> For example I give you any copy protection that has ever been implemented.
That's a bad example. Copy protection can easily be circumvented because you have physical access to and root permissions on the machine the to-be-copied data is on. DRM gives you the encrypted data and the key.
> $12,000 (estimating fees) isn't anywhere near unlimited funds. If he had something that was worth the effort, an average businessman could spend that much to get it.
Sure, but an average businessman doesn't go around kicking peoples doors in and threatening people with a gun to force them to give up their secrets (well, not where I'm from). Even if they do, the password great great grandparent gave us is useless: if you visit him and threaten him with a gun, you don't ask for the ip and login of his server, you ask him to simply hand over the secrets you want. If great great grandparent visits slashdot through a few proxies (== adds more 'obscurity'), his server is once again safe and you lost $4000 in your quest for his server.
I guess you could still try to connect to all used IPv4 addresses and try the password. Then again, great great grandparent's computer could be behind a router blocking incomming connections, or the password could be of an account that has no rights to do anything.
> You presume that login credentials and IP addresses are "unfindable". Warrants, interrogation, torture, greased palms, all of these things can easily circumvent the fact that one does not know information about your machine _right now_.
Sure, but that means nothing can be secure unless nobody knows about it and nobody can find out about it OR it in inaccesable for everyone. If we assume an opponent who plays without any rules whatsoever and has unlimited resources and can find out where you live, you always lose. Duh. Very insightful indeed.
> Obscurity always sucks. There are plenty of easy ways to provide security without having to rely on the fact that a second party does not know easily found information.
Tell me a way to secure something I have/know against an opponent that has no morals, my body, my posessions, and everything I know.
> We expect computers to be perfect but the measuring system isn't perfect so the results aren't either.
The measuring system IS perfect. You either vote for a candidate or you don't. Adding integers is something computers can do very well without errors.
> You'll note that in this properly cast debate, anyone saying that only 0.000000% is acceptable counts as an extremist who won't be listened to.
A 0.000000% error margin is perfectly acceptable when you are adding some positive integers when the sum of all integers is guaranteed to be between 0 and 6 million (finnish population 2008 estimate 5.3 millios).
Do you call a teacher an extremist he when says 1 + 1 != 2.000000001 (assuming both 1s are integers)?
> People will hold you to account (won't do them any good, but they will anyway) if you put the planet at risk by your immediate, forseeable actions.
But that is my point, all predictions say the planet will be okay. We may not have ben building LHCs for thousands of years, but the earth (and every other object in our solar system) has been hit by really really fast particles for billions of years. Let's put this thing in perspective: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-energy_cosmic_ray we have been hit by a particle with an energy of about 50 joules, which is several orders of magnitude more that what the LHC can do.
> That's the difference between a heavy particle experiment and wearing an ugly coat.
Colliding particles at very high energies is exactly like putting on clothes: both have been happening for ages and neither has ever destroyed the earth. The argument that 'something unforseen may happen that destroys the earth' is equally valid for both.
> You don't say, "Oh well, we don't know for sure that anything bad will happen, so we'll just assume that it won't." That is voodoo science.
I say that to myself every time I put on my coat. I know I am lying to myself - with our limited understanding of the universe putting on clothes may very well trigger an unforseen event that destroys the solar system - but the snow outside has convinced me to sacrifice a little intellectual integrity in exchange for being able to wear my coat. Don't worry, I'm not taking too many risks: I'm not wearing anything underneath.
> I STILL don't think the LHC will kill us all but the fact we're debating it says something.
Yes, it says that people are easily scared by things they do not understand. See also: wireless, mobile phones, things that have a 'chemical' smell... Ask some random people what would happen if the sun were to be replaced instantaneously by a black hole with a mass equal to that of the sun (moving in the same direction as the sun with the same speed, etc). Most people will reply that the earth would get 'sucked' in the black hole... if you don't even understand gravity you have no place in a debate concerning the LHC.
Yes, because surely all this soap-stealing is costing them so much money that they can't possibly make a profit when GP visits. Also, when the cleaners start stealing soap the hotels will start banning customers who haven't even touched the soap for stealing it.
Try to estimate the severity of the problem before you come up with an expensive way (that will piss off innocent people and require more administration) to 'solve' it.
> For my money, figure that out and you've pretty much figured out how to cure any age related disease. Heart failure / disease, liver, kidney, gall bladder, and prostate issues.
> Birds migrate, species adapt... it is the nature of life. It is the built-in imperative.
Then again, 'it is a built-in imperative' is hardly a good reason to do something. 'I am performing this action because millions of years of evolution have decided that this is a good way for my genes to spread.' sounds pretty dumb to me. To your genes you are nothing but a reproduction machine with a three billion years of feature creep. You are the means to their end, and 100% expendable when they are done with you (salmon comes to mind). They will not hesitate to encourage self-destructive behavior when this makes you have many babies before you kick the bucket. Consider yourself cannon fodder in their war for reproduction. To use them to decide what is a proper course of action for a person is a bad idea.
> Some would put group before self, and would rather bear some hardships now, in order to maximize the survival of their children.
Okay... but let's be realistic here. The sun is not going to kill us for the next few billion years. A few generations from now, people will be amused at our attempts to ensure their survival with our horribly ineffective technology.
I played Trem for a while, but it has some problems, some of which are not that hard to fix. To name one, all players on the human team have the same model/skin/voice. The graphics are kinda old which wouldn't bother me that much if it weren't for the samewhat disappointing gameplay. Humans tend to camp a lot until they get enough kills for stage 3, and one or two feeders on your team can make you lose the game easily. Also, deconners suck.
Modern reactors are pretty safe. I would welcome a nuclear reactor in my back yard: I'm sure a garden illuminated by cherenkov radiation would be most pleasing to the eye:)
Why? ANYONE with a working brain can become a security professional. You are not in any way responsible for his actions (or for the actions of any other security professional), but by saying you feel 'ashamed' for his actions you suggest you somehow are (and that security professionals are incapable of independent thought...). Why do you feel shame?
> Is this really where we should be putting our smartest scientists?
What gives us the right to decide where to 'put' 'our' smartest scientists? They belong to themselves, right? It is their choice what to do with their brains (cure cancer or get drunk or work at the LHC).
If you insist on asking a question I guess you could ask 'Do we really want to fund the LHC?'.
> Why are people so interested in mimicing humans? Isn't intelligence far more interesting than human-ness?
Ah, but what IS intelligence? The beauty of the turing test is that it 'proves' that a program is intelligent when it cannot be distinguished from something that we already consider to be intelligent (humans), without (and this is the important bit) the need to properly define intelligence.
Of course when we have programs that can pass the turing test it will be much easier to convince people that a non-human program can be intelligent.
But if the thing that appears to be X is not exactly like X, you might notice the difference subconciously. Testing for brain activity might detect whether you can subconsiously tell something that appears to be X and the true X apart.
> I don't see how you can equate a simple statement like "Ozgnikt stabbed FrumbumnÃr" with a moving image showing blood spurting everywhere and shit and giblets all falling out.
I didn't. I just said that the books contained a lot of violence. I never in any way suggested that the violence in LotR was the same as people stabbing eachother in a moving picture 'showing blood spurting everywhere and shit and giblets all falling out', although now I feel the need to point out that IMHO books can do a better job describing pain and agony (and possibly the joy this brings to the one inflicting the pain and agony...) than movies, provided the reader has at least some imagination.
Dude, that sucks. Why should the government dictate what games parents are allowed to give to their children? I played many games that would be considered R16/R18 when I was younger than 16, and many of my friends did the same, and none of us became crazy drunken women-beating drug-dealing axe-murderers.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, humans and a cat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephens_Island_Wren
> Better, stronger, faster.
Looking at its lifetime, we did a very very good job at the 'faster' part.
But it IS irrelevant if you are prepared to go to his home and beat any information you need out of him.
> For example I give you any copy protection that has ever been implemented.
That's a bad example. Copy protection can easily be circumvented because you have physical access to and root permissions on the machine the to-be-copied data is on. DRM gives you the encrypted data and the key.
> $12,000 (estimating fees) isn't anywhere near unlimited funds. If he had something that was worth the effort, an average businessman could spend that much to get it.
Sure, but an average businessman doesn't go around kicking peoples doors in and threatening people with a gun to force them to give up their secrets (well, not where I'm from). Even if they do, the password great great grandparent gave us is useless: if you visit him and threaten him with a gun, you don't ask for the ip and login of his server, you ask him to simply hand over the secrets you want. If great great grandparent visits slashdot through a few proxies (== adds more 'obscurity'), his server is once again safe and you lost $4000 in your quest for his server.
I guess you could still try to connect to all used IPv4 addresses and try the password. Then again, great great grandparent's computer could be behind a router blocking incomming connections, or the password could be of an account that has no rights to do anything.
> You presume that login credentials and IP addresses are "unfindable". Warrants, interrogation, torture, greased palms, all of these things can easily circumvent the fact that one does not know information about your machine _right now_.
Sure, but that means nothing can be secure unless nobody knows about it and nobody can find out about it OR it in inaccesable for everyone. If we assume an opponent who plays without any rules whatsoever and has unlimited resources and can find out where you live, you always lose. Duh. Very insightful indeed.
> Obscurity always sucks. There are plenty of easy ways to provide security without having to rely on the fact that a second party does not know easily found information.
Tell me a way to secure something I have/know against an opponent that has no morals, my body, my posessions, and everything I know.
> We expect computers to be perfect but the measuring system isn't perfect so the results aren't either.
The measuring system IS perfect. You either vote for a candidate or you don't. Adding integers is something computers can do very well without errors.
> You'll note that in this properly cast debate, anyone saying that only 0.000000% is acceptable counts as an extremist who won't be listened to.
A 0.000000% error margin is perfectly acceptable when you are adding some positive integers when the sum of all integers is guaranteed to be between 0 and 6 million (finnish population 2008 estimate 5.3 millios).
Do you call a teacher an extremist he when says 1 + 1 != 2.000000001 (assuming both 1s are integers)?
> On rare occasion, intuition does get it right, on things that should've been scientifically tested years ago.
True, then again, when you are afraid of everything you're guaranteed to be 'right' sometimes.
> People will hold you to account (won't do them any good, but they will anyway) if you put the planet at risk by your immediate, forseeable actions.
But that is my point, all predictions say the planet will be okay. We may not have ben building LHCs for thousands of years, but the earth (and every other object in our solar system) has been hit by really really fast particles for billions of years. Let's put this thing in perspective: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-high-energy_cosmic_ray we have been hit by a particle with an energy of about 50 joules, which is several orders of magnitude more that what the LHC can do.
> That's the difference between a heavy particle experiment and wearing an ugly coat.
Colliding particles at very high energies is exactly like putting on clothes: both have been happening for ages and neither has ever destroyed the earth. The argument that 'something unforseen may happen that destroys the earth' is equally valid for both.
> You don't say, "Oh well, we don't know for sure that anything bad will happen, so we'll just assume that it won't." That is voodoo science.
I say that to myself every time I put on my coat. I know I am lying to myself - with our limited understanding of the universe putting on clothes may very well trigger an unforseen event that destroys the solar system - but the snow outside has convinced me to sacrifice a little intellectual integrity in exchange for being able to wear my coat. Don't worry, I'm not taking too many risks: I'm not wearing anything underneath.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed_acyclic_graph
Enjoy.
> I STILL don't think the LHC will kill us all but the fact we're debating it says something.
Yes, it says that people are easily scared by things they do not understand. See also: wireless, mobile phones, things that have a 'chemical' smell... Ask some random people what would happen if the sun were to be replaced instantaneously by a black hole with a mass equal to that of the sun (moving in the same direction as the sun with the same speed, etc). Most people will reply that the earth would get 'sucked' in the black hole... if you don't even understand gravity you have no place in a debate concerning the LHC.
Everyone is entitled to an _informed_ opinion.
Yes, because surely all this soap-stealing is costing them so much money that they can't possibly make a profit when GP visits. Also, when the cleaners start stealing soap the hotels will start banning customers who haven't even touched the soap for stealing it.
Try to estimate the severity of the problem before you come up with an expensive way (that will piss off innocent people and require more administration) to 'solve' it.
> For my money, figure that out and you've pretty much figured out how to cure any age related disease. Heart failure / disease, liver, kidney, gall bladder, and prostate issues.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere
I can has your money now?
> Birds migrate, species adapt... it is the nature of life. It is the built-in imperative.
Then again, 'it is a built-in imperative' is hardly a good reason to do something. 'I am performing this action because millions of years of evolution have decided that this is a good way for my genes to spread.' sounds pretty dumb to me. To your genes you are nothing but a reproduction machine with a three billion years of feature creep. You are the means to their end, and 100% expendable when they are done with you (salmon comes to mind). They will not hesitate to encourage self-destructive behavior when this makes you have many babies before you kick the bucket. Consider yourself cannon fodder in their war for reproduction. To use them to decide what is a proper course of action for a person is a bad idea.
> Some would put group before self, and would rather bear some hardships now, in order to maximize the survival of their children.
Okay... but let's be realistic here. The sun is not going to kill us for the next few billion years. A few generations from now, people will be amused at our attempts to ensure their survival with our horribly ineffective technology.
I played Trem for a while, but it has some problems, some of which are not that hard to fix. To name one, all players on the human team have the same model/skin/voice.
The graphics are kinda old which wouldn't bother me that much if it weren't for the samewhat disappointing gameplay. Humans tend to camp a lot until they get enough kills for stage 3, and one or two feeders on your team can make you lose the game easily. Also, deconners suck.
Modern reactors are pretty safe. I would welcome a nuclear reactor in my back yard: I'm sure a garden illuminated by cherenkov radiation would be most pleasing to the eye :)
Why? ANYONE with a working brain can become a security professional. You are not in any way responsible for his actions (or for the actions of any other security professional), but by saying you feel 'ashamed' for his actions you suggest you somehow are (and that security professionals are incapable of independent thought...). Why do you feel shame?
Why would we do something tricky like 'land on it' when we can send a nuke to 'collide with it' instead?
> Is this really where we should be putting our smartest scientists?
What gives us the right to decide where to 'put' 'our' smartest scientists? They belong to themselves, right? It is their choice what to do with their brains (cure cancer or get drunk or work at the LHC).
If you insist on asking a question I guess you could ask 'Do we really want to fund the LHC?'.
> Why are people so interested in mimicing humans? Isn't intelligence far more interesting than human-ness?
Ah, but what IS intelligence? The beauty of the turing test is that it 'proves' that a program is intelligent when it cannot be distinguished from something that we already consider to be intelligent (humans), without (and this is the important bit) the need to properly define intelligence.
Of course when we have programs that can pass the turing test it will be much easier to convince people that a non-human program can be intelligent.
But if the thing that appears to be X is not exactly like X, you might notice the difference subconciously. Testing for brain activity might detect whether you can subconsiously tell something that appears to be X and the true X apart.
> I don't see how you can equate a simple statement like "Ozgnikt stabbed FrumbumnÃr" with a moving image showing blood spurting everywhere and shit and giblets all falling out.
I didn't. I just said that the books contained a lot of violence. I never in any way suggested that the violence in LotR was the same as people stabbing eachother in a moving picture 'showing blood spurting everywhere and shit and giblets all falling out', although now I feel the need to point out that IMHO books can do a better job describing pain and agony (and possibly the joy this brings to the one inflicting the pain and agony...) than movies, provided the reader has at least some imagination.
Dude, that sucks. Why should the government dictate what games parents are allowed to give to their children? I played many games that would be considered R16/R18 when I was younger than 16, and many of my friends did the same, and none of us became crazy drunken women-beating drug-dealing axe-murderers.
> Remember people, we live in democracies (well, alot of us do!), you don't just have to bend over and take it unless THE MAJORITY AGREES
Fixed that for you.