Speaking of the swearing capabilities of the English language, this particular porcelain-contained weather anomaly actually originated with Linus having to revert to Finnish when trying to find a powerful enough curse to suit the particular level of stupidity in the transgression being addressed at the time:
And because you were about to ask, "perkeleen vittupää" as an idiom translates to "you fucking idiot", while a more literal translation would be: "In the name of the overgod, you are a cunthead". Finnish is kind of expressive in that particular area:-)
You of course know the answer already, since you posted the quiz in your sig, but I though it might be fun to post the quiz in a more explicit form, so that more people have a chance to participate. So here goes:
What is the difference between these two groups?
Group A
.startdot@example.com
two..dots@example.com
twodots@example..com
enddot.@example.com
startdash@-subdomain.example.com
enddash@subdomain-.example.com
Group B
ipv4@[127.0.0.1]
ipv6@[IPv6:CAFE::BABE]
!#$&={|}~?^/@example.com
user@localhost.localdomain
"quoted"@example.com
Three point hint: it has to do with RFC 2821.
One point hint: out of the approximately 200 000 people who have implemented a way to pattern match an email address,
approximately seven have ever actually bothered to read the RFC.
My bank's site requires three things to authenticate me:
1: a user code, 8 characters of randomness generated by the bank (something I and the bank both know) 2: a password, at least 8 character of not-very-randomness generated by me (something the bank can check without actually having to store it) 3: a four-digit number from a printed wallet-size list of one-time codes generated by the bank (something I have)
The password used to be also generated by the bank, but they came to their senses; now that I get to choose it myself, even the clerk who created my account (and possibly caught a glimpse at my one-time password list in the process) does not know everything that is needed to authenticate as me.
The extra trouble is, of course, the exchange of the one-time code lists. This they do by mailing me a new one when there are ~20 unused codes left in the old one, and then I just need to log in to their web site, give the id of the new list, and confirm the list change by a code from the old list.
Not nearly as high-tech as SecurID, but works like a charm.
Since Australia is a member of the UN, the right to free speech is quite explicit there too.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
an improvement from 10mpg to 11mpg is a much larger improvement in fuel consumed than going from 40mpg to 41mpg
Interestingly, the difference in fuel costs for 10 to 11 MPG is even bigger than the difference between 40 to 44 MPG. (proof: assume that the distance is 440 miles. The respective amounts of fuel are 44, 40, 11 and 10 gallons)
But whichever way you place a fraction, the divisor will be the one to throw anyone's intuition off, so it is equally easy to cook up a situation where thinking in liters/100km will mislead you:
If your budget allows you exactly 100 liters of fuel a month, then an improvement from 10 to 9 liters/100km will give you as many extra monthly kilometers as
a) an improvement from 5 to 4 liters/kilometer, or
b) an improvement from 5 to 4.5 liters/kilometer?
Solution: Neither. The respective distances are 1000km to 1111km, 2000km to 2500km and 2000 to 2222 km.
Why not km/liter, which is a much more convenient format for any sort of day-to-day use...
It does not really matter. There are three situations where you will ever need the fuel consumption stats, and in each one of them both ways are just as easy to use. I used MPG instead of km/liter below, since the two are conceptually equal, but the former makes for easier reading as it is a commonly used unit.
1. Comparing the fuel economy of cars
bigger MPG is better
smaller liters/100km is better
2. Computing the fuel costs for a given trip, when you cannot use the "top up before you leave, top up again at destination" method
divide the trip length by MPG to get gallons
multiply the trip length by liters/100km to get liters
3. Estimating whether you can reach a destination without refueling. This is the only case which you'll typically have to do in your head, since you are driving. Therefore you want to avoid division, which is difficult to do this way. However, both systems will cope easily:
multiply remaining fuel by MPG to get your range, and compare with remaining distance
multiply remaining distance by liters/100km (division by 100 is easy) to get required fuel, and compare with remaining fuel.
In the third situation both methods involve only a multiplication of two small numbers, so even if you cannot calculate the correct figures, it's easy enough to hit the correct ballpark with either method.
There does not seem to be a real difference between the convenience of the systems in day-to-day use.
It seems slightly silly to me that the content providers have pay for their network access in order to offer their services, which they usually do for free. A contentless net is a useless net, so it would seem reasonable that a content provider get their connection at very cheap prices, at least. Of course this will never happen, but let's say, for argument's sake, that Google started to aggressively renegotiate their peering agreements. It would seem that anyone not willing to peer with them at dictated terms would be left with an unsellable Google-less Internet.
The smaller content providers obviously cannot do anything so straightforward without at least uniting their power first, but if they ever did, I think the ISPs would be the ones to fold first, after all they have to sell _something_ to the home customer.
Naturally, that would mean every web page instantly becoming uselessly heavy with ads and no concern for bandwith usage, so let's hope they never get around to it.
(Full disclosure: I work at a company that hosts several relatively large web services.)
It's easy to overthink even in the simplest cases
on
Taco Bell Programming
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I once had a pair of command line tools that both printed lists of words (usernames, actually, one per row), and I wanted to find out how many unique ones there were. Obviously, the right hand side part of the pipeline was going to be something along the lines of " | sort -u | wc -l", but then I got utterly stuck by the left hand side. How can I combine the STDOUTs of two processes? Do I really need to resort to using temporary files? Is there really no tool to do the logical opposite of the "tee" command?
You are probably thinking: "Oh, you silly person, that's so trivial, you must be very incompetent", but in case you aren't, you might want to spend a minute trying to figure it out before reading on. I even asked a colleague for help before realizing that the reason I could not find a tool for the task was quite an obvious one: such a tool does not exist. Or actually it kinda does, but only in an implied sense: what I was hoping to achieve could be done by the humble semicolon and a pair of parens. I only had to put the two commands in parens to run them in a subshell, put a semicolon in between, so one will run after the other is finished, and I was done. I guess it was just that the logical leap from "This task is so simple, there must be a tool for this" to "just run the commands one after another" was too big for my feeble mind to accomplish.
So I guess the moral of the story is, even if you want to use just one simple tool, you may be overthinking it:-)
Do you inspect and thoroughly understand every update that your distro suggests
Of course not. This is because it is considerably more difficult to compromise a distro's packet distribution system than it is to compromise or spoof a website. Tricking my browser should be even easier.
Things might have been different had I spotted any kind of digital signature (or even a checksum) anywhere near the download page, or if the download had even originated on a SSL verified server. This is very likely to be because of incompetence of the guys running the site, but on my list of reasons for adding things to the kernel, incompetence is not exactly on the top.
Is anything bad going to happen to you if you compile and run that C code? As far as I can tell, no.
You are very likely correct in thinking that adding yet another anonymous recommendation on the internet will make more people run the code. However, this is Slashdot, where the users are slightly more security aware than on an average internet site.
You see, If I were to attack all those nifty linux boxen out there, what would be a better attack vector than advertising your exploit on slashdot, which is known to accept almost anything on the front page, and yet is very likely to contain the biggest active linux user community on the nets? By looking at the code it seems obvious that the tool contains enough binary code to contain an exploit or three. If it is never used in a malicious way, it is somewhat difficult to say. So, outside a security lab setting, it is hard to tell if the provided code is not the exploit itself. Definitely "You are probably getting hacked right now! Check for viruses for free!" has been one of the more common attack vector against Windows users.
Whatever the case, I would not recommend running code that looks like this:
static char dis4blens4sel1nuxhayettgdr64545[] and static int wtfyourunhere_heee(char *out_release, char* out_version)
[in American English] "3 feet square" refers to an area 3 ft. x 3 ft
I'm no expert in your language on that side of the big wet thing, but in Finglish the phrase would be "3 foot square", modulo hyphens. Which just further proves your point about the construction being annoying, I guess:-)
Here's my translation of the Finnish air force article (http://www.ilmavoimat.fi/index.php?id=1149) the parent mentioned. Only the first bit talks about the engine damage, the rest is about how the air force is going to measure the ash levels and handle its routine operations.
Ash particles pose a real threat to aviation safety in the Finnish air space.
Over Thursday and Friday, the Air Force has examined the F-18 Hornet fighters of the Lapland Wing that flew practice flights over northern Finland on Thursday morning. The air space was still open to the public then.
The planes were examined after they landed, and volcanic ash dust, resembling potato flour, was detected in the engine intakes. An engine of one of the Hornets was further examined with a fiber optic camera. It was concluded from the images, that significant engine damage is caused by even a short flight through ash.
The pictures show that the accumulated ash has melted inside the combustion chamber, where the temperature is around 1000 degrees centigrade (1800 F). The molten ash blocks the cooling ducts, which causes overheating of engine parts, and the materials are weakened. This causes a risk for fractures in the rotating parts of the engine, and in the worst case the parts will break apart and the engine will be completely destroyed.
The exposed Hornets will be thoroughly inspected. It will be necessary to dismantle at least some of the engines, after which they will be sent to Patria engine repairs for further examination. Any engines with noticeable ash exposure will be taken apart to determine the full extent of the damage. The cooling air ducts will also be checked for ash blockages at that time.
No, it's not at all the same.
If the number of people that can multitask is only one in 40, I wonder what's the proportion of people who can focus on a _single_ task for long enough to read through an entire Slashdot summary. So far that summary has defeated at least someone who gets paid to read them, and someone who was prompted to do so by my earlier comment.
To learn to program, a person needs the programmer mindset. At the bottom of that is the ability to run the program in one's head, thinking "If I were the computer, what would I be doing at this point of the program." This skill is not something that people are born with, it must be learned.
This means that the beginner's language must be very simple, have a very clearly defined instruction set, and it must be able to keep the would-be programmer's interest for a long enough time for the lessons to sink in. It is entirely OK if the language isn't the current fad, useful in real life, general-purpose, or even Turing complete, as long as it is simple enough, and the output is something else than just boring plain text.
I haven't tried programming Lego Mindstorms myself, so I'll have to stick to recommending Logo. (which, for a young teen, is not at all too childish.)
The programmer will tell you when it is time to get to more "useful" languages.
To me it seems a bit selfish to deprive the universe of a higher level of intelligence just because the said intelligence might consider its creators expendable.
As I see it, no purpose for the existence of intelligent life in the universe can be found by our current level of intelligence.
From this, it seems clear that one of the following must be true:
there is no purpose for the existence on intelligence
there is a purpose, but it is impossible to find using rational thought alone
there is a purpose, and it is possibly to find using rational thought, but ours is not on a high enough level
Now, from the point of view of finding the purpose of intelligent life, it does not matter what we do if either 1 or 2 happens to be the case. To take this to an extreme, intelligent life could be said to be very little different from the non-intelligent type. If our universe happened to work in such a manner that 3 were true, however, then it should be our primary concern to achieve a higher level of consciousness.
So, from an extreme rationalist point of view, if we continue strive for a higher level of intelligent thought, we do not have to admit there is nothing special about the ability of logical thinking.
Slashdot Mirror
... the three basic components of life found in both DNA and RNA -- uracil, cytosine, and thymine.
The three components present in both DNA and RNA are cytosine, guanine and adenine. Uracil is only present in RNA, and thymine only in DNA.
Speaking of the swearing capabilities of the English language, this particular porcelain-contained weather anomaly actually originated with Linus having to revert to Finnish when trying to find a powerful enough curse to suit the particular level of stupidity in the transgression being addressed at the time:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2013/7/13/132
And because you were about to ask, "perkeleen vittupää" as an idiom translates to "you fucking idiot", while a more literal translation would be: "In the name of the overgod, you are a cunthead". Finnish is kind of expressive in that particular area :-)
You of course know the answer already, since you posted the quiz in your sig, but I though it might be fun to post the quiz in a more explicit form, so that more people have a chance to participate. So here goes:
What is the difference between these two groups?
Group A
Group B
Three point hint: it has to do with RFC 2821.
One point hint: out of the approximately 200 000 people who have implemented a way to pattern match an email address, approximately seven have ever actually bothered to read the RFC.
</Offtopic>
My bank's site requires three things to authenticate me:
1: a user code, 8 characters of randomness generated by the bank (something I and the bank both know)
2: a password, at least 8 character of not-very-randomness generated by me (something the bank can check without actually having to store it)
3: a four-digit number from a printed wallet-size list of one-time codes generated by the bank (something I have)
The password used to be also generated by the bank, but they came to their senses; now that I get to choose it myself, even the clerk who created my account (and possibly caught a glimpse at my one-time password list in the process) does not know everything that is needed to authenticate as me.
The extra trouble is, of course, the exchange of the one-time code lists. This they do by mailing me a new one when there are ~20 unused codes left in the old one, and then I just need to log in to their web site, give the id of the new list, and confirm the list change by a code from the old list.
Not nearly as high-tech as SecurID, but works like a charm.
Those would be one-time passwords. One time pads are something different.
Since Australia is a member of the UN, the right to free speech is quite explicit there too.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 19:
Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.
an improvement from 10mpg to 11mpg is a much larger improvement in fuel consumed than going from 40mpg to 41mpg
Interestingly, the difference in fuel costs for 10 to 11 MPG is even bigger than the difference between 40 to 44 MPG. (proof: assume that the distance is 440 miles. The respective amounts of fuel are 44, 40, 11 and 10 gallons)
But whichever way you place a fraction, the divisor will be the one to throw anyone's intuition off, so it is equally easy to cook up a situation where thinking in liters/100km will mislead you:
If your budget allows you exactly 100 liters of fuel a month, then an improvement from 10 to 9 liters/100km will give you as many extra monthly kilometers as
a) an improvement from 5 to 4 liters/kilometer, or
b) an improvement from 5 to 4.5 liters/kilometer?
Solution: Neither. The respective distances are 1000km to 1111km, 2000km to 2500km and 2000 to 2222 km.
people suck at math.
Exactly.
Why not km/liter, which is a much more convenient format for any sort of day-to-day use ...
It does not really matter. There are three situations where you will ever need the fuel consumption stats, and in each one of them both ways are just as easy to use. I used MPG instead of km/liter below, since the two are conceptually equal, but the former makes for easier reading as it is a commonly used unit.
1. Comparing the fuel economy of cars
bigger MPG is better
smaller liters/100km is better
2. Computing the fuel costs for a given trip, when you cannot use the "top up before you leave, top up again at destination" method
divide the trip length by MPG to get gallons
multiply the trip length by liters/100km to get liters
3. Estimating whether you can reach a destination without refueling. This is the only case which you'll typically have to do in your head, since you are driving. Therefore you want to avoid division, which is difficult to do this way. However, both systems will cope easily:
multiply remaining fuel by MPG to get your range, and compare with remaining distance
multiply remaining distance by liters/100km (division by 100 is easy) to get required fuel, and compare with remaining fuel.
In the third situation both methods involve only a multiplication of two small numbers, so even if you cannot calculate the correct figures, it's easy enough to hit the correct ballpark with either method.
There does not seem to be a real difference between the convenience of the systems in day-to-day use.
It seems slightly silly to me that the content providers have pay for their network access in order to offer their services, which they usually do for free. A contentless net is a useless net, so it would seem reasonable that a content provider get their connection at very cheap prices, at least. Of course this will never happen, but let's say, for argument's sake, that Google started to aggressively renegotiate their peering agreements. It would seem that anyone not willing to peer with them at dictated terms would be left with an unsellable Google-less Internet.
The smaller content providers obviously cannot do anything so straightforward without at least uniting their power first, but if they ever did, I think the ISPs would be the ones to fold first, after all they have to sell _something_ to the home customer.
Naturally, that would mean every web page instantly becoming uselessly heavy with ads and no concern for bandwith usage, so let's hope they never get around to it.
(Full disclosure: I work at a company that hosts several relatively large web services.)
I once had a pair of command line tools that both printed lists of words (usernames, actually, one per row), and I wanted to find out how many unique ones there were. Obviously, the right hand side part of the pipeline was going to be something along the lines of " | sort -u | wc -l", but then I got utterly stuck by the left hand side. How can I combine the STDOUTs of two processes? Do I really need to resort to using temporary files? Is there really no tool to do the logical opposite of the "tee" command?
You are probably thinking: "Oh, you silly person, that's so trivial, you must be very incompetent", but in case you aren't, you might want to spend a minute trying to figure it out before reading on. I even asked a colleague for help before realizing that the reason I could not find a tool for the task was quite an obvious one: such a tool does not exist. Or actually it kinda does, but only in an implied sense: what I was hoping to achieve could be done by the humble semicolon and a pair of parens. I only had to put the two commands in parens to run them in a subshell, put a semicolon in between, so one will run after the other is finished, and I was done. I guess it was just that the logical leap from "This task is so simple, there must be a tool for this" to "just run the commands one after another" was too big for my feeble mind to accomplish.
So I guess the moral of the story is, even if you want to use just one simple tool, you may be overthinking it :-)
Do you inspect and thoroughly understand every update that your distro suggests
Of course not. This is because it is considerably more difficult to compromise a distro's packet distribution system than it is to compromise or spoof a website. Tricking my browser should be even easier.
Things might have been different had I spotted any kind of digital signature (or even a checksum) anywhere near the download page, or if the download had even originated on a SSL verified server. This is very likely to be because of incompetence of the guys running the site, but on my list of reasons for adding things to the kernel, incompetence is not exactly on the top.
Is anything bad going to happen to you if you compile and run that C code? As far as I can tell, no.
You are very likely correct in thinking that adding yet another anonymous recommendation on the internet will make more people run the code. However, this is Slashdot, where the users are slightly more security aware than on an average internet site.
You see, If I were to attack all those nifty linux boxen out there, what would be a better attack vector than advertising your exploit on slashdot, which is known to accept almost anything on the front page, and yet is very likely to contain the biggest active linux user community on the nets? By looking at the code it seems obvious that the tool contains enough binary code to contain an exploit or three. If it is never used in a malicious way, it is somewhat difficult to say. So, outside a security lab setting, it is hard to tell if the provided code is not the exploit itself. Definitely "You are probably getting hacked right now! Check for viruses for free!" has been one of the more common attack vector against Windows users.
Whatever the case, I would not recommend running code that looks like this:
static char dis4blens4sel1nuxhayettgdr64545[] and
static int wtfyourunhere_heee(char *out_release, char* out_version)
So you are saying that it was just a BREAK?
[in American English] "3 feet square" refers to an area 3 ft. x 3 ft
I'm no expert in your language on that side of the big wet thing, but in Finglish the phrase would be "3 foot square", modulo hyphens. Which just further proves your point about the construction being annoying, I guess :-)
A venal government of a single country hijacked multiple domains with ease? Surely this should not be possible.
Ash particles pose a real threat to aviation safety in the Finnish air space.
Over Thursday and Friday, the Air Force has examined the F-18 Hornet fighters of the Lapland Wing that flew practice flights over northern Finland on Thursday morning. The air space was still open to the public then.
The planes were examined after they landed, and volcanic ash dust, resembling potato flour, was detected in the engine intakes. An engine of one of the Hornets was further examined with a fiber optic camera. It was concluded from the images, that significant engine damage is caused by even a short flight through ash.
The pictures show that the accumulated ash has melted inside the combustion chamber, where the temperature is around 1000 degrees centigrade (1800 F). The molten ash blocks the cooling ducts, which causes overheating of engine parts, and the materials are weakened. This causes a risk for fractures in the rotating parts of the engine, and in the worst case the parts will break apart and the engine will be completely destroyed.
The exposed Hornets will be thoroughly inspected. It will be necessary to dismantle at least some of the engines, after which they will be sent to Patria engine repairs for further examination. Any engines with noticeable ash exposure will be taken apart to determine the full extent of the damage. The cooling air ducts will also be checked for ash blockages at that time.
I wish you a most pleasant life :-)
No, it's not at all the same. If the number of people that can multitask is only one in 40, I wonder what's the proportion of people who can focus on a _single_ task for long enough to read through an entire Slashdot summary. So far that summary has defeated at least someone who gets paid to read them, and someone who was prompted to do so by my earlier comment.
Timothy already posted this, it's still on the front page. http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/03/31/2154207/Supertaskers-Can-Safely-Use-Mobile-Phones-While-Driving
The product site lists the size as 52mm x 52mm x 52mm.
This means that the beginner's language must be very simple, have a very clearly defined instruction set, and it must be able to keep the would-be programmer's interest for a long enough time for the lessons to sink in. It is entirely OK if the language isn't the current fad, useful in real life, general-purpose, or even Turing complete, as long as it is simple enough, and the output is something else than just boring plain text.
I haven't tried programming Lego Mindstorms myself, so I'll have to stick to recommending Logo. (which, for a young teen, is not at all too childish.)
The programmer will tell you when it is time to get to more "useful" languages.
Security by obscenity?
- there is no purpose for the existence on intelligence
- there is a purpose, but it is impossible to find using rational thought alone
- there is a purpose, and it is possibly to find using rational thought, but ours is not on a high enough level
Now, from the point of view of finding the purpose of intelligent life, it does not matter what we do if either 1 or 2 happens to be the case. To take this to an extreme, intelligent life could be said to be very little different from the non-intelligent type. If our universe happened to work in such a manner that 3 were true, however, then it should be our primary concern to achieve a higher level of consciousness. So, from an extreme rationalist point of view, if we continue strive for a higher level of intelligent thought, we do not have to admit there is nothing special about the ability of logical thinking.