Yes, I agree with this part. I'm reading Tom Vanderbilt's "Traffic" at the moment - there's a chapter on traffic norms. He compares driving in China, India and Africa and talks about the strong correlation between corruption and traffic accident and death rates among countries. For example, Belgium has much higher accident rates than the neighbouring country, the Netherlands, and this can be partially explained by the culture. The speed limit issue raised in the summary is just about American cultural norms.
Traffic is filled with injunctive norms, telling drivers what to do and what not to do. But the descriptive norm is often saying something else - and saying it louder. The most common example is the speed limit. The law on many U.S. highways is 65 miles per hour, but a norm has gradually emerged that says anything up to 10 miles per hour above that is legal fair game. Raise the speed limit, and the norm tends to shift; driving the speed limit starts to seem hazardous.
In Australia the current Australian Design Rules for vehicles say speedometers aren't allowed to under-read, so the police can book you if you are 1 km/h over the speed limit if they like. I don't know what tolerance they actually use, but driving at the speed limit is no problem here for other drivers.
The chapter in the book also talks about tipping, which seems like a form of corruption to me. "If you want to know how corrupt a given country is, you may not need a big police sting. You could just look at how regularly its citizens tip." However, it seems like "the norm" to people living in tipping countries and they often defend it (just like Australians often defend mandatory bicycle helmet laws).
One of the least corrupt countries in the world is Finland, where your traffic fine is proportional to your income.
The reality is the censorship is considered to be a complete joke - freegate or tor just goes right through it. The government is just wasting their time. Facebook, youtube and twitter are all "blocked" but everyone uses them. It only gets annoying when you're accessing wifi from a mobile device and don't have a VPN already set up.
There's a site called blockediniran.com which is pretty accurate - http://www.blockediniran.com/?siteurl=google.com it shows that google.com is not blocked yet (but, for example, it can't understand that m.smh.com.au is a website). However, when I was there, every other country variant of google was blocked - google.com.au, google.co.uk, google.co.nz etc, and blockediniran confirms those.
I'm not impressed at all -- instead, try Bildgesmythe at www.personalityforge.com.
User: Hi Cleverbot, how are you today? Cleverbot: Good. How are you today? User: I'm sick, staying home from work today with a sore throat. Cleverbot: We should have some warm apple pie then, my shout. User: I think chicken soup might be better for my throat. Where do you live, by the way? Cleverbot: Somebody who makes other people laugh. User: Which country do you live in? Cleverbot: I live in Flatland. User: Where is that, is it near the UK? Cleverbot: Yes. It is a town called Idle. User: I asked about a country so why are you talking about a town? Cleverbot: Oh, I plan to go to school. User: Where do you go to school? Cleverbot: South wilts. User: Where's that? Cleverbot: No, pennsylvania. User: Do you mean that South Wilts is in Pennsylvania? Cleverbot: No. I have a dog named Shakespeare. User: There is no way that any sentient being could mistake you for a human. Cleverbot: We are now married.
I have the same 15-inch October 2006 Core 2 Duo MBP -- I will stick with it, or wait for the MacBook Air upgrade, because I can't see myself buying a laptop without USB 3.0 when it will be obsolete within 6 months.
My 2006 MBP has an ExpressCard slot so I can "add" USB 3.0 ports or eSATA ports, but the unibody 15-inch MBPs don't!
Steve Wozniak interviewed by the Australian Financial Review in March 2008:
about 8:00: "But the iPhone I feel very restricted on... I would hack mine for a while and put on a lot of these other apps... it's the sort of thing Steve Jobs and I did back when we found ways to hack into the phone system... " About the ringtone restriction: "I don't like that... it reminds us of the way we would talk about Microsoft...". Watch the whole thing, he's about as critical of Apple and Jobs as possible, and a big advocate of openness in hardware and software design.
I know about the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" paper. I'm not sure he ever implemented it; he just implied he knew how to. It pays to be paranoid!
In the paper UNIX Password Security - Ten Years Later the authors wrote "Over the past 10 years, improvements in hardware and software have increased the crypts/second/dollar ratio by five orders of magnitude." That was about 20 years ago, so if no-one has reported cracking ken's password in the meantime, I think the original UNIX password algorithm has stood up well.
Back in the 1980s Sierra On-Line used to copy protect their adventure games with a copy protection system which involved strangely formatted sectors on the original disk which were impossible to duplicate exactly using standard PC hardware. The loader "sierra.com" used to call a copy-protection program "cpc.com" which loaded data from the disk to decrypt the main program and run it. cpc.com had some of the most obscure, twisty, awful code ever written to prevent debugging and it constantly used different methods to thwart stepping through the program using INT 3 (these were the days before Soft-Ice). But the solution (or "crack") was just dead simple. Just fire up debug, step to the beginning of cpc.com, and copy the vector from INT 3 into the INT 13 vector - then cpc.com stops right at the point where the data from the disk is being loaded, so it can be copied. Despite all the incredibly complex code, cpc.com had to read the data off the disk so there was no way the Sierra programmers could thwart this method. It sounds like the same thing in Vista -- the INT 13 redirection happens before everything else and can't be thwarted.
Six buttons is too many for an Apple object! I suggest just one button, and the remote can have a motion detector in it; the user can hold the remote parallel to the appropriate face of a cube, and click the button. Simplicity itself!
Outside the US, the ROKR has to compete head-to-head with the Sony Ericsson W800i. The "Walkman" W800i is not crippled in the same way as the ROKR is - it has a 2 megapixel camera, you can use MP3s as ringtones, the music playing interface is very much like iTunes with songs arranged by artist and album, and you are not limited to 100 songs. Pro Duo sticks are available in sizes up to 2Gb right now compared to the Transflash 512Mb.
I guess since the W800i is a GSM phone without the 850MHz band, it isn't sold much in the US. But rest assured in GSM countries the ROKR looks like the piece of crap it is, a Motorola E398 with an extra button.
(Though personally I'm holding out for the Samsung D600 instead of the W800i.)
Very good, I was about to post this comment myself when I saw yours. I found it using groups.google.com searching for "1-2-3 won't run" getting to a July 1992 post which cited the quote from "a newly-released
bio of Uncle Bill" which I correctly guessed to be "Hard Drive". If you had posted non-anonymously you might have some mod points now...
I commented about Iran being number 3 on orkut a month ago today. My comment still stands - I wouldn't classify it as a "very repressive police-state", I think you have to visit yourself to see, and being French it is easy for you to visit. And even without being an orkut member you can see that those 6.05% are all IN Iran (of 929,894 right now).
I'm surprised no-one has quoted Ken Thompson on Belle. Belle was a chess computer that he wanted to take to the world chess championships in the USSR, but he was denied an export license, leading to the classic ken quote:
"The only way you could make a weapon out of it is if you dropped it out of a plane and hit somebody..."
Iran: I throw this in for contrast. If a US citizen/resident alien, your biggest problem will be explaining yourself to Uncle Sam. Consult with an attorney to make darn sure you aren't in conflict with US economic restrictions on trade with Iran before you go. Don't hit on local women, bad mouth Islam or the government, or take pictures of any thing that even resembles a government or military installation. In fact, this is more of a normal overseas posting, so it's not nearly as lucrative. There are some up to date tourist guide books on the country, and good poop from the British and Australian Embassy web sites.
I'm an Australian who lived in Iran from March 2002 to October 2003. I don't think I was ever in any physical danger - I don't see why it would rate hazard pay now. I mean, people, we're talking about the third biggest country on orkut, where women post pictures of themselves without hijab and everyone lists their drinking frequency. Many Westerners have strange misimpressions about the place, and the Western media typically emphasise only aspects that stand out, not everyday life. Because of this, I have to come to believe and tell others that the only way to understand Iran is to visit personally.
... shows that he's been offering "proofs" since July 1989. I see from MathSciNet that he has 87 papers from 1958 to 1994, but isn't this a bit like the boy who cried wolf?
Yup, Tenenbaum is the author of "Introduction to analytic and probabilistic number theory" and 113 papers in number theory. I think that's the end of this proof, unless it rises from the dead a la Wiles. A pity the average slashdotter has such a short attention span...
From: Zbigniew Fiedorowicz Newsgroups: sci.physics,sci.math Subject: Re: There Are Infinitely Many Prime Twins Date: Thu, 03 Jun 2004 13:27:58 -0400 Organization: Ohio State University Lines: 30 Message-ID: References: NNTP-Posting-Host: dhcp-94-53.math.ohio-state.edu Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu 1086283722 19410 140.254.94.53 (3 Jun 2004 17:28:42 GMT) X-Complaints-To: abuse@osu.edu NNTP-Posting-Date: 3 Jun 2004 17:28:42 GMT User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win 9x 4.90; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en In-Reply-To:
I have heard that Michel Balazard of the University of Bordeaux has found a serious error in the proof.
>J'ai malheureusement trouv une erreur grave dans l'article d'Arenstorf.
>Le lemme 8, page 35 est manifestement faux, et il est fondamental. Il
>est possible que la dmonstration puisse tre rpare, mais c'est non
>trivial.
The author received his doctorate 48 years ago. According to MathSciNet his first paper was in 1963, and his most recent in 1993.
If it turns out to be true, this will be super-duper-extraordinary - the man is probably in his 70s. G. H. Hardy wrote: "No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game". Wiles proved FLT at 40, Perelman of the purported Poincare proof is in his 30s... this is similar-level stuff. The only thing I can think of that even comes close is Fred Galvin in his 50s (?) proving the Dinitz conjecture.
You can follow discussions on sci.math and fr.sci.maths. Or read about how similar asymptotic proofs about properties of primes failed. Remember, this is arxiv - in the age of electronic preprints, you get many good proofs like Perelman's along with almost-proofs like Castro-Mahecha's and Dunwoody's.
I'm not a religious person, and I normally don't resort to Biblical citations, but I think this one applies:
"The love of money is the root of all evil." (also one of the most misquoted passages in the Bible just for the record).
The replies so far have missed the point: this is the King James Version translation, which mistranslates the Greek. It's best to put the KJV alongside a modern translation like this:
KJV
For the love of money is the root of all evil...
NASB
For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil...
The first seven people on the mailing list were trollers on the gay USENET newsgroups, and the last three should be well known. I didn't realise Fred Phelps was famous then.
I only know Atiyah as the author of a textbook on commutative algebra, which was a graduate course I hated.
There's a lot of incomprehension in the comments about higher mathematics. The fact that all four of the Clay Mathematics Institute Research Fellows this year are not native Americans indicates the truth of the AeA's comment on math teaching in American schools. I note that all of the fellows are in topology or closely related areas. My doctorate is in combinatorics, "the slums of topology", so I'm probably not qualified to explain the Atiyah-Singer theorem to y'all!
In case any of you think that the Enigma was "broken" by the boffins of Bletchley Park, and with Gillogly's ciphertext-only attack, became "ancient history", there are some ciphertexts from WW2 produced with the 4-rotor machine which have never been broken.
(People have been so foolish as to say "Enigma is a joke to crack for my desktop"...)
Slashdot Mirror
In Australia the current Australian Design Rules for vehicles say speedometers aren't allowed to under-read, so the police can book you if you are 1 km/h over the speed limit if they like. I don't know what tolerance they actually use, but driving at the speed limit is no problem here for other drivers.
The chapter in the book also talks about tipping, which seems like a form of corruption to me. "If you want to know how corrupt a given country is, you may not need a big police sting. You could just look at how regularly its citizens tip." However, it seems like "the norm" to people living in tipping countries and they often defend it (just like Australians often defend mandatory bicycle helmet laws).
One of the least corrupt countries in the world is Finland, where your traffic fine is proportional to your income.
There is a huge gulf between media reports of life in Iran and the reality. I was there for two weeks this month and wrote a short blog post on the internet censorship. http://kanahakkliha.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/iran-in-2012.html
The reality is the censorship is considered to be a complete joke - freegate or tor just goes right through it. The government is just wasting their time. Facebook, youtube and twitter are all "blocked" but everyone uses them. It only gets annoying when you're accessing wifi from a mobile device and don't have a VPN already set up.
There's a site called blockediniran.com which is pretty accurate - http://www.blockediniran.com/?siteurl=google.com it shows that google.com is not blocked yet (but, for example, it can't understand that m.smh.com.au is a website). However, when I was there, every other country variant of google was blocked - google.com.au, google.co.uk, google.co.nz etc, and blockediniran confirms those.
I'm not impressed at all -- instead, try Bildgesmythe at www.personalityforge.com.
User: Hi Cleverbot, how are you today?
Cleverbot: Good. How are you today?
User: I'm sick, staying home from work today with a sore throat.
Cleverbot: We should have some warm apple pie then, my shout.
User: I think chicken soup might be better for my throat. Where do you live, by the way?
Cleverbot: Somebody who makes other people laugh.
User: Which country do you live in?
Cleverbot: I live in Flatland.
User: Where is that, is it near the UK?
Cleverbot: Yes. It is a town called Idle.
User: I asked about a country so why are you talking about a town?
Cleverbot: Oh, I plan to go to school.
User: Where do you go to school?
Cleverbot: South wilts.
User: Where's that?
Cleverbot: No, pennsylvania.
User: Do you mean that South Wilts is in Pennsylvania?
Cleverbot: No. I have a dog named Shakespeare.
User: There is no way that any sentient being could mistake you for a human.
Cleverbot: We are now married.
I have the same 15-inch October 2006 Core 2 Duo MBP -- I will stick with it, or wait for the MacBook Air upgrade, because I can't see myself buying a laptop without USB 3.0 when it will be obsolete within 6 months.
My 2006 MBP has an ExpressCard slot so I can "add" USB 3.0 ports or eSATA ports, but the unibody 15-inch MBPs don't!
Steve Wozniak interviewed by the Australian Financial Review in March 2008: about 8:00: "But the iPhone I feel very restricted on ... I would hack mine for a while and put on a lot of these other apps ... it's the sort of thing Steve Jobs and I did back when we found ways to hack into the phone system ... " About the ringtone restriction: "I don't like that ... it reminds us of the way we would talk about Microsoft ...". Watch the whole thing, he's about as critical of Apple and Jobs as possible, and a big advocate of openness in hardware and software design.
I know about the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" paper. I'm not sure he ever implemented it; he just implied he knew how to. It pays to be paranoid! In the paper UNIX Password Security - Ten Years Later the authors wrote "Over the past 10 years, improvements in hardware and software have increased the crypts/second/dollar ratio by five orders of magnitude." That was about 20 years ago, so if no-one has reported cracking ken's password in the meantime, I think the original UNIX password algorithm has stood up well.
No-one has cracked Ken Thompson's UNIX password yet, and he is a co-inventor of the algorithm...
Back in the 1980s Sierra On-Line used to copy protect their adventure games with a copy protection system which involved strangely formatted sectors on the original disk which were impossible to duplicate exactly using standard PC hardware. The loader "sierra.com" used to call a copy-protection program "cpc.com" which loaded data from the disk to decrypt the main program and run it. cpc.com had some of the most obscure, twisty, awful code ever written to prevent debugging and it constantly used different methods to thwart stepping through the program using INT 3 (these were the days before Soft-Ice). But the solution (or "crack") was just dead simple. Just fire up debug, step to the beginning of cpc.com, and copy the vector from INT 3 into the INT 13 vector - then cpc.com stops right at the point where the data from the disk is being loaded, so it can be copied. Despite all the incredibly complex code, cpc.com had to read the data off the disk so there was no way the Sierra programmers could thwart this method. It sounds like the same thing in Vista -- the INT 13 redirection happens before everything else and can't be thwarted.
Six buttons is too many for an Apple object! I suggest just one button, and the remote can
have a motion detector in it; the user can hold the remote parallel to the appropriate
face of a cube, and click the button. Simplicity itself!
I guess since the W800i is a GSM phone without the 850MHz band, it isn't sold much in the US. But rest assured in GSM countries the ROKR looks like the piece of crap it is, a Motorola E398 with an extra button.
(Though personally I'm holding out for the Samsung D600 instead of the W800i.)
Very good, I was about to post this comment myself when I saw yours. I found it using groups.google.com searching for "1-2-3 won't run" getting to a July 1992 post which cited the quote from "a newly-released bio of Uncle Bill" which I correctly guessed to be "Hard Drive". If you had posted non-anonymously you might have some mod points now...
"One hand full of rest is better than two fists full of labor and striving after wind." -- Ecclesiastes, about 2300 years ago
I commented about Iran being number 3 on orkut a month ago today. My comment still stands - I wouldn't classify it as a "very repressive police-state", I think you have to visit yourself to see, and being French it is easy for you to visit. And even without being an orkut member you can see that those 6.05% are all IN Iran (of 929,894 right now).
I'm surprised no-one has quoted Ken Thompson on Belle. Belle was a chess computer that he wanted to take to the world chess championships in the USSR, but he was denied an export license, leading to the classic ken quote:
"The only way you could
make a weapon out of it is if you dropped it out of a plane and hit
somebody..."
I'm an Australian who lived in Iran from March 2002 to October 2003. I don't think I was ever in any physical danger - I don't see why it would rate hazard pay now. I mean, people, we're talking about the third biggest country on orkut, where women post pictures of themselves without hijab and everyone lists their drinking frequency. Many Westerners have strange misimpressions about the place, and the Western media typically emphasise only aspects that stand out, not everyday life. Because of this, I have to come to believe and tell others that the only way to understand Iran is to visit personally.
... shows that he's been offering "proofs" since July 1989. I see from MathSciNet that he has 87 papers from 1958 to 1994, but isn't this a bit like the boy who cried wolf?
Yup, Tenenbaum is the author of "Introduction to analytic and probabilistic number theory" and 113 papers in number theory. I think that's the end of this proof, unless it rises from the dead a la Wiles. A pity the average slashdotter has such a short attention span...
From: Zbigniew Fiedorowicz
Newsgroups: sci.physics,sci.math
Subject: Re: There Are Infinitely Many Prime Twins
Date: Thu, 03 Jun 2004 13:27:58 -0400
Organization: Ohio State University
Lines: 30
Message-ID:
References:
NNTP-Posting-Host: dhcp-94-53.math.ohio-state.edu
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Trace: charm.magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu 1086283722 19410 140.254.94.53 (3 Jun 2004 17:28:42 GMT)
X-Complaints-To: abuse@osu.edu
NNTP-Posting-Date: 3 Jun 2004 17:28:42 GMT
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Win 9x 4.90; en-US; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007
X-Accept-Language: en-us, en
In-Reply-To:
I have heard that Michel Balazard of the University of Bordeaux
has found a serious error in the proof.
>J'ai malheureusement trouv une erreur grave dans l'article d'Arenstorf.
>Le lemme 8, page 35 est manifestement faux, et il est fondamental. Il
>est possible que la dmonstration puisse tre rpare, mais c'est non
>trivial.
If it turns out to be true, this will be super-duper-extraordinary - the man is probably in his 70s. G. H. Hardy wrote: "No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man's game". Wiles proved FLT at 40, Perelman of the purported Poincare proof is in his 30s... this is similar-level stuff. The only thing I can think of that even comes close is Fred Galvin in his 50s (?) proving the Dinitz conjecture.
You can follow discussions on sci.math and fr.sci.maths. Or read about how similar asymptotic proofs about properties of primes failed. Remember, this is arxiv - in the age of electronic preprints, you get many good proofs like Perelman's along with almost-proofs like Castro-Mahecha's and Dunwoody's.
- KJV
For the love of money is the root of all evil...
-
NASB
For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil...
For a more detailed study of the Greek, see White's ``King James Only Controversy''.The first seven people on the mailing list were trollers on the gay USENET newsgroups, and the last three should be well known. I didn't realise Fred Phelps was famous then.
(Very first USENET Make Money Fast post for comparison.)
Yes, you're right, the Powerbook design is Apple's and the manufacturing is by Quanta, Compal, and Asustek in Taiwan.
There's a lot of incomprehension in the comments about higher mathematics. The fact that all four of the Clay Mathematics Institute Research Fellows this year are not native Americans indicates the truth of the AeA's comment on math teaching in American schools. I note that all of the fellows are in topology or closely related areas. My doctorate is in combinatorics, "the slums of topology", so I'm probably not qualified to explain the Atiyah-Singer theorem to y'all!
In case any of you think that the Enigma was "broken" by the boffins of Bletchley Park, and with Gillogly's ciphertext-only attack, became "ancient history", there are some ciphertexts from WW2 produced with the 4-rotor machine which have never been broken. (People have been so foolish as to say "Enigma is a joke to crack for my desktop"...)