Yes, a $99 Dreamcast was a great way for my roommate and I to slack out for our last semester.
Running "backup copies" without a mod chip certainly helps, too!
(Though.. I've got to say that the playstation controller is more ergonomic, IMO, than the Dreamcast's. That thing really hurts after a while.)
We really like Marvel vs Capcom 2, Virtual On, Tony Hawk 2, Jet Grind Radio, Cannon Spike, and Skies of Arcadia. There's definitely enough here for a $99 purchase, and if you get sick of it you can throw NetBSD on it.;)
The proof is generally generated by the compiler. We can really do this now -- the problem is making the proofs smaller (often they are large than the program) and enhancing the expressiveness of the safety policy language. (right now, usually we just get type safety).
Sure, if your name is "confusingly similar" to Microsoft's, then they could probably bust you for trademark infringement. VeriSign could deny you a certificate for whatever reason they like, I suppose, but this would be a legitimate one.
That may sound like a bold statement, but if you think about it for a moment, can you ever trust an automated software update again, even a "secure" one?
Yeah, maybe. Research is currently being done on how to do this without the idea of a trusted party. The general idea is that the code comes with a proof of its safety (or a proof that it meets some other specification), which is "easily" verified by a small piece of software on your computer. It's not a panacea (there is a world of difficulty in specifying the right policies), but it could certainly stop updates of application-level (or especially applet-level) software from containing naughtiness.
Uh.. what does this have to do with security through obscurity? AFAIK, the certification protocols are based on well-published algorithms.
"Security through Obscurity" is a nice-sounding catch phrase, but it doesn't apply to every discussion about security. It seems like someone always mentions it on slashdot, though....
(Nonetheless, you're right about the social engineering thing!)
> The colour gameboy is pretyty much identical to
> the original gameboy, and very few games were
> released supporting the miserable advance in
> features.
This is bullshit. For one thing, the GBC has a processor with double the clock speed of the original Gameboy. There are loads of other significant enhancements (color not the least of these).
It's a good quote, but if you suggest it to him and use Free Software and Open Source as if they were the same thing like that, you're in for a tongue lashing.;)
Sounds like another good reason to be a constructivisit. In Constructive mathematics, numbers are defined in terms of a total function which computes them (or, for a "real" number, a function which can get you arbitrarily close to them). None of this "let n = 1 if the continuum hypothesis is true, 0 otherwise" stuff! Constructive mathematics is pretty nice, though some "obvious" stuff is not provable.
Of course, some classicists find delight in how insanely undecidable their mathematics is, and that's fine, too. =)
\Omega_{UTM} is a pretty cool idea, though, much worse than the standard trick of defining which has decimal digit n = 1 if turing machine n halts, 0 otherwise (also undecidable, but not as hopeless as his!). I wish I hadn't missed the lecture.
This is nonsense. Not to defend the MPAA, but 7 lines of C code (especially all packed up like that) is enough to represent some very complicated ideas. Given arbitrary-precision arithmetic, for instance, I'm sure you could implement RSA in 7 lines (you can certainly explain it in pseudocode). The RC4 algorithm is probably about 2 lines.
The brevity of an idea has nothing to do with how useful/important/'honest' it is. For that matter, it doesn't have much to do with how complicated it is. (Can you really explain CSS after "reading" that 7 line program?)
Good luck finding arbitrary strings of digits in pi. I'm not sure anyone has proven that the infinite expansion of pi contains every decimal sequence, to begin with. Then, a counting argument shows that you can't transfer (in general) messages "smaller" than the original this way. You're probably better off sending the message encrypted with some reversible mathematical function.
perl and PHP are not the "latest and greatest" programming languages by any stretch. Do they really teach that at universities (outside of "web programming" or "unix scripting" classes)?
High level languages are high-level because they abstract away from the machine, not because they include primitives for hash tables or linked lists. Why can't one learn the difference between hash tables and linked lists by programming them in Java, for instance? That's what we do at my school.
I'm about to graduate from a 4-year program at CMU, and then go on to grad school.
Here's what I'd change:
- Emphasize teaching and TAing; heavily encourage students to TA, and provide training and resources for them and their professors. Since the numbers don't really work if every student is TAing, organize some classes so that they are like teaching (presentations and such). I definitely learned more from TAing 6 (jeez) classes than I did taking them.
- A mentorship/advisor program for senior year, similar to how it is typically done in graduate school.
- De-emphasize low-level programming for beginners. In computer science theory we only worry about algorithmic efficiency, and in industry computers are getting so fast that programmer productivity and the quality of a product matters more than its runtime speed. Of course, systems programming classes are vital to a well-rounded CS program, just that you shouldn't make beginners have to deal with bus errors and core dumps.
- Objects are not everything! I would have loved a course which gave us design problems and asked us to approach them in lots of different ways (objects being one of those, but not the only one).
- "Tracks" for students who want to be industry programmers vs. theory heads vs. etc.
Every author, musician, software developer...? No, certainly not every one. There are lots of people who give away their work for free, and lots who permit you to copy it. I'm serious, some people do not think the way you do. Linux and a lot of the software that goes with permits copying explicitly. I'd like to think of myself as a graphic designer and musician, and my fonts and music are free, and I permit copying. I'm sure we can find significant examples for your other categories. This is not an obvious point.
As for the "copying is moral" argument, I don't expect to win over many people with just slashdot posts. Morals are more complicated than that. However, I believe the distinction between theft and copying is real, and that you are just plain wrong to claim they are the same. Theft deprives someone of property directly. Copying does not (though it may, indirectly). There's plenty of reasonable arguments to be made about copying being bad, but none of them come down to analogies about stealing cars.
This is not a very convincing argument. Is the money destroyed? Do we not spend that money on other things? By copying, we've created NEW wealth; just because some imaginary figure can be calculated doesn't mean that it is necessarily a loss for society.
Perhaps you can make a utility argument based on the reduced *incentive* to create (I don't buy that either, but many people do, and it is reasonable). But once works are created, I can't believe any argument which says that society benefits from having to pay to duplicate it.
Anyway, my original point was not a defense of copying. I am just trying to keep the ideas of "theft" and "copying" separate so that we can engage in a discussion which is less confused by bad terminology.
I think it's important that we don't conflate the idea of "theft" (stealing property, removing it from its owner) with the idea of "copying" (duplicating something without degrading the original). To be sure, both are illegal under current US law. However, they're illegal for different reasons, and with different justifications.
The RIAA and others want you to fall into the mind trap that copying IS theft, since practically everyone believes that traditional theft is immoral. In order to make sound judgments about these issues, we need to clearly separate the two concepts.
Yeah, you're kind of right, but we like the whole Civil Disobedience thing. I don't think any of us are really surprised that the RIAA and MPAA come down hard on things they see as a threat to their bottom line, and probably their claims are justified within current law (at least as far as Napster is concerned). But damn, it does feel good to make it hard for them, doesn't it?
The central tenet of the free information ethic is that information is not the same as tangible property, since I can reproduce it without destroying the original. A good analogy for bible kids is when Jesus allegedly took one loaf of bread and one fish and made thousands from it. How can we deny someone that ability? (Then we worry that there will be no incentive to create information... and that's where the argument really begins.)
Oh man, the abbreviation "P2P" reminds me so much of B2B that I can hardly stand to hear it. Buzzwording stuff like this might make it more exciting to IT Magazines, but is it worth it?
It also kind of reminds me of my little sister's AOL IM slang "g2g" for "got to go". arrrrrrrrrgh!
"Peer-to-Peer" is just as many syllables, and I think is a little easier to say.
The work of Turing and Church proved that there does not exist a general procedure to determine if an arbitrary piece of software terminates (and by extension, that many other properties are similarly undecidable). Did you ever study computer science?
They did NOT show that one cannot "prove" software. In addition, the notion of "proving" software is nonsense unless you say what you are proving about the software. Can I prove that every well-formed C program has a main? Of course, it's in the definition. Can I prove that an arbitrary well-typed Standard ML program has a well defined evaluation sequence (that it is "safe")? Yes. Can I prove that an arbitrary program in the simply typed lambda calculus always terminates? Yes. There are many extremely useful properties of programs that actually can be proved mechanically.
Furthermore, just because a procedure can't do it in general doesn't mean that a human can't prove specfic programs, perhaps with the help of a computer. Look at CAR Hoare's logic for proving iterative program correctness, for instance.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, a $99 Dreamcast was a great way for my roommate and I to slack out for our last semester.
;)
Running "backup copies" without a mod chip certainly helps, too!
(Though.. I've got to say that the playstation controller is more ergonomic, IMO, than the Dreamcast's. That thing really hurts after a while.)
We really like Marvel vs Capcom 2, Virtual On, Tony Hawk 2, Jet Grind Radio, Cannon Spike, and Skies of Arcadia. There's definitely enough here for a $99 purchase, and if you get sick of it you can throw NetBSD on it.
The proof is generally generated by the compiler. We can really do this now -- the problem is making the proofs smaller (often they are large than the program) and enhancing the expressiveness of the safety policy language. (right now, usually we just get type safety).
Sure, if your name is "confusingly similar" to Microsoft's, then they could probably bust you for trademark infringement. VeriSign could deny you a certificate for whatever reason they like, I suppose, but this would be a legitimate one.
Yeah, maybe. Research is currently being done on how to do this without the idea of a trusted party. The general idea is that the code comes with a proof of its safety (or a proof that it meets some other specification), which is "easily" verified by a small piece of software on your computer. It's not a panacea (there is a world of difficulty in specifying the right policies), but it could certainly stop updates of application-level (or especially applet-level) software from containing naughtiness.
Check out http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~petel/papers/pcc/pcc.html for more info on Proof Carrying Code.
Uh.. what does this have to do with security through obscurity? AFAIK, the certification protocols are based on well-published algorithms.
"Security through Obscurity" is a nice-sounding catch phrase, but it doesn't apply to every discussion about security. It seems like someone always mentions it on slashdot, though....
(Nonetheless, you're right about the social engineering thing!)
> The colour gameboy is pretyty much identical to
> the original gameboy, and very few games were
> released supporting the miserable advance in
> features.
This is bullshit. For one thing, the GBC has a processor with double the clock speed of the original Gameboy. There are loads of other significant enhancements (color not the least of these).
It's a good quote, but if you suggest it to him and use Free Software and Open Source as if they were the same thing like that, you're in for a tongue lashing. ;)
This is how we keep out the Foot and Mouth disease, you know... =)
Sounds like another good reason to be a constructivisit. In Constructive mathematics, numbers are defined in terms of a total function which computes them (or, for a "real" number, a function which can get you arbitrarily close to them). None of this "let n = 1 if the continuum hypothesis is true, 0 otherwise" stuff! Constructive mathematics is pretty nice, though some "obvious" stuff is not provable.
Here's some links:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/mathematics-cons tructive/
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fp/courses/logic/
Of course, some classicists find delight in how insanely undecidable their mathematics is, and that's fine, too. =)
\Omega_{UTM} is a pretty cool idea, though, much worse than the standard trick of defining which has decimal digit n = 1 if turing machine n halts, 0 otherwise (also undecidable, but not as hopeless as his!). I wish I hadn't missed the lecture.
This is nonsense. Not to defend the MPAA, but 7 lines of C code (especially all packed up like that) is enough to represent some very complicated ideas. Given arbitrary-precision arithmetic, for instance, I'm sure you could implement RSA in 7 lines (you can certainly explain it in pseudocode). The RC4 algorithm is probably about 2 lines.
The brevity of an idea has nothing to do with how useful/important/'honest' it is. For that matter, it doesn't have much to do with how complicated it is. (Can you really explain CSS after "reading" that 7 line program?)
Well, it's still at trial. Does the MPAA, EFF, or 2600 think it's getting old?
Maybe it deserves a category on slashdot so you can filter it out, though.
Good luck finding arbitrary strings of digits in pi. I'm not sure anyone has proven that the infinite expansion of pi contains every decimal sequence, to begin with. Then, a counting argument shows that you can't transfer (in general) messages "smaller" than the original this way. You're probably better off sending the message encrypted with some reversible mathematical function.
perl and PHP are not the "latest and greatest" programming languages by any stretch. Do they really teach that at universities (outside of "web programming" or "unix scripting" classes)?
High level languages are high-level because they abstract away from the machine, not because they include primitives for hash tables or linked lists. Why can't one learn the difference between hash tables and linked lists by programming them in Java, for instance? That's what we do at my school.
I'm about to graduate from a 4-year program at CMU, and then go on to grad school.
Here's what I'd change:
- Emphasize teaching and TAing; heavily encourage students to TA, and provide training and resources for them and their professors. Since the numbers don't really work if every student is TAing, organize some classes so that they are like teaching (presentations and such). I definitely learned more from TAing 6 (jeez) classes than I did taking them.
- A mentorship/advisor program for senior year, similar to how it is typically done in graduate school.
- De-emphasize low-level programming for beginners. In computer science theory we only worry about algorithmic efficiency, and in industry computers are getting so fast that programmer productivity and the quality of a product matters more than its runtime speed. Of course, systems programming classes are vital to a well-rounded CS program, just that you shouldn't make beginners have to deal with bus errors and core dumps.
- Objects are not everything! I would have loved a course which gave us design problems and asked us to approach them in lots of different ways (objects being one of those, but not the only one).
- "Tracks" for students who want to be industry programmers vs. theory heads vs. etc.
Every author, musician, software developer...? No, certainly not every one. There are lots of people who give away their work for free, and lots who permit you to copy it. I'm serious, some people do not think the way you do. Linux and a lot of the software that goes with permits copying explicitly. I'd like to think of myself as a graphic designer and musician, and my fonts and music are free, and I permit copying. I'm sure we can find significant examples for your other categories. This is not an obvious point.
As for the "copying is moral" argument, I don't expect to win over many people with just slashdot posts. Morals are more complicated than that. However, I believe the distinction between theft and copying is real, and that you are just plain wrong to claim they are the same. Theft deprives someone of property directly. Copying does not (though it may, indirectly). There's plenty of reasonable arguments to be made about copying being bad, but none of them come down to analogies about stealing cars.
This is not a very convincing argument. Is the money destroyed? Do we not spend that money on other things? By copying, we've created NEW wealth; just because some imaginary figure can be calculated doesn't mean that it is necessarily a loss for society.
Perhaps you can make a utility argument based on the reduced *incentive* to create (I don't buy that either, but many people do, and it is reasonable). But once works are created, I can't believe any argument which says that society benefits from having to pay to duplicate it.
Anyway, my original point was not a defense of copying. I am just trying to keep the ideas of "theft" and "copying" separate so that we can engage in a discussion which is less confused by bad terminology.
I think it's important that we don't conflate the idea of "theft" (stealing property, removing it from its owner) with the idea of "copying" (duplicating something without degrading the original). To be sure, both are illegal under current US law. However, they're illegal for different reasons, and with different justifications.
The RIAA and others want you to fall into the mind trap that copying IS theft, since practically everyone believes that traditional theft is immoral. In order to make sound judgments about these issues, we need to clearly separate the two concepts.
From radio waves?
Is is just me, or does the name Hercules bring you back to the days of CGA?
Have they really been making cards under that brand all this time?
Who do all the Linux Standards Base belong to?
Memory is made of transistors too.
Yeah, you're kind of right, but we like the whole Civil Disobedience thing. I don't think any of us are really surprised that the RIAA and MPAA come down hard on things they see as a threat to their bottom line, and probably their claims are justified within current law (at least as far as Napster is concerned). But damn, it does feel good to make it hard for them, doesn't it?
The central tenet of the free information ethic is that information is not the same as tangible property, since I can reproduce it without destroying the original. A good analogy for bible kids is when Jesus allegedly took one loaf of bread and one fish and made thousands from it. How can we deny someone that ability? (Then we worry that there will be no incentive to create information... and that's where the argument really begins.)
Oh man, the abbreviation "P2P" reminds me so much of B2B that I can hardly stand to hear it. Buzzwording stuff like this might make it more exciting to IT Magazines, but is it worth it?
It also kind of reminds me of my little sister's AOL IM slang "g2g" for "got to go". arrrrrrrrrgh!
"Peer-to-Peer" is just as many syllables, and I think is a little easier to say.
You can use any of the more complete programs on his Gallery page to do it; this one just descrambles the content blocks.
The work of Turing and Church proved that there does not exist a general procedure to determine if an arbitrary piece of software terminates (and by extension, that many other properties are similarly undecidable). Did you ever study computer science?
They did NOT show that one cannot "prove" software. In addition, the notion of "proving" software is nonsense unless you say what you are proving about the software. Can I prove that every well-formed C program has a main? Of course, it's in the definition. Can I prove that an arbitrary well-typed Standard ML program has a well defined evaluation sequence (that it is "safe")? Yes. Can I prove that an arbitrary program in the simply typed lambda calculus always terminates? Yes. There are many extremely useful properties of programs that actually can be proved mechanically.
Furthermore, just because a procedure can't do it in general doesn't mean that a human can't prove specfic programs, perhaps with the help of a computer. Look at CAR Hoare's logic for proving iterative program correctness, for instance.