It's even worse than I described. You mentioned the people's water supply. In the first version of the bill, the board was explicitly empowered to prohibit the creation of new water reservoirs. It also said some board members must be from Sanford, the town in the middle of the fracking sweat zone. Why would the board need to prohibit new reservoirs? I read somewhere that the water seeping into the ground from reservoirs somehow hurts fracking profits. The final version still grants the board the power to prohibit new water reservoirs, but it's cleverly implicit in the broad powers granted to the board. The conspiracy nut in me wonders if there is a land baron in Sanford who is against a new reservoir because it will harm his fracking profits.
Unfortunately, this is true in the most recent victory for fracking: drilling where I live in North Carolina, specifically Durham, and Chatham counties. The oil industry wrote this bill, and the Republicans, with one unwitting Democrat, passed it over our governor's veto.
Now, I'm not against fracking, done responsibly, and if we get something for it. A law I would support would have a public commission with over 50% of it's members voted into the position from counties where fracking occurs. It would have public meetings, and make public exactly what is being pumped into our ground. It would have tough penalties for frackers who pollute our ground water, and the city, county, and state would be free to levy taxes on natural gas profits.
That's not what we got. Thanks to NC redneck Republicans, we're simply a slutty high school girl begging for any boy with a penis to have a good time. They are keeping all records secret for two years in an ongoing way that insures no public information will ever be timely enough to do anything about any crap that happens. The board will meet in secret as often as they like, and are appointed by the Charmain of the House and Governor, who will most likely be Republican when the time comes. The law explicitly forbids the government from informing the public about what chemicals are being pumped into the ground. If you don't want fracking on your land, your neighbor is allowed to force you to, with nothing more that a board rubber stamp. All local laws are automatically revoked if they interfere with fracking. Only a stupid $30K one-time tax can be levied per well by a county, and the law has no state taxes at all for the oil guys.
If that's not enough to give every fracker out there a boner, we also sweetened the deal with a big fat pay-back to T-Bone Pickens, who will get millions for installing natural gas infrastructure in NC. I wouldn't have a problem with this, except T-Bone is a big Republican backer, who just bought himself another fat state contract.
I'd argue that both of your examples are also bogus software patents that are killing innovation in the US. I personally am an author on 22 patents (Google QuickLogic and Cox for my older patents). Most of them are defensive software patents that we file because someone else might if we don't. It's extortion by the USPTO. Patent trolls make us that much more edgy to patent every stupid barely innovation we can.
Ben Franklin was proud to file some really innovative patents, like bifocals and swimming fins. If you come up with bifocals, I think you deserve 20 years to make something from it. Now days, patents are too expensive for you and me to file on our own. Franklin wouldn't have filed any in today's environment. Software patents take this BS to a whole new level. First, only a few stupid countries other than the US recognize them, so all we're doing is giving away opportunities to foreign countries, where software innovation continues without having to "code dumb", which is what I do most of the time to try and make sure I don't accidentally violate a patent.
People on this slashdot thread are mostly such dorks... believing that cutting down all the trees on a continent could not possibly change temperatures... mornons.
The reason Global Warming now has a place along side Evolution and the theory that the Earth is round, is that there is such a huge stupid conservative lobby trying to group-think us all into believing the Earth is only 10,000 years old, we will never run out of oil, and smoking is good for you.
Here's one of my favorite sources. Examine the graphs, and you'll find that few inter-glacial periods lasted over 20 thousand years, and we've been in ours for... 20 thousand years. Add to that the trend over the last 10 million years, and it seems that these ice ages are getting colder and colder. Straight line projection for another 10 million years puts us in snow-ball Earth territory. It's entirely possible that higher life on land was (and still may be) nearly at an end.
However, if you just want to be anal, like most Fox News fans when it comes to the topic of global warming, we can just take NASA's satellite measurements of surface temperatures since 1972. The Earth is warming. There's no way an intelligent person can look at that graph and not draw the obvious best line fit conclusion. Actually, that's not quite right, because there are plenty of intelligent people who are simply incapable of seeing what they don't want to see.
This whole Udacity thing is fascinating. I think comp-sci is especially suitable for online education. Self paced is awesome for geeks like me with day jobs, but a rigorous schedule is probably better for full time students. I don't know where this is going, but 160K students learning this course has to have a bigger global impact than any lecture.
Actually, over the summer, the Google Car course is self paced. I finished it in about a week. It was very cool. Unfortunately I have to wait for a couple months until they offer the final exam again.
Insightful post, though did you watch the Surface video first? I'm no Microsoft fan-boy (I'm more of a Linux lover), but I think Microsoft just knocked one out of the park. I haven't seen innovation like this from Microsoft in over a decade.
Finally, someone figured out that tablets should have a super thin keyboard built into the cover. I've been pestering my Dell brother-in-law marketing dude for something like this for four years, but Dell doesn't generally innovate, it just copies and lowers prices (with the exception of the amazing Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook).
This device is why both Ubuntu's Unity and Gnome 3 look a lot like Windows 8. It was just a matter of time before tablets like the Surface came into being. Got a netbook? Who wouldn't trade one in for a Surface? Who needs Facetime when we've got Skype? Who needs Apple Works or whatever crap office suite they sell when you can get Office (or Libre Office, in my case)?
I read a very insightful blog post on the surface. I agree with the blogger... the actual Surface may not sell in high volume. Instead, it just might succeed in creating a Windows 8 based tablet OEM ecosystem capable of trashing iPad volumes. I probably will get a Surface from Microsoft and run Ubuntu Unity on it (and live with the resulting pain). However, now that Dell can wait and see if there's a true market for Surface without anyone over there having to (God forbid!) take a risk, I predict I will have a sweet Dell branded Surface clone at a very reasonable price for my next tablet.
Now, one more thing Microsoft has to fix. When well we get a Microsoft Software Store? Apple showed how to do it while being as evil as humanly possible, and "Don't Be Evil" Google had no second thoughts about duplicating that evil. I was really saddened when Google proved it has no interest in bringing authors and users closer together, and were simply in the race to become the new content gate keepers, just like Apple. Will Microsoft take this opportunity to be the good guys for a change?
I live in Chapel Hill, home to UNC, where NVDA was born. I have some friends who are deep into NVDA's tech development. The short answer: "NVDA loves Linux and open source, but fucking God damned stupid software patents make it criminally stupid for NVDA to let the open source community in on how they actually write their drivers."
It's always nice to hear from a well informed person on a topic (unlike me in this case). I wish there where a "he knows what he's talking about" mod option.
Man, I can't believe I'm stuck in the position of defending big stupid corporations. I have stuck by a rule not to work for a company with more than 100 employees for 20 years.
The reason they save money is because they cache encrypted data from their own remote servers to their own local servers. You are correct that workers visiting random encrypted sites will not be cachable. But when they visit remote company web sites, they own both the remote server, and the local caching server. Its not that hard to make it all work in this case.
They are caching data from one of their remote servers to a local server, and they can only do this if you're browsing a company web site, which in theory is pretty often in a big corporation. They get away with caching data that normally you would be afraid to cache because the server of the original data will inform you when there's an update. This is all easy when you own the computers on both ends.
My understanding is that very large companies are doing this to save money rather than to snoop on your https sessions. Companies are saving money by locally caching large data sets from electrically far away branches of the same company. When you https into a a company site in another country, you get that nice all secure indicator, even though your company has a caching server in the middle.
That said, large companies have Big Brother watching you all the time. My aunt had to get a guy fired for watching porn at work, because that was part of her job. If you're trying to be sneaky, do it competently, or don't do it at all.
I'm almost done with Udacity's free on-line robotic car course. It's fascinating, probably more for the new ideas in teaching than the actual course, though the course is pretty good. I don't know where this is heading, but the impact on the world of having 160,000 people take the online course has to outweigh the impact of teaching a lecture once a semester at Stanford.
The old system works, and offers opportunity for personal growth that's so far simply not available on line. I learned more from my peers in Berkeley undergrad engineering than from actual course work. I see no good online substitute for having a group of super-geek peers who love to hack stuff, build stuff, and pull off audacious stunts. Communicating by e-mail is just not the same as an all nighter group session of mathematical noodling on an unsolved problem.
So, somewhere there will be a new balance, where we take advantage of this super affordable access to learning, while somehow giving our young people a college experience. I don't know where it's heading, but it will be exciting to watch.
I've long been fully in favor of the right to bear arms. Last month, I spent a few days in Paris, where I was targeted by pick-pockets three times. One of the little fuckers I caught by the neck and had to restrain myself from killing him. I think that if these guys had hand guns, I'd be in a whole different place right now.
So, I've changed my opinion on hand guns, even though I love using them for target practice. The rifles used for hunting are an important part of our American heritage, but handguns are simply for killing people. If you own a hunting rifle, there's a good chance you used it for it's intended purpose. Using a handgun for it's intended purpose is only legal in self defense, and they suck at self defense compared to shotguns. So, as much as I loved firing a Colt 45 at the dirt in my friends back yard, I think I'd prefer that future low-lifes trying to take my wallet be like the pick-pockets in Paris. They could have pulled a knife, but in reality, that's just a bit too dangerous for most criminals. They might get their ass kicked. Hand guns make killing easy, and criminals are all about what's easy.
Now, that said, it's intensely scary having the government require us to register guns. I think the two groups of people I fear most are criminals with guns, and a government trying to take mine away. Is there some middle ground were we can agree to keep hand-guns out of circulation while allowing the rest to be used without Big Brother's oversight?
You are psychotic, and need mental help. I shouldn't respond to a post from a psychopath. It's just plain stupid, but I can be sometimes. My children are 1/4 Jewish genetically, although I think it's really more of a cultural than genetic heritage. I'm Unitarian, and the only belief drilled into me as a child is to respect other's religious beliefs, at least so long as they don't try to force me to adopt them.
I'm guessing you consider yourself either Christian or Muslim. I am quite sure authorities of both religions reject you as a worshiper, as will God, if he does sit in judgement, when you die.
It's part of us. I would be interested to know if white people's blond hair, blue eyes, and large noses have Neanderthal origins. After all, they lived in cold climates far longer than modern humans.
The issues from TFA shed light on a the ethical complexity of genetics. Personally, I want a copy of my genome. I have some specific health related reasons I want it, but it would be cool to do things with it, like find out roughly what percentage Native American I am (I'm at least 1/32nd Cherokee), if that's even possible. Where have my mitochondria evolved most recently? Do I have the cheating gene?
Hungary has it wrong on two counts. First, they outlawed extracting genetic information except for health reasons. That's got to put a real damper on genetic research, and the Libertarian in me is crying foul. It's my genes, and I should be free to do what I want with them. Second, they're going after the genetics lab over this dumb law, rather than going after the MP for racist behavior. Let's hope we have more success in the US in drafting legislation to protect peoples right to genetic privacy, while giving people full access to data about themselves, and promoting genetic research.
That depends on your definition of better off. He's one of the smartest programmers ever, and had becoming rich been his life's ambition, I'm sure he would have succeeded. He probably could have had anything he wanted. Instead he gave up most of the good things in life in order to give the world free software.
Unlike so many religious leaders who give up so much to promote their faith, RMS has made an impact with results you can point to and say, "Yep. The world is a better place because this guy lived." I doubt he has many serious regrets. I sometimes second guess my whole life, and wonder if perhaps I should have devoted my life to improving the world, without regard to how much I could get paid to do it.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a non-mean slashdot. If you read all the 0 and -1 rated posts, you have to realize slashdot attracts a psychotic element. Abrasively sarcastic seems to be what post posters are trying to achieve. I read anyway because every few posts someone has something insightful to say that I would have a hard time finding on any other news related forum.
I just got back from a trip to Paris. Within 10 seconds of entering the Metro at the airport, a pickpocket was trying to steal my wife's wallet. On each of the next two days, we were also targeted by pickpockets. The third time, I got the little fucker by the neck and had to restrain myself from killing him.
So, no, I'm not planning to go back to Paris any time soon, Third world places like Paris are best shunned.
This point about making password hashing take a whole second is critical. For some reason, the geniuses in charge of our Internet security are totally screwing this up. Take my GPG private key, for example. I have to encrypt the damned thing with a humongous pass phrase, because some dork, who you would expect to know something about security (having written GPG), didn't bother making the private key's decryption key a compute intensive hash of my pass phrase. This allows attackers to do efficient brute-force attacks on our PGP private keys. They don't even have to run the compute intensive RSA algorithm... they just do AES with their password guess and detect if it's correct instantly, because GPG goes to the trouble of providing an instant "Your guess was correct" feature. Worse, sites like github not only allow, but require these insecure PGP keys to be used to log into their systems, even though they have no control over what, if any, password is protecting the user's private keys. I just got a private key from a rather good IT guy recently, and the file was named "ThePasswordIsFoo"! I used to encrypt my freaking OpenVPN keys with a password designed to give you an RSI injury, but the new IT policy is to leave it unencrypted on every Windows machine! And I thought our old SSH on port 22 was scary (actually... that is pretty damned scary). This same problem is true of encrypted documents. The most secure document encryption software I currently know of is my own stupid little tinycrypt algorithm. Do you use encfs, or TrueCrypt? Don't count on any CPU intensive hashing to protect your password. Brute force away!
Instead of leaving your documents wide open to brute force attacks like GPG using Blowfish or AES, it uses the old broken WEB encryption algorithm, RC4, with only a tiny mod: it drops the first 768 bytes of the key stream, which last I checked means no one knows any useful attack against it. It salts the encrypted file with a random 20 byte nonce, and requires about 1 second to compute the hash of the user's password used to do the encryption. Why should average non-security geeks like me have to write our own encryption software for documents, and live with 20+ character passwords on everything that uses GPG? Couldn't we at least count on GPG to get it right?
On top of all that, I run freaking Windows, meaning that I have no clue what software is sniffing for my passwords. I'm careful about what I install, but I installed ZIP, for example, a clear nasty piece of spy/annoy-ware, and Skype, one of the worst security leaks in history. God forbid that I install a free game or anything really stupidly dangerous. I sure hope all those laptops employees carry back and forth from home don't have any dangerous exe files installed:-P A couple friends who actually study security technology rave about the security tech in Windows. But I still press the "Yes" button on that freaking "Allow this program to make changes to your computer" dialog multiple times a day.
What a mess! So, let's drag freaking Linked-In over the coals! Then, let's have a quick look in the mirror. GPG, hears looking at you! Windows... let's not even go there. Mt Gox... really?
As far as I can tell, it looks like we'll still have NATs by default in our Cicso/LinkSys/whoever home routers and wireless access points. NAT works just fine with IPv6, and our ISP service providers would prefer that it remain difficult to impossible for P2P applications to work at all.
Is it possible to educate kids without immersing them in a university environment where they can find their peer group, and actually hang out with them?
I believe I have learned more than 90% of my engineering/computer knowledge on my own and from peers, even though I went to UC Berkeley for undergrad, and probably over 50% of my math/science. By the time I'd take an electronics or computer course, I'd already built most of the hardware and software taught in the course. That's because I had a great peer group who loved to build stuff, code hacks, and explore arcane mathematics. People like Geo Homsy, who's working on the Organograph, taught me far more than any teacher. He once, and not completely inaccurately, boasted, "I taught him everything he knows."
I feel that it's easier to learn science/math/engineering/compsci material through Google and Wikipedia than in class, but without that college campus experience, who would bother? I feel the major challenge for on-line education is connecting people. We already form on-line groups to debate virtually every interesting topic, but is bitching on a list like this any substitute for planning an audacious stunt over beer and pizza with some of your best friends? How important is learning group theory if you don't use any of it to solve every moving-piece puzzle you and your friends can get hold of? How important is writing that computing assignment to calculate x^n, where n is an integer, if you don't compete with your friends to come up with an optimal solution, thus discovering a fascinating and little known unsolved mathematics problem in comp sci? How is learning alpha-beta tree pruning going to feel in an online course (probably like a root canal), compared to competing with friends on Othello or Go algorithms, thus requiring everybody to grok it in their gut? How good would a geek like me be at Calculus if I didn't keep getting asked by hot chicks to help them with homework over at their place? How do you reproduce that on-line?
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It's even worse than I described. You mentioned the people's water supply. In the first version of the bill, the board was explicitly empowered to prohibit the creation of new water reservoirs. It also said some board members must be from Sanford, the town in the middle of the fracking sweat zone. Why would the board need to prohibit new reservoirs? I read somewhere that the water seeping into the ground from reservoirs somehow hurts fracking profits. The final version still grants the board the power to prohibit new water reservoirs, but it's cleverly implicit in the broad powers granted to the board. The conspiracy nut in me wonders if there is a land baron in Sanford who is against a new reservoir because it will harm his fracking profits.
Unfortunately, this is true in the most recent victory for fracking: drilling where I live in North Carolina, specifically Durham, and Chatham counties. The oil industry wrote this bill, and the Republicans, with one unwitting Democrat, passed it over our governor's veto.
Now, I'm not against fracking, done responsibly, and if we get something for it. A law I would support would have a public commission with over 50% of it's members voted into the position from counties where fracking occurs. It would have public meetings, and make public exactly what is being pumped into our ground. It would have tough penalties for frackers who pollute our ground water, and the city, county, and state would be free to levy taxes on natural gas profits.
That's not what we got. Thanks to NC redneck Republicans, we're simply a slutty high school girl begging for any boy with a penis to have a good time. They are keeping all records secret for two years in an ongoing way that insures no public information will ever be timely enough to do anything about any crap that happens. The board will meet in secret as often as they like, and are appointed by the Charmain of the House and Governor, who will most likely be Republican when the time comes. The law explicitly forbids the government from informing the public about what chemicals are being pumped into the ground. If you don't want fracking on your land, your neighbor is allowed to force you to, with nothing more that a board rubber stamp. All local laws are automatically revoked if they interfere with fracking. Only a stupid $30K one-time tax can be levied per well by a county, and the law has no state taxes at all for the oil guys.
If that's not enough to give every fracker out there a boner, we also sweetened the deal with a big fat pay-back to T-Bone Pickens, who will get millions for installing natural gas infrastructure in NC. I wouldn't have a problem with this, except T-Bone is a big Republican backer, who just bought himself another fat state contract.
I'd argue that both of your examples are also bogus software patents that are killing innovation in the US. I personally am an author on 22 patents (Google QuickLogic and Cox for my older patents). Most of them are defensive software patents that we file because someone else might if we don't. It's extortion by the USPTO. Patent trolls make us that much more edgy to patent every stupid barely innovation we can.
Ben Franklin was proud to file some really innovative patents, like bifocals and swimming fins. If you come up with bifocals, I think you deserve 20 years to make something from it. Now days, patents are too expensive for you and me to file on our own. Franklin wouldn't have filed any in today's environment. Software patents take this BS to a whole new level. First, only a few stupid countries other than the US recognize them, so all we're doing is giving away opportunities to foreign countries, where software innovation continues without having to "code dumb", which is what I do most of the time to try and make sure I don't accidentally violate a patent.
People on this slashdot thread are mostly such dorks... believing that cutting down all the trees on a continent could not possibly change temperatures... mornons.
There's another theory I read recently that the Little Ice Age was caused by mass death of the native Indians throughout the Americas due to European diseases.
The reason Global Warming now has a place along side Evolution and the theory that the Earth is round, is that there is such a huge stupid conservative lobby trying to group-think us all into believing the Earth is only 10,000 years old, we will never run out of oil, and smoking is good for you.
Here's one of my favorite sources. Examine the graphs, and you'll find that few inter-glacial periods lasted over 20 thousand years, and we've been in ours for... 20 thousand years. Add to that the trend over the last 10 million years, and it seems that these ice ages are getting colder and colder. Straight line projection for another 10 million years puts us in snow-ball Earth territory. It's entirely possible that higher life on land was (and still may be) nearly at an end.
However, if you just want to be anal, like most Fox News fans when it comes to the topic of global warming, we can just take NASA's satellite measurements of surface temperatures since 1972. The Earth is warming. There's no way an intelligent person can look at that graph and not draw the obvious best line fit conclusion. Actually, that's not quite right, because there are plenty of intelligent people who are simply incapable of seeing what they don't want to see.
This whole Udacity thing is fascinating. I think comp-sci is especially suitable for online education. Self paced is awesome for geeks like me with day jobs, but a rigorous schedule is probably better for full time students. I don't know where this is going, but 160K students learning this course has to have a bigger global impact than any lecture.
Actually, over the summer, the Google Car course is self paced. I finished it in about a week. It was very cool. Unfortunately I have to wait for a couple months until they offer the final exam again.
PHP is a well liked language, according to this interesting comparison that was slashdotted a while back. At least, it doesn't seem to make users swear. I'm not exactly sure what this means. My first reaction is PHP users really like using PHP, while C++ users just hate using C++. However, it could also mean that PHP users are just more polite. Another possibility is they all work at huge companies read their e-mails, and they worry about them reading their commit messages. Python users are the second most polite, though, and most Python coders I know also use C++. Also, I'd say a bunch of Python coders are a-holes like most of us here on slashdot. I do have to admit that when I code in C++, I spend a lot more time being frustrated at stupid library problems than when I'm coding in Python. When doing a quick PHP web hack, PHP doesn't seem to get in my way.
I'd say that if PHP is popular, and apparently doesn't frustrate users, then it's not broken.
Insightful post, though did you watch the Surface video first? I'm no Microsoft fan-boy (I'm more of a Linux lover), but I think Microsoft just knocked one out of the park. I haven't seen innovation like this from Microsoft in over a decade.
Finally, someone figured out that tablets should have a super thin keyboard built into the cover. I've been pestering my Dell brother-in-law marketing dude for something like this for four years, but Dell doesn't generally innovate, it just copies and lowers prices (with the exception of the amazing Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook).
This device is why both Ubuntu's Unity and Gnome 3 look a lot like Windows 8. It was just a matter of time before tablets like the Surface came into being. Got a netbook? Who wouldn't trade one in for a Surface? Who needs Facetime when we've got Skype? Who needs Apple Works or whatever crap office suite they sell when you can get Office (or Libre Office, in my case)?
I read a very insightful blog post on the surface. I agree with the blogger... the actual Surface may not sell in high volume. Instead, it just might succeed in creating a Windows 8 based tablet OEM ecosystem capable of trashing iPad volumes. I probably will get a Surface from Microsoft and run Ubuntu Unity on it (and live with the resulting pain). However, now that Dell can wait and see if there's a true market for Surface without anyone over there having to (God forbid!) take a risk, I predict I will have a sweet Dell branded Surface clone at a very reasonable price for my next tablet.
Now, one more thing Microsoft has to fix. When well we get a Microsoft Software Store? Apple showed how to do it while being as evil as humanly possible, and "Don't Be Evil" Google had no second thoughts about duplicating that evil. I was really saddened when Google proved it has no interest in bringing authors and users closer together, and were simply in the race to become the new content gate keepers, just like Apple. Will Microsoft take this opportunity to be the good guys for a change?
I live in Chapel Hill, home to UNC, where NVDA was born. I have some friends who are deep into NVDA's tech development. The short answer: "NVDA loves Linux and open source, but fucking God damned stupid software patents make it criminally stupid for NVDA to let the open source community in on how they actually write their drivers."
It's always nice to hear from a well informed person on a topic (unlike me in this case). I wish there where a "he knows what he's talking about" mod option.
Man, I can't believe I'm stuck in the position of defending big stupid corporations. I have stuck by a rule not to work for a company with more than 100 employees for 20 years.
The reason they save money is because they cache encrypted data from their own remote servers to their own local servers. You are correct that workers visiting random encrypted sites will not be cachable. But when they visit remote company web sites, they own both the remote server, and the local caching server. Its not that hard to make it all work in this case.
They are caching data from one of their remote servers to a local server, and they can only do this if you're browsing a company web site, which in theory is pretty often in a big corporation. They get away with caching data that normally you would be afraid to cache because the server of the original data will inform you when there's an update. This is all easy when you own the computers on both ends.
My understanding is that very large companies are doing this to save money rather than to snoop on your https sessions. Companies are saving money by locally caching large data sets from electrically far away branches of the same company. When you https into a a company site in another country, you get that nice all secure indicator, even though your company has a caching server in the middle.
That said, large companies have Big Brother watching you all the time. My aunt had to get a guy fired for watching porn at work, because that was part of her job. If you're trying to be sneaky, do it competently, or don't do it at all.
I'm almost done with Udacity's free on-line robotic car course. It's fascinating, probably more for the new ideas in teaching than the actual course, though the course is pretty good. I don't know where this is heading, but the impact on the world of having 160,000 people take the online course has to outweigh the impact of teaching a lecture once a semester at Stanford.
The old system works, and offers opportunity for personal growth that's so far simply not available on line. I learned more from my peers in Berkeley undergrad engineering than from actual course work. I see no good online substitute for having a group of super-geek peers who love to hack stuff, build stuff, and pull off audacious stunts. Communicating by e-mail is just not the same as an all nighter group session of mathematical noodling on an unsolved problem.
So, somewhere there will be a new balance, where we take advantage of this super affordable access to learning, while somehow giving our young people a college experience. I don't know where it's heading, but it will be exciting to watch.
I've long been fully in favor of the right to bear arms. Last month, I spent a few days in Paris, where I was targeted by pick-pockets three times. One of the little fuckers I caught by the neck and had to restrain myself from killing him. I think that if these guys had hand guns, I'd be in a whole different place right now.
So, I've changed my opinion on hand guns, even though I love using them for target practice. The rifles used for hunting are an important part of our American heritage, but handguns are simply for killing people. If you own a hunting rifle, there's a good chance you used it for it's intended purpose. Using a handgun for it's intended purpose is only legal in self defense, and they suck at self defense compared to shotguns. So, as much as I loved firing a Colt 45 at the dirt in my friends back yard, I think I'd prefer that future low-lifes trying to take my wallet be like the pick-pockets in Paris. They could have pulled a knife, but in reality, that's just a bit too dangerous for most criminals. They might get their ass kicked. Hand guns make killing easy, and criminals are all about what's easy.
Now, that said, it's intensely scary having the government require us to register guns. I think the two groups of people I fear most are criminals with guns, and a government trying to take mine away. Is there some middle ground were we can agree to keep hand-guns out of circulation while allowing the rest to be used without Big Brother's oversight?
You are psychotic, and need mental help. I shouldn't respond to a post from a psychopath. It's just plain stupid, but I can be sometimes. My children are 1/4 Jewish genetically, although I think it's really more of a cultural than genetic heritage. I'm Unitarian, and the only belief drilled into me as a child is to respect other's religious beliefs, at least so long as they don't try to force me to adopt them.
I'm guessing you consider yourself either Christian or Muslim. I am quite sure authorities of both religions reject you as a worshiper, as will God, if he does sit in judgement, when you die.
It's part of us. I would be interested to know if white people's blond hair, blue eyes, and large noses have Neanderthal origins. After all, they lived in cold climates far longer than modern humans.
The issues from TFA shed light on a the ethical complexity of genetics. Personally, I want a copy of my genome. I have some specific health related reasons I want it, but it would be cool to do things with it, like find out roughly what percentage Native American I am (I'm at least 1/32nd Cherokee), if that's even possible. Where have my mitochondria evolved most recently? Do I have the cheating gene?
Hungary has it wrong on two counts. First, they outlawed extracting genetic information except for health reasons. That's got to put a real damper on genetic research, and the Libertarian in me is crying foul. It's my genes, and I should be free to do what I want with them. Second, they're going after the genetics lab over this dumb law, rather than going after the MP for racist behavior. Let's hope we have more success in the US in drafting legislation to protect peoples right to genetic privacy, while giving people full access to data about themselves, and promoting genetic research.
Seriously. The answer to tech distracting drivers is tech replacing drivers.
That depends on your definition of better off. He's one of the smartest programmers ever, and had becoming rich been his life's ambition, I'm sure he would have succeeded. He probably could have had anything he wanted. Instead he gave up most of the good things in life in order to give the world free software.
Unlike so many religious leaders who give up so much to promote their faith, RMS has made an impact with results you can point to and say, "Yep. The world is a better place because this guy lived." I doubt he has many serious regrets. I sometimes second guess my whole life, and wonder if perhaps I should have devoted my life to improving the world, without regard to how much I could get paid to do it.
I'm not sure I've ever seen a non-mean slashdot. If you read all the 0 and -1 rated posts, you have to realize slashdot attracts a psychotic element. Abrasively sarcastic seems to be what post posters are trying to achieve. I read anyway because every few posts someone has something insightful to say that I would have a hard time finding on any other news related forum.
I just got back from a trip to Paris. Within 10 seconds of entering the Metro at the airport, a pickpocket was trying to steal my wife's wallet. On each of the next two days, we were also targeted by pickpockets. The third time, I got the little fucker by the neck and had to restrain myself from killing him.
So, no, I'm not planning to go back to Paris any time soon, Third world places like Paris are best shunned.
This point about making password hashing take a whole second is critical. For some reason, the geniuses in charge of our Internet security are totally screwing this up. Take my GPG private key, for example. I have to encrypt the damned thing with a humongous pass phrase, because some dork, who you would expect to know something about security (having written GPG), didn't bother making the private key's decryption key a compute intensive hash of my pass phrase. This allows attackers to do efficient brute-force attacks on our PGP private keys. They don't even have to run the compute intensive RSA algorithm... they just do AES with their password guess and detect if it's correct instantly, because GPG goes to the trouble of providing an instant "Your guess was correct" feature. Worse, sites like github not only allow, but require these insecure PGP keys to be used to log into their systems, even though they have no control over what, if any, password is protecting the user's private keys. I just got a private key from a rather good IT guy recently, and the file was named "ThePasswordIsFoo"! I used to encrypt my freaking OpenVPN keys with a password designed to give you an RSI injury, but the new IT policy is to leave it unencrypted on every Windows machine! And I thought our old SSH on port 22 was scary (actually... that is pretty damned scary). This same problem is true of encrypted documents. The most secure document encryption software I currently know of is my own stupid little tinycrypt algorithm. Do you use encfs, or TrueCrypt? Don't count on any CPU intensive hashing to protect your password. Brute force away!
Instead of leaving your documents wide open to brute force attacks like GPG using Blowfish or AES, it uses the old broken WEB encryption algorithm, RC4, with only a tiny mod: it drops the first 768 bytes of the key stream, which last I checked means no one knows any useful attack against it. It salts the encrypted file with a random 20 byte nonce, and requires about 1 second to compute the hash of the user's password used to do the encryption. Why should average non-security geeks like me have to write our own encryption software for documents, and live with 20+ character passwords on everything that uses GPG? Couldn't we at least count on GPG to get it right?
On top of all that, I run freaking Windows, meaning that I have no clue what software is sniffing for my passwords. I'm careful about what I install, but I installed ZIP, for example, a clear nasty piece of spy/annoy-ware, and Skype, one of the worst security leaks in history. God forbid that I install a free game or anything really stupidly dangerous. I sure hope all those laptops employees carry back and forth from home don't have any dangerous exe files installed :-P A couple friends who actually study security technology rave about the security tech in Windows. But I still press the "Yes" button on that freaking "Allow this program to make changes to your computer" dialog multiple times a day.
What a mess! So, let's drag freaking Linked-In over the coals! Then, let's have a quick look in the mirror. GPG, hears looking at you! Windows... let's not even go there. Mt Gox... really?
As far as I can tell, it looks like we'll still have NATs by default in our Cicso/LinkSys/whoever home routers and wireless access points. NAT works just fine with IPv6, and our ISP service providers would prefer that it remain difficult to impossible for P2P applications to work at all.
Is it possible to educate kids without immersing them in a university environment where they can find their peer group, and actually hang out with them?
I believe I have learned more than 90% of my engineering/computer knowledge on my own and from peers, even though I went to UC Berkeley for undergrad, and probably over 50% of my math/science. By the time I'd take an electronics or computer course, I'd already built most of the hardware and software taught in the course. That's because I had a great peer group who loved to build stuff, code hacks, and explore arcane mathematics. People like Geo Homsy, who's working on the Organograph, taught me far more than any teacher. He once, and not completely inaccurately, boasted, "I taught him everything he knows."
I feel that it's easier to learn science/math/engineering/compsci material through Google and Wikipedia than in class, but without that college campus experience, who would bother? I feel the major challenge for on-line education is connecting people. We already form on-line groups to debate virtually every interesting topic, but is bitching on a list like this any substitute for planning an audacious stunt over beer and pizza with some of your best friends? How important is learning group theory if you don't use any of it to solve every moving-piece puzzle you and your friends can get hold of? How important is writing that computing assignment to calculate x^n, where n is an integer, if you don't compete with your friends to come up with an optimal solution, thus discovering a fascinating and little known unsolved mathematics problem in comp sci? How is learning alpha-beta tree pruning going to feel in an online course (probably like a root canal), compared to competing with friends on Othello or Go algorithms, thus requiring everybody to grok it in their gut? How good would a geek like me be at Calculus if I didn't keep getting asked by hot chicks to help them with homework over at their place? How do you reproduce that on-line?