I think it started with the Awesome Bar. I like the feature but some people didn't, and being told it was "awesome" just made them feel alienated, like the Moz devs were completely out of touch.
tries to reconcile faith and science.... Those types of mutation rates are just not possible. It would mutate us out of existence.
These guys are missing how faith works. It's not based on logic and reason; in fact, it is explicitly the virtue of believing something despite logic and reason. Reasoned arguments are pointless when the counterargument is "god guided evolution to create our diversity, and lovingly saved us from mutagenic self-destruction".
Trying to reconcile faith and the scientific method is nonsensical. Trying to do it in context of creationsim, one of the deadest horses to ever be beat, is just foolish.
The MD5 collision vulnerability only allows you to generate pairs of plaintext that share the same hash. It does not allow you to find a colliding plaintext-B from a given plaintext-A. It also does not allow you to compute a plaintext from a given hash.
In terms of passwords, here's what the exploit looks like: The attacker generates a pair of colliding texts; they use one of them as a password; the other text can also be used for the password. There are some contrived scenarios where this might be a problem, but for the normal case of authentication, it's a non-issue.
MD5 still needs to be dropped due to collisions, but passwords aren't the pressing reason.
Your analysis is perfectly realistic. Unfortunately, my cynicism is about congress, which is more than happy to legislate fixes to completely made-up problems. See the absurd debate about "human-animal hybrids" for a related example.
To be honest, this is a good move on their part. Gaming requires fast, precise response, and their tech just can't hack it there; so the headsets were only useful for secondary functions. Other than being shiny, the tech wasn't enough better than a keyboard to justify the price.
Detecting drowsy drivers is a *great* use of the tech. Here, you don't need fast response, so you can afford some time for noise filtering. And the signal you're looking for is much easier to spot: it's not little consciousness tweeks you've learned. Brainwaves when you're falling asleep are screaming obvious. You can probably pick them out with nothing more than an FFT. It's much easier than trying to image-process eye movements.
Sure, but the military is operating on a $700B budget, whereas NASA is working with $18B. They'd be a more efficient spinoff generator even at 5% the output.
I also prefer to think of NASA as part of the military. Those big rockets weren't developed just to deliver astronauts to space, and NASA still does a lot of military work, like launching spy sats.
Oh, I'm happy for what we get. Yes, military research gives us lots of good spinoff tech. NASA and DARPA develop all kinds of toys for us. I just want to set people's expectations that this thing doesn't suggest that practical hypersonic aircraft are even on the horizon yet.
Mach 20 isn't really exotic in this context: don't think of it as a plane; it's more like a Reentry Vehicle for an ICBM warhead. The innovation is instead of following a ballistic trajectory (perhaps with minor maneuvering with an RCS), it glides aerodynamically. That gives it considerably more maneuverability, which would let it drop a bunch of bombs along the way, retarget late in flight, evade countermeasures like a fox, and perhaps even work as a rapid-deployment surveillance platform.
As far as air breathing aircraft go, we haven't progressed very well since the late 60s / early 70s. In that era, we came up with the Concorde (Mach 2 supercruise), and the SR-71 (Mach 3 on an engine that's built like a turbojet with reheat, but effectively operates as a ramjet at cruise speed). For practical aircraft, that's the best we've ever done. Prototypes like the X-43 and X-51 are pushing it farther, but they're only running a couple minutes at a time so far. Sustained flight at those speeds is really hard, so the Falcon's approaching it from the other end: bringing down the speed of a rocket-boosted vehicle instead of trying to raise the speed of an air-breather.
Unfortunately it's mostly a military toy since it's rocket-launched. Few peaceful applications are going to want to pay for an IRBM or ICBM per-use. The most we'll get out of it is knowledge about how to fly at these speeds which may come in handy if we get a practical scramjet working.
There's a small amount of fuel on board for the RCS, probably hydrazine. The OP wouldn't smell it because it's a tiny amount, a long way offshore, and it wasn't released (the vehicle made a controlled splashdown, so it did not break up).
That one's actually not so much of a problem. SHA256 will be secure for quite a while, and if it's ever in danger it's quite easy to switch to a new hashing algorithm. Even if it's completely broken, we'd simply have to stop the block chain at the last known good point, then switch to a new secure algorithm for all future hashes.
Transaction signatures (IE, spending money) is based on ECDSA. Again, if computing power is increasing to the point where it may be a concern (which is still a very long ways off), we have to change algorithms and resign all our wallets. That's more of a nuisance, but it still fails gracefully.
If ECDSA, SHA256, and RIPEMD-160 are all suddenly, simultaneously, and completely broken such that I can do the following:
hash=(a given hash) pubkey=de-RIPEMD-160(de-SHA256(hash)) secret=ECDSApub2sec(pubkey)... then we're in deep shit. In such a scenario of the breakdown of all cryptography traditional bank networks would be in serious trouble too. Fortunately, that's pretty unlikely.:)
Personally, I think the biggest problems with BitCoin are economic, not cryptographic.
The underlying philosophy of value, while interesting, was a bit beyond the scope of the OP's misconceptions.:)
Paper money's intrinsic value is essentially zero; gold's intrinsic value is a low-double-digit percentage of it's price. The difference is large enough to become qualitative: you can always recover *some* value from your gold, whereas slips of paper can go below zero value (you'd have to pay someone to haul them away). Unfortunately fools are buying up gold like mad thinking it's "safe", and the price is now parabolic; the amount of intrinsic value they're buying per dollar is dropping like a rock. I give it a year or two before they find out what their gold is really worth. It won't be zero, but it won't be four figures either.
Fiat currency: Basically every major world currency is by fiat now. There are good arguments both ways, but if you feel strongly about this, I hope you keep all your assets in gold instead of USD, which isn't backed by anything.
CPU: The CPU/GPU cycles aren't wasted. They provide the security for BTC by making it computationally infeasible to double-spend (you'd need to out-compute the rest of the network). If you know a better way to do this in a decentralized way, speak up!
Why BitCoin and Slashdot: Because it's the intersection of the networking, cryptography, economics, freedom from central authorities, and futurism. Perhaps you don't care, but collectively, it's stuff we're interested in. I don't suggest BitCoin as an investment (the value is driven more by speculation than need at present - you'll lose your shirt unless you have experience in forex and penny stocks), but it's absolutely an interesting topic for discussion - even if only so we can find the flaws and start thinking about how to start Bitcoin2 without them.
Disclosure: My present holdings: < 5BTC My market position: no orders open or planned My business: The making and selling of physical goods and services (legal, non-BTC-related) My goal: a stable, international currency with no central authority taking a percentage of every sale I make or controlling my funds
It's not just Ft. Collins. It's all over. It's not just the cops. It's the whole judicial system.
Without going into details, I've watched two friends (in completely unrelated circumstances) get utterly railroaded through the system. They were gray-area cases; Much like in TFA, both fully admitted to the technicalities of the crime, but there were *huge* mitigating circumstances. Nobody in the system gives a shit, and so things that morally should have given them a few months of probation resulted in deals for a few years of prison to mitigate the chance that a jury would ignore the circumstances and a judge would put them away for decades.
The whole experience made a joke out of justice. I'm evaluating other countries to move to.
That's an awfully big assumption to make on their behalf. How much heat do you think they'll take for lying under oath? Some, but enough to make things right?
Don't delude yourself that justice will be done when the facts become public. Justice sucks when plea bargains and settlements are the norm. If you're waiting until after the initial judgement to release your video, you're only giving the victim a chance at a successful appeal, and that's not a lot to bargain with.
I think it'd be heroic (in the greatest self-sacrificing, for the greater good kind of way) for a victim to choose this route to expose the corruption. For you to make that choice is just selfish.
They're still the master. Linux is their eager little pet, far more willing to learn new tricks than their old pet Solaris.
Servers *seriously suck* in this department
on
The Death of Booting Up
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The worst I've dealt with is the HP DL380. Those things took nearly three minutes just to POST. To access the RAID config you had to hit a key combo within a 3-second window at end of the POST.
That was years ago. I think that was the low point, but that's just anecdotal.
I'm not talking about getting rid of cities. The problem is the suburbs surrounding them.
I'm also not talking about eliminating cars, just incentivising using other modes of transport.
You're making two assumptions in your condemnation of public transport: #1, that you need to travel so far (things would be much closer without any reduction in useful space when you don't have streets wide enough for two cars to pass between two cars parked on each side between every row of houses, sprawling parking lots surrounding every business, etc); #2, that public transportation has to be awful like it is in the US.
Numerous small towns have better net connectivity than the silicon valley. It's actually relatively inexpensive for small towns to invest in fiber, and many do when not bullied by the telcos.
Trying to get people to stop using cars is basically forcing them to reduce their quality of life
Getting you to drive less improves everyone else's quality of life. Since they are all reducing their usage too, your net quality of life improves. It is not a zero-sum game: everyone can win at this.
cyclists are expected to share the roads with large dangerous vehicles
Indeed - this is an excellent reason to try to reduce the number of cars on the road. Bicycling is much more fun on a sparsely-trafficked street.
Lack of personal transportation will force people to live in overcrowded ghettos
As a counterexample, I offer the entire history of human civilization before 1920.
People should stop living in the current deep suburbs where you're dependent on long-range personal transportation for everything. That doesn't mean ghettos. That means smaller, locally-sufficient towns. That means when you want to buy milk, a box of nails and a fishing pole, you don't make a trip to Safeway, Home Depot and Big 5, busting your way through a dozen traffic lights, circling for a spot in three enormous parking lots (which are also an enormous waste of land), and wait in line for some minimum-wage checkout clerk who hates his job. Instead, you walk, bike, or drive around the corner to the town's General Store, hand your money to Tom who lives three doors down from you, and jot back home - less stressed, less financially burdened by your car, less alienated. Like you were saying, it's about quality of life.
Sure, they won't have the selection and rock-bottom prices you're used to, but for anything you don't need right this minute, you have the internet. Or just plan your occasional trips to those specialty stores - it's not like you won't have a car at all. You're just encouraged to use it less.
[everything else you said]
We're talking about the Netherlands here. The cities are quite nice, and life without a car is not a burden even outside the cities.
Outcome n+1: A small but dedicated Anonymous raiding squad wearing Guy Fawkes masks is tunneling under Facebook's data center as we speak and planting dozens of barrels of ANFO. Come the 5th of November, Facebook is quite literally destroyed. Overall: l33t++. Probability: It will definitely happen in my dreams tonight.
Yep, coming soon, you just jailbreak it like this and-"...
This is actually one of my big misgivings about my iPhone. I have to jailbreak it to do a lot of cool things with it, and Apple goes way out of their way to make it obnoxiously hard. I skip most of the upgrades because it's a complete PITA to plan an upgrade path that won't lose my jailbreak.
I'm giving very serious thought to switching to an Android phone where I can jailbreak it once (possibly with vendor-blessing, or perhaps not), install Cyanogenmod, and be done with it.
If I wanted the best vendor-supplied experience, the iPhone has it, hands down. But I'm a tinkerer, and Android is calling.
It's kinda neat how it carries the soldier's stuff. But why not take it a step further and put some seats on it so it can carry the soldiers too? Of course, you'd want to then add a roof and windshield to keep the rain off. It'd be nice to add air conditioning to the troop area, so you'd want the option to fully enclose it, and really the best way is to just add some doors to the sides. Maybe some armor too, in case someone takes a pot shot at them. Then you could mount a big gun on top so they could shoot back without even having to dismount.
In all seriousness, I don't see where the "follow me" mode would be more useful than a HMMWV or a light APC. It won't have better terrain handling (I really doubt that it'll outperform a human driver when rock crawling), so you're limited to walking speed on easy to moderate terrain. Why not take a jeep instead? If it's to learn the route, just have someone hop on and drive it the first time through.
That's not to say I think it's useless. An unmanned cargo carrier would probably be very useful for shuttling stuff around. I just don't understand what role it'd fill as a close-follow pack mule.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it started with the Awesome Bar. I like the feature but some people didn't, and being told it was "awesome" just made them feel alienated, like the Moz devs were completely out of touch.
tries to reconcile faith and science. ... Those types of mutation rates are just not possible. It would mutate us out of existence.
These guys are missing how faith works. It's not based on logic and reason; in fact, it is explicitly the virtue of believing something despite logic and reason. Reasoned arguments are pointless when the counterargument is "god guided evolution to create our diversity, and lovingly saved us from mutagenic self-destruction".
Trying to reconcile faith and the scientific method is nonsensical. Trying to do it in context of creationsim, one of the deadest horses to ever be beat, is just foolish.
The MD5 collision vulnerability only allows you to generate pairs of plaintext that share the same hash. It does not allow you to find a colliding plaintext-B from a given plaintext-A. It also does not allow you to compute a plaintext from a given hash.
In terms of passwords, here's what the exploit looks like: The attacker generates a pair of colliding texts; they use one of them as a password; the other text can also be used for the password. There are some contrived scenarios where this might be a problem, but for the normal case of authentication, it's a non-issue.
MD5 still needs to be dropped due to collisions, but passwords aren't the pressing reason.
Your analysis is perfectly realistic. Unfortunately, my cynicism is about congress, which is more than happy to legislate fixes to completely made-up problems. See the absurd debate about "human-animal hybrids" for a related example.
Unfortunately, I foresee a new kind of prohibition. How long before the US Congress legislates to make a gene illegal?
To be honest, this is a good move on their part. Gaming requires fast, precise response, and their tech just can't hack it there; so the headsets were only useful for secondary functions. Other than being shiny, the tech wasn't enough better than a keyboard to justify the price.
Detecting drowsy drivers is a *great* use of the tech. Here, you don't need fast response, so you can afford some time for noise filtering. And the signal you're looking for is much easier to spot: it's not little consciousness tweeks you've learned. Brainwaves when you're falling asleep are screaming obvious. You can probably pick them out with nothing more than an FFT. It's much easier than trying to image-process eye movements.
Sure, but the military is operating on a $700B budget, whereas NASA is working with $18B. They'd be a more efficient spinoff generator even at 5% the output.
I also prefer to think of NASA as part of the military. Those big rockets weren't developed just to deliver astronauts to space, and NASA still does a lot of military work, like launching spy sats.
Oh, I'm happy for what we get. Yes, military research gives us lots of good spinoff tech. NASA and DARPA develop all kinds of toys for us. I just want to set people's expectations that this thing doesn't suggest that practical hypersonic aircraft are even on the horizon yet.
Mach 20 isn't really exotic in this context: don't think of it as a plane; it's more like a Reentry Vehicle for an ICBM warhead. The innovation is instead of following a ballistic trajectory (perhaps with minor maneuvering with an RCS), it glides aerodynamically. That gives it considerably more maneuverability, which would let it drop a bunch of bombs along the way, retarget late in flight, evade countermeasures like a fox, and perhaps even work as a rapid-deployment surveillance platform.
As far as air breathing aircraft go, we haven't progressed very well since the late 60s / early 70s. In that era, we came up with the Concorde (Mach 2 supercruise), and the SR-71 (Mach 3 on an engine that's built like a turbojet with reheat, but effectively operates as a ramjet at cruise speed). For practical aircraft, that's the best we've ever done. Prototypes like the X-43 and X-51 are pushing it farther, but they're only running a couple minutes at a time so far. Sustained flight at those speeds is really hard, so the Falcon's approaching it from the other end: bringing down the speed of a rocket-boosted vehicle instead of trying to raise the speed of an air-breather.
Unfortunately it's mostly a military toy since it's rocket-launched. Few peaceful applications are going to want to pay for an IRBM or ICBM per-use. The most we'll get out of it is knowledge about how to fly at these speeds which may come in handy if we get a practical scramjet working.
There's a small amount of fuel on board for the RCS, probably hydrazine. The OP wouldn't smell it because it's a tiny amount, a long way offshore, and it wasn't released (the vehicle made a controlled splashdown, so it did not break up).
That one's actually not so much of a problem. SHA256 will be secure for quite a while, and if it's ever in danger it's quite easy to switch to a new hashing algorithm. Even if it's completely broken, we'd simply have to stop the block chain at the last known good point, then switch to a new secure algorithm for all future hashes.
Transaction signatures (IE, spending money) is based on ECDSA. Again, if computing power is increasing to the point where it may be a concern (which is still a very long ways off), we have to change algorithms and resign all our wallets. That's more of a nuisance, but it still fails gracefully.
If ECDSA, SHA256, and RIPEMD-160 are all suddenly, simultaneously, and completely broken such that I can do the following:
hash=(a given hash) ... then we're in deep shit. In such a scenario of the breakdown of all cryptography traditional bank networks would be in serious trouble too. Fortunately, that's pretty unlikely. :)
pubkey=de-RIPEMD-160(de-SHA256(hash))
secret=ECDSApub2sec(pubkey)
Personally, I think the biggest problems with BitCoin are economic, not cryptographic.
The underlying philosophy of value, while interesting, was a bit beyond the scope of the OP's misconceptions. :)
Paper money's intrinsic value is essentially zero; gold's intrinsic value is a low-double-digit percentage of it's price. The difference is large enough to become qualitative: you can always recover *some* value from your gold, whereas slips of paper can go below zero value (you'd have to pay someone to haul them away). Unfortunately fools are buying up gold like mad thinking it's "safe", and the price is now parabolic; the amount of intrinsic value they're buying per dollar is dropping like a rock. I give it a year or two before they find out what their gold is really worth. It won't be zero, but it won't be four figures either.
Fiat currency: Basically every major world currency is by fiat now. There are good arguments both ways, but if you feel strongly about this, I hope you keep all your assets in gold instead of USD, which isn't backed by anything.
CPU: The CPU/GPU cycles aren't wasted. They provide the security for BTC by making it computationally infeasible to double-spend (you'd need to out-compute the rest of the network). If you know a better way to do this in a decentralized way, speak up!
Why BitCoin and Slashdot: Because it's the intersection of the networking, cryptography, economics, freedom from central authorities, and futurism. Perhaps you don't care, but collectively, it's stuff we're interested in. I don't suggest BitCoin as an investment (the value is driven more by speculation than need at present - you'll lose your shirt unless you have experience in forex and penny stocks), but it's absolutely an interesting topic for discussion - even if only so we can find the flaws and start thinking about how to start Bitcoin2 without them.
Disclosure:
My present holdings: < 5BTC
My market position: no orders open or planned
My business: The making and selling of physical goods and services (legal, non-BTC-related)
My goal: a stable, international currency with no central authority taking a percentage of every sale I make or controlling my funds
Ah, but how long does it take to boot the Dell hosts underneath? :)
I was bitching about the hardware POST, which VMs don't need to do. I started doing all my installer dev work in VMs for that reason alone.
It's not just Ft. Collins. It's all over. It's not just the cops. It's the whole judicial system.
Without going into details, I've watched two friends (in completely unrelated circumstances) get utterly railroaded through the system. They were gray-area cases; Much like in TFA, both fully admitted to the technicalities of the crime, but there were *huge* mitigating circumstances. Nobody in the system gives a shit, and so things that morally should have given them a few months of probation resulted in deals for a few years of prison to mitigate the chance that a jury would ignore the circumstances and a judge would put them away for decades.
The whole experience made a joke out of justice. I'm evaluating other countries to move to.
The victim will be righted
That's an awfully big assumption to make on their behalf. How much heat do you think they'll take for lying under oath? Some, but enough to make things right?
Don't delude yourself that justice will be done when the facts become public. Justice sucks when plea bargains and settlements are the norm. If you're waiting until after the initial judgement to release your video, you're only giving the victim a chance at a successful appeal, and that's not a lot to bargain with.
I think it'd be heroic (in the greatest self-sacrificing, for the greater good kind of way) for a victim to choose this route to expose the corruption. For you to make that choice is just selfish.
Why only release it after the trial? By all means stay anonymous, but for the sake of the victim, at least supply a copy to their attorney.
They're still the master. Linux is their eager little pet, far more willing to learn new tricks than their old pet Solaris.
The worst I've dealt with is the HP DL380. Those things took nearly three minutes just to POST. To access the RAID config you had to hit a key combo within a 3-second window at end of the POST.
That was years ago. I think that was the low point, but that's just anecdotal.
I'm not talking about getting rid of cities. The problem is the suburbs surrounding them.
I'm also not talking about eliminating cars, just incentivising using other modes of transport.
You're making two assumptions in your condemnation of public transport: #1, that you need to travel so far (things would be much closer without any reduction in useful space when you don't have streets wide enough for two cars to pass between two cars parked on each side between every row of houses, sprawling parking lots surrounding every business, etc); #2, that public transportation has to be awful like it is in the US.
Numerous small towns have better net connectivity than the silicon valley. It's actually relatively inexpensive for small towns to invest in fiber, and many do when not bullied by the telcos.
Trying to get people to stop using cars is basically forcing them to reduce their quality of life
Getting you to drive less improves everyone else's quality of life. Since they are all reducing their usage too, your net quality of life improves. It is not a zero-sum game: everyone can win at this.
cyclists are expected to share the roads with large dangerous vehicles
Indeed - this is an excellent reason to try to reduce the number of cars on the road. Bicycling is much more fun on a sparsely-trafficked street.
Lack of personal transportation will force people to live in overcrowded ghettos
As a counterexample, I offer the entire history of human civilization before 1920.
People should stop living in the current deep suburbs where you're dependent on long-range personal transportation for everything. That doesn't mean ghettos. That means smaller, locally-sufficient towns. That means when you want to buy milk, a box of nails and a fishing pole, you don't make a trip to Safeway, Home Depot and Big 5, busting your way through a dozen traffic lights, circling for a spot in three enormous parking lots (which are also an enormous waste of land), and wait in line for some minimum-wage checkout clerk who hates his job. Instead, you walk, bike, or drive around the corner to the town's General Store, hand your money to Tom who lives three doors down from you, and jot back home - less stressed, less financially burdened by your car, less alienated. Like you were saying, it's about quality of life.
Sure, they won't have the selection and rock-bottom prices you're used to, but for anything you don't need right this minute, you have the internet. Or just plan your occasional trips to those specialty stores - it's not like you won't have a car at all. You're just encouraged to use it less.
[everything else you said]
We're talking about the Netherlands here. The cities are quite nice, and life without a car is not a burden even outside the cities.
Outcome n+1: A small but dedicated Anonymous raiding squad wearing Guy Fawkes masks is tunneling under Facebook's data center as we speak and planting dozens of barrels of ANFO. Come the 5th of November, Facebook is quite literally destroyed.
Overall: l33t++. Probability: It will definitely happen in my dreams tonight.
Whoosh!
Awesome! Is there an iPhone port of this?
Yep, coming soon, you just jailbreak it like this and-" ...
This is actually one of my big misgivings about my iPhone. I have to jailbreak it to do a lot of cool things with it, and Apple goes way out of their way to make it obnoxiously hard. I skip most of the upgrades because it's a complete PITA to plan an upgrade path that won't lose my jailbreak.
I'm giving very serious thought to switching to an Android phone where I can jailbreak it once (possibly with vendor-blessing, or perhaps not), install Cyanogenmod, and be done with it.
If I wanted the best vendor-supplied experience, the iPhone has it, hands down. But I'm a tinkerer, and Android is calling.
It's kinda neat how it carries the soldier's stuff. But why not take it a step further and put some seats on it so it can carry the soldiers too? Of course, you'd want to then add a roof and windshield to keep the rain off. It'd be nice to add air conditioning to the troop area, so you'd want the option to fully enclose it, and really the best way is to just add some doors to the sides. Maybe some armor too, in case someone takes a pot shot at them. Then you could mount a big gun on top so they could shoot back without even having to dismount.
In all seriousness, I don't see where the "follow me" mode would be more useful than a HMMWV or a light APC. It won't have better terrain handling (I really doubt that it'll outperform a human driver when rock crawling), so you're limited to walking speed on easy to moderate terrain. Why not take a jeep instead? If it's to learn the route, just have someone hop on and drive it the first time through.
That's not to say I think it's useless. An unmanned cargo carrier would probably be very useful for shuttling stuff around. I just don't understand what role it'd fill as a close-follow pack mule.