The last thing they want for a government job is someone well-informed. Let all the outsiders, within your borders and beyond, read all the cables they want. Just so long as your young prospective employees have no clue, you're okay!
How would this work in the tech world?
``We can't hire you because you know too much about our technology from leaked documents. Please send your resume to our nearest competitor.'':)
Receive an e-mail with smileys from a Hotmail user and your decent e-mail program will warn that the message contains images. If you choose not to display them, the e-mail is devoid of all emoticons.
I receive all my mails using RoundCube webmail these days. It warns that an HTML e-mail contains images, and will only display them if you want to. If an e-mail demands a read receipt, you are prompted whether or not you wish to send that.
The bottom line is that web bugs are not possible without the cooperation of dumb client software.
This feigned concern about online privacy is just a political chain that policitians and government bodies yank in order to appear to care about individual rights.
There is nothing that the State craves more than to track every move of every citizen.
If criminals without a profit motive are a harder nut to crack, maybe they need to be punished more severely, not less, one would think.
I don't see why premeditated murder should be treated differently from a crime of passion. Murder is murder.
A crime of passion is in fact planned. A person knows exactly under what circumstances he would kill, and does so when circumstances arise which fit that pattern. Merely, such a killer perhaps does not think/specifically/ about a given situation. Thinking like ``I would kill a person in such and such relation to me if they did such and such'' is no less evil than ``I will kill because of...''. It's the same. One is merely an instantiation of the other by the substitution of concretes.
The whole rhetoric about premeditation is nonsense. I believe that every crime of passion is deeply rooted in the personality of the killer, moulded since birth.
Punishing apparently planned killings more severely clearly sends the message that a "thought crime" occurs when one is planning a killing which does not occur when a killing is done with a blank mind, on an apparent emotional whim.
The difference in punishment precisely corresponds to what the thought-crime is worth by itself.
Commit some act to maximize profit, get a harsh sentence. Commit exactly the same act without profit motive, get a light sentence.
If the profit motive adds N months to a sentence for some act, then by the most straightforward, linear morality arithmetic, this means that simply having a profit motive in the absence of committing any act is in and of itself a crime punishable by N months.
The reason arithmetic is slow is because of the abstraction inversion.
You're manipulating data that can fit into a few bits by moving semantic mountains.
How fast would a computer do arithmetic if you, say, represented numbers as PNG pictures, and cobbed it together with shell scripts invoking image processing utilities?
Under a conformal mapping, the local features (such as small objects, like what the scanners are looking for) could be seen without distortion, other than possibly changes in scale and rotation.
The actual image could be severely distorted on the global scale. (E.g. think, Escher's ``Gallery'' and beyond).
Unfortunately, the distorted image is not immune to the opposite transformation being applied. However, the distortion could be randomized. To undistort an image, you would have to know certain coefficients which could be varied for each image. Without knowing the parameters, the reverse mapping becomes a search problem over the distorted image.
The difficulty of this is probably well in excess of being proportional to the actual threat.
Even if that's the case, then the crime is cracking the machines, not selling tickets.
A set of related actions can be decomposed into non-criminal and criminal.
If a villain scratches his ass during a robbery, that doesn't mean ass scratching is a crime, even if it was necessary so that he could rob more comfortably.
Tickets should go to the people who really want to go and are willing to pay for it.
If you want to ensure tickets for some people who really want to go, but are ``broke-ass scrubs'', then you need some clever system in place to defeat scalping.
Sell expensive tickets, but then give rebates, such that it's very difficult for scalpers to obtain those rebates.
Or, issue tickets tied to identity (like what airlines do).
Variation on rebate:
Sell expensive, but fully refundable deposits on good seats (so fans can secure early bird seats). Then charge for the actual ticket at the door. Then there are two tickets: the admission ticket (which cost $$$), and the supplementary seat ticket (which is free).
Never hand out cash rebates, only credit the original credit card.
Scalping should never be illegal since it is just free enterprise.
But it should be fair game to try to put in place mechanisms to prevent it. Airlines do it by binding tickets to identities.
Here is another idea a: deposit system tied to credit cards.
Suppose cheap tickets are available online for $15 so that important fans (like kids who can't afford pricey tickets) could see a young band. You want these fans to be able to go to the concert because one day they will have good jobs and support the old band.
A deposit system could discourage the scalping of cheap tickets.
To get an early seat for $15, you have to put down, say, $215. When you show up to the concert, you get $200 back.
What can a scalper do now? He has to take the risk of buying a $215 ticket, which may not sell. Come close to show time, he's holding something he paid $215 for. To merely break even, someone has to hand him a wad of cash totalling $215.
That person, in turn, will only hand him $215 if he believes that he can get most of that money back (i.e. recover the $200) deposit. But it will be made very clear to everyone that refunds will be performed strictly by crediting the original card, never in cash! So basically, the scalper has to convince some suckers at the door that the ticket is worth >= $215.
A tightly regulated procedure can be put in place to refund the deposits to ticket holders who were unable to make the show. They would have to go somewhere in person and present the ticket, the credit card which matches the ticket, and picture ID. (If it's daddy's credit card, daddy has to go there).
Refunds to those attending concerts could be done in the absence of the credit card being presented. This opens the possibility that a scalper sells a ticket for $15, and can get the refund when the ticket is used. However, if the ticket is not used, he has to go through the above system to try to recover the deposit. Moreover, the limitations on number of tickets per credit card would have to be defeated somehow. For instance, the scalper would have to use some online banking website to generate one-time-use credit card numbers, so he can use a unique one for each ticket. Such credit card numbers could be refused in the post-concert refund system (where you have to present the actual plastic card with the number).
Another way to fight the scalpers would be for the issuer to make phony purchase requests to the scalpers. Buy those cheap tickets from the scalpers, and then put those tickets into a "do not refund" database.
The problem is, what stops you, as a scalper, from buying out every ticket you possibly can through whatever means necessary, and then jack the prices up?
The legitimate capitalist known as a ``scalper'' takes on significant risk: namely that he will be left with worthless, unsold tickets once the event is over.
As the concert date and time nears, the probability that a ticket remains unsold increases. This creates an incentive for the scalper to reduce the markup on the ticket in an attempt to offset a possible loss. It's better to sell a 100 dollar ticket for 60 bucks, than to recover nothing at all.
A scalper cannot jack up the price of a ticket arbitrarily beyond the fair market price. At best he can hope for emotional factors; he will snag that buyer who will pay ``anything'' to see his favorite artist at the last minute and has a lot of money.
By contrast, ticket issuers don't have such a great risk because they simply issued the tickets at little cost per ticket. If 20% of the venue is not sold, they still make money. So they can simply invent a price and dictate. In fact, they can jack up the price such that they will not all sell out. It may be more profitable to make it so expensive that only 90% of the seats are filled, than so cheap that 100% of the seats are sold.
How do you know whether tickets being sold are discounted? Relative to what, exactly? Discount or surcharge have to be measured only against one standard: fair market price. The only way to know the fair market price is to have a liquid market with free buying and selling. Only thanks to scalping activity can we know what the fair market price of a ticket is. If scalpers face losses, then it means tickets were overpriced. If they profit, tickets were underpriced. Without scalpers, we don't know.
Say what? Why would you sign up for e-mails, when you've registered hundreds of Internet domains? I have one domain and could generate thousands of working e-mail addresses
in a few keystrokes: $ clisp -x '(loop for x below 10000 do (format t "~a: kaz~%" (gensym)))' >/etc/aliases
What is a bogus e-mail, anyway? If they use it as a real end-point for receiving a ticket purchase confirmation, then it's a real e-mail address.
A bogus e-mail address is one which cannot be used to send anything to whoever provided the e-mail address. You don't "sign up" for a bogus e-mail address; you randomly generate it. E.g: "asdf@xyzzy.com".
I would not hesitate a second to write code to detect a benchmark and supply optimized behavior.
The people who believe in stupid benchmarks and use them to make important decisions (or, at the very least, asses of themselves in forums) should be embarrassed, not benchmark cheaters.
What is the definition of cheating anyway? If the implementation accepts the benchmarking program and delivers a performance, that is a valid result, no matter how it was achieved. If a benchmark calculates the millionth digit of PI, it is a perfectly valid optimization to recognize that code and turn it into a literal constant which spews out the millionth digit of pi.
Yes, that optimization serves the implementors, not the user. So what? Where is the law that says the implementors of a software should not include code which serves them rather than the user? That is the privilege of the developer.
You can't use a tech gimmick in the vending machine to make the market permanently want to buy three times the number of drinks.
How much of that figure is the consequence of lost sales in the other vending machines? I.e. people who normally would go to any machine are drawn to the new, shiny one that recognizes their face and recommends drinks?
If you own both the new and old type of vending machine, reshuffling sales among them doesn't help you.
If you could replace every single machine with this one, and as a consequence permanently triple sales for all vending machines all across the board, that would be something!
I use Kompozer. HTML for content, CSS for styling. SVG for inline vector graphics.
To print, open it in the browser, set up some page parameters (margins, footer), and off we go.
HTML cuts and pastes easily into Word documents, and Outlook e-mails, with formatting largely intact.
I use CSS tricks for numbering sections, subsections and subsubsections. (Tricks which, ironically, don't work in IE7).
A simple script generates a clickable table of contents (which is in its own DIV that is styled differently: we don't want the spacing arounding the headings to be the same as in the rest of the document.
If someone complains that you aren't using Word, you can say that you're using the languages that the Web is based on, including every single e-commerce website in the world, from the largest to the smallest. End of story. STFU.
C can be a high level language. In one recent project, I added garbage collection to C and tagged types. The code is a lot like Javascript. Function arguments, return values, parameters and local variables are of type "val", the null pointer is replaced by a nil which is safe to use, type errors throw exceptions.
Even string literals are incorporated into the scheme. Using the macro lit("foo") I make a string literal foo (proper compile-time static data) which is type-tagged and behaves as an object of string type. The garbage collector recognizes these as pure objects (just like fixed integers, etc) and skips over them.
The val object is represented as a pointer, but with a few spare bits which serve as a type tag. Fixed width integers are unboxed, and the nil object is actually a null pointer, which nicely integrates into C, because you can write code like if (obj) {... } which means ``if the object is not nil...''. nil is also the empty list and list terminator (exactly like in Lisp).
Instead of printf, I use a function called format. All of its arguments are "val" so there are no type issues. The function can detect when there aren't enough arguments for the format string and throw an exception. format sends output to a stream object.
Basically C gives you the basic flow control constructs, functions, and expression syntax. How you manipulate the bits is up to you; you can fix the semantics of the data items being pushed around.
There are limitations, of course, because C doesn't give you enough access to the language to tweak the compiler. For instance, you can't teach the compiler to generate code which is aware of your garbage collector.
An individual C compiler could have extensions for that, but there is no such thing in the standard language, and even hacks like this are outside of the standard (though de-facto quite portable, which is often what counts).
Slashdot Mirror
The last thing they want for a government job is someone well-informed. Let all the outsiders, within your borders and beyond, read all the cables they want. Just so long as your young prospective employees have no clue, you're okay!
How would this work in the tech world?
``We can't hire you because you know too much about our technology from leaked documents. Please send your resume to our nearest competitor.'' :)
Receive an e-mail with smileys from a Hotmail user and your decent e-mail program will warn that the message contains images. If you choose not to display them, the e-mail is devoid of all emoticons.
Idiots.
I receive all my mails using RoundCube webmail these days. It warns that an HTML e-mail contains images, and will only display them if you want to. If an e-mail demands a read receipt, you are prompted whether or not you wish to send that.
The bottom line is that web bugs are not possible without the cooperation of dumb client software.
This is nothing like the cognitive human brain. This is only a variable memory device.
Your statement is rooted in the hypothesis that cognition requires more than state and feedback.
This hypothesis has not been proven or disproven.
However, it is implausible that there are magical metaphysical hidden variables which endow the brain with cognition.
Riiiiiight. Sure.
This feigned concern about online privacy is just a political chain that policitians and government bodies yank in order to appear to care about individual rights.
There is nothing that the State craves more than to track every move of every citizen.
Unix has already been in Microsoft's reach. Microsoft had a Unix product called Xenix.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
Xenix is what SCO bought in order to produce SCO UNIX.
Who cares about Unix anymore, or what suckers are getting it next.
If criminals without a profit motive are a harder nut to crack, maybe they need to be punished more severely, not less, one would think.
I don't see why premeditated murder should be treated differently from a crime of passion. Murder is murder.
A crime of passion is in fact planned. A person knows exactly under what circumstances he would kill, and does so when circumstances arise which fit that pattern. Merely, such a killer perhaps does not think /specifically/ about a given situation. Thinking like ``I would kill a person in such and such relation to me if they did such and such'' is no less evil than ``I will kill because of ...''. It's the same. One is merely an instantiation of the other by the substitution of concretes.
The whole rhetoric about premeditation is nonsense. I believe that every crime of passion is deeply rooted in the personality of the killer, moulded since birth.
Punishing apparently planned killings more severely clearly sends the message that a "thought crime" occurs when one is planning a killing which does not occur when a killing is done with a blank mind, on an apparent emotional whim.
The difference in punishment precisely corresponds to what the thought-crime is worth by itself.
Take a look at his crimes without the veil of judgment. He did some pretty neato stuff.
He found a way to run his code on a huge number of computers without the owners knowing at all.
No, he just used the existing Microsoft "API" for doing all this.
is that the profit motive is evil.
Commit some act to maximize profit, get a harsh sentence. Commit exactly the same act without profit motive, get a light sentence.
If the profit motive adds N months to a sentence for some act, then by the most straightforward, linear morality arithmetic, this means that simply having a profit motive in the absence of committing any act is in and of itself a crime punishable by N months.
Nice communist values there.
The reason arithmetic is slow is because of the abstraction inversion.
You're manipulating data that can fit into a few bits by moving semantic mountains.
How fast would a computer do arithmetic if you, say, represented numbers as PNG pictures, and cobbed it together with shell scripts invoking image processing utilities?
Would that show that your CPU has a bottleneck?
Under a conformal mapping, the local features (such as small objects, like what the scanners are looking for) could be seen without distortion, other than possibly changes in scale and rotation.
The actual image could be severely distorted on the global scale. (E.g. think, Escher's ``Gallery'' and beyond).
Unfortunately, the distorted image is not immune to the opposite transformation being applied. However, the distortion could be randomized. To undistort an image, you would have to know certain coefficients which could be varied for each image. Without knowing the parameters, the reverse mapping becomes a search problem over the distorted image.
The difficulty of this is probably well in excess of being proportional to the actual threat.
Even if that's the case, then the crime is cracking the machines, not selling tickets.
A set of related actions can be decomposed into non-criminal and criminal.
If a villain scratches his ass during a robbery, that doesn't mean ass scratching is a crime, even if it was necessary so that he could rob more comfortably.
Tickets should go to the people who really want to go and are willing to pay for it.
If you want to ensure tickets for some people who really want to go, but are ``broke-ass scrubs'', then you need some clever system in place to defeat scalping.
Sell expensive tickets, but then give rebates, such that it's very difficult for scalpers to obtain those rebates.
Or, issue tickets tied to identity (like what airlines do).
Variation on rebate:
Sell expensive, but fully refundable deposits on good seats (so fans can secure early bird seats). Then charge for the actual ticket at the door. Then there are two tickets: the admission ticket (which cost $$$), and the supplementary seat ticket (which is free).
Never hand out cash rebates, only credit the original credit card.
Scalping should never be illegal since it is just free enterprise.
But it should be fair game to try to put in place mechanisms to prevent it. Airlines do it by binding tickets to identities.
Here is another idea a: deposit system tied to credit cards.
Suppose cheap tickets are available online for $15 so that important fans (like kids who can't afford pricey tickets) could see a young band. You want these fans to be able to go to the concert because one day they will have good jobs and support the old band.
A deposit system could discourage the scalping of cheap tickets.
To get an early seat for $15, you have to put down, say, $215. When you show up to the concert, you get $200 back.
What can a scalper do now? He has to take the risk of buying a $215 ticket, which may not sell. Come close to show time, he's holding something he paid $215 for. To merely break even, someone has to hand him a wad of cash totalling $215.
That person, in turn, will only hand him $215 if he believes that he can get most of that money back (i.e. recover the $200) deposit. But it will be made very clear to everyone that refunds will be performed strictly by crediting the original card, never in cash! So basically, the scalper has to convince some suckers at the door that the ticket is worth >= $215.
A tightly regulated procedure can be put in place to refund the deposits to ticket holders who were unable to make the show. They would have to go somewhere in person and present the ticket, the credit card which matches the ticket, and picture ID. (If it's daddy's credit card, daddy has to go there).
Refunds to those attending concerts could be done in the absence of the credit card being presented. This opens the possibility that a scalper sells a ticket for $15, and can get the refund when the ticket is used. However, if the ticket is not used, he has to go through the above system to try to recover the deposit. Moreover, the limitations on number of tickets per credit card would have to be defeated somehow. For instance, the scalper would have to use some online banking website to generate one-time-use credit card numbers, so he can use a unique one for each ticket. Such credit card numbers could be refused in the post-concert refund system (where you have to present the actual plastic card with the number).
Another way to fight the scalpers would be for the issuer to make phony purchase requests to the scalpers. Buy those cheap tickets from the scalpers, and then put those tickets into a "do not refund" database.
The problem is, what stops you, as a scalper, from buying out every ticket you possibly can through whatever means necessary, and then jack the prices up?
The legitimate capitalist known as a ``scalper'' takes on significant risk: namely that he will be left with worthless, unsold tickets once the event is over.
As the concert date and time nears, the probability that a ticket remains unsold increases. This creates an incentive for the scalper to reduce the markup on the ticket in an attempt to offset a possible loss. It's better to sell a 100 dollar ticket for 60 bucks, than to recover nothing at all.
A scalper cannot jack up the price of a ticket arbitrarily beyond the fair market price. At best he can hope for emotional factors; he will snag that buyer who will pay ``anything'' to see his favorite artist at the last minute and has a lot of money.
By contrast, ticket issuers don't have such a great risk because they simply issued the tickets at little cost per ticket. If 20% of the venue is not sold, they still make money. So they can simply invent a price and dictate. In fact, they can jack up the price such that they will not all sell out. It may be more profitable to make it so expensive that only 90% of the seats are filled, than so cheap that 100% of the seats are sold.
How do you know whether tickets being sold are discounted? Relative to what, exactly? Discount or surcharge have to be measured only against one standard: fair market price. The only way to know the fair market price is to have a liquid market with free buying and selling. Only thanks to scalping activity can we know what the fair market price of a ticket is. If scalpers face losses, then it means tickets were overpriced. If they profit, tickets were underpriced. Without scalpers, we don't know.
addresses?
Say what? Why would you sign up for e-mails, when you've registered hundreds of Internet domains? I have one domain and could generate thousands of working e-mail addresses
/etc/aliases
in a few keystrokes:
$ clisp -x '(loop for x below 10000 do (format t "~a: kaz~%" (gensym)))' >
What is a bogus e-mail, anyway? If they use it as a real end-point for receiving a ticket purchase confirmation, then it's a real e-mail address.
A bogus e-mail address is one which cannot be used to send anything to whoever provided the e-mail address. You don't "sign up" for a bogus e-mail address; you randomly generate it. E.g: "asdf@xyzzy.com".
If you want to create a national OS for Russia, the last thing you want is:
... into a different electronic orifice of the motherboard than what is customary?
This is exciting news, indeed!
I will join this game-changing revolution by using file descriptor 3 for standard output!
I would not hesitate a second to write code to detect a benchmark and supply optimized behavior.
The people who believe in stupid benchmarks and use them to make important decisions (or, at the very least, asses of themselves in forums) should be embarrassed, not benchmark cheaters.
What is the definition of cheating anyway? If the implementation accepts the benchmarking program and delivers a performance, that is a valid result, no matter how it was achieved. If a benchmark calculates the millionth digit of PI, it is a perfectly valid optimization to recognize that code and turn it into a literal constant which spews out the millionth digit of pi.
Yes, that optimization serves the implementors, not the user. So what? Where is the law that says the implementors of a software should not include code which serves them rather than the user? That is the privilege of the developer.
This story is rooted in ridiculous xenophobia.
You have more to fear from your wi-fi or cable snooping neighbor than from China.
Security must be end-to-end. There is no such thing as a trusted ISP or country.
This will wear off eventually.
You can't use a tech gimmick in the vending machine to make the market permanently want to buy three times the number of drinks.
How much of that figure is the consequence of lost sales in the other vending machines? I.e. people who normally would go to any machine are drawn to the new, shiny one that recognizes their face and recommends drinks?
If you own both the new and old type of vending machine, reshuffling sales among them doesn't help you.
If you could replace every single machine with this one, and as a consequence permanently triple sales for all vending machines all across the board, that would be something!
Deja Vu all over again.
Almost a decade ago, Nikon warned users that Windows XP destroyed the EXIF data in JPEG images.
Just say no to these bozos.
I use Kompozer. HTML for content, CSS for styling. SVG for inline vector graphics.
To print, open it in the browser, set up some page parameters (margins, footer), and off we go.
HTML cuts and pastes easily into Word documents, and Outlook e-mails, with formatting largely intact.
I use CSS tricks for numbering sections, subsections and subsubsections. (Tricks which, ironically, don't work in IE7).
A simple script generates a clickable table of contents (which is in its own DIV that is styled differently: we don't want the spacing arounding the headings to be the same as in the rest of the document.
If someone complains that you aren't using Word, you can say that you're using the languages that the Web is based on, including every single e-commerce website in the world, from the largest to the smallest. End of story. STFU.
C can be a high level language. In one recent project, I added garbage collection to C and tagged types. The code is a lot like Javascript. Function arguments, return values, parameters and local variables are of type "val", the null pointer is replaced by a nil which is safe to use, type errors throw exceptions.
Even string literals are incorporated into the scheme. Using the macro lit("foo") I make a string literal foo (proper compile-time static data) which is type-tagged and behaves as an object of string type. The garbage collector recognizes these as pure objects (just like fixed integers, etc) and skips over them.
The val object is represented as a pointer, but with a few spare bits which serve as a type tag. Fixed width integers are unboxed, and the nil object is actually a null pointer, which nicely integrates into C, because you can write code like if (obj) { ... } which means ``if the object is not nil ...''. nil is also the empty list and list terminator (exactly like in Lisp).
Instead of printf, I use a function called format. All of its arguments are "val" so there are no type issues. The function can detect when there aren't enough arguments for the format string and throw an exception. format sends output to a stream object.
Basically C gives you the basic flow control constructs, functions, and expression syntax. How you manipulate the bits is up to you; you can fix the semantics of the data items being pushed around.
There are limitations, of course, because C doesn't give you enough access to the language to tweak the compiler. For instance, you can't teach the compiler to generate code which is aware of your garbage collector.
An individual C compiler could have extensions for that, but there is no such thing in the standard language, and even hacks like this are outside of the standard (though de-facto quite portable, which is often what counts).