Gee, what could possibly go wrong with the Almighty State vilifying a broad class of people and then gradually choking off their ability to communicate with the world?
Oh noez! He had sex with a consenting partner! Now he must *suffer*, or society will collapse! Why, if he isn't made an example of, people might even start thinking they had a right to decide what to do with their own bodies, and we can't very well have that.
No, you just dismissed the identities lived experiences of hundreds of thousands of people because you, for reasons that are rather unclear, wish to insist that chromosomes trump all else regardless of evidence. If a person has an unusual gender identity for their karyotype, that is prima facie evidence that at least some elements of this person's neurology, the ones which influence subjectively perceived gender identity, did not develop in a very typical way for their chromosomes, and there is no particular reason to expect other sexually dimorphic elements to have developed in the chromosomally-typical way.
Really, if you're trying to look at statistics on gender differences further out from the mean than one or two standard deviations (and if you're looking at the most famous rather than average programmers, that's what you're doing), the last thing you should be doing is approaching it with this sort of simplistic binary thinking; it seems clear that transgender people are significantly overrepresented (i'd guess a factor of ten at least over prevalence in the general population) among the upper extremes of ability in this field, and this is an interesting phenomenon well within the scope of a study on gender differences in programming ability, and one that would be totally ignored by just proclaiming chromosomes the only variable of interest ex recto. The study the article linked to is insensitive by virtue of labelling its categories 'transsexuals' and 'women' rather than 'transgender women' and 'cisgender women', and by failing to inquire about trans men in the programming field, but at least it noticed an interesting and relevant phenomenon which your preferred model of gender would ignore.
See also: genetic homosexuality and the attraction mechanism.
What does that have to do with anything? Gender identity and sexual orientation really don't have very much to do with each other, but bigots regularly conflate the two. I'm beginning to get a very clear and ugly picture of your views on the subject.
Maybe you should have spent five minutes with Google before shooting your mouth off about something you're obviously clueless about. Putting aside the sheer stupidity of claiming that subjective states such as hunger or gender dysphoria don't exist because you can't directly observe them, it just isn't true that you're speaking of a subjective state with no independently observable correlates:
Nothing. Just like there's nothing to stop the TSA from arresting someone with a phobia of flying (or crowded airports, or fascism...) on the grounds that they "look nervous". You didn't seriously think this had anything to do with catching terrorists, did you?
The EM spectrum doesn't have ends; it makes no sense to speak of something converting "1% of the EM Spectrum". Sunlight is, to a decent approximation, a black-body spectrum at about 5778 K. Of the total radiant power, about 12% lies in the ultraviolet (wavelengths shorter than 400nm), about 37% is visible, and about 51% is infrared (wavelengths longer than 700nm). At the distance of Earth's orbit, before any absorption by the atmosphere, it has a power density of about 1,367 W/m^2 (this varies depending on the time of year due to Earth's orbital eccentricity).
A given solar cell will be able to convert a certain proportion of incident radiation to electrical power; this efficiency in general will vary as a function of the wavelength, so the total power produced will be the integral over the entire spectrum of that efficiency multiplied by the incident power at that wavelength. Thus, the efficiency may depend somewhat on the spectrum used. For real-world solar cells, efficiency varies from around 6% or so for the cheap ones in calculators and such up to 19% for high-end commercially available systems, and 40% for cutting-edge materials in the laboratory.
In brief, the claim that the technology referred to in the article can achieve a 500x efficiency improvement over existing solar cells is flagrantly incompatible with the first law of thermodynamics.
Sadly, something being in the mainline kernel is no guarantee of avoiding bit-rot. I've been maintaining an elaborately modified version of the Cyclades PC-300 driver for years for precisely that reason. The SMP startup code on sparc64 has a race condition involving a shared buffer for passing params into PROM calls; I know this has been in the current kernel for at least the past year, but I believe it can only occur even in principle on machines with at least three processors. In practice the probability of a conflict rises with the number of processors; I have only been able to demonstrate it using at least five, and the 12-CPU E4500 I originally encountered it on seems to have only a single-digit-percentage chance of booting without a patch to acquire prom_entry_lock at the appropriate point.
Now, it seems hard to imagine ReiserFS will decline to that level of obscurity any time soon, but it certainly is possible for code in the mainline kernel to stay broken for a long time.
Because which strategy works better would depend on what strategy everyone else in the local population is following. You end up with an stable equilibrium proportion where both strategies work equally well, all things being equal, but if you perturb it slightly the one becomes slightly more advantageous than the other and reproduces faster until the equilibrium is restored.
Yeah, this can happen, but I dunno that this is as big a problem as you think. Spammers just plain aren't all that bright, and they don't care very much if they miss the tiny proportion of addresses that geeks try to protect like this when there are so many totally unprotected addresses so easy to obtain. It seems like a lot of the time, when they try to harvest addresses, the harvester doesn't realize + is a valid character in an address and only gets the part after the plus sign. I bounce a lot of spam sent to addresses like slashdot@persephoneslair.org and usenet@persephoneslair.org.
Except that lots and lots of web sites fail at RFC 822 and think + isn't a valid character in an e-mail address. Usually the same sort of maldesigned horrors that make you type your e-mail address twice even though, unlike your password, you can read it as you type to make sure it's correct, or have a single free-form blank for credit card numbers and enforce some idiosyncratic rule on separators (really, is $cc =~ s/-//g; that hard?), or enforce strong passwords and then cripple them with mandatory 'security' questions that allow anyone who knows you halfway well to reset your password.
Yeah, I use them too, and if web designers were a whole lot smarter they would be a better solution to things like this, but in practice lots of web sites just refuse to accept addresses like that. I should get around to making sendmail let me use an underscore instead of a + for that purpose.
Suppose Alice sends a message to Bob and encrypts it with Bob's public key. You're trying to intercept that message, and get to see the ciphertext, and you also get to see Bob's public key. If you knew Bob's private key you could decrypt the message and get the plaintext just like he does, but it'd take an unreasonably large amount of processor time to compute his private key from his public key, so you can't do that. If you know the space of possible plaintexts is relatively small, though, you can try encrypting every possible plaintext with the known public key until one matches the known ciphertext. This is really well-known stuff.
All of them are vulnerable. If you have a ciphertext, and you know the public key, you can just try brute-forcing the space of plaintexts rather than the space of keys, which may be much smaller, especially if the plaintexts all have a known form. Effectively, the fact that the public key must be public gives an attacker the ability to encrypt an unlimited number of chosen plaintexts.
If you use the public-key algorithm to encrypt a randomly generated secret key, and then switch to a secret-key cipher, then the space of possible plaintexts for the public-key cipher is at least as large as the keyspace for the secret-key cipher, and then the chosen-plaintext attack is no longer the weakest point.
RSA is a public-key cipher. They usually don't get used directly because they're much more expensive computationally than AES and the like, and potentially vulnerable to chosen-plaintext attacks. Real protocols like SSL typically use a public-key cipher like RSA or DSA to negotiate a shared secret key and perform authentication, and then switch to a symmetric cipher like AES or IDEA.
Heh. I've never caught anyone cheating on *me* that way, but I did once use the ULOG target of iptables to help a former roommate catch her boyfriend in adult chatrooms on Yahoo. He was impersonating a black man with an 18-inch penis, and fantasizing about simultaneous penetrating pregnant woman and her unborn fetus, with lethal results for the fetus.
I needed to wash my brain out with bleach after that one. Amazingly, she stayed with him two more years.
I would consider breaking into my account to look around worse than just breaking into my appartment to look around.
Exactly. Same here. Breaking into my account and snooping through my files (including 60M of IM logs, e-mail archives going back almost a decade, and probably one or two naughty pics of an ex-girlfriend) would be *much* worse than snooping around my apartment, and probably only a notch or two better than breaking into my *mind* and snooping around.
So put/home on an encrypted partition and pay attention to your system logs so you know if the machine got shut down while you were away. I think if you're living with a partner who is willing to physically mess with your machines just to read your e-mail, you have bigger problems than keeping your passwords safe anyway.
Well, I suppose I shouldn't be assuming which sex is the correct one for you, but from the implication of scarcity I'll go ahead and assume you're a straight male.
Anyway, we *do* exist. Including myself, I know of at least two women who know how to use a packet sniffer. Now, we're both gay, so that doesn't help you very much, but I'm sure there have to be straight geeky women out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Gee, what could possibly go wrong with the Almighty State vilifying a broad class of people and then gradually choking off their ability to communicate with the world?
Oh noez! He had sex with a consenting partner! Now he must *suffer*, or society will collapse! Why, if he isn't made an example of, people might even start thinking they had a right to decide what to do with their own bodies, and we can't very well have that.
Wow, most mangled Yeats quote ever. For the record, the original (from The Second Coming) is:
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
No, you just dismissed the identities lived experiences of hundreds of thousands of people because you, for reasons that are rather unclear, wish to insist that chromosomes trump all else regardless of evidence. If a person has an unusual gender identity for their karyotype, that is prima facie evidence that at least some elements of this person's neurology, the ones which influence subjectively perceived gender identity, did not develop in a very typical way for their chromosomes, and there is no particular reason to expect other sexually dimorphic elements to have developed in the chromosomally-typical way.
Really, if you're trying to look at statistics on gender differences further out from the mean than one or two standard deviations (and if you're looking at the most famous rather than average programmers, that's what you're doing), the last thing you should be doing is approaching it with this sort of simplistic binary thinking; it seems clear that transgender people are significantly overrepresented (i'd guess a factor of ten at least over prevalence in the general population) among the upper extremes of ability in this field, and this is an interesting phenomenon well within the scope of a study on gender differences in programming ability, and one that would be totally ignored by just proclaiming chromosomes the only variable of interest ex recto. The study the article linked to is insensitive by virtue of labelling its categories 'transsexuals' and 'women' rather than 'transgender women' and 'cisgender women', and by failing to inquire about trans men in the programming field, but at least it noticed an interesting and relevant phenomenon which your preferred model of gender would ignore.
See also: genetic homosexuality and the attraction mechanism.
What does that have to do with anything? Gender identity and sexual orientation really don't have very much to do with each other, but bigots regularly conflate the two. I'm beginning to get a very clear and ugly picture of your views on the subject.
Maybe you should have spent five minutes with Google before shooting your mouth off about something you're obviously clueless about. Putting aside the sheer stupidity of claiming that subjective states such as hunger or gender dysphoria don't exist because you can't directly observe them, it just isn't true that you're speaking of a subjective state with no independently observable correlates:
Male-to-Female Transsexuals Have Female Neuron Numbers in a Limbic Nucleus
That must be why people keep assuming I'm straight. I never make any gay noises.
Nothing. Just like there's nothing to stop the TSA from arresting someone with a phobia of flying (or crowded airports, or fascism...) on the grounds that they "look nervous". You didn't seriously think this had anything to do with catching terrorists, did you?
We then can have a balances between peoples right to security (which out weighs your right to free speech) and free speech.
Aren't there some books you could be burning somewhere?
I'd like to see them install a trojan on my UltraSPARC.
Can one of you physicists tell me how 4.5 Kelvin is different from 2 Kelvin, operationally?
At 2 K, adding a given amount of energy makes the entropy of the system go up 2.25 times as much as it would at 4.5 K. :)
The EM spectrum doesn't have ends; it makes no sense to speak of something converting "1% of the EM Spectrum". Sunlight is, to a decent approximation, a black-body spectrum at about 5778 K. Of the total radiant power, about 12% lies in the ultraviolet (wavelengths shorter than 400nm), about 37% is visible, and about 51% is infrared (wavelengths longer than 700nm). At the distance of Earth's orbit, before any absorption by the atmosphere, it has a power density of about 1,367 W/m^2 (this varies depending on the time of year due to Earth's orbital eccentricity).
A given solar cell will be able to convert a certain proportion of incident radiation to electrical power; this efficiency in general will vary as a function of the wavelength, so the total power produced will be the integral over the entire spectrum of that efficiency multiplied by the incident power at that wavelength. Thus, the efficiency may depend somewhat on the spectrum used. For real-world solar cells, efficiency varies from around 6% or so for the cheap ones in calculators and such up to 19% for high-end commercially available systems, and 40% for cutting-edge materials in the laboratory.
In brief, the claim that the technology referred to in the article can achieve a 500x efficiency improvement over existing solar cells is flagrantly incompatible with the first law of thermodynamics.
Sadly, something being in the mainline kernel is no guarantee of avoiding bit-rot. I've been maintaining an elaborately modified version of the Cyclades PC-300 driver for years for precisely that reason. The SMP startup code on sparc64 has a race condition involving a shared buffer for passing params into PROM calls; I know this has been in the current kernel for at least the past year, but I believe it can only occur even in principle on machines with at least three processors. In practice the probability of a conflict rises with the number of processors; I have only been able to demonstrate it using at least five, and the 12-CPU E4500 I originally encountered it on seems to have only a single-digit-percentage chance of booting without a patch to acquire prom_entry_lock at the appropriate point.
Now, it seems hard to imagine ReiserFS will decline to that level of obscurity any time soon, but it certainly is possible for code in the mainline kernel to stay broken for a long time.
Because which strategy works better would depend on what strategy everyone else in the local population is following. You end up with an stable equilibrium proportion where both strategies work equally well, all things being equal, but if you perturb it slightly the one becomes slightly more advantageous than the other and reproduces faster until the equilibrium is restored.
Yeah, this can happen, but I dunno that this is as big a problem as you think. Spammers just plain aren't all that bright, and they don't care very much if they miss the tiny proportion of addresses that geeks try to protect like this when there are so many totally unprotected addresses so easy to obtain. It seems like a lot of the time, when they try to harvest addresses, the harvester doesn't realize + is a valid character in an address and only gets the part after the plus sign. I bounce a lot of spam sent to addresses like slashdot@persephoneslair.org and usenet@persephoneslair.org.
Except that lots and lots of web sites fail at RFC 822 and think + isn't a valid character in an e-mail address. Usually the same sort of maldesigned horrors that make you type your e-mail address twice even though, unlike your password, you can read it as you type to make sure it's correct, or have a single free-form blank for credit card numbers and enforce some idiosyncratic rule on separators (really, is $cc =~ s/-//g; that hard?), or enforce strong passwords and then cripple them with mandatory 'security' questions that allow anyone who knows you halfway well to reset your password.
Yeah, I use them too, and if web designers were a whole lot smarter they would be a better solution to things like this, but in practice lots of web sites just refuse to accept addresses like that. I should get around to making sendmail let me use an underscore instead of a + for that purpose.
Suppose Alice sends a message to Bob and encrypts it with Bob's public key. You're trying to intercept that message, and get to see the ciphertext, and you also get to see Bob's public key. If you knew Bob's private key you could decrypt the message and get the plaintext just like he does, but it'd take an unreasonably large amount of processor time to compute his private key from his public key, so you can't do that. If you know the space of possible plaintexts is relatively small, though, you can try encrypting every possible plaintext with the known public key until one matches the known ciphertext. This is really well-known stuff.
All of them are vulnerable. If you have a ciphertext, and you know the public key, you can just try brute-forcing the space of plaintexts rather than the space of keys, which may be much smaller, especially if the plaintexts all have a known form. Effectively, the fact that the public key must be public gives an attacker the ability to encrypt an unlimited number of chosen plaintexts.
If you use the public-key algorithm to encrypt a randomly generated secret key, and then switch to a secret-key cipher, then the space of possible plaintexts for the public-key cipher is at least as large as the keyspace for the secret-key cipher, and then the chosen-plaintext attack is no longer the weakest point.
RSA is a public-key cipher. They usually don't get used directly because they're much more expensive computationally than AES and the like, and potentially vulnerable to chosen-plaintext attacks. Real protocols like SSL typically use a public-key cipher like RSA or DSA to negotiate a shared secret key and perform authentication, and then switch to a symmetric cipher like AES or IDEA.
It's okay, I'm kinda used to the stupid. At least it mostly happens here rather than in my real life.
Heh. I've never caught anyone cheating on *me* that way, but I did once use the ULOG target of iptables to help a former roommate catch her boyfriend in adult chatrooms on Yahoo. He was impersonating a black man with an 18-inch penis, and fantasizing about simultaneous penetrating pregnant woman and her unborn fetus, with lethal results for the fetus.
I needed to wash my brain out with bleach after that one. Amazingly, she stayed with him two more years.
I would consider breaking into my account to look around worse than just breaking into my appartment to look around.
Exactly. Same here. Breaking into my account and snooping through my files (including 60M of IM logs, e-mail archives going back almost a decade, and probably one or two naughty pics of an ex-girlfriend) would be *much* worse than snooping around my apartment, and probably only a notch or two better than breaking into my *mind* and snooping around.
So put /home on an encrypted partition and pay attention to your system logs so you know if the machine got shut down while you were away. I think if you're living with a partner who is willing to physically mess with your machines just to read your e-mail, you have bigger problems than keeping your passwords safe anyway.
You seem to have been interested enough to bother replying.
Well, I suppose I shouldn't be assuming which sex is the correct one for you, but from the implication of scarcity I'll go ahead and assume you're a straight male.
Anyway, we *do* exist. Including myself, I know of at least two women who know how to use a packet sniffer. Now, we're both gay, so that doesn't help you very much, but I'm sure there have to be straight geeky women out there.
I am the very best kind of mutant. :)