The "experience paradox" is one of the most annoying and overrated problems in all fields. Pay no attention to it: any good employer is really looking for talent. You can show talent through demos, a good interview, personal recommendations, and the like. If a company is focused on experience, you don't want to work there because either a) the owners don't care enough (or consider themselves too busy,) to make good hires, or b) bad management has let an HR department become a power base.
I've been programming for over 20 years, I don't a college degree, and have had several jobs. Oddly (or not so oddly,), the better the company, the less they care about paper qualifications. If you find yourself being dismissed out of hand by a company for lack of experience, ask yourself why it would be worth your while to work there.
The way to get a great job is to be a great candidate. It's that simple. This doesn't mean "spinning facts," because if it's a good company, they will detect this.
1) Decide what skills you have (or could have) that are useful. Be prepared to convince them. If you want to do art, have a portfolio. If you want to write code, have some source code. Be prepared to discuss your work.
2) Be able to talk about the field (games.) What do you enjoy playing? What makes a specific game good? What feature was a good game missing? Why didn't the designers put it in?
3) Write a "deep" demo, not a shallow one. No one cares about another bad Quake knockoff. Pick a small domain and master it. For example,
the shareware game "Action SuperCross" was simple 2d side-scroller, but with a physics model that was superb, and I doubt the author would have a problem getting hired at the game shop of his choice. Hell, I'd hire him for six figures if he wants to write systems code.
Wanna do AI code? Just write a simple simulator of 10 units vs 10 units on a square map. Probably only need 2 or 3 unit types. Show a platoon attacking a base, a squad crossing a bridge, a convey traversing contested territory. It doesn't matter if units are nothing more than circles... show the AI you say you can program.
4) "If you wanna be a writer, write!" is a good rule. You should be writing 20K lines of code a year. This is how you hone your skills. Don't worry about the code being useful/portfolio-stuff.
5) "The trouble with most wannabe sci-fi writers is that all they read is sci-fi." Great ideas come because you have deep knowledge of other fields. We all know about war, sci-fi, martial arts, DnD, etc. Great games come from new domains, not recycling ideas.
6) Tell me your idea for the ultimate "FPS-RTS-MMPOLG," and I will listen politiely. Tell me your idea for a game that my mother would buy (and she probably wouldn't even know it's a game,) and I will hire you on the spot.
We've had a few years where the uneducated public got into the stock market and really screwed things up. They're dropping out now, because they got hammered just like they deserved.
How did they the uneducated public "really screw things up?" They invested in things that looked promising (the internet,) and got burned when the profit models were exposed as bad ideas (by the lack of profits.) So what got screwed up? The markets continue to buy and sell stock.
I've a bunch of friends that bought Amazon or whatever, and complain to me on phone about the current price. My response is almost always the same: "why did you buy it? what was your reasoning as to why it's going to worth more five years from now?"
As we get back to having financial markets run by people who understand them and who are competent to decide which companies deserve investment, we'll see some real, solid prosperity again -- no mirage, but real creation of real wealth -- for the first time since the 1980's.
Well, there are two issues here: financial markets are "run" by providers of liquidity: they buy and sell in short term, hopefully pocketing enough spread to stay in business. The poeple deciding that companies deserve investment tend to have longer horizons: the day-to-day market moves don't affect their decisions. Companies live or die based on profits, not what the market is doing.
This ain't a crapshoot guys... do the math: look at capitalization, earnings, and sales. Avoid money-pits, buy real, underpriced businesses.
Sigh, I really don't want to add to the language flames, but here goes anyway:
Those that do not use LISP are condemned to reinvent it. Badly.
Every good computer programmer I know has designed several "mini-languages." They all improve expressability in some minor way (because they scatch an itch or are optimized for a specific domain.) But, 99% of them never catch on because they are not extensible in a "deep" fashion, or if extensible, the meta-language of extensibility is painful for real-world problems.
Languages become nasty because programmers try to write "nice" APIs for their users. E.g. the systems guys provide "clean" APIs for the library writers. The library guys provide "clean" APIs for the application writers. The application writers provide "clean" APIs for the users. Each layer uses a lot of crufty stuff in an attempt to make life easy for the users of the layer. Eventually, the entire system is cruft, and hard for everyone.
C was clean, but began to collapse when programmers were forced into heavy macro hacks to implement more complex systems.
C++ started nicely, but soon was burdened by the ancient linker. Templates have become the new evil that replaces the old evil of macros.
Fortran avoided the whole issue by making abstraction beyond the subroutine level impossible.
Common Lisp, ML, Prolog, Scheme, Smalltalk, etc, all try to be "honest" languages: the writer of a piece of code trusts his users, and the users can inspect the system they are using. Everyone is assumed to be intelligent, and "information hiding" is looked upon with a degree of suspicion. The more "features" a language has, the more it worries me: these are decisions made by the designer that I cannot change. This is why I like LISP: your program must conform to certain basic rules (it is a list,) but all other design decisions are visible to me, and probably changable by me.
Of thelist of 38 unqiue characteristics of LX, Common Lisp already has 33 of them. Indentation sensitive syntax is similar to paren-balancing syntax. The other 4 are either artifacts of non-sexpr languages, or trivially implementable in a few lines of LISP.
LISP was the original user-built, customizable language.
Therefore, any disclosure of information that would allow the defeat of those technologies would
violate both the spirit and the terms of the Click-Through Agreement (the "Agreement"). In addition, any disclosure of information gained from participating in the Public Challenge
would be outside the scope of activities permitted by the Agreement and could subject you and your research team to actions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DCMA").
The initial claim is violation of the "click-thru" license. These guys may be able to back-track by claiming that that was the main point of the letter. The DMCA second claim may stand based on the phrase "good faith:" if you violate the click-thru to get the datasets, you can't be acting in good faith.
Sad, but I think the RIAA will be able to weasel their way out of this one.
Sounds all nice and dandy for now, but I can see the legalities coming into play should someone in the United States purchase it. All those Custom's forms, paranoid spooks
wondering why your buying a rocket, etc.
Probably not a problem: it's not a rocket, just a capsule. Even if it was a rocket, I doubt the "spooks" would care....
When I was being interviewed by the ATF for my explosives permit (needed for little rockets,) the agent ran over the import rules (nice, smart guy, he knew Russian rockets were selling cheap). Basically, he said: as long as the rocket has less than 25 tons of fuel in it, and you have a place to store it, wave this permit and it's yours!
Aside from that where the hell would you keep it? I can see a company purchasing it to throw in their building's lobby, I can even see NASA buying the rocket to get an
insight into Russian based tech in some fashion, but the typical art collector?
It's only 10 feet or so wide. Would easily fit into a Manhattan loft. "Have you every made love in a space capsule" probably won't get you laid... but 40 years later there will be 50 grandmothers in New Jersey telling their grandkids "I once had the chance to have sex in a Soyez capsule. I can't believe I turned it down!"
Ok, to paraphrase: two particles initially have some correlation (e.g. polarization.) Reading the polarization of one tells me something about the polarization of the other. Over time, random environmently interactions cause the correlation of the polarizations of the particles to be reduced. All this seems reasonable.
I still have one question: how can I tell if an evesdropper has been looking at my particles? It seems to me that if I can tell, I can construct a Faster Than Light communications device as follows:
1) I generate a stream of entangled particles.
2) For each pair, I send one particle towards Alpha Centuri, and preserve the other particle in my local ring buffer.
3) To transmit an FTL bit, I evesdrop on (observe ) a set of 7 year old particles in my local buffer.
4) The receiver on Alpha Centuri instantly detects that evesdropping has taken place, and thus gets the FTL bit of info.
Add a couple of these. These have much better multi-spectrum detection and reaction.
Re:The classic, if much decried, Freudian struggle
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Where the id says "More! Grunt! More!"
The ego says "I am satisfied. All's right with the world."
And the Superego says "Consume. Spend. Buy. Just do it!"
Freudian struggle? You're more right than you could possibly realize:) The original posters quote was from Tom Lehrer's "Smut:"
Well, Anne Marie is probably the most skilled Slashdot troll. Over 100 replies to "her" last eight posts. The trolls are quiet elegant: start with a politically correct, heartfelt plea for AIDS research, animal rights, porn controls, etc, then veer into a sentence or two of outright insanity (e.g animals are people, porn grinds people into soup.)
What self-respecting nerd can stop himself replying to this? "She" is just so right: the simple yet sophisticated name, the heart in the right place, the signs of some intelligence. Damn, this is a Madison Avenue quality character.
Yo, this is the second thing that I've seen that confirms my view that we humans know significantly less about genetic science than we thought we knew.
I think the article only confirms that the author doesn't know much about genetics. No geneticist (that I've even spoken to, at least,) believes that a list of genes equals a useful API for making/modifying humans.
The clones we made of sheep, mice, and other animals resembled the products of buggy code made by lazy programmers or those forced to write shit by insane business models
(remember the sig, "it compiles! Ship it!"). We didn't realize the significance of the slow, steady process of genetic replication within the embryo.
Exactly right. Cloning is a "neat hack" in the Computer Science sense: I don't know what X does, but I know enough to make a copy of it. No one involved in cloning claims they understand all the processes involved in growth... they just have used a bunch of tools to provide a proof of feasibility. Think of them as writers of "bit copiers" (for those that remember the old days of floppy disk duplication.) Ask them if it's an exact copy, and the better of them will say "I'm not sure, but it seems to work so far."
Likewise, we hurled gazillions of dollars at the genome project, in private and public searches. Why were the gazillions hurled? Because of the notion that we could find nice,
patentable pieces of genetic code, controlling various physiological processes.
Now that we realize we have got a map to nowhere, lets table the whole deal until we understand more about the operation of genes.
Yep, "map" is a dumb term. I'd prefer to think of it as having the object code to an operating system and its associated applications, running on a processor that we don't have the spec for. Some crashes we can cure (they occur in application code that is clearly fixable,) but most problems are due to interactions amongst parts of the system.
Cancer is similar to the infamous Blue Screen of Death. Yes, it's obvious that something bad has happened, but we aren't going to find a line of code that says BlueScreenOfDeathNow(). It's an emergent property of a complex system.
I am all for scientific research but I worry that further pushes down this line of inquiry will be driven by the profit motive, not any kind of medical or healing motive.
You're more of an optimist that me. I reckon most easily curable deseases with be cured pretty soon. The bulk, however, will fall into the category of: "system crashes after 70 years uptime. no solution other than complete redesign."
Hi, Ben Franklin here, I've come back from the grave to address your concerns...
With all the pure BULLSHIT that has infected our lives, I really wish there were a "reboot" button on society. This is what the Founding Fathers were able to do. They drafted a brilliant foundation for a successful country, but they didn't put any stop measure in to keep it from becoming infinitely beauracratic and corrupt.
Thanks, we did our best. We added checks and balances to avoid direct abuses of power. We reserved all rights to the states in areas not spelled out. We even provided a list of rights that apply to all men. Based on what I've seen in the last two hundred years, I think we would have added a few clauses devoted to personal privacy, taxation, and corporations. Still, even the stuff we spelled out clearly somehow got messed up, e.g.:
Thanks for messing with free speech.
While we were mostly concerned with political speech, your court cases show "artistic speech" is worthy of coverage. Good, we like this. Why did you make it a felony to talk about encryption circumvention? Why did you make it a felony to talk about having sex with minors? Why did you make it a felony to burn the flag? What part of freedom of the presses did you not understand?
Right to bear arms?
Damn, what's the point of the whole thing if you can't oppose what you feel is unlawful force. Where did we say "unless you are a convicted felon," or "unless you live in New York City?"
Don't get me started on warrented versus warrentless arrests. Um, police can come in and take your Babbage-machines as "evidence" without you being able to sue them? We thought we had this issue nailed down pretty clearly.
These are meant to be simple, absolute, minimal rules. Why are you "reinterpreting" them?
Corporations "re-engineer" themselves all the time. Wipe the slate clean, terminate all policies (laws), everything.. Then assemble a team of top notch leaders and visionaries and recreate everything from scratch.
Don't go there, citizen! Almost every "re-engineering" attempt leads to more short-sighted rules, not less. What percentage of companies successfully "re-engineered" themselves? Our country's strength is that we did not re-engineer our country during World War II, the McCarthy era, Vietnam, the Cold War, the Napster war, or anything else.
I'll go back to my coffin now... thanks for your time.
This is a division-level exercise. From the private's point of view, it mostly consists of sitting in a wet hole for a day or two, then moving to another wet hole. The senior officers (them in the HQ) get a fun week-long camping trip, including the occassional helicopter excursion for increased enjoyment.
The "boys," I think, vastly prefer division-level simulation, combined with squad-level "real firepower" training.
Large scale exercises for good for showing the officers how things fall apart fast in the real world, but are lousy for training the troops in the field.
It's odd the Gibson missed the the most obvious point:
Japan and GB are similar because they were both strong island nations.
Both cultures developed a "we are the best" culture because they were relatively immune to being conquered, and didn't have external ideas forced upon them.
With no frontier, both produced a culture of politeness, and a system that tolerated eccentrics (but not radicals.)
HE:
1.) installed aprogram so that he could access two intel machines from a remote location
Well, he set up a tunnel so he could get his mail. Bad judgement.
2.)copied a password file from a machine
He was a sys-admin working for the firm at the time. SAs often have root, and are meant to be securing systems as part of their job-descriptions. This includes looking at files that normal users wouldn't need to go near.
3.) cracked the password file using a cracker tool
Standard thing for an SA to do. You don't want open accounts on your company's systems. Bad judgement to do it without telling your boss, but a common part of being an SA.
Consider, this happened six years ago.
To put it in perspective:
Fifteen years ago there was virtually no internet. There was no concept of users having privacy over there files/email. SAs were managing complex, expensive machines, and protecting them from damage. SAs were considered the de facto owners of the machines. The major threats were internal malicious/naive users.
Ten years ago, privacy rights on computers were beginning to emerge. SAs no longer were expected to randomly read whatever they found. Big servers were still expensive machines, and SAs were experted to keep them secure: running crack and similar were routine activities. SAs were considered the de facto police of the machines. The major threats were unsecured dialins.
Five years ago, machines had become commonplace and cheaper than employees. SAs were considered de facto clerks. The major threat to systems had become external attacks based on weak passwords, and/or unsecured machines.
RS made the mistake of trying to fix new-style weaknesses with an old-timer mentality. Intel freaked when they saw an SA walking around a machine checking the locks (much like if you saw a cop testing the locks on an unoccupied house today.) RS made various statements to the police because he wanted them to understand that his activities were typical for SAs. Intel pressed charges, and corporate inertia took over: a Kafkaesque felony trial took place, where a mere year or two before, his consultancy would have been terminated without prejudice, because his professional style was compatible with Intel's environment.
Um, your resume is on your j: drive. This is obviously not internet accessible. Also, why not provide a version in HTML or PS? Word is a nasty proprietary format.
If that were the case it would be great. Unfortunately, NP problems are much harder: find the minimum length round-trip road between the cities.
Soap bubbles solve local minimization problems... the whole trouble with NP complete problems is that local optimization doesn't seem to help with the global optimization problem. I.e. nothing better than brute-force works.
Re:A sign of changing times
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People tend to think that systems like that are unbreakable.. and I am not convinced 100%. One time pads are very effective, but I understood that the pads still need to be
transmitted to both communicating parties. This is always a problem. How would they be sent? In person? By messenger? With a trusted aide? There are many ways that this
could be intercepted.
Well, If I were designing the system: trusted aides transmitting the pad on DVD, or whatever. Independant observers to check for interference. Pad is invalidated if any "risk condition" arises.
Maybe the list was hand written and a partial copy is on the piece of paper underneath the top. Maybe they use PGP to exchange one-time pads. Maybe the
code for generating the one-time pads isnt that random. Maybe they mess up and use the wrong pad. The underlying system theory may be mostly secure, but can a perfect
implementation *ever* exist? I don't know.
No perfect system exists: that's why we have an expert group design it. We avoid pad resuse, non-random pads, and pad-interception though state of the art defenseses.
Whats more, lets say a machine on the scale of ASIC. Targets using 128-bit or higher encryption- how long would that take to crack on 10k clustered machines each with 64
Alpha chips? I have no idea, but I am not convinced that certain encryption will forever be unbreakable.
Damn straight: anything less than one-time pads are an invitation to getting yourself compromised.
Security is an ongoing art. Dont you agree?
Yes. Physical security is. Theoretical security is solved. High level security penetration is little more than bribing cleaning ladies.
A sign of changing times
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No serious cryptographer can deny that most well-funded groups now have the ability to produce secure communications and computing systems. The days of superior computing power cracking the enemies codes are over.
Today, any decent group (consisting of a sys-admin, a mathematician, and an engineer) could design and implement a hard, impenetrable system. E.g. Someone offers you $1MM to spec a drug cartel's computer/communication system: it isn't that difficult anymore... figure one-time pads, redundant hardened sites, physical data-distruction systems.
The offensive role is reduced to looking for errors: misconfigured systems, compromisable humans, etc.
The defensive role is similar: make it hard for aggressors to get our data due to known vulnerabilities. Put the security on a sound mathematical foundation, and educate sites to reduce the chance of physical intrusion.
It makes sense for the NSA to work on good defense: in theory, the USA is the superpower of the world. We have more to lose than anyone else if our various government and commercial groups implement their own insecure, ad hoc security systems. Release a good system, our enemeies already have them.
Think of every mass-market book or movie that touches on a topic you know well (e.g. computers, hang-gliders, math, Egyptian hieroglyphs, rockets, ancient stone-work.) They ALL misexplain the topic. Any rational author will pick a few good concepts and gloss over the details... audiences do not want a hundred pages of footnotes about the current state of the art.
Live with it, and pray your product isn't mentioned by name. Do you really expect "Sneakers" to provide cryto info, or "Dr Strangelove" to explain nuclear strategy? Any item more complex than a felt-tip pen should be made non-company specific by a rational author/screenwriter.
Traditionally, movie titles have neither trademark nor copyright protection. For example, two movies, both called "Black Rain" were released in the same year.
The internet movie database shows 93 matches for movies containing the word "Diablo." Give it up Blizzard: it's a common word, and trademark doesn't apply. E.g. I can call a book "Scientology Exposed," and Scientology won't win a lawsuit based on trademark infridgement. I could even write a book called "Breakfast of Champions," and General Mills would just have to deal with it.
Most of these IP agreements imply that you are dedicating your efforts to the firm. If your goal is to earn a living while working on the ultimate open source X, then you and your employer probably don't have a meeting of minds: are you being hiring for working hours (sorta consulting), or for inventing things for the firm? The former is worth about half of the latter: do you and the firm agree on what you role/responsibility is?
My current employment agreement gives all my work to my employer: this is fine by me... I'm expected to be working for the firm's benefit whenever I write commercial code, and the firm compensates me very well for this. I'll consult the firm's lawyers before I release any GPL code.
My previous employment agreement said something like: "I warrant myself to be an expert in the following specific areas. I'll work on your stuff full-time. If I leave, I keep my brain contents, I take no physical stuff. I'm an expert, I've thought about most things: if you have a specific idea, I'll sign a non-disclosure concerning it. If your idea was already published, I'm free to reuse it."
At my first job, management tried to make everyone sign their invention rights away "in exchange for future compensation and employment." I refused to sign: when the president eventually demanded I sign, I pointed out that he could fire me without cause anyway: fire me or go away. I never heard anything about it again.
Don't be afraid to explain that you know about a lot of stuff, and will continue to learn more. A lawyer wouldn't sign over the rights to her incremental general knowledge gained for working on a specific case. Why should they expect you to? Note that this is not the same as specific knowledge about the case: this is a reasonable area for non-disclosure.
I was in high school when these boxen were being sold. Hardware was so expensive, and was the limiting factor in a computer setup, that people almost didn't consider software as meaningful... a better processor, more RAM address space, upper and lowercase input, color graphics, floppy disk availability, a serial interface: these were the points that drove the purchasing decision.
A hundred companies flowered trying to find the mix that would sell consumers. Within 5 years, the playing field had changed: software drove purchasing decisions... if you didn't have Visicalc, you didn't sell. Almost none of the hardware makers got rich, but many software makers did.
I fondly remember programming the Wang PC with 8K, the Pet vs Apple Flamewars, the ultimate 10 Meg(!) Corvus HardDisk, the highspeed Mountain modems (300 baud,) and cool printers (Epson bi-directional dot-matrix.) We programmers knew intuitively that our job was to wrap the hardware in device-independant drivers. We did it, and commoditized computer manufacture.
Today, our systems rock, but I'm still wistful when I think of the hardware hackers: they were men like us. Who will remember their beautiful designs except us that killed them?
Animated GIFs illustrate one of the big problems of complex GUI apps: the cure for the pain is no where near the source of the pain.
I've watched naive users (e.g. my parents) use a browser. When faced with an agonizing animated GIF, giant blink text, or horrible background, they move the mouse to the offending item, and try to turn it off. This is, of course, in keeping with the GUI concept: select the item, then manipulate it, perhaps with a right mouse click. This corresponds deeply with reality: if a mosquito is biting me, I focus on it and take action.
Browser interfaces are often counter-intuitive because the cure is hidden in deep menu items, e.g. edit->prefs->advanced->.... Users rarely find these things, and if they do, don't know what they do. My dad doesn't want to disable all Java apps, he just wants to stop the pain he is experiencing on the page he is currently visiting.
To make a browser great, watch your new users very closely.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been programming for over 20 years, I don't a college degree, and have had several jobs. Oddly (or not so oddly,), the better the company, the less they care about paper qualifications. If you find yourself being dismissed out of hand by a company for lack of experience, ask yourself why it would be worth your while to work there.
The way to get a great job is to be a great candidate. It's that simple. This doesn't mean "spinning facts," because if it's a good company, they will detect this.
1) Decide what skills you have (or could have) that are useful. Be prepared to convince them. If you want to do art, have a portfolio. If you want to write code, have some source code. Be prepared to discuss your work.
2) Be able to talk about the field (games.) What do you enjoy playing? What makes a specific game good? What feature was a good game missing? Why didn't the designers put it in?
3) Write a "deep" demo, not a shallow one. No one cares about another bad Quake knockoff. Pick a small domain and master it. For example,
4) "If you wanna be a writer, write!" is a good rule. You should be writing 20K lines of code a year. This is how you hone your skills. Don't worry about the code being useful/portfolio-stuff.
5) "The trouble with most wannabe sci-fi writers is that all they read is sci-fi." Great ideas come because you have deep knowledge of other fields. We all know about war, sci-fi, martial arts, DnD, etc. Great games come from new domains, not recycling ideas.
6) Tell me your idea for the ultimate "FPS-RTS-MMPOLG," and I will listen politiely. Tell me your idea for a game that my mother would buy (and she probably wouldn't even know it's a game,) and I will hire you on the spot.
How did they the uneducated public "really screw things up?" They invested in things that looked promising (the internet,) and got burned when the profit models were exposed as bad ideas (by the lack of profits.) So what got screwed up? The markets continue to buy and sell stock.
I've a bunch of friends that bought Amazon or whatever, and complain to me on phone about the current price. My response is almost always the same: "why did you buy it? what was your reasoning as to why it's going to worth more five years from now?"
As we get back to having financial markets run by people who understand them and who are competent to decide which companies deserve investment, we'll see some real, solid prosperity again -- no mirage, but real creation of real wealth -- for the first time since the 1980's.
Well, there are two issues here: financial markets are "run" by providers of liquidity: they buy and sell in short term, hopefully pocketing enough spread to stay in business. The poeple deciding that companies deserve investment tend to have longer horizons: the day-to-day market moves don't affect their decisions. Companies live or die based on profits, not what the market is doing.
This ain't a crapshoot guys... do the math: look at capitalization, earnings, and sales. Avoid money-pits, buy real, underpriced businesses.
Those that do not use LISP are condemned to reinvent it. Badly.
Every good computer programmer I know has designed several "mini-languages." They all improve expressability in some minor way (because they scatch an itch or are optimized for a specific domain.) But, 99% of them never catch on because they are not extensible in a "deep" fashion, or if extensible, the meta-language of extensibility is painful for real-world problems.
Languages become nasty because programmers try to write "nice" APIs for their users. E.g. the systems guys provide "clean" APIs for the library writers. The library guys provide "clean" APIs for the application writers. The application writers provide "clean" APIs for the users. Each layer uses a lot of crufty stuff in an attempt to make life easy for the users of the layer. Eventually, the entire system is cruft, and hard for everyone.
C was clean, but began to collapse when programmers were forced into heavy macro hacks to implement more complex systems.
C++ started nicely, but soon was burdened by the ancient linker. Templates have become the new evil that replaces the old evil of macros.
Fortran avoided the whole issue by making abstraction beyond the subroutine level impossible.
Common Lisp, ML, Prolog, Scheme, Smalltalk, etc, all try to be "honest" languages: the writer of a piece of code trusts his users, and the users can inspect the system they are using. Everyone is assumed to be intelligent, and "information hiding" is looked upon with a degree of suspicion. The more "features" a language has, the more it worries me: these are decisions made by the designer that I cannot change. This is why I like LISP: your program must conform to certain basic rules (it is a list,) but all other design decisions are visible to me, and probably changable by me.
Of thelist of 38 unqiue characteristics of LX, Common Lisp already has 33 of them. Indentation sensitive syntax is similar to paren-balancing syntax. The other 4 are either artifacts of non-sexpr languages, or trivially implementable in a few lines of LISP.
LISP was the original user-built, customizable language.
Therefore, any disclosure of information that would allow the defeat of those technologies would violate both the spirit and the terms of the Click-Through Agreement (the "Agreement"). In addition, any disclosure of information gained from participating in the Public Challenge would be outside the scope of activities permitted by the Agreement and could subject you and your research team to actions under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act ("DCMA").
The initial claim is violation of the "click-thru" license. These guys may be able to back-track by claiming that that was the main point of the letter. The DMCA second claim may stand based on the phrase "good faith:" if you violate the click-thru to get the datasets, you can't be acting in good faith.
Sad, but I think the RIAA will be able to weasel their way out of this one.
Probably not a problem: it's not a rocket, just a capsule. Even if it was a rocket, I doubt the "spooks" would care....
When I was being interviewed by the ATF for my explosives permit (needed for little rockets,) the agent ran over the import rules (nice, smart guy, he knew Russian rockets were selling cheap). Basically, he said: as long as the rocket has less than 25 tons of fuel in it, and you have a place to store it, wave this permit and it's yours!
Aside from that where the hell would you keep it? I can see a company purchasing it to throw in their building's lobby, I can even see NASA buying the rocket to get an insight into Russian based tech in some fashion, but the typical art collector?
It's only 10 feet or so wide. Would easily fit into a Manhattan loft. "Have you every made love in a space capsule" probably won't get you laid... but 40 years later there will be 50 grandmothers in New Jersey telling their grandkids "I once had the chance to have sex in a Soyez capsule. I can't believe I turned it down!"
Or maybe not.
I still have one question: how can I tell if an evesdropper has been looking at my particles? It seems to me that if I can tell, I can construct a Faster Than Light communications device as follows:
1) I generate a stream of entangled particles.
2) For each pair, I send one particle towards Alpha Centuri, and preserve the other particle in my local ring buffer.
3) To transmit an FTL bit, I evesdrop on (observe ) a set of 7 year old particles in my local buffer.
4) The receiver on Alpha Centuri instantly detects that evesdropping has taken place, and thus gets the FTL bit of info.
Where did I go wrong?
Add a couple of these. These have much better multi-spectrum detection and reaction.
Freudian struggle? You're more right than you could possibly realize :) The original posters quote was from Tom Lehrer's "Smut:"
More, more, I'm still not satisfied!
Stories of tortures
Used by debauchers
Lurid, licentious and vile
Make me smile.
Novels that pander
To my taste for candor
Give me a pleasure sublime.
Let's face it I love slime!
What self-respecting nerd can stop himself replying to this? "She" is just so right: the simple yet sophisticated name, the heart in the right place, the signs of some intelligence. Damn, this is a Madison Avenue quality character.
I think the article only confirms that the author doesn't know much about genetics. No geneticist (that I've even spoken to, at least,) believes that a list of genes equals a useful API for making/modifying humans.
The clones we made of sheep, mice, and other animals resembled the products of buggy code made by lazy programmers or those forced to write shit by insane business models (remember the sig, "it compiles! Ship it!"). We didn't realize the significance of the slow, steady process of genetic replication within the embryo.
Exactly right. Cloning is a "neat hack" in the Computer Science sense: I don't know what X does, but I know enough to make a copy of it. No one involved in cloning claims they understand all the processes involved in growth... they just have used a bunch of tools to provide a proof of feasibility. Think of them as writers of "bit copiers" (for those that remember the old days of floppy disk duplication.) Ask them if it's an exact copy, and the better of them will say "I'm not sure, but it seems to work so far."
Likewise, we hurled gazillions of dollars at the genome project, in private and public searches. Why were the gazillions hurled? Because of the notion that we could find nice, patentable pieces of genetic code, controlling various physiological processes.
Now that we realize we have got a map to nowhere, lets table the whole deal until we understand more about the operation of genes.
Yep, "map" is a dumb term. I'd prefer to think of it as having the object code to an operating system and its associated applications, running on a processor that we don't have the spec for. Some crashes we can cure (they occur in application code that is clearly fixable,) but most problems are due to interactions amongst parts of the system.
Cancer is similar to the infamous Blue Screen of Death. Yes, it's obvious that something bad has happened, but we aren't going to find a line of code that says BlueScreenOfDeathNow(). It's an emergent property of a complex system.
I am all for scientific research but I worry that further pushes down this line of inquiry will be driven by the profit motive, not any kind of medical or healing motive.
You're more of an optimist that me. I reckon most easily curable deseases with be cured pretty soon. The bulk, however, will fall into the category of: "system crashes after 70 years uptime. no solution other than complete redesign."
With all the pure BULLSHIT that has infected our lives, I really wish there were a "reboot" button on society. This is what the Founding Fathers were able to do. They drafted a brilliant foundation for a successful country, but they didn't put any stop measure in to keep it from becoming infinitely beauracratic and corrupt.
Thanks, we did our best. We added checks and balances to avoid direct abuses of power. We reserved all rights to the states in areas not spelled out. We even provided a list of rights that apply to all men. Based on what I've seen in the last two hundred years, I think we would have added a few clauses devoted to personal privacy, taxation, and corporations. Still, even the stuff we spelled out clearly somehow got messed up, e.g.:
- Thanks for messing with free speech.
- While we were mostly concerned with political speech, your court cases show "artistic speech" is worthy of coverage. Good, we like this. Why did you make it a felony to talk about encryption circumvention? Why did you make it a felony to talk about having sex with minors? Why did you make it a felony to burn the flag? What part of freedom of the presses did you not understand?
- Right to bear arms?
- Damn, what's the point of the whole thing if you can't oppose what you feel is unlawful force. Where did we say "unless you are a convicted felon," or "unless you live in New York City?"
Don't get me started on warrented versus warrentless arrests. Um, police can come in and take your Babbage-machines as "evidence" without you being able to sue them? We thought we had this issue nailed down pretty clearly.These are meant to be simple, absolute, minimal rules. Why are you "reinterpreting" them?
Corporations "re-engineer" themselves all the time. Wipe the slate clean, terminate all policies (laws), everything.. Then assemble a team of top notch leaders and visionaries and recreate everything from scratch.
Don't go there, citizen! Almost every "re-engineering" attempt leads to more short-sighted rules, not less. What percentage of companies successfully "re-engineered" themselves? Our country's strength is that we did not re-engineer our country during World War II, the McCarthy era, Vietnam, the Cold War, the Napster war, or anything else.
I'll go back to my coffin now... thanks for your time.
The "boys," I think, vastly prefer division-level simulation, combined with squad-level "real firepower" training.
Large scale exercises for good for showing the officers how things fall apart fast in the real world, but are lousy for training the troops in the field.
Japan and GB are similar because they were both strong island nations.
Both cultures developed a "we are the best" culture because they were relatively immune to being conquered, and didn't have external ideas forced upon them.
With no frontier, both produced a culture of politeness, and a system that tolerated eccentrics (but not radicals.)
Well, he set up a tunnel so he could get his mail. Bad judgement.
2.)copied a password file from a machine
He was a sys-admin working for the firm at the time. SAs often have root, and are meant to be securing systems as part of their job-descriptions. This includes looking at files that normal users wouldn't need to go near.
3.) cracked the password file using a cracker tool
Standard thing for an SA to do. You don't want open accounts on your company's systems. Bad judgement to do it without telling your boss, but a common part of being an SA.
Consider, this happened six years ago. To put it in perspective:
Fifteen years ago there was virtually no internet. There was no concept of users having privacy over there files/email. SAs were managing complex, expensive machines, and protecting them from damage. SAs were considered the de facto owners of the machines. The major threats were internal malicious/naive users.
Ten years ago, privacy rights on computers were beginning to emerge. SAs no longer were expected to randomly read whatever they found. Big servers were still expensive machines, and SAs were experted to keep them secure: running crack and similar were routine activities. SAs were considered the de facto police of the machines. The major threats were unsecured dialins.
Five years ago, machines had become commonplace and cheaper than employees. SAs were considered de facto clerks. The major threat to systems had become external attacks based on weak passwords, and/or unsecured machines.
RS made the mistake of trying to fix new-style weaknesses with an old-timer mentality. Intel freaked when they saw an SA walking around a machine checking the locks (much like if you saw a cop testing the locks on an unoccupied house today.) RS made various statements to the police because he wanted them to understand that his activities were typical for SAs. Intel pressed charges, and corporate inertia took over: a Kafkaesque felony trial took place, where a mere year or two before, his consultancy would have been terminated without prejudice, because his professional style was compatible with Intel's environment.
Um, your resume is on your j: drive. This is obviously not internet accessible. Also, why not provide a version in HTML or PS? Word is a nasty proprietary format.
Soap bubbles solve local minimization problems... the whole trouble with NP complete problems is that local optimization doesn't seem to help with the global optimization problem. I.e. nothing better than brute-force works.
Well, If I were designing the system: trusted aides transmitting the pad on DVD, or whatever. Independant observers to check for interference. Pad is invalidated if any "risk condition" arises.
Maybe the list was hand written and a partial copy is on the piece of paper underneath the top. Maybe they use PGP to exchange one-time pads. Maybe the code for generating the one-time pads isnt that random. Maybe they mess up and use the wrong pad. The underlying system theory may be mostly secure, but can a perfect implementation *ever* exist? I don't know.
No perfect system exists: that's why we have an expert group design it. We avoid pad resuse, non-random pads, and pad-interception though state of the art defenseses.
Whats more, lets say a machine on the scale of ASIC. Targets using 128-bit or higher encryption- how long would that take to crack on 10k clustered machines each with 64 Alpha chips? I have no idea, but I am not convinced that certain encryption will forever be unbreakable.
Damn straight: anything less than one-time pads are an invitation to getting yourself compromised.
Security is an ongoing art. Dont you agree?
Yes. Physical security is. Theoretical security is solved. High level security penetration is little more than bribing cleaning ladies.
Today, any decent group (consisting of a sys-admin, a mathematician, and an engineer) could design and implement a hard, impenetrable system. E.g. Someone offers you $1MM to spec a drug cartel's computer/communication system: it isn't that difficult anymore... figure one-time pads, redundant hardened sites, physical data-distruction systems.
The offensive role is reduced to looking for errors: misconfigured systems, compromisable humans, etc.
The defensive role is similar: make it hard for aggressors to get our data due to known vulnerabilities. Put the security on a sound mathematical foundation, and educate sites to reduce the chance of physical intrusion.
It makes sense for the NSA to work on good defense: in theory, the USA is the superpower of the world. We have more to lose than anyone else if our various government and commercial groups implement their own insecure, ad hoc security systems. Release a good system, our enemeies already have them.
Live with it, and pray your product isn't mentioned by name. Do you really expect "Sneakers" to provide cryto info, or "Dr Strangelove" to explain nuclear strategy? Any item more complex than a felt-tip pen should be made non-company specific by a rational author/screenwriter.
The internet movie database shows 93 matches for movies containing the word "Diablo." Give it up Blizzard: it's a common word, and trademark doesn't apply. E.g. I can call a book "Scientology Exposed," and Scientology won't win a lawsuit based on trademark infridgement. I could even write a book called "Breakfast of Champions," and General Mills would just have to deal with it.
haiku is popcorn
a poetic explosive
never forgotten
Well, speaking as an ex-Brit and now American, I find the two nations more similar than different. Both know funny when they see it.
My current employment agreement gives all my work to my employer: this is fine by me... I'm expected to be working for the firm's benefit whenever I write commercial code, and the firm compensates me very well for this. I'll consult the firm's lawyers before I release any GPL code.
My previous employment agreement said something like: "I warrant myself to be an expert in the following specific areas. I'll work on your stuff full-time. If I leave, I keep my brain contents, I take no physical stuff. I'm an expert, I've thought about most things: if you have a specific idea, I'll sign a non-disclosure concerning it. If your idea was already published, I'm free to reuse it."
At my first job, management tried to make everyone sign their invention rights away "in exchange for future compensation and employment." I refused to sign: when the president eventually demanded I sign, I pointed out that he could fire me without cause anyway: fire me or go away. I never heard anything about it again.
Don't be afraid to explain that you know about a lot of stuff, and will continue to learn more. A lawyer wouldn't sign over the rights to her incremental general knowledge gained for working on a specific case. Why should they expect you to? Note that this is not the same as specific knowledge about the case: this is a reasonable area for non-disclosure.
A hundred companies flowered trying to find the mix that would sell consumers. Within 5 years, the playing field had changed: software drove purchasing decisions... if you didn't have Visicalc, you didn't sell. Almost none of the hardware makers got rich, but many software makers did.
I fondly remember programming the Wang PC with 8K, the Pet vs Apple Flamewars, the ultimate 10 Meg(!) Corvus HardDisk, the highspeed Mountain modems (300 baud,) and cool printers (Epson bi-directional dot-matrix.) We programmers knew intuitively that our job was to wrap the hardware in device-independant drivers. We did it, and commoditized computer manufacture.
Today, our systems rock, but I'm still wistful when I think of the hardware hackers: they were men like us. Who will remember their beautiful designs except us that killed them?
I've watched naive users (e.g. my parents) use a browser. When faced with an agonizing animated GIF, giant blink text, or horrible background, they move the mouse to the offending item, and try to turn it off. This is, of course, in keeping with the GUI concept: select the item, then manipulate it, perhaps with a right mouse click. This corresponds deeply with reality: if a mosquito is biting me, I focus on it and take action.
Browser interfaces are often counter-intuitive because the cure is hidden in deep menu items, e.g. edit->prefs->advanced->.... Users rarely find these things, and if they do, don't know what they do. My dad doesn't want to disable all Java apps, he just wants to stop the pain he is experiencing on the page he is currently visiting. To make a browser great, watch your new users very closely.