Well, since everything is marked either checked or don't use, that's not unreasonable. Granted a more accurate marking would be to just not mark it those two times. Also, with the rating given nobody who is serious about security would use skype, so it's not like they're actually misleading anyone.
In California the appear to have made things worse. This isn't certain, because lots of other things were happening at the same time, but they sure haven't made things better.
OTOH, time has clearly demonstrated that no small group of people is capable of policing their predatory behavior upon the non-members of the group. Or at least all attempts to date have been unsuccessful. Some of the attempts have lasted for decades before failure, and their modes of failure have lead me to develop a hypothesis (which I usually phrase as the following assertion): When a centralized position of power is created it will over time come to be filled by people more interested in exercizing (and increasing) the power than in doing the task that the position was created so accomplish.
This doesn't imply that there aren't individuals who won't be majorly corrupted by such a post, merely that those given to corruption by power will be the ones most strongly incentivized to strive for it (the positon of power).
The problem is that universities should not be expected to be trade schools, and trade schools should not be expected to be universities. And there needs to be an additional category in the middle for things like chemists and doctors.
The trouble is, each of those kinds of school needs to have the classes that each of the others has, just with a different center. This used to be handled by the different colleges within the university, but they have become homogenized under the stress of an administration that wants to make administering them simpler, where what they really needed was to become more distinct.
But note that an artist who wants to learn metal welding shouldn't need to learn that in the art school, there should be a "transfer class" in a trade school that teaches welding. The art school should decide (in advance) whether to allow units to transfer for that class. (It should probably decide yes.)
Think of this proposal as splitting the university (plus the trade schools that have been killed off) into separately administered colleges that allow students to flow between them, but each one has its own requirements for what it takes to complete a major.
Now paying for this.... I think that student education should be totally subsidized. Not room and board. Not materials. But the education itself.
I also think that inventions developed with public funding should be available to the public, and free to use for any company chartered and paying taxes within the geographic area controlled by the particular government. This includes drugs. This doesn't mean that the government should pay for safety testing, but it means that no company should be able to prevent another from qualifying a drug that has been developed with public money. I know that this cuts off one major source of funding that has been developed by many universities, but my feeling is "This is a rip-off!", and they don't deserve to control the patents. If they pay for it, of course, it's a totally different matter. But universities that take federal money for non-teaching purposes should not then be able to claim the results other than prestige and copyrights. (And I'm even dubious about copyrights. That could grow into another area of corruption.)
The real problem is that people like to eat, and they prefer to eat foods that are high in calories. Also, once they leave childhood they prefer to minimize exercise. This is a bad combination, but it isn't unique to humans. What's unique to humans is that they can usually find a lot of reasonably tasty food with minimal effort.
Go watch lions in a zoo, and see how much they sleep. This is normal. If you want an animal to be active, you limit its food supply, and arrange things so that activity is require to get anything that isn't dead boring to eat. N.B.: This effect is less marked in smaller animals because: 1) It takes less effort to move, and 2) Smaller animals need to eat more often. But humans count as larger animals.
This is oversimplified, of course, but there is no magic dietary food that you can eat or avoid to solve the problem. He's right that we have no real need for sugar, but we also only need a small amount of fat. But if we eliminate both we tend to OD on protein, which has its own problems.
I think the best fad diet of recent times was the oat bran diet. It still didn't solve the problem, of course, but it was minimally harmful.
FWIW, I tend to avoid sugar, and minimize fats (with some exceptions for olive oil...but even that only in moderation). But I like to eat, and I'm not active enough....and I weigh about twice what I should.
The only group of people I'm aware of that aren't *vigorous* exercisers and aren't overweight are strict vegetarians...or orientals who eat a traditional diet, which is nearly the same thing. (Or very young...though even there the percentage of overweight is increasing rapidly. Probably because their ability to run around has been sharply curtailed over the last several decades.)
Funny, I belong to a group that believes that the Bible is a bunch of rabble-rousing political propaganda and so out of context that most people either don't understand or misunderstand most of it. And that most invocations of God within the bible are as sincere as that made by Obama at his last speech. (Well, actually since those quoted in the Bible were usually out of power, by someone running against him.)
Doesn't matter: Based on the summary this isn't new information. If the story matches the summary, then it beats me why anyone would bother to mention it.
Hearing it is quick. Really understanding it in practice takes work.
OTOH, you don't need to quit you day job. You can get started on 15 minutes a day. (Eventually you'll want to spend more, but you only need to do it when you decide to.)
Still, you'll find lots of groups that want you to jump into rapic immersion. But you can find the same thing in bridge clubs.
P.S.: I am not a Zen, or any other kind, of Buddhist. I have too hard a time accepting Karma, even though the Buddha was quite obscure when he talked about just what was reincarnated...it could be something quite reasonable, rather like momentum being conserved. Of course, that could be the fault of the translation that I read. Very few introductions to Buddhism give much sign of paying much attention to what survives of the actual "word of the Buddha". Well, they do, but they're pushing their interpretation of what he meant.
I believe that Bushido was called the "Way of the Samuri". That not all samuri followed it is certainly true, but it was still called the way of the samuri. And it didn't require that you not be a follower of Zen Buddhism or of Shinto. In fact, IIUC it even encouraged you to be a follower of zen.
And saying that the "Way of the Samuri" was neo-confuscism is very strange. It was Japanese, not Chinese. There certainly were many close parallels, and the Japanese certainly admired (envied?) much about Chinese culture, but it wasn't that close. Zen Buddhism in Japan wasn't much like the thing with the same original name in China, though it did evolve from imported teachings.
More to the point, faith is necessary to life. There's no logical basis for believing that what you remember is what happened, or believing that the sun will rise tomorrow, or many other things.
And "faith in the religious sense" doesn't define what it is talking about. Different people will mean different things by it. "Belief contrary to evidence" when used by someone other than the believer usually seems to mean something like "they didn't reach the same conclusion from the evidence that I did", but this reaction is predicted by Bayesian reasoning since their priors will not be the same. The only interesting case is when it's used by the believer...but even then you can't say it's necessarily toxic. It's frequently a necessary part of forming a scientific theory.
Now when you are talking about belief in things that are inherently unverifiable...whoops! You can't prove that the sun will rise after you are dead, and you have no way to verify it. But I don't think you would call that belief inherently toxic.
Lets take an explicit case where there are contradictory actions required: Take a Jehovah's Witness who has a child that needs a tranfusion. The Jehovah's Witness will believe that the transfusion is inherently evil, even though it only observably results in good (as he would define it). You, an external observer, only evaluate the observable results, and call his beliefs toxic. I, another external observer, can only evaluate the observable results, and believe that the decision should be up to the child...though I remain quite conflicted about this, because I don't think a young child should be expected to make this kind of decision. I am the only with conflicted decsions, so does that mean that mine is the more toxic belief? (I'm pretending that the Jehova's Witness isn't conflicted.)
Perhaps you need to define "toxic" in this context, as I find myself unable to resolve its meaning.
Actually, it depends on what you mean as unique. If you mean the entire fingerprints, in fine detail, then they probably are unique. (Math again.) If you only look at a few features and judge them by categories, then they are unlikely to be unique.
Guess which the police do. (Hint: It was quite hard to index all the details before pixelated images were used on computers. And it's still quite hard to get accurate registration and elimination of duplicates.)
Treason is specifically defined, and so I don't think you can make treason stick. But you should be able to get hundreds of thousands of count of malfeasance....were there any justice.
Yeah, and I've worked in places where there were women as my superiors. Anecdote isn't data. Many parts of IT, however, *are* essentially boys clubs. I've never worked in one, but I've sure visited a lot of them.
(rolls eyes) Look, just because the IT industry is a misogynistic boys club doesn't mean that other groups aren't worse. The police probably aren't as bad as the army, either, that doesn't exonerate them.
I think you misunderstand my prosal. No particular part of the pass phrase can be guaranteed to be in a dictionary. They just need to be memorable for some reason. (Even with your understanding of what I meant, I believe that you miscalculated.)
I will admit I could have used a better example, but I'm not suggesting that the peices should necerssarily for words of any extant language, merely that they be memorable. I would restrict it to things that I can enter from my keyboard, but that, to me, seems reasonable. Intentional misspellings are desireable in this context, but I was just whipping up a short, quick example, and didn't consider it carefully. Even so you underestimate the number of words. English has a dictionary of on the order of 5 million words, though that may be including technical vocabularies. Then add in punctuation as desired and the occasional number in an unpredictable place and...
What I'm really proposing is lifting the limit on password length...or at least extending it to 512 characters...and using all of them in computing a base 64 (or 128) code from that. (I'm not considering salting, because I'm only here talking about an individual password, but tables of passwords woudl need to include that.)
Additionally, if thinking about logon attempts, if failed logon attempts result in increasing delays before the next attempt if permitted, even the current systems are sufficient. This has the problem that you may need to disconnect your machine from the internet before you'll be able to access it, but in many cases that's a trivial price. If it isn't, then you need another approach, such as whitelisting certain ip address numbers, so that they never exceed 5 minutes between allowed attempts.
If you can get at the info, a TLA can coerce you into giving them the information. Unless you're both willing to die and to be tortured to protect the information, you can't both access the information and keep it from them, if they're determined. Of course, if they're just mildly curious you can do it, but then things that work against the phone company should work.
I'd like to set it to any number of errors in a row starts increasing the time between allowed login tries, and start the delay with the 2 seconds and square it for each succeeding wrong guess. Also a warning on the login page as soon as even one erroroneous login attempt is detected.
Unfortunately, it's not a standard option, I'm lazy, and I don't have anything valuable on my machine. (E.g., I won't do banking over the internet.)
Besides, it wouldn't matter if CAPTCHA were cracked for his purpose. His purpose is to raise the cost of intrusion to the point where the attackers go somewhere else. Not ideal, but it's probably the best you can do.
Now there are several layered approaches that one can adopt to strengthen the security, but convincing the attackers to pick on someone else is probably the best any of them, or all of them combined, will accomplish. How much security you use depends on what you're protecting. Personally, if I were really after security I'd mount the system on a read only device, checksum everything, and have a daemon that rebooted the system if checksum validation failed. The idea of storing the user passwords on a separate device that can only reply "True" or "False" to a username:password pair has a lot going for it. But is it worth the hassle? That depends on what you're protecting. (For me, no. I don't have anything valuable on my machine except some code I'm developing, and when it's done it will be GPL.)
No, I think upper management is going to be even more secure than owner. Of course, *getting* to upper management will be interesting, with all middle management gone.
As for "well on it's way". It's over a decade away, probably over two. I expect the first "human brain equivalent" computer to show up around 2030...but that's just the hardware. Unless one of the neural net projects succeeds, the software is going to take a bit longer. Of course you can do an awful lot by redesigning jobs to remove the need for intelligence, but SOME jobs won't be attacked that easily. How to predict what those jobs are, however, is not obvious.
OTOH, they think they may have recently identified the structure in the human brain that yields consciousness. If so, then neural simulation models may yield spectacular successes. Unfortunately, this may cause us to build things without understanding their implications. Which means we may well not understand the goal structure of the entity that we build.... Whoops!
So a "whoops!" could happen *before* the human brain equivalent computer. It wouldn't be an "intelligent" as a human, but that's not really that important if it has enough power under its control...which it could get by just being useful.
OTOH, a decent AI with sufficient intelligent would be far superior as a world ruler to the bozos who are currently driving the bus. The key question isn't its intelligence, but rather its goal structure.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, since everything is marked either checked or don't use, that's not unreasonable. Granted a more accurate marking would be to just not mark it those two times. Also, with the rating given nobody who is serious about security would use skype, so it's not like they're actually misleading anyone.
In California the appear to have made things worse. This isn't certain, because lots of other things were happening at the same time, but they sure haven't made things better.
OTOH, time has clearly demonstrated that no small group of people is capable of policing their predatory behavior upon the non-members of the group. Or at least all attempts to date have been unsuccessful. Some of the attempts have lasted for decades before failure, and their modes of failure have lead me to develop a hypothesis (which I usually phrase as the following assertion):
When a centralized position of power is created it will over time come to be filled by people more interested in exercizing (and increasing) the power than in doing the task that the position was created so accomplish.
This doesn't imply that there aren't individuals who won't be majorly corrupted by such a post, merely that those given to corruption by power will be the ones most strongly incentivized to strive for it (the positon of power).
The problem is that universities should not be expected to be trade schools, and trade schools should not be expected to be universities. And there needs to be an additional category in the middle for things like chemists and doctors.
The trouble is, each of those kinds of school needs to have the classes that each of the others has, just with a different center. This used to be handled by the different colleges within the university, but they have become homogenized under the stress of an administration that wants to make administering them simpler, where what they really needed was to become more distinct.
But note that an artist who wants to learn metal welding shouldn't need to learn that in the art school, there should be a "transfer class" in a trade school that teaches welding. The art school should decide (in advance) whether to allow units to transfer for that class. (It should probably decide yes.)
Think of this proposal as splitting the university (plus the trade schools that have been killed off) into separately administered colleges that allow students to flow between them, but each one has its own requirements for what it takes to complete a major.
Now paying for this.... I think that student education should be totally subsidized. Not room and board. Not materials. But the education itself.
I also think that inventions developed with public funding should be available to the public, and free to use for any company chartered and paying taxes within the geographic area controlled by the particular government. This includes drugs. This doesn't mean that the government should pay for safety testing, but it means that no company should be able to prevent another from qualifying a drug that has been developed with public money. I know that this cuts off one major source of funding that has been developed by many universities, but my feeling is "This is a rip-off!", and they don't deserve to control the patents. If they pay for it, of course, it's a totally different matter. But universities that take federal money for non-teaching purposes should not then be able to claim the results other than prestige and copyrights. (And I'm even dubious about copyrights. That could grow into another area of corruption.)
A valid point. Consider it a criticism of the summary.
Fat is not harmless. It's just differently harmful than are carbohydrates or protein.
I'm told that vegetarians that allow themselves dairy products may be fat. Perhaps I haven't met many of them.
The real problem is that people like to eat, and they prefer to eat foods that are high in calories. Also, once they leave childhood they prefer to minimize exercise. This is a bad combination, but it isn't unique to humans. What's unique to humans is that they can usually find a lot of reasonably tasty food with minimal effort.
Go watch lions in a zoo, and see how much they sleep. This is normal. If you want an animal to be active, you limit its food supply, and arrange things so that activity is require to get anything that isn't dead boring to eat.
N.B.: This effect is less marked in smaller animals because:
1) It takes less effort to move, and
2) Smaller animals need to eat more often.
But humans count as larger animals.
This is oversimplified, of course, but there is no magic dietary food that you can eat or avoid to solve the problem. He's right that we have no real need for sugar, but we also only need a small amount of fat. But if we eliminate both we tend to OD on protein, which has its own problems.
I think the best fad diet of recent times was the oat bran diet. It still didn't solve the problem, of course, but it was minimally harmful.
FWIW, I tend to avoid sugar, and minimize fats (with some exceptions for olive oil...but even that only in moderation). But I like to eat, and I'm not active enough....and I weigh about twice what I should.
The only group of people I'm aware of that aren't *vigorous* exercisers and aren't overweight are strict vegetarians...or orientals who eat a traditional diet, which is nearly the same thing. (Or very young...though even there the percentage of overweight is increasing rapidly. Probably because their ability to run around has been sharply curtailed over the last several decades.)
Funny, I belong to a group that believes that the Bible is a bunch of rabble-rousing political propaganda and so out of context that most people either don't understand or misunderstand most of it. And that most invocations of God within the bible are as sincere as that made by Obama at his last speech. (Well, actually since those quoted in the Bible were usually out of power, by someone running against him.)
Doesn't matter: Based on the summary this isn't new information. If the story matches the summary, then it beats me why anyone would bother to mention it.
Hearing it is quick. Really understanding it in practice takes work.
OTOH, you don't need to quit you day job. You can get started on 15 minutes a day. (Eventually you'll want to spend more, but you only need to do it when you decide to.)
Still, you'll find lots of groups that want you to jump into rapic immersion. But you can find the same thing in bridge clubs.
P.S.: I am not a Zen, or any other kind, of Buddhist. I have too hard a time accepting Karma, even though the Buddha was quite obscure when he talked about just what was reincarnated...it could be something quite reasonable, rather like momentum being conserved. Of course, that could be the fault of the translation that I read. Very few introductions to Buddhism give much sign of paying much attention to what survives of the actual "word of the Buddha". Well, they do, but they're pushing their interpretation of what he meant.
He's not validating scientology, he's trying to defame religions.
I believe that Bushido was called the "Way of the Samuri". That not all samuri followed it is certainly true, but it was still called the way of the samuri. And it didn't require that you not be a follower of Zen Buddhism or of Shinto. In fact, IIUC it even encouraged you to be a follower of zen.
And saying that the "Way of the Samuri" was neo-confuscism is very strange. It was Japanese, not Chinese. There certainly were many close parallels, and the Japanese certainly admired (envied?) much about Chinese culture, but it wasn't that close. Zen Buddhism in Japan wasn't much like the thing with the same original name in China, though it did evolve from imported teachings.
More to the point, faith is necessary to life. There's no logical basis for believing that what you remember is what happened, or believing that the sun will rise tomorrow, or many other things.
And "faith in the religious sense" doesn't define what it is talking about. Different people will mean different things by it. "Belief contrary to evidence" when used by someone other than the believer usually seems to mean something like "they didn't reach the same conclusion from the evidence that I did", but this reaction is predicted by Bayesian reasoning since their priors will not be the same. The only interesting case is when it's used by the believer...but even then you can't say it's necessarily toxic. It's frequently a necessary part of forming a scientific theory.
Now when you are talking about belief in things that are inherently unverifiable...whoops! You can't prove that the sun will rise after you are dead, and you have no way to verify it. But I don't think you would call that belief inherently toxic.
Lets take an explicit case where there are contradictory actions required:
Take a Jehovah's Witness who has a child that needs a tranfusion. The Jehovah's Witness will believe that the transfusion is inherently evil, even though it only observably results in good (as he would define it). You, an external observer, only evaluate the observable results, and call his beliefs toxic. I, another external observer, can only evaluate the observable results, and believe that the decision should be up to the child...though I remain quite conflicted about this, because I don't think a young child should be expected to make this kind of decision. I am the only with conflicted decsions, so does that mean that mine is the more toxic belief? (I'm pretending that the Jehova's Witness isn't conflicted.)
Perhaps you need to define "toxic" in this context, as I find myself unable to resolve its meaning.
Actually, it depends on what you mean as unique. If you mean the entire fingerprints, in fine detail, then they probably are unique. (Math again.) If you only look at a few features and judge them by categories, then they are unlikely to be unique.
Guess which the police do. (Hint: It was quite hard to index all the details before pixelated images were used on computers. And it's still quite hard to get accurate registration and elimination of duplicates.)
Is that an admission of accomplice to murder?
Treason is specifically defined, and so I don't think you can make treason stick. But you should be able to get hundreds of thousands of count of malfeasance....were there any justice.
I don't know. To me each count looks like a separate act of malfeasance.
Yeah, and I've worked in places where there were women as my superiors. Anecdote isn't data. Many parts of IT, however, *are* essentially boys clubs. I've never worked in one, but I've sure visited a lot of them.
(rolls eyes)
Look, just because the IT industry is a misogynistic boys club doesn't mean that other groups aren't worse. The police probably aren't as bad as the army, either, that doesn't exonerate them.
Why should only politicians be allowed to redefine the word as they choose?
I think you misunderstand my prosal. No particular part of the pass phrase can be guaranteed to be in a dictionary. They just need to be memorable for some reason. (Even with your understanding of what I meant, I believe that you miscalculated.)
I will admit I could have used a better example, but I'm not suggesting that the peices should necerssarily for words of any extant language, merely that they be memorable. I would restrict it to things that I can enter from my keyboard, but that, to me, seems reasonable. Intentional misspellings are desireable in this context, but I was just whipping up a short, quick example, and didn't consider it carefully. Even so you underestimate the number of words. English has a dictionary of on the order of 5 million words, though that may be including technical vocabularies. Then add in punctuation as desired and the occasional number in an unpredictable place and...
What I'm really proposing is lifting the limit on password length...or at least extending it to 512 characters...and using all of them in computing a base 64 (or 128) code from that. (I'm not considering salting, because I'm only here talking about an individual password, but tables of passwords woudl need to include that.)
Additionally, if thinking about logon attempts, if failed logon attempts result in increasing delays before the next attempt if permitted, even the current systems are sufficient. This has the problem that you may need to disconnect your machine from the internet before you'll be able to access it, but in many cases that's a trivial price. If it isn't, then you need another approach, such as whitelisting certain ip address numbers, so that they never exceed 5 minutes between allowed attempts.
If you can get at the info, a TLA can coerce you into giving them the information. Unless you're both willing to die and to be tortured to protect the information, you can't both access the information and keep it from them, if they're determined. Of course, if they're just mildly curious you can do it, but then things that work against the phone company should work.
Two factor authentication is no more secure than a longer password. (Granted, it can easily be the equivalent of a MUCH longer password.)
FWIW I think we should switch from passwords to pass phrases. "All cows eat radishes" is much harder to guess than "#iOpqn23!"
I'd like to set it to any number of errors in a row starts increasing the time between allowed login tries, and start the delay with the 2 seconds and square it for each succeeding wrong guess. Also a warning on the login page as soon as even one erroroneous login attempt is detected.
Unfortunately, it's not a standard option, I'm lazy, and I don't have anything valuable on my machine. (E.g., I won't do banking over the internet.)
Besides, it wouldn't matter if CAPTCHA were cracked for his purpose. His purpose is to raise the cost of intrusion to the point where the attackers go somewhere else. Not ideal, but it's probably the best you can do.
Now there are several layered approaches that one can adopt to strengthen the security, but convincing the attackers to pick on someone else is probably the best any of them, or all of them combined, will accomplish. How much security you use depends on what you're protecting. Personally, if I were really after security I'd mount the system on a read only device, checksum everything, and have a daemon that rebooted the system if checksum validation failed. The idea of storing the user passwords on a separate device that can only reply "True" or "False" to a username:password pair has a lot going for it. But is it worth the hassle? That depends on what you're protecting. (For me, no. I don't have anything valuable on my machine except some code I'm developing, and when it's done it will be GPL.)
No, I think upper management is going to be even more secure than owner. Of course, *getting* to upper management will be interesting, with all middle management gone.
As for "well on it's way". It's over a decade away, probably over two. I expect the first "human brain equivalent" computer to show up around 2030...but that's just the hardware. Unless one of the neural net projects succeeds, the software is going to take a bit longer. Of course you can do an awful lot by redesigning jobs to remove the need for intelligence, but SOME jobs won't be attacked that easily. How to predict what those jobs are, however, is not obvious.
OTOH, they think they may have recently identified the structure in the human brain that yields consciousness. If so, then neural simulation models may yield spectacular successes. Unfortunately, this may cause us to build things without understanding their implications. Which means we may well not understand the goal structure of the entity that we build. ... Whoops!
So a "whoops!" could happen *before* the human brain equivalent computer. It wouldn't be an "intelligent" as a human, but that's not really that important if it has enough power under its control...which it could get by just being useful.
OTOH, a decent AI with sufficient intelligent would be far superior as a world ruler to the bozos who are currently driving the bus. The key question isn't its intelligence, but rather its goal structure.