First, there's a "smoking gun" in the breach. The attack's general incoming direction can easily be traced to china, which at least indicates a proxy's sitting there. That gives China an opportunity to cooperate (if it really wasn't the government, or at least if they have a scapegoat handy), leading to some diplomatic goodwill and good PR all around. In an assassination, the evidence takes far longer to work out and get a general direction from, and accusing another country of assassination is a much more serious accusation, that can't be spun into happy cooperation as easily.
Then there's the target. An unclassified system being breached doesn't really matter, so even without any definite culprit or even many facts, the news can be released without too much worry. For an assassination, everyone involved in the investigation will immediately be inundated with requests for more information, taking precious time away from the investigation itself.
Less need for careful tact means the news can be released faster. This principle is unrelated to what politicians are in charge.
$10 million will fund medical care for about half a dozen elderly grandparents whose children won't let them die gracefully. With that money, the hospital will be able to pay the staff and buy the drugs and equipment to keep their bodily functions active without brain control for another few weeks. No amount of money will give dear old Grandma a realistic chance of recovery, but the beeping of the monitors will comfort her family a bit, while they wallow in fear and postpone the actual grief.
There is no punchline here. The fact that the most biased party possible still has near-absolute control over a dying person's medical treatment is just sad, and it's a major reason medical costs are so high for everyone else.
No. It means (proabably... IANAL, and IANAPortugueseL) that as long as you aren't engaging in any commerce (including building reputation), and you're using it personally (meaning not distributing to the public at large), it's legal. In other words, downloading a song to listen to yourself is probably fine, but putting music on your Portuguese-hosted website probably isn't.
The structures that allow cows to eat a wide diet predate their domestication (by about 20 million years), so the breeding (which is really just human-guided evolution) is irrelevant.
Cows (and other ruminants) are effectively omnivores whose meat has been replaced by eating their own gut bacteria. Grasses are a good food because they feed the gut bacteria while providing an entirely different set of nutrients directly to the cows. When the cows then digest the bacteria, they get the high-protein supplement they need. Any other feed that provides roughly the same nutrition to the cow is suitable, because a different species of bacteria will thrive on it, and the symbiosis remains.
No, cows evolved to eat a wide variety of things and extract nutrients from them. Grass happens to be one of the better (by human standards for the cows' products) choices for their food, but it's certainly not perfect.
I can also sit down in a day and machine the parts for a bearing-polishing machine. It proves nothing, though, because I'm just copying something that's already been invented. I didn't have to come up with the idea myself, or refine it, or really put any effort into it at all. That's the key motivation for patents in the first place: Effort should be rewarded, while trivial copying should not.
So now we're stuck with a fundamental problem of having to decide what the minimum amount of effort is that deserves patent protection. The prevailing theory for the past 200 years has been that just nailing down the original idea (in a fully-functional form) is enough (but see the footnote). Now that computers have blurred the distinction between math and reality, it's the cultural perception of patents that is changing. Now there's the expectation that there must be a tangible product for the inventor's effort to be valued.
On a theoretical level, all algorithms are indeed just a transcription of a mathematical concept. Practically, though, no major program is just a perfect rendition of an underlying theory. An application is a compilation of algorithms, just as a machine is a particular arrangement of parts. All physical parts are just the physical application of certain laws of physics, so should ball-bearing-polishing machines be prohibited from patents as well?
Footnote: Minimal effort is sufficient for granting the patent, because details like utility aren't readily known at the outset. Whether that effort is sufficient for appeal is a separate matter. Since Google's particular patent idea doesn't seem to have undergone much refinement, it's more vulnerable to being found to be obvious upon review.
I don't want a world where we have no intellectual property laws and ideas are stolen wholesale... however I also don't like what software patents are doing today and I feel like we need to find a better approach to this complicated problem.
Look... I know you're fairly well-known around here, so I hate to question you, but I really don't think you're quite irrational or extreme enough for Slashdot.
No, not just multiple usernames. Multiple personas, each with their own configuration and visibility, linked to a single master account but can appear to others as though they're separate. Multiple usernames would involve logging out of one and into another to use the alternate personas, but this method removes that inconvenience.
Congratulations on your fourth-grade reading level. You've demonstrated the ability to read a headline, but not an actual patent.
The Google patent in question covers a particular method of managing multiple personas. I, for example, could have a persona of "Sarten-X", which I could use for my programming and other online dealings, and "John Smith", which I use for my professional and audio work. When someone interacts with me on a social network, they can pick which profile they're interacting with.
The patent does not broadly cover "anonymity" in general, so other companies can allow anonymous access.
So perhaps do a bitofresearch on your own? You clearly also don't understand the concept, but you sure are quick to take offense.
The entropy of a system is simply the number of options for that scheme, expressed in bits. Sure, there are assumptions in the comic but they are applied equally to both sides. The password uses only one particular pattern (and offers a few more bits to account for picking other patterns), while the phrase is restricted to using exactly four words. While the phrase is restricted to a 2000-word (11 bit) dictionary, the password has a 16-bit dictionary to choose from (covering a vocabulary of 65,000 words).
The comic isn't meant to be an academic paper, but rather to make accessible the results of decades of study into information theory.
While the comic has a pretty poor explanation, the theory is sound: A four-word phrase offers more options (and therefore more protection against a brute-force attack) than an 8-character password, for even a very small dictionary. In fact, the number of options is so drastically larger that it more than compensates for any alterations to the password, like adding numbers or misspelling.
Of course, the number of options is expanded even further when the password may not actually be a phrase. Maybe the password is really just a 30-digit section of pi. An attacker must try that (and every other number combination) too, so the brute-force strength of a long phrase password is still higher than a shorter random password.
For a comic, the strip is perfectly valid. A longer (though simpler) password is vastly stronger against brute-force attacks than a shorter one, even though the shorter one looks weirder.
Note, though, that the strip does not account for attacks other than brute-force, but phrases are still usually better. An attacker physically standing in your office will quickly recognize that a jumbled mess of letters and punctuation taped to your monitor is a password, but an obscure quote attributed to someone he's never heard of is just another office decoration. Even against phishing attacks or plaintext storage hacks, a long phrase is no less secure than a shorter password, since it's not the password that's being attacked.
What's so ridiculous about it? It's important to note that many factors in human population changes are not genetic - the genes just come along for the ride. Natural disasters, politics, and climate force people to mingle and move, and the good (or at least not-too-bad) genes get passed on every time a male gets close enough to a female.
The vast majority of the mutations that are widespread through the population are either benign or beneficial. The ones that aren't don't stick around in the gene pool long enough to become widespread. It's the other half of the selection pressure you mentioned: The selection pressure culls bad mutations out quickly, so the good (or at least ineffective ones) are all that's left. This is definitely a case of history being written by the victors: The bad mutations don't usually stick around long enough to be noticed (in long-term history).
So how do they know it was a mutation?
Because some folks have it, and other folks don't. From the geographic distribution of where the haves and have-nots are, combined with the prevailing theories about human movements, the researchers can estimate what genetic group first got the change.
one mutated birth isn't going to suddenly diffuse across an entire species.
It doesn't happen suddenly. That one mutation spreads through one family, who suddenly has the ability to survive without eating fish (substituting vegetables, instead). Over the next thousand years or so, that family (and the associated mutation) spread across the local region, and the knowledge of "it's okay to eat vegetables" spread with it. Since that group could wander further (carrying longer-lasting vegetables rather than fish), they spread farther than other groups, until they eventually became dominant.
How one random gene in one birth suddenly afflicts an entire population?
Just to be clear, it doesn't. The one random change will be in one family line, and only really become widespread if it allows the family to outgrow the rest of the population, or if the the rest of the population dies off.
Am I the only one who didn't like 1979 the first time, and don't want a replay?
As far as politics goes, yes.
The 50-year-old politicians in office now were 20 in 1979, and now see their world history through the rose-colored glasses of their youth. Without the understanding of what led to problems before, the politicians and policy-makers blunder onward, in blissful ignorance of upcoming crises. Last time these issues came up, everything seemed so simple (as everything usually does to twenty-somethings) that the prerequisite conditions were ignored. Now those conditions have returned, and the politicians would rather fight over 55,000 immigrants (that's 0.01% of the US population) than worry about what long-term problems are approaching.
As I've often said, everything is far more complex than any politician will admit. Nothing a single President or Congress administration can do can fix the economy, or bring peace to the world, or cure cancer, or eliminate hatred. All we can do is realize that we're a very small part of a very large machine, built by millions of years of entropy screwing things up. We should quit trying to use quick fixes for every problem, and instead focus on not breaking things in the same way over and over again.
Now that the LHC has located the Higgs boson, which gives particles their mass, scientists have moved on to looking for the field that gives entities karma. The search is made more difficult by the fact that karma can only be observed in the hindsight of idealists, in the absence of a strong regulation force. In an effort to reduce the regulation force's effects on the experiment, the scientists have asked all bureaucrats to vacate the laboratory premises. Unfortunately, funding for the project ran out shortly thereafter.
A console XBox device with a simple interface that shows Office documents, manages smooth Live video conferencing, and is locked down enough that any extra applications can't be installed on it, regardless of the demands of even the most whiny manager. Instead, they could be installed into a sandboxed subsystem (and visible only upon request) in case a presenter wants to show off a Windows application.
I'd buy that out of desire to have a presentation system that "just works".
Slashdot Mirror
Of course.
First, there's a "smoking gun" in the breach. The attack's general incoming direction can easily be traced to china, which at least indicates a proxy's sitting there. That gives China an opportunity to cooperate (if it really wasn't the government, or at least if they have a scapegoat handy), leading to some diplomatic goodwill and good PR all around. In an assassination, the evidence takes far longer to work out and get a general direction from, and accusing another country of assassination is a much more serious accusation, that can't be spun into happy cooperation as easily.
Then there's the target. An unclassified system being breached doesn't really matter, so even without any definite culprit or even many facts, the news can be released without too much worry. For an assassination, everyone involved in the investigation will immediately be inundated with requests for more information, taking precious time away from the investigation itself.
Less need for careful tact means the news can be released faster. This principle is unrelated to what politicians are in charge.
Preferably with a nice little tag (on the conduit itself, or at least on the string) that says where it goes.
While you (or your successors) can run around the building waving a cable tracer around like a dousing rod, labels make for a lot fewer weird looks.
$10 million will fund medical care for about half a dozen elderly grandparents whose children won't let them die gracefully. With that money, the hospital will be able to pay the staff and buy the drugs and equipment to keep their bodily functions active without brain control for another few weeks. No amount of money will give dear old Grandma a realistic chance of recovery, but the beeping of the monitors will comfort her family a bit, while they wallow in fear and postpone the actual grief.
There is no punchline here. The fact that the most biased party possible still has near-absolute control over a dying person's medical treatment is just sad, and it's a major reason medical costs are so high for everyone else.
Oh, come on... Even without that whole "causation" thing, or that "significance" bullshit, just calculating statistics is hard enough.
Especially while high.
No. It means (proabably... IANAL, and IANAPortugueseL) that as long as you aren't engaging in any commerce (including building reputation), and you're using it personally (meaning not distributing to the public at large), it's legal. In other words, downloading a song to listen to yourself is probably fine, but putting music on your Portuguese-hosted website probably isn't.
Windows 8: Emacs edition
They took many exposures totaling 23 days. From TFA:
This image is the combined total of over 2000 separate images, and the total exposure is a whopping two million seconds, or 23 days!
The structures that allow cows to eat a wide diet predate their domestication (by about 20 million years), so the breeding (which is really just human-guided evolution) is irrelevant.
Cows (and other ruminants) are effectively omnivores whose meat has been replaced by eating their own gut bacteria. Grasses are a good food because they feed the gut bacteria while providing an entirely different set of nutrients directly to the cows. When the cows then digest the bacteria, they get the high-protein supplement they need. Any other feed that provides roughly the same nutrition to the cow is suitable, because a different species of bacteria will thrive on it, and the symbiosis remains.
No, cows evolved to eat a wide variety of things and extract nutrients from them. Grass happens to be one of the better (by human standards for the cows' products) choices for their food, but it's certainly not perfect.
I can also sit down in a day and machine the parts for a bearing-polishing machine. It proves nothing, though, because I'm just copying something that's already been invented. I didn't have to come up with the idea myself, or refine it, or really put any effort into it at all. That's the key motivation for patents in the first place: Effort should be rewarded, while trivial copying should not.
So now we're stuck with a fundamental problem of having to decide what the minimum amount of effort is that deserves patent protection. The prevailing theory for the past 200 years has been that just nailing down the original idea (in a fully-functional form) is enough (but see the footnote). Now that computers have blurred the distinction between math and reality, it's the cultural perception of patents that is changing. Now there's the expectation that there must be a tangible product for the inventor's effort to be valued.
On a theoretical level, all algorithms are indeed just a transcription of a mathematical concept. Practically, though, no major program is just a perfect rendition of an underlying theory. An application is a compilation of algorithms, just as a machine is a particular arrangement of parts. All physical parts are just the physical application of certain laws of physics, so should ball-bearing-polishing machines be prohibited from patents as well?
Footnote: Minimal effort is sufficient for granting the patent, because details like utility aren't readily known at the outset. Whether that effort is sufficient for appeal is a separate matter. Since Google's particular patent idea doesn't seem to have undergone much refinement, it's more vulnerable to being found to be obvious upon review.
But do you pick which profile to use with each message, and are they all linked together under one account?
Convenient multiple personality disorder, where the person can pick which personality to use for everything.
I don't want a world where we have no intellectual property laws and ideas are stolen wholesale ... however I also don't like what software patents are doing today and I feel like we need to find a better approach to this complicated problem.
Look... I know you're fairly well-known around here, so I hate to question you, but I really don't think you're quite irrational or extreme enough for Slashdot.
No, not just multiple usernames. Multiple personas, each with their own configuration and visibility, linked to a single master account but can appear to others as though they're separate. Multiple usernames would involve logging out of one and into another to use the alternate personas, but this method removes that inconvenience.
Congratulations on your fourth-grade reading level. You've demonstrated the ability to read a headline, but not an actual patent.
The Google patent in question covers a particular method of managing multiple personas. I, for example, could have a persona of "Sarten-X", which I could use for my programming and other online dealings, and "John Smith", which I use for my professional and audio work. When someone interacts with me on a social network, they can pick which profile they're interacting with.
The patent does not broadly cover "anonymity" in general, so other companies can allow anonymous access.
So perhaps do a bit of research on your own? You clearly also don't understand the concept, but you sure are quick to take offense.
The entropy of a system is simply the number of options for that scheme, expressed in bits. Sure, there are assumptions in the comic but they are applied equally to both sides. The password uses only one particular pattern (and offers a few more bits to account for picking other patterns), while the phrase is restricted to using exactly four words. While the phrase is restricted to a 2000-word (11 bit) dictionary, the password has a 16-bit dictionary to choose from (covering a vocabulary of 65,000 words).
The comic isn't meant to be an academic paper, but rather to make accessible the results of decades of study into information theory.
Four words from a 10^4-word dictionary is (10^4)^4, which is 10,000,000,000,000,000 (or 10^16, not 10^8) possible combinations, or about 53 bits.
The dictionary used for the comic is only 2000 words.
You are not the only one, and that's sad.
While the comic has a pretty poor explanation, the theory is sound: A four-word phrase offers more options (and therefore more protection against a brute-force attack) than an 8-character password, for even a very small dictionary. In fact, the number of options is so drastically larger that it more than compensates for any alterations to the password, like adding numbers or misspelling.
Of course, the number of options is expanded even further when the password may not actually be a phrase. Maybe the password is really just a 30-digit section of pi. An attacker must try that (and every other number combination) too, so the brute-force strength of a long phrase password is still higher than a shorter random password.
For a comic, the strip is perfectly valid. A longer (though simpler) password is vastly stronger against brute-force attacks than a shorter one, even though the shorter one looks weirder.
Note, though, that the strip does not account for attacks other than brute-force, but phrases are still usually better. An attacker physically standing in your office will quickly recognize that a jumbled mess of letters and punctuation taped to your monitor is a password, but an obscure quote attributed to someone he's never heard of is just another office decoration. Even against phishing attacks or plaintext storage hacks, a long phrase is no less secure than a shorter password, since it's not the password that's being attacked.
What's so ridiculous about it? It's important to note that many factors in human population changes are not genetic - the genes just come along for the ride. Natural disasters, politics, and climate force people to mingle and move, and the good (or at least not-too-bad) genes get passed on every time a male gets close enough to a female.
We'll go in order...
mutations are so rarely beneficial
The vast majority of the mutations that are widespread through the population are either benign or beneficial. The ones that aren't don't stick around in the gene pool long enough to become widespread. It's the other half of the selection pressure you mentioned: The selection pressure culls bad mutations out quickly, so the good (or at least ineffective ones) are all that's left. This is definitely a case of history being written by the victors: The bad mutations don't usually stick around long enough to be noticed (in long-term history).
So how do they know it was a mutation?
Because some folks have it, and other folks don't. From the geographic distribution of where the haves and have-nots are, combined with the prevailing theories about human movements, the researchers can estimate what genetic group first got the change.
one mutated birth isn't going to suddenly diffuse across an entire species.
It doesn't happen suddenly. That one mutation spreads through one family, who suddenly has the ability to survive without eating fish (substituting vegetables, instead). Over the next thousand years or so, that family (and the associated mutation) spread across the local region, and the knowledge of "it's okay to eat vegetables" spread with it. Since that group could wander further (carrying longer-lasting vegetables rather than fish), they spread farther than other groups, until they eventually became dominant.
How one random gene in one birth suddenly afflicts an entire population?
Just to be clear, it doesn't. The one random change will be in one family line, and only really become widespread if it allows the family to outgrow the rest of the population, or if the the rest of the population dies off.
Am I the only one who didn't like 1979 the first time, and don't want a replay?
As far as politics goes, yes.
The 50-year-old politicians in office now were 20 in 1979, and now see their world history through the rose-colored glasses of their youth. Without the understanding of what led to problems before, the politicians and policy-makers blunder onward, in blissful ignorance of upcoming crises. Last time these issues came up, everything seemed so simple (as everything usually does to twenty-somethings) that the prerequisite conditions were ignored. Now those conditions have returned, and the politicians would rather fight over 55,000 immigrants (that's 0.01% of the US population) than worry about what long-term problems are approaching.
As I've often said, everything is far more complex than any politician will admit. Nothing a single President or Congress administration can do can fix the economy, or bring peace to the world, or cure cancer, or eliminate hatred. All we can do is realize that we're a very small part of a very large machine, built by millions of years of entropy screwing things up. We should quit trying to use quick fixes for every problem, and instead focus on not breaking things in the same way over and over again.
That philosophy won't win elections, though.
It doesn't matter what version of HTML you're using. Someone will always want the tag.
*claps*
Now that the LHC has located the Higgs boson, which gives particles their mass, scientists have moved on to looking for the field that gives entities karma. The search is made more difficult by the fact that karma can only be observed in the hindsight of idealists, in the absence of a strong regulation force. In an effort to reduce the regulation force's effects on the experiment, the scientists have asked all bureaucrats to vacate the laboratory premises. Unfortunately, funding for the project ran out shortly thereafter.
A console XBox device with a simple interface that shows Office documents, manages smooth Live video conferencing, and is locked down enough that any extra applications can't be installed on it, regardless of the demands of even the most whiny manager. Instead, they could be installed into a sandboxed subsystem (and visible only upon request) in case a presenter wants to show off a Windows application.
I'd buy that out of desire to have a presentation system that "just works".