Your human target is 50 feet away and barely moving and yet SOMEHOW all of your crack Stormtroopers miss with a weapon that shoots at the speed of light.
In the real 3 movies, this is actually explained quite well. (Inability of the armor to protect against teddy bears is another story). It canon that Storm Troopers are good shots: "these blast points are too accurate to be Sand People". So why do they miss so consistently in certain scenes in SW and ESB? Because they've been ordered to let the prisoners escape / capture them alive.
Think about it: the times in the first movie when Storm Troopers can't hit anything are during the rescue of Princess Leia and return to the Rebel base carrying the tracking device. Of course they miss! Would you want to ruin Vader's plan? At other times in the movie they certainly manage to kill off Rebels (and civilians) here and there.
Similarly in the second movie: there's a stretch where the Storm Troopers cant seem to hit anything but a droid, but Vader's plan is to sell Han to Jabba and have a nice father-son chat.
He. Selected. A. Specific. Individual. To be his victim. That's what makes it a crime.
Imagine someone writing up a plan to kill you, Feyshtey, on a particular day, with a particular tool, with express cooperation of a few other people. The police discover it. Should they prosecute? Or should they let it go until the plan is actually carried out and you were transformed into a corpse?
None of that is illegal, nor should it be. No thoughts should be illegal. No plans should be illegal. Taking action to further those plans: that's what should be (and is, at least for conspiracy) illegal.
Loretta Lynch Vows to Prosecute Those Who Use 'Anti-Muslim' Speech That 'Edges Toward Violence'
What do you expect from an AG named "Lynch"?
Seems like the "identity politics" crowd these days worries more about backlash against muslims after a terrorist attack than the next attack. You know, there wasn't a backlash after 9/11, because the average American really can distinguish between "muslim terrorist" and "muslim". Really.
If the first word were alphabetical by lattitude, and the second by longitude, and the third very different for nearby squares, this would be a much better system. From the first two words you could get a good general idea where someone was, and the fourth would act as a checksum.
Rei's idea is more clever: tainted should be the default. A special, limited, "clean string" class would be used as the argument to anything that executes a command. I like it.
While we're wishing, I want a language where "const" and "not allowed to be null" were the default, and "mutable" and "nullable" required special syntax.
Or even better, you don't even have to copy the code, you just need to type the google terms that result in the appropriate SO question as the first hit.
The first joke I saw about this was Stack Sort (take the first SO search result for sorting, apply that to the list, loop down the results until it's sorted). This has of course been implemented.
Since it's been implemented, you could do a meta version - search for "stack sort implementation", and run that code!
The market reflects the best efforts of people with a great deal of money on the line to predict the future. When it looks like a real shortage is on the horizon, you see stuff like people buying vast amounts of oil, loading it into tankers, and storing the oil to be sold into the predicted crunch. The wisdom of crowds is never perfect, but it can be OK.
Solar is nice during the day and all, but fusion solves a bunch of problems solar doesn't, from heating load over winter nights to industrial power. (Plus, a big chunk of power consumption, about half of industrial use is never electrical energy, but thermal used directly).
Tell you what, the EFF has credibility in the bank with me. Google on the other hand...
Well fuck me running, I agree with Ratzo on something. Google is an advertizing company, and weasel words and outright lying convincingly are core competencies for them. The EFF has never steered me wrong.
Plus, the weasel words here are pretty obvious: Google admits to collecting students personal information, but tries to hide behind "we only use it in aggregate".
There's a need to conserve helium because it's non-renewable.
That's not important. Everything is non-renewable on some scale. Solar power is not renewable on some scale. Fusion is non-renewable on some scale. That's not the question I asked. You answered the question you liked, instead of the question I asked. Did you think I wouldn't notice?
I was arguing about the wider problem of helium usage, and your claim that the shortage didn't exist and/or that the market would sort it out
So, for any specific thing you want to address, you still need to demonstrate that that specific thing is worthwhile. If helium becomes scare, the price will rice, and people will use less. Until you prove (1), I'm free to assume that people will just produce more (since they're venting it anyway right now), and so demand will be met with new supply, just as it is with, oil, natural gas, food, and basically everything else people have been predicting we'd run out of for the last 150 years.
Someone poorly versed in science invents a disaster scenario. People who are actually interested in science and evidence, listen and dismiss the argument as no solid evidence was presented, and speculation isn't the thing they're interested in, so they stop paying attention. Some politician sees the opportunity, and writes legislation that, what a coincidence, happens to benefit some of his donors while mandating that people give up just a little to avert this alleged disaster.
As a claimed result of these actions, disaster is averted, and anyone actually interested in science and evidence who finally hears about the law and complains is clearly a denier, or works for some evil corporations (you can tell the evil ones because they don't donate to said politician).
So, no, I'm not interested in buying your tiger rock without some evidence of tigers in the neighborhood, and the tiger-deterring effectiveness the rock. Even though I accept certain existence of tigers in the world, that's not really the important fact here.
It's the same pet peeve I have about low-flow toilets madated nation-wide: 1) Prove there's a need to conserve water where I live 2) Prove that the amount of water used in toilets is non-trivial 3) Prove that this solution significantly reduces the amount of water used in toilets.
If you can't prove all three, fuck off with low-flow toilets.
So, again, the burden of proof is on you that (1) we stand any real chance of exhausting the Earths helium supply before fusion is easy (or grabbing it from off-planet, but that seems further out), and (2) the thing you want to ban is a significant contributor to the problem, and (3) the ban will actually work to achieve that goal, unlike say drug laws.
I've never seen any evidence for (1), and I not seeing how (2) would apply to hard drives. (3) I'll give you.
Well, obviously PRNGs arn't random - that's why they're called psuedo-random. Whether stuff like radioactive decay is "true random" is, at best, an empirical question (not a philosophical one), and more likely a nonsense question. That happens a lot in QM: trying to reason in detail about phenomena at that scale in terms of stuff we're familiar with just can't work: the concepts just don't match up. For example, asking whether the position of an electron is actually random: the question makes a flawed assumption, as electrons aren't discrete objects with individual positions to begin with. As a loose analogy, sure, we can talk about particles with position, but if you ask any hard questions then you have to abandon the notion.
None of that says that it's scarce, or that we could possibly run out before it becomes trivial to get more, or that Helium used in production is a non-trivial contributor to total Helium loss. Hand-wavey doomsday arguments just aren't that interesting.
m. Wikipedia, for all it's faults, is one of the wonders of the modern age. Between it and Google, it's like a global repository of human knowledge... or at least, a summary of human knowledge, with links to deeper knowledge.
But while its power is derived from the masses of humans that create and edit that content, the masses are also its weakness.
Wikipedia: a formerly comprhensive collection of human knowledge, being deleted one article at a time until it's all gone. Once a place that derived its power masses of humans that created and edited that content, but now controlled by an ever-shrinking editorial cabal, soon to be replaced by a shell script.
There is no scarcity of helium in the first place, and, just like any other commodity, the market will seek a price where supply meets demand. The cure for high commodity prices is high commodity prices. If helium becomes valuable to produce because the demand grows, the the natural gas fields which today just release all that useless helium will start capturing it and producing 2 products.
From my point of view as a user, I just want the plug-in to be secure. Since these plugins (allegedly) protect valuable IP, they'll have vastly better security review than Flash has ever had. The side effect of these companies caring about DRM is a security awareness that will be quite beneficial to the user.
And, still, as little as the standard requires, anything there is better than nothing there. (I think the standards committee were really slacking here, BTW, but then, the W3C isn't a real standards body AFAIK. No oversight or best practices from ANSI, NIST, ISO, or any of the important parent organizations.)
It's useless since you can't write a module that supports any and all possible encryption mechanisms, selectable dynamically. So you don't do that, and end up with a non-standard standardisation.
It's an imperfect world. That's just how it is, when it takes 5 years for a draft standard to become official (by which time everything using it is obsolete), but crypto changes frequently. The thing it" it still helps a lot. It tremendously reduces the amount of vendor-specific code needed to get the job done.
And, given all of the above, overall, 64 bit is about 30% faster. Based on what I've read, and what I've benchmarked
But are you looking at number crunching, or at "card walloping code": iterating though a large array of large objects, applying some simple transformation to each. Most business code, after all, does nothing interesting to a lot of bloated objects. (of course, such code is almost always I/O bound anyhow, so maybe it doesn't matter.)
don't think we've actually got a true random source - just stuff that appears to be true random until we've a greater understanding.
That's a philosophical topic that, while interesting, isn't relevant. Diode thermal noise is unpredictable, and that's the important bit. Just as rolling a die: is it random? That's a topic for the ages. Is it unpredictable, with all the right statistical properties? Yup, for a fair die. That's the relevant test. If you can predict the output of any cryptographically secure RNG, there's a $1 billion prize waiting for you.
The predictability of other RNGs are well-studied, and well characterized. E.g., it's possible to predict the output of a LCG-based RNG, but it takes quite sophisticated software, and billions of sequential results (well, assuming we're not using 16-bit keys here). Add some physical entropy and it's secure enough unless $billions are on the line. Is it truly random? Who cares - it's better than physical dice.
On the philosophical question, quantum physics tells us that some things are unpredictable, and whether random or not, any observation we can possibly make can't distinguish the underlying state from random, making the philosophical question a bit of a moot point.
The allegations against Tim Hunt were false, because context is needed for meaning, and in context his words were clearly unoffensive (plus I think the initial social media stuff about it included fabricated quotes). He said that what confused him the most about being asked to resign was that he was never asked to explain the incident, to give context.
To every SJW who dies of cancer in the coming decades, I say: karma's a bitch, no?
ESR's statement wasn't out of the blue, though, just its inclusion in this summary is (WTF?). ESR was talking about a real problem, applicable a few dozen people in the world,and irrelevant to everyone else.
If you are looking to avoid cheating, you assume everything you've not verified is unknown...
I'm not worried about a player at my table hacking a device, but I wouldn't trust a device with a closed source RNG. There are plenty of ways to cheat with dice, and that's fine: we're not rolling d20s for money.
generating random numbers in a non-deterministic way on a digital device remains a very difficult task.
Deterministic is just fine, though you do need some way to seed it. Entropy sources are very cheap. A cheap entropy source plus a cryptographically secure PRNG gives a better result than physical dice. A half-way decent PRNG is good enough for people who aren't betting money.
Pretty much by definition, a cryptographically secure PRNG is indistinguishable from genuinely random output if all you can see is the output source for any human-scale series of output values. In practice you add an entropy source for key generation as a safeguard against weaknesses in the PRNG that are discovered long after you ship (or that were put there by the NSA, which is sadly all too real). But if all you see is a few thousand results of a simulated 20-sided die you just don't need anything special to keep the next roll unpredictable.
Slashdot Mirror
Your human target is 50 feet away and barely moving and yet SOMEHOW all of your crack Stormtroopers miss with a weapon that shoots at the speed of light.
In the real 3 movies, this is actually explained quite well. (Inability of the armor to protect against teddy bears is another story). It canon that Storm Troopers are good shots: "these blast points are too accurate to be Sand People". So why do they miss so consistently in certain scenes in SW and ESB? Because they've been ordered to let the prisoners escape / capture them alive.
Think about it: the times in the first movie when Storm Troopers can't hit anything are during the rescue of Princess Leia and return to the Rebel base carrying the tracking device. Of course they miss! Would you want to ruin Vader's plan? At other times in the movie they certainly manage to kill off Rebels (and civilians) here and there.
Similarly in the second movie: there's a stretch where the Storm Troopers cant seem to hit anything but a droid, but Vader's plan is to sell Han to Jabba and have a nice father-son chat.
He. Selected. A. Specific. Individual. To be his victim. That's what makes it a crime.
Imagine someone writing up a plan to kill you, Feyshtey, on a particular day, with a particular tool, with express cooperation of a few other people. The police discover it. Should they prosecute? Or should they let it go until the plan is actually carried out and you were transformed into a corpse?
None of that is illegal, nor should it be. No thoughts should be illegal. No plans should be illegal. Taking action to further those plans: that's what should be (and is, at least for conspiracy) illegal.
Loretta Lynch Vows to Prosecute Those Who Use 'Anti-Muslim' Speech That 'Edges Toward Violence'
What do you expect from an AG named "Lynch"?
Seems like the "identity politics" crowd these days worries more about backlash against muslims after a terrorist attack than the next attack. You know, there wasn't a backlash after 9/11, because the average American really can distinguish between "muslim terrorist" and "muslim". Really.
"Three, sir!"
"Third! Third would act as a checksum!"
If the first word were alphabetical by lattitude, and the second by longitude, and the third very different for nearby squares, this would be a much better system. From the first two words you could get a good general idea where someone was, and the fourth would act as a checksum.
Doesn't Perl's "taint mode" do something like this? Looks like Ruby does it too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Rei's idea is more clever: tainted should be the default. A special, limited, "clean string" class would be used as the argument to anything that executes a command. I like it.
While we're wishing, I want a language where "const" and "not allowed to be null" were the default, and "mutable" and "nullable" required special syntax.
Or even better, you don't even have to copy the code, you just need to type the google terms that result in the appropriate SO question as the first hit.
The first joke I saw about this was Stack Sort (take the first SO search result for sorting, apply that to the list, loop down the results until it's sorted). This has of course been implemented.
Since it's been implemented, you could do a meta version - search for "stack sort implementation", and run that code!
The market reflects the best efforts of people with a great deal of money on the line to predict the future. When it looks like a real shortage is on the horizon, you see stuff like people buying vast amounts of oil, loading it into tankers, and storing the oil to be sold into the predicted crunch. The wisdom of crowds is never perfect, but it can be OK.
Solar is nice during the day and all, but fusion solves a bunch of problems solar doesn't, from heating load over winter nights to industrial power. (Plus, a big chunk of power consumption, about half of industrial use is never electrical energy, but thermal used directly).
Tell you what, the EFF has credibility in the bank with me. Google on the other hand...
Well fuck me running, I agree with Ratzo on something. Google is an advertizing company, and weasel words and outright lying convincingly are core competencies for them. The EFF has never steered me wrong.
Plus, the weasel words here are pretty obvious: Google admits to collecting students personal information, but tries to hide behind "we only use it in aggregate".
Does Postgre have reasonable DB replication? Or is losing a server a crisis?
There's a need to conserve helium because it's non-renewable.
That's not important. Everything is non-renewable on some scale. Solar power is not renewable on some scale. Fusion is non-renewable on some scale. That's not the question I asked. You answered the question you liked, instead of the question I asked. Did you think I wouldn't notice?
I was arguing about the wider problem of helium usage, and your claim that the shortage didn't exist and/or that the market would sort it out
So, for any specific thing you want to address, you still need to demonstrate that that specific thing is worthwhile. If helium becomes scare, the price will rice, and people will use less. Until you prove (1), I'm free to assume that people will just produce more (since they're venting it anyway right now), and so demand will be met with new supply, just as it is with, oil, natural gas, food, and basically everything else people have been predicting we'd run out of for the last 150 years.
So here's how it works.
Someone poorly versed in science invents a disaster scenario. People who are actually interested in science and evidence, listen and dismiss the argument as no solid evidence was presented, and speculation isn't the thing they're interested in, so they stop paying attention. Some politician sees the opportunity, and writes legislation that, what a coincidence, happens to benefit some of his donors while mandating that people give up just a little to avert this alleged disaster.
As a claimed result of these actions, disaster is averted, and anyone actually interested in science and evidence who finally hears about the law and complains is clearly a denier, or works for some evil corporations (you can tell the evil ones because they don't donate to said politician).
So, no, I'm not interested in buying your tiger rock without some evidence of tigers in the neighborhood, and the tiger-deterring effectiveness the rock. Even though I accept certain existence of tigers in the world, that's not really the important fact here.
It's the same pet peeve I have about low-flow toilets madated nation-wide:
1) Prove there's a need to conserve water where I live
2) Prove that the amount of water used in toilets is non-trivial
3) Prove that this solution significantly reduces the amount of water used in toilets.
If you can't prove all three, fuck off with low-flow toilets.
So, again, the burden of proof is on you that (1) we stand any real chance of exhausting the Earths helium supply before fusion is easy (or grabbing it from off-planet, but that seems further out), and (2) the thing you want to ban is a significant contributor to the problem, and (3) the ban will actually work to achieve that goal, unlike say drug laws.
I've never seen any evidence for (1), and I not seeing how (2) would apply to hard drives. (3) I'll give you.
Well, obviously PRNGs arn't random - that's why they're called psuedo-random. Whether stuff like radioactive decay is "true random" is, at best, an empirical question (not a philosophical one), and more likely a nonsense question. That happens a lot in QM: trying to reason in detail about phenomena at that scale in terms of stuff we're familiar with just can't work: the concepts just don't match up. For example, asking whether the position of an electron is actually random: the question makes a flawed assumption, as electrons aren't discrete objects with individual positions to begin with. As a loose analogy, sure, we can talk about particles with position, but if you ask any hard questions then you have to abandon the notion.
None of that says that it's scarce, or that we could possibly run out before it becomes trivial to get more, or that Helium used in production is a non-trivial contributor to total Helium loss. Hand-wavey doomsday arguments just aren't that interesting.
m. Wikipedia, for all it's faults, is one of the wonders of the modern age. Between it and Google, it's like a global repository of human knowledge... or at least, a summary of human knowledge, with links to deeper knowledge.
But while its power is derived from the masses of humans that create and edit that content, the masses are also its weakness.
Wikipedia: a formerly comprhensive collection of human knowledge, being deleted one article at a time until it's all gone. Once a place that derived its power masses of humans that created and edited that content, but now controlled by an ever-shrinking editorial cabal, soon to be replaced by a shell script.
There is no scarcity of helium in the first place, and, just like any other commodity, the market will seek a price where supply meets demand. The cure for high commodity prices is high commodity prices. If helium becomes valuable to produce because the demand grows, the the natural gas fields which today just release all that useless helium will start capturing it and producing 2 products.
From my point of view as a user, I just want the plug-in to be secure. Since these plugins (allegedly) protect valuable IP, they'll have vastly better security review than Flash has ever had. The side effect of these companies caring about DRM is a security awareness that will be quite beneficial to the user.
And, still, as little as the standard requires, anything there is better than nothing there. (I think the standards committee were really slacking here, BTW, but then, the W3C isn't a real standards body AFAIK. No oversight or best practices from ANSI, NIST, ISO, or any of the important parent organizations.)
It's useless since you can't write a module that supports any and all possible encryption mechanisms, selectable dynamically. So you don't do that, and end up with a non-standard standardisation.
It's an imperfect world. That's just how it is, when it takes 5 years for a draft standard to become official (by which time everything using it is obsolete), but crypto changes frequently. The thing it" it still helps a lot. It tremendously reduces the amount of vendor-specific code needed to get the job done.
And, given all of the above, overall, 64 bit is about 30% faster. Based on what I've read, and what I've benchmarked
But are you looking at number crunching, or at "card walloping code": iterating though a large array of large objects, applying some simple transformation to each. Most business code, after all, does nothing interesting to a lot of bloated objects. (of course, such code is almost always I/O bound anyhow, so maybe it doesn't matter.)
don't think we've actually got a true random source - just stuff that appears to be true random until we've a greater understanding.
That's a philosophical topic that, while interesting, isn't relevant. Diode thermal noise is unpredictable, and that's the important bit. Just as rolling a die: is it random? That's a topic for the ages. Is it unpredictable, with all the right statistical properties? Yup, for a fair die. That's the relevant test. If you can predict the output of any cryptographically secure RNG, there's a $1 billion prize waiting for you.
The predictability of other RNGs are well-studied, and well characterized. E.g., it's possible to predict the output of a LCG-based RNG, but it takes quite sophisticated software, and billions of sequential results (well, assuming we're not using 16-bit keys here). Add some physical entropy and it's secure enough unless $billions are on the line. Is it truly random? Who cares - it's better than physical dice.
On the philosophical question, quantum physics tells us that some things are unpredictable, and whether random or not, any observation we can possibly make can't distinguish the underlying state from random, making the philosophical question a bit of a moot point.
The allegations against Tim Hunt were false, because context is needed for meaning, and in context his words were clearly unoffensive (plus I think the initial social media stuff about it included fabricated quotes). He said that what confused him the most about being asked to resign was that he was never asked to explain the incident, to give context.
To every SJW who dies of cancer in the coming decades, I say: karma's a bitch, no?
ESR's statement wasn't out of the blue, though, just its inclusion in this summary is (WTF?). ESR was talking about a real problem, applicable a few dozen people in the world,and irrelevant to everyone else.
She is NOT an engineer. ... What she is, is a software developer. ... Fuck all these people who think otherwise and dilute the word
Those new-fangled train drivers aren't really engineers! Unless you roll your petard against the castle gates, you're just diluting the word!
Call it what you want, the best paying jobs with an "engineer" job title are software developers. That's sufficient recognition for me.
If you are looking to avoid cheating, you assume everything you've not verified is unknown...
I'm not worried about a player at my table hacking a device, but I wouldn't trust a device with a closed source RNG. There are plenty of ways to cheat with dice, and that's fine: we're not rolling d20s for money.
generating random numbers in a non-deterministic way on a digital device remains a very difficult task.
Deterministic is just fine, though you do need some way to seed it. Entropy sources are very cheap. A cheap entropy source plus a cryptographically secure PRNG gives a better result than physical dice. A half-way decent PRNG is good enough for people who aren't betting money.
Pretty much by definition, a cryptographically secure PRNG is indistinguishable from genuinely random output if all you can see is the output source for any human-scale series of output values. In practice you add an entropy source for key generation as a safeguard against weaknesses in the PRNG that are discovered long after you ship (or that were put there by the NSA, which is sadly all too real). But if all you see is a few thousand results of a simulated 20-sided die you just don't need anything special to keep the next roll unpredictable.