Sure you can protect the idiots. Like my post said, you can use 2-factor auth, or if it's not that important, you can make account recovery easy. Debit cards work fine with a 4-digit PIN, because both "it's 2-factor auth" and "fraud prevention and recovery is well thought out".
The difference between "idiot" and "at fault" is huge.
Users will be idiots. Does any IT admin deny this fact? If your system only protects users who aren't idiots, you're a sorry excuse for an admin.
Make your system robust against weak passwords. This is not rocket science. If it's something important, use two-factor auth. If not, make account recovery easy - put real thought and effort into it! And for goodness sake, make sure your DB of password hashes doesn't become public - that's all in your hands, and it's completely your fault if that happens, weak passwords or strong.
Ahh, the cult of the victim. "Oooh, look at me, I'm special, I'm a victim and so should have special privileges". Fuck that noise. If you're the victim of institutional oppression, such as laws or policies (official or otherwise) that discriminate against your race, that's one thing - the system needs to change, and it will take more than you to do it. But if the only damage is "hurt feelings", then, seriously, grow up.
Yes, it hurts. Welcome to adulthood. Life is a mixed bag. If you do something productive with your life as an adult you'll find insults childish and laughable. Our failure as a society is preventing teenagers from doing just that, in the name of "protecting" them.
The defense against "hurt feelings" isn't cocooning kids from even insults! It's true self-confidence that comes from actually participating in the real world. Getting that first job, earning your own way, to some small degree. Finding your place.
The fact that rumors of rapes and assaults (that you yourself acknowledge are often true) were ignored in your school is not something to be proud of.
The weren't ignored, they were simply treated with appropriate skepticism by the students. Gossip was entertaining; not anything more. The school admins did look into anything substantive, but they also knew people like to BS and threaten as a way to blow off steam - real violence wasn't preceded by threats!
these systems allow for easier and stronger anonymity, and make it possible to spread such rumors faster and wider
Oh, what bullshit. Gossip spreads at the speed of sound anyway, and you never learn the origin.
Standing up to bullies has been 100% effective in my life. No, revenge and passive-aggressive nonsense doesn't work at all. The first time at any new school a bully tried to intimidate me or shove me around, I started a fight right there. My track record for winning those fight was poor, but that's not important. Bullies are taking the easy path as they see it, and you just have to show you're not on that path.
One nice thing in my school (more than 15 years ago) was that you'd get the "takes two to fight" nonsense only if the pattern hadn't yet emerged for that particular bully. The admins at my schools weren't completely stupid, and weren't handcuffed by "zero tolerance".
I got in one fight at each new school I went to -- winning the fight was not in any way required to remove yourself from the target list for bullies -- and only once was I suspended. That case was very early in the school year.
All those sorts of rumors were common in my high school (pre mobile phone), phones have nothing at all to do with it. And nothing ever came of the rumors - gossip was fun, but no one really took it seriously (and in my school, most of the rumors were true).
Did some precious perfect snowflake get his wittle feelers hurt? Maybe it's time to grow up. Has the new generation somehow lost the natural skepticism towards anonymous rumors? Somehow I doubt it.
Fair point - I guess I should have said "the general area where Menlo Park and EPA are, that's there's not a great name for collectively" is mid-gentrification. Maybe we should call the area "Ravenswood", mostly because it sounds cool.
No one has actually found dark matter... as in put it under a microscope or touched it
Right, like all of cosmology.
There's solid evidence for the existence of dark matter - it's composition remains a mystery as early hypotheses aren't panning out.
What I don't get is why anyone would think Dark Matter would form layers above and below the galactic disk. Hard to see why the distribution about the galaxy would be anything but spherical.
Sure, all you have to do is make numerically accurate predictions of future observations, how hard can that be? Or failing that, just be a String Theorist...
Everything is science is "theoretical", that doesn't mean it's unlikely to be true.
Dark matter explains both galaxy rotation and the behavior of the early universe quite well. Until the CMBR data, dark matter was just one hypothesis among many for galaxy rotation, but only dark matter explained the observed pattern of mass distribution when the universe cooled enough to become transparent for the first time. And the numbers matched to a couple of significant digits, not in some hand-wavey way.
What dark matter is made of is still an open question, but it's pretty clear that about 4/5ths of the matter in the universe is dark.
Yeah, but it's about moving the Overton window. As the democratic state becomes weaker, private businesses take over a governing role. Before you had to bribe - now you just pay directly for cops.
That's the real story here. And Menlo Park used to be quite the bad neighborhood, so with Cali government falling apart it would be a disturbing development if this meant that you have to hire your own police officer if you want police protection. But I think that's sensationalized - Menlo Park is already mid-gentrification, already has a very high police presence. It's just not the case here that Facebook needed to pay the cops just to do their job.
There's more here than meets the eye. FB certainly could have hired off-duty police officers as security guards for cheaper. It's either some stunt by FB, or a blatant shakedown by the local PD (nice campus you've got there...), and I doubt we'll ever know which.
Sure, if you mean "working memory" as a loose analogy for the computer sense, sure, I agree with you because that requires active contemplation. If by "working memory" you mean the stuff we're currently contemplating, its the contemplating part that matters, yes? That's how you're distinguishing "working memory" from "memory"? So the difference is "intelligence", not the storage medium?
You can't "use" an concept stored in "human memory" directly either. Thinking about stuff copies* it out of memory and into consciousness. (Or did you mean "memory" in a very loose sense, in which case I agree with you).
*Human memory is normally quite lossy - we reconstruct most of what we remember - heck, we construct most of what we see - so "copy" isn't the best word, really.
A firm yes to the second, unless you have some very particular religious beliefs.
The first though is less obvious: the best current working definition for "knowledge" is "justified, true belief". Wikipedia holds many things that are both true and justified, but Wikipedia doesn't "believe" anything, if we're just speaking about the web site, not the editors.
"Belief" certainly requires sentience (feeling), and maybe sapience (thinking). Personally, I think human sapience isn't all that special or unique, that we're only different in degree, not in kind, from the smarter (non-human) animals, and sentience is quite common. How aware does a system have to be to have a belief? More than a web site does today, to be sure, but I think that bar is pretty low.
A "law" is simply a terse theory. There's no hierarchy where a "law" is better than a "theory", its just that some very theories that explain a lot despite having a very short mathematical expression get called "laws".
E.g., there's no "law of evolution" because there's not a clever math one-liner that conveys the theory. "F=ma" is a "law" not because it's particularly true (since it's not), but because it's 4 characters.
There's nothing that makes one more stupid than being too arrogant to learn from one's mistakes. Accept corrections, like compliments, gracefully and move on.
Right - the protocol only fails for anonymity when someone can log the IP addresses associated with every bitcoin transaction ever, and get the physical address associated with every IP address. So, yeah, here on Earth it's not anonymous, but it looks great on a whiteboard.
If you keep logs, you out your users when the government gets the logs - that's hardly news. And bitcoin "keeping logs" is fundamental to the protocol. It's still a neat protocol, and it's probably easier to anonymize (or steal) an IP address than a credit card, but don't think you're hidden from the NSA by the power of bitcoin.
Perhaps you could argue that an ICBM is a bit too heavy to "bear", but for most of US history, artillery was privately purchased and donated to towns and cities for defense. IIRC as late as Teddy Roosevelt we'd go to war with artillery that just some guys bought, bought the mules to haul it, and brought with them to the war (in addition to what the army itself had, but that was often inadequate and the supplemental pieces were welcomed).
If you're uncomfortable with your neighbor owning an ICBM (I know I am), we can amend the constitution, using the mechanism provided. We should just creatively interpret it, because that is precisely what led to losing most of the protections in the Bill of Rights.
Because it's convenient to allow creative interpretation instead of actually amending the Constitution, we've lost much of the point of it all!
Yup, in the MS world it's nuts to set up a new exchange server these days. Office 365 Just Works (well, works as well as Exchange ever works, but let's assume that was the goal), and for small companies a monthly per-seat check is way less of a burden than needing an IT guy.
Slashdot Mirror
If the auth system is a cert stored on my device plus a simple password I can easily remember, then it's a great idea.
Sure you can protect the idiots. Like my post said, you can use 2-factor auth, or if it's not that important, you can make account recovery easy. Debit cards work fine with a 4-digit PIN, because both "it's 2-factor auth" and "fraud prevention and recovery is well thought out".
The difference between "idiot" and "at fault" is huge.
Users will be idiots. Does any IT admin deny this fact? If your system only protects users who aren't idiots, you're a sorry excuse for an admin.
Make your system robust against weak passwords. This is not rocket science. If it's something important, use two-factor auth. If not, make account recovery easy - put real thought and effort into it! And for goodness sake, make sure your DB of password hashes doesn't become public - that's all in your hands, and it's completely your fault if that happens, weak passwords or strong.
Ahh, the cult of the victim. "Oooh, look at me, I'm special, I'm a victim and so should have special privileges". Fuck that noise. If you're the victim of institutional oppression, such as laws or policies (official or otherwise) that discriminate against your race, that's one thing - the system needs to change, and it will take more than you to do it. But if the only damage is "hurt feelings", then, seriously, grow up.
Yes, it hurts. Welcome to adulthood. Life is a mixed bag. If you do something productive with your life as an adult you'll find insults childish and laughable. Our failure as a society is preventing teenagers from doing just that, in the name of "protecting" them.
The defense against "hurt feelings" isn't cocooning kids from even insults! It's true self-confidence that comes from actually participating in the real world. Getting that first job, earning your own way, to some small degree. Finding your place.
The fact that rumors of rapes and assaults (that you yourself acknowledge are often true) were ignored in your school is not something to be proud of.
The weren't ignored, they were simply treated with appropriate skepticism by the students. Gossip was entertaining; not anything more. The school admins did look into anything substantive, but they also knew people like to BS and threaten as a way to blow off steam - real violence wasn't preceded by threats!
these systems allow for easier and stronger anonymity, and make it possible to spread such rumors faster and wider
Oh, what bullshit. Gossip spreads at the speed of sound anyway, and you never learn the origin.
Standing up to bullies has been 100% effective in my life. No, revenge and passive-aggressive nonsense doesn't work at all. The first time at any new school a bully tried to intimidate me or shove me around, I started a fight right there. My track record for winning those fight was poor, but that's not important. Bullies are taking the easy path as they see it, and you just have to show you're not on that path.
One nice thing in my school (more than 15 years ago) was that you'd get the "takes two to fight" nonsense only if the pattern hadn't yet emerged for that particular bully. The admins at my schools weren't completely stupid, and weren't handcuffed by "zero tolerance".
I got in one fight at each new school I went to -- winning the fight was not in any way required to remove yourself from the target list for bullies -- and only once was I suspended. That case was very early in the school year.
All those sorts of rumors were common in my high school (pre mobile phone), phones have nothing at all to do with it. And nothing ever came of the rumors - gossip was fun, but no one really took it seriously (and in my school, most of the rumors were true).
Did some precious perfect snowflake get his wittle feelers hurt? Maybe it's time to grow up. Has the new generation somehow lost the natural skepticism towards anonymous rumors? Somehow I doubt it.
Fair point - I guess I should have said "the general area where Menlo Park and EPA are, that's there's not a great name for collectively" is mid-gentrification. Maybe we should call the area "Ravenswood", mostly because it sounds cool.
Okay... fine... but that's entirely theoretical.
Right, like all of science.
No one has actually found dark matter... as in put it under a microscope or touched it
Right, like all of cosmology.
There's solid evidence for the existence of dark matter - it's composition remains a mystery as early hypotheses aren't panning out.
What I don't get is why anyone would think Dark Matter would form layers above and below the galactic disk. Hard to see why the distribution about the galaxy would be anything but spherical.
Sure, all you have to do is make numerically accurate predictions of future observations, how hard can that be? Or failing that, just be a String Theorist ...
Everything is science is "theoretical", that doesn't mean it's unlikely to be true.
Dark matter explains both galaxy rotation and the behavior of the early universe quite well. Until the CMBR data, dark matter was just one hypothesis among many for galaxy rotation, but only dark matter explained the observed pattern of mass distribution when the universe cooled enough to become transparent for the first time. And the numbers matched to a couple of significant digits, not in some hand-wavey way.
What dark matter is made of is still an open question, but it's pretty clear that about 4/5ths of the matter in the universe is dark.
Yeah, but it's about moving the Overton window. As the democratic state becomes weaker, private businesses take over a governing role. Before you had to bribe - now you just pay directly for cops.
That's the real story here. And Menlo Park used to be quite the bad neighborhood, so with Cali government falling apart it would be a disturbing development if this meant that you have to hire your own police officer if you want police protection. But I think that's sensationalized - Menlo Park is already mid-gentrification, already has a very high police presence. It's just not the case here that Facebook needed to pay the cops just to do their job.
There's more here than meets the eye. FB certainly could have hired off-duty police officers as security guards for cheaper. It's either some stunt by FB, or a blatant shakedown by the local PD (nice campus you've got there ...), and I doubt we'll ever know which.
Wow, where does the hate come from?
Sure, if you mean "working memory" as a loose analogy for the computer sense, sure, I agree with you because that requires active contemplation. If by "working memory" you mean the stuff we're currently contemplating, its the contemplating part that matters, yes? That's how you're distinguishing "working memory" from "memory"? So the difference is "intelligence", not the storage medium?
You can't "use" an concept stored in "human memory" directly either. Thinking about stuff copies* it out of memory and into consciousness. (Or did you mean "memory" in a very loose sense, in which case I agree with you).
*Human memory is normally quite lossy - we reconstruct most of what we remember - heck, we construct most of what we see - so "copy" isn't the best word, really.
Human memory is just storage, no different from paper. It's the intelligence that's relevant, not the storage.
A firm yes to the second, unless you have some very particular religious beliefs.
The first though is less obvious: the best current working definition for "knowledge" is "justified, true belief". Wikipedia holds many things that are both true and justified, but Wikipedia doesn't "believe" anything, if we're just speaking about the web site, not the editors.
"Belief" certainly requires sentience (feeling), and maybe sapience (thinking). Personally, I think human sapience isn't all that special or unique, that we're only different in degree, not in kind, from the smarter (non-human) animals, and sentience is quite common. How aware does a system have to be to have a belief? More than a web site does today, to be sure, but I think that bar is pretty low.
Do you see any of that as different from what I said above? Or were you thinking that 3 isn't true of "theories" as well?
Not being tech savvy is no excuse. Hire a contractor to do the work, then pay for a security audit from a different firm. That's all that's required.
A "law" is simply a terse theory. There's no hierarchy where a "law" is better than a "theory", its just that some very theories that explain a lot despite having a very short mathematical expression get called "laws".
E.g., there's no "law of evolution" because there's not a clever math one-liner that conveys the theory. "F=ma" is a "law" not because it's particularly true (since it's not), but because it's 4 characters.
There's nothing that makes one more stupid than being too arrogant to learn from one's mistakes. Accept corrections, like compliments, gracefully and move on.
Right - the protocol only fails for anonymity when someone can log the IP addresses associated with every bitcoin transaction ever, and get the physical address associated with every IP address. So, yeah, here on Earth it's not anonymous, but it looks great on a whiteboard.
If you keep logs, you out your users when the government gets the logs - that's hardly news. And bitcoin "keeping logs" is fundamental to the protocol. It's still a neat protocol, and it's probably easier to anonymize (or steal) an IP address than a credit card, but don't think you're hidden from the NSA by the power of bitcoin.
We *shouldn't just creatively ...
The second amendment says that I can own an ICBM.
Perhaps you could argue that an ICBM is a bit too heavy to "bear", but for most of US history, artillery was privately purchased and donated to towns and cities for defense. IIRC as late as Teddy Roosevelt we'd go to war with artillery that just some guys bought, bought the mules to haul it, and brought with them to the war (in addition to what the army itself had, but that was often inadequate and the supplemental pieces were welcomed).
If you're uncomfortable with your neighbor owning an ICBM (I know I am), we can amend the constitution, using the mechanism provided. We should just creatively interpret it, because that is precisely what led to losing most of the protections in the Bill of Rights.
Because it's convenient to allow creative interpretation instead of actually amending the Constitution, we've lost much of the point of it all!
Yup, in the MS world it's nuts to set up a new exchange server these days. Office 365 Just Works (well, works as well as Exchange ever works, but let's assume that was the goal), and for small companies a monthly per-seat check is way less of a burden than needing an IT guy.