Musings: I use really crappy passwords in places where I really don't care - that is on sites that I think shouldn't bother me with passwords in the first place. My contact info, email etc., is publicly available in various places so I don't care about protecting that at all - it's a lost cause.
My normal passwords are based on mnemonics and won't be broken by dictionary searches, but I don't use many special characters. I also use the same passwords for many different sites. So far I haven't had any incidents at all but if something would happen, I think I have made sure my life won't be ruined. The credit cards have moderate limits and I don't write about my ball gag fetish.
I have one strong password I use for really important systems, but I end up using it so rarely it sometimes slips out of my mind.
I don't think it is reasonable to expect people to use different strong passwords on every site, not even "important" sites such as social networking. Even if I did, every once in a while I would certainly forget which password goes where and thus give away the wrong one, at which the nefarious site will have won anyway.
what this means is that surface-air rocket launchers and missiles are easier to come by and operate than software for picking up transmissions from airplanes - unless said software is available in the appstore for $1.7.
With a mass three times larger than Earth's, the newly discovered world has the muscle to hold atmosphere. (article)
An exoplanet, 20 to 50 percent the mass of Earth, has been discovered 20 light-years away... (summary)
My limited imagination has problems seeing how such a misstake can come about. Is the summary from a completely different article than what it links to? I also like
I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent
...as a good example of how to pull numbers out of your butt.
What does this mean exactly? He must start a legal process in order to get the name of the people who now have the dog. Suppose he just got their names anyway, what is he supposed to do? Grab his shotgun, walz over there and demand the dog back? I don't know anything about American law but surely there'd have to be a legal process involved either way, so what's the big deal about having to start it before finding out the names?
What about teaching students to hack into computer systems? That's fairly common and fairly well accepted...and in those exercises it's not just a 'think of a way to do this', it's a 'here is a server, here is a PC, go do it'.
By the way, are you suggesting we say to the students 'here is a bunch of people, here is a chainsaw, go do it'?
What about teaching students to hack into computer systems? That's fairly common and fairly well accepted...and in those exercises it's not just a 'think of a way to do this', it's a 'here is a server, here is a PC, go do it'.
There's a difference in badness between "hack" (into a computer) and "kill" (thousands of people). Furthermore the former is much less likely than the latter to latch on to some dark primeval instincts of a depressed juvenile. Moreover still, a discussion about hacking (the technical aspects, not the so much the social) will probably lead to someone learning something directly useful. A discussion about mass murder? Very few people spend their daily life with anything related to that, and many of those who do are called "paranoid".
The FBI exists to protect profits. In fact the government exists to protect commerce, the very basis of our society
I agree, but moreover... I'd say that individual officials within whatever the FBI hierarchy is, probably like to prioritize cases that more easily yield results. Missing persons: you spend millions of dollars flying around looking for them (or whatever) and in the end there's a pretty good chance they will stay missing. Pirates: you pay a bunch of interns a few farthings to surf the net and collect IP adresses (or something) and, well, we all know how hard it is to find pirates on the Internet.
This is really helpful. Any tips on finding out some of this meta-information on potential supervisors? If I email their current grad students, will I get honest answers?
You would, I guess, so why not? Or better yet, talk to them in person.
Though I was thinking more in the lines of "talk to the professor" and judge his character for yourself. Avoid someone who seems reluctant (it might be his department is forcing a PhD student on him, or any number of reasons), prefer someone who seems enthusiastic and already is talking about concrete research ideas that seem to fit you.
Use ISI Web of Knowledge. Search for the terms you are interested in. Find papers. Sort by date. Who's publishing in your field these days? This is who you want to talk to.
That's all well and good, but there are some other things to consider also. One: funding. Two: funding. Three: Make sure that whoever you choose is interested in YOU. I know several unfortunate PhD candidates who have tried for far too long but fail to graduate and one common denominator is lack of interest from supervisor. Four: Also keep in mind that there are lots of jerks out there - someone might seem good at first but then lose interest in what you do. If this happens and you can't change the situation, really, consider abandoning ship sooner than later.
I was lucky; I got a paper published as MSc student and another almost for free as a consequence. I wasted a year and a half with a lousy supervisor but then got an opportunity to change to someone good at another university (I sincerely recommend choosing an experience professor who will supervise you personally - not one that will delegate you to his assistant professors).
"I want, I want, I want - it should be fast, reliable, private etc. etc. oh but I don't want to pay for it."
A friend in China recommends this
http://vtunnel.com/, I have no idea how it stands up to all those reqs. Alt. just tunneling with SSH (u capable of that?).
The mistake -- and it is a mistake, because when you actually run the experiment, the hypothesis is invalidated -- is thinking that each of the above cases is equally likely.
Finally; good explanation! And really, anyone should strongly suspect foul logic after reading the proposition (33%).. After all the ordering by birth is completely arbitrary - we can get the same (faulty) result by ordering by IQ or level of ugliness.
Good advice too and through. Especially point one. I have no experience with the problem you describe but from what you write it sounds to me like your algorithm takes two coordinates on the surface of a sphere and calculates the distance between them along that surface. So far it's high school math. Furthermore I bet many very bright programmers have come up with various hairfine improvements to make simple microprocessors do this task as efficiently as possible. Probably precision issues, issues about how good approximation the sphere is in the first place etc. etc. Seems unlikely you would have a significant algoritmic improvement.
..for me and I never really understood this bitching about privacy - if I post something (on facebook or pretty much anywhere on the internet) I expect that it is public. If it's posted to "friends only" it's still public. Honestly, if you have a secret and tell it to your 100-200 or so "friends", is it reasonable to expect that no one else will hear it? No, there are only two levels: "private" (don't post) and public. The misstake of facebook was to pretend otherwise, so now people seem to think they have a God-given right to intermediate privacy levels that logically can't exist since you can't really stop individuals from spreading whatever you give them.
Here is how unbreakable DRM will eventually work:
When internet connections are high enough bandwidths and low enough latencies, you will only have video transferred to you, all game assets will be entirely stored and run on their hardware, never will anything be stored on YOUR end that you will can manipulate.
Hah! I could point out that the speed of light puts limit on how you can improve "lag" time and so on, but really - contingent on technologies improving, I can just as well claim that any material that is displayed/run/whatever on your machine can be copied, rebundled and pirated/sold independently of its copyright holder no matter what they try.
I wrote that sounds of movement behind my back from things I do not see are distracting (while not so if I see the cause of the sounds); if that makes me paranoid in your world well then so be it.
I've been in all sorts of offices. I actually prefer sharing a larger room over having my own tiny one or a cubicle, but of course there shouldn't bee too many peopl or there will just be constant chatter. So given that, a medium room with a handfull of pepople, I strongly dislike having my desk face a wall and my back to the room - it has only disadvantages. Mostly it's unnerving to have people moving around behind you. On the other hand facing the room has only advantages for me - it's more social, no one sneaks up on you and at least personally I'm not the least distracted by seeing things move around. It's the sounds that may be bothersome, but seeing what makes the sounds actually ameliorates the issue a bit.
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Musings: I use really crappy passwords in places where I really don't care - that is on sites that I think shouldn't bother me with passwords in the first place. My contact info, email etc., is publicly available in various places so I don't care about protecting that at all - it's a lost cause.
My normal passwords are based on mnemonics and won't be broken by dictionary searches, but I don't use many special characters. I also use the same passwords for many different sites. So far I haven't had any incidents at all but if something would happen, I think I have made sure my life won't be ruined. The credit cards have moderate limits and I don't write about my ball gag fetish.
I have one strong password I use for really important systems, but I end up using it so rarely it sometimes slips out of my mind.
I don't think it is reasonable to expect people to use different strong passwords on every site, not even "important" sites such as social networking. Even if I did, every once in a while I would certainly forget which password goes where and thus give away the wrong one, at which the nefarious site will have won anyway.
I'm happy to see any contributions to Octave - the open Matlab-sort-of-immitation. It's great in principle, but still somewhat rough around the edges.
what this means is that surface-air rocket launchers and missiles are easier to come by and operate than software for picking up transmissions from airplanes - unless said software is available in the appstore for $1.7.
With a mass three times larger than Earth's, the newly discovered world has the muscle to hold atmosphere. (article)
An exoplanet, 20 to 50 percent the mass of Earth, has been discovered 20 light-years away... (summary)
My limited imagination has problems seeing how such a misstake can come about. Is the summary from a completely different article than what it links to? I also like
I would say that the chances for life on this planet are 100 percent
...as a good example of how to pull numbers out of your butt.
Should I Learn To Program iOS Or Android Devices?
Learn to program instead.
What does this mean exactly? He must start a legal process in order to get the name of the people who now have the dog. Suppose he just got their names anyway, what is he supposed to do? Grab his shotgun, walz over there and demand the dog back? I don't know anything about American law but surely there'd have to be a legal process involved either way, so what's the big deal about having to start it before finding out the names?
Meh, stupid people don't deserve to have money anyway.
Then on the other hand neither does ZoneAlarm.
finally a device that actually might start working again when you yell at it.
What about teaching students to hack into computer systems? That's fairly common and fairly well accepted...and in those exercises it's not just a 'think of a way to do this', it's a 'here is a server, here is a PC, go do it'.
By the way, are you suggesting we say to the students 'here is a bunch of people, here is a chainsaw, go do it'?
What about teaching students to hack into computer systems? That's fairly common and fairly well accepted...and in those exercises it's not just a 'think of a way to do this', it's a 'here is a server, here is a PC, go do it'.
There's a difference in badness between "hack" (into a computer) and "kill" (thousands of people). Furthermore the former is much less likely than the latter to latch on to some dark primeval instincts of a depressed juvenile. Moreover still, a discussion about hacking (the technical aspects, not the so much the social) will probably lead to someone learning something directly useful. A discussion about mass murder? Very few people spend their daily life with anything related to that, and many of those who do are called "paranoid".
mod parent up.
Find someone younger and hotter and take her to the funeral.
This facinates me; what kind of person writes something like that and what is going through their head when they do?
The FBI exists to protect profits. In fact the government exists to protect commerce, the very basis of our society
I agree, but moreover... I'd say that individual officials within whatever the FBI hierarchy is, probably like to prioritize cases that more easily yield results. Missing persons: you spend millions of dollars flying around looking for them (or whatever) and in the end there's a pretty good chance they will stay missing. Pirates: you pay a bunch of interns a few farthings to surf the net and collect IP adresses (or something) and, well, we all know how hard it is to find pirates on the Internet.
I love this idea! I'd have a really nifty way to punish my ISP next time I'm hit with technical problems and poor attitude!
how do these big fat women always find the exact center of a doorway or an aisle so that no one can get around them
Practice. If they get too close to any wall their gravity might collapse it towards them.
Alas, that is called evolution, not practice.
This is really helpful. Any tips on finding out some of this meta-information on potential supervisors? If I email their current grad students, will I get honest answers?
You would, I guess, so why not? Or better yet, talk to them in person.
Though I was thinking more in the lines of "talk to the professor" and judge his character for yourself. Avoid someone who seems reluctant (it might be his department is forcing a PhD student on him, or any number of reasons), prefer someone who seems enthusiastic and already is talking about concrete research ideas that seem to fit you.
Use ISI Web of Knowledge. Search for the terms you are interested in. Find papers. Sort by date. Who's publishing in your field these days? This is who you want to talk to.
That's all well and good, but there are some other things to consider also. One: funding. Two: funding. Three: Make sure that whoever you choose is interested in YOU. I know several unfortunate PhD candidates who have tried for far too long but fail to graduate and one common denominator is lack of interest from supervisor. Four: Also keep in mind that there are lots of jerks out there - someone might seem good at first but then lose interest in what you do. If this happens and you can't change the situation, really, consider abandoning ship sooner than later.
I was lucky; I got a paper published as MSc student and another almost for free as a consequence. I wasted a year and a half with a lousy supervisor but then got an opportunity to change to someone good at another university (I sincerely recommend choosing an experience professor who will supervise you personally - not one that will delegate you to his assistant professors).
"I want, I want, I want - it should be fast, reliable, private etc. etc. oh but I don't want to pay for it."
A friend in China recommends this http://vtunnel.com/, I have no idea how it stands up to all those reqs. Alt. just tunneling with SSH (u capable of that?).
The mistake -- and it is a mistake, because when you actually run the experiment, the hypothesis is invalidated -- is thinking that each of the above cases is equally likely.
Finally; good explanation! And really, anyone should strongly suspect foul logic after reading the proposition (33%).. After all the ordering by birth is completely arbitrary - we can get the same (faulty) result by ordering by IQ or level of ugliness.
Good advice too and through. Especially point one. I have no experience with the problem you describe but from what you write it sounds to me like your algorithm takes two coordinates on the surface of a sphere and calculates the distance between them along that surface. So far it's high school math. Furthermore I bet many very bright programmers have come up with various hairfine improvements to make simple microprocessors do this task as efficiently as possible. Probably precision issues, issues about how good approximation the sphere is in the first place etc. etc. Seems unlikely you would have a significant algoritmic improvement.
..for me and I never really understood this bitching about privacy - if I post something (on facebook or pretty much anywhere on the internet) I expect that it is public. If it's posted to "friends only" it's still public. Honestly, if you have a secret and tell it to your 100-200 or so "friends", is it reasonable to expect that no one else will hear it? No, there are only two levels: "private" (don't post) and public. The misstake of facebook was to pretend otherwise, so now people seem to think they have a God-given right to intermediate privacy levels that logically can't exist since you can't really stop individuals from spreading whatever you give them.
Here is how unbreakable DRM will eventually work: When internet connections are high enough bandwidths and low enough latencies, you will only have video transferred to you, all game assets will be entirely stored and run on their hardware, never will anything be stored on YOUR end that you will can manipulate.
Hah! I could point out that the speed of light puts limit on how you can improve "lag" time and so on, but really - contingent on technologies improving, I can just as well claim that any material that is displayed/run/whatever on your machine can be copied, rebundled and pirated/sold independently of its copyright holder no matter what they try.
I wrote that sounds of movement behind my back from things I do not see are distracting (while not so if I see the cause of the sounds); if that makes me paranoid in your world well then so be it.
I've been in all sorts of offices. I actually prefer sharing a larger room over having my own tiny one or a cubicle, but of course there shouldn't bee too many peopl or there will just be constant chatter. So given that, a medium room with a handfull of pepople, I strongly dislike having my desk face a wall and my back to the room - it has only disadvantages. Mostly it's unnerving to have people moving around behind you. On the other hand facing the room has only advantages for me - it's more social, no one sneaks up on you and at least personally I'm not the least distracted by seeing things move around. It's the sounds that may be bothersome, but seeing what makes the sounds actually ameliorates the issue a bit.
Wouldn't an infestation of yew be more easily cured by an excess of bowyers?
Good point - but they are harder to come by these days I think.