I really don't know how people can argue that everyone having devices that can instantly kill makes people safer. Let's look at the gun issue in two ways, shall we?
APPROACH ONE: The stats approach: The homocide rate per 100000 people is 5.7 in the US. That's compared to 2.03 in the UK, 1.64 in France, and 0.5 in Japan.
APPROACH TWO: The logical approach: A robber bursts into your house. He's holding a loaded handgun with the safety off. To shoot you he has to point it at you and pull the trigger. To shoot him you have to get up, grab your gun, take the safety off and shoot him. Who do you think is going to win? A gun fight so massively favours the person who initiates it, that a gun can almost never be considered a defensive weapon. Sure if you ban them there's the odd occasion when someone might threaten you with a gun when you're unarmed, but if someone points a gun in your face and has the guts to pull the trigger, having a gun in your pocket won't make a huge difference. Besides, this scenario is extremely uncommon, as owning an illegal gun is so risky that you're not going to get one just for a few muggings.
As for the argument that it protects you from your government, oh please. Do you really think the public would stand up to the full force of the US military for long?
And if everyone in the US had a personal nuclear device that went off automatically should their vital signs fail, there would be a lot less gun crime in the US. Maybe you should implement that.
You are a moron if you have never seen the UAV/Apache videos. The Apache pilots go through this thorough process of identifying the target, whether they have weapons or have been firing mortars.
Sure, they check they have weapons. Not much good when they're shooting the hell out of friendly forces though, is it? Take a look at this link. Of course it doesn't matter much when the US refuses to cooperate with the inquiry anyway.
I think he's referring to Mitchell and Webb, who did the same adverts for the UK. Although they've done lots of things together, they are most famous for the cringe-inducing, yet totally amazing Peep Show (which America will be missing out on it seems, as your networks seem to refuse to air anything that isn't recasted and watered down).
Rocks are dated based on what layer of strata they are found in. Strata is dated based on the rocks found within it. This is called circular reasoning, isn't scientific but is used to date things all the time.
That's not circular reasoning at all.
Take a few samples from a strata and date them using carbon-dating or whatever. You know now the age of those rocks. Call this data A.
Make the assumption that other rocks in the strata are of a similar age. Call this assumption B.
When presented with a rock that's from that strata, you can assume it's of a similar age to the previous ones. Call this assumption C.
So we have A plus B implies C. That's not circular at all. Circular would be saying "This rock is a million years old. Therefore the strata is a million years old. Therefore the rock is a million years old." In that argument there's nothing to show that the rock really is a million years old. However in the model above, the age is determined by an experiment and can be relied on.
It's exactly the same as having a box of blue balls and a box of red balls. Someone is hiding a ball behind their back and will only tell you it came from the same box as a red ball. Which colour do you guess? If you said anything other than "red" (including you can't tell), then I don't know what to say.
It just doesn't hold that believing in some crazy religious BS entails being stupid in other areas.
No, it doesn't. Not necessarily. But being a creationist shows that you're willing to overlook overwhelming evidence in order to believe something written in the bible. What happens when there's a Second Cold War and the fundamentalist with their finger on the big red button starts reading about Noah and how God killed everyone but Noah and his family?
And remember, Bush's "crusade" is still killing people every day.
Umm.. how exactly is kids being interested in politics a good thing?
Maybe I'm just old, but when I was a kid, we left grown up matters like politics to the adults. Being that children can't vote, and no-one cares about their political opinions, doesn't this survey say that they're basically worried about things they have no control over? Isn't that the definition of stress?
Wow. So you want kids to remain ignorant until they can vote. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea!
Ignoring just how stupid that point of view is, it's still not stupid to be interested in things you can't influence. I'm English and as such can't vote in the US. That doesn't mean I'm not going to be interested in who wins the next US election. What with one-sided extradition treaties, US torture flights flying through London and your military refusing to cooperate when your pilots kill our soldiers in Iraq (even when one of our papers leaks the tapes), I care very much about the result in November.
A less polluting and more efficient source of energy? Like nuclear? Hell, an oil-burning power station is hugely more efficient than an internal combustion engine.
As with most DRM schemes, I think there's an ulterior motive here, and I think that's to kill the second hand market.
If this is indeed the case, then it's a very short-sighted tactic. Take books for example. Obviously it's impractical to eliminate the second-hand book market, but even if publishers could, they wouldn't want to. The knowledge that you can resell a book helps keep prices high, especially when it comes to academic books. If you know you can never recoup any of the money spent, are you going to want to shell out top dollar to get the game/book/film as soon as it's out?
Your current government, sure -- but much of the rest of the world is currently suffering all sorts of horrors because the past policies of GB. From Africa to the middle east, all these so-called "countries" that are or have been engaged in civil war are so because you guys drew a map that was convenient for you, forced people to get along at the point of 10,000 bayonets while you were there, and then thought it would continue to be so once you left.
Gotta love American logic. Apparently US citizens aren't to blame for their current government's actions, but British citizens are to blame for things that happened before they were born...
The US is still playing junior varsity "nation building" by comparison.
And the other favourite: "Someone did something worse in the past, so we can do whatever we want!"
Yeah they even can provide complicated proof that there's a solution, while being unable to provide one.
Yeah, there's some really weird stuff like that. I just finished the Maths Tripos at Cambridge (UK) and in a Logic supervision I was discussing the theory of proofs and the fact that you can show something is provable but without actually finding a proof (mad, I know). I asked whether this really mattered because if you know there's a proof of something you know it must be true, and my supervisor gave me a very interesting example:
Colouring graphs on orientable surfaces of genus n is something that is quite interesting. (Think colouring a map, painted on a doughnut with n holes, with the fewest colours necessary). We know that there is a way to construct a fast (polynomial time) algorithm which colours such a graph in the least possible number of colours. However, because we haven't found a constructive proof, we have no idea how to find these algorithms! Frustrating, eh?
Indeed. And all that heat is wasting a lot of energy. Everyone should turn things they're not using off at the wall (or unplug them of course). It's incredible the amount of energy that's being wasted in this way.
I don't understand why these machines exist. I've only voted in one general election (here in the UK) and we used the old "cross in the box then put the paper in the slot" technique. The result was still in by the next day, so what problem are these machines supposed to be solving?
I know where I've been, I don't need to be told every time I type a url, and I shouldn't have to jump through hoops to turn this crappy "feature" off.
Translation: My mother borrowed my PC to check her email, typed the first three letters of "hotmail" and the Awesome Bar nearly gave her a heart attack.
Except that very article says that it wasn't widely believed in the scientific community but was spun by the media. Global warming however is recognised by the majority of the scientific community.
And even if that wasn't the case, you're using the stupid "A scientist was once wrong so I can ignore any evidence any scientist ever produces argument".
Re:Next, Lego Will Make It a Creativity-Free Kit
on
Beijing 2008 In Lego
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
What?! TFA has a load of pictures of things which aren't from a guide.
I actually worked this out in an MSN conversation with someone the other week. We were wondering whether they could have just made 20 Saturn Vs, launch them one after another and have a party on the moon instead of going to Iraq. These were our calculations:
they spent $6.5 billion on Saturn V's
cost of iraq war to the US: $518B
$6.5 = $38.34 in new money apparently
so the cost of the iraq war is about 13.5 times the cost of all of the saturn Vs
so 20 Saturn Vs would be about a tenth of an iraq war
Now I'm no expert, but I reckon making a couple of hundred Saturn Vs and sending representatives from every country in the world to the moon would have done a lot more for world peace than another war.
I think you've missed the point. If you're not allowing access to the files then encryption isn't particularly important now is it?
The whole point of encryption is that you could email it to your arch-nemesis and they would still be unable to decrypt it in a useful time-frame. Take AES with a 256 bit key. That would (on average) take all of the computers in the world millions of years to brute force. It's possible that someone could get lucky, but they'd have to dedicate years of processing time on the off-chance that you had encrypted something particularly juicy.
Gah. I wish people wouldn't keep trying to use public key encryption when it's not needed. Public key encryption is used to get around the key distribution problem. Signing is used because anyone can easily encrypt stuff using your public key and you can't guarantee they are who they say they are.
From what I can tell, he's not sending these files to anyone. He's uploading them and the only person who will access them will be himself. This is exactly what regular, symmetric encryption is for!
Encrypt the files using AES or Blowfish or a combination. Truecrypt may be handy though I'm sure there are many other implementations. If you're keen on security use a password and a randomly generated keyfile which you keep safe on a USB stick (with multiple backups of course). The person on the other end obviously can't open the files without the key (which would take NSA millions of years to brute force). If he changes the files in some way then you won't be able to decrypt them with your key so you know something's up. No need for signing, GPG or anything particularly clever. As for sharing, who cares? Noone will be able to open them; that's the point of encryption.
Slashdot Mirror
Yawn. Usual moronic Yank argument.
I really don't know how people can argue that everyone having devices that can instantly kill makes people safer. Let's look at the gun issue in two ways, shall we?
APPROACH ONE: The stats approach: The homocide rate per 100000 people is 5.7 in the US. That's compared to 2.03 in the UK, 1.64 in France, and 0.5 in Japan.
APPROACH TWO: The logical approach: A robber bursts into your house. He's holding a loaded handgun with the safety off. To shoot you he has to point it at you and pull the trigger. To shoot him you have to get up, grab your gun, take the safety off and shoot him. Who do you think is going to win? A gun fight so massively favours the person who initiates it, that a gun can almost never be considered a defensive weapon. Sure if you ban them there's the odd occasion when someone might threaten you with a gun when you're unarmed, but if someone points a gun in your face and has the guts to pull the trigger, having a gun in your pocket won't make a huge difference. Besides, this scenario is extremely uncommon, as owning an illegal gun is so risky that you're not going to get one just for a few muggings.
As for the argument that it protects you from your government, oh please. Do you really think the public would stand up to the full force of the US military for long?
And if everyone in the US had a personal nuclear device that went off automatically should their vital signs fail, there would be a lot less gun crime in the US. Maybe you should implement that.
You are a moron if you have never seen the UAV/Apache videos.
The Apache pilots go through this thorough process of identifying the target, whether they have weapons or have been firing mortars.
Sure, they check they have weapons. Not much good when they're shooting the hell out of friendly forces though, is it? Take a look at this link. Of course it doesn't matter much when the US refuses to cooperate with the inquiry anyway.
I don't need to see your driving habits to know you can't drive faster in a blue Civic than you can in a red Civic.
But the red one appears to be driving away much, much faster.
I think he's referring to Mitchell and Webb, who did the same adverts for the UK. Although they've done lots of things together, they are most famous for the cringe-inducing, yet totally amazing Peep Show (which America will be missing out on it seems, as your networks seem to refuse to air anything that isn't recasted and watered down).
Rocks are dated based on what layer of strata they are found in. Strata is dated based on the rocks found within it. This is called circular reasoning, isn't scientific but is used to date things all the time.
That's not circular reasoning at all.
So we have A plus B implies C. That's not circular at all. Circular would be saying "This rock is a million years old. Therefore the strata is a million years old. Therefore the rock is a million years old." In that argument there's nothing to show that the rock really is a million years old. However in the model above, the age is determined by an experiment and can be relied on.
It's exactly the same as having a box of blue balls and a box of red balls. Someone is hiding a ball behind their back and will only tell you it came from the same box as a red ball. Which colour do you guess? If you said anything other than "red" (including you can't tell), then I don't know what to say.
It just doesn't hold that believing in some crazy religious BS entails being stupid in other areas.
No, it doesn't. Not necessarily. But being a creationist shows that you're willing to overlook overwhelming evidence in order to believe something written in the bible. What happens when there's a Second Cold War and the fundamentalist with their finger on the big red button starts reading about Noah and how God killed everyone but Noah and his family?
And remember, Bush's "crusade" is still killing people every day.
Umm.. how exactly is kids being interested in politics a good thing?
Maybe I'm just old, but when I was a kid, we left grown up matters like politics to the adults. Being that children can't vote, and no-one cares about their political opinions, doesn't this survey say that they're basically worried about things they have no control over? Isn't that the definition of stress?
Wow. So you want kids to remain ignorant until they can vote. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea!
Ignoring just how stupid that point of view is, it's still not stupid to be interested in things you can't influence. I'm English and as such can't vote in the US. That doesn't mean I'm not going to be interested in who wins the next US election. What with one-sided extradition treaties, US torture flights flying through London and your military refusing to cooperate when your pilots kill our soldiers in Iraq (even when one of our papers leaks the tapes), I care very much about the result in November.
Actually science still can't explain where DNA came from or for that matter science cannot explain matter.
As Stephen Fry once said: "Science may not know everything, but that doesn't mean science knows nothing".
A less polluting and more efficient source of energy? Like nuclear? Hell, an oil-burning power station is hugely more efficient than an internal combustion engine.
...social stigmas are very powerfull tools for preventing destructive behaviour ... We stigmatize ... homosexuality ... often with great success.
destructive behaviour
homosexuality
Are you serious? And here I was thinking /. was for intelligent people...
"Hey, those guys are doing something I wouldn't want to! Get them!"
As with most DRM schemes, I think there's an ulterior motive here, and I think that's to kill the second hand market.
If this is indeed the case, then it's a very short-sighted tactic. Take books for example. Obviously it's impractical to eliminate the second-hand book market, but even if publishers could, they wouldn't want to. The knowledge that you can resell a book helps keep prices high, especially when it comes to academic books. If you know you can never recoup any of the money spent, are you going to want to shell out top dollar to get the game/book/film as soon as it's out?
Heavy Weapons Guy, is that you?
Your current government, sure -- but much of the rest of the world is currently suffering all sorts of horrors because the past policies of GB. From Africa to the middle east, all these so-called "countries" that are or have been engaged in civil war are so because you guys drew a map that was convenient for you, forced people to get along at the point of 10,000 bayonets while you were there, and then thought it would continue to be so once you left.
Gotta love American logic. Apparently US citizens aren't to blame for their current government's actions, but British citizens are to blame for things that happened before they were born...
The US is still playing junior varsity "nation building" by comparison.
And the other favourite: "Someone did something worse in the past, so we can do whatever we want!"
What, you mean like bank fees?
Bank fees?! Banks pay us for using them... it's called interest.
Yeah they even can provide complicated proof that there's a solution, while being unable to provide one.
Yeah, there's some really weird stuff like that. I just finished the Maths Tripos at Cambridge (UK) and in a Logic supervision I was discussing the theory of proofs and the fact that you can show something is provable but without actually finding a proof (mad, I know). I asked whether this really mattered because if you know there's a proof of something you know it must be true, and my supervisor gave me a very interesting example:
Colouring graphs on orientable surfaces of genus n is something that is quite interesting. (Think colouring a map, painted on a doughnut with n holes, with the fewest colours necessary). We know that there is a way to construct a fast (polynomial time) algorithm which colours such a graph in the least possible number of colours. However, because we haven't found a constructive proof, we have no idea how to find these algorithms! Frustrating, eh?
I've noticed that the power warts get quite hot.
Indeed. And all that heat is wasting a lot of energy. Everyone should turn things they're not using off at the wall (or unplug them of course). It's incredible the amount of energy that's being wasted in this way.
I don't understand why these machines exist. I've only voted in one general election (here in the UK) and we used the old "cross in the box then put the paper in the slot" technique. The result was still in by the next day, so what problem are these machines supposed to be solving?
I know where I've been, I don't need to be told every time I type a url, and I shouldn't have to jump through hoops to turn this crappy "feature" off.
Translation: My mother borrowed my PC to check her email, typed the first three letters of "hotmail" and the Awesome Bar nearly gave her a heart attack.
Except that very article says that it wasn't widely believed in the scientific community but was spun by the media. Global warming however is recognised by the majority of the scientific community.
And even if that wasn't the case, you're using the stupid "A scientist was once wrong so I can ignore any evidence any scientist ever produces argument".
What?! TFA has a load of pictures of things which aren't from a guide.
"Kids aren't creative!"
"These kids are being creative right now."
"Don't use facts to ruin my rant, you brat!"
Tell that to Google, Hoover, Speedo, Biro, Frisbee, etc.
I actually worked this out in an MSN conversation with someone the other week. We were wondering whether they could have just made 20 Saturn Vs, launch them one after another and have a party on the moon instead of going to Iraq. These were our calculations:
Now I'm no expert, but I reckon making a couple of hundred Saturn Vs and sending representatives from every country in the world to the moon would have done a lot more for world peace than another war.
I think you've missed the point. If you're not allowing access to the files then encryption isn't particularly important now is it?
The whole point of encryption is that you could email it to your arch-nemesis and they would still be unable to decrypt it in a useful time-frame. Take AES with a 256 bit key. That would (on average) take all of the computers in the world millions of years to brute force. It's possible that someone could get lucky, but they'd have to dedicate years of processing time on the off-chance that you had encrypted something particularly juicy.
Gah. I wish people wouldn't keep trying to use public key encryption when it's not needed. Public key encryption is used to get around the key distribution problem. Signing is used because anyone can easily encrypt stuff using your public key and you can't guarantee they are who they say they are.
From what I can tell, he's not sending these files to anyone. He's uploading them and the only person who will access them will be himself. This is exactly what regular, symmetric encryption is for!
Encrypt the files using AES or Blowfish or a combination. Truecrypt may be handy though I'm sure there are many other implementations. If you're keen on security use a password and a randomly generated keyfile which you keep safe on a USB stick (with multiple backups of course). The person on the other end obviously can't open the files without the key (which would take NSA millions of years to brute force). If he changes the files in some way then you won't be able to decrypt them with your key so you know something's up. No need for signing, GPG or anything particularly clever. As for sharing, who cares? Noone will be able to open them; that's the point of encryption.