You may, or may not, be correct that investing in "safe" companies with stable historical profits is a better bet than in new unproven companies.
But that wasn't what I said. What I said is that having a larger war-chest will, all other being equal, on the average lead to a greater market evaluation. Put another way, with a market-cap of 5 billion suddenly won a billion in Lotto, their market-cap very very likely *would* go up.
It is very much true that money-coffers are not (by far!) the only thing influencing the market-pricing of companies.
But that is not the same thing as saying that the size of the money-coffers does not influence the pricing of a company at all, which is what you're going to have to claim if you want profits going into money-coffers to provide no benefit whatsoever.
Owning stock is means owning a part of the company. If the company turns a profit, it means that either there's a dividend (which, like you say obviosly benefits those receiving it) OR the money-coffers of the company grows.
Now, trough your stocks you own a part of those money-coffers. It is absurd to claim that it does not benefit you if a money-coffer that belongs 1% to you grows.
Actually that's not the moronic idea. The moronic idea is that assuming there is some sort of security in knowing someones SSN.
There's SSNs in Norway. There's nothing secret about them. Knowing one does *not* make it much easier to impersonate someone or otherwise misuse their identity. (neither does knowing the "mothers maiden name") by the way. My SSN is 230776-50712 and my mothers maiden name is Skogstad. Doesn't tell you anything, other than my date of birth (first 6 digits in SSN) and that I'm male (middle digit in the end of the SSN is odd)
To compute a hash, you have to read the entire file, and do some math on the contents.
Correct this far.
If you have 3 hashes, you have to read your entire 4GB+ file from your hard drive 3 times over,
This however, is absolutely braindead and completely wrong. You are correct that reading the entire file is in general the slowest part of creating a hash, but there's no reason you'd have to do that three times for three hashes.
In general you create a hash by first initializing the hash-function, then repeatedly "updating" it with the entire contents of the file, and then finally finalizing it.
With three hashes you can trivially do that while only reading the file once by doing something like so:
In practice on a modern computer this would be more or less identically quick to a single hash. Yes, it'd consume almost 3 times the cpu, but this is (as you correctly point out) a job that is going to be io-limited anyway.
...is that the USA has a set of laws which enables a 19 year old to sue someone because they flirted with her when she was 17, and considered meeting her for sex.
At that age, wanting sex is perfectly normal, indeed at that age, among females, close to 2/3rds have had sex already. (males are a bit later because quite often couples consist of a younger girl and older boy)
It's quite stupid to have laws against behaviour that is voluntarily, has no outsiders harmed and is so common that practiced by the majority.
Personally I first had sex with my girlfriend when I was 16 and she was 15. We both wanted it. Perfectly legal, nothing wrong about it.
Yeah, sure. No problem. I'm prepared to proove I have a clue. I'm just not prepared to spend so much time doing it when the tech-support person obviously does not;
Your NNTP server seems to be down, I can't read usenet, for that matter it's not even answering pings.
What OS are you using ?
Linux.
What kind of modem do you have ?
None. But the problem ain't the modem in any case, I have a perfectly fine connection to other servers on the internet, just not to your nntp-server.
Did you install Service-pack 3 ?
I said I use Linux. Yes, it's fully patched.
Did you try rebooting your computer ?
This helps when pinging any of a dozen other servers work fine while pinging yours (by name or ip), how exactly ?
Did you or did you not ?
etc....
It's frustrated when you need to literally answer 50 questions to get the person on the other end to recognize the fact that *actually* their NNTP-server is down, and *actually* this is something which someone on their end is actually going to have to fix, it won't help if I reboot one or 10 times.
Okay, so it's not retarded and shared by a lot of lazy people, but instead absolutely astoundingly braindead ?
Or perhaps it should be considered "wise" to handle ones finances so poorly that a unexpected (to people at this level, all bills are unexpected) bill of $500 is a problem.
"Choose convenience" is a lame cop-out. Can you give an example of some behaviour that in your opinion *does* deserve the label "retarded" ?
I fail to see how it's particularily "convenient" to have to go beg someone for money the next time a $500 cost shows up. Or to have to pass the next time something fun or interesting costing $500 appears.
Even if the treatment causes infertility, it's still a major breaktrough -- assuming it actually works for humans offcourse.
A pretty large part of the people getting cancer are past their having-children age anyways, or they already have all the children they want, or they don't actually want any children.
Even if all these fail, so that the infertility is indeed a drawback, I'm sure most people would still choose alive but infertile over dead.
And use of that "tool" is plainly wrong, if not outright illegal
Yeah, rigth. MAPS doesn't do ANYTHING other than publish a list that says essentially: "We believe spam is coming from the ISP associated with these IP-adresses". That's it. You seriously consider that to be illegal ? Under what law ?
If *I* freely choose to read that list, and reject email coming from those ISPs that's my free choise. I have no obligation to accept ANY email, I could choose to accept only email that comes from ip-adresses which are prime if that was my fancy.
They're not in ANY way interfering with your "services", all they are doing is reporting a fact: "We got complaints of spam coming from this ISP."
Ever heard about free speech ?
Face it, you NEVER had any rigth to have your email be accepted by MY servers. When I choose to configure my own servers in such a way that email from you get rejected, that's tough luck for you.
There's a problem with this, and this problem is obvious in countries that have such a law, for example Germany.
The problem is that in practice, any certification costs money. This means that any game developed by nonprofits in general will not be certified. It would be a lot of work, and quite likely costly, for a OSS developer to ensure that his game was certified according to each of dozens of different classification-boards.
And if you think large groups of countries will agree on one common standard, one common certification board, you're dreaming. That's not the case for movies and wouldn't be the case for games.
Practical upshot ? You can't legally sell a Linux-distro to a minor in Germany. In practice it's done all the time, because the law gets ignored for things which aren't mainly games, and which are obviously not very objectionable anyway.
But in principle, you'll have to strip ALL games (including solitaire, mahjong, minesweeper and tuxracer) from a Linux-distro, or jump trough expensive and time-consuming hoops if you want to legally sell your linux-distro to minors in Germany.
Move. To Scandinavia. In Norway, for example, marketing to physical persons over individually adressable electronic channels (i.e. fax, sms, email) is only allowed if there is prior, informed consent, or an ongoing business-relationship. The burden of proof lies on the one doing the marketing.
Penalties: Fines or prison up to 1 year. These actually happen too. This week a company sending spam got a deadling of march 26th 12:00 for providing proof that 5 persons (including me) had given prior, informed consent to receiving marketing-email. If they fail to do so they'll receive a fine of around $10.000.
In most cases it's more like "sloppy infringement" than really "willfull infringement", when the infringement is only due to incompetense and/or inadequate knowledge of the licenses the software is under, it's not usually hidden.
My Kiss DP-500 divx capable networked dvd-player is really a embedded arm-thingie running linux. You don't have to be a genius to figure this out -- their "firmware upgrades" are offered as iso-files, mounting said iso will show you that it's a pretty standard, if stripped down linux.
Even with willfull infringement, it can be hard to hide all traces to the fact that your binary is produced from GPLed code. You can try, but I'm not so sure it'd be trivial, and one thing is for sure -- if you do that -- and get discovered anyway, you'll be treated a lot less nicely than in the case where it's a simple oversigth.
In the USA, about half of all who go personally bankrupt do so due to unpayable medical bills.
USA is the 4. richest land in the world (measured in equal-worth dollars per capita), only after Luxenburg, Norway and Ireland.
USA also uses more government money for healthcare than most other countries 5.8% of all government money is spent on healthcare.
And still, healthcare in the USA is *not* generally available for all, but requires expensive private insurances and frequently drive people in ruin.
Norway, in contrast, uses 6.6% of all government money for healthcare -- 14% more than the USA. And for that *everyone* who is legally in norway for a period of more than a year gets universal healthcare. There are more doctors/capita, there are fewer infants dying, the average living-age is higher, in general there's no indication that the healthcare isn't equally good or better.
When you add in what americans and their employers pay for private healthcare insurance in addition to the government spendings it seems to me that you pay more, and get less. Why, exactly, is this a good way to organize things ?
Of these three, I think only "realism" is questionable. Atleast if you mean realistic in the sense "could really happen", and not realistic in the sense "looks convincing"
You can make a good game with little complexity. But there are also good games that you can make that are only possible to make if complexity can be handled. In other words, given a choise between two machines, one that can handle large complexity, and one that cannot, the former is likely to have the largest selection of good games.
It's the same with freedom. A game can be good with little freedom. But there are other games that require (or atleast benefit from) more freedom. Thus, given the choise between two machines, one of which makes large freedom possible, the other not, the choise is simple.
Even more so for content that is "dense", that is, a lot of information in a small file. A Scientific paper is maybe a single MB or two, and contains a lot of information (it is "dense"), a movie in contrast is a GB or more, and is frequently only entertainment for an hour and a half.
I consider it extremely likely that simply *allowing* distribution will be enough, the net will take care of the rest by itself.
It's harder if you insist that distribution takes place only from *your* servers, and forbid redistribution, but in that case your problems are of your own making.
You are rigth that in many cases suicide-attempts or talks of suicide is a cry for help.
Sure, you could say, there's more rational ways to ask for help than in essence threathening. This is true, but in most cases either the person doesn't know how to use those other more rational ways, or they tried already and nothing happened.
Suicides actually happen when the pain and suffering becomes stronger than the means the person has available for mitigating them. Constructive help would seek either to diminish whatever is causing that pain, or to teach the person new and better ways of coping with it, or both.
And clicking this "Regional Setting" will not only change the keyboard to the apropriate setting, but also ensure that all icons and menu-entries are labeled in the rigth language and the same for help for all programs ?
If so, Windows has improved in this respect. That still doesn't make them the forerunner, Linux has had this for like a decade.
The small languages I mentioned are still not supported though, so for two of the countries I mentioned it wouldn't help. It's an improvement if ONE install can support MULTIPLE languages, but it doesn't bring all that much if the language you want aren't among the ones offered.
It seems to me like Microsoft HAS been farther along in many technologies than Linux, such as native language input and localization for years. It seems to me Linux is still playing catchup to many of MS's supposedly inferior technologies.
It can "seem" whatever it want for you, that doesn't make it reality. Where do I buy a version of XP or Office localised in Icelandic ? Or Nynorsk ? or Sami ? Or Sorbisk ?
That's localisation. Then how about internalisation ?
How, exactly, do I install Windows and Office in such a way that different students can use different languages ? What do I do when there's students using three different mother-tongues in a class and every one of them has the rigth to get their computing-environment in their own language ?
With Linux it's no issue. Simply select which languages are to be available at install. With Windows it is, as far as I know, impossible to at all support more than one language at a time, without going to multi-boot or some such monstrosity.
Norway has students using Nynorsk and Bokmål. Switzerland has some schoold experimenting with mixed classes (french german), Germany has a small minority speaking sorbisch. Finland has a minority speaking Swedish. Canada has french and english parts.
"Walkman" is a trademark of Sony Corporation. Thus there's been dozens of phones capable of playing music in different formats, including mp3, but none of them where able to, for purely legal reasons, refer to themselves as a "walkman".
Cheap marketing. It's sorta like those shamppos claiming to be the only one containing "HydroCare", and then when you read the label more carefully it says "HydroCare" is a tm of the corporation making exactly that shampoo. Thus the competitors *can* contain chemically exactly the same molecules, they just can't call them "HydroCare".
No surprise the slashdot-editors fall for it though.
For example many phishers set up a web-site which will ask for your account-nr and pin. And then when you provide it, they store them and *also* forward you to the real banksite.
So, you'll really be logged in at your real bank. And quite likely you'll never notice that someone was sitting inbetween and storing a copy of your pin.
I know. There are some cases where leaving the price out is a deliberate action. However in those cases, like you say, they'll typically atleast provide information about how to learn the price.
Re:Info on what exactly SHA-1 is ...
on
SHA-1 Broken
·
· Score: 1
You are correct, salting the document before signing it will prevent the attack I described.
I agree a well-designed cryptosystem should do this, hopefully you're rigth that they do.
It's true this is academic research. 2^70 is still reasonable complexity for most everyday applications. There's certainly no need for users to panic. I do however think it's prudent for designers and developers of cryptographic systems to consider migrating to another hash.
Most people wouldn't like charging say their own parents to fix a problem with the computer (or car, or plumbing, or tv-antenna -- this is nothing specific to computers)
But they can do what I did; When my father had problems with his Windows (not viruses or malware, but problems nonetheless) I told him that sure I could fix it, next time I come visit him, in easter.
I also told him that offcourse if he had Linux I could've fixed it tomorrow evening because Linux is 90% maintenable over the internet. (90% because I'd not be able to fix problems which prevented him from getting online)
So, next time I visited he got Linux alongside Windows in a dual-boot configuration. 2 months later Windows stopped working for whatever reason. "but that didn't matter, because I just continued using Linux" my father said. Another 3 months later he had filled up his harddisk, and wondered if there was something I could do to free up space. Well, there's always that windows-partition that haven't been working for the last 3 months anyway, I said. Today he's Linux only.
Turns out there's not *that* many people willing and capable of fixing windows. And suffering without a computer until the next time I visited and fixed things was a bigger nuisance than the rather minor retraining he had to do on Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
But that wasn't what I said. What I said is that having a larger war-chest will, all other being equal, on the average lead to a greater market evaluation. Put another way, with a market-cap of 5 billion suddenly won a billion in Lotto, their market-cap very very likely *would* go up.
It is very much true that money-coffers are not (by far!) the only thing influencing the market-pricing of companies.
But that is not the same thing as saying that the size of the money-coffers does not influence the pricing of a company at all, which is what you're going to have to claim if you want profits going into money-coffers to provide no benefit whatsoever.
Owning stock is means owning a part of the company. If the company turns a profit, it means that either there's a dividend (which, like you say obviosly benefits those receiving it) OR the money-coffers of the company grows.
Now, trough your stocks you own a part of those money-coffers. It is absurd to claim that it does not benefit you if a money-coffer that belongs 1% to you grows.
One would assume, if noone else, atleast Slashdot is aware that there *are* other OSes out here. (and Opera supports quite a few of them)
There's SSNs in Norway. There's nothing secret about them. Knowing one does *not* make it much easier to impersonate someone or otherwise misuse their identity. (neither does knowing the "mothers maiden name") by the way. My SSN is 230776-50712 and my mothers maiden name is Skogstad. Doesn't tell you anything, other than my date of birth (first 6 digits in SSN) and that I'm male (middle digit in the end of the SSN is odd)
Correct this far.
If you have 3 hashes, you have to read your entire 4GB+ file from your hard drive 3 times over,
This however, is absolutely braindead and completely wrong. You are correct that reading the entire file is in general the slowest part of creating a hash, but there's no reason you'd have to do that three times for three hashes.
In general you create a hash by first initializing the hash-function, then repeatedly "updating" it with the entire contents of the file, and then finally finalizing it.
With three hashes you can trivially do that while only reading the file once by doing something like so:
In practice on a modern computer this would be more or less identically quick to a single hash. Yes, it'd consume almost 3 times the cpu, but this is (as you correctly point out) a job that is going to be io-limited anyway.
At that age, wanting sex is perfectly normal, indeed at that age, among females, close to 2/3rds have had sex already. (males are a bit later because quite often couples consist of a younger girl and older boy)
It's quite stupid to have laws against behaviour that is voluntarily, has no outsiders harmed and is so common that practiced by the majority.
Personally I first had sex with my girlfriend when I was 16 and she was 15. We both wanted it. Perfectly legal, nothing wrong about it.
- Your NNTP server seems to be down, I can't read usenet, for that matter it's not even answering pings.
- What OS are you using ?
- Linux.
- What kind of modem do you have ?
- None. But the problem ain't the modem in any case, I have a perfectly fine connection to other servers on the internet, just not to your nntp-server.
- Did you install Service-pack 3 ?
- I said I use Linux. Yes, it's fully patched.
- Did you try rebooting your computer ?
- This helps when pinging any of a dozen other servers work fine while pinging yours (by name or ip), how exactly ?
- Did you or did you not ?
- etc....
It's frustrated when you need to literally answer 50 questions to get the person on the other end to recognize the fact that *actually* their NNTP-server is down, and *actually* this is something which someone on their end is actually going to have to fix, it won't help if I reboot one or 10 times.Or perhaps it should be considered "wise" to handle ones finances so poorly that a unexpected (to people at this level, all bills are unexpected) bill of $500 is a problem.
"Choose convenience" is a lame cop-out. Can you give an example of some behaviour that in your opinion *does* deserve the label "retarded" ?
I fail to see how it's particularily "convenient" to have to go beg someone for money the next time a $500 cost shows up. Or to have to pass the next time something fun or interesting costing $500 appears.
A pretty large part of the people getting cancer are past their having-children age anyways, or they already have all the children they want, or they don't actually want any children.
Even if all these fail, so that the infertility is indeed a drawback, I'm sure most people would still choose alive but infertile over dead.
Yeah, rigth. MAPS doesn't do ANYTHING other than publish a list that says essentially: "We believe spam is coming from the ISP associated with these IP-adresses". That's it. You seriously consider that to be illegal ? Under what law ?
If *I* freely choose to read that list, and reject email coming from those ISPs that's my free choise. I have no obligation to accept ANY email, I could choose to accept only email that comes from ip-adresses which are prime if that was my fancy.
They're not in ANY way interfering with your "services", all they are doing is reporting a fact: "We got complaints of spam coming from this ISP."
Ever heard about free speech ?
Face it, you NEVER had any rigth to have your email be accepted by MY servers. When I choose to configure my own servers in such a way that email from you get rejected, that's tough luck for you.
The problem is that in practice, any certification costs money. This means that any game developed by nonprofits in general will not be certified. It would be a lot of work, and quite likely costly, for a OSS developer to ensure that his game was certified according to each of dozens of different classification-boards.
And if you think large groups of countries will agree on one common standard, one common certification board, you're dreaming. That's not the case for movies and wouldn't be the case for games.
Practical upshot ? You can't legally sell a Linux-distro to a minor in Germany. In practice it's done all the time, because the law gets ignored for things which aren't mainly games, and which are obviously not very objectionable anyway.
But in principle, you'll have to strip ALL games (including solitaire, mahjong, minesweeper and tuxracer) from a Linux-distro, or jump trough expensive and time-consuming hoops if you want to legally sell your linux-distro to minors in Germany.
17 year-old linux-users aren't exactly *that* rare.
Penalties: Fines or prison up to 1 year. These actually happen too. This week a company sending spam got a deadling of march 26th 12:00 for providing proof that 5 persons (including me) had given prior, informed consent to receiving marketing-email. If they fail to do so they'll receive a fine of around $10.000.
My Kiss DP-500 divx capable networked dvd-player is really a embedded arm-thingie running linux. You don't have to be a genius to figure this out -- their "firmware upgrades" are offered as iso-files, mounting said iso will show you that it's a pretty standard, if stripped down linux.
Even with willfull infringement, it can be hard to hide all traces to the fact that your binary is produced from GPLed code. You can try, but I'm not so sure it'd be trivial, and one thing is for sure -- if you do that -- and get discovered anyway, you'll be treated a lot less nicely than in the case where it's a simple oversigth.
In the USA, about half of all who go personally bankrupt do so due to unpayable medical bills.
USA is the 4. richest land in the world (measured in equal-worth dollars per capita), only after Luxenburg, Norway and Ireland.
USA also uses more government money for healthcare than most other countries 5.8% of all government money is spent on healthcare.
And still, healthcare in the USA is *not* generally available for all, but requires expensive private insurances and frequently drive people in ruin.
Norway, in contrast, uses 6.6% of all government money for healthcare -- 14% more than the USA. And for that *everyone* who is legally in norway for a period of more than a year gets universal healthcare. There are more doctors/capita, there are fewer infants dying, the average living-age is higher, in general there's no indication that the healthcare isn't equally good or better.
When you add in what americans and their employers pay for private healthcare insurance in addition to the government spendings it seems to me that you pay more, and get less. Why, exactly, is this a good way to organize things ?
Of these three, I think only "realism" is questionable. Atleast if you mean realistic in the sense "could really happen", and not realistic in the sense "looks convincing"
You can make a good game with little complexity. But there are also good games that you can make that are only possible to make if complexity can be handled. In other words, given a choise between two machines, one that can handle large complexity, and one that cannot, the former is likely to have the largest selection of good games.
It's the same with freedom. A game can be good with little freedom. But there are other games that require (or atleast benefit from) more freedom. Thus, given the choise between two machines, one of which makes large freedom possible, the other not, the choise is simple.
Even more so for content that is "dense", that is, a lot of information in a small file. A Scientific paper is maybe a single MB or two, and contains a lot of information (it is "dense"), a movie in contrast is a GB or more, and is frequently only entertainment for an hour and a half.
I consider it extremely likely that simply *allowing* distribution will be enough, the net will take care of the rest by itself.
It's harder if you insist that distribution takes place only from *your* servers, and forbid redistribution, but in that case your problems are of your own making.
You are rigth that in many cases suicide-attempts or talks of suicide is a cry for help.
Sure, you could say, there's more rational ways to ask for help than in essence threathening. This is true, but in most cases either the person doesn't know how to use those other more rational ways, or they tried already and nothing happened.
Suicides actually happen when the pain and suffering becomes stronger than the means the person has available for mitigating them. Constructive help would seek either to diminish whatever is causing that pain, or to teach the person new and better ways of coping with it, or both.
If so, Windows has improved in this respect. That still doesn't make them the forerunner, Linux has had this for like a decade.
The small languages I mentioned are still not supported though, so for two of the countries I mentioned it wouldn't help. It's an improvement if ONE install can support MULTIPLE languages, but it doesn't bring all that much if the language you want aren't among the ones offered.
It can "seem" whatever it want for you, that doesn't make it reality. Where do I buy a version of XP or Office localised in Icelandic ? Or Nynorsk ? or Sami ? Or Sorbisk ?
That's localisation. Then how about internalisation ?
How, exactly, do I install Windows and Office in such a way that different students can use different languages ? What do I do when there's students using three different mother-tongues in a class and every one of them has the rigth to get their computing-environment in their own language ?
With Linux it's no issue. Simply select which languages are to be available at install. With Windows it is, as far as I know, impossible to at all support more than one language at a time, without going to multi-boot or some such monstrosity.
Norway has students using Nynorsk and Bokmål. Switzerland has some schoold experimenting with mixed classes (french german), Germany has a small minority speaking sorbisch. Finland has a minority speaking Swedish. Canada has french and english parts.
Cheap marketing. It's sorta like those shamppos claiming to be the only one containing "HydroCare", and then when you read the label more carefully it says "HydroCare" is a tm of the corporation making exactly that shampoo. Thus the competitors *can* contain chemically exactly the same molecules, they just can't call them "HydroCare".
No surprise the slashdot-editors fall for it though.
For example many phishers set up a web-site which will ask for your account-nr and pin. And then when you provide it, they store them and *also* forward you to the real banksite.
So, you'll really be logged in at your real bank. And quite likely you'll never notice that someone was sitting inbetween and storing a copy of your pin.
I know. There are some cases where leaving the price out is a deliberate action. However in those cases, like you say, they'll typically atleast provide information about how to learn the price.
I agree a well-designed cryptosystem should do this, hopefully you're rigth that they do.
It's true this is academic research. 2^70 is still reasonable complexity for most everyday applications. There's certainly no need for users to panic. I do however think it's prudent for designers and developers of cryptographic systems to consider migrating to another hash.
But they can do what I did; When my father had problems with his Windows (not viruses or malware, but problems nonetheless) I told him that sure I could fix it, next time I come visit him, in easter.
I also told him that offcourse if he had Linux I could've fixed it tomorrow evening because Linux is 90% maintenable over the internet. (90% because I'd not be able to fix problems which prevented him from getting online)
So, next time I visited he got Linux alongside Windows in a dual-boot configuration. 2 months later Windows stopped working for whatever reason. "but that didn't matter, because I just continued using Linux" my father said. Another 3 months later he had filled up his harddisk, and wondered if there was something I could do to free up space. Well, there's always that windows-partition that haven't been working for the last 3 months anyway, I said. Today he's Linux only.
Turns out there's not *that* many people willing and capable of fixing windows. And suffering without a computer until the next time I visited and fixed things was a bigger nuisance than the rather minor retraining he had to do on Linux.