Why would they have any goal to be working toward at all? We take it for granted that an intelligent entity would necessarily value self-preservation. But it doesn't have to be so, that's a product of natural selection. Why would a machine intelligence "care" if it survived? Why would it care about anything, for that matter? If anything, it'll be selected to have goals to serve us.
If intelligent machines ever pose a threat to humans, it will be because of another group of humans giving them that goal.
Once you have more than a half dozen passwords, your ability to remember them drastically decreased unless you are some sort of savant.
Absolutely. The fact that we (application developers) are dealing with passwords at all is the root of the problem here. The first time I wrote an app that did this (in 1997) I felt a little queasy about it. Yes you should use a three-tier design if at all possible. Ad-hoc queries cause many more issues than just this anyway; stored procedures should be the only allowed access from the middle tier. The password should be hashed a zillion times before being stored or compared.
But really, that's all just band-aids. We should not have to re-implement this for every application, and the user should not be subjected to the absolute train wreck of having to register and make up credentials for every fucking site. I would have thought something better would be here by now.
No amount of bitching at users or developers is going to help. This whole way of doing things needs to be tossed, and we need to figure out which one of these we want. Or something else if none of those are really sufficient. But something.
Point taken -- thanks for the clarification. There are a few comments in this thread that seem to be saying that you can't trust that something hasn't been altered, even when the hash matches, but it's hard to tell what they're saying.
Minor nit-pick: A hash is not a hash. I'm sure you are aware, but just for clarity -- Cryptographic hashes are intended to make it very hard to modify the binary stream without changing the hash. Not all hashes have that property. If you know what the cryptographic hash is supposed to be (you trust the hash) then you can be confident the stream has not been modified if the hashes match (ignoring known weaknesses, e.g. in MD5.)
Yep. This is really more a function of the (guest) OS than anything else. As long as the guest is OK booting under either hardware (physical and virtual) dynamically, it should work fine. It's been a long time since mainstream OSs couldn't do that. It can be a little tricky to set up the VM to use a physical partition, though. That's the part that bootcamp does for you, which is nice, but it's definitely not the only way to make this work.
I don't know why everyone is confused about this, but this isn't "unique symbols." The palm pilot input method was innovative because it solved two problems with handwriting recognition. The first problem was that there was nowhere near enough processing power to run a real handwriting recognition algorithm (which existed at the time). The second was that because you are writing each letter in the same space, there is less information to work with. Without character spacing, you have no idea whether a stroke is part of the current glyph or the beginning of a new one. They solved both problems the same way: by making each character a single continuous path, and the direction/order matters. That makes the recognition easier, and it knows when you are done with a character because you lift the stylus.
The downside is that you have to invest quite a bit to learn how to do it. It's frustrating to have to learn how to do something you already know how to do: write.
This is more sophisticated. There is quite a bit of variation in the way people write letters, and without the prescribed continuous glyph, a lot of ambiguity.
Give them some credit. This isn't just a rehash of Graffiti. It's real handwriting recognition. I think that's impressive for such a small device. Not as limited as the palm pilot for sure, but still a very limited machine. It may be an incremental improvement, but that's what innovation is, literally, distinct from invention.
Without ASLR, return to x exploits are trivial for all x. All that is needed is the address of a function (or any code -- it doesn't have to be the 'official' entry point of a function) that does something useful to the attacker, and a way to clobber the stack.
This doesn't really have anything to do with libc, except that it is a rich source of well known addresses (without ASLR). So what in the hell are you talking about?
You're both wrong/right. In order to supplant Objective-C, Swift would have to play well with the bazillion lines of Objective-C, and coexist with it for possibly a very long time. On the other hand, even if Apple "could not be more clear" that swift is built to supplant Objective-C, that doesn't mean it will succeed, and doesn't mean Apple won't change their mind. It's a gamble and they certainly know it. They keep that to themselves in order to encourage you to drink the cool-aid.
If only there were some way to simulate physical systems like that. Where will they find the computing power? Plus the software probably costsafortune.
Life is not one of the great scientific unknowns. Live and dead mice are not indistinguishable. No one today expects microbes to spontaneously come into being. Creating life from scratch is a technical problem, not a theoretical one. If stating so is pedantic then so be it.
I suppose it's going to be a while before we run out of alpha emitters. So the Wikipedia page is wrong then, when it says Helium is a finite resource. Last time I trust Wikipedia (yeah right:).
You said it slowly dissipates into space. That means the rate it leaves the atmosphere is low, so the rate it is replenished is low, and that's the limiting extraction rate.
According to this (that didn't take long), the rate Helium leaves the atmosphere is 50g/s, or 3e5 cm^3/s. The National Helium Reserve is 1e9 m^3. So, extracting all of the Helium from the atmosphere before it escapes, it would take 1e9 m^3 / (3e5 cm^3/s), or over 100 years to replace the reserves.
But extracting all of it is hopelessly unrealistic. I don't know, but it seems even 1% would be ambitious. So now we're looking at tens of thousands of years.
So either the national reserve is ridiculously large, or removing it from the atmosphere is not going to be a solution to the shortage. Right? Or am I missing something (else)?
That makes more sense, thanks. I mean, what's so special about booting from the network, why does it have to be wifi, and why do you need a special device?
Here in Seattle, most of the buses that don't get on the freeway are electric trolleys, and many of the ones that do drive on the freeway are hybrids. They looked like this in 1940, now they look like this.
Interesting. The last sentence on the Wikipedia page for helium:
"Helium is a finite resource and is one of the few elements with escape velocity, meaning that once released into the atmosphere, it escapes into space."
Slashdot Mirror
Typical programmers.
FTFY.
Besides, if you think that's bad, you should see what happens when they actually do do something. <grin/>
Why would they have any goal to be working toward at all? We take it for granted that an intelligent entity would necessarily value self-preservation. But it doesn't have to be so, that's a product of natural selection. Why would a machine intelligence "care" if it survived? Why would it care about anything, for that matter? If anything, it'll be selected to have goals to serve us.
If intelligent machines ever pose a threat to humans, it will be because of another group of humans giving them that goal.
Hey, you said it, not me. ;)
Once you have more than a half dozen passwords, your ability to remember them drastically decreased unless you are some sort of savant.
Absolutely. The fact that we (application developers) are dealing with passwords at all is the root of the problem here. The first time I wrote an app that did this (in 1997) I felt a little queasy about it. Yes you should use a three-tier design if at all possible. Ad-hoc queries cause many more issues than just this anyway; stored procedures should be the only allowed access from the middle tier. The password should be hashed a zillion times before being stored or compared.
But really, that's all just band-aids. We should not have to re-implement this for every application, and the user should not be subjected to the absolute train wreck of having to register and make up credentials for every fucking site. I would have thought something better would be here by now.
No amount of bitching at users or developers is going to help. This whole way of doing things needs to be tossed, and we need to figure out which one of these we want. Or something else if none of those are really sufficient. But something.
Point taken -- thanks for the clarification. There are a few comments in this thread that seem to be saying that you can't trust that something hasn't been altered, even when the hash matches, but it's hard to tell what they're saying.
Minor nit-pick: A hash is not a hash. I'm sure you are aware, but just for clarity -- Cryptographic hashes are intended to make it very hard to modify the binary stream without changing the hash. Not all hashes have that property. If you know what the cryptographic hash is supposed to be (you trust the hash) then you can be confident the stream has not been modified if the hashes match (ignoring known weaknesses, e.g. in MD5.)
Yep. This is really more a function of the (guest) OS than anything else. As long as the guest is OK booting under either hardware (physical and virtual) dynamically, it should work fine. It's been a long time since mainstream OSs couldn't do that. It can be a little tricky to set up the VM to use a physical partition, though. That's the part that bootcamp does for you, which is nice, but it's definitely not the only way to make this work.
I don't know why everyone is confused about this, but this isn't "unique symbols." The palm pilot input method was innovative because it solved two problems with handwriting recognition. The first problem was that there was nowhere near enough processing power to run a real handwriting recognition algorithm (which existed at the time). The second was that because you are writing each letter in the same space, there is less information to work with. Without character spacing, you have no idea whether a stroke is part of the current glyph or the beginning of a new one. They solved both problems the same way: by making each character a single continuous path, and the direction/order matters. That makes the recognition easier, and it knows when you are done with a character because you lift the stylus.
The downside is that you have to invest quite a bit to learn how to do it. It's frustrating to have to learn how to do something you already know how to do: write.
This is more sophisticated. There is quite a bit of variation in the way people write letters, and without the prescribed continuous glyph, a lot of ambiguity.
Give them some credit. This isn't just a rehash of Graffiti. It's real handwriting recognition. I think that's impressive for such a small device. Not as limited as the palm pilot for sure, but still a very limited machine. It may be an incremental improvement, but that's what innovation is, literally, distinct from invention.
Without ASLR, return to x exploits are trivial for all x. All that is needed is the address of a function (or any code -- it doesn't have to be the 'official' entry point of a function) that does something useful to the attacker, and a way to clobber the stack.
This doesn't really have anything to do with libc, except that it is a rich source of well known addresses (without ASLR). So what in the hell are you talking about?
That's a lot of languages and platforms. Know what they all have in common? I'll give you a hint; it starts with C.
You're both wrong/right. In order to supplant Objective-C, Swift would have to play well with the bazillion lines of Objective-C, and coexist with it for possibly a very long time. On the other hand, even if Apple "could not be more clear" that swift is built to supplant Objective-C, that doesn't mean it will succeed, and doesn't mean Apple won't change their mind. It's a gamble and they certainly know it. They keep that to themselves in order to encourage you to drink the cool-aid.
.NET
See also: Microsoft and
If only there were some way to simulate physical systems like that. Where will they find the computing power? Plus the software probably costs a fortune.
RAM generally is, and address space always is.
Here's a few choice quotes:
Although now rejected by mainstream science, vitalism has a long history...
Vitalism is no longer philosophically and scientifically viable...
By 1931, "Biologists have almost unanimously abandoned vitalism as an acknowledged belief."
Life is not one of the great scientific unknowns. Live and dead mice are not indistinguishable. No one today expects microbes to spontaneously come into being. Creating life from scratch is a technical problem, not a theoretical one. If stating so is pedantic then so be it.
Let me say this another way.. How are you so sure it's dead?
Pulse?
How quaint. When I need to know something, my computer travels back in time and alters history so that I always knew it.
If all of your measurements are the same, you're either not very good at taking measurements, or you're not very good at killing mice.
You better let the Nobel people know to get his prize ready, because he's right. Entropy is unlikely to decrease in a closed system. But it can.
I suppose it's going to be a while before we run out of alpha emitters. So the Wikipedia page is wrong then, when it says Helium is a finite resource. Last time I trust Wikipedia (yeah right:).
You said it slowly dissipates into space. That means the rate it leaves the atmosphere is low, so the rate it is replenished is low, and that's the limiting extraction rate.
According to this (that didn't take long), the rate Helium leaves the atmosphere is 50g/s, or 3e5 cm^3/s. The National Helium Reserve is 1e9 m^3. So, extracting all of the Helium from the atmosphere before it escapes, it would take 1e9 m^3 / (3e5 cm^3/s), or over 100 years to replace the reserves.
But extracting all of it is hopelessly unrealistic. I don't know, but it seems even 1% would be ambitious. So now we're looking at tens of thousands of years.
So either the national reserve is ridiculously large, or removing it from the atmosphere is not going to be a solution to the shortage. Right? Or am I missing something (else)?
That makes more sense, thanks. I mean, what's so special about booting from the network, why does it have to be wifi, and why do you need a special device?
Here in Seattle, most of the buses that don't get on the freeway are electric trolleys, and many of the ones that do drive on the freeway are hybrids. They looked like this in 1940, now they look like this.
"Helium is a finite resource and is one of the few elements with escape velocity, meaning that once released into the atmosphere, it escapes into space."
So how does that work?
I take it you have some reservations about the veracity of his assertions?