If you think it's in the hands of the US citizens...then you haven't been paying attention. It's in the hands of a very small group of extremely powerful people. They usually get their way be fraud, but partially it's because the design of the voting system means that there are only two viable candidates for any national office. (This is a result of the plurality wins voting system.) That means that only two candidates need to be bought off before the election. And the costs of running for office are such than anyone who refuses to be bought off won't get elected. Even Ross Perot couldn't win, despite his incredible wealth. It's also a facto that media celebreties aren't allowed to campaign. During the VietNam incursion Pat Paulson ran a humorous campaign for president. He might well have won if they had counted the votes for him. People were that dissatisfied with the government. So they just didn't count the votes. The consolidation of the media means that only those stories that the owners of the media consider "appropriate" get much coverage. So they barely cover public demonstrations, and when they do the coverage is slanted.
The US isn't yet a true dictatorship, but it's drifting in that direction quite rapidly, and VERY few of the citizens desire this. Most of the areas where those who do are in the majoritye are remote areas where they have little contact with the actions of the government. Also the government is, in conjunction with various technological trends, destroying the middle class. Relatively few leave it by climbing up.
Yes. The Constitution enumerates what the governement is allowed to do. It doesn't say it's allowed to track citizens. That means the Feds aren't allowed to do it. (It says nothing, however, about what the states are allowed to do.)
What you are ignoring is that identical twins don't just share single genes, they share identical arrangements of every gene. They also share most epigenetic markers. There isn't a single gene that is for, say, preferring a particular brand of cigarettes. But with a large enough number of identical genes you get things like "preferring the shape of a circle surrounded by grene" and "lack of concern over a bitter taste", etc. until you do get a large number of "unexpected correlations above chance". This doesn't mean they have a gene for preferring Taryton cigaretts.
I've seen it both ways in IBM documentation. It is the numeral one, but I think sometimes they were thinking in Roman Numerals, and other times in Arabic.
Yes. So MAYBE it's reasonable. But since it's selected for promotion by the NSA it's also reasonable to look for secondary effects. Remember, they not only acted to strengthen net encryption in a way that nobody understood for a decade, they also acted to weaken it in a way that nobody understood for a decade.
If you can't tell one hand from the other, why shouldn't you assume that it's the treacherous one? Vile acts can be MUCH more destructive than virtuous act can be constructive.
Sorry, but PL/1 was a decent language with atrocious subsets at rediculous prices. The compiler was also large and slow. And I had some problems with it's "intelligent type conversion"s. But you've got to remember what other languages were around at the time. It hadn't learned Object Oriented programming. Etc. But it made safe use of pointers rather easy. I wrote my first Red-Black tree in PL/1 and it was a lot easier both to do and to understand than the one I did later in C.
OTOH, I must admit that I was coming to it from Fortran and never did pick up the Cobol parts of it, except for picture type variables, which I occasionally found useful. (Doing dynamic format statements in Fortran IV was quite difficult.)
Except that one wonders *why* are they funding it. How will it make our communications less secure?
Off hand the only thing that comes to mind is that there would be fewer components of the browser that the NSA needed to compromise if all the languages used the same interpreter. Perhaps that's all there is. It's even possible that they didn't fund the project with a malign intent. That, however, is not the way I'd bet given their "improvements" of encryption methods.
Strict constructionists (in the US) know that the Constitution promises that each state will have a republican form of government, not a democracy. It sure doesn't promise that everyone will be allowed to vote, as most of the founding fathers believed that only men (i.e., not women) who owned property should be allowed to vote, and some of them wanted the restrictions to be tighter than that. (I'm not sure what their stance was on free Negroes that owned property. I've never encountered any direct quotation. Many of them, however, didn't believe that Indians should be allowed to vote.)
As customization reaches lower and lower levels, it becomes increasingly difficult to meaningfully compromise it. Probably the only way to meaningfully compromise an FPGA is to autodetect an internet connectin, and stream out to it everything you receive, possibly only on receiving a particular activation signal. That would be reasonably easy to detect, and even THAT compromise wouldn't be easy, but FPGAs don't have any memory capacity, so they can't accumulate and wait to be polled.
That, in more restrained language, was my initial response. I.e., "It couldn't happen to a more deserving company.".
I hope Sony loses, though I'm not really interrested in whether the guy wins.
OTOH, there have been (above) arguments that seem to argue that he should win as a point of law, as well as a point of justice. (And unusual synchrony.)
While you are correct, the comment is about students. If you don't learn to program without a garbage collector, you haven't really learned to program. I'd go further and insist that you need a good foundation in an assembly language. MIX is good enough, you don't need anything fancy. You just need to learn how things work at the basic level.
I'd also say that you need to learn a range of languages (not well, be adequately). I'd include Fortran, Lisp, Forth as the basic level. Then C for a more advanced level. (Perhaps you *could* do everything in C in Fortran95 instead, but why?)
Finally, at an advanced level, I'd introduce Java, Erlang, Smalltalk, and, Haskell or OCaML. If you want another language after that, Either Ada95 or modern x64 assembler.
And I'd do the whole thing in one year, which means none of the languages are covered in depth. Then pick any one of them, Java if you prefer, for more comprehensive study of algorithms. But *start* with a simplified assembler.
N.B.: There could be a parallel track that was followed based around HTML, Javascript, TCP servers, etc. I don't understand enough about it, because I never studied it, so I only ended up knowning pieces here and there that I picked up for project. I envision these classes intertwined like the Math and Physics classes that I took in college. E.g, the TCP lessons would be needed when the Java(or whatever) classes started to address multiprocessing on multiple computers.
The GP is probably an astroturfer rather than a troll. OTOH, there really *are* idiots who believe that kind of garbage, even after being shafted by MS a couple of times.
So it is your contention that Techtronix sells ransomeware. I will agree that ransomware sounds like a reasonable description of this Techtronix featue. Ransomeware is usually implemented in a different manner, but this feature makes Ransomware seem as if it is and intentional Techtronix feature.
I wouldn't want to blatantly claim that "Techtronix is Ransomware" without a clearer understanding. But I also wouldn't want to deny that Techtronix is Ransomware.
Irony or sarcasm, perhaps. I don't see contradiction.
When I was just leaning chess, I thought it the right thing to do to never resign, and fight to the end. Later I realized that this just proved I didn't understand my position...but that was only after working through a lot of endgames.
When you see clearly that an action will be disasterous, then to go ahead and do it anyway shows stupidity, not courage. A better point would be that Hack-a-day showed that they identified with a smaller proportion of internet users than you would like, or some such. In such a case, when you identify with a wide variety of users you can justifiably engage in personally disasterous actions with the goal of destroying your opposition. In chess this is analogous to a sacrifice play, where a piece is intentionally sacrificed in order to lead the opponent into a disasterous reply. (Think of how it would look if each of the pieces were intelligent, and identified with itself rather than with its side.)
OTOH, do note that sacrifice plays are inherently tricky, and one usually can't depend on them working as well as one would hope. It's rare than one can really understand the full consequences ahead of time.
Not tinfoil per se, be it think metalic fibres might be needed. Copper or aluminum should probably suffice, but perhaps it needs to be ferromagnetic. The question is, does it need to be grounded? It seems to me, though, that a knitted antenna would broadcast so many signals out of phase with each other that it couldn't be decoded.
No. The rational man theory does NOT work on the stock market. It doesn't even work well for those sections that are computer driven, because the models are always based on incorrect presumptions.
OTOH, I will agree that it OFTEN works on the stock market. This is a far different statement. But much of the stock market is driven by gambling fever, often played with "other people's money". (And in that since, since the player doesn't risk much, I suppose you could call it rational from his point of view. Even then I doubt it, though.)
Unfortunately, it's not a strawman. Not exactly. The researchers themselves may not do that extrapolation, but those they convince of their finding do. The GP post, however, is historically inaccurate. The "rational market theory" originated some time before 1950, and was dominant during the 1950 and later. It has recently been challenged by people doing actual reasearch that proved it an invalid model.
IIRC it originated by an economic school that was ideologicaly comitted to the Free Market, despite the obvious fact that never throughout the course of history has there ever BEEN a free market. Some are freer than others, e.g. the market in illegal drugs, where even killing your opponents is considered a valid business move. Those markets, however, fail the normal definition because the purchaser doesn't really know what he's buying.
I'd agree with you if you made a few changes, thus: Yet, can have much more positive impact on society and individuals. to: Yet, canin principlehave much more positive impact on society and individuals. and: That's bad reporting, not necessarily bad experiments. to: That's bad reporting.It's nomal in reports on experiments. and Lastly, a negative outcome is also valuable. to: Lastly, a negative outcomeis as valuable as the original result. It's just not seen as as newsworthy.
Additionally, with respect to the first point, whle in principle the results from psychology could be beneficial to society, in practice they appear to be mainly used for the powerful to control the less powerful. This generally results in negative impact on individuals. Perhaps society benefits, for certain meanings of society. But there's more than one reason that Behaviorism was so well funded for so long.
There are valid definitions of "experiment" for which those are experiments.
E.g., theories are often only checkable by conditions around a supernova. This means you have a theory and a prediction. You won't be able to prove everything about the theory by observing a single supernova, but you may be able to disprove it. And in science you can never prove a theory correct, you can only fail to disprove it.
FWIW, the Higgs boson has been a terrific disappointment because it didn't prove any theories wrong. There's still hope, but it's getting smaller. This is an especial disappointment because we know our current theories are wrong, or at least incomplete, but we don't know where to look for how to change things. Everything we try seems to come out as the theories predict. Perhaps the Higgs will show SOME unexpected behavior. Perhaps we'll have to depend on gravity waves. (Ugh. If you think the Higgs was hard to measure...) Maybe the answer will lie in terms of "cosmic connections" (which is sort of like entanglement, but with posterior measurement rather than prior sharing of a state).
But guess what....Every Higgs particle measurement is a separate non-repeatable experiment. We can't control the environment well enough to make them repeatable. Worse, so far they've all had to be done on the same (not replicable) equipment. This is clearly not optimal, but you deal with what you've got.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think it's in the hands of the US citizens...then you haven't been paying attention. It's in the hands of a very small group of extremely powerful people. They usually get their way be fraud, but partially it's because the design of the voting system means that there are only two viable candidates for any national office. (This is a result of the plurality wins voting system.) That means that only two candidates need to be bought off before the election. And the costs of running for office are such than anyone who refuses to be bought off won't get elected. Even Ross Perot couldn't win, despite his incredible wealth. It's also a facto that media celebreties aren't allowed to campaign. During the VietNam incursion Pat Paulson ran a humorous campaign for president. He might well have won if they had counted the votes for him. People were that dissatisfied with the government. So they just didn't count the votes. The consolidation of the media means that only those stories that the owners of the media consider "appropriate" get much coverage. So they barely cover public demonstrations, and when they do the coverage is slanted.
The US isn't yet a true dictatorship, but it's drifting in that direction quite rapidly, and VERY few of the citizens desire this. Most of the areas where those who do are in the majoritye are remote areas where they have little contact with the actions of the government. Also the government is, in conjunction with various technological trends, destroying the middle class. Relatively few leave it by climbing up.
What does that have to do with history?
Yes. The Constitution enumerates what the governement is allowed to do. It doesn't say it's allowed to track citizens. That means the Feds aren't allowed to do it. (It says nothing, however, about what the states are allowed to do.)
What you are ignoring is that identical twins don't just share single genes, they share identical arrangements of every gene. They also share most epigenetic markers. There isn't a single gene that is for, say, preferring a particular brand of cigarettes. But with a large enough number of identical genes you get things like "preferring the shape of a circle surrounded by grene" and "lack of concern over a bitter taste", etc. until you do get a large number of "unexpected correlations above chance". This doesn't mean they have a gene for preferring Taryton cigaretts.
I've seen it both ways in IBM documentation. It is the numeral one, but I think sometimes they were thinking in Roman Numerals, and other times in Arabic.
Yes. So MAYBE it's reasonable. But since it's selected for promotion by the NSA it's also reasonable to look for secondary effects. Remember, they not only acted to strengthen net encryption in a way that nobody understood for a decade, they also acted to weaken it in a way that nobody understood for a decade.
If you can't tell one hand from the other, why shouldn't you assume that it's the treacherous one? Vile acts can be MUCH more destructive than virtuous act can be constructive.
Sorry, but PL/1 was a decent language with atrocious subsets at rediculous prices. The compiler was also large and slow. And I had some problems with it's "intelligent type conversion"s. But you've got to remember what other languages were around at the time. It hadn't learned Object Oriented programming. Etc. But it made safe use of pointers rather easy. I wrote my first Red-Black tree in PL/1 and it was a lot easier both to do and to understand than the one I did later in C.
OTOH, I must admit that I was coming to it from Fortran and never did pick up the Cobol parts of it, except for picture type variables, which I occasionally found useful. (Doing dynamic format statements in Fortran IV was quite difficult.)
Except that one wonders *why* are they funding it. How will it make our communications less secure?
Off hand the only thing that comes to mind is that there would be fewer components of the browser that the NSA needed to compromise if all the languages used the same interpreter. Perhaps that's all there is. It's even possible that they didn't fund the project with a malign intent. That, however, is not the way I'd bet given their "improvements" of encryption methods.
This depends entirely on their purpose. If the purpose is to have an arbitrary reason to harass people it works fine.
No. But a stamp series featuring KISS would be interesting. I doubt, however, that I'd pay extra for it.
Strict constructionists (in the US) know that the Constitution promises that each state will have a republican form of government, not a democracy. It sure doesn't promise that everyone will be allowed to vote, as most of the founding fathers believed that only men (i.e., not women) who owned property should be allowed to vote, and some of them wanted the restrictions to be tighter than that. (I'm not sure what their stance was on free Negroes that owned property. I've never encountered any direct quotation. Many of them, however, didn't believe that Indians should be allowed to vote.)
As customization reaches lower and lower levels, it becomes increasingly difficult to meaningfully compromise it. Probably the only way to meaningfully compromise an FPGA is to autodetect an internet connectin, and stream out to it everything you receive, possibly only on receiving a particular activation signal. That would be reasonably easy to detect, and even THAT compromise wouldn't be easy, but FPGAs don't have any memory capacity, so they can't accumulate and wait to be polled.
Well, if they WERE to advertise it that way, many of my objections would vanish. Of course, I still wouldn't buy what they were selling...
That, in more restrained language, was my initial response. I.e., "It couldn't happen to a more deserving company.".
I hope Sony loses, though I'm not really interrested in whether the guy wins.
OTOH, there have been (above) arguments that seem to argue that he should win as a point of law, as well as a point of justice. (And unusual synchrony.)
While you are correct, the comment is about students. If you don't learn to program without a garbage collector, you haven't really learned to program. I'd go further and insist that you need a good foundation in an assembly language. MIX is good enough, you don't need anything fancy. You just need to learn how things work at the basic level.
I'd also say that you need to learn a range of languages (not well, be adequately). I'd include Fortran, Lisp, Forth as the basic level. Then C for a more advanced level. (Perhaps you *could* do everything in C in Fortran95 instead, but why?)
Finally, at an advanced level, I'd introduce Java, Erlang, Smalltalk, and, Haskell or OCaML. If you want another language after that, Either Ada95 or modern x64 assembler.
And I'd do the whole thing in one year, which means none of the languages are covered in depth. Then pick any one of them, Java if you prefer, for more comprehensive study of algorithms. But *start* with a simplified assembler.
N.B.: There could be a parallel track that was followed based around HTML, Javascript, TCP servers, etc. I don't understand enough about it, because I never studied it, so I only ended up knowning pieces here and there that I picked up for project. I envision these classes intertwined like the Math and Physics classes that I took in college. E.g, the TCP lessons would be needed when the Java(or whatever) classes started to address multiprocessing on multiple computers.
I like Trolltech, but it's probably already owned by someone.
The GP is probably an astroturfer rather than a troll. OTOH, there really *are* idiots who believe that kind of garbage, even after being shafted by MS a couple of times.
So it is your contention that Techtronix sells ransomeware. I will agree that ransomware sounds like a reasonable description of this Techtronix featue. Ransomeware is usually implemented in a different manner, but this feature makes Ransomware seem as if it is and intentional Techtronix feature.
I wouldn't want to blatantly claim that "Techtronix is Ransomware" without a clearer understanding. But I also wouldn't want to deny that Techtronix is Ransomware.
Irony or sarcasm, perhaps. I don't see contradiction.
When I was just leaning chess, I thought it the right thing to do to never resign, and fight to the end. Later I realized that this just proved I didn't understand my position...but that was only after working through a lot of endgames.
When you see clearly that an action will be disasterous, then to go ahead and do it anyway shows stupidity, not courage. A better point would be that Hack-a-day showed that they identified with a smaller proportion of internet users than you would like, or some such. In such a case, when you identify with a wide variety of users you can justifiably engage in personally disasterous actions with the goal of destroying your opposition. In chess this is analogous to a sacrifice play, where a piece is intentionally sacrificed in order to lead the opponent into a disasterous reply. (Think of how it would look if each of the pieces were intelligent, and identified with itself rather than with its side.)
OTOH, do note that sacrifice plays are inherently tricky, and one usually can't depend on them working as well as one would hope. It's rare than one can really understand the full consequences ahead of time.
Not tinfoil per se, be it think metalic fibres might be needed. Copper or aluminum should probably suffice, but perhaps it needs to be ferromagnetic. The question is, does it need to be grounded? It seems to me, though, that a knitted antenna would broadcast so many signals out of phase with each other that it couldn't be decoded.
No. The rational man theory does NOT work on the stock market. It doesn't even work well for those sections that are computer driven, because the models are always based on incorrect presumptions.
OTOH, I will agree that it OFTEN works on the stock market. This is a far different statement. But much of the stock market is driven by gambling fever, often played with "other people's money". (And in that since, since the player doesn't risk much, I suppose you could call it rational from his point of view. Even then I doubt it, though.)
Unfortunately, it's not a strawman. Not exactly. The researchers themselves may not do that extrapolation, but those they convince of their finding do. The GP post, however, is historically inaccurate. The "rational market theory" originated some time before 1950, and was dominant during the 1950 and later. It has recently been challenged by people doing actual reasearch that proved it an invalid model.
IIRC it originated by an economic school that was ideologicaly comitted to the Free Market, despite the obvious fact that never throughout the course of history has there ever BEEN a free market. Some are freer than others, e.g. the market in illegal drugs, where even killing your opponents is considered a valid business move. Those markets, however, fail the normal definition because the purchaser doesn't really know what he's buying.
I'd agree with you if you made a few changes, thus:
Yet, can have much more positive impact on society and individuals.
to:
Yet, can in principle have much more positive impact on society and individuals.
and:
That's bad reporting, not necessarily bad experiments.
to:
That's bad reporting. It's nomal in reports on experiments.
and
Lastly, a negative outcome is also valuable.
to:
Lastly, a negative outcome is as valuable as the original result. It's just not seen as as newsworthy.
Additionally, with respect to the first point, whle in principle the results from psychology could be beneficial to society, in practice they appear to be mainly used for the powerful to control the less powerful. This generally results in negative impact on individuals. Perhaps society benefits, for certain meanings of society. But there's more than one reason that Behaviorism was so well funded for so long.
There are valid definitions of "experiment" for which those are experiments.
E.g., theories are often only checkable by conditions around a supernova. This means you have a theory and a prediction. You won't be able to prove everything about the theory by observing a single supernova, but you may be able to disprove it. And in science you can never prove a theory correct, you can only fail to disprove it.
FWIW, the Higgs boson has been a terrific disappointment because it didn't prove any theories wrong. There's still hope, but it's getting smaller. This is an especial disappointment because we know our current theories are wrong, or at least incomplete, but we don't know where to look for how to change things. Everything we try seems to come out as the theories predict. Perhaps the Higgs will show SOME unexpected behavior. Perhaps we'll have to depend on gravity waves. (Ugh. If you think the Higgs was hard to measure...) Maybe the answer will lie in terms of "cosmic connections" (which is sort of like entanglement, but with posterior measurement rather than prior sharing of a state).
But guess what....Every Higgs particle measurement is a separate non-repeatable experiment. We can't control the environment well enough to make them repeatable. Worse, so far they've all had to be done on the same (not replicable) equipment. This is clearly not optimal, but you deal with what you've got.