What about the life forms on Earth that we have not yet discovered? Are you absolutely sure that they require water, too?
I already admitted that anything is possible. I'm not absolutely sure, but I'm 99.999% sure that there's nothing living on this planet that doesn't somehow depend on water. Positing that life could exist without it is the extreme claim, not mine.
Yes, we should start with what we know instead of what we don't. What we shouldn't do is end it there.
Why does an investigation for water-based life on Mars imply an "end" to all other investigation? What burr do you have up your ass anyway?
And if you lie to me about a loved one dying (you bastard, you), then how is my reaction flawed in a way that "logic" is not. There is no logic vs. emotion. Emotion has a logical basis.
That example wasn't so good. Here's a much better one: I spike your drink with MDMA and you begin to experience powerful emotions towards everybody in the room. Now explain how those emotions have a logical cause?
Emotion may be induced by any number of things. Logical reasons are one of them. But all emotion clearly is not logical.
Just because they were not able to find water on a planet doesn't mean that life doesn't exist. Don't we know of creature on our very own earth where they survice at absolute depths on volcanoes/oceans where they don't get sunlight or water or other harsh environment?
No. All creatures on this planet require water to live, and I do mean all. Some don't need light, some don't need heat, some don't care what the pressure is, but they ALL, to the very last one of them, require water.
The fact that such a wide variety of life exists on earth, with each organism so dramatically different from the others, but all requiring water, actually shows how universal a role it plays.
Without water, how are you going to dissolve both ionic and non-ionic substances? How are you going to absorb the waste heat of chemical metabolism? Without water, where are you going to carry out the chemical reactions of life? Ask any chemist how important water is to all kinds of chemistry, not just biological reactions. You can't do anything important without water.
Is it possible that there is some strange, ghostly, electromagnetic being living on a planet somewhere? Maybe, but how would we ever find it? We know what water-based life looks like, so don't you think we should start with what we know instead of what we don't?
I don't have the numbers here, but I assume the physical foundation for this story is that at that pressure, the boiling temperature is below the freezing temperature, so water really can't exist stably in fluid state.
You're pretty much right. Have a look at the phase diagram for water.
This particular diagram is, coincidentally, marked with the letters "M" "V" and "E" for the conditions which exist on Mars, Venus, and Earth, respectively.
On Mars, the temperature and pressure fall into a regime where water vapor directly sublimates to and from the solid state. No liquid state is present. However, an increase of a few degrees in temperature would push Mars very close to the triple point of water that the Earth currently rests at.
Doesn't have to be ragtag at all -- if I was faced with a supercomputing task and had the option of buying a 1024 node system or leasing the time from Sun, I might consider buying the system if I knew I could recoup investment by leasing the time. Every prospective customer is therefore a prospective competitor.
I think this view is too optimistic. The price can't drop to the "amortized hardware cost plus utilities" because there's more to it than that. A cluster computer is not like a piece of artwork which you can just rent out to anybody who wants it. You need to maintain it, fix parts as they fail, pay an employee to do this for you, build an accounting system to track the money flows, pay for marketing and sales support in order to develop contracts, support clients when their shitty code breaks, etc. You basically have to go into the business of being a cycle provider.
It doesn't follow that everybody who requires supercomputing services is necessarily interested in entering the supercomputing business.
Tommy Lee Jones, as a tracker cop who chases bad guys through snow covered Oregon, just seems rehashed and boring now.
Way off topic, but the snow scenes in "The Hunted" were set in British Columbia, not Oregon. Seeing snow like that near Portland, Silver Falls, or any of the other Oregon settings in the film would be highly unusual.
That movie was almost intolerably bad, but I watched it all the way through anyway because it featured Portland. And what a ludicrous caricature of Portland it was -- steam emanating from city manhole covers, TLJ "warping" between distant parts of the city within the same chase scene, the MAX train going over a bridge it doesn't actually go over, etc. Funny and annoying at the same time.
Then follow that logic through: if Sun successfully establishes a market for leased CPU, then the Grid @ Home screensaver will come out offering to pay you some fraction of the proceeds to use your computer's idle cycles -- and presents that capacity to market at a lower cost than Sun's $1/hr.
You assume that all parallel jobs have a negligible communication overhead. Many parallel algorithms are communication bound, and these simply won't work when distributed across the Internet. Are you seriously comparing a rag tag assembly of 1000 random PCs tied together across the Internet, to a 1000 node hypercube with dedicated gigabit interconnects?
Isn't that many times what it's worth? 365*24=over $7K for a year's worth of computing. Hmmmmm...
But say you wanted to run the job ten times faster. You'd split it across ten CPUs. Each CPU would perform 1/10th the work, but in parallel, so the job gets done in 1/10th the time. But the total number of CPU-hours you've used remains the same. So you pay the same price but get the job done ten times faster.
If you wanted to do that yourself, you'd have to buy 10 CPUs and once the job was done you'd have a bunch of CPUs you didn't need.
One gallon of Gas contains roughly 34kWh of energy, so a 10 mile commute at 30mpg cones to about 22kWh round trip (assuming that that 34kWh is the available energy capacity). Next to that, 1kW for 8 hours is nothing.
8 is "nothing" next to 22? What are you smoking? You've just shown that the computer would use 36% the energy the car uses. That's frickin' HUGE.
PKI in an effective trust architecture is much harder to do. Sure, you can create your own structure for free using OpenSSL, but why should I trust you? More importantly, why should I trust your brother's uncle's cousin's son's former roommate's key, which has a trust relationship all the way back through that chain with you?
That wasn't at all the sort of model I was suggesting. Imagine a group of family and friends who want to securely email each other. They select one individual, probably the most responsible and technically savvy among them, to be the TA. This TA then hands out certificates to the members of the group. Do it in person if you're paranoid.
I'm not talking about letting just anybody sign anybody else's certificate.
The rest are algorithmic, and therefore susceptible to decryption by algorithmic attacks. Decryption of them is a matter of being clued to the nature of the algorithm, and perhaps in possession of the knowledge of a secret constant with which the decryption algorithm can be generated. And once the constant is guessed, all messages based on it are decrypted.
The problem with OTP, is that if you need to encrypt a gig of data, you need a gig of key bytes. A human cannot remember a gig of key bytes, so it must be stored on some media somewhere. So now, the key has a physical existence and can be stolen.
OTP is more secure in a theoretical sense but has many practical problems.
Since the results are going to be random, what's the point? You might as well flip coins to decide who has to drink. Or even simpler, everybody could just drink.
It's like the kids game "Chutes and Ladders." You have no opportunity to do anything that will affect the outcome. You might as well not be playing it.
how useless popular comms software is. Why should I have to register with Verisign to send an encrypted email to my girlfriend, co-workers etc. Why can't I just click a button and generate a random 128 bit key set and use PGP?
What, pray tell, is wrong with the S/MIME standard? Nobody says your certificate has to be signed by Verisign. Jeez, set up your own Trusted Authority for you own group of friends and contacts, and self-sign your certificates.
It is also interesting to note the bias they give PGP here. Basically, there are two good asymmetric key distribution schemes in the world: PGP and PKI.
PKI just means "public key infrastructure" and can refer to any method for managing and exchanging public keys. X.509 certificates and the entire framework of trusted authorities surrounding them are just one implementation of a PKI. PGP is another, more simplistic implementation.
So you can't really compare PGP, which is a specific application, to PKI, which is just a broad term for key management infrastructures.
And what about "PKI" (in the sense you seem to mean it) isn't free? OpenSSL can do everything with certificates that you'd ever want to do.
I have a daughter about that age. I say don't let them watch tv or use the computer. Kick their little butts outside and let them play, explore the world, use their imagination. Get them books, legos an erector set or anything let will let them build and use their imagination.
And while you're at it, don't waste their precious time teaching them how to eat with a fork, dress themselves, or brush their teeth. We mustn't take away that important time for fucking around.
I'll all for letting kids explore, create, and imagine with no educational framework constraining them, but some things just need to be taught. At an early age. Whether you want to or not, and whether the kid wants to or not. The ability to use a computer skillfully is no longer optional. Forbidding them from using a computer is like forbidding them from tying their own shoes.
The kid's 6 years old and you're now thinking about letting him... browse the web? No offense, but you're WAAAAY behind.
My best friends' child knew how to start up Internet Explorer, go to the History, load her favorite Flash games site, and navigate to the game she wanted to play before she even knew how to READ. Why haven't you made the computer a part of the child's life from day one? Are you afraid he's going to "break" it? Sheesh!
Okay, so maybe your kid hasn't been interested in using the thing. But what sort of excuse is that? Most kids aren't too interested in learning how to dress themselves for school, but this skill isn't optional. Age 6?! I'm stunned.
Why anybody would swerve and risk their own life and the lives of others to avoid hitting a rabbit, squirrel, cat, et al is beyond rational comprehension.
Back in high school, I almost killed myself when I tried to avoid hitting a parade of raccoons crossing a 40 MPH roadway. I braked and swerved, and the back end came loose and the car spun around 180 degrees and slammed into the curb. A few feet either way and I would have ended up wrapped around a telephone pole.
This was late at night with no other traffic around. It would have been a serious accident if there had been other drivers.
Since then, I don't so much as flinch when something like a squirrel or raccoon runs across the road. If I have enough time to safely slow down, I'll do that, but putting my own life in danger to avoid an animal that raids your garbage can at night is just plain stupid.
(Sadly, my effort was wasted anyway. As my car spun around, I caught one of the raccoons and kind of "smeared" him with the tire. When I regained normal thought and stepped out of my car to assess the damage, I heard the poor animals groaning in the bushes on the roadside. It was truly horrific.)
I'm sorry, but there's a big difference between genetics, over which one has no control, and taking drugs, which is (at least certainly in the beginning) a voluntary action.
There is a difference, but I think the OP's point was that because companies have become comfortable with drug tests (and expect that most employees will submit to them), it wasn't a very big step to move on to testing their genetics. It's a slippery slope argument, but not all such arguments are specious.
Give them an inch and they'll take a yard, etc etc.
Don't trust OSS, just like you should not trust binaryies. ALWAYS run `gpg --verify` or at least md5sum and compare against what is on the site. If there is nothing, well, beware.
The fact that something is signed doesn't prove anything except that somebody signed it. Nothing prevents me from writing some C code that corrupts files in your home directory, signing it, and throwing it up on SourceForge. I'll be caught out soon enough, but in the meantime, people get screwed.
Additionally, GPG signatures are only worth something if there is a verifiable chain of trust leading back to a TA. And even then, it only proves that you are who you say you are. It does nothing to prove that the code doesn't contain something malicious.
At any rate, checking every tarball is a wasted effort. It's far easier to just ensure that your important data is backed up, so that if something does happen, you can just reinstall and move on with life. (Somebody administering a server might not have this option, but as an end user I certainly do.)
Exactly the same risks as downloading a tarball of sourcecode and compiling it. Oh, you read every line of source you download? Including the configure script, which may well contain a trojan? Ignore me then!
You make a valid point, but consider reality for a second. How many tarballs are you aware of that contained malicious code? Compare to the number of Windows.EXE files which aren't what they appear to be. Statistically, running an unknown EXE is far more dangerous.
I can count on zero hands the number of times I've been burned by a source tarball. But I've encountered Windows trojans easily hundreds of times. Does this make me complacent? Probably. But I'm just going with the statistics.
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I already admitted that anything is possible. I'm not absolutely sure, but I'm 99.999% sure that there's nothing living on this planet that doesn't somehow depend on water. Positing that life could exist without it is the extreme claim, not mine.
Yes, we should start with what we know instead of what we don't. What we shouldn't do is end it there.
Why does an investigation for water-based life on Mars imply an "end" to all other investigation? What burr do you have up your ass anyway?
Originally it stood for "Special Weapons Attack Team" but it was changed, I guess because it sounded too scary.
Dammit, this stupid ATM machine won't take my PIN number! And the LCD display is all messed up. Somebody call in the SWAT team!
That example wasn't so good. Here's a much better one: I spike your drink with MDMA and you begin to experience powerful emotions towards everybody in the room. Now explain how those emotions have a logical cause?
Emotion may be induced by any number of things. Logical reasons are one of them. But all emotion clearly is not logical.
No. All creatures on this planet require water to live, and I do mean all. Some don't need light, some don't need heat, some don't care what the pressure is, but they ALL, to the very last one of them, require water.
The fact that such a wide variety of life exists on earth, with each organism so dramatically different from the others, but all requiring water, actually shows how universal a role it plays.
Without water, how are you going to dissolve both ionic and non-ionic substances? How are you going to absorb the waste heat of chemical metabolism? Without water, where are you going to carry out the chemical reactions of life? Ask any chemist how important water is to all kinds of chemistry, not just biological reactions. You can't do anything important without water.
Is it possible that there is some strange, ghostly, electromagnetic being living on a planet somewhere? Maybe, but how would we ever find it? We know what water-based life looks like, so don't you think we should start with what we know instead of what we don't?
You're pretty much right. Have a look at the phase diagram for water.
This particular diagram is, coincidentally, marked with the letters "M" "V" and "E" for the conditions which exist on Mars, Venus, and Earth, respectively.
On Mars, the temperature and pressure fall into a regime where water vapor directly sublimates to and from the solid state. No liquid state is present. However, an increase of a few degrees in temperature would push Mars very close to the triple point of water that the Earth currently rests at.
I think this view is too optimistic. The price can't drop to the "amortized hardware cost plus utilities" because there's more to it than that. A cluster computer is not like a piece of artwork which you can just rent out to anybody who wants it. You need to maintain it, fix parts as they fail, pay an employee to do this for you, build an accounting system to track the money flows, pay for marketing and sales support in order to develop contracts, support clients when their shitty code breaks, etc. You basically have to go into the business of being a cycle provider.
It doesn't follow that everybody who requires supercomputing services is necessarily interested in entering the supercomputing business.
Way off topic, but the snow scenes in "The Hunted" were set in British Columbia, not Oregon. Seeing snow like that near Portland, Silver Falls, or any of the other Oregon settings in the film would be highly unusual.
That movie was almost intolerably bad, but I watched it all the way through anyway because it featured Portland. And what a ludicrous caricature of Portland it was -- steam emanating from city manhole covers, TLJ "warping" between distant parts of the city within the same chase scene, the MAX train going over a bridge it doesn't actually go over, etc. Funny and annoying at the same time.
You assume that all parallel jobs have a negligible communication overhead. Many parallel algorithms are communication bound, and these simply won't work when distributed across the Internet. Are you seriously comparing a rag tag assembly of 1000 random PCs tied together across the Internet, to a 1000 node hypercube with dedicated gigabit interconnects?
But say you wanted to run the job ten times faster. You'd split it across ten CPUs. Each CPU would perform 1/10th the work, but in parallel, so the job gets done in 1/10th the time. But the total number of CPU-hours you've used remains the same. So you pay the same price but get the job done ten times faster.
If you wanted to do that yourself, you'd have to buy 10 CPUs and once the job was done you'd have a bunch of CPUs you didn't need.
8 is "nothing" next to 22? What are you smoking? You've just shown that the computer would use 36% the energy the car uses. That's frickin' HUGE.
The result is c4ca4238a0b923820dcc509a6f75849b
Also, try the MD5 of the MD5:
echo -n c4ca4238a0b923820dcc509a6f75849b | md5sum
28c8edde3d61a0411511d3b1866f0636 -
That also turns up hits.
That wasn't at all the sort of model I was suggesting. Imagine a group of family and friends who want to securely email each other. They select one individual, probably the most responsible and technically savvy among them, to be the TA. This TA then hands out certificates to the members of the group. Do it in person if you're paranoid.
I'm not talking about letting just anybody sign anybody else's certificate.
The problem with OTP, is that if you need to encrypt a gig of data, you need a gig of key bytes. A human cannot remember a gig of key bytes, so it must be stored on some media somewhere. So now, the key has a physical existence and can be stolen.
OTP is more secure in a theoretical sense but has many practical problems.
It's like the kids game "Chutes and Ladders." You have no opportunity to do anything that will affect the outcome. You might as well not be playing it.
What, pray tell, is wrong with the S/MIME standard? Nobody says your certificate has to be signed by Verisign. Jeez, set up your own Trusted Authority for you own group of friends and contacts, and self-sign your certificates.
Who the hell would use PGP...
PKI just means "public key infrastructure" and can refer to any method for managing and exchanging public keys. X.509 certificates and the entire framework of trusted authorities surrounding them are just one implementation of a PKI. PGP is another, more simplistic implementation.
So you can't really compare PGP, which is a specific application, to PKI, which is just a broad term for key management infrastructures.
And what about "PKI" (in the sense you seem to mean it) isn't free? OpenSSL can do everything with certificates that you'd ever want to do.
Uhhh.. Isn't that what he just said? Or are you implying that "more viscous" does not mean the same thing as "higher viscosity?" HUH?
And while you're at it, don't waste their precious time teaching them how to eat with a fork, dress themselves, or brush their teeth. We mustn't take away that important time for fucking around.
I'll all for letting kids explore, create, and imagine with no educational framework constraining them, but some things just need to be taught. At an early age. Whether you want to or not, and whether the kid wants to or not. The ability to use a computer skillfully is no longer optional. Forbidding them from using a computer is like forbidding them from tying their own shoes.
My best friends' child knew how to start up Internet Explorer, go to the History, load her favorite Flash games site, and navigate to the game she wanted to play before she even knew how to READ. Why haven't you made the computer a part of the child's life from day one? Are you afraid he's going to "break" it? Sheesh!
Okay, so maybe your kid hasn't been interested in using the thing. But what sort of excuse is that? Most kids aren't too interested in learning how to dress themselves for school, but this skill isn't optional. Age 6?! I'm stunned.
Back in high school, I almost killed myself when I tried to avoid hitting a parade of raccoons crossing a 40 MPH roadway. I braked and swerved, and the back end came loose and the car spun around 180 degrees and slammed into the curb. A few feet either way and I would have ended up wrapped around a telephone pole.
This was late at night with no other traffic around. It would have been a serious accident if there had been other drivers.
Since then, I don't so much as flinch when something like a squirrel or raccoon runs across the road. If I have enough time to safely slow down, I'll do that, but putting my own life in danger to avoid an animal that raids your garbage can at night is just plain stupid.
(Sadly, my effort was wasted anyway. As my car spun around, I caught one of the raccoons and kind of "smeared" him with the tire. When I regained normal thought and stepped out of my car to assess the damage, I heard the poor animals groaning in the bushes on the roadside. It was truly horrific.)
There is a difference, but I think the OP's point was that because companies have become comfortable with drug tests (and expect that most employees will submit to them), it wasn't a very big step to move on to testing their genetics. It's a slippery slope argument, but not all such arguments are specious.
Give them an inch and they'll take a yard, etc etc.
This is Slashdot. You don't have to self-censor the word "pissed."
The fact that something is signed doesn't prove anything except that somebody signed it. Nothing prevents me from writing some C code that corrupts files in your home directory, signing it, and throwing it up on SourceForge. I'll be caught out soon enough, but in the meantime, people get screwed.
Additionally, GPG signatures are only worth something if there is a verifiable chain of trust leading back to a TA. And even then, it only proves that you are who you say you are. It does nothing to prove that the code doesn't contain something malicious.
At any rate, checking every tarball is a wasted effort. It's far easier to just ensure that your important data is backed up, so that if something does happen, you can just reinstall and move on with life. (Somebody administering a server might not have this option, but as an end user I certainly do.)
You make a valid point, but consider reality for a second. How many tarballs are you aware of that contained malicious code? Compare to the number of Windows .EXE files which aren't what they appear to be. Statistically, running an unknown EXE is far more dangerous.
I can count on zero hands the number of times I've been burned by a source tarball. But I've encountered Windows trojans easily hundreds of times. Does this make me complacent? Probably. But I'm just going with the statistics.