"But once you/do/ understand things better, superstitions just hold you back"
There are differences between religion and superstition. Believing they are the same does not make them so.
The evidence is most people won't understand things better and never will.
Most people do not know how a car/computer starts and works when they turn the key/press the power button. Most never try to understand the workings of the things around them. They just mimic others (how many read manuals?), and it works well enough for them. They know about as much about cars and computers as the cargo cult knew about planes.
While it may appear to hold individuals back, it allows societies to move forward faster.
It lets human society and groups scale - allowing more specialization/differentiation. It also allows people to spend more time on other stuff (like picking lice off each other or poking each other on Facebook);).
Humans seem prone to religion - even those that cast away old religions often start following new ones (e.g. Neo-Paganism, "Antifur Militants").
This may be due to wars and plagues in the past - where selection was more at a group level than an individual level. Or it may be due to some other reason.
Whatever it is, culture and religion are here to stay and they significantly affect survivability and fitness (even today a strange ancient practice like circumcision can reduce the infection rate of some STDs).
The people following a culture and religion make up a "greater organism". Each cell may be rather stupid, but by tending to follow a bunch of rules/beliefs, there can be an emergent organism.
As I often joke: free market economists don't change lightbulbs - they just write theoretical papers in the darkness while waiting for Adam Smith's Invisible Hand to do it.
Which belief systems will tend to result in Invisible Hands that are statistically more likely to change "lightbulbs" that need changing?
Definitely not belief systems where "everyone must understand everything better first".
Lastly, if lightbulbs are changed, is it because bunches of cells changed them or people did or the Invisible Hands did?;).
After all he "even installed VNC so I could manage their GUI desktops if necessary"
If he did that and did things right he should be able to VNC or SSH in. So there is no need for 80 year olds to learn how to untar. He could just do it for them, then ask them to try again.
ssh is better than remote desktop for remote management when there's crappy internet connectivity.
Car analogy: There are companies that can easily sell high end luxury sports cars, and there are companies that can't.
I think it's still possible for a company to sell "their brand" gaming PCs (and make money).
But that company is probably not the current HP.
If you were a billionaire, you won't be wasting your time building your own high end PC unless it was a hobby (e.g. you were a Tony Stark). You'd tell your trusty valet/butler/PA or equivalent - "get me the best PC, and put the best games and stuff on it, make sure it's done by the time I'm back from my new island. Oh wait, get three just in case".
If you were that billionaire, would you want to see three HP computers after your trip? I wouldn't.
How does that prove they care about security? All that shows is they care about wiping the egg off their face.
If they really cared, they'd have caught it before it happened.
For example: they could get the CA's to deposit $$$$$$ every year, and then have 3rd parties try to subvert the CAs. If the 3rd party succeeds, the CA loses the deposit and the 3rd party gets some of the $$$$$. If at the end of the year everything is ok, the CAs get 75% of their deposit back. Then list the audit results and track record of CAs on their website. If a CA keeps failing audits, the CA and the bosses of the CA are banned (basically if the same crappy people are involved in starting another CA, that CA will also be banned).
Another thing, just look at the Mozilla CA cert management UI.
If you try to delete a cert, it doesn't delete it. It disables its use for stuff (which is OK I guess) BUT you can't tell from the main UI page.
The next time Mozilla updates the certs, you have to select each cert and go to "edit", one by one to see what changed.
I've tried suggesting security improvements to the Mozilla/Netscape bunch before, but it was a big waste of time.
I've probably posted others, but I bet "everyone" is still going to leave the dozens of CA certs in their browsers, and Mozilla and friends aren't going to do the SSH style thing - warn user if the cert changes for whatever reason- even if it's a valid cert.
I'd like to know if my bank's cert suddenly changed from the old cert to some cert signed by some CA in Elbonia.:)
Yeah and when cheap home supercaps are widely available, watch out for more crazy people building railguns and other stuff (focused EMP, lightning guns, pulse lasers...).
I just hope nobody invents something cheap that can be abused to "nuke everybody in the city" soon, since I think people aren't quite civilized/domesticated enough yet.
It's all good till the neighbourhood idiot/asshole gets demigod-like powers;).
Even with your eyes closed, you can detect someone putting a hand near your ear just from it blocking the ambient sound.
Try it!
My guess if you were in a "semi alert" state (and not oblivious state) and something big suddenly "appeared" behind you, dramatically changing the soundscape, you'd notice too.
I believe more than a few of our ancestors have survived because of that ability:).
FWIW you could make license plates that look different to cameras from human eyes.
Point an infrared remote control at your phone camera or digital camera - press the remote control buttons and you'll see the light on the screen of the camera.
But you normally won't see that light with your eyes.
So you might be able to rig things so that your plates are different every day to cameras, but the same to the eyes.
Of course if a cop bothers to compare what his eyes see to what his camera sees, you're in trouble:).
A car with an efficient and light hydrocarbon fuel cell with a smaller supercapacitor for regen braking (a supercapacitor that can do repeated regenerative braking of 110kph to 0 in 5 seconds would be more than good enough for me - which works out to storing 465kJ(0.13kWh) at a rate of 93kW).
Then I'd be able to use hydrocarbon fuels (which have better storage and transportation properties than hydrogen), have good acceleration, regenerative braking, no (or less) need for gears, and very good "mpg".
If you can create hydrogen fuel using nuclear power, it might not be so difficult to create hydrocarbon fuels using nuclear power.
A lot of the taiwanese motherboards (and video cards) and a bad capacitor problem a few years ago. One story was someone tried to steal the formula from the japanese, and the japanese figured it out so they planted an incomplete recipe... One that resulted in the capacitors going bust much faster (e.g. within 1 year warranty).
This affected a lot of companies, and they all made crap stuff for a while.
To me it's more of a batch thing. They'll have bad and good batches. You buy stuff from a bad batch, a lot of them will be bad.
So when you say an Asus motherboard sucks/rocks, to be useful you'd have to provide model and year.
Once you have enough data points then you can figure out which manufacturer has a better track record, is improving or getting worse.
"These probiotics are not so advanced yet as to support any significant weight loss."
A tapeworm egg or two might help with weight loss;).
Breed the right sort of tapeworm and the side effects might be less severe than stapling your stomach or whatever stuff they do nowadays to help people with a serious weight problem (even liposuction can be dangerous).;).
Turn signals are going on and off at about 1 Hz. The LED tail lights are going on and off much faster.
To a creature with "slow" eyes (or a long exposure camera), a turn signal light might appear dimmer ("in between") instead of alternating between "on" and "off".
To a creature with "fast" eyes, both of lights will appear to go on and off.
It's just the matter of frequency.
His reasoning is wrong. Just because something is DC doesn't make it impossible or even unlikely that the tail lights are going on and off rapidly.
And safer if you put the 1/2 lights in separate spot by themselves.
It should be more obvious that someone is braking when you suddenly see more lights lit up (or a different shape of lights being made) than when you see a brighter light vs a dimmer light that's the same shape.
Looking at that story, it would be interesting to see the before and after code.
Maybe he was using it as an excuse to clean up the code (aka refactoring) - and since management was willing to give him the time, he took it.
If I were the newcomer, it might be a good idea to keep my mouth shut and ask him about it later in private. A better strategic move I think.
He could be that silly of course, but then at least you would then confirm it for yourself, rather than just make him look silly (and not knowing what he is really up to), while immediately making a potential enemy.
Well at least he didn't say there was evidence of WMD in the code and so it needed a change.
When you bake a cake in an oven, it's not easy to say at which point the mixture of flour, eggs, sugar etc become cake.
But that doesn't mean an arbitrary line should not be drawn (or should be drawn for that matter) stating that a cake mixture legally becomes cake at point X.
In the real world, you will often have to draw arbitrary lines somewhere. It may be stupid to do so, but often it is even more stupid to NOT do so.
And that is where we should be using our alleged intelligence and figuring out whether we should draw that arbitrary line (and if so, where), or not, or not _yet_.
BUT keep in mind: whether we should or not (and where), should be far _less_ to do with the physical stuff (8 cells, cake stickiness, etc), and more to do with the long term consequences.
After all we might say tomatoes are vegetables and not fruits for import purposes, and even if it is silly, it might be better overall to do so (at least till someone has a better idea or things change).
If we are going to say a bunch of human cells gets a right to live just on the basis of sufficient intelligence or personality, most people here (including me) shouldn't be alive.
Plenty of brains in the world but very little intelligence.
Slashdot Mirror
"But once you /do/ understand things better, superstitions just hold you back"
;).
;).
There are differences between religion and superstition. Believing they are the same does not make them so.
The evidence is most people won't understand things better and never will.
Most people do not know how a car/computer starts and works when they turn the key/press the power button. Most never try to understand the workings of the things around them. They just mimic others (how many read manuals?), and it works well enough for them. They know about as much about cars and computers as the cargo cult knew about planes.
While it may appear to hold individuals back, it allows societies to move forward faster.
It lets human society and groups scale - allowing more specialization/differentiation. It also allows people to spend more time on other stuff (like picking lice off each other or poking each other on Facebook)
Humans seem prone to religion - even those that cast away old religions often start following new ones (e.g. Neo-Paganism, "Antifur Militants").
This may be due to wars and plagues in the past - where selection was more at a group level than an individual level. Or it may be due to some other reason.
Whatever it is, culture and religion are here to stay and they significantly affect survivability and fitness (even today a strange ancient practice like circumcision can reduce the infection rate of some STDs).
The people following a culture and religion make up a "greater organism". Each cell may be rather stupid, but by tending to follow a bunch of rules/beliefs, there can be an emergent organism.
As I often joke: free market economists don't change lightbulbs - they just write theoretical papers in the darkness while waiting for Adam Smith's Invisible Hand to do it.
Which belief systems will tend to result in Invisible Hands that are statistically more likely to change "lightbulbs" that need changing?
Definitely not belief systems where "everyone must understand everything better first".
Lastly, if lightbulbs are changed, is it because bunches of cells changed them or people did or the Invisible Hands did?
He's either stupid, incompetent or trolling.
After all he "even installed VNC so I could manage their GUI desktops if necessary"
If he did that and did things right he should be able to VNC or SSH in. So there is no need for 80 year olds to learn how to untar. He could just do it for them, then ask them to try again.
ssh is better than remote desktop for remote management when there's crappy internet connectivity.
"has been selling for well over a year now?"
But has it been selling well?
Maybe it hasn't and hence the silly article.
If I were so filthy rich, that I could offer to buy girls a car as my pickup line, I don't think I'd want an HP as my high end personal computer...
If I were one of those "Quad SLI FTW!" gamers, I wouldn't be buying an HP. I'd be personally building my own custom rig.
Car analogy:
There are companies that can easily sell high end luxury sports cars, and there are companies that can't.
I think it's still possible for a company to sell "their brand" gaming PCs (and make money).
But that company is probably not the current HP.
If you were a billionaire, you won't be wasting your time building your own high end PC unless it was a hobby (e.g. you were a Tony Stark). You'd tell your trusty valet/butler/PA or equivalent - "get me the best PC, and put the best games and stuff on it, make sure it's done by the time I'm back from my new island. Oh wait, get three just in case".
If you were that billionaire, would you want to see three HP computers after your trip? I wouldn't.
Do they wonder? I thought they said it's because of "the pirates".
I don't think there'll be enough handicapped parking spaces at MacWorld for all 300,000 of them.
Edit the CA cert you "deleted"- you should see all the checkboxes deselected.
:).
Then test to see that you get a warning/error when visiting the relevant sites.
The UI needs a bit of improvement
How does that prove they care about security? All that shows is they care about wiping the egg off their face.
If they really cared, they'd have caught it before it happened.
For example: they could get the CA's to deposit $$$$$$ every year, and then have 3rd parties try to subvert the CAs. If the 3rd party succeeds, the CA loses the deposit and the 3rd party gets some of the $$$$$. If at the end of the year everything is ok, the CAs get 75% of their deposit back. Then list the audit results and track record of CAs on their website. If a CA keeps failing audits, the CA and the bosses of the CA are banned (basically if the same crappy people are involved in starting another CA, that CA will also be banned).
Another thing, just look at the Mozilla CA cert management UI.
If you try to delete a cert, it doesn't delete it. It disables its use for stuff (which is OK I guess) BUT you can't tell from the main UI page.
The next time Mozilla updates the certs, you have to select each cert and go to "edit", one by one to see what changed.
I've tried suggesting security improvements to the Mozilla/Netscape bunch before, but it was a big waste of time.
It's each person's responsibility.
Whether they know it or not.
And they don't care about security (nor do the users).
That's why self-signed certs aren't really more risky than CA signed certs in practice.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1041927&cid=25890305
http://ask.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=534356&cid=23199022
I've probably posted others, but I bet "everyone" is still going to leave the dozens of CA certs in their browsers, and Mozilla and friends aren't going to do the SSH style thing - warn user if the cert changes for whatever reason- even if it's a valid cert.
I'd like to know if my bank's cert suddenly changed from the old cert to some cert signed by some CA in Elbonia. :)
What stops you from staying with vmware server 1.0.x instead of moving to 2.x?
1.0.x is good enough for me.
I'm not going to 2.x (I think vmware has lost the plot). If vmware continues doing silly stuff, my upgrade path from 1.0.x is likely to be VirtualBox.
Yeah and when cheap home supercaps are widely available, watch out for more crazy people building railguns and other stuff (focused EMP, lightning guns, pulse lasers...).
;).
I just hope nobody invents something cheap that can be abused to "nuke everybody in the city" soon, since I think people aren't quite civilized/domesticated enough yet.
It's all good till the neighbourhood idiot/asshole gets demigod-like powers
It doesn't even have to be echo location.
:).
Even with your eyes closed, you can detect someone putting a hand near your ear just from it blocking the ambient sound.
Try it!
My guess if you were in a "semi alert" state (and not oblivious state) and something big suddenly "appeared" behind you, dramatically changing the soundscape, you'd notice too.
I believe more than a few of our ancestors have survived because of that ability
"I'd want an expert in sonar to call bullshit on this one"
Like a dolphin? They can most certainly tell.
The dolphin could give you an ultrasound and see if something is seriously wrong with your insides...
Or, pick a choice internal organ to ram and damage:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3323070/Killer-dolphins-baffle-marine-experts.html
Our sonar of course is a lot crappier.
FWIW you could make license plates that look different to cameras from human eyes.
:).
Point an infrared remote control at your phone camera or digital camera - press the remote control buttons and you'll see the light on the screen of the camera.
But you normally won't see that light with your eyes.
So you might be able to rig things so that your plates are different every day to cameras, but the same to the eyes.
Of course if a cop bothers to compare what his eyes see to what his camera sees, you're in trouble
Actually I wouldn't mind having a car with both.
A car with an efficient and light hydrocarbon fuel cell with a smaller supercapacitor for regen braking (a supercapacitor that can do repeated regenerative braking of 110kph to 0 in 5 seconds would be more than good enough for me - which works out to storing 465kJ(0.13kWh) at a rate of 93kW).
Then I'd be able to use hydrocarbon fuels (which have better storage and transportation properties than hydrogen), have good acceleration, regenerative braking, no (or less) need for gears, and very good "mpg".
If you can create hydrogen fuel using nuclear power, it might not be so difficult to create hydrocarbon fuels using nuclear power.
He might actually be an AI, and that's why you didn't get that much insight and meaning from that post.
Who is pining for a manned mission to Mars?
George W Bush?
If that's the case, maybe we should have sent him to Mars.
If it was done earlier, it would have brought great benefit to the world.
Even now, it might still prove useful.
A lot of the taiwanese motherboards (and video cards) and a bad capacitor problem a few years ago. One story was someone tried to steal the formula from the japanese, and the japanese figured it out so they planted an incomplete recipe... One that resulted in the capacitors going bust much faster (e.g. within 1 year warranty).
This affected a lot of companies, and they all made crap stuff for a while.
To me it's more of a batch thing. They'll have bad and good batches. You buy stuff from a bad batch, a lot of them will be bad.
So when you say an Asus motherboard sucks/rocks, to be useful you'd have to provide model and year.
Once you have enough data points then you can figure out which manufacturer has a better track record, is improving or getting worse.
"These probiotics are not so advanced yet as to support any significant weight loss."
;).
;).
A tapeworm egg or two might help with weight loss
Breed the right sort of tapeworm and the side effects might be less severe than stapling your stomach or whatever stuff they do nowadays to help people with a serious weight problem (even liposuction can be dangerous).
Very similar.
Turn signals are going on and off at about 1 Hz.
The LED tail lights are going on and off much faster.
To a creature with "slow" eyes (or a long exposure camera), a turn signal light might appear dimmer ("in between") instead of alternating between "on" and "off".
To a creature with "fast" eyes, both of lights will appear to go on and off.
It's just the matter of frequency.
His reasoning is wrong. Just because something is DC doesn't make it impossible or even unlikely that the tail lights are going on and off rapidly.
And safer if you put the 1/2 lights in separate spot by themselves.
It should be more obvious that someone is braking when you suddenly see more lights lit up (or a different shape of lights being made) than when you see a brighter light vs a dimmer light that's the same shape.
Looking at that story, it would be interesting to see the before and after code.
Maybe he was using it as an excuse to clean up the code (aka refactoring) - and since management was willing to give him the time, he took it.
If I were the newcomer, it might be a good idea to keep my mouth shut and ask him about it later in private. A better strategic move I think.
He could be that silly of course, but then at least you would then confirm it for yourself, rather than just make him look silly (and not knowing what he is really up to), while immediately making a potential enemy.
Well at least he didn't say there was evidence of WMD in the code and so it needed a change.
Heck, I thought everyone here was part time.
:).
I'm surprised how so many people manage "full time" while being on slashdot/digg/wikipedia/youtube all the time
When you bake a cake in an oven, it's not easy to say at which point the mixture of flour, eggs, sugar etc become cake.
But that doesn't mean an arbitrary line should not be drawn (or should be drawn for that matter) stating that a cake mixture legally becomes cake at point X.
In the real world, you will often have to draw arbitrary lines somewhere. It may be stupid to do so, but often it is even more stupid to NOT do so.
And that is where we should be using our alleged intelligence and figuring out whether we should draw that arbitrary line (and if so, where), or not, or not _yet_.
BUT keep in mind: whether we should or not (and where), should be far _less_ to do with the physical stuff (8 cells, cake stickiness, etc), and more to do with the long term consequences.
After all we might say tomatoes are vegetables and not fruits for import purposes, and even if it is silly, it might be better overall to do so (at least till someone has a better idea or things change).
If we are going to say a bunch of human cells gets a right to live just on the basis of sufficient intelligence or personality, most people here (including me) shouldn't be alive.
Plenty of brains in the world but very little intelligence.