You're assuming that all 282 trillion possible passwords are equally likely. In reality, 90% of passwords will be in the first million checked (real, pronouncable words), 90% of what's left will be discoverable in the first several billion (real words, intermixed with digits/symbols).
Agreed. Look at the Hitchhiker's Guide movie. The scenes where the Vogons are done with puppetry are amazing, the scenes where they're CGI are 'meh'. Same goes for the original Alien vs the A v P movies, as soon as I see CGI (especially for characters/animals) the emotion center of my brain says 'nope' and shuts down.
You do realize that bacteria are everywhere right? Just because we modified this one to glow doesn't give it some unique survival advantage or propensity to mutate. If anything, the bacteria is going to be a monoculture and more susceptible to chemicals and preditors.
I know you're joking and I don't mean to direct this at you necissarily but I think it should be said.
Many companies suck. They abuse their positions and take advantage of their customers, they manipulate the writing and interpretation of laws to suit their ends, they sue innocent people in an effort to scare people into respecting their intangible rights. Slashdot, correctly, berates them when there is news about this kind of thing. We help spread knowledge of their actions and provide sometimes insightful analysis which in turn, I hope, gets passed on to others outside the slashdot crowd.
However, when one of these companies does something right, instead of saying "Good first step, you've got a long way to go but this helps ever so slightly" we berate them just as much as if we found out their datacenters were powered by burning babies. It's not helpful and it's not really fair. You can't punish good behavior just as much as bad and expect to have any effects, it doesn't work on dogs and I doubt it works on corporations.
So, let me (karma be damned) be the first to say: This is a small step in the right direction Microsoft. You have a long way to go, but this, ever so slightly, helps.
But should they be? What if the Nazi party had used the leter 'N' as it's symbol, should the letter be banned in Germany? Don't get me wrong, I understand the reasons for the ban, I just don't think it is wise to say "this, and only this, is illegal". A) I gaurantee there are still Nazi's and Neo-Nazis in Germany. B) The swastika has symbolic meaning to the Hindu religion. In other words, you are banning both less than, and more than you wanted to when you created the ban.
How about the original copyright or 5 years, whichever is greater. So if the original, unextended copyright was set to expire in 3 months, the family could apply for the extention but would get only a 5 year extention. That gives the family plenty of time to arrange their finances (even enough time to get a degree and search for a job if that is necissary). I find that better than just saying tough tooties to the family.
On the other hand, ideally what I would like to see is sane limits to begin with. How about a single 20 year copyright. No extentions to worry about, no orphaned children. Also, legislate it such that if the length is extended by law in the future, the current rules apply for all works created up until that law passes. Lord knows the content owners would demand the reverse (if the length was shortened they would want to be grandfathered in with the old limit).
At well run companies, they understand up to the highest levels that long run, maintainable and understandble code is faster and cheaper. They may be few and far between, but to just accept manager and executive incompetence is how companies go down the toilet. And yes, not understanding the costs and benifits associated with your business domain is incompetence regardless of how common it is.
These laws cover the corner cases of how we are to interact with each other.
No, those laws create the corner cases of how we interact with each other. How many hundreds of pages of laws exist in an attempt to outlaw fraud? Fraud: Lying or misleading someone in order to aquire their money or property. But no, we have to have every possible means and method of fraud laid out explicitly, otherwise the lawyers will weasel their clients out of punishment. The problem is the weaseling, and it isn't solved by making the law so complicated that the lawyers are the only ones who have a chance in hell of understanding it (and even then, ussually only within a specific, narrow domain).
Yes, which is exactly how every court in the country has ruled dozens of times. The problem is, there is a certain group of people who would rather not pay income taxes and so they look through the laws for every possible excuse not to have to. Worse, they then sell this 'information' to unsuspecting people looking for tax breaks; people who then get audited and penalized.
I would think that such an effect would have been discovered in the various 'gravity maps' that have been made of the Earth. If so, I can't imagine that they forgot to take that into account when trying to solve (or resolve) one of the mysteries of modern physics.
I think you mean 3.74698572 × 10^12 Planck Lengths per Planck Time. It's high time we abandonded this archaic 'metric' system for one that more accurately expresses the universe.
Three Words (or one word and one name): Von Neuman Probes.
It should be relatively trivial for an advanced civilization to seed every star in the galaxy with self replicating probes. The initial investment would be only enough to construct the first generation and send them out, after that they would reproduce with local resources and send out the next wave. The apparent lack of such probes in our solar system should be, in my opinion, much more concerning to the SETI crowd than the lack of radio transmissions which would probably be impossible to detect from any significant distance anyway.
I understand, on principle why they charge early termination fees. $350 for a smartphone seems extreme, but taking the new Droid for example, the phone costs $550 without a plan and the customer gets it for $200 which is right in line. What doesn't make sense is the fact that if I cancel my contract 1 year and 11 months in, I'm expected to pay the whole termination fee, despite the fact that Verizon has already made back $335 of it. That's just abussive. Termination fees should be proportional to the amount of the contract you are terminating and capped at the amount of subsidization on the phone.
Because a phone call is innitiating the contact in the privacy of your home. There is no easy way to block harrassing phone calls and just getting phone calls you don't want is somewhat harmful as it ties up your phone line and reduces its value. The internet, is a giant meeting place; this case is like meeting someone in the park, getting into an argument about politics, and being called an asshole. There is nothing libelous, slanderous, or harassing about that.
The statement was obviously an insult and not meant to be true; hence, it is not libellous. The statement was in no way threatening. The statement was mean, but that doesn't equate to harrassing. Harassment is ongoing, persistent meanness. Harassment is following the kid from forum to forum to continue the argument. Harassment is threatening violence or insighting fear. Harassment isn't calling someone gay once.
Even if their information is accurate, which I don't see how it could possibly be, it is meaningless. Number of flaws is a horrible way to measure system security since it doesn't take into account severity, ease of attack, unreported flaws, or un-acknowledged flaws. When you get down to it, there really isn't any good way to measure security, but I would bet hours spent in code reviews would correlate much better than number of reported flaws.
From the summary, 30 minutes to scan, 60 minutes to process. Comes to about 22 seconds actually; which, for all intents and purposes, is about 30 seconds.
This is a perfect example of a situation that capitalism works. A million greedy investors are going to be much better at finding out information than a single government agency is at hiding it. If nothing else, I highly doubt that every investor in the world takes their reports at face value (if they do, I should become an investor because the current ones are freakin retarded).
The fundamental problem with most automated driving schemes is that they address driving on freeways, which people don't mind all that much.
Speak for yourself. I make a 5 hour drive once a month to see family and assuming a minumum level of safety, I would pay at least $5k for a system that kept the current lane, kept the current speed, and automatically slowed down to avoid accidents. Sure my drive would take just as long, probably even longer since it wouldn't go around slow vehicles in the fast lane, but that would be hours out of my life that I could spend doing any of a dozen different things.
And why, praytell, does a major production have to cost $250 million? District 9, one of the most profitable and enjoyable movies of the year, cost a whopping $30 million to make. And that's a movie with superb special effects, at least on par with Hollywoods $200+ million action movies. They've made $200 million just in theaters, and probably will make double that once it is released to dvd and blu-ray.
If they have to have a hearing for each case, won't this seriously bog down the court system?
Tough tooties. If 90% of your population is criminalized as a result of legislation you pass, perhaps you should reconsider that legislation? But that isn't what will happen. The people this law was written for (the content holders) will kick and scream until the government agrees to 'streamline' the process. And we'll be right back to DMCA or 3 strikes style laws.
Finding a consensus on the purpose of imprisonment is pretty much impossible.
Which is, in my opinion, the problem. If prison is about punishment; fine, take away the cable TV, education, and job training. If prison is about rehabilitation; fine, then prison should be like a combination full time thearapy and education system (and incidently, the same kinds of facilities should be open to non-criminals). If prison is about keeping dangerous people off the streets; fine, then sentences should be based off of scientifically valid recidivism rates combined with the dangerousness of their type of crime.
Slashdot Mirror
You're assuming that all 282 trillion possible passwords are equally likely. In reality, 90% of passwords will be in the first million checked (real, pronouncable words), 90% of what's left will be discoverable in the first several billion (real words, intermixed with digits/symbols).
Agreed. Look at the Hitchhiker's Guide movie. The scenes where the Vogons are done with puppetry are amazing, the scenes where they're CGI are 'meh'. Same goes for the original Alien vs the A v P movies, as soon as I see CGI (especially for characters/animals) the emotion center of my brain says 'nope' and shuts down.
You do realize that bacteria are everywhere right? Just because we modified this one to glow doesn't give it some unique survival advantage or propensity to mutate. If anything, the bacteria is going to be a monoculture and more susceptible to chemicals and preditors.
I know you're joking and I don't mean to direct this at you necissarily but I think it should be said.
Many companies suck. They abuse their positions and take advantage of their customers, they manipulate the writing and interpretation of laws to suit their ends, they sue innocent people in an effort to scare people into respecting their intangible rights. Slashdot, correctly, berates them when there is news about this kind of thing. We help spread knowledge of their actions and provide sometimes insightful analysis which in turn, I hope, gets passed on to others outside the slashdot crowd.
However, when one of these companies does something right, instead of saying "Good first step, you've got a long way to go but this helps ever so slightly" we berate them just as much as if we found out their datacenters were powered by burning babies. It's not helpful and it's not really fair. You can't punish good behavior just as much as bad and expect to have any effects, it doesn't work on dogs and I doubt it works on corporations.
So, let me (karma be damned) be the first to say: This is a small step in the right direction Microsoft. You have a long way to go, but this, ever so slightly, helps.
How about 1 million cores being a mega-core. So the proposed supercomputer would be a 100 mega-core computer.
But should they be? What if the Nazi party had used the leter 'N' as it's symbol, should the letter be banned in Germany? Don't get me wrong, I understand the reasons for the ban, I just don't think it is wise to say "this, and only this, is illegal". A) I gaurantee there are still Nazi's and Neo-Nazis in Germany. B) The swastika has symbolic meaning to the Hindu religion. In other words, you are banning both less than, and more than you wanted to when you created the ban.
How about the original copyright or 5 years, whichever is greater. So if the original, unextended copyright was set to expire in 3 months, the family could apply for the extention but would get only a 5 year extention. That gives the family plenty of time to arrange their finances (even enough time to get a degree and search for a job if that is necissary). I find that better than just saying tough tooties to the family.
On the other hand, ideally what I would like to see is sane limits to begin with. How about a single 20 year copyright. No extentions to worry about, no orphaned children. Also, legislate it such that if the length is extended by law in the future, the current rules apply for all works created up until that law passes. Lord knows the content owners would demand the reverse (if the length was shortened they would want to be grandfathered in with the old limit).
At well run companies, they understand up to the highest levels that long run, maintainable and understandble code is faster and cheaper. They may be few and far between, but to just accept manager and executive incompetence is how companies go down the toilet. And yes, not understanding the costs and benifits associated with your business domain is incompetence regardless of how common it is.
These laws cover the corner cases of how we are to interact with each other.
No, those laws create the corner cases of how we interact with each other. How many hundreds of pages of laws exist in an attempt to outlaw fraud? Fraud: Lying or misleading someone in order to aquire their money or property. But no, we have to have every possible means and method of fraud laid out explicitly, otherwise the lawyers will weasel their clients out of punishment. The problem is the weaseling, and it isn't solved by making the law so complicated that the lawyers are the only ones who have a chance in hell of understanding it (and even then, ussually only within a specific, narrow domain).
Yes, which is exactly how every court in the country has ruled dozens of times. The problem is, there is a certain group of people who would rather not pay income taxes and so they look through the laws for every possible excuse not to have to. Worse, they then sell this 'information' to unsuspecting people looking for tax breaks; people who then get audited and penalized.
I would think that such an effect would have been discovered in the various 'gravity maps' that have been made of the Earth. If so, I can't imagine that they forgot to take that into account when trying to solve (or resolve) one of the mysteries of modern physics.
I think you mean 3.74698572 × 10^12 Planck Lengths per Planck Time. It's high time we abandonded this archaic 'metric' system for one that more accurately expresses the universe.
Three Words (or one word and one name): Von Neuman Probes.
It should be relatively trivial for an advanced civilization to seed every star in the galaxy with self replicating probes. The initial investment would be only enough to construct the first generation and send them out, after that they would reproduce with local resources and send out the next wave. The apparent lack of such probes in our solar system should be, in my opinion, much more concerning to the SETI crowd than the lack of radio transmissions which would probably be impossible to detect from any significant distance anyway.
I understand, on principle why they charge early termination fees. $350 for a smartphone seems extreme, but taking the new Droid for example, the phone costs $550 without a plan and the customer gets it for $200 which is right in line. What doesn't make sense is the fact that if I cancel my contract 1 year and 11 months in, I'm expected to pay the whole termination fee, despite the fact that Verizon has already made back $335 of it. That's just abussive. Termination fees should be proportional to the amount of the contract you are terminating and capped at the amount of subsidization on the phone.
Because a phone call is innitiating the contact in the privacy of your home. There is no easy way to block harrassing phone calls and just getting phone calls you don't want is somewhat harmful as it ties up your phone line and reduces its value. The internet, is a giant meeting place; this case is like meeting someone in the park, getting into an argument about politics, and being called an asshole. There is nothing libelous, slanderous, or harassing about that.
The statement was obviously an insult and not meant to be true; hence, it is not libellous.
The statement was in no way threatening.
The statement was mean, but that doesn't equate to harrassing. Harassment is ongoing, persistent meanness. Harassment is following the kid from forum to forum to continue the argument. Harassment is threatening violence or insighting fear. Harassment isn't calling someone gay once.
Even if their information is accurate, which I don't see how it could possibly be, it is meaningless. Number of flaws is a horrible way to measure system security since it doesn't take into account severity, ease of attack, unreported flaws, or un-acknowledged flaws. When you get down to it, there really isn't any good way to measure security, but I would bet hours spent in code reviews would correlate much better than number of reported flaws.
From the summary, 30 minutes to scan, 60 minutes to process. Comes to about 22 seconds actually; which, for all intents and purposes, is about 30 seconds.
This is a perfect example of a situation that capitalism works. A million greedy investors are going to be much better at finding out information than a single government agency is at hiding it. If nothing else, I highly doubt that every investor in the world takes their reports at face value (if they do, I should become an investor because the current ones are freakin retarded).
Oh? So he has video of a US senator working with terrorists? It seems that may have been news worthy to mention.
...I am a fan of anybody who challenges them.
Where 'them' was a list of liberal leaders around the world. His assumption was quite valid IMO.
So... it detects the direction of gravity... or more accurately, the direction of acceleration due to gravity.
The fundamental problem with most automated driving schemes is that they address driving on freeways, which people don't mind all that much.
Speak for yourself. I make a 5 hour drive once a month to see family and assuming a minumum level of safety, I would pay at least $5k for a system that kept the current lane, kept the current speed, and automatically slowed down to avoid accidents. Sure my drive would take just as long, probably even longer since it wouldn't go around slow vehicles in the fast lane, but that would be hours out of my life that I could spend doing any of a dozen different things.
And why, praytell, does a major production have to cost $250 million? District 9, one of the most profitable and enjoyable movies of the year, cost a whopping $30 million to make. And that's a movie with superb special effects, at least on par with Hollywoods $200+ million action movies. They've made $200 million just in theaters, and probably will make double that once it is released to dvd and blu-ray.
If they have to have a hearing for each case, won't this seriously bog down the court system?
Tough tooties. If 90% of your population is criminalized as a result of legislation you pass, perhaps you should reconsider that legislation? But that isn't what will happen. The people this law was written for (the content holders) will kick and scream until the government agrees to 'streamline' the process. And we'll be right back to DMCA or 3 strikes style laws.
Finding a consensus on the purpose of imprisonment is pretty much impossible.
Which is, in my opinion, the problem. If prison is about punishment; fine, take away the cable TV, education, and job training. If prison is about rehabilitation; fine, then prison should be like a combination full time thearapy and education system (and incidently, the same kinds of facilities should be open to non-criminals). If prison is about keeping dangerous people off the streets; fine, then sentences should be based off of scientifically valid recidivism rates combined with the dangerousness of their type of crime.