Seriously, has anyone here ever written to their representatives and had it work properly?
Yes and no. And when it doesn't work, it frustrates THE HELL out of me. I once called my Federal House of Representative's office and expressed my opinion on a political matter (not in an abrasive way, but in a 'hey, here's my opinion, please mark this down, and by the way what does the congressman think?'). By this woman's confused and slightly annoyed sound, you would've thought I'd have asked her to build a compiler from scratch. She had no idea what to do with my call.
On a separate occasion, I've also left voicemail messages for my Federal Senators - not even a form letter received. What a way to piss a constituent off. When someone offers their opinion, at least have the common decency to humor them FFS!!
OTOH, I emailed my state representatives and state senator (our district has only one), and all three emailed me back! I was extremely surprised, and happy.
In retrospect, yes, I understand these federal guys are busy, but they should have a process to deal with constituents, and I find it more than slightly alarming that if I were to throw a few hundred dollars in for the Congressman, and a few thousand down for the Senators, I could get their attention during a campaign fundraiser.
Probably the worst part was when I told other folks about this, and they didn't seem to give a shit, because they never have (and probably never will) contacted their government representatives. Democracy... pfft, I can't wait until we create an AI that will administer our stupid human civilization 100x better than we ever will.
I would say if pressed, he would certainly admit that there are many ways an alien civilization could, and even might visit us. I think his point was more on educating non-geeks on the tremendous distances space really is composed of - and to answer bullshit alien abduction "theorists". Most people don't know the difference between a solar system and the (a?) universe.
Saying the guy who created Cosmos is not a science hero is very questionable and calling the guy who wrote Contact unimaginative borders on stupid.
Funny, instead of paying extra, I'd just use a hammer, or a desk drawer, or if in a real pinch my two hands to break the thing apart. Unless you're James Bond, I don't see how most folks would need any more than this, and if they do need more, they already have it.
I defer to your knowledge relative to mine, but I do wonder why we work on switching pieces of transport protocols around and changing the tiny things when we could just move to something entirely different. I recall reading IPv6 has a host of new mechanisms built directly into the protocol which address these types of concerns. IPv6 is far more than just NAT avoidance and long IP addresses - with its built in packet priority values and other bells and whistles I think IPv6 could help solve this type of problem?
Exactly what I was thinking. But I would say that this is still more innovation from MS and they look to be getting their crap together a bit lately - that is I would say that, if this wasn't/.
Who wants to take odds that a malware author will act to save these machines? It's not an impossibility - who would want to potentially lose many thousand boxes when you could just push a fix down to the machines? These machines are assets in the malware authors' "business".
It'll be interesting to watch. If it happens, it'll be kind of like a geek version of spy vs spy.
Thank you to the one person who actually thought about a logical response and crafted it w/o getting indignant and not even paying attention to the question I was posing!
Yes, this is essentially the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials post-WWII, and one of the many reasons delineated in why clinicians, to this day do not use the "clinical" trials imposed on WWII prisoners of war, despite the fact that there was unique (and admittedly terrible) scientific, medical facts gathered from the tests, which may be helpful in other areas that may benefit humanity.
I think you're over analyzing my comment without addressing the main question. And as I said, I do agree with the modern stance, but it is a question that does deserve to be considered.
Or do you think it's an easy decision to sacrifice many hundreds of thousands of lives for a few dozen?
That's very evolved of us, and I do agree with the practice. However, I've got to admit a part of me does say "Why don't we give this vaccine to ten creeps on death row, throw them a few hookers and see what happens".
We would have the answer so much quicker and in the end, if the vaccine turns out to be effective, we'll save so many more (important - yes, I said it) lives. Is it really moral to trade the lives of a few dozen creeps over hundreds of thousands of African lives to preserve OUR sense of humanity? Yeah... I guess so... I guess.
Did the world suddenly turn to brighter colors? Are you now able to think faster, have better sex and talk to the animals? Because that's what happened when I got my first first post.
I don't normally do angry rants, but sometimes I'm surprised by the juvenile and compassionless attitudes of some people on/.
I'd really love to know the average age of the typical/. reader. There are brilliant minds here, for sure, but I agree with you that some comments (outside of just this one story) and overall community attitudes are lacking in maturity. I largely hope these attitudes are held by kids - smart kids, but kids nonetheless.
You stated what I was trying to say much more intelligently and succinctly. My initial point was to say that this is a mathematical breakthrough, for sure, but won't really endanger or even impact our cryptographic security platform, but when quantum computers become more stable and a sufficient amount of qubits are entangled, I'm not aware of any backup plan which will still provide secure communication protocols over long distances. And well, that could be a pretty big problem.
Just for fun, wolfram-alpha it (doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it?). That is what it's designed to do, after all - plus I found the results a little more useful than google.
I defer to your knowledge, since it looks like you've got more than I do, judging by your comment.
However, I was under the impression that due to the superpositional state of a qubit (i.e. being both 1 and 0) adding one extra qubit essentially doubles the effective power of the quantum computer (in terms of the very specific operations of finding factors for large numbers and searching data). So, once we are more effective at entangling qubits, we don't really have a defense against a brute force attack, unless we can come up with some exceedingly LARGE LARGE numbers...
Well, I don't think anyone has said it would be "impossible" to decrypt communication as we use it now, just pretty difficult. Of course, there are degrees of difficulty, and with quantum computers, the difficulty of breaking the types of keys we use now becomes much lower because of the superpositional state the qubits inhabit.
Yeah, this is interesting math, but I don't think our cryptographic scheme is in danger until quantum computers become a stable and reliable source of heavy computing. Then we're all in trouble. How do you create a key, when the entire large number method is made obsolete by quantum computing? I haven't looked into it much, but I don't think anyone has found an answer yet.
To my knowledge quantum cryptography is still limited to very close distances, while cracking a crypto key is obviously not affected by this limitation.
If Lenovo was going to fix _one thing_ I wish they would move the placement of the forward and backward navigation keys from near the arrow keys. My Thinkpad x61 has the keys to navigate forward and backward in a browser right next to the arrow keys, so when I'm typing up a form (for example/.) and I want to move from one portion of my text to the other, I'll press the arrow keys. Only problem is that every once in a while, I'll miss and instead of hitting a back arrow, I'll hit the backward navigation key. My browser will go back, and my form will be wiped - drives me nuts!
I can't be the only person this has happened to...
You know, I liked MJ, and I think there is probably a strong chance he didn't molest any children. I just think he was a weird dude who had issues. I've read a lot of jokes on this page, and all were tasteless and not at all funny.
Slashdot Mirror
Holy shit!!
Seriously, has anyone here ever written to their representatives and had it work properly?
Yes and no. And when it doesn't work, it frustrates THE HELL out of me. I once called my Federal House of Representative's office and expressed my opinion on a political matter (not in an abrasive way, but in a 'hey, here's my opinion, please mark this down, and by the way what does the congressman think?'). By this woman's confused and slightly annoyed sound, you would've thought I'd have asked her to build a compiler from scratch. She had no idea what to do with my call.
On a separate occasion, I've also left voicemail messages for my Federal Senators - not even a form letter received. What a way to piss a constituent off. When someone offers their opinion, at least have the common decency to humor them FFS!!
OTOH, I emailed my state representatives and state senator (our district has only one), and all three emailed me back! I was extremely surprised, and happy.
In retrospect, yes, I understand these federal guys are busy, but they should have a process to deal with constituents, and I find it more than slightly alarming that if I were to throw a few hundred dollars in for the Congressman, and a few thousand down for the Senators, I could get their attention during a campaign fundraiser.
Probably the worst part was when I told other folks about this, and they didn't seem to give a shit, because they never have (and probably never will) contacted their government representatives. Democracy... pfft, I can't wait until we create an AI that will administer our stupid human civilization 100x better than we ever will.
I would say if pressed, he would certainly admit that there are many ways an alien civilization could, and even might visit us. I think his point was more on educating non-geeks on the tremendous distances space really is composed of - and to answer bullshit alien abduction "theorists". Most people don't know the difference between a solar system and the (a?) universe.
Saying the guy who created Cosmos is not a science hero is very questionable and calling the guy who wrote Contact unimaginative borders on stupid.
Funny, instead of paying extra, I'd just use a hammer, or a desk drawer, or if in a real pinch my two hands to break the thing apart. Unless you're James Bond, I don't see how most folks would need any more than this, and if they do need more, they already have it.
Speakers tend to wake said baby up, inducing the crying which subject was trying to monitor (and presumably deter)
I defer to your knowledge relative to mine, but I do wonder why we work on switching pieces of transport protocols around and changing the tiny things when we could just move to something entirely different. I recall reading IPv6 has a host of new mechanisms built directly into the protocol which address these types of concerns. IPv6 is far more than just NAT avoidance and long IP addresses - with its built in packet priority values and other bells and whistles I think IPv6 could help solve this type of problem?
HAHA - sorry, looks like the mods didn't get the humor
Exactly what I was thinking. But I would say that this is still more innovation from MS and they look to be getting their crap together a bit lately - that is I would say that, if this wasn't /.
Who wants to take odds that a malware author will act to save these machines? It's not an impossibility - who would want to potentially lose many thousand boxes when you could just push a fix down to the machines? These machines are assets in the malware authors' "business".
It'll be interesting to watch. If it happens, it'll be kind of like a geek version of spy vs spy.
Well, I've heard several web folks bitch about where their bailout was... and here it is!
Thank you to the one person who actually thought about a logical response and crafted it w/o getting indignant and not even paying attention to the question I was posing!
Yes, this is essentially the conclusion of the Nuremberg trials post-WWII, and one of the many reasons delineated in why clinicians, to this day do not use the "clinical" trials imposed on WWII prisoners of war, despite the fact that there was unique (and admittedly terrible) scientific, medical facts gathered from the tests, which may be helpful in other areas that may benefit humanity.
I think you're over analyzing my comment without addressing the main question. And as I said, I do agree with the modern stance, but it is a question that does deserve to be considered.
Or do you think it's an easy decision to sacrifice many hundreds of thousands of lives for a few dozen?
That's very evolved of us, and I do agree with the practice. However, I've got to admit a part of me does say "Why don't we give this vaccine to ten creeps on death row, throw them a few hookers and see what happens".
We would have the answer so much quicker and in the end, if the vaccine turns out to be effective, we'll save so many more (important - yes, I said it) lives. Is it really moral to trade the lives of a few dozen creeps over hundreds of thousands of African lives to preserve OUR sense of humanity? Yeah... I guess so... I guess.
Did the world suddenly turn to brighter colors? Are you now able to think faster, have better sex and talk to the animals? Because that's what happened when I got my first first post.
I don't normally do angry rants, but sometimes I'm surprised by the juvenile and compassionless attitudes of some people on /.
I'd really love to know the average age of the typical /. reader. There are brilliant minds here, for sure, but I agree with you that some comments (outside of just this one story) and overall community attitudes are lacking in maturity. I largely hope these attitudes are held by kids - smart kids, but kids nonetheless.
MOD PARENT UP!
You stated what I was trying to say much more intelligently and succinctly. My initial point was to say that this is a mathematical breakthrough, for sure, but won't really endanger or even impact our cryptographic security platform, but when quantum computers become more stable and a sufficient amount of qubits are entangled, I'm not aware of any backup plan which will still provide secure communication protocols over long distances. And well, that could be a pretty big problem.
Just for fun, wolfram-alpha it (doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, does it?). That is what it's designed to do, after all - plus I found the results a little more useful than google.
I defer to your knowledge, since it looks like you've got more than I do, judging by your comment.
However, I was under the impression that due to the superpositional state of a qubit (i.e. being both 1 and 0) adding one extra qubit essentially doubles the effective power of the quantum computer (in terms of the very specific operations of finding factors for large numbers and searching data). So, once we are more effective at entangling qubits, we don't really have a defense against a brute force attack, unless we can come up with some exceedingly LARGE LARGE numbers...
Well, I don't think anyone has said it would be "impossible" to decrypt communication as we use it now, just pretty difficult. Of course, there are degrees of difficulty, and with quantum computers, the difficulty of breaking the types of keys we use now becomes much lower because of the superpositional state the qubits inhabit.
Yeah, this is interesting math, but I don't think our cryptographic scheme is in danger until quantum computers become a stable and reliable source of heavy computing. Then we're all in trouble. How do you create a key, when the entire large number method is made obsolete by quantum computing? I haven't looked into it much, but I don't think anyone has found an answer yet.
To my knowledge quantum cryptography is still limited to very close distances, while cracking a crypto key is obviously not affected by this limitation.
If Lenovo was going to fix _one thing_ I wish they would move the placement of the forward and backward navigation keys from near the arrow keys. My Thinkpad x61 has the keys to navigate forward and backward in a browser right next to the arrow keys, so when I'm typing up a form (for example /.) and I want to move from one portion of my text to the other, I'll press the arrow keys. Only problem is that every once in a while, I'll miss and instead of hitting a back arrow, I'll hit the backward navigation key. My browser will go back, and my form will be wiped - drives me nuts!
I can't be the only person this has happened to...
Hold that switch for five seconds, and the box will turn off 99.9% of the time...
New tag: lolzune
It might be something someday, but as of today, I think it's a punchline.
You know, I liked MJ, and I think there is probably a strong chance he didn't molest any children. I just think he was a weird dude who had issues. I've read a lot of jokes on this page, and all were tasteless and not at all funny.
Yours was tasteless and hilarious! +1 dark humor!
Dots? Who the hell has dots? My unix login prompt cursor doesn't even move when I type the password in; I'd love to have some dots!