One thing and an observation. Thing) a good SSL Cert (and accompanying support code) that allows for encryption w/o necessarily ensuring authenticity. We use self-signed certs for https: connections to a web-available database in our office and it's disconcerting to most first-time users to see all the warnings against "confirming that exception".
Observation) I'm still STUNNED that password encryption policies are not part of "privacy statements" on the web. I tend to use "secure" and "insecure" passwords. I was stunned recently when I went into a Sprint office to update my cell phone account and... long story short... the clerk asked me if I knew my account password (I didn't). He then asked for my name and looked it up and... get this... told me what my password was!!! un-fucking-believable. Turns out I did set it (I recognized the pw as being one if mine).
First in the US we have a guy whose father turned him in and who was on several other countries no-fly-list and yet he's able to board an airplane and try to set off a bomb. Now we have a guy who made only one remark and the authorities are all over him.
These 2 items are related by the failure of authorities to see the whole picture. In the Christmas day bomber case they didn't put the evidence together to realize he was a threat. In twitter-threat case they over-reacted to only one piece of evidence.
I would hope that if authorities looked at the entire picture in both cases the proper course of action would have been self evident. So why aren't authorities looking at the WHOLE PICTURE before reacting?
A few years ago when this was first reported I had no strong thoughts about it, mainly because the exclusion in the constitution seemed to be OK. This seizure doesn't happen within the borders only at the borders so and as long as they don't break the device or hold it for an unreasonable length of time... it seems OK.
HOWEVER I now believe it is crazy for at least 2 reasons. a) it's archaic, anything you could reasonably want on your laptop you could "store in the cloud" and grab it once you're within the border but more to the point b) what's the worst that can happen from importing a laptop to a country?
Let's examine (b) for a minute. Assuming the device isn't a way to smuggle something physical like drugs or a weapon, then the only thing on that laptop are ideas. (If you're worried about child porn, see reason (a) above.) I would hope that our society is robust enough that it can withstand any "conflicting" ideas that may be present on someone's laptop and because of this, it might be time to consider a universal bill-of-rights, freedom of speech being one of them.
There may even be precedent for this concept... IANAL, but what's the logic behind a "diplomatic pouch"? I believe they are only big enough to allow a limited amount of a thing. A pouch may be big enough to bring a gun in, but not big enough to bring a tank in. A gun is no threat to a country, a tank... somewhat more of a threat. Similarly, I believe the founders of the diplomatic pouch idea felt that ideas are not a threat to a country. Or at least ideas originating from a country that we have a diplomatic relationship with are not a threat.
Then finally, I believe the reason why most/.ers are worried about this is again related to the concept that laptops store ideas... the other main storage location for ideas are inside our heads. It's a crazy leap to be sure, but I think viscerally some may object to the inherent "idea censorship" that's implied in laptop seizures.
He's a step ahead of you. He's tried doing it the right way and gotten no results. So he's going to skip the part where he wastes his time.
Really?!?! I'll believe you, especially since I haven't RTFA, but let's narrow down just precisely what he's "tired" about "wasting".
Old process: a) find security bugs b) report them to vendor c) wait for a fix d) check to see if fix is released e) if not release info to public if so then do nothing.
One thing that could improve this process is to change steps c-e thusly: c) wait 2 months d) release info to the public
If the company fixed it then releasing the info is no harm, right? and if he doesn't have to check then he's not wasting any time. He could even set up a reminder on his computer to ping him when the 2 months are up.
So... what part of his time is he wasting doing it the "right way"? I'm a bit confused here.
Now if someone would do BallBlazer...
on
M.U.L.E. Is Back
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· Score: 1
If the graphics card puts out say... 120 FPS while the monitor only handles say 30FPS could motion blur be made to happen because of that difference? With both 120 FPS card and monitor the blurring occurs in the eye. At the other end of the spectrum, some graphics cards may compute the blurring directly in the video card and output a blurred image to the monitor. I'm wondering if there's a 3rd way, either now or possible in the future, for an intentional mis-match between graphics card FPS and monitor FPS such that some "buffer" between GPU and monitor could average 2-4 frames worth of graphics card generated high-frame-rate/non-blurred images to present a blurred image on the monitor.
(For that matter, normal 'spatial' antialiasing could be done by generating 3200x1800 images and averaging 4 pixels down to 1 at 1600x900 resolution).
Both are good, no question about it. Both have uses that may or may not overlap with what you intend to do with the CS degree. HOWEVER, I STRONGLY RECOMMEND YOU TAKING WHAT YOU LIKE THE BEST. Your problem with math may be that you're uncomfortable with it and taking any course that makes you comfortable may bleed over into other related areas.
So, given a choice between the 'vector' class, where you may struggle and hate it but 'learn it' and the 'graph' course where you may have fun with it, go for the fun one first and always keep in the back of your mind that you should perhaps take the 'vector' class too.
Actually I have a course outline for you. a) the 'graph' class b) then a full on linear algebra class... it will introduce you to vectors albeit in an abstract way similar to the 'graph' class above (proofs and also vectors in more than just 3 dimensions) c) then the 'vector' class, at least the vector part of that should be a breeze for you. Though the differential part will still be as hard as it was before taking class "b" above.
Finally, ALL math is good. (So I'd let your passion decide.) I remember a math professor of mine commenting on a task he was working on for the forestry department of the university. The task was to compute the area of an arbitrary polygonal shape. The forestry dept first went to the CS department where they tried the normal triangularization trick but ran into trouble because that trick encounters difficulty when dealing with concave polygons. The math professor used Green's Theorem which also results is a much much cleaner algorithm.
I don't think it's amnesia though but 2 other things: Firstly, the vast majority of people have no area of expertise deeper than the average journalist, so THEY never get to see the Gell-Mann effect. They have no reason to distrust the media. Secondly, even those who do may mix equal parts amnesia with assuming editorial oversight. "It's in print, someone must have fact checked, therefore it must be true."
The standard right wing (not really sure how Republican that is) retort is that if you have no safety net you'll be more careful. So... if there were no government assistance in the form of Social Security then you'll be more motivated to save for yourself. Since, as you point out, you're probably paying for someone else's social security... just think how much MORE motivated you should be!
It's sad that modern culture seems to have it that the only way to get an "unbiased" opinion is to get an "equally but oppositely" biased opinion.
A true translation of the Bible using modern technology would have links on practically every word showing the background discussion of all the meanings of the original word, alternative words that could have been used and etc. Discussion on why other words may not capture the original meaning and, here's the key part, let people decide for themselves.
When did we start combating ignorance with alternatively biased ignorance instead of more knowledge?
I don't understand why this sort of thing is in one person's hands in the first place. Granted it's not an admin's sole responsibility to engineer the work environment, but folks, the military has it right here with the double key firing mechanism on nuclear missiles... why aren't there 2 system admins who change passwords simultaneously? One types it in, the other types in the confirmation and then the password is changed?
Just because the system CAN be administered by a single admin doesn't mean it SHOULD be. Redundancy applies to more than just hardware.
Strictly speaking I can agree with Schmidt. "If I'm doing something I don't want anyone do know then perhaps I shouldn't be doing it." However, THAT IS NOT THE ISSUE HERE and I'm surprised Schmidt doesn't know that. a) BIG difference between "anyone" knowing what I do and "EVERYONE" knowing what I do. b) BIG difference between "anyone" and "large group of random strangers" knowing what I do. c) BIG difference between "anyone" knowing all of what I do and "anyone" knowing just enough to take it out of context and me having to prove the full context isn't nefarious.
Finally on a purely technical, reflexive and symmetric point if someone is seeking to know what I'm doing online, it should be as easy for me to learn that THEY are doing THAT too.
A few years back there was an "expose" type interview with select folks inside Google, the upshot of which was that all the google employees interviewed envisioned only the bright optimistic future where more computers and knowledge of everyone's online activities was a good thing. The interviewer could not even ask any questions contrary to this world view because the google employees just could not understand what the interviewer was asking. It was sad and scary.
Thing is I'd personally love to live in that world too, but I'm more realistic than that. I want my social systems to be a bit more fault tolerant of people's foibles and some privacy goes a long way toward warding off abuses of power.
My preferred way to learn morse is to install a keyboard clicker that taps out the morse equivalent of every keystroke I type. Every few years I look for such an app but haven't found one yet. Anyway... I am very interested in the meta-learning aspect of this. If I just have this tapping in the "background" of my daily computer life, how long will it take to sink in?
The patent clerc should tell his 5 year old about the idea. If he says "duh", it's not patentable.
I'm for patent reform as much as the next guy, but I'm also old enough to remember when soda cans had pull tabs that were removable. They were like that for YEARS before the current type that opens but stays affixed to the can. Whenever I hear the "duh" argument I wonder if the putative "5 year old" would have said "duh" to the current type of pop top.
Arguments in favor of that being a "non-duh" patent:
it was YEARS before someone came up with something different.
undoubtedly took some engineering to make it: 1) sealed well enough to not leak, 2) weak enough to open, 3) strong enough to not break off entirely.
I haven't read the MS application, but it's not clear the "duh" argument applies here.
Good to see this particular technology come to life. It's been discussed a bunch in the past. However, when I read the headline I thought of my fav alternative, actual TRAINS.
The idea is to extend the ferry boat concept to things like Amtrack. I live in Seattle and when I need to go to Portland I drive instead of taking the train at least in part because I'll need my car when I get there. If I could drive my car on to a train and wait in the train for the trip to Portland and then drive off once I arrive, I may actually consider using mass transit to get from here to there.
In short, the problem with mass transit is it's a hub-to-hub solution and unless there's a hub-to-destination solution at both ends it's always going to be a hard sell. Ferry's (IMHO) and to a lesser extend the OP's "Land Trains" solve the complete destination-to-destination problem.
I agree, and I'd like to add a subtle addition to #4, think about what sort of activities would require the company to hire another IT person. If you think your company will grow enough in the next 5 years that this may be a possibility, it may be a good idea to quantify your time such that it is easier for the managers to see that indeed your "use rate" is trending upward to the point where another person is needed. (This falls into the above poster's "no surprises" mantra.) I would guess at your size company the worst thing for you is that your time needs expand to the point where it could "naturally" support 1.5 people. But hiring a half a person is hard, so you either eat a boat load of overtime or have some partial outsourcing solution or "temporarily" decide to scale back on some non-mission critical activities (eg employee PC tech support).
I'm suggesting that in addition to merely quantifying your time, you divide it into buckets that also indicate how you'd think the IT needs will grow and/or a partial person could be utilized. If, for example, the PC tech support is a non-mission critical aspect of your biz and if there are good outside consultants available who could do that if your time needs rise in another area, then this will be a useful aspect of your time to track.
Funny... but as I understand it... one mode of QM communications only allows for 100% detection of an intercepted communication, not specifically unbreakable ciphers.
Let's take it all the way in the other direction. Suppose this person had a very communicable disease that was also very deadly, and for strange reasons he was first convicted of murder before doctors discovered that he in fact had this disease. Would you release him from prison?
Answer... yes and no. I'd release him from prison but still keep him away from the general population (think quarantine) and/or cure him from this disease.
So here... Italy is releasing him early but not doing anything else to either protect the rest of the population from him or cure him of the side effects of this aggression gene.
Prison may very well be the wrong place, but completely free is also the wrong place. They keep criminally insane people in a mental hospital don't they? What about this guy?
Slashdot Mirror
It took me a couple minutes to realize the story was not about the Apple Newton, leading into the rumored Apple Tablet...
I didn't realize technology had such a hold on my perception of current and past events, as well as common sense.
Me too. And add another one... I also couldn't tell if it meant the background development of the TV show "Newton's Apple"
One thing and an observation.
Thing) a good SSL Cert (and accompanying support code) that allows for encryption w/o necessarily ensuring authenticity. We use self-signed certs for https: connections to a web-available database in our office and it's disconcerting to most first-time users to see all the warnings against "confirming that exception".
Observation) I'm still STUNNED that password encryption policies are not part of "privacy statements" on the web. I tend to use "secure" and "insecure" passwords. I was stunned recently when I went into a Sprint office to update my cell phone account and ... long story short... the clerk asked me if I knew my account password (I didn't). He then asked for my name and looked it up and... get this... told me what my password was!!! un-fucking-believable. Turns out I did set it (I recognized the pw as being one if mine).
Great, just great.
First in the US we have a guy whose father turned him in and who was on several other countries no-fly-list and yet he's able to board an airplane and try to set off a bomb. Now we have a guy who made only one remark and the authorities are all over him.
These 2 items are related by the failure of authorities to see the whole picture. In the Christmas day bomber case they didn't put the evidence together to realize he was a threat. In twitter-threat case they over-reacted to only one piece of evidence.
I would hope that if authorities looked at the entire picture in both cases the proper course of action would have been self evident. So why aren't authorities looking at the WHOLE PICTURE before reacting?
A few years ago when this was first reported I had no strong thoughts about it, mainly because the exclusion in the constitution seemed to be OK. This seizure doesn't happen within the borders only at the borders so and as long as they don't break the device or hold it for an unreasonable length of time... it seems OK.
HOWEVER I now believe it is crazy for at least 2 reasons.
a) it's archaic, anything you could reasonably want on your laptop you could "store in the cloud" and grab it once you're within the border
but more to the point
b) what's the worst that can happen from importing a laptop to a country?
Let's examine (b) for a minute. Assuming the device isn't a way to smuggle something physical like drugs or a weapon, then the only thing on that laptop are ideas. (If you're worried about child porn, see reason (a) above.) I would hope that our society is robust enough that it can withstand any "conflicting" ideas that may be present on someone's laptop and because of this, it might be time to consider a universal bill-of-rights, freedom of speech being one of them.
There may even be precedent for this concept... IANAL, but what's the logic behind a "diplomatic pouch"? I believe they are only big enough to allow a limited amount of a thing. A pouch may be big enough to bring a gun in, but not big enough to bring a tank in. A gun is no threat to a country, a tank... somewhat more of a threat. Similarly, I believe the founders of the diplomatic pouch idea felt that ideas are not a threat to a country. Or at least ideas originating from a country that we have a diplomatic relationship with are not a threat.
Then finally, I believe the reason why most /.ers are worried about this is again related to the concept that laptops store ideas... the other main storage location for ideas are inside our heads. It's a crazy leap to be sure, but I think viscerally some may object to the inherent "idea censorship" that's implied in laptop seizures.
That's nothing...
Here's an article that uses the Drake Equation to figure out how many politicians are cheating on their spouses. (That we haven't heard of.)
http://newswithnumbers.com/2009/06/25/the-drake-equation-and-the-number-of-politicians-who-cheat/
He's a step ahead of you. He's tried doing it the right way and gotten no results. So he's going to skip the part where he wastes his time.
Really?!?! I'll believe you, especially since I haven't RTFA, but let's narrow down just precisely what he's "tired" about "wasting".
Old process:
a) find security bugs
b) report them to vendor
c) wait for a fix
d) check to see if fix is released
e) if not release info to public if so then do nothing.
One thing that could improve this process is to change steps c-e thusly:
c) wait 2 months
d) release info to the public
If the company fixed it then releasing the info is no harm, right? and if he doesn't have to check then he's not wasting any time. He could even set up a reminder on his computer to ping him when the 2 months are up.
So... what part of his time is he wasting doing it the "right way"? I'm a bit confused here.
I'd be set!!!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_Blazer
Here's a question...
If the graphics card puts out say... 120 FPS while the monitor only handles say 30FPS could motion blur be made to happen because of that difference? With both 120 FPS card and monitor the blurring occurs in the eye. At the other end of the spectrum, some graphics cards may compute the blurring directly in the video card and output a blurred image to the monitor. I'm wondering if there's a 3rd way, either now or possible in the future, for an intentional mis-match between graphics card FPS and monitor FPS such that some "buffer" between GPU and monitor could average 2-4 frames worth of graphics card generated high-frame-rate/non-blurred images to present a blurred image on the monitor.
(For that matter, normal 'spatial' antialiasing could be done by generating 3200x1800 images and averaging 4 pixels down to 1 at 1600x900 resolution).
Both are good, no question about it. Both have uses that may or may not overlap with what you intend to do with the CS degree. HOWEVER, I STRONGLY RECOMMEND YOU TAKING WHAT YOU LIKE THE BEST. Your problem with math may be that you're uncomfortable with it and taking any course that makes you comfortable may bleed over into other related areas.
So, given a choice between the 'vector' class, where you may struggle and hate it but 'learn it' and the 'graph' course where you may have fun with it, go for the fun one first and always keep in the back of your mind that you should perhaps take the 'vector' class too.
Actually I have a course outline for you.
a) the 'graph' class
b) then a full on linear algebra class... it will introduce you to vectors albeit in an abstract way similar to the 'graph' class above (proofs and also vectors in more than just 3 dimensions)
c) then the 'vector' class, at least the vector part of that should be a breeze for you. Though the differential part will still be as hard as it was before taking class "b" above.
Finally, ALL math is good. (So I'd let your passion decide.) I remember a math professor of mine commenting on a task he was working on for the forestry department of the university. The task was to compute the area of an arbitrary polygonal shape. The forestry dept first went to the CS department where they tried the normal triangularization trick but ran into trouble because that trick encounters difficulty when dealing with concave polygons. The math professor used Green's Theorem which also results is a much much cleaner algorithm.
Interesting article. Thanks for mentioning it.
I don't think it's amnesia though but 2 other things:
Firstly, the vast majority of people have no area of expertise deeper than the average journalist, so THEY never get to see the Gell-Mann effect. They have no reason to distrust the media.
Secondly, even those who do may mix equal parts amnesia with assuming editorial oversight. "It's in print, someone must have fact checked, therefore it must be true."
The standard right wing (not really sure how Republican that is) retort is that if you have no safety net you'll be more careful. So... if there were no government assistance in the form of Social Security then you'll be more motivated to save for yourself. Since, as you point out, you're probably paying for someone else's social security ... just think how much MORE motivated you should be!
It's sad that modern culture seems to have it that the only way to get an "unbiased" opinion is to get an "equally but oppositely" biased opinion.
A true translation of the Bible using modern technology would have links on practically every word showing the background discussion of all the meanings of the original word, alternative words that could have been used and etc. Discussion on why other words may not capture the original meaning and, here's the key part, let people decide for themselves.
When did we start combating ignorance with alternatively biased ignorance instead of more knowledge?
I, for one, welcome patent trolls... it slows the coming singularity.
I don't understand why this sort of thing is in one person's hands in the first place. Granted it's not an admin's sole responsibility to engineer the work environment, but folks, the military has it right here with the double key firing mechanism on nuclear missiles... why aren't there 2 system admins who change passwords simultaneously? One types it in, the other types in the confirmation and then the password is changed?
Just because the system CAN be administered by a single admin doesn't mean it SHOULD be. Redundancy applies to more than just hardware.
Strictly speaking I can agree with Schmidt. "If I'm doing something I don't want anyone do know then perhaps I shouldn't be doing it." However, THAT IS NOT THE ISSUE HERE and I'm surprised Schmidt doesn't know that.
a) BIG difference between "anyone" knowing what I do and "EVERYONE" knowing what I do.
b) BIG difference between "anyone" and "large group of random strangers" knowing what I do.
c) BIG difference between "anyone" knowing all of what I do and "anyone" knowing just enough to take it out of context and me having to prove the full context isn't nefarious.
Finally on a purely technical, reflexive and symmetric point if someone is seeking to know what I'm doing online, it should be as easy for me to learn that THEY are doing THAT too.
A few years back there was an "expose" type interview with select folks inside Google, the upshot of which was that all the google employees interviewed envisioned only the bright optimistic future where more computers and knowledge of everyone's online activities was a good thing. The interviewer could not even ask any questions contrary to this world view because the google employees just could not understand what the interviewer was asking. It was sad and scary.
Thing is I'd personally love to live in that world too, but I'm more realistic than that. I want my social systems to be a bit more fault tolerant of people's foibles and some privacy goes a long way toward warding off abuses of power.
My preferred way to learn morse is to install a keyboard clicker that taps out the morse equivalent of every keystroke I type. Every few years I look for such an app but haven't found one yet. Anyway... I am very interested in the meta-learning aspect of this. If I just have this tapping in the "background" of my daily computer life, how long will it take to sink in?
The patent clerc should tell his 5 year old about the idea. If he says "duh", it's not patentable.
I'm for patent reform as much as the next guy, but I'm also old enough to remember when soda cans had pull tabs that were removable. They were like that for YEARS before the current type that opens but stays affixed to the can. Whenever I hear the "duh" argument I wonder if the putative "5 year old" would have said "duh" to the current type of pop top.
Arguments in favor of that being a "non-duh" patent:
I haven't read the MS application, but it's not clear the "duh" argument applies here.
Problem is most lawyers don't write comments in their "Programs".
How about GONE - GO - Next Edition.
Good to see this particular technology come to life. It's been discussed a bunch in the past. However, when I read the headline I thought of my fav alternative, actual TRAINS.
The idea is to extend the ferry boat concept to things like Amtrack. I live in Seattle and when I need to go to Portland I drive instead of taking the train at least in part because I'll need my car when I get there. If I could drive my car on to a train and wait in the train for the trip to Portland and then drive off once I arrive, I may actually consider using mass transit to get from here to there.
In short, the problem with mass transit is it's a hub-to-hub solution and unless there's a hub-to-destination solution at both ends it's always going to be a hard sell. Ferry's (IMHO) and to a lesser extend the OP's "Land Trains" solve the complete destination-to-destination problem.
I agree, and I'd like to add a subtle addition to #4, think about what sort of activities would require the company to hire another IT person. If you think your company will grow enough in the next 5 years that this may be a possibility, it may be a good idea to quantify your time such that it is easier for the managers to see that indeed your "use rate" is trending upward to the point where another person is needed. (This falls into the above poster's "no surprises" mantra.) I would guess at your size company the worst thing for you is that your time needs expand to the point where it could "naturally" support 1.5 people. But hiring a half a person is hard, so you either eat a boat load of overtime or have some partial outsourcing solution or "temporarily" decide to scale back on some non-mission critical activities (eg employee PC tech support).
I'm suggesting that in addition to merely quantifying your time, you divide it into buckets that also indicate how you'd think the IT needs will grow and/or a partial person could be utilized. If, for example, the PC tech support is a non-mission critical aspect of your biz and if there are good outside consultants available who could do that if your time needs rise in another area, then this will be a useful aspect of your time to track.
Funny... but as I understand it... one mode of QM communications only allows for 100% detection of an intercepted communication, not specifically unbreakable ciphers.
Let's take it all the way in the other direction. Suppose this person had a very communicable disease that was also very deadly, and for strange reasons he was first convicted of murder before doctors discovered that he in fact had this disease. Would you release him from prison?
Answer... yes and no. I'd release him from prison but still keep him away from the general population (think quarantine) and/or cure him from this disease.
So here... Italy is releasing him early but not doing anything else to either protect the rest of the population from him or cure him of the side effects of this aggression gene.
Prison may very well be the wrong place, but completely free is also the wrong place. They keep criminally insane people in a mental hospital don't they? What about this guy?
It's not the size of the leap that's impressive it's the fact that the intermediate space wasn't traversed.
Conception AND Birth