1) I was telling someone else to not whine that they needed something if they didn't know how. "That won't get us very far." What won't? I didn't propose a plan of action; I was simply pointing out to the parent that they didn't have one. What is your specific criticism?
2) "It's actually need that drives invention" Nonsense. There are tons of things that drive invention - personal interest gave us the lightbulb before the development of electrifaction; there was not a need, as homes were successfully gaslit. There's no need for almost any of the bulk of luxury technologies out there; things like massage chairs aren't needed, they just satisfy creature comforts. Dumb luck and bad office cleaning gave us modern antibiotics. Radio was developed to win a bitter argument between Marconi and Jagdish Bose. Video games were developed independantly half a dozen times as a hobby on oscilloscopes, mainframes, EDSAC, televisions, and even blinkenlights. Quite a bit of development is purely for profit.
Need in fact drives relatively little invention. Yes, there are a few dramatic examples, especially during wartime, but the great bulk of human invention does not come from a presupposed desperation. To reduce people's ambitions to the results of happenstance is ridiculously reductionist.
So ask all you want
Yeah, I was telling the parent not to ask for things. I haven't actually asked for anything. Did you even read the very short thing I said?
and maybe one day someone will be clever enough to supply the solution to your problem.
Actually, I don't see a problem. My employees use mnemonics, and we've all got nice strong passwords. I run an automated password cracker on my own server 24/7, and I put a polaroid of anyone caught with a weak password up in the kitchen.
Yeah, or you can use simple mnemonics. Believe it or not, people aren't dumb, they're just lazy; if you give them an easy way to be safe, they'll do it. The reason you keep hearing people saying to use the initial letters of a passphrase is that that works very well.
IatVMoaMMgIIAVaM - Seventeen characters and easily remembered by any theater major (I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General; I've Information Animal, Vegetable and Mineral.) If you're feeling particularly paranoid, enleet every other letter when warranted. I4tVM0aMMgI1AVaM is quite strong.
And frankly, if you can't remember even one phrase, you're a slouch and there's no saving you.
Not quite... the format itself is something you need to know.
No, it isn't. This is highschool algebra. It doesn't matter what the meanings of those characters are; it's a discrete enumerated set, and that means all you need to know to find the combination list is how many there are.
For a radix ninety-six password character set, a four-character password has exactly 84,934,656 possible combinations. For five characters, there are instead 8,153,726,976 combinations. The method he uses is equivalent to a two character password with radix fourty thousand, which has a possible range of 1,600,000,000, which is inbetween 96^4 and 96^5. To be specific, his two-word 40k dict scheme is equivalent to a 96 radix password of length 4.6432.
To be clear, increasing the size of the dictionary doesn't help. Two words in your dictionary have 40,000,000,000 possible results, which is equivalent to a radix 96 password of 5.3484 characters. Still unacceptably weak.
"But how could that be? 40 billion is a huge number!" No, it isn't. In context the required passwords in the story are 16 characters, and most OSes actually have radix-128 passwords, not 96. Yours is 40 billion space. That scheme is 5.192*10^33-space.
40000000000
5192296858534827628530496329220100
Pretty big difference in strength, when you get down to it. In order to match, you need seven words (hell, you even need 6 words with the full OED,) and that's assuming that people use words from all over the dictionary - words people don't know and can't spell. Please remember that the average adult only knows 25-30K words; you're not going to see a lot of people's passwords saying "acerose rhabdomancer zythyr coreaur philoblapterer quirit egg." If you're willing to have a password that's seven words, why don't you just use the first three to fill out your 16-letter requirement, then use one letter further on in the sentence each month? I got my 16 off of the first two.
And then, what about those of us who want actual strong passwords, and are willing to use internal schemes to come up with things like F6hY_n'@1:t-+3bR ? (For reference, I just use a salted MD5 hash run through uuencode against my unchanging password and the first second of the appropriate week as a unix timestamp; I get an unassailable unreversable new password every week, I have the thing running on an old Sega VMU, so it's effectively a one-time pad, and it's easily changed en masse with another tool I wrote.)
By the way, here's a web version for you (I can't get the uuencode stuff past the character filter, so you get hexadecimal) :
if (($len-1) >= strlen($hash)) { die("Requested hash too long for MD5."); } else { echo substr($hash, 0, $len); }
?>
Dictionary keys are a neat idea, but they don't work in practice. People won't use the whole dictionary; if you're lucky they'll use 1/4 of it. 50,000 * 50,000 = not strong enough.
In fact, the Faces of Death videos aren't available to people under 18 in about half of the US. The point I was making was that we regulate content according to age fairly often, and that to suggest that doing that is a violation of the first amendment is patently absurd.
Luckily, the price point is $4.99 to $7.99. And, frankly, I'd pay that to play Zelda 2 again; with current gas prices it's cheaper than the trip to the mall alone, let alone the hour or four it takes to track down a copy. And, god forbid I want something rare, like Lolo 3, Nobunaga's Ambition, North and South or what have you.
There were more than 1200 games in English for the NES alone. Chances are there's something in that back catalog that you haven't already paid for.
That's statistically as secure as a four and one half letter password, assuming 96 usable characters. Does that qualify for a flaw you don't know about?
or -- God forbid -- have a security system that makes sense?
The first person to suggest a system that both makes sense and is actually secure will be rich overnight. Don't ask for something if you don't know anyone who can provide it, and can't say how yourself. It's like whining that GM hasn't made a car that gets a bujillion miles per gallon and has pretzels for exhaust.
Yeah. Pornographic magazines, VHS and DVDs; the Faces of Death videos; playing cards showing boobies; websites and web cam streams; adult cable tv channels; the Jackson at the superbowl; gentlemen's clubs; none of these things are regulated by the government. Why should video games be?
I don't support the law, but at least I'm willing to look at it in a legitimate context.
It's really simple: watch what they watch, read what they read, play what they play, meet their friends and meet their friend's parents.
So what you're saying is that you don't have kids and that you don't yet understand teenage rebellion? Either that, or you have a really odd definition of simple.
Actually, that sort of phrasing is highly desirable, and found throughout our legal system. The reason is that it's therefore easy to update the definition to reflect changing social mores or newly available variations on a theme, without actually changing the law. This means that the law itself can be interpreted in a uniform fashion without attempting to refer to specifics of definitions and without any risk of these references tainting or damaging the law based on one individual judge's beliefs (this used to be a runaway problem in the United States, during its first 50 years.)
In an odd way, I feel programmers will best understand it in terms of object orientation. Don't bother with the flames; I know that it's at best a shaky metaphor and at worst patently silly. Still, I like it, and I think it gets the point across.
Think of these definitions as Alexandrescu-style policy classes. This means that we can spend time shaking down the law (the host class,) debugging it, extending it, profiling (huhu) it, gold-plating it and so on. We can link that law to other laws. Whatever. When the implementation details change, we don't want to have to go back and re-debug the law; therefore we isolate fungible details like specific definitions of terms as policies, and snap them in as needed.
See, definitions change/a//lot/. Ob Simpsons reference, "between Moneybags and Scrooge McDuck, all the best ankle is taken." There was a point in this country where showing bare ankle in public was considered indecent. Now we have sideboob on NBC, as well as asses. Once upon a time, a TV exec would get fired if they didn't fire a writer who wrote nigger; now, it's virtually a staple not only of crime dramas and documentaries, but of comedies and even cartoons ("Now that's what I'm talking about. We do not say the N-word in this house!" "Grandpa, you said nigger 47 times yesterday. I counted." "Nigga hush.") Once upon a time, the head executive at paramount was almost fired for showing a couple's bedroom with a single bed, instead of two beds as was the self-deception of the day (think I'm kidding? Go watch Turner Classic Movies.) Now, soap operas are essentially soft-porn, showing sex onscreen and making it legal by leaving the covers over the actors.
Once upon a time, we actually had laws to take children away from single mothers who weren't widowers, because they were immoral and would ruin the children.
The point is, though, the above law is essentially good. If a mother is unfit to the point where she is a risk to her children, the children do need to be taken away. In fact, the above law is still in effect; however, since the definitions can be updated seperately of the law, we've been able to remove the nonsense about single mothers, and to add stuff to cover (for example) cocaine and drunk driving, neither of which existed in primordeal Boston.
Because the definitions have been able to be changed to keep up with our social mores, the laws don't need to be reimplemented, re-tested, loopholes don't get opened, legitimate convictions don't get overturned, et cetera. Yes, you're right to point out that the definition isn't well had; however, it shouldn't be in the law either way. And, actually, this is the norm for this kind of law: first you generate the law, then when people might be breaking it, you take their asses to court and let juries decide. That sets precedent, which essentially anneals a definition of the term.
The reason this is important? Let's pretend that there wasn't a bunch of precedent that made this law a paper tiger. Let's pretend that this was the first time these issues had ever come up. If that were the case, then suddenly this law would be a real threat. The people railing on and on about the first amendment don't know what the hell they're talking about; the constitution is specifically structured to allow the states to set rules governing decency
Pity they don't border Nevada; we'd get more jokes out of a place where you have to walk in a five foot circle to get Grand Thefo Auto, guns, go gambling and whoring than pretty much any other meme on the internet.
Other than the drastically improved screen quality, better battery life and smaller form factor, they're identical machines. From the perspective of the software, the *only* difference is the ability to control the backlight brightness. In fact, it takes significant effort just to tell them apart without screwing with the brightness register.
You should read the article you cited, where it begins to discuss the endocrinological differences between pygmies and average people, their extremely low birth size, their lack of an adolescent growth spurt, and so on. It seems your article actually supports me. Actually, essentially every reference I find which is newer than 1980 supports me. Mercedes de Onis is responsible for a great many studies you can look into if you're interested, but the canonical reference is TJ Merimee's paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, NEJM issue 316, pp906-91. That's in 1987, if you actually intend to look it up, and want to call your library to make sure they have it first. That paper discusses insulin-like growth factor (you can read more about that on the internet as IGF, not ILGF.) Studies show that the Bantu, Ituri, Efe and Mbuti - the peoples we refer to as pygmies from the Congo forests of Zaire - stop growing at between 10 and 12 years of age, have no postpuberty endocrine phase at all (the 13-15 year old omg how tall did you get last summer thing.)
More detailed studies have since been made, though they're not as easy to read. Another reasonable paper is RC Bailey's, from Annals of Human Biology, issue 18 pp113-20, which is from 1991. That paper focuses specifically on the near-total lack of IGF-1, which is the most common reason for non-dysplasic dwarfism (that is, the stuff that isn't about your skeleton binding early.) The group of conditions circling around IGF-1, IGTD and similar chemicals is known as GHD. In the pygmy peoples there's also been a demonstrated lack of ICF-I by Renaldo Martorel, and there are several statistical studies which suggest (we're not sure yet) a resistance to Partial Growth Hormone, presumably due to damage in GHBP's ectodomain. Alternate isolated peoples show problems in other parts of the growth sequence, such as the Mountain Ok, Aeta and Mamanwa, who are lacking Growth Hormone Binding Protien but who do not show the resistance to GH.
A more important paper, but one which is almost impossibly for a layperson to read, is E.Z. Tronick S.A. Winn's paper in the Journal of Pediatric Developmental Behavior, issue 13, pp421-4, from 1992. That paper addresses the complete lack of other problems, most notably reduced vision, mental retardation, brittle skeleton or fragile tendon disorders which would be expected if the lack of growth was based on dietary fault. In fact, the only dietary health problem commonly attributed to the pygmies is hypoglycemia, which is suspected to be largely due to the major and frequently unreliable usage of honey in their diet and trade relationships with surrounding peoples.
Another paper from 1992, Zhou Xianjin's paper to Nature in issue 376, pp771-4, suggests that the Efe may in fact have two seperate kinds of pervasive dwarfism, a flaw in the nuclear scaffolding HmGI-c and HmGI(y), which is critical during embryogenic cycle dependant phosphorylation. Awesomely, Nature actually gives the references for their papers online, which saves me a lot of retyping.
You can also look up the Mountain Ok from Papua New Guinea, who show deficiencies in GHRhR. Unfortunately, the Kongkandji, Indindji and Barbaram aboriginal peoples of Australia are essentially extinct, so we have no idea what kept them small; medical science, working largely from photographs, suggests thanatophoric or diastrophic dysplasia, both of which are genetic disorders with a high recurrence in spontaneous mutation, due to the damage being near the end of the appropr
This is a common misunderstanding in the mechanisms underlying natural selection. It is not the case that there's just one direction that things inevitably go, or even in fact that there's a definitive pressure applied by a given type of environment. It is often the case that several contradictory pressures are applied at once, and in many cases a species branches to fulfill both of them.
In fact, it's worth noting that all five of Earth's five biggest reptiles are in the setting that you suggest that they do not do well - the Crocodile Monitor from Papua New Guinea, the Komodo Dragon/Monitor Lizard from the Komodo Islands, Varanus Gigentis which lives on the islands around the coasts of Australia and New Zealand, the Goanna from Kakadu (also an island orbiting Australia) and the Water Monitor from Sumatra (the Nile Monitor is bigger than the Water Monitor, but they swim the oceans - they've been seen in Florida, Norway and Madagascar - so nobody knows where they're from, and locational pressure isn't an issue for them.) For that matter, the Butaan is in the Phillipines, and the Butaan is the only enormous tree lizard (also the only enormous herbivorous lizard) we're even aware of. And then there's Godzilla and Ghidra from Japan, Dark L'tzash "Dick Cheney" Sztsalit from Atlantis, and so on.
It is critically important to remember that speciation and trait selection are fundamentally stochaistic processes - they're _random_ , and in small populations there isn't enough buffer to clear out the mistakes. Sometimes an adaptation occurs not because of pressure, but the adaptation is so fundamentally different that it causes the ecosystem to change around it (the introduction of free oxygen through photosynthesis is the most dramatic example, but you see this gappen a lot when predators' targets are moved up and down the food chain, too.) Hell, sometimes an adaptation in Species A is a force for change in Species B. The oft-reported bit about the color of Rooks in London when industry happened, and made white birds easier to see than black birds, is frequently not followed through: there was a species of falcon which moved entirely away from brightness sight and towards motion sight, and the behavior of the rooks changed to made fewer and sharper turns to compensate.
This notion of "efficiency" isn't really that big of an issue to the reptiles; if it was, they wouldn't gorge and squat the way they do, which is tremendously inefficient (great cats do it too, except in the desert.) It is suspected that the reason some lizards shrink is to hide more effectively in an island where there isn't much room to hide. That explains neatly why it doesn't happen to the lizards that manage to stay at the top of the food chain; they just have no reason to hide in the first place. This is nicely seen in the Blackthroat and Red Acanthurus monitors, both who are from the same part of Indonesia - the Blackthroat got a thicker skin and a stronger jaw, making it the bad boy on the block, but the Red got a hide that looks like the local underbrush, shrank and got a brief turbo boost like crocodiles have.
I think it likely that the hobbits are indeed a new branch of hominids, but without a good, solid explanation for why they would be small, the theory will never be acceptable to any evolutionary scientist worth a damn, no matter how much they want it to be true
Yeah, um, wrong. Genetic historians know that not everything happens for a reason; it's a question of survival. We didn't evolve for spina bifida or kleinfelter's syndrome; it just happened. Sometimes those random things are good - eyeballs. Sometimes they're bad - mongolism. Sometimes they're a mixed bag - sickle cell anemia, which though it causes potentially fatal episodic shock, confers significant resistance to malaria, which before medicine was a pretty big win. Give those people another 50,000 years in the wild, and they'll probably develop a modified sickle cell which still fights the malaria but which doesn't clog the capillar
Wait. Did you just ask what the chances were that a genetic defect would become prevalent in a tiny isolated group of individuals? After just a few generations it's near-100%. That's why inbreeding is bad. This is what created the pygmies and various other dwarf and midget populations throughout the world.
Granted it's not nessecarily the same defect, but the idea that a small group of people is somehow immune to disease strikes me as silly.
Welcome to 1993. The people you're pretending to be one of moved on long before you ever learned the word. As a general rule of thumb, try to get angry about things you're not an obvious outsider to.
Crime has been shown to follow Metcalfe's Law - incidence grows as the square of the population per square mile. Using Census 2000 numbers, the country had an average population density of 79.6 people per square mile, for an activity rate of 6336. Florida has a population density of 296.4, for an activity rate of 87852. One expects to see rougly 13.8* the crime per person in a state as densely packed as Florida as compared to this nation as a whole. This also accounts for New York (401.9->161523,) and most damningly New Jersey (1134->1285956, a number largely reflected in such hellholes as Newark, Camden, Jersey City, Hoboken, and so on.)
In fact, if you take a look at the numbers, nearly every state fits the growth perfectly given an arbitrary coefficient. Texas and Ohio aberrantly high, California and Pennsylvania are aberrantly low. New York, surprisingly, is actually beating the curve pretty well; it's just so dense that you can't really tell until you understand the numbers.
That said, what it boils down to is that in N people, there will be E=(N/X) bad eggs; however, as N goes up, each E can affect more people, and as the distribution of E gets wider, you statistically see a few of a more horrible class of person show up who are able to do just awful things like shooting at the freeway.
Why does Florida have so much crime? Because there are more people there, so there are more nutbags there.
Yeah, I know that's exactly why I think about stealing money and getting rich, so that I can retire to Bangalore and flip burgers before I go home to my mud hut.
Slashdot Mirror
Er.
1) I was telling someone else to not whine that they needed something if they didn't know how. "That won't get us very far." What won't? I didn't propose a plan of action; I was simply pointing out to the parent that they didn't have one. What is your specific criticism?
2) "It's actually need that drives invention" Nonsense. There are tons of things that drive invention - personal interest gave us the lightbulb before the development of electrifaction; there was not a need, as homes were successfully gaslit. There's no need for almost any of the bulk of luxury technologies out there; things like massage chairs aren't needed, they just satisfy creature comforts. Dumb luck and bad office cleaning gave us modern antibiotics. Radio was developed to win a bitter argument between Marconi and Jagdish Bose. Video games were developed independantly half a dozen times as a hobby on oscilloscopes, mainframes, EDSAC, televisions, and even blinkenlights. Quite a bit of development is purely for profit.
Need in fact drives relatively little invention. Yes, there are a few dramatic examples, especially during wartime, but the great bulk of human invention does not come from a presupposed desperation. To reduce people's ambitions to the results of happenstance is ridiculously reductionist.
So ask all you want
Yeah, I was telling the parent not to ask for things. I haven't actually asked for anything. Did you even read the very short thing I said?
and maybe one day someone will be clever enough to supply the solution to your problem.
Actually, I don't see a problem. My employees use mnemonics, and we've all got nice strong passwords. I run an automated password cracker on my own server 24/7, and I put a polaroid of anyone caught with a weak password up in the kitchen.
Nobody's ever been up there twice.
Yeah, or you can use simple mnemonics. Believe it or not, people aren't dumb, they're just lazy; if you give them an easy way to be safe, they'll do it. The reason you keep hearing people saying to use the initial letters of a passphrase is that that works very well.
IatVMoaMMgIIAVaM - Seventeen characters and easily remembered by any theater major (I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General; I've Information Animal, Vegetable and Mineral.) If you're feeling particularly paranoid, enleet every other letter when warranted. I4tVM0aMMgI1AVaM is quite strong.
And frankly, if you can't remember even one phrase, you're a slouch and there's no saving you.
No, it isn't. This is highschool algebra. It doesn't matter what the meanings of those characters are; it's a discrete enumerated set, and that means all you need to know to find the combination list is how many there are.
For a radix ninety-six password character set, a four-character password has exactly 84,934,656 possible combinations. For five characters, there are instead 8,153,726,976 combinations. The method he uses is equivalent to a two character password with radix fourty thousand, which has a possible range of 1,600,000,000, which is inbetween 96^4 and 96^5. To be specific, his two-word 40k dict scheme is equivalent to a 96 radix password of length 4.6432.
To be clear, increasing the size of the dictionary doesn't help. Two words in your dictionary have 40,000,000,000 possible results, which is equivalent to a radix 96 password of 5.3484 characters. Still unacceptably weak.
"But how could that be? 40 billion is a huge number!" No, it isn't. In context the required passwords in the story are 16 characters, and most OSes actually have radix-128 passwords, not 96. Yours is 40 billion space. That scheme is 5.192*10^33-space.
Pretty big difference in strength, when you get down to it. In order to match, you need seven words (hell, you even need 6 words with the full OED,) and that's assuming that people use words from all over the dictionary - words people don't know and can't spell. Please remember that the average adult only knows 25-30K words; you're not going to see a lot of people's passwords saying "acerose rhabdomancer zythyr coreaur philoblapterer quirit egg." If you're willing to have a password that's seven words, why don't you just use the first three to fill out your 16-letter requirement, then use one letter further on in the sentence each month? I got my 16 off of the first two.
And then, what about those of us who want actual strong passwords, and are willing to use internal schemes to come up with things like F6hY_n'@1:t-+3bR ? (For reference, I just use a salted MD5 hash run through uuencode against my unchanging password and the first second of the appropriate week as a unix timestamp; I get an unassailable unreversable new password every week, I have the thing running on an old Sega VMU, so it's effectively a one-time pad, and it's easily changed en masse with another tool I wrote.)
By the way, here's a web version for you (I can't get the uuencode stuff past the character filter, so you get hexadecimal) :
<?php
$oneweek = 60 * 60 * 24 * 7;
if (isset($_GET['length'])) { $len = $_GET['length']; } else { $len = 16; }
$now = time();
$firstSecond = $now - ($now % $oneweek);
$hash = md5($firstSecond . $_GET['pass']);
if (($len-1) >= strlen($hash)) { die("Requested hash too long for MD5."); } else { echo substr($hash, 0, $len); }
?>
Dictionary keys are a neat idea, but they don't work in practice. People won't use the whole dictionary; if you're lucky they'll use 1/4 of it. 50,000 * 50,000 = not strong enough.
In fact, the Faces of Death videos aren't available to people under 18 in about half of the US. The point I was making was that we regulate content according to age fairly often, and that to suggest that doing that is a violation of the first amendment is patently absurd.
dont want to have to pay $10-20 to buy it again.
Luckily, the price point is $4.99 to $7.99. And, frankly, I'd pay that to play Zelda 2 again; with current gas prices it's cheaper than the trip to the mall alone, let alone the hour or four it takes to track down a copy. And, god forbid I want something rare, like Lolo 3, Nobunaga's Ambition, North and South or what have you.
There were more than 1200 games in English for the NES alone. Chances are there's something in that back catalog that you haven't already paid for.
Luckily, the market doesn't pander to thieving scum like you.
That's statistically as secure as a four and one half letter password, assuming 96 usable characters. Does that qualify for a flaw you don't know about?
or -- God forbid -- have a security system that makes sense?
The first person to suggest a system that both makes sense and is actually secure will be rich overnight. Don't ask for something if you don't know anyone who can provide it, and can't say how yourself. It's like whining that GM hasn't made a car that gets a bujillion miles per gallon and has pretzels for exhaust.
Yeah. Pornographic magazines, VHS and DVDs; the Faces of Death videos; playing cards showing boobies; websites and web cam streams; adult cable tv channels; the Jackson at the superbowl; gentlemen's clubs; none of these things are regulated by the government. Why should video games be?
I don't support the law, but at least I'm willing to look at it in a legitimate context.
It's really simple: watch what they watch, read what they read, play what they play, meet their friends and meet their friend's parents.
So what you're saying is that you don't have kids and that you don't yet understand teenage rebellion? Either that, or you have a really odd definition of simple.
Actually, that sort of phrasing is highly desirable, and found throughout our legal system. The reason is that it's therefore easy to update the definition to reflect changing social mores or newly available variations on a theme, without actually changing the law. This means that the law itself can be interpreted in a uniform fashion without attempting to refer to specifics of definitions and without any risk of these references tainting or damaging the law based on one individual judge's beliefs (this used to be a runaway problem in the United States, during its first 50 years.)
/a/ /lot/. Ob Simpsons reference, "between Moneybags and Scrooge McDuck, all the best ankle is taken." There was a point in this country where showing bare ankle in public was considered indecent. Now we have sideboob on NBC, as well as asses. Once upon a time, a TV exec would get fired if they didn't fire a writer who wrote nigger; now, it's virtually a staple not only of crime dramas and documentaries, but of comedies and even cartoons ("Now that's what I'm talking about. We do not say the N-word in this house!" "Grandpa, you said nigger 47 times yesterday. I counted." "Nigga hush.") Once upon a time, the head executive at paramount was almost fired for showing a couple's bedroom with a single bed, instead of two beds as was the self-deception of the day (think I'm kidding? Go watch Turner Classic Movies.) Now, soap operas are essentially soft-porn, showing sex onscreen and making it legal by leaving the covers over the actors.
In an odd way, I feel programmers will best understand it in terms of object orientation. Don't bother with the flames; I know that it's at best a shaky metaphor and at worst patently silly. Still, I like it, and I think it gets the point across.
Think of these definitions as Alexandrescu-style policy classes. This means that we can spend time shaking down the law (the host class,) debugging it, extending it, profiling (huhu) it, gold-plating it and so on. We can link that law to other laws. Whatever. When the implementation details change, we don't want to have to go back and re-debug the law; therefore we isolate fungible details like specific definitions of terms as policies, and snap them in as needed.
See, definitions change
Once upon a time, we actually had laws to take children away from single mothers who weren't widowers, because they were immoral and would ruin the children.
The point is, though, the above law is essentially good. If a mother is unfit to the point where she is a risk to her children, the children do need to be taken away. In fact, the above law is still in effect; however, since the definitions can be updated seperately of the law, we've been able to remove the nonsense about single mothers, and to add stuff to cover (for example) cocaine and drunk driving, neither of which existed in primordeal Boston.
Because the definitions have been able to be changed to keep up with our social mores, the laws don't need to be reimplemented, re-tested, loopholes don't get opened, legitimate convictions don't get overturned, et cetera. Yes, you're right to point out that the definition isn't well had; however, it shouldn't be in the law either way. And, actually, this is the norm for this kind of law: first you generate the law, then when people might be breaking it, you take their asses to court and let juries decide. That sets precedent, which essentially anneals a definition of the term.
The reason this is important? Let's pretend that there wasn't a bunch of precedent that made this law a paper tiger. Let's pretend that this was the first time these issues had ever come up. If that were the case, then suddenly this law would be a real threat. The people railing on and on about the first amendment don't know what the hell they're talking about; the constitution is specifically structured to allow the states to set rules governing decency
Pity they don't border Nevada; we'd get more jokes out of a place where you have to walk in a five foot circle to get Grand Thefo Auto, guns, go gambling and whoring than pretty much any other meme on the internet.
That's not what irony means.
Other than the drastically improved screen quality, better battery life and smaller form factor, they're identical machines. From the perspective of the software, the *only* difference is the ability to control the backlight brightness. In fact, it takes significant effort just to tell them apart without screwing with the brightness register.
I wouldn't mind seeing a reference on a claim like that. I call BS. See http://www.discover.com/issues/may-92/features/aqu estionofsize42/
You should read the article you cited, where it begins to discuss the endocrinological differences between pygmies and average people, their extremely low birth size, their lack of an adolescent growth spurt, and so on. It seems your article actually supports me. Actually, essentially every reference I find which is newer than 1980 supports me. Mercedes de Onis is responsible for a great many studies you can look into if you're interested, but the canonical reference is TJ Merimee's paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, NEJM issue 316, pp906-91. That's in 1987, if you actually intend to look it up, and want to call your library to make sure they have it first. That paper discusses insulin-like growth factor (you can read more about that on the internet as IGF, not ILGF.) Studies show that the Bantu, Ituri, Efe and Mbuti - the peoples we refer to as pygmies from the Congo forests of Zaire - stop growing at between 10 and 12 years of age, have no postpuberty endocrine phase at all (the 13-15 year old omg how tall did you get last summer thing.)
More detailed studies have since been made, though they're not as easy to read. Another reasonable paper is RC Bailey's, from Annals of Human Biology, issue 18 pp113-20, which is from 1991. That paper focuses specifically on the near-total lack of IGF-1, which is the most common reason for non-dysplasic dwarfism (that is, the stuff that isn't about your skeleton binding early.) The group of conditions circling around IGF-1, IGTD and similar chemicals is known as GHD. In the pygmy peoples there's also been a demonstrated lack of ICF-I by Renaldo Martorel, and there are several statistical studies which suggest (we're not sure yet) a resistance to Partial Growth Hormone, presumably due to damage in GHBP's ectodomain. Alternate isolated peoples show problems in other parts of the growth sequence, such as the Mountain Ok, Aeta and Mamanwa, who are lacking Growth Hormone Binding Protien but who do not show the resistance to GH.
A more important paper, but one which is almost impossibly for a layperson to read, is E.Z. Tronick S.A. Winn's paper in the Journal of Pediatric Developmental Behavior, issue 13, pp421-4, from 1992. That paper addresses the complete lack of other problems, most notably reduced vision, mental retardation, brittle skeleton or fragile tendon disorders which would be expected if the lack of growth was based on dietary fault. In fact, the only dietary health problem commonly attributed to the pygmies is hypoglycemia, which is suspected to be largely due to the major and frequently unreliable usage of honey in their diet and trade relationships with surrounding peoples.
Another paper from 1992, Zhou Xianjin's paper to Nature in issue 376, pp771-4, suggests that the Efe may in fact have two seperate kinds of pervasive dwarfism, a flaw in the nuclear scaffolding HmGI-c and HmGI(y), which is critical during embryogenic cycle dependant phosphorylation. Awesomely, Nature actually gives the references for their papers online, which saves me a lot of retyping.
You can also look up the Mountain Ok from Papua New Guinea, who show deficiencies in GHRhR. Unfortunately, the Kongkandji, Indindji and Barbaram aboriginal peoples of Australia are essentially extinct, so we have no idea what kept them small; medical science, working largely from photographs, suggests thanatophoric or diastrophic dysplasia, both of which are genetic disorders with a high recurrence in spontaneous mutation, due to the damage being near the end of the appropr
This is a common misunderstanding in the mechanisms underlying natural selection. It is not the case that there's just one direction that things inevitably go, or even in fact that there's a definitive pressure applied by a given type of environment. It is often the case that several contradictory pressures are applied at once, and in many cases a species branches to fulfill both of them.
In fact, it's worth noting that all five of Earth's five biggest reptiles are in the setting that you suggest that they do not do well - the Crocodile Monitor from Papua New Guinea, the Komodo Dragon/Monitor Lizard from the Komodo Islands, Varanus Gigentis which lives on the islands around the coasts of Australia and New Zealand, the Goanna from Kakadu (also an island orbiting Australia) and the Water Monitor from Sumatra (the Nile Monitor is bigger than the Water Monitor, but they swim the oceans - they've been seen in Florida, Norway and Madagascar - so nobody knows where they're from, and locational pressure isn't an issue for them.) For that matter, the Butaan is in the Phillipines, and the Butaan is the only enormous tree lizard (also the only enormous herbivorous lizard) we're even aware of. And then there's Godzilla and Ghidra from Japan, Dark L'tzash "Dick Cheney" Sztsalit from Atlantis, and so on.
It is critically important to remember that speciation and trait selection are fundamentally stochaistic processes - they're _random_ , and in small populations there isn't enough buffer to clear out the mistakes. Sometimes an adaptation occurs not because of pressure, but the adaptation is so fundamentally different that it causes the ecosystem to change around it (the introduction of free oxygen through photosynthesis is the most dramatic example, but you see this gappen a lot when predators' targets are moved up and down the food chain, too.) Hell, sometimes an adaptation in Species A is a force for change in Species B. The oft-reported bit about the color of Rooks in London when industry happened, and made white birds easier to see than black birds, is frequently not followed through: there was a species of falcon which moved entirely away from brightness sight and towards motion sight, and the behavior of the rooks changed to made fewer and sharper turns to compensate.
This notion of "efficiency" isn't really that big of an issue to the reptiles; if it was, they wouldn't gorge and squat the way they do, which is tremendously inefficient (great cats do it too, except in the desert.) It is suspected that the reason some lizards shrink is to hide more effectively in an island where there isn't much room to hide. That explains neatly why it doesn't happen to the lizards that manage to stay at the top of the food chain; they just have no reason to hide in the first place. This is nicely seen in the Blackthroat and Red Acanthurus monitors, both who are from the same part of Indonesia - the Blackthroat got a thicker skin and a stronger jaw, making it the bad boy on the block, but the Red got a hide that looks like the local underbrush, shrank and got a brief turbo boost like crocodiles have.
I think it likely that the hobbits are indeed a new branch of hominids, but without a good, solid explanation for why they would be small, the theory will never be acceptable to any evolutionary scientist worth a damn, no matter how much they want it to be true
Yeah, um, wrong. Genetic historians know that not everything happens for a reason; it's a question of survival. We didn't evolve for spina bifida or kleinfelter's syndrome; it just happened. Sometimes those random things are good - eyeballs. Sometimes they're bad - mongolism. Sometimes they're a mixed bag - sickle cell anemia, which though it causes potentially fatal episodic shock, confers significant resistance to malaria, which before medicine was a pretty big win. Give those people another 50,000 years in the wild, and they'll probably develop a modified sickle cell which still fights the malaria but which doesn't clog the capillar
Wait. Did you just ask what the chances were that a genetic defect would become prevalent in a tiny isolated group of individuals? After just a few generations it's near-100%. That's why inbreeding is bad. This is what created the pygmies and various other dwarf and midget populations throughout the world.
Granted it's not nessecarily the same defect, but the idea that a small group of people is somehow immune to disease strikes me as silly.
I dunno, Gorilla Grodd and the Ultra-Humanite do a pretty good job of it.
His taste and your spelling skills are equivalent both in quality and in degree of disgust by onlookers.
Welcome to 1993. The people you're pretending to be one of moved on long before you ever learned the word. As a general rule of thumb, try to get angry about things you're not an obvious outsider to.
Yes, do learn about banks in Switzerland, which haven't hidden money in more than a decade. Also, learn about selecting to whom to listen carefully.
Crime has been shown to follow Metcalfe's Law - incidence grows as the square of the population per square mile. Using Census 2000 numbers, the country had an average population density of 79.6 people per square mile, for an activity rate of 6336. Florida has a population density of 296.4, for an activity rate of 87852. One expects to see rougly 13.8* the crime per person in a state as densely packed as Florida as compared to this nation as a whole. This also accounts for New York (401.9->161523,) and most damningly New Jersey (1134->1285956, a number largely reflected in such hellholes as Newark, Camden, Jersey City, Hoboken, and so on.)
In fact, if you take a look at the numbers, nearly every state fits the growth perfectly given an arbitrary coefficient. Texas and Ohio aberrantly high, California and Pennsylvania are aberrantly low. New York, surprisingly, is actually beating the curve pretty well; it's just so dense that you can't really tell until you understand the numbers.
That said, what it boils down to is that in N people, there will be E=(N/X) bad eggs; however, as N goes up, each E can affect more people, and as the distribution of E gets wider, you statistically see a few of a more horrible class of person show up who are able to do just awful things like shooting at the freeway.
Why does Florida have so much crime? Because there are more people there, so there are more nutbags there.
$Id: crime-gc-howto.html, v 1.38 2006/03/17 22:52:50 johnh Exp $
HOWTO: Make a million dollars illegally and go straight the fuck to jail
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(Stop reading here. The joke's over, and I'm not Ferris Buehller.)
Yeah, I know that's exactly why I think about stealing money and getting rich, so that I can retire to Bangalore and flip burgers before I go home to my mud hut.
How can I possibly respond to the accusation of cliche when the appropriate Enron joke is even worse? (Huhu.)