd.com/1319/

I see somebody got a high score! Good job!

My sheep kept crashing into the green blocks. I figured it was trying to radicalize me to fight for the sheeple.

Disclaimer: I have no plans to vote at this point. Aside from writing in a joke candidate, I can't think of a single option that wouldn't leave me feeling filthy afterwards.

You could follow this example and try: "Robert'); DROP TABLE Candidates;--"

But, I don't know how filthy you'd feel afterwards ... :-)

Mercury lives close to the bottom of a very deep gravity well.

https://xkcd.com/681/

If you fall down that well, you gain an enormous amount of velocity that you have to dump if you want to orbit/land on the planet. Mercury has no atmosphere to aerobrake so you need fuel to stop.

The rail gun you'll need to send shipments back to earth would be pretty immense to lift any reasonable mass out of that gravity well.

The fact that the argument keeps changing should tell anyone everything they need to know.

Not to mention we're still in a cold period.

And the notion that there's some global temperature that climate is "supposed to be' is patently unscientific and ignorant of history.

The data shows we SHOULD be in a cold phase but the Earth has been warming rapidly compared to the last 10,000 years. The last time the average temperature rose 1c rapidly it took 900 years. Since the Industrial Revolution( roughly 1850s) the average temperature has risen a bit over 1C.

You can insist that given the great complexity of the Earth's ecosystem, scientists could not possibly know what will happen. They can theorize about weather change and some are right and some are wrong. But there is no doubt that the average temperature is rising and some areas close to the equator will start to be come uninhabitable in 20-30 years.

http://xkcd.com/1732/

Here's the main journal article xkcd referenced for that comic.

You've noted, in different words, that the trend since around 1900 is unprecedented in the entire time frame of the temperature reconstruction, last 20k years or more. You are absolutely correct, the journal article re-confirms that the graph trend from 1900 onward is unlike anything in the 20,000 years prior in the entire dataset.

If you read closer though, there is another potential explanation beyond human CO2 emissions that must also be accounted for. If you check the article, you will find that the data set from 1900 backwards is a DIFFERENT data set than the one graphed from 1900 forwards. The data graphed prior to 1900 is reconstructed from proxy sources, the data graphed after 1900 is the instrumental record.

When temperatures averaged over 100+ years, it's tough to average the tail end last 100 years well so using the instrumental record isn't wrong. Drawing conclusions SOLELY on the divergence that happens at 1900 though is to say the least, nuanced. Plainly, the most important and probable factor that must first be thoroughly ruled out is that the change in data sets is having an impact. There's a possibility that thermometers measure temperature more accurately than proxy records that are statistically analyzed and averaged over hundreds or thousands of years.

But there is no doubt that the average temperature is rising and some areas close to the equator will start to be come uninhabitable in 20-30 years.

It's nonsense like that which makes people decide AGW is bullshit and everyone associated with it is either a useful idiot or has a secret agenda. No, areas close to the equator will not become uninhabitable, any more than they already are because most of the equator is covered by ocean. 78% in fact. The remaining 22% is across the narrow part of Africa, the northern edge of Brazil (which is Amazon jungle), and bits of Indonesia, which is also heavy jungle. By reasonable standards, most of the land crossing parts of the equator are already uninhabitable. I dunno about you but centipedes a foot long put me off.

https://xkcd.com/605/

I think you are severely overestimating the danger of radiation. NASA measured the radiation dose received in 180 day trip to Mars to be about 330 mSv. This is probably enough to increase long-term cancer risk, but little else. Check the xkcd about radiation.

The fact that the argument keeps changing should tell anyone everything they need to know.

Not to mention we're still in a cold period.

And the notion that there's some global temperature that climate is "supposed to be' is patently unscientific and ignorant of history.

The data shows we SHOULD be in a cold phase but the Earth has been warming rapidly compared to the last 10,000 years. The last time the average temperature rose 1c rapidly it took 900 years. Since the Industrial Revolution( roughly 1850s) the average temperature has risen a bit over 1C.

You can insist that given the great complexity of the Earth's ecosystem, scientists could not possibly know what will happen. They can theorize about weather change and some are right and some are wrong. But there is no doubt that the average temperature is rising and some areas close to the equator will start to be come uninhabitable in 20-30 years.

http://xkcd.com/1732/

Obligatory xkcd

In fact, I consider you the worst of all forms of censors, instead of trying to rationally deal with the GP's point, you called him names hoping that people would get angry

Argh. Let's get this shit straight: censorship means to impede the ability for voluntary listeners (sometimes including those who might not currently be aware of the message's existence) to listen or read your actual message. There are some caveats we can toss in here like disruptive communications (flooding, 3am bullhorn shouting, etc.), opt-in and opt-out filtration (including comment moderation), and those lively debates about whether naked pictures count as speech but let's put that all to the side; the point is censorship involves an impedance of access or perhaps awareness. That is all. You're right that it goes way beyond the first amendment--corporations can do it and individuals can do it to and the harm is very similar (differing mostly in extent), but bad argumentation is something else entirely. If you need a label for certain bad arguments, go use one of those informal fallacies of argumentation; they're usually badly abused, but they're fine in principle.

Just please, please don't dilute and distort the definition of "censorship" any further than it's already been distorted. It's bad enough trying to argue with all these ignoramuses who believe that certain things are only not worthwhile, but are in fact completely meaningless unless it's the government that's doing it..

The First Amendment protects people from government interference in their speech (with certain exceptions). It does not stop Twitter from banning him (which they did) should they decide to do so.

Milo never argued the First Amendment makes it illegal to do what Twitter did. This might just be the biggest straw man of all time... pretending that people who support free speech are trying to misinterpret the constitution.

And Milo seems to deliberately distort the idea that just because we have freedom of speech in the U.S., it doesn't require anyone to allow him on their privately owned or publicly traded forums.

You people are the ones who are grossly distorting the idea of free speech (yes, I just linked xkcd as an example of how NOT to do something), although I'm not certain if you're doing it deliberately. Free speech has a definition outside of constitutional law and even outside of any courtroom. It is a thing that you can choose to support or not support regardless of whether or not you are acting as part of a government.

That doesn't mean anyone has to or should listen to any jackass who opens his mouth. I'm not advocating against filters or opt-in block lists, but supporting free speech generally means advocating that people who want to voluntarily read a political opinion that has been published through a general purpose communication platform should be able to. I'm not saying illegal/legal, I'm just saying *should*. If you are against this, if you think that Twitter and ISPs and phone companies should be dictating our political speech and social mores, then then you are at least to some extent against free speech.

Guess what, if a private golf course discriminates against a black person... it's racism! It's racism when the government does it. It's racism when a private business does it. It's racism even if it's legal for them to do it. And so it is with free speech.

no, Milo is all about trolling and shitposting. This has absolutely nothing to do with free speech https://xkcd.com/1357/

seems you need to be reminded what free speech is and isn't. https://xkcd.com/1357/

Last time I checked, the government wasn't trying shut him or 4chan up/down. There isn't a need for a haven, he just wants a place for shitty people to be shitty people on the internet. Equating free speech with shitposting and demanding to be heard and respected demeans free speech and needs to stop! Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1357/

tl;dr In Opposite world, we're not concerned about our precious bodily fluids?

WAKE UP SHEEPLE!

For me it's the "aims to combine all the goodies of Emacs and Vim" that gets me...

Sounds like an old oblig. xkcd: https://xkcd.com/927/

https://xkcd.com/686/

You may think that, got very little to do with what has happened though.

http://www.xkcd.com/1732/

Now that brings joy to my heart. I didn't get a link to their web cam when I did my search. Sometimes the world just needs to be a little weirder but I don't recommend bobcats.

Obligatory xkcd cartoon

Feh, and then came the expansion packs. First The Crusades, then The Reformation, plenty of bloodshed and violence there. Those those expansions were exciting! But then they came out with nothing but grindy shit after that. First was Industrial Revolution. Ok, I almost forgot about Wild West after that. But now more grindy shit, even with a rep system called Big Data now in the latest one! Nothing but grinding rep here grinding rep there. They didn't even raise the level cap! WTF.

Hell, I'll bet most of it was hacked together with PERL.

There is actually a comic about you.

Reminds me of an xkcd about reputation-based spam-blocking. Seems we might have a similar situation here, except that we end up with everyone benefitting from being able to play against the most enjoyable opponents all the time.

Actually, homeopathy doesn't disagree. Homeopathy says they magically turn into cures if they're sufficiently dilute.

Too many people mock homeopathy merely for its magical increasing-dilution-is-stronger claims, and forget to mock it for its toxins-reverse-effect-at-a-certain-dilution-level claims. :)

And really, if you think about it, it's all perfectly logical. Diluting lessens the problem, so if you keep diluting, eventually the problem becomes zero, and therefore, if you keep diluting, simple extrapolation shows that the problem level must go negative at that point, if it's truly still lessening. And a negative problem is a cure. QED. :D

Does anyone know more info about it?

Yes, I do recall having read something somewhere about it being total bullshit.

But wait, there's this new study I heard about...

If there does turn out to be a small link, I'll be shocked if the risk is going to be too minuscule to obsess over. People only care about cell phones causing cancer because invisible EM / radio waves are freaky. It's weird magical stuff flying through the air that I can't see or hear or smell --> We need to be paranoid about it. That is the basis of the concern over non-ionizing EM causing cancer. Here are a list of things that we're almost certain cause cancer:

* Barbecued food with any black "grill marks" or other carbonization on it.
* Smoked foods
* Regularly being around lit candles
* Being around a lit fireplace, even if it's just occasionally.
* Drinking your coffee (or any other drink/food) while it's too hot.
* The sun--anything over the minimum amount required for your body to manufacture the vitamin D you need (just a few minutes per day, at least for lower-melanin people in lower latitudes).

* Possibly anything that causes prolonged or repeated inflammation.


I'm not saying you shouldn't worry about your kids or err on the side of caution, but if you aren't at all concerned about everything on the above list... don't kid yourself. You're not a safe, informed conscientious parent. You're simply unduly afraid of what you don't understand.

Intellectual exchanges like this^ need to be preserved that for posterity.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1683/

Thanks Randall.

https://xkcd.com/1683/

you can replace SHA-256 with other commonly used algorithms, and you'll get very similar results.

Uh huh. I'm afraid I can't quite let this slide--before we take this conversation private, I need to clearly emphasize just how ridiculous you're behaving.

As I've repeatedly indicated, I am a layman using goal-based working definitions, not technical process-based terms, because I am not (and never claimed to be) intimately familiar with the processes. I'm using "hash" as a shorthand for so-called one-way functions that are intended to obscure, i.e. with no need for symmetry or decoding but a strong need for it to be hard to reverse. I'm sure that "hash" means something very different to you. Congratulations. I knew that there was a distinction between "nonce" and "salt" too (and I even briefly brought up nonces in this thread long before you did), but that doesn't mean you have a legitimate point here. Ditto "hash" and whatever magical terms there are that you refuse to share with me.

You know... if I hear someone saying "clip" instead of "magazine" or "mag" I will sometimes correct them, but you know what I don't do? Pretend to not understand what they are talking about and then refuse to tell them the correct term. And if someone says "hey, the reason why that clip isn't fitting is it's backwards!"... the fact that you aren't actually holding a clip in your hand has very little bearing on the usefulness of their advice.

An astute observer might mention that there are subsets of this family of algorithms, having the strict stipulation of input sizes being less than the output digest size, which are referred to as perfect hashing functions. These are actually relatively rarely used for typical cryptographic applications, and for various good reasons.

I'm not sure if you could have ended that sentence in a more obnoxious manner, given the context of this discussion. (However, I'll go out on a limb here and say that it potentially leaks too much information about the input. Yes?)

That said, before I go any further, I do withdrawal my assertion (from a couple posts back, but not present in my original post) that provably zero collisions is achievable. I mean such transforms do exist, obviously, but perhaps not in a manner that is also sufficiently hard for an attacker to reverse engineer.

So let's do a bit of a test here to see how much intellectual honesty you're capable of. You and a lot of other people are caught up on the word "hash", even though I told you to feel free to substitute another word. Given your last few replies, the implication is that such a substitution doesn't exist and what I'm suggesting is inherently flawed and that *any* hashlike algorithm would have these issues. Well, ok then. I wish for you to tell me precisely what is wrong with this setup. I am not saying that this is what the final product would look like (I have no idea how it would look once optimized for efficiency), but it may give you a better idea of what I include under my umbrella term of "hash".

Plug the salt (or nonce or whatever you term it; I do_not_care) and password into a well designed crypto PRNG capable of generating a stream of numbers of arbitrary le

I'm So Meta, Even This Acronym

And of course, my favorite emacs command C-x M-c M-butterfly

You forgot the xkcd link

If being online is adversely affecting your health, sanity, and happiness, you probably suffer from chronic road rage as well. Stop getting overwrought by things beyond your ability to control or influence, and give up your impulse to correct every mistake and your tendency to be outraged by opinions you don't share.

Oh, and oblig. xkcd.

Depends on the feeding strategy doesn't it ... https://what-if.xkcd.com/105/
Without storage, less than three years. Should be enough to get you through a nuclear winter though.

Did we hit the comet hard enough to deflect it away from Earth?
Today's xkcd: http://www.xkcd.com/1740/

> Only five percent of respondents didn't know the characteristics of a secure password, with the majority of respondents understanding that passwords should contain uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols.

These requirements profoundly _discourage_ secure passwords. The difficulty of remembering them, and typing them well at a hidden password field, strongly encourage storage of passwords locally in cut&paste text windows or in local plaintext password storage. The current champion application for this security failure is AWS, which stores complex randomized alphanumeric strings which _no one_ can remember, forcing their default inclusion in plaintext local user fules or even hardcoded in saved wrapper scripts.

I'm afraid that robust password generation was much better explained and documented in an old XKCD cartoon, https://xkcd.com/936/

What form of "properly hashed and securely stored" would make a five character numeric-only password even remotely acceptable?

Mind you, I don't disagree with your premise - The problem here has nothing to do with end-users, and everything to do with expecting them to remember over a hundred distinct "secure" passwords. But that glaring flaw aside (which leads people to use the least secure password a site will let them, and reuse it at every site they can), there *is* still such a thing as a pathetically weak password.

We've all seen, and can debate the exact accuracy of the relevant XKCD strip, but the general idea holds true - We'd all do a hell of a lot better to use memorable three to five word phrases, than trying to squeeze something we can almost remember into leetspeak with an extra random character or two tacked on at the end.

I forgot to include the obligatory xkcd on dicewords: https://xkcd.com/936/

https://xkcd.com/927/

I see you conveniently replied only to the above post, instead of the one where I did cover the specifics. You also appeared to ignore some other posts were other people mentioned the specifics. On top of this, you've completely ignored my attempts to explain how little fuel waste there need be, in principle.

So no, I don't particularly feel like providing you with an in-depth, blow by blow, thoroughly sourced analysis unless you pay me. However, I am still curious what it's like to be a grown man who would rather believe that the science and the numbers lie instead of considering the possibility that people simply suck.

Maybe this is just a German thing?

There have been several glacial/interglacial periods over the last 120,000 years. The peak of the current interglacial occurred about 8000 years ago. Since then temperatures have been slowly falling... up until about 150 years ago when something happened and temperatures dramatically reversed course.. Here's just the last 20,000 years by XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1732/

One reason for climate change, from my thinking, is that the earth's spin is slowing down. At one second per year or decade or century, that slow down has a side effect. The sun is able to do one second more melting of ice.

And of course, birmomg fossil fuels also causes a side effect. Altogether, I can, in my mind, rationalize what we are experiencing as "global warming"
 

They are not 'wacky' beliefs; they are scientifically literate ones. If they are producing so much waste that it cannot physically remain on-site then someone has fucked up, period. The fuel waste alone should be very, very, very small. The non-fuel waste can and should be minimized. If you're producing so much non-fuel waste that it won't fit on the lot then either the designer or the operator(s) of the plant has been moronically reckless.

Clear thinking and scientific literacy should never take a back seat to the reports produced by bureaucratic incompetents.

But that Roku has to pass through a real firewall and because I know it is stupid little device I only let it talk to a select few domains (really how many domains do you need to connect to to watch internet TV) and there is a lot of crap that I just block at the firewall including ad servers for all hosts. That is the benefit of having a good knowledge of computer security is that I can set things up to actually be secure. Also I view all mobile devices as the security holes they are and separate them from the computer that do real things. For shits and giggles I will also screw around with having my own Upside-down-ternet and do various things like substitute words in articles or redirect ad images and flash video to porn images and videos although the latter I really only do when I want to mess with my buddies at poker night.

I have another XKCD for you: https://xkcd.com/605/

There have been several glacial/interglacial periods over the last 120,000 years. The peak of the current interglacial occurred about 8000 years ago. Since then temperatures have been slowly falling... up until about 150 years ago when something happened and temperatures dramatically reversed course.. Here's just the last 20,000 years by XKCD: http://xkcd.com/1732/

Recently posted perspective here.