I'll confess immediately that I didn't read TFA. I just want to drop this link to a nice Isaac Asimov essay, back from 1962: Not as We Know it – The Chemistry of Life
Remember that Asimov was a professor of biochemistry. In the article, he investigates alternatives to the chemistry of life as we know it. He comes up with the following list:
[H]ere, then, is my list of life chemistries, spanning the temperature range from near red heat down to near absolute zero:
1. fluorosilicone in fluorosilicone
2. fluorocarbon in sulfur
3.*nucleic acid/protein (O) in water
4. nucleic acid/protein (N) in ammonia
5. lipid in methane
6. lipid in hydrogen
Of this half dozen, the third only is life-as-we-know-it. Lest you miss it, I've marked it with an asterisk.
When you read the article, you may want to skip the first bit and start from about the paragraph "Well, that's what I want to discuss."
Many people don't seem to realise that by editing Wikipedia anonymously, you're giving away your IP address for everyone to see. I'd expected a comment to that effect here but didn't, so I'll be the first to post it.
In that sense, editing with a registered account is much more anonymous. Only some Wikipedia staff members can look up your IP address, so edits from Capitol Hill using an account won't be picked up by this twitter bot. Also, those staff members (should) have to follow procedures before they can look up your IP.
Michael Sinatra over at seclists.org had the following to say:
This should be a lesson to all of us, since EDUCAUSE is definitely not
alone here: We all do regular, legitimate business in ways that is
sometimes indistinguishable from phishing, at least to regular users.
That needs to stop. Email marketers and analytics junkies will not like
to hear this, but we need to put an end to embedded email links that are
redirected through other systems. IMO, we should put an end to *all*
legitimate links in emails; instead have a business portal with all of
the links to surveys, training sites, etc., and have notification emails
for when new things appear on the portal. In addition, we could modify
our SSO sites so that they alert users when they need to take care of
something that we would normally use email for which to notify the user.
Once that's done, we can assure users that we will NEVER ask them to
click on a link in an email, just like we currently remind them that we
never ask them for passwords.
If that is "too hard" and/or the analytics stuff is "too valuable" then
we need to simply accept the risk that our users will get caught in
phishing attacks. The bad guys have figured out that it is very easy to
mimic our business practices, and they have gotten very good at doing
it. Unless we change those practices, they will find us to be easy
pickings.
...and Slashdot's title for the story that "Online Ads Are More Dangerous Than Porn" takes it still a level further. It's certainly not what Cisco said.
The summary, and the Security Week article, write that "Users are more 21 times more likely to get hit with malware from online shopping sites than if they'd gone to a counterfeit software site".
Cisco's report says that "Online shopping sites are 21 times more likely to deliver malicious content than counterfeit software sites."
Those statements are not equivalent. Online shopping sites have many more visitors than counterfeit software sites, so they have more opportunity to deliver malware. The same goes for the factor of 27 for search engines.
Also, it's hard to check the factor of 182 for adult sites, since the report doesn't include that number, or in fact even the words "porn" or "adult".
All code in MariaDB is released under GPL, LPGL or BSD. MariaDB does not
have closed source modules like the one you can find in MySQL enterprise
edition. In fact, all the closed source features in MySQL 5.5 enterprise
edition are found in the MariaDB open source version.
MariaDB includes test cases for all fixed bugs. Oracle doesn't provide test
cases for new bugs fixed in MySQL 5.5.
All bugs and development plans are public.
MariaDB is developed by the community in true open source spirit.
In 1940, Robert A. Heinlein (writing under the pseudonym of Lyle Monroe) published a story called "Let There Be Light" where the firefly's bioluminosity whas studied leading to the development of "light panels", kinda-sorta predicting LEDs. It's a nice development that now the firefly is being studied to improve those LEDs. Though the mechanism is totally different of course.
The story is apparently in the public domain now, available here.
Yes, GP confused me for a moment there. I decided to gave it a miss because I felt the sum was a bit large for a game quite likely not available on my platform. I almost thought I'd missed something.
The GP's point still stands. He mentions "that the infrastructure you need to navigate without it has been neglected or even systematically dismantled". This includes lighthouses, many of which are no longer being maintained. I find this a bad idea: they offer a globally distributed and resilient fall-back option to the much more centralised (almost single-point-of-failure) technology that GPS offers.
That's exactly what he did. He mailed it to a small group of experts and asked them for their comments. Some of them sent it on, commenting: "hey, this looks like a legit attempt", and before Vinay knew it, his article was on the web.
They all contain links to weird-looking pages which, of course, I never open.
If you never open them, how do you know the pages look weird? Or did you mean to write "They all contain weird-looking links to pages which, of course, I never open"?
Anyway, I believe many of those work on a slightly different principle: not downloading an EXE but simply asking you to enter your MSN/hotmail password to be able to see the embarrassing pics in question... and then mailing/IM'ing themselves on.
If I'd said NP-complete, I'd have said that there are plenty of NP-complete problems of which all instances can be solved in polynomial time, which is probably wrong:-) My statement is perfectly valid for the set NP, however.
There are plenty of NP problems of which all instances are solvable in polynomial time. Remember that P is a subset (and if this paper is correct, a proper subset) of NP.
Also, as for that last "proved" bit, the article ends with:
"It's not quite right to say that we have now 'proven' General Relativity," Breton said. "However, so far, Einstein's theory has passed all the tests that have been conducted, including ours."
But then, you can never really prove a physical theory, can you? You can only disprove it by finding a counterexample, or confirm it again and again through experiment.
Slashdot Mirror
I was as confused as you are. But I found that such a thing was actually proposed just over a year ago and even got a lot of support!
I'll confess immediately that I didn't read TFA. I just want to drop this link to a nice Isaac Asimov essay, back from 1962:
Not as We Know it – The Chemistry of Life
Remember that Asimov was a professor of biochemistry. In the article, he investigates alternatives to the chemistry of life as we know it. He comes up with the following list:
When you read the article, you may want to skip the first bit and start from about the paragraph "Well, that's what I want to discuss."
Na-naaa naa-na-na.
Many people don't seem to realise that by editing Wikipedia anonymously, you're giving away your IP address for everyone to see. I'd expected a comment to that effect here but didn't, so I'll be the first to post it.
In that sense, editing with a registered account is much more anonymous. Only some Wikipedia staff members can look up your IP address, so edits from Capitol Hill using an account won't be picked up by this twitter bot. Also, those staff members (should) have to follow procedures before they can look up your IP.
Please, please use a command like \mathit or \text around text used in maths mode. I see $italics$ far too often still in papers and presentations.
So, you should e.g. write: $\Psi_\mathit{classical computer}$
See also: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=mathstext
Michael Sinatra over at seclists.org had the following to say:
This should be a lesson to all of us, since EDUCAUSE is definitely not alone here: We all do regular, legitimate business in ways that is sometimes indistinguishable from phishing, at least to regular users. That needs to stop. Email marketers and analytics junkies will not like to hear this, but we need to put an end to embedded email links that are redirected through other systems. IMO, we should put an end to *all* legitimate links in emails; instead have a business portal with all of the links to surveys, training sites, etc., and have notification emails for when new things appear on the portal. In addition, we could modify our SSO sites so that they alert users when they need to take care of something that we would normally use email for which to notify the user. Once that's done, we can assure users that we will NEVER ask them to click on a link in an email, just like we currently remind them that we never ask them for passwords.
If that is "too hard" and/or the analytics stuff is "too valuable" then we need to simply accept the risk that our users will get caught in phishing attacks. The bad guys have figured out that it is very easy to mimic our business practices, and they have gotten very good at doing it. Unless we change those practices, they will find us to be easy pickings.
What Cisco's report actually said is that behaviour often perceived as "safe" (such as online shopping) carries more risk than generally thought.
...and Slashdot's title for the story that "Online Ads Are More Dangerous Than Porn" takes it still a level further. It's certainly not what Cisco said.
The summary, and the Security Week article, write that "Users are more 21 times more likely to get hit with malware from online shopping sites than if they'd gone to a counterfeit software site".
Cisco's report says that "Online shopping sites are 21 times more likely to deliver malicious content than counterfeit software sites."
Those statements are not equivalent. Online shopping sites have many more visitors than counterfeit software sites, so they have more opportunity to deliver malware. The same goes for the factor of 27 for search engines.
Also, it's hard to check the factor of 182 for adult sites, since the report doesn't include that number, or in fact even the words "porn" or "adult".
Probably most important to Fedora is this:
Wikipedia, too, is moving from MySQL to MariaDB.
Releasing the source doesn't guarantee that a specific cash register is also running that code. So will this be all that helpful?
In 1940, Robert A. Heinlein (writing under the pseudonym of Lyle Monroe) published a story called "Let There Be Light" where the firefly's bioluminosity whas studied leading to the development of "light panels", kinda-sorta predicting LEDs. It's a nice development that now the firefly is being studied to improve those LEDs. Though the mechanism is totally different of course.
The story is apparently in the public domain now, available here.
Yes, GP confused me for a moment there. I decided to gave it a miss because I felt the sum was a bit large for a game quite likely not available on my platform. I almost thought I'd missed something.
The GP's point still stands. He mentions "that the infrastructure you need to navigate without it has been neglected or even systematically dismantled". This includes lighthouses, many of which are no longer being maintained. I find this a bad idea: they offer a globally distributed and resilient fall-back option to the much more centralised (almost single-point-of-failure) technology that GPS offers.
FreeCell is not np-anything. It's a finite tree that can be exhaustively searched.
Generalized FreeCell is NP-Complete.
That's exactly what he did. He mailed it to a small group of experts and asked them for their comments. Some of them sent it on, commenting: "hey, this looks like a legit attempt", and before Vinay knew it, his article was on the web.
They all contain links to weird-looking pages which, of course, I never open.
If you never open them, how do you know the pages look weird? Or did you mean to write "They all contain weird-looking links to pages which, of course, I never open"?
Anyway, I believe many of those work on a slightly different principle: not downloading an EXE but simply asking you to enter your MSN/hotmail password to be able to see the embarrassing pics in question... and then mailing /IM'ing themselves on.
If I'd said NP-complete, I'd have said that there are plenty of NP-complete problems of which all instances can be solved in polynomial time, which is probably wrong :-) My statement is perfectly valid for the set NP, however.
No, my point is that you're talking about NP-complete. Remember that P is a subset of NP; whether or not it's a proper subset is (still) the question.
There are plenty of NP problems of which all instances are solvable in polynomial time. Remember that P is a subset (and if this paper is correct, a proper subset) of NP.
I'm surprised that nobody posted this yet.
"Unfortunanely, there seems to be no pattern yet", but what about secret messages?
Queue in 10 million "global warming is a scam", "don't look at me, people didna doit" and "Al Gore is a weenie" comments.
You mean 'cue'. And drop the 'in' (were you thinking of 'chime in'?)
Wiki - the source of all knowledge - has some good details.
The source of all knowledge is exactly what it isn't. It's (or should be, at least) an aggregation of information from reliable sources.
But then, you can never really prove a physical theory, can you? You can only disprove it by finding a counterexample, or confirm it again and again through experiment.
I got a pretty good scare out of Donovan's aging to death.
He chose... poorly.