This is, without a doubt, the reason why I am questioning the credibility of this story.... because the claim is such that they don't mention the name of the country that did this so as to not compromise that nation's defense program if its enemies should realize that they can economically destroy them by sending $200 drones to be destroyed by multimillion dollar missiles, but the list of countries that the USA has given patriot missiles to is so tiny as to make the mere fact that this story was even announced very nearly just as damaging to that country's defense program for the exact same reasons, and if they realized that releasing the name would have compromised them, they must surely have realized the even saying that it happened without mentioning the name could very easily have done so as well.
If they had, instead, not mentioned the term "patriot missile", and instead just said a "multi-milliion dollar missile", I would have beeen far more inclined to have believed them, because that would not have so drastically narrowed down the list of countries that it could possibly be, and thus be potentially just as damaging to that country as if they had simply said its name explicitly. If they had simply not mentioned that they did not want to disclose the name of the country because they were trying to act in that country's best interest, then I would have interpreted the failure to specify the country's name in the story as either shoddy reporting or else bullshit.. The fact that they explicitly said that this was the reason they weren't disclosing the name leaves only one reasonable conclusion - the story is false.
They claim that they specifically didn't disclose the name of the ally because that could alert enemies of that nation to realize that they may be able to overwhelm the nation economically by simply sending inexpensive drones out at them. However, the USA doesn't give their Patriot missiles to a lot of countries, so the number of possible countries this could be is pretty small. What makes the story dubious is not that they fail to mention the name of the country, but that the list of possible countries is small enough that even releasing the story in the first place could be very nearly just as compromising to that country.
Arguably all apperance of intelligence, natural or artificial, is nothing more than immitation of other intelligent behaviour.
AI can most definitely be real intelligence, but it is intelligence that just happens to be artificial, rather than (implicitly) natural. Natural is fairly well defined... it refers to things that are produced entirely by natural phenomenon, such as evolution, which has led to human beings having what we call intelligence. Artificial is anything that that isn't natural, so we're good to go on that term. Now if you could just find a way for everyone to agree on what "intelligence" is, then we'd actually have a way of measuring objectively how close we are to achieving AI (or if or when we already have). Until we have done so, however, it is impossible to know how far along we actually are.
Do you have any specific reason for believing that is not how math works, or are you one of the aforementioned people who thinks that their inituive understanding math alone puts them in a position to dispute any well-reasoned (or even allegedly well-reasoned) conclusions without actually having rigorously studied it? If you see a flaw in the proof I gave, point it out... otherwise, you only come across as someone who is, to put it rather bluntly, too ignorant about the subject to even know what it is that you don't know.
I wasn't suggesting it was... only that the above poster's comment that 0.999... is not equal to 1 is false. The proof that they are the same is inconsequential to physics because the equality is not derived from any real world phenomenon.
Actually, 0.999... *is* equal to 1.... in real life. They are simply two different ways of describing the exact same number.
I'll give you benefit of the doubt and assume that you are not somebody who thinks that they have a clear understanding of why they should be different and would ignore any proofs to the contrary, but here is one of probably a dozen proofs that should be readily understandable by anyone who knows how to compute the decimal expansion of a fraction.
Consider that the decimal expansion of 1/9 is 0.111.... repeating forever, and it is clear that if you multiply this decimal expansion of 1/9 by any one-digit number, there are no carryovers in the multiplication, so 0.111... multiplied by 9 would therefore equal 0.999... repeating forever, but we also know that 1/9 multiplied by 9 is 1, and thus 0.999... must be equal to 1... They look different, but they are actually the same. This is not simply the result of some series converging on the number 1, it literally is the exact same number. It is simply an alternative representation that arises out of the ways that we are permitted to describe numbers in mathematics.
Per capita, the US is far worse. An old saying about pointing at the splinters in somebody else's eye when you have an entire 2x4 plank in your own comes to mind.
I agree that is how it *supposed* to be... but if the paperwork hasn't even been filled out yet that proved he was ever actually on the payroll, then it is unfortunately quite easy for a company to be dickish.
When I was much younger, and still had a lot to learn about how the real world works, I was fired once on my first day (apparently because I wasn't "getting it"), also about 4 hours in, and before I had even filled in the necessary tax forms at one company.... when I came back in the following week on the day that the paychecks were being issued to collect money for the hours that I had worked, if it hadn't been for my supervisor speaking up and saying that he remembered me coming in on my first and only day, and vouched for approximately how long I had been there, I may have had a fight on my hands because nobody else there recognized me. In my case, I think it was less that the company was trying to be an asshole to me than that the paperwork just hadn't been filled out, and since i was gone, it slipped by the wayside, so it's a kind of a different circumstance, but the underlying point remains.... when you are fired so quickly after being hired on, evidence that you were ever even there in the first place can be hard to come by.
He probably hadn't even been at work long enough for all the paperwork to have been filled out that proved he was ever even an employee there in the first place. As far as HR was concerned at the time, he wasn't an employee yet, so a "rescinded" job offer would make sense from their perspective. And if they really wanted to be assholes (which it appears that they did, so why not go the whole ten yards?), they might have even been able to plausibly deny that he had even actually worked there for the alleged four hours.
My point was only that generalizing and saying that absolutely any pattern use is going to make a password easier to break is wrong. There is nothing wrong with utilizing patterns that will make your passwords easier for you, and you alone, to remember or reconstruct.
Only if you are using a rule that other people will know in advance to apply when trying to crack your password.. The fallacy in your line of reasoning is that there is somehow only a limited set of such rules that anyone could feasibly apply. There is not
For example, let's say I use a rule where a specific sequence of word associations that I would make from a given input (such as the name of a service I was intending to use and the date that I last changed the password, for example) yields an alphanumeric sequence with a mix of upper-case, lower-case and punctuation that is relatively easy for me to reproduce, but unless someone knows exactly what my thought process is on how I go about this, or especially what word associations that I utilize to perform the transformation, there is no possible way utilize the fact that I may have used some unknown pattern to restrict which passwords to try in any type of attack. All that anyone could deduce is that it is probably something that can be done easily in one's head... but without knowing what thoughts are in my head in the first place, there's still no way to compute what a particular password selected by this method might be, and any combination of dictionary and brute force attacks on it are no more likely to succeed than if such a password had been a genuinely random alphanumeric sequence.
Granted, the method that I use for my passwords is still probably vulnerable to the $5 wrench method of password cracking, but I'm not sure that vulnerability is one that I need to worry too much about (or if or when I do, I will have far bigger things to worry about than whatever the password might be protecting).
There is nothing theoretically wrong with using patterns that will help you remember.... there are no constraints on the kinds of experiences a person may have had that might help them generate a password that only they might see the significance of.
Obviously if you know the ruleset that a person used in their pattern, then you can restrict your search and the password becomes easier to crack, because while the number of rules that person used to generate their password is probably relatively tiny so that it is easy to remember, there is *NO* limit on what those rules might be. They might be derived from personal memories or mental associations known only to them, and would not make sense to anyone else unless they knew what the pattern was in the first place.
... on an older screen or one that has been abused. On a new device? Not so much. The only reason that anyone's going to take Nintendo's explanation lying down is because trying to stand up to Nintendo on this point is going to take a ton of perseverance, time, and probably money with no assurance that it's actually going to work out.
My point is that there is no real difference between checksums of the data and some other contrived function of the data, and that there is no reason that the contrived function may not be reversible to arrive at the original data, or a reasonable approximation of it.
I log the progress of the streaming, as it progresses? Am I infringing on copyright yet?
After all if the log files contain checksums of the packets received during streaming, those checksums are technically derivative works and saving them would mean I am not streaming them, right? If derived works of streamed content are exempt, then what is to stop someone from making an encrypted copy of the content, and saving that, and then decrypting the content offline? They aren't saving the content, after all, they are only saving a derived work.
This interpretation of copyright law has a hole so big you could probably fit an entire planet through it.
Java is slow, but if the intended target machine that it is running on is fast enough, then it might still be good enough for all practical purposes for given applications. Given that, at least in my experience, software can often be developed in Java in better than half time that it seems to take to develop native software of the same complexity, this speed of development advantage can often be a sufficient reason to go with Java even if runtime speed is compromised.
I have been programming in Java since 1.3, and I do not know why so many people here say Java isn't portable.... Every piece of software I have ever written for it has worked on *ALL* platforms for which a j2se runtime of at least the level which was used in development existed, and has continued to work just as well when running under a more recent j2se runtimes.
If you know that you didn't download it and you know nobody else did on your network, then you personally already have a reason to believe that the accusation is a blind one, coming from somebody who is hoping that the recipient will be ignorant enough to think that they have been caught doing something wrong. If the email is directly from the accuser, you can ignore it... it is baseless and not worth responding to.
If, however, the email is from your ISP, then it may be prudent to give the ISP sufficient basis to doubt the credibility of the accusation as well. Most notable in this regard is that the alleged movie you downloaded is not even spelled correctly, making the apparent claim that this accusation may be coming from some kind of official avenue at least somewhat suspect. Assure your ISP that you did not download any illegal content, and express your concern to your ISP that you suspect that this allegation is coming from an organization that has no authority to be issuing such notices in the first place, and that they may be hoping that if they send out enough of these kinds of notices randomly, they may get lucky and stumble across somebody who is wanting to quickly reach some kind of quiet out-of-court settlement.
Because she is fucking eighty-one years old.... the technology to do what she has done here didn't even exist until she was already near or past retirement age. Perhaps if you are fortunate enough to make it to that age yourself you will understand why demonstrating the skill to learn something new at that age is a kind of a big deal.
The accomplishment is not in that she is a woman, but that by the time the technology even *existed* to do what she has just done, she was already at an age where many people have retired. So at most, it's a reflection of a stereotype of the elderly, not women.
In the US, the only things you cannot discriminate for are those in "protected categories". The protected category list currently includes race, age, religion, marital status, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, physical or mental disability, and veteran status. There might be a couple of other reasons in there, but to the best of my recollection, that's about it.
Notwithstanding, it *is* legal to discriminate against someone in the US for even one of the protected category criteria if you can demonstrate that the particular criteria being discriminated for is directly related to the position being applied for, such as gender for a model.
By no means is it illegal to discriminate based on factors that are not explicitly in the protected category list, and the relevance of a particular factor not in that list to a job is entirely immaterial.
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This is, without a doubt, the reason why I am questioning the credibility of this story.... because the claim is such that they don't mention the name of the country that did this so as to not compromise that nation's defense program if its enemies should realize that they can economically destroy them by sending $200 drones to be destroyed by multimillion dollar missiles, but the list of countries that the USA has given patriot missiles to is so tiny as to make the mere fact that this story was even announced very nearly just as damaging to that country's defense program for the exact same reasons, and if they realized that releasing the name would have compromised them, they must surely have realized the even saying that it happened without mentioning the name could very easily have done so as well.
If they had, instead, not mentioned the term "patriot missile", and instead just said a "multi-milliion dollar missile", I would have beeen far more inclined to have believed them, because that would not have so drastically narrowed down the list of countries that it could possibly be, and thus be potentially just as damaging to that country as if they had simply said its name explicitly. If they had simply not mentioned that they did not want to disclose the name of the country because they were trying to act in that country's best interest, then I would have interpreted the failure to specify the country's name in the story as either shoddy reporting or else bullshit.. The fact that they explicitly said that this was the reason they weren't disclosing the name leaves only one reasonable conclusion - the story is false.
They claim that they specifically didn't disclose the name of the ally because that could alert enemies of that nation to realize that they may be able to overwhelm the nation economically by simply sending inexpensive drones out at them. However, the USA doesn't give their Patriot missiles to a lot of countries, so the number of possible countries this could be is pretty small. What makes the story dubious is not that they fail to mention the name of the country, but that the list of possible countries is small enough that even releasing the story in the first place could be very nearly just as compromising to that country.
Arguably all apperance of intelligence, natural or artificial, is nothing more than immitation of other intelligent behaviour.
AI can most definitely be real intelligence, but it is intelligence that just happens to be artificial, rather than (implicitly) natural. Natural is fairly well defined... it refers to things that are produced entirely by natural phenomenon, such as evolution, which has led to human beings having what we call intelligence. Artificial is anything that that isn't natural, so we're good to go on that term. Now if you could just find a way for everyone to agree on what "intelligence" is, then we'd actually have a way of measuring objectively how close we are to achieving AI (or if or when we already have). Until we have done so, however, it is impossible to know how far along we actually are.
Do you have any specific reason for believing that is not how math works, or are you one of the aforementioned people who thinks that their inituive understanding math alone puts them in a position to dispute any well-reasoned (or even allegedly well-reasoned) conclusions without actually having rigorously studied it? If you see a flaw in the proof I gave, point it out... otherwise, you only come across as someone who is, to put it rather bluntly, too ignorant about the subject to even know what it is that you don't know.
Uh... no.
I wasn't suggesting it was... only that the above poster's comment that 0.999... is not equal to 1 is false. The proof that they are the same is inconsequential to physics because the equality is not derived from any real world phenomenon.
You can easily prove that 1/9 = 0.111... using long division for the base step to get the first digit of the expansion, and apply proof by induction
Actually, 0.999... *is* equal to 1.... in real life. They are simply two different ways of describing the exact same number.
I'll give you benefit of the doubt and assume that you are not somebody who thinks that they have a clear understanding of why they should be different and would ignore any proofs to the contrary, but here is one of probably a dozen proofs that should be readily understandable by anyone who knows how to compute the decimal expansion of a fraction.
Consider that the decimal expansion of 1/9 is 0.111.... repeating forever, and it is clear that if you multiply this decimal expansion of 1/9 by any one-digit number, there are no carryovers in the multiplication, so 0.111... multiplied by 9 would therefore equal 0.999... repeating forever, but we also know that 1/9 multiplied by 9 is 1, and thus 0.999... must be equal to 1... They look different, but they are actually the same. This is not simply the result of some series converging on the number 1, it literally is the exact same number. It is simply an alternative representation that arises out of the ways that we are permitted to describe numbers in mathematics.
Per capita, the US is far worse. An old saying about pointing at the splinters in somebody else's eye when you have an entire 2x4 plank in your own comes to mind.
I agree that is how it *supposed* to be... but if the paperwork hasn't even been filled out yet that proved he was ever actually on the payroll, then it is unfortunately quite easy for a company to be dickish.
When I was much younger, and still had a lot to learn about how the real world works, I was fired once on my first day (apparently because I wasn't "getting it"), also about 4 hours in, and before I had even filled in the necessary tax forms at one company.... when I came back in the following week on the day that the paychecks were being issued to collect money for the hours that I had worked, if it hadn't been for my supervisor speaking up and saying that he remembered me coming in on my first and only day, and vouched for approximately how long I had been there, I may have had a fight on my hands because nobody else there recognized me. In my case, I think it was less that the company was trying to be an asshole to me than that the paperwork just hadn't been filled out, and since i was gone, it slipped by the wayside, so it's a kind of a different circumstance, but the underlying point remains.... when you are fired so quickly after being hired on, evidence that you were ever even there in the first place can be hard to come by.
He probably hadn't even been at work long enough for all the paperwork to have been filled out that proved he was ever even an employee there in the first place. As far as HR was concerned at the time, he wasn't an employee yet, so a "rescinded" job offer would make sense from their perspective. And if they really wanted to be assholes (which it appears that they did, so why not go the whole ten yards?), they might have even been able to plausibly deny that he had even actually worked there for the alleged four hours.
My point was only that generalizing and saying that absolutely any pattern use is going to make a password easier to break is wrong. There is nothing wrong with utilizing patterns that will make your passwords easier for you, and you alone, to remember or reconstruct.
Only if you are using a rule that other people will know in advance to apply when trying to crack your password.. The fallacy in your line of reasoning is that there is somehow only a limited set of such rules that anyone could feasibly apply. There is not
For example, let's say I use a rule where a specific sequence of word associations that I would make from a given input (such as the name of a service I was intending to use and the date that I last changed the password, for example) yields an alphanumeric sequence with a mix of upper-case, lower-case and punctuation that is relatively easy for me to reproduce, but unless someone knows exactly what my thought process is on how I go about this, or especially what word associations that I utilize to perform the transformation, there is no possible way utilize the fact that I may have used some unknown pattern to restrict which passwords to try in any type of attack. All that anyone could deduce is that it is probably something that can be done easily in one's head... but without knowing what thoughts are in my head in the first place, there's still no way to compute what a particular password selected by this method might be, and any combination of dictionary and brute force attacks on it are no more likely to succeed than if such a password had been a genuinely random alphanumeric sequence.
Granted, the method that I use for my passwords is still probably vulnerable to the $5 wrench method of password cracking, but I'm not sure that vulnerability is one that I need to worry too much about (or if or when I do, I will have far bigger things to worry about than whatever the password might be protecting).
There is nothing theoretically wrong with using patterns that will help you remember.... there are no constraints on the kinds of experiences a person may have had that might help them generate a password that only they might see the significance of.
Obviously if you know the ruleset that a person used in their pattern, then you can restrict your search and the password becomes easier to crack, because while the number of rules that person used to generate their password is probably relatively tiny so that it is easy to remember, there is *NO* limit on what those rules might be. They might be derived from personal memories or mental associations known only to them, and would not make sense to anyone else unless they knew what the pattern was in the first place.
... on an older screen or one that has been abused. On a new device? Not so much. The only reason that anyone's going to take Nintendo's explanation lying down is because trying to stand up to Nintendo on this point is going to take a ton of perseverance, time, and probably money with no assurance that it's actually going to work out.
My point is that there is no real difference between checksums of the data and some other contrived function of the data, and that there is no reason that the contrived function may not be reversible to arrive at the original data, or a reasonable approximation of it.
I log the progress of the streaming, as it progresses? Am I infringing on copyright yet?
After all if the log files contain checksums of the packets received during streaming, those checksums are technically derivative works and saving them would mean I am not streaming them, right? If derived works of streamed content are exempt, then what is to stop someone from making an encrypted copy of the content, and saving that, and then decrypting the content offline? They aren't saving the content, after all, they are only saving a derived work.
This interpretation of copyright law has a hole so big you could probably fit an entire planet through it.
Java is slow, but if the intended target machine that it is running on is fast enough, then it might still be good enough for all practical purposes for given applications. Given that, at least in my experience, software can often be developed in Java in better than half time that it seems to take to develop native software of the same complexity, this speed of development advantage can often be a sufficient reason to go with Java even if runtime speed is compromised.
I have been programming in Java since 1.3, and I do not know why so many people here say Java isn't portable.... Every piece of software I have ever written for it has worked on *ALL* platforms for which a j2se runtime of at least the level which was used in development existed, and has continued to work just as well when running under a more recent j2se runtimes.
Is there a reason other that forgtfulness or snobbery that you didn't mention Linux?
If you know that you didn't download it and you know nobody else did on your network, then you personally already have a reason to believe that the accusation is a blind one, coming from somebody who is hoping that the recipient will be ignorant enough to think that they have been caught doing something wrong. If the email is directly from the accuser, you can ignore it... it is baseless and not worth responding to.
If, however, the email is from your ISP, then it may be prudent to give the ISP sufficient basis to doubt the credibility of the accusation as well. Most notable in this regard is that the alleged movie you downloaded is not even spelled correctly, making the apparent claim that this accusation may be coming from some kind of official avenue at least somewhat suspect. Assure your ISP that you did not download any illegal content, and express your concern to your ISP that you suspect that this allegation is coming from an organization that has no authority to be issuing such notices in the first place, and that they may be hoping that if they send out enough of these kinds of notices randomly, they may get lucky and stumble across somebody who is wanting to quickly reach some kind of quiet out-of-court settlement.
Are we getting an early start on this or something?
Because she is fucking eighty-one years old.... the technology to do what she has done here didn't even exist until she was already near or past retirement age. Perhaps if you are fortunate enough to make it to that age yourself you will understand why demonstrating the skill to learn something new at that age is a kind of a big deal.
The accomplishment is not in that she is a woman, but that by the time the technology even *existed* to do what she has just done, she was already at an age where many people have retired. So at most, it's a reflection of a stereotype of the elderly, not women.
Uh, no. In fact, you kind of have it backwards.
In the US, the only things you cannot discriminate for are those in "protected categories". The protected category list currently includes race, age, religion, marital status, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, physical or mental disability, and veteran status. There might be a couple of other reasons in there, but to the best of my recollection, that's about it.
Notwithstanding, it *is* legal to discriminate against someone in the US for even one of the protected category criteria if you can demonstrate that the particular criteria being discriminated for is directly related to the position being applied for, such as gender for a model.
By no means is it illegal to discriminate based on factors that are not explicitly in the protected category list, and the relevance of a particular factor not in that list to a job is entirely immaterial.