Just because a resource is abundant and cheap isn't a reason to abuse it. You don't waste water, do you?
The purpose of a computer is to digitize ideas. If throwing extra RAM chips in to a computer saves me from having my concentration (and thus idea digitization) broken by a disk read delay, it is not a waste.
This is slashdot, schwab. How on earth did you wind up on this website while still thinking of better hardware as being a "waste?"
And yes, I waste water, too. But that's much much cheaper than silicon.
I am seriously curious: Do you actually believe any of the shit you say, or do you just enjoy the reactions you get out of all the people on this site dumbfounded by your apparent stupidity?
What an unsophisticated view! The author of those statements must be the type who can look at any shade of grey and see either black or white. It must be difficult to get through life with such an intellectual handicap.
There really is no question as to whether altruism is a natural thing. It certainly is. The question is how much of it is genetic and how much of it is memetic.
One may argue that memes are not natural--but since they are observed in animals, that's a tough argument to make.
Again, that's an oversimplification. If we were to cause extinction of HIV, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The immune systems aren't either "strong" or "weak." In many cases they provide antibodies for SPECIFIC diseases. Having antibodies for a certain disease won't necessarily help you fighting another disease, so it is better to not encounter that disease at all.
With that said, it is a very complex set of systems. There are some cases where seemingly-harmful disease exposure has some benefits. But for a lot of diseases, there is NO BENEFIT WHATSOEVER in being exposed to them--only harm. THAT is why your idea is a dumb oversimplification.
All we have to do is avoid serious plague for a little while longer (100 years perhaps?) and we will be able to create artificial antibodies, thus wiping disease out as we know it. So I caution you not to support immune strengthening through natural selection or any other crazy idea like that.
What we need is to determine which microbes are good and which are bad. Then we need to eliminate the bad ones and encourage the good ones.
Any unknown source (a door knob) should be treated as potentially having bad bacteria. But your oversimplification (we should have more bacteria, harmful and helpful) is dumb. Fewer illnesses is only a good thing.
Much like cigarette tax money goes to health education, wouldn't it be great if lottery profits were required to go to statistics and finance education?
That said, all the people I know who p[l]ay the lottery claim to do it because the realization of the possibility of great wealth is entertaining enough that it is worth the expense, even if they never win.
What is the name of your challenge-response token? Who makes it?
And, the problem with "it is probably easier to skim credit cards elsewhere" is that it's only temporary. The best security practices help you in that way today, but eventually everyone is using the best security practices.
That is a good idea for a device. A smartcard combined with a "Yes/No" button and a digital readout would be a great product. The firmware would be small enough that it could be mathematically proven (as much as possible) that it is free of vulnerabilities of its own. The screen would need to be able to display "transfer $X to account Y?"
That doesn't help much at all. Read past the press releases. There are many ways around this. The attacker could present the user with a fake browser window. He could modify the browser itself to insert transactions into a normal user-initiated session. The list goes on.
Like so many things in life, something you (know|have|are){2,} is an oversimplification. It's a lossy compression (if you will) of the much-more-complex science of authentication. This is why you misunderstand the subject.
Think it through: I have a keystroke logger on your PC. You type in your username (something you know) and your SecurID code (something you think you have:-). I then log in to your online bank app using the stuff you just typed and start transferring money.
For these purposes, the SecurID "something you have" is an illusion: It is really just "something you know (for sixty seconds)".
Even "something you are" is really "something you know" if the bioscanner is external to the system to which you are authenticating (which is the case for all over-the-net type apps).
Oversimplification is loved by sales people, but it is bad overall. It causes people like you to think SecurID really is "two-factor authentication." It's not, at least not entirely.
But had the same money been used to, say, help elderly people on fixed incomes heat their houses?
That is a terrible idea. It is as bad as the evil property tax breaks for elderly people. Grandma needed that huge house when she had a family with four kids. Now that she's 80, and has trouble going up or down stairs, WHY ARE WE PAYING HER TO CONTINUE HEATING THAT HUGE HOUSE?? We need to make sure old people pay market value so that they have incentive to move in to small, 1-story condos and apartments. We need to increase the supply of family-sized homes so that young people have a chance at raising their children properly.
Subsidizing old people to heat empty rooms is bad for the economy, bad for the environment, and bad for society.
To add to this: Some of the most sophisticated spamming trojans come from the Russian mob. These spamming trojans include rootkit detectors so that they clean other hackers' crap off of a zombie freeing up more resources for the spam bot.
It stands to reason that some of the best trojan-cleaning products come from Russia--they are the ones writing the trojans!
I looked at your "invisible knapsack" list. It seems to be a list of ways of discrimination. Those are bad, too. Discriminating based on race is bad. Have I wavered on this point? You think you can get me to do so?
Admission systems that discriminate based on birthright are immoral. "Your dad went here," "your mom has dark skin," and "you have brown eyes" would all be EQUALLY BAD methods of screening applicants.
I have friends who are rich (compared to my family) and get free rides to school (everything paid for) only because of their minority status. One is asian, one is mixed race (partially latino). I had to pay for school. They get it given to them because of racism. That's wrong. If I had a friend who got a free ride because his dad went to school here, I would be equally as pissed.
In grade school, the local collage hosted a free science camp. I wanted to go, but it was for girls only. There was no such camp for boys available. That's sexist fucking discrimination.
Yeah, I'm more pissed about times I've been discriminated against personally. Other people should be equally pissed if it happens to them. I've seen white people discriminate against other white people, based on accents, along the same lines of your knapsack list. "Redneck" or "hick" were the terms used. So yes, you can be white and face the same troubles as your list states.
The worst, though, is people who attribute problems caused by economic inequalities to race. Give money for school to families who need the money. If you ask their race when doing so, you're a racist prick. You will probably find that such scholarship programs will increase overall racial diversity, even if they let in rednecks and other poor white kids by mistake (oh no!)
What the hell are you talking about? I am not the descendant of an alumnus of any university. What privilege do you think I have?
I would be surprised if it were legal for public unis to do this. It is immoral to discriminate against people in the workplace and in the educational system based on who their parents are.
Like I just said: I'm a proponent of a meritocratic society. What is your major malfunction? Do you think all white people get free rides to Harvard because all their parents went there? You must be retarded, and I have no problem discriminating against you because of that.
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Thank you. That was the joke.
Slashdot: News for Materials Science Engineers--Stuff that the software engineers haven't seen since college.
I've never liked the idea of the compiler generating the machine code, when the programmer should just be doing his job properly.
Face it. You're a dinosaur.
The purpose of a computer is to digitize ideas. If throwing extra RAM chips in to a computer saves me from having my concentration (and thus idea digitization) broken by a disk read delay, it is not a waste.
This is slashdot, schwab. How on earth did you wind up on this website while still thinking of better hardware as being a "waste?"
And yes, I waste water, too. But that's much much cheaper than silicon.
I am seriously curious: Do you actually believe any of the shit you say, or do you just enjoy the reactions you get out of all the people on this site dumbfounded by your apparent stupidity?
What an unsophisticated view! The author of those statements must be the type who can look at any shade of grey and see either black or white. It must be difficult to get through life with such an intellectual handicap.
There really is no question as to whether altruism is a natural thing. It certainly is. The question is how much of it is genetic and how much of it is memetic.
One may argue that memes are not natural--but since they are observed in animals, that's a tough argument to make.
Sir, you have found a home here on slashdot.
Again, that's an oversimplification. If we were to cause extinction of HIV, we have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The immune systems aren't either "strong" or "weak." In many cases they provide antibodies for SPECIFIC diseases. Having antibodies for a certain disease won't necessarily help you fighting another disease, so it is better to not encounter that disease at all.
With that said, it is a very complex set of systems. There are some cases where seemingly-harmful disease exposure has some benefits. But for a lot of diseases, there is NO BENEFIT WHATSOEVER in being exposed to them--only harm. THAT is why your idea is a dumb oversimplification.
All we have to do is avoid serious plague for a little while longer (100 years perhaps?) and we will be able to create artificial antibodies, thus wiping disease out as we know it. So I caution you not to support immune strengthening through natural selection or any other crazy idea like that.
What we need is to determine which microbes are good and which are bad. Then we need to eliminate the bad ones and encourage the good ones.
Any unknown source (a door knob) should be treated as potentially having bad bacteria. But your oversimplification (we should have more bacteria, harmful and helpful) is dumb. Fewer illnesses is only a good thing.
Much like cigarette tax money goes to health education, wouldn't it be great if lottery profits were required to go to statistics and finance education?
That said, all the people I know who p[l]ay the lottery claim to do it because the realization of the possibility of great wealth is entertaining enough that it is worth the expense, even if they never win.
The Perl language was designed with genetic programming in mind. Any random combination of characters is executable Perl.
What is the name of your challenge-response token? Who makes it?
And, the problem with "it is probably easier to skim credit cards elsewhere" is that it's only temporary. The best security practices help you in that way today, but eventually everyone is using the best security practices.
That is a good idea for a device. A smartcard combined with a "Yes/No" button and a digital readout would be a great product. The firmware would be small enough that it could be mathematically proven (as much as possible) that it is free of vulnerabilities of its own. The screen would need to be able to display "transfer $X to account Y?"
I mean to dispel the myth that with 2-factor, someone can't steal your credentials unless they take "something you have."
you manipulative bastard :-)
That doesn't help much at all. Read past the press releases. There are many ways around this. The attacker could present the user with a fake browser window. He could modify the browser itself to insert transactions into a normal user-initiated session. The list goes on.
Like so many things in life, something you (know|have|are){2,} is an oversimplification. It's a lossy compression (if you will) of the much-more-complex science of authentication. This is why you misunderstand the subject.
:-). I then log in to your online bank app using the stuff you just typed and start transferring money.
Think it through: I have a keystroke logger on your PC. You type in your username (something you know) and your SecurID code (something you think you have
For these purposes, the SecurID "something you have" is an illusion: It is really just "something you know (for sixty seconds)".
Even "something you are" is really "something you know" if the bioscanner is external to the system to which you are authenticating (which is the case for all over-the-net type apps).
Oversimplification is loved by sales people, but it is bad overall. It causes people like you to think SecurID really is "two-factor authentication." It's not, at least not entirely.
Stealing passwords is trivially easy. Even with two-factor authentication (SecurID), someone can MITM you if they own your PC.
The trick is getting cash transfered from someone's bank once you have their credentials.
That is a terrible idea. It is as bad as the evil property tax breaks for elderly people. Grandma needed that huge house when she had a family with four kids. Now that she's 80, and has trouble going up or down stairs, WHY ARE WE PAYING HER TO CONTINUE HEATING THAT HUGE HOUSE?? We need to make sure old people pay market value so that they have incentive to move in to small, 1-story condos and apartments. We need to increase the supply of family-sized homes so that young people have a chance at raising their children properly.
Subsidizing old people to heat empty rooms is bad for the economy, bad for the environment, and bad for society.
"It was the humans who scorched the sky..."
Do you live in the USA? $150k is chump change for modern military technology.
To add to this: Some of the most sophisticated spamming trojans come from the Russian mob. These spamming trojans include rootkit detectors so that they clean other hackers' crap off of a zombie freeing up more resources for the spam bot.
It stands to reason that some of the best trojan-cleaning products come from Russia--they are the ones writing the trojans!
I looked at your "invisible knapsack" list. It seems to be a list of ways of discrimination. Those are bad, too. Discriminating based on race is bad. Have I wavered on this point? You think you can get me to do so?
Admission systems that discriminate based on birthright are immoral. "Your dad went here," "your mom has dark skin," and "you have brown eyes" would all be EQUALLY BAD methods of screening applicants.
I have friends who are rich (compared to my family) and get free rides to school (everything paid for) only because of their minority status. One is asian, one is mixed race (partially latino). I had to pay for school. They get it given to them because of racism. That's wrong. If I had a friend who got a free ride because his dad went to school here, I would be equally as pissed.
In grade school, the local collage hosted a free science camp. I wanted to go, but it was for girls only. There was no such camp for boys available. That's sexist fucking discrimination.
Yeah, I'm more pissed about times I've been discriminated against personally. Other people should be equally pissed if it happens to them. I've seen white people discriminate against other white people, based on accents, along the same lines of your knapsack list. "Redneck" or "hick" were the terms used. So yes, you can be white and face the same troubles as your list states.
The worst, though, is people who attribute problems caused by economic inequalities to race. Give money for school to families who need the money. If you ask their race when doing so, you're a racist prick. You will probably find that such scholarship programs will increase overall racial diversity, even if they let in rednecks and other poor white kids by mistake (oh no!)
What the hell are you talking about? I am not the descendant of an alumnus of any university. What privilege do you think I have?
I would be surprised if it were legal for public unis to do this. It is immoral to discriminate against people in the workplace and in the educational system based on who their parents are.
Like I just said: I'm a proponent of a meritocratic society. What is your major malfunction? Do you think all white people get free rides to Harvard because all their parents went there? You must be retarded, and I have no problem discriminating against you because of that.