I simply believe that holding corporations to a different standard, whether higher or lower, than individuals is wrong.
Why? For 2 reasons, corporations (above a certain size, of course) should be held to a different standard:
1. The excuse of ignorance of law can never apply to a corporation above a certain size. A vast majority of crimes that normal citizens do as part of leading their simple lives are due to ignorance of law - not only that doing so and so is illegal but all the nitty-gritty of it.
Ignorance of law in common people makes it practical to not enforce all laws always on all normal citizens. This never applies to corporations.
2. Corporations cannot be jailed / given death penalty. Until you figure out a way of doing such a thing, corporations will always inherently be held to a different standard.
But if one can tell from reading a slashdot post of the man that he is not a woman because of that post reflecting an extreme lack of understanding about women's body/mind - it is natural to make fun of him issuing advisories to gynecologists.
Something analogous is happening to you, relax and enjoy.
At any rate, I don't imagine that it will be long before someone distributes the Flash player as a bunch of (obfuscated) C classes or libraries or some such (perhaps as an on-line service) which a developer could then paste into Apple's developer tools, along with a byte-code or other pastable representation of the Flash program which would then be compiled by the allowed Apple tools into a native binary.
Only to have all applications using it blocked from app-store?
First, if the time taken to crack a password is two months, and you change your passwords every two months, then there's a 50% chance of cracking the password in the first attempt, and a 100% chance of cracking the password the second attempt. So your example doesn't work.
How did you arrive at this "100% chance of cracking the password the second attempt"? Does that extend to 150% chance in the third attempt by that logic?
If you change your password every two months, and it takes two months to crack a password, then, starting at the moment you change the password, the cracker has two months to crack the passworld. Since the assumption was it takes twomonths to crack the password, in two months the password will be cracked.
In your language, does "attempt" mean "month"? Sorry, I assumed you were using some form of English. In your language, you might be absolutely right but I know nothing about it.
For your information, in English, your above explanation while being absolutely right, has no relation to your original statement which I had replied to in my GP post. Surprisingly, "month" and "attempt" are NOT synonyms in English.
For the rest of your argument, I have this: For all but the most idiotic of cracking mechanisms - an account-password combination will not be tried soon after it has failed.
The probability of changing a password to one in the window about to be probed is equal to the probability of changing a password out of the window about to be probed
There is a non-zero probability of the event that a password has already been tried (and failed to crack) to which the password is now changed. The cracker is not likely to retry this account-password combination soon - might only get around to it after 2 months. By which time there is a non-zero probability that the password will be changed to some other password that he has recently tried. Might help to think of it as a probability of "dodging" the cracker.
First, if the time taken to crack a password is two months, and you change your passwords every two months, then there's a 50% chance of cracking the password in the first attempt, and a 100% chance of cracking the password the second attempt. So your example doesn't work.
How did you arrive at this "100% chance of cracking the password the second attempt"? Does that extend to 150% chance in the third attempt by that logic?
Sorry, but you are wrong. Odds of cracking succeeding does change (decrease) by password changing for all but the most idiotic cracking mechanisms. Simple to understand if we realize that the cracker will not try the same password over and over again before hitting some limit.
...and I love the way that the slashdot group mind
Your assumption: there is a "slashdot group mind".
treats Flash as the spawn of Satan and destroyer of worlds until Apple leaves it out (and, consequently, persuades a number of large video sites to switch to standards-based HTML5 video).
Invalidated.
There is no "group mind". Different slashdot posters have different opinions.
1. You could get/write an addon that makes firefox always clean the database. Might make it slow, but could be worth it for you. Documentation sufficient to create addons is quite good for firefox. On filesystems like ext3, this might make it unusably slow.
2. Fork the browser using the source code. Maybe you could even convince an existing fork (say IceWeasel) to include the feature you require.
3. Run a script that cleans up the sqlite database whenever you quit/start firefox. Could even do it periodically when browser is running, but not sure how well it will work.
All software have to make tradeoffs. Here the tradeoff is between performance and privacy (that too, privacy of the kind where the user is shy of his own hard disk, pretty rare requirement). Some don't provide a way to override the decisions the developers make. Some do. Firefox is most undoubtedly in the latter category.
Strictly speaking, my assumption is that there is a non-zero probability that humanity is doomed if something isn't done
There is a non-zero probability that humanity is doomed if something is done. The following 2 are non-zero:
1. Risk of something (apparently) orthogonal to global warming. E.g. Sun exploding much before current predictions of its death. 2. Risk of "doing something" causing catastrophic conflict. Banal example: nuclear war, melting the earth's crust.
So doing is square with not doing in that respect.
Well, then your opinions on climatology aren't worth much then, are they.
His opinion is worth the same as yours - shit. If you oppose others' criticism of climate scientists on the basis of their lack of qualification, shouldn't you oppose your own support for them on the same basis?
Carmack said it already: we do not want more triangles, we want prettier triangles
How does that work? A triangle is the simplest polygon, and is by definition a plain triangle. How can it be prettier? The only way I see is, to add curves / gradients etc. to it: which works by breaking the triangle into more triangles. So it boils down to more triangles.
At worst, they have made themselves only second to AMD and still way ahead of Intel when considering product capabilities
Problem is, Nvidia cards are very expensive. Sure they are only second to AMD in performance, but lag a lot behind AMD in performance/price ratio. Intel might be much behind both of these in performance, but they are really cheap (or free, as you look at it). Who will buy Nvidia (except, of course, the business and research applications you mentioned) when there is undoubtedly and objectively a big gap in performance/price ratio? Sometimes, being a clear second best might be disastrous: this is one of those cases.
That's right, but success makes him extremely attractive. All his defects will be not known in advance because he feigns a good, kindly nature. Even after they are found out, the defects will be ignored for a long time because that person is successful. He will even blame his spouse for the marital discord and since he is a smooth-talking, charming person, outer world(including his parents-in-law) will believe him more than the suffering spouse.
Marrying (and even your child's marrying) a successful person means that you have "arrived" in life. We cannot simply wish away this attraction for success we have as a species.
You can very easily determine if someone is a psychopath by what he says (i.e. they have no empathy and this quickly shows).
I guess it is not that simple. They sure have no empathy, but some are extremely good actors and feign more empathy than a "normal" guy can feel. So yes, there are unsuccessful psychopaths whose lack of empathy is evident. But there are genius psychopaths about whom it takes very long time for one to know that they are psychopaths.
Very interesting. I checked this and this and surprisingly, you are right. But how can Australians use the same word for these 2 things: don't they have any sense of linguistic hygiene?
remember that pwn2own contest where Vista was the last one to be hacked, and the explanation of the guy who did it
The one I remember had Ubuntu going unhacked and Vista going down second following Mac OS. Could you give me a link to the contest you are talking about?
Those things are different from mathematical proofs or scientific hypotheses, which are not inventions, in the sense that you cannot do anything with them alone. You must apply them to a situation. They are no good on their own. You cannot put a mathematical proof or scientific hypothesis into a product. You can put a drug or a machine or an algorithm into a product.
An algorithm cannot do anything alone either. It must be applied to a situation.
E.g. merge sort. What can you do with the algorithm alone? You need to have items that need to be sorted, figure out merge sort is best for your case, and then apply it to the situation. Without the last step, what use is merge sort?
Slashdot Mirror
6. Most people don't use ExpressCards; they'd rather have a slightly larger battery or other features taking up the space.
So, why did Apple ship ExpressCard slots before? My colleague with a MacBook Pro uses an ExpressCard ... to give him eSATA.
When Apple sells a feature, it is "da feature to die for". When Apple doesn't sell the feature - "who wants to use that feature anyway".
I simply believe that holding corporations to a different standard, whether higher or lower, than individuals is wrong.
Why? For 2 reasons, corporations (above a certain size, of course) should be held to a different standard:
1. The excuse of ignorance of law can never apply to a corporation above a certain size. A vast majority of crimes that normal citizens do as part of leading their simple lives are due to ignorance of law - not only that doing so and so is illegal but all the nitty-gritty of it.
Ignorance of law in common people makes it practical to not enforce all laws always on all normal citizens. This never applies to corporations.
2. Corporations cannot be jailed / given death penalty. Until you figure out a way of doing such a thing, corporations will always inherently be held to a different standard.
But if one can tell from reading a slashdot post of the man that he is not a woman because of that post reflecting an extreme lack of understanding about women's body/mind - it is natural to make fun of him issuing advisories to gynecologists.
Something analogous is happening to you, relax and enjoy.
At any rate, I don't imagine that it will be long before someone distributes the Flash player as a bunch of (obfuscated) C classes or libraries or some such (perhaps as an on-line service) which a developer could then paste into Apple's developer tools, along with a byte-code or other pastable representation of the Flash program which would then be compiled by the allowed Apple tools into a native binary.
Only to have all applications using it blocked from app-store?
First, if the time taken to crack a password is two months, and you change your passwords every two months, then there's a 50% chance of cracking the password in the first attempt, and a 100% chance of cracking the password the second attempt. So your example doesn't work.
How did you arrive at this "100% chance of cracking the password the second attempt"? Does that extend to 150% chance in the third attempt by that logic?
If you change your password every two months, and it takes two months to crack a password, then, starting at the moment you change the password, the cracker has two months to crack the passworld. Since the assumption was it takes twomonths to crack the password, in two months the password will be cracked.
In your language, does "attempt" mean "month"? Sorry, I assumed you were using some form of English. In your language, you might be absolutely right but I know nothing about it.
For your information, in English, your above explanation while being absolutely right, has no relation to your original statement which I had replied to in my GP post. Surprisingly, "month" and "attempt" are NOT synonyms in English.
For the rest of your argument, I have this: For all but the most idiotic of cracking mechanisms - an account-password combination will not be tried soon after it has failed.
The probability of changing a password to one in the window about to be probed is equal to the probability of changing a password out of the window about to be probed
There is a non-zero probability of the event that a password has already been tried (and failed to crack) to which the password is now changed. The cracker is not likely to retry this account-password combination soon - might only get around to it after 2 months. By which time there is a non-zero probability that the password will be changed to some other password that he has recently tried. Might help to think of it as a probability of "dodging" the cracker.
First, if the time taken to crack a password is two months, and you change your passwords every two months, then there's a 50% chance of cracking the password in the first attempt, and a 100% chance of cracking the password the second attempt. So your example doesn't work.
How did you arrive at this "100% chance of cracking the password the second attempt"? Does that extend to 150% chance in the third attempt by that logic?
Sorry, but you are wrong. Odds of cracking succeeding does change (decrease) by password changing for all but the most idiotic cracking mechanisms. Simple to understand if we realize that the cracker will not try the same password over and over again before hitting some limit.
That's the sort of thing that happens now in years when the weather is unreliable
When? Is weather ever reliable?
...and I love the way that the slashdot group mind
Your assumption: there is a "slashdot group mind".
treats Flash as the spawn of Satan and destroyer of worlds until Apple leaves it out (and, consequently, persuades a number of large video sites to switch to standards-based HTML5 video).
Invalidated.
There is no "group mind". Different slashdot posters have different opinions.
Ok, but you have many options here.
1. You could get/write an addon that makes firefox always clean the database. Might make it slow, but could be worth it for you. Documentation sufficient to create addons is quite good for firefox. On filesystems like ext3, this might make it unusably slow.
2. Fork the browser using the source code. Maybe you could even convince an existing fork (say IceWeasel) to include the feature you require.
3. Run a script that cleans up the sqlite database whenever you quit/start firefox. Could even do it periodically when browser is running, but not sure how well it will work.
All software have to make tradeoffs. Here the tradeoff is between performance and privacy (that too, privacy of the kind where the user is shy of his own hard disk, pretty rare requirement). Some don't provide a way to override the decisions the developers make. Some do. Firefox is most undoubtedly in the latter category.
Strictly speaking, my assumption is that there is a non-zero probability that humanity is doomed if something isn't done
There is a non-zero probability that humanity is doomed if something is done. The following 2 are non-zero:
1. Risk of something (apparently) orthogonal to global warming. E.g. Sun exploding much before current predictions of its death.
2. Risk of "doing something" causing catastrophic conflict. Banal example: nuclear war, melting the earth's crust.
So doing is square with not doing in that respect.
Well, then your opinions on climatology aren't worth much then, are they.
His opinion is worth the same as yours - shit. If you oppose others' criticism of climate scientists on the basis of their lack of qualification, shouldn't you oppose your own support for them on the same basis?
Carmack said it already: we do not want more triangles, we want prettier triangles
How does that work? A triangle is the simplest polygon, and is by definition a plain triangle. How can it be prettier? The only way I see is, to add curves / gradients etc. to it: which works by breaking the triangle into more triangles. So it boils down to more triangles.
At worst, they have made themselves only second to AMD and still way ahead of Intel when considering product capabilities
Problem is, Nvidia cards are very expensive. Sure they are only second to AMD in performance, but lag a lot behind AMD in performance/price ratio. Intel might be much behind both of these in performance, but they are really cheap (or free, as you look at it). Who will buy Nvidia (except, of course, the business and research applications you mentioned) when there is undoubtedly and objectively a big gap in performance/price ratio? Sometimes, being a clear second best might be disastrous: this is one of those cases.
There won't be any fight. Superman, like always, will simply fly away.
Here is a link
Isn't UV entering your inner eye (past the lens) harmful? UV cause cancer, right?
That's right, but success makes him extremely attractive. All his defects will be not known in advance because he feigns a good, kindly nature. Even after they are found out, the defects will be ignored for a long time because that person is successful. He will even blame his spouse for the marital discord and since he is a smooth-talking, charming person, outer world(including his parents-in-law) will believe him more than the suffering spouse.
Marrying (and even your child's marrying) a successful person means that you have "arrived" in life. We cannot simply wish away this attraction for success we have as a species.
People recommended tricks like XORING two pointers together to save space
While I see your point, any example where XOR of two pointers is of any practical utility?
thanks
You can very easily determine if someone is a psychopath by what he says (i.e. they have no empathy and this quickly shows).
I guess it is not that simple. They sure have no empathy, but some are extremely good actors and feign more empathy than a "normal" guy can feel. So yes, there are unsuccessful psychopaths whose lack of empathy is evident. But there are genius psychopaths about whom it takes very long time for one to know that they are psychopaths.
obviously no sane parent would want their child to marry a smooth talking, charming, psychopath.
I wouldn't be too sure of that. "Civilized" society calls him successful, and they would queue up to marry him.
Very interesting. I checked this and this and surprisingly, you are right. But how can Australians use the same word for these 2 things: don't they have any sense of linguistic hygiene?
What do you mean by "reality overlay" and what are the practical applications of it? I did try to Google it, but I didn't get anything worth doing.
Though, iPad is already a good platform for reality overlay, though probably you don't mean this.
remember that pwn2own contest where Vista was the last one to be hacked, and the explanation of the guy who did it
The one I remember had Ubuntu going unhacked and Vista going down second following Mac OS. Could you give me a link to the contest you are talking about?
Those things are different from mathematical proofs or scientific hypotheses, which are not inventions, in the sense that you cannot do anything with them alone. You must apply them to a situation. They are no good on their own. You cannot put a mathematical proof or scientific hypothesis into a product. You can put a drug or a machine or an algorithm into a product.
An algorithm cannot do anything alone either. It must be applied to a situation.
E.g. merge sort. What can you do with the algorithm alone? You need to have items that need to be sorted, figure out merge sort is best for your case, and then apply it to the situation. Without the last step, what use is merge sort?
No idea, but there must be a law about people assuming that editing Slashdot signature doesn't affect posts made previous to the edit.