Except CSV isn't a standard. While the general idea is similar, the details differ greatly from parser to parser. Do you need a trailing comma on the line? Do you allow leading or trailing space on an entry? Since most generators use slightly different conventions, parsers need to be significantly more complex. And CSV is far more limited in scope. I think of CSV as the scripting language to XML's high level OO VM language. Neither is a particularly efficient format, but they're both easier to work with than the alternative (binary coded data), and they're each good for different things. CSV works well for simple data structures, just like scripting languages are appropriate for small utility programs, while XML is good for complex, rigidly defined structures, just like a high level OO language is more appropriate to large projects where maintainability is a concern.
Defending the GP: My friend works for a video game company. One of the "perks" is that they get a debit card with a decent amount of cash on it every year that they *must* spend on games or game-related material (the idea is to allow him to discern what makes a game good or bad and serve as inspiration at work). The amount of money provided is enough that he, at last check a year or so ago, owned the following:
NES
SNES
Wii
Dreamcast
PS1
PS2
PS3
Xbox
Xbox 360
Some ancient cartridge based TI system (TI-92)
Two gaming capable PCs
Probably one or two more consoles hidden in the cabinet gathering dust
Even without that sort of eclectic collection, if the guy from the article had a few friends that played LAN games between a few copies of a console, twelve would be easy. That said, I'm guessing the feds have more evidence than the console count, but there's nothing intrinsically incriminating about having twelve consoles.
Beyond that, arresting a guy for modding consoles on any level below mass-production (at least a few hundred consoles a month) seems like a real waste of time. Much like arresting prostitutes, you're shutting down one small time provider of an "illegal" service, but the built-in demand will ensure that you do nothing to stem the tide.
First, the cost of computing truly random numbers is way too high for that, unless you are performing an iterative approach to random number generation (and then you have the problem of predictability). It could be done, but you'd be pumping a lot of hardware into computing values that would be thrown away 99.9%+ of the time.
Secondarily, if your PRNG algorithm is broken, you're stuck replacing the hardware. At least a bad software PRNG can be replaced.
That said, hardware PRNG is provided in many modern systems by a TPM. It lacks the performance problems associated with your solution, since it only generates random numbers on demand. It still has the problem of a potential exploit being discovered leading to expensive hardware upgrades, but to my knowledge that has not been a problem to date.
Not really. Making an educated guess from the article, it appears that this is implemented as a simple controller lockout, not actual encryption. So swapping the flash memory into another controller (common computer forensics technique) would bypass it. Most people paranoid enough to want a disk password want real encryption, so using Intel's half-measure of a password is likely a very uncommon scenario. The tests are probably very simple; glossing over this case would be an understandable, if not desirable, oversight.
They probably meant a hard disk password. Depending on implementation, this means either disk supported full disk encryption, or a simple firmware interlock that prevents reading through the controller without the password (but could be bypassed with forensic tools that read the disk surface directly).
The X25-M's initial firmware was unusually bad; the degradation was more rapid and more severe than necessary. Thus, they issued a firmware update. The results were quite impressive. It not only reduced the perf degradation, but it seems to have made writes faster across the board.
I suspect PETA would still have a problem unless your chickens are free to leave (not just free to walk around). Remember, this is a group that doesn't believe in pet ownership, no matter how well the animals are treated (their argument is more elaborate than I care to go into).
I personally think that if you have a hard time finding the eggs, you've probably done more than enough to remove any hint of ethical dilemma, but then, I eat steak and wear leather without guilt, so my views aren't exactly in line with PETA's.
I am actually laughing out loud at that one. My girlfriend's father (a repellent, money grubbing man) was operating as a day trader for years. He was operating on margin too, so much of his profits, even in the good years, were eaten up by the interest. Last November he pulled out of the market (having lost the vast majority of his wealth aside from the house) "for good" due to it being a "big scam."
Meanwhile, I've been investing over a thousand a month ever since I got a full time job. I think I'm still down a little bit overall (I graduated in 2006, so my timing was a bit off), but not that much, and watching the returns the past few months has been magical.
I put more money in mutual funds regularly, regardless of market conditions (and conveniently, the way my company matches 401-k contributions meant their entire match was deposited between January and March). Dollar cost averaging is wonderful. I never said this prevents the less wealthy from making money in the market in other ways. I said it is one more way of making money that is inaccessible to the poor.
A reasonable argument, if only it were phrased without the surplus of question marks. I doubt they have the finances to pull it off, even if they stopped paying a few protesters (from what I can tell, the protesters are paid a token amount, not enough to drain the accounts). The reward they offer has pure upside potential; as long as they make sure to keep a million in the bank, the options are:
No one creates in-vitro meat: Nothing lost, nothing gained
Viable in-vitro meat is brought to market: They achieved their aim for pennies on the dollar (since it will cost way more than a million to develop, the motivation is more psychological than monetary, much like the Ansari X prize)
Somewhat inaccurate. They have offered a reward to the first person to make in-vitro meat, where the meat is grown independent of the animal, economically viable. They oppose "unethical treatment," which is defined broadly enough to mean killing or confining an animal for virtually any reason. Bruce Friedrich, a spokesman for PETA, has said that if in-vitro meat were available, he'd eat it in a heartbeat. After all, no animal would have to suffer to provide it. It's a consistent position, which I respect.
Before anyone starts, I'm aware of hypocrisy in other areas (PETA pet shelters), but I'm addressing only their views on vegetarianism.
HF isn't the problem there. HF has tiny effects on large market movements (as in the article's example, a set of trades in the seven figure range ended up adding a four digit "surcharge" due to the influence of HF; mere tenths of a percent). The problems with the economy are indirectly related to this: The glorification of wealth without regard for producing utility, the inability to accurately evaluate risks, etc. HF trading has small risks, small rewards and short time frames. It doesn't incur systemic risk because it's intrinsically time-limited; you can't slowly build up risk further and further and have it crash around you when your total period of ownership is measured in milliseconds.
If you paid even a lick of attention to TFA, you'd note that this is a vulnerability in third party software. If you've got stock firmware, you don't need to update, and if you don't have stock firmware, you couldn't get the update from Linksys anyway.
Hey, as long as the limits are reasonable, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it. Humans are pretty bad at picking stocks; all those rules our brains use to simplify decision making tend to muck up our ability to evaluate them accurately. The computers can be trained to evaluate based solely on those factors that are actually useful, and do it faster and more effectively than the human could. It sounds horrible the way you phrase it, but so many other applications we use computers for; we don't like the idea of machines supplanting humans in most fields.
Humans don't make the purchases or sales. The algorithms trade on their own, all the humans do is define the mechanism to evaluate trades and set limits (to ensure a bug or an unusual market movement doesn't get out of control).
The problem is the start-up cost. Buying the necessary hardware, obtaining the required data sources, developing the necessary analytical formulas and coding them efficiently costs a *lot* of money. So it's the free market of people who already have a lot of money and time, or simply an enormous amount of money.
I'm not entirely against it in some cases; well implemented it can smooth out market fluctuations and value securities more accurately. But it still makes me squeamish: It's yet another mechanism by which the rich get richer, and the poor get left behind. Every trade a "normal" person makes will end up costing a small amount more, and the difference goes into the pocket of the HF funds. It feels very much like the "shave the fractional cents off interest calculations" scam: No one suffers individually suffer, but it still feels wrong.
If you installed DD-WRT, yes. This has nothing to do with any technical specs on the router; it's a software processing bug that is exploitable either via an incoming connection from the internet (if remote management is enabled) or if any local user accesses a carefully crafted malicious website.
Wait, what? Are you against the Linksys website or their routers? Of all the reasons to reject a router, poor corporate website design is not that high on my list of priorities:
Security
Compatibility
Ease of use
Performance
...
Corporate website design
Feel free to hate Linksys for any of the other reasons. I was royally pissed off for a long time by the relentless router reboots caused by poor interaction between the logging mechanism and BitTorrent; thankfully they released fixed firmware for that a few years ago. But I'm not going to drop them just because they overuse Flash.
That does block the nastier exploit (explained below). But there is another vector which that doesn't address: commands issued *from* your browser. Steps:
You visit a malicious webpage for one reason or another (read: porn, warez)
The webpage contains a malicious resource request (I'm not clear on whether it could an img tag would be sufficient, but JS could definitely do it) that occurs on page load
The request actually goes straight to your router, which interprets it as a perfectly legitimate management order
The bigger exploit is if you enabled remote management. In that case you don't even have to turn on your computer, they can just directly access your router from the outside. But exploits that require you to visit a malicious link, in any common browser, are still serious.
Dark chocolate is relatively low in sugars compared to other forms of chocolate. Many Type 2 diabetes patients can handle sugar, without insulin, in limited quantities. If there are health benefits from the dark chocolate, expending some of your limited sugar intake on dark chocolate may be worth it, particularly if one of the benefits is to mitigate other risks related to diabetes.
Since it didn't specify false positive or false negative, and the plain English interpretation is that any given test will accurately categorize 90% of the time, you have to assume it applies to both. Any form of behavioral observation, particularly in a case where there are penalties for being put in a specific category, is going to have both (since normal people can have bad days, and terrorists can be good actors).
Note, I did not chide him for failing statistics. English, without recourse to domain specific language, can still be fairly unambiguous. The example given illustrates a simplified case, so plain English was sufficient to express the gist of the statement.
Technically, it would mean testing it on an evenly mixed population: 50% terrorist, 50% non-terrorist. And if we've reached that point, I think it's time to give up.
Slashdot Mirror
Except CSV isn't a standard. While the general idea is similar, the details differ greatly from parser to parser. Do you need a trailing comma on the line? Do you allow leading or trailing space on an entry? Since most generators use slightly different conventions, parsers need to be significantly more complex. And CSV is far more limited in scope. I think of CSV as the scripting language to XML's high level OO VM language. Neither is a particularly efficient format, but they're both easier to work with than the alternative (binary coded data), and they're each good for different things. CSV works well for simple data structures, just like scripting languages are appropriate for small utility programs, while XML is good for complex, rigidly defined structures, just like a high level OO language is more appropriate to large projects where maintainability is a concern.
Even without that sort of eclectic collection, if the guy from the article had a few friends that played LAN games between a few copies of a console, twelve would be easy. That said, I'm guessing the feds have more evidence than the console count, but there's nothing intrinsically incriminating about having twelve consoles.
Beyond that, arresting a guy for modding consoles on any level below mass-production (at least a few hundred consoles a month) seems like a real waste of time. Much like arresting prostitutes, you're shutting down one small time provider of an "illegal" service, but the built-in demand will ensure that you do nothing to stem the tide.
First, the cost of computing truly random numbers is way too high for that, unless you are performing an iterative approach to random number generation (and then you have the problem of predictability). It could be done, but you'd be pumping a lot of hardware into computing values that would be thrown away 99.9%+ of the time.
Secondarily, if your PRNG algorithm is broken, you're stuck replacing the hardware. At least a bad software PRNG can be replaced.
That said, hardware PRNG is provided in many modern systems by a TPM. It lacks the performance problems associated with your solution, since it only generates random numbers on demand. It still has the problem of a potential exploit being discovered leading to expensive hardware upgrades, but to my knowledge that has not been a problem to date.
Not really. Making an educated guess from the article, it appears that this is implemented as a simple controller lockout, not actual encryption. So swapping the flash memory into another controller (common computer forensics technique) would bypass it. Most people paranoid enough to want a disk password want real encryption, so using Intel's half-measure of a password is likely a very uncommon scenario. The tests are probably very simple; glossing over this case would be an understandable, if not desirable, oversight.
They probably meant a hard disk password. Depending on implementation, this means either disk supported full disk encryption, or a simple firmware interlock that prevents reading through the controller without the password (but could be bypassed with forensic tools that read the disk surface directly).
The X25-M's initial firmware was unusually bad; the degradation was more rapid and more severe than necessary. Thus, they issued a firmware update. The results were quite impressive. It not only reduced the perf degradation, but it seems to have made writes faster across the board.
I suspect PETA would still have a problem unless your chickens are free to leave (not just free to walk around). Remember, this is a group that doesn't believe in pet ownership, no matter how well the animals are treated (their argument is more elaborate than I care to go into).
I personally think that if you have a hard time finding the eggs, you've probably done more than enough to remove any hint of ethical dilemma, but then, I eat steak and wear leather without guilt, so my views aren't exactly in line with PETA's.
I am actually laughing out loud at that one. My girlfriend's father (a repellent, money grubbing man) was operating as a day trader for years. He was operating on margin too, so much of his profits, even in the good years, were eaten up by the interest. Last November he pulled out of the market (having lost the vast majority of his wealth aside from the house) "for good" due to it being a "big scam."
Meanwhile, I've been investing over a thousand a month ever since I got a full time job. I think I'm still down a little bit overall (I graduated in 2006, so my timing was a bit off), but not that much, and watching the returns the past few months has been magical.
I put more money in mutual funds regularly, regardless of market conditions (and conveniently, the way my company matches 401-k contributions meant their entire match was deposited between January and March). Dollar cost averaging is wonderful. I never said this prevents the less wealthy from making money in the market in other ways. I said it is one more way of making money that is inaccessible to the poor.
You have to confine chickens to do it. To my knowledge, they don't care about the egg itself, but the suffering of the hen that lays it.
It sounds like Apple is learning from the urban legend version of Microsoft. Except they're doing it for real.
Somewhat inaccurate. They have offered a reward to the first person to make in-vitro meat, where the meat is grown independent of the animal, economically viable. They oppose "unethical treatment," which is defined broadly enough to mean killing or confining an animal for virtually any reason. Bruce Friedrich, a spokesman for PETA, has said that if in-vitro meat were available, he'd eat it in a heartbeat. After all, no animal would have to suffer to provide it. It's a consistent position, which I respect.
Before anyone starts, I'm aware of hypocrisy in other areas (PETA pet shelters), but I'm addressing only their views on vegetarianism.
HF isn't the problem there. HF has tiny effects on large market movements (as in the article's example, a set of trades in the seven figure range ended up adding a four digit "surcharge" due to the influence of HF; mere tenths of a percent). The problems with the economy are indirectly related to this: The glorification of wealth without regard for producing utility, the inability to accurately evaluate risks, etc. HF trading has small risks, small rewards and short time frames. It doesn't incur systemic risk because it's intrinsically time-limited; you can't slowly build up risk further and further and have it crash around you when your total period of ownership is measured in milliseconds.
If you paid even a lick of attention to TFA, you'd note that this is a vulnerability in third party software. If you've got stock firmware, you don't need to update, and if you don't have stock firmware, you couldn't get the update from Linksys anyway.
Hey, as long as the limits are reasonable, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with it. Humans are pretty bad at picking stocks; all those rules our brains use to simplify decision making tend to muck up our ability to evaluate them accurately. The computers can be trained to evaluate based solely on those factors that are actually useful, and do it faster and more effectively than the human could. It sounds horrible the way you phrase it, but so many other applications we use computers for; we don't like the idea of machines supplanting humans in most fields.
Humans don't make the purchases or sales. The algorithms trade on their own, all the humans do is define the mechanism to evaluate trades and set limits (to ensure a bug or an unusual market movement doesn't get out of control).
The problem is the start-up cost. Buying the necessary hardware, obtaining the required data sources, developing the necessary analytical formulas and coding them efficiently costs a *lot* of money. So it's the free market of people who already have a lot of money and time, or simply an enormous amount of money.
I'm not entirely against it in some cases; well implemented it can smooth out market fluctuations and value securities more accurately. But it still makes me squeamish: It's yet another mechanism by which the rich get richer, and the poor get left behind. Every trade a "normal" person makes will end up costing a small amount more, and the difference goes into the pocket of the HF funds. It feels very much like the "shave the fractional cents off interest calculations" scam: No one suffers individually suffer, but it still feels wrong.
If you installed DD-WRT, yes. This has nothing to do with any technical specs on the router; it's a software processing bug that is exploitable either via an incoming connection from the internet (if remote management is enabled) or if any local user accesses a carefully crafted malicious website.
Feel free to hate Linksys for any of the other reasons. I was royally pissed off for a long time by the relentless router reboots caused by poor interaction between the logging mechanism and BitTorrent; thankfully they released fixed firmware for that a few years ago. But I'm not going to drop them just because they overuse Flash.
That does block the nastier exploit (explained below). But there is another vector which that doesn't address: commands issued *from* your browser. Steps:
The bigger exploit is if you enabled remote management. In that case you don't even have to turn on your computer, they can just directly access your router from the outside. But exploits that require you to visit a malicious link, in any common browser, are still serious.
Dark chocolate is relatively low in sugars compared to other forms of chocolate. Many Type 2 diabetes patients can handle sugar, without insulin, in limited quantities. If there are health benefits from the dark chocolate, expending some of your limited sugar intake on dark chocolate may be worth it, particularly if one of the benefits is to mitigate other risks related to diabetes.
Since it didn't specify false positive or false negative, and the plain English interpretation is that any given test will accurately categorize 90% of the time, you have to assume it applies to both. Any form of behavioral observation, particularly in a case where there are penalties for being put in a specific category, is going to have both (since normal people can have bad days, and terrorists can be good actors).
Note, I did not chide him for failing statistics. English, without recourse to domain specific language, can still be fairly unambiguous. The example given illustrates a simplified case, so plain English was sufficient to express the gist of the statement.
Technically, it would mean testing it on an evenly mixed population: 50% terrorist, 50% non-terrorist. And if we've reached that point, I think it's time to give up.