Yes it very often is. It depends on what you want to use it for offcourse.
If you see some reference to, say Draupnir, and have no idea what or who that may be, then an article telling you that it's an arm-ring worn by Odin the norse God, forged by Brokk and Eitri and originally set of a gift-triple consisting of this, Mjollnir and Gullinbursti.
Now, it migth be it was actually worn by Loke, that Brokk had no part in the forging and that Eitri made it alone. Nevertheless you'd now connect this to norse mythology, which would be a huge help in looking up more accurate information about it, should you need so. (often "artifact from norse mythology" will be answer enough for your needs)
Offcourse, an article where *everything* is completely wrong and misleading can be worse than nothing, but I've never seen such an article on Wikipedia. I've seen inaccuracies, inconsistencies, errors. But I've never seen an article so bad that it doesn't at the very least give you a general idea what something is. Have you ?
It depends. For any one topic, there are usually better sources. That is as it should be, it's an encyclopedia after all, and no work attempting to cover all topics can be as specific as works covering one very very narrow topic.
For many things a traditional encyclopedia is useless even as a first search, because it quite simply has no entry at all.
Wikipedia is most commonly used when you hear something, and want a quick ivdea what that's all about. You won't find out what RFC1777 is in Britannica, infact you're quite likely to not even figure out what an 'RFC' is. Brittanica also can't tell you how many people live in Austevoll or what, exactly Draupnir is.
A incomplete and imperfect article beats NO article any time of day. Usually, once you've read what Wikipedia has to say on a subject, you also know enough to have some idea where to search for more detail.
Also, any parent will tell you the importance of teaching children about right vs. wrong. Have you ever really thought about what that says about our inborn tendencies?
Not much. It basically says that to function well as part of a society, you need to know the rules of that society. We say "rigth and wrong" but in reality we mostly mean accepted and/or not-accepted by society.
The rules you need to know are different for different societies, so obviously they'll have to be learnt after birth.
An American child does not need to learn that sitting in such a manner as to expose the undersides of his feet to a stranger (for example at a beach) is "wrong", a child from Dubai does.
A child from Germany needs to learn that saying "Gesundheit" when somebody near you sneeze is expected behaviour. A Norwegian child don't.
A child from a village in Amazonas does not need to learn that going outdoors without clothes would be "wrong", a child from Atlanta does.
In some cultures children learn that having more than one wife is "wrong", in others they don't. In some cultures having more than one husband is perfectly fine, in others it'd be "wrong".
There's a gazillion such rules. Most are, if not completely arbitrary, then atleast strongly culturally varying. Having to learn them has little to do with any universal concept of rigth and wrong, and much more with successfully interacting with a society.
This says nothing about our born morality, or lack thereof. All it does say is that training is required to learn a complex set of behavioural expectations.
True. There is a legal ruling saying that MS has to do so-and-so by date so-and-so. That date is well in the past, and Microsoft has, infact, not actually done so-and-so.
It's hardly surprising that this carries stiff penalties. Having a legal system at all is pointless if society does not, at the same time, forcefully insist that judgements are respected and adhered to.
Giving someone a fine is supposed to serve 3 purposes; (which all adds up to the 1 purpose of preventing certain behaviour from occuring)
First, the knowledge that certain behaviour can lead to fines would tend to discourage you from engaging in that behaviour in the first place.
Two, if you do engage in it anyway, and receive a fine, you migth be discouraged from doing the same thing again.
Three, when others observe you getting a fine for certain behaviour, they may conclude they themselves should refrain from that behaviour.
In order for the two first to work, the fine must be sufficient to influence your behaviour. If you earn a thousand dollars a week, obviously the risk of getting a 50 cent fine for some behaviour or other is unlikely to deter you much.
On this background, scaling fines by the income of the recipient makes perfect sense. True for individuals, even more so for companies. A $5000 fine could be sufficient to influence a tiny company, on MS it obviously would not even register.
If you did *not* scale the fines then you'd have two alternatives when it comes to companies. Either the fines are so high that any fine at all results in instant bankruptcy for all small and medium companies, or the fines are so low that they are completely ineffectual as tools for modifying large-company-behaviour.
Why is this price particularly high? It's only half as much as a really good laptop
It costs more than a entry-level laptop, and does significantly less. Compared to the small VAIO my wife bougth last week for pretty much exactly this price this thing lacks:
A decent keyboard.
Connectivity (it has some, but the laptop has much more)
The ability to run Heroes og Migth and Magic5
The ability to run Gnucash
A decent-sized harddisk.
A DVD-burner
It has too low resolution.
It has a much smaller screen.
I'm not arguing it should have all these things -- then it'd be a laptop, and we have laptops already. I'm arguing that when it is a much more targeted device, capable of doing MUCH less than a laptop can do, then the price should reflect this. $299 would be fine.
You're missing the point. Using "simpler" (as in childsplay) crypto rather than standard well-tested crypto in low-security applications would make sense if doing so saved you significant amounts of programming-time, working-memory or cpu-time or had other significant advantages.
That's not the case, infact the oposite is likely to be the case as aes(message,key) is likely to be well-tested, well-documented code you can simply use whereas xor_with_sillystring(message) is likely to first need being written by you, then debugged etc.
Thus, the only scenario where it makes sense to use sillycode is in cases where the easy crackability of the ciphertext is a feature, something you explicitly want.
"We don't need a million years, only a week of security" is not an argument if you can have the million-years security more easily than the week security. (ignoring the very real possibility that you'll make a mistake and your week-security turns out to be 2-seconds security)
First, $500 is like pay for perhaps half a week of programming. And that assumes that one person got all the prices, and that the prices where actually worth the stated value to that person (unlikely, or he'd have bougth them already) and that he knows before starting that he'll certainly win.
It's true many of the disasters listened originated with man. But that's beside the point.
The point is that with every human dependant upon a single planet a single accident or a single malicious act can conceivably kill every last one of us.
With self-sustaining colonies on multiple planets, that's a lot harder to imagine. You'd need a *simultaneous* accident and/or malicious act on all of our colonies at once.
For example, a large enough meteor can very well kill every human on earth. It would have no influence at all on those living on Mars.
Economic freedom is the more important part of freedom in my view. Most of the other stuff, drinking under 21, no gay marriage, drug laws, etc... is secondary.
Leave it to an American to explain whats truly important in life.
Being free to marry who you want. Being free to pursue the knowledge one wants. Being free to publish what one wants. Being free to decide yourself wheteher to become a mother or not. Granting your gay partner the same recognition, and the same juridical rigths as heterosexual partners enjoy. Being free from imprisonment for the horrible crime of smoking the leaves of some plant. Being free to openly discuss most any topic without interference from the government. Being allowed to travel freely without having your biometrics controlled by government and checked against a secret "don't fly" list.
These things are, in the words of the parent comment, 'secondary'
The only freedom that really counts is, offcourse, the allmigthy buck.
Until someone has called you once before, or you've talked to them in some out-of-band way, you have no way of knowing what your friends/relatives/etc keys are.
True, unless you use web-of-trust, in which case it's sufficient that they've talked to someone you've talked to etc.
Or unless there's some server you trust enough that you'll take thats servers word for the link between a certain email-adress and a certain public-key, and you know the email-adress of your friends/relatives/etc.
Setting up a server that verifies email, and signs public keys of people who complete the verification is near-trivial. (the near-part being related to being sufficiently paranoid about the secret signing-key.)
TweakUI can do focus follows mouse, and decide if the newly focused window should autoraise or not when focused in this manner. Thus that fixes 1.5 of the 5 issues above. But I agree -- even with Gnome or XP it's possible to configure a fair bit more if one is willing to muck about.
Sure. Absolutely. For some people, some of the time, Windows is the more practical choise. At other times Linux is a much superior choise. It depends on a lot of stuff ranging from software availability to user experience.
I'm just saying, the fact that one experiences irritations when moving from Windows to Linux is no evidence that Windows is superior.
Because there are irritations when moving in the other direction too. It's just a consequence of the two systems being different, that's all.
I agree. I don't think it's nessecarily a disaster, or even a negative thing, if King Kong budget kind of movies in the future become harder to finance, we'll make do, quite possibly with larger variation and more good movies by spreading the same sum on dozens of cheaper movies.
Ain't saying everyone is like that. I'm saying that porn is one area where the actual sales, and the sales you'd guess if you surveyed 1000 people on the street and multiplied by the population would be very different. (actual sales would be much higher than your survey would lead you to believe, because many people will say they don't buy porn, when infact they do, or they'll underreport their buying)
This is pretty much so for everything people perceive as negative.
(stem cell) Why should the government fund this or any other research?
That's not what I meant. Strong forces want to *forbid* this research.
What purpose does gay marriage serve?
Irrelevant. Government regulation of stuff that serves no purpose is still government regulation. My point was that the government in the USA does heavily regulate. Not if the regulations make sense or not.
As a tourist, an immigrant or what?
*everyone* who wants to enter the USA, American, Norwegian or Sudanese, need to give up this set of information and present a machine-readable biometric passport. If you leave USA, you'll be required to give up this info to be allowed back in. In contrast you can travel freely from Spain to Iceland to Japan while giving the governments significantly less info.
With the alcohol and sex thing, you again forget what I'm saying. I'm not saying all these regulations are nessecarily good or bad. (they may be, but that's not the point). I'm saying that the USA is infact, pretty heavily regulated. The general impression, as seen from Europe, is that big business and money is significantly less regulated than in Europe while personal behaviour and freedoms are *more* regulated than we're used to.
If huge parts of certain population-groups commit crimes they should be imprisonsed.
Perhaps. But again: that wasn't my point. The point was that drug use is extremely strictly regulated in the USA. I'm trying to get across that the people who say: "we're successful because we're so unregulated" aren't telling the entire truth. Parts of society *are* pretty free in USA, other activities are regulated up the Bazoo.
As for if the regulation is imposed by the state or by washington, that's utterly irrelevant. If it's illegal to, say, sleep with your 16 year old girlfriend where you live, then that is government regulation regardless of which particular branch of government came up with this particular idiocy.
In a gas-boiler you *want* to loose as little heat to the exhaust as possible and keep as much as possible heat in. Leaking heat from the exhaust to the intak is a *feature* in such a setting.
With AC you *want* to loose the heat in the exhaust. In that context leaking heat from the exhaust to the intake-air is a *bug*.
Ok. That's a valid point. I was thinking of the tweaks to DES-tables way-back-when. Yes, I'm aware that all later evidence suggest that this was done to protect against differential cryptoanalysis which apparently NSA knew about at DES design-time when nobody else did. (atleast nobody that's talking about it)
But you're rigth, there's no such arbitrary, unexplained table-tweaks in AES.
Alan Cox had a good take on that when visiting us at BLUG in Bergen. He was lecturing a large hall of people, say 600 persons, and where taking questions.
Someone, presumably a journalist, asked if having everything Open Source wouldn't mean all programmers to loose their well-paying jobs.
Alan didn't reply, but he asked two questions: (paraphrasing from memory)
How many here have been, at some point, paid to write or maintain software ? Hundreds of hands went up. (nerd audience, naturally, who goes to a Alan Cox lecture a saturday evening ?)
How many here have ever been paid to write proprietary software that can be bougth shrink-wrapped ? Literally 2-3 hands went up.
It doesn't work like that. And frankly, I agree with them. Breastfeeding has no relation to what goes on in an adult males head.
I just don't agree that the adult variant is all that "harmful", infact I have a hard time saying where the supposed "harm" in seeing a naked breast resides.
You mean you know noone who will admit to having bougth porn.... Not the same thing.
Besides, porn movies are embarassingly low-budget. What counts as a "high budget" porn-movie doesn't even show up on the radar for budgeting normal movies. And some of the low-budget porn-movies have budgets down in the 4-digits range.
You don't need to sell an awful lot to make a profit if your total budget is less than a years salary.
People, especially those outside the industry, continously miss this point.
When you say you're a programmer, peoples first thougth is that you had some hand in creating some software that can be bougth shrink-wrapped somewhere.
As you point out, that's really the exception. My guess is that atleast 90% of all the programming dont today is never ever going to end up being sold shrink-wrap.
Except smoking significantly reduces your healthy years too. Smokers don't just on the average die sooner than non-smokers -- they also on the average get sick sooner. Really, it's a nonsense argument, if you really considered living those last sick years a net detriment rather than a net benefit, suicide at the point where you get sick would be the only logical choise.
Somehow, most people change their mind on this the minute they are sick. (ok, so some old people do commit suicide, but it's not exactly the majority.)
Better would be to have a coaxial arrangement like a gas boiler flue, where the {hot} exhaust pipe is actually mounted inside the {cool} intake pipe.
What would be the benefit of this over two pipes side-by-side ? Your exhaust-air would get a little cooler, your intake-air a little warmer. But that's exactly the oposite of what you want....
Slashdot Mirror
If you see some reference to, say Draupnir, and have no idea what or who that may be, then an article telling you that it's an arm-ring worn by Odin the norse God, forged by Brokk and Eitri and originally set of a gift-triple consisting of this, Mjollnir and Gullinbursti.
Now, it migth be it was actually worn by Loke, that Brokk had no part in the forging and that Eitri made it alone. Nevertheless you'd now connect this to norse mythology, which would be a huge help in looking up more accurate information about it, should you need so. (often "artifact from norse mythology" will be answer enough for your needs)
Offcourse, an article where *everything* is completely wrong and misleading can be worse than nothing, but I've never seen such an article on Wikipedia. I've seen inaccuracies, inconsistencies, errors. But I've never seen an article so bad that it doesn't at the very least give you a general idea what something is. Have you ?
For many things a traditional encyclopedia is useless even as a first search, because it quite simply has no entry at all.
Wikipedia is most commonly used when you hear something, and want a quick ivdea what that's all about. You won't find out what RFC1777 is in Britannica, infact you're quite likely to not even figure out what an 'RFC' is. Brittanica also can't tell you how many people live in Austevoll or what, exactly Draupnir is.
A incomplete and imperfect article beats NO article any time of day. Usually, once you've read what Wikipedia has to say on a subject, you also know enough to have some idea where to search for more detail.
Not much. It basically says that to function well as part of a society, you need to know the rules of that society. We say "rigth and wrong" but in reality we mostly mean accepted and/or not-accepted by society.
The rules you need to know are different for different societies, so obviously they'll have to be learnt after birth.
An American child does not need to learn that sitting in such a manner as to expose the undersides of his feet to a stranger (for example at a beach) is "wrong", a child from Dubai does.
A child from Germany needs to learn that saying "Gesundheit" when somebody near you sneeze is expected behaviour. A Norwegian child don't.
A child from a village in Amazonas does not need to learn that going outdoors without clothes would be "wrong", a child from Atlanta does.
In some cultures children learn that having more than one wife is "wrong", in others they don't. In some cultures having more than one husband is perfectly fine, in others it'd be "wrong".
There's a gazillion such rules. Most are, if not completely arbitrary, then atleast strongly culturally varying. Having to learn them has little to do with any universal concept of rigth and wrong, and much more with successfully interacting with a society.
This says nothing about our born morality, or lack thereof. All it does say is that training is required to learn a complex set of behavioural expectations.
It's hardly surprising that this carries stiff penalties. Having a legal system at all is pointless if society does not, at the same time, forcefully insist that judgements are respected and adhered to.
In order for the two first to work, the fine must be sufficient to influence your behaviour. If you earn a thousand dollars a week, obviously the risk of getting a 50 cent fine for some behaviour or other is unlikely to deter you much.
On this background, scaling fines by the income of the recipient makes perfect sense. True for individuals, even more so for companies. A $5000 fine could be sufficient to influence a tiny company, on MS it obviously would not even register.
If you did *not* scale the fines then you'd have two alternatives when it comes to companies. Either the fines are so high that any fine at all results in instant bankruptcy for all small and medium companies, or the fines are so low that they are completely ineffectual as tools for modifying large-company-behaviour.
It costs more than a entry-level laptop, and does significantly less. Compared to the small VAIO my wife bougth last week for pretty much exactly this price this thing lacks:
I'm not arguing it should have all these things -- then it'd be a laptop, and we have laptops already. I'm arguing that when it is a much more targeted device, capable of doing MUCH less than a laptop can do, then the price should reflect this. $299 would be fine.
That's not the case, infact the oposite is likely to be the case as aes(message,key) is likely to be well-tested, well-documented code you can simply use whereas xor_with_sillystring(message) is likely to first need being written by you, then debugged etc.
Thus, the only scenario where it makes sense to use sillycode is in cases where the easy crackability of the ciphertext is a feature, something you explicitly want.
"We don't need a million years, only a week of security" is not an argument if you can have the million-years security more easily than the week security. (ignoring the very real possibility that you'll make a mistake and your week-security turns out to be 2-seconds security)
First, $500 is like pay for perhaps half a week of programming. And that assumes that one person got all the prices, and that the prices where actually worth the stated value to that person (unlikely, or he'd have bougth them already) and that he knows before starting that he'll certainly win.
It's true many of the disasters listened originated with man. But that's beside the point.
The point is that with every human dependant upon a single planet a single accident or a single malicious act can conceivably kill every last one of us.
With self-sustaining colonies on multiple planets, that's a lot harder to imagine. You'd need a *simultaneous* accident and/or malicious act on all of our colonies at once.
For example, a large enough meteor can very well kill every human on earth. It would have no influence at all on those living on Mars.
Leave it to an American to explain whats truly important in life.
Being free to marry who you want. Being free to pursue the knowledge one wants. Being free to publish what one wants. Being free to decide yourself wheteher to become a mother or not. Granting your gay partner the same recognition, and the same juridical rigths as heterosexual partners enjoy. Being free from imprisonment for the horrible crime of smoking the leaves of some plant. Being free to openly discuss most any topic without interference from the government. Being allowed to travel freely without having your biometrics controlled by government and checked against a secret "don't fly" list.
These things are, in the words of the parent comment, 'secondary'
The only freedom that really counts is, offcourse, the allmigthy buck.
I rest my case.
True, unless you use web-of-trust, in which case it's sufficient that they've talked to someone you've talked to etc.
Or unless there's some server you trust enough that you'll take thats servers word for the link between a certain email-adress and a certain public-key, and you know the email-adress of your friends/relatives/etc.
Setting up a server that verifies email, and signs public keys of people who complete the verification is near-trivial. (the near-part being related to being sufficiently paranoid about the secret signing-key.)
TweakUI can do focus follows mouse, and decide if the newly focused window should autoraise or not when focused in this manner. Thus that fixes 1.5 of the 5 issues above. But I agree -- even with Gnome or XP it's possible to configure a fair bit more if one is willing to muck about.
I'm just saying, the fact that one experiences irritations when moving from Windows to Linux is no evidence that Windows is superior.
Because there are irritations when moving in the other direction too. It's just a consequence of the two systems being different, that's all.
This is pretty much so for everything people perceive as negative.
That's not what I meant. Strong forces want to *forbid* this research.
What purpose does gay marriage serve?
Irrelevant. Government regulation of stuff that serves no purpose is still government regulation. My point was that the government in the USA does heavily regulate. Not if the regulations make sense or not.
As a tourist, an immigrant or what?
*everyone* who wants to enter the USA, American, Norwegian or Sudanese, need to give up this set of information and present a machine-readable biometric passport. If you leave USA, you'll be required to give up this info to be allowed back in. In contrast you can travel freely from Spain to Iceland to Japan while giving the governments significantly less info.
With the alcohol and sex thing, you again forget what I'm saying. I'm not saying all these regulations are nessecarily good or bad. (they may be, but that's not the point). I'm saying that the USA is infact, pretty heavily regulated. The general impression, as seen from Europe, is that big business and money is significantly less regulated than in Europe while personal behaviour and freedoms are *more* regulated than we're used to.
If huge parts of certain population-groups commit crimes they should be imprisonsed.
Perhaps. But again: that wasn't my point. The point was that drug use is extremely strictly regulated in the USA. I'm trying to get across that the people who say: "we're successful because we're so unregulated" aren't telling the entire truth. Parts of society *are* pretty free in USA, other activities are regulated up the Bazoo.
As for if the regulation is imposed by the state or by washington, that's utterly irrelevant. If it's illegal to, say, sleep with your 16 year old girlfriend where you live, then that is government regulation regardless of which particular branch of government came up with this particular idiocy.
In a gas-boiler you *want* to loose as little heat to the exhaust as possible and keep as much as possible heat in. Leaking heat from the exhaust to the intak is a *feature* in such a setting.
With AC you *want* to loose the heat in the exhaust. In that context leaking heat from the exhaust to the intake-air is a *bug*.
But you're rigth, there's no such arbitrary, unexplained table-tweaks in AES.
Someone, presumably a journalist, asked if having everything Open Source wouldn't mean all programmers to loose their well-paying jobs.
Alan didn't reply, but he asked two questions: (paraphrasing from memory)
I just don't agree that the adult variant is all that "harmful", infact I have a hard time saying where the supposed "harm" in seeing a naked breast resides.
Besides, porn movies are embarassingly low-budget. What counts as a "high budget" porn-movie doesn't even show up on the radar for budgeting normal movies. And some of the low-budget porn-movies have budgets down in the 4-digits range.
You don't need to sell an awful lot to make a profit if your total budget is less than a years salary.
When you say you're a programmer, peoples first thougth is that you had some hand in creating some software that can be bougth shrink-wrapped somewhere.
As you point out, that's really the exception. My guess is that atleast 90% of all the programming dont today is never ever going to end up being sold shrink-wrap.
Somehow, most people change their mind on this the minute they are sick. (ok, so some old people do commit suicide, but it's not exactly the majority.)
It's possible to win the national lottery 10 times in a row too. Or to crack AES by successfully guessing the correct key on the very first try.
What would be the benefit of this over two pipes side-by-side ? Your exhaust-air would get a little cooler, your intake-air a little warmer. But that's exactly the oposite of what you want....