So I made this argument in a submission over on Plastic on the second. I wonder if this article about it just came up by coincedence.
In any case I'm wondering if this means there is any actual legal merit in the speculation. It seemed a compelling argument from a logical case but I haven't heard from anyone who might have enough constitutional law experience to know.
Automatically generate a contract and then force the user to write code which meets that contract when interpreted. This would be a very effective test for humans on the other hand unfortunatly it takes too much training to learn.
Basically this is the same effect that it is very easy for humans to prove a great many simple theorems but we can't write a good computer theorem prover. I teach logic and it is clear that even the worst student can be made to do better at proofs than computer based theorem provers suggests that this would be a very good test (in theory). Since there is a natural (Howard-curry?) conrrespondance between proving a statement and writing a function with a particular type another way to pose the problem is ask the user to write code implementing a particular contract.
Maybe the idea could be cleaned up with a really simply code system and explanation of what it meant to implement the contract. At the very least one could use it for geek only sites.
Automatically generate a contract and then force the user to write code which meets that contract when interpreted. This would be a very effective test for humans on the other hand unfortunatly it takes too much training to learn.
Basically this is the same effect that it is very easy for humans to prove a great many simple theorems but we can't write a good computer theorem prover. I teach logic and it is clear that even the worst student can be made to do better at proofs than computer based theorem provers suggests that this would be a very good test (in theory). Since there is a natural (Howard-curry?) conrrespondance between proving a statement and writing a function with a particular type another way to pose the problem is ask the user to write code implementing a particular contract.
Maybe the idea could be cleaned up with a really simply code system and explanation of what it meant to implement the contract. At the very least one could use it for geek only sites.
For instance looking at the pdf http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/captcha_crypt.pdf the following procedure suggests itself. Use newly aquired web pages that haven't been added to the search engine yet as seeds and ask the human to compare these to a paragraph generated by automated text generation and answer which makes sense. While the authors of the paper dismiss this approach because it relies on a particular secret (the human created paragraphs) I think they ignore the possibility that this secret can continually be updated.
While I understand the appeal of vision based tests as very easy to automate and simple to implement long term use of these kind of tests, especially in single use contexts like signing up for an account requires a more complex problem.
Quite simply vision is too simple, or at least the easily automated part of vision that is being used in these type of tests. What needs to be tested is ability to reason and detect patterns in data.
Basically we need to give people reading interpratation tests like they had on the SAT and GRE. Of course the simplest way to do this would just be to hire people to give the correct answers. Heck, this might even be the cheapest way to deal with the problem. You could pay people very little to work at home and give a one word/few word description of what a paragraph was about.
However, if you insist on making this entierly automated I think search data provides a useful basis to work from. Basically, I think you could get a vague idea of paragraph content by the semantic structure, i.e. the web pages which link here and the pages to which this links. Alternativly you might ask the person to give a related topic that wasn't one of a list of obviously related topics.
Sure spammers could duplicate this if they had the algorithm and the usage data. However, the idea behind this is that building an index to the whole www so they can locate the paragraph snippet in its semantic context is very expensive and is something yahoo and google can do easily and the spammers would have great trouble doing.
Of course maybe there is some really clever algorithm out there that is computationally one way for computers but easy to reverse for people.
Ehh, depends. If someone is using geek to describe their ideal state, like christian, I agree. On the other hand if they are just using it to be descriptive, the same way I might say I'm an american or otherwise describe my cultural background.
Furthermore, while I agree with you about what everyone thinks some people really are more abnormal, or at least less accepted by society, than non-geeks. Sure, there are some very charming socially conciouss geeks but the very fact of their interests does put them at a disadvantage (talking about technical details does not make for good chit-chat). Also many geeks have very limited social skills (still not sure why that is...some suggest apsergers).
Now many people do decide they are geeks in a very self-limiting fashion, they realize they are not accepted by society at large and retreat and only interact with other geeks. This I agree is to be avoided. However, others may realize this and use this knowledge to change their behavior and try talking about something else than chip design at the next party. Also some people really have gone out and seen the world and decided they like hanging out with geeks best and this may just be a sign of maturity, everyone should reach a point in their life when they realize who they enjoy and stop wasting their time trying to get others to like them.
Suppose the figure cited in the summary is true, most software prices have fallen only by 14% but areas microsoft has entered have fallen by 60%. Does this mean microsoft is making prices lower? Not at all!
If Microsoft picked software markets to enter at random this would be a strong argument. However, they most certainly do not which means that a statistic like this must be taken with caution.
Suppose microsoft's strategy is to break into a market gain dominance and then extract money once competition was crushed. Then microsoft would choose to enter those markets with overpriced software which they could undercut explaining the correlation between microsoft entering the market and lower prices.
In short the statistic we really need to see is a size weighted average of price reduction.
I understand that functional units are not the same thing as an APU. However, the fact that the G4 (and I think G5) have multiple functional units which can handle the same type of operation means there is silicon to spare in some sense.
As for the quesiton of eliminating the cache I thought this was true in name only. Isn't that 8K or whatever each APU is claimed to have access to supposed to be on chip?
Well, I think we all recognized that article was a little over enthusiastic but it does suggest some interesting possibilities.
First of all I want to say I think it is completly possible to make a processor with 8APUs and so forth. For starters PowerPC chips already have several seperate execution units on them, and I think they use fewer transitors than intel chips. Moreover, a huge chunk of the transitor budget goes to doing things like cache consistancy or complicated instruction prediction which is probably not used on the much simpler APUs.
Of course it seems like this is primarily of interest to game systems or signal processing applications (note that a 4 threaded 32 stream processors is just another way of saying 4 cell procesors, each has a PPC core with 8 APUs). However, I would not be so quick to dismiss this for the PC market. While it may be true that many individual applications may not easily multi-thread it seems we are approaching a point where the biggest complaint is not the maximum processing rate in one application but the ability to run multiple applications at once. On my computers I'm rarely if ever frustrated at the rate some program is running at, but slowdown in other programs when I run a processor intensive job or turn on a video. So while drawing a webpage may not be speed up by this processor drawing several webpages at the same time will be and that is the sort of thing which makes a big difference for the end user.
Also, a processor like this offers great possibilities for JIT and VM code. The main thread can dispatch instructions and threads to the APUs dynamically based on what is happening in the system. Also I find it interesting that IBM is going the same way as intel in pushing all the complexity on the compiler. It makes one wonder if itanium is really as dead as everyone thinks. Perhaps in 4 years when AMD can't squeeze anything more out of x86 intel will be ready to jump in having worked out all the bugs to their new chip.
Just to let everyone know this is not the only product or even the first product to do this.
Another option is EPL server by ispheres . Unlike the product mentioned here, which seems to be just some extra code thrown on top of a database EPL server is built from the ground up for this sort of application.
Quite frankly this is not worthwhile except for high end companies who do not particularly suffer from registar-lock (the trouble to deal with the registrar is low compared to the overhead in deciding to change domain management) so it can be offered to them by the third-party registrars as an extra feature. In fact in a situation like this PGP doesn't really provide that much more security than a stored hashed password like which seems to be offered by the procedure of for org, biz and the like domains.
PGP is all great to play spys with or if you are likely to be investigated by the government it is of limited use, and in fact a security risk for many people. If pgp was incorporated into the domain standard it would either have to be managed at the registrar level, which from a users point of view gives no more security than whatever password is used to access it. If it is managed by the user the week point will never be the PGP but the lost key recovery process. Besides, the week point when using good passwords over secure connections is likely to be trojans and key-loggers which actually may be more dangerous under PGP, if the user puts all his keys on one key ring he enters the password far more frequently than his password/passphrase at the registrar making it easier to catch with a keylogger.
Ohh, oops. I'm not a fish expert so my memory about those being shallow water fish may be completly bad. your sure these are the type of fish which never go in shallow water??
The recomendation in the linked discussion is that by using both restrar-lock and auth_info the system provides a reasonable comprimise between security and the incentive for registrars to make the domain transfer process as difficult as possible.
Now, I agree that there is certainly a worry that losing registrars could make sending a domain name very difficult if they initiated a transfer. However, a system which provides registrar-lock which many registrars initiate by default and require user action to remove is just as abuseable. So long as the registrar may put on registrar-lock by default they may incorporate any difficulty they want into the process of removing registrar lock. In fact this is even worse than just requiring the losing registrar to initiate a transfer. After all many domain holders like myself until today have no idea that registrar lock even exists and may attempt to do the transfer before we know we have to undo the registrar lock, adding additional difficulty on top of any difficulty for removing registrar-lock.
As it is we get the worst of both worlds. Since registrar-lock is not always turned on many domain names are left vulnerable but those registrars who want to make it difficult to leave have just as much incentive to turn on registrar-lock by default and make it hard to turn off as they would to initiate a transfer. At this point it would be strictly better to go to a loser-initiated system.
I think a good fix would be to require that registrar-lock be off by default. Those domains that wanted it could turn it on easily, after all the registrar has every incentive to make this as easy to do as possible. This is also a good match for the threat/benefit model. Big name domains are must liable to be attacked, but they have departments that can deal with a difficult transfer process, while private users can leave registrar-lock off knowing that they are unlikely to be targeted and being more likely to change registrars anyway.
Alright, I know this post is probablly too far down for anyone to ever notice but a couple points about the question of whether females are naturally worse at math and science.
So my first point is that there are *clearly* social and cultural factors at work here discouraging women from doing math and science. I'm a grad student in mathematics (well logic actually) and since this is an issue of some interest to me I've conducted some informal surveys of women I know around the department and elsewhere. Almost every one admits to feeling some pressure to be dumb or at least dumb in technical fields to attract men.
Unfortunatly, it really does seem like many men prefer women who they can protect and somehow fufill the masculine role with. Often girls believe that by acting dumb or ditzy they will pick up me, and they are probably right. I have had several women tell me they started acting dumb or hid their interest in math/science to attract men. This matches well with the data which suggests that women start falling out of math/science about when puberty hits.
On top of this is the issue that mathematics and the sciences are naturally somewhat combative and assertive. These are not some random cultural fact as many feminist thinkers would have us believe, but a reflection of the truth conditions in many of these fields. Scientific fields work best when their is a competition for the truth and everyone tries to tear down an idea before it becomes accepted. Now there *may* be a genetic component of ability to deal with competition but in this case I think the cultural component outweighs the genetic.
For instance my mother is an assertive argumentative woman, though much less so than me and other men I know. Yet she often gets shit for being a bitch or the like because she is so combative and stands up for her position. Even if my example is unconvincing, and hell I wouldn't believe someone talking about their mother either, I think it is clear that women are expected to be less confrontational by society. Just look at the way men relate to each other versus women, women are quite frequently big on cooperation and agreement while men will often take enjoyment in competition. This certainly may be rooted in genetics but for whatever reason this has a clear social impact on girls while growing up.
This all is not to mention plenty of people who still instill differnt values in their male and female children, often unconciouslly. For instance one of my female friends would be told 'stop thinking like a man' when she was exceptionally logical or the like while growing up.
So clearly there is a large social/cultural component. Yet it is far from clear that this is responsible for all of the large ratio between men and women in the sciences. After all, the effects I mentioned above should all be fully in gear in college yet women drop out of the math and sciences all the way up through grad school at a greater rate than men.
Now, I admit this surely doesn't prove that women have less ability, in fact if anything I think it suggests they have less interest. Though in a very real sense interest is an important facet of math/science ability. Moreover, it is quite possible that this continued drop out rate just reflects a greater opportunity to do have other engaging lifestyles.
It is quite possible, likely even, that many people in math and science would have bailed out if they were offered a chance at a family life, or even easy sex and partying. We should not dismiss the notion that women are dropping out of math and science because these are very demanding and time-consuming activities and they have the chance to life in some other manner (party, have children). While men might have similar attitudes often they simply don't have the opportunity, or temptation, to leave science for a relationship or another lifestyle.
In short there clearly are cultural influences but it is quite possible that these cultural attitudes arise out of real differ
Alright you want to make a robot that does a traditional dance. Fine I guess that has an appeal but don't pretend it is to preserve japanese culture, unless that is the culture of making crazy electronic gadgets. After all DVDs and Movies of *people* are alot easier to imitate than dancing robots.
Well if you have actually *read* my post you would see that I specifically talked about near shore creatures. Anyone who has seen the videos of the tsunami should realize that it can pick up an move things near shore.
While you are surely right that divers in the deep sea will not be affected those close in to the shore, where the water has started to rise up, can very well be picked up and carried ashore.
Those aren't particularly weird fish. They may be weird and some of them are fish but this certainly doesn't make them weird fish.
Alot of the things in the water look pretty damn strange but I recognized alot of these animals from science shows and not even ones about deep water fish. While I can't comment about all of them several looked to be the type one might find in fairly shallow water.
So in response to those who said a Tsunami could bring up these fish I have to disagree, it certainly could stir up fish which live close to shore and even throw them on to land. While it isn't going to stir up fish from the deep ocean my guess is that these are all just fish that live near land but people normally don't notice.
I don't think you understand the point of CORBA style objects. These objects are not just data but objects in the broader object oriented programing sense. It is probably better to think of something like CORBA as being an object orientated replacement to RPC than as a replacement for IPC.
If you want to implement programs relying on shared services, for instance a insert a graph object inside a spreadsheet you need some kind of remote procedure call. Often these services need persistant state data and simply *can't* be implemented by executing a whole program each time you need a redraw or something similar. Furthermore if you insist on each program to invent it's own mechanism for managing persistant state info, rather than using a general OO standard, then far *fewer* programs can intercommunicate.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against small text based utilities for command lines and the like. However, we don't insist that all programs which want a directory listing call the ls program and parse the output and we shouldn't insist programs do this instead of using an object model either.
What I meant is that AMD can claim advantages about the NX bit in one of two ways.
1: It is a technical innovation which increases the capabilities of the processor to stop exploits.
2: It is a pragmatic innovation which will cause OS's to have better virus protection.
AMD can choose either way to promote their product but not half of one and a little bit of the other. If you choose 1 you have to admit that NX does nothing technically that segment level protection does. If you choose 2 you can only consider the benefits that are likely to be implemented in the OS not theoretical ones.
Yes, it could be used to implement such a secure OS but it won't be in most mainstream operating systems. Dividing things strictly into writable and executable bins causes all sorts of backward compatibility problems for JIT compilers and the like (stack execution I think is more rare).
In any case this was already possible before the NX bit. Segment level protection prohibits the CPU from loading CS with any segment which isn't marked executeable. Unfortunatly, most OS's don't use segment level protection (someday I would like to find out why) so the only claims of improvement that AMD should be able to provide with the NX bit are in terms of OS adoption. Clearly openBSD was able to use this earlier feature in previous versions of OS so it is certainly technically possible. So at best AMD should be able to advertise "makes it easier for your OS programmers."
So I mostly agree with your conclusions, I even made a similar post about it being more a bond film device than something for real terrorists. However, just the weight of the rock isn't enough to guarantee this. Apparently this slab is particularly precarious or else we wouldn't be worrying about it in the first place. After all we aren't worried about the actual Isle of Man being knocked over into the sea. In theory you can balance an arbitrarily large amount of stuff in a manner which allows a fingertip to topple it over.
So I am inclined to believe that nothing on that scale could be affected reasonable amounts of conventional explosives (reasonable includes multiple jetliners filled with explosives). However, I would really like actual confirmation that things weren't balanced that carefully.
I've been in the bay area for 4 years and I have seen lightning only twice during that entire period, remembering that most lightning is cloud to cloud that's pretty damn unlikely. In fact I challenge you to find any record of lightning damage in the SF Bay area (modulo people flying kites into storms). Even the girl who had been hit by lightning 3 times moved here to escape it and nothing has happened since.
Exactly how loose is this giant slab of rock (I couldn't find any pictures). Is it a real possibility that terrorists could dislodge it with high explosives?
I imagine this is just another one of those grand doomsdays schemes that makes for a perfect movie but isn't actually practical. Just like covering the artic/antartic with carbon black (to change the albedo(sp?)) it is something people could do, but not without arousing great sucpiscion. So it's great to have your super secret organization with sub-ice airports launch an operation to cover the pole with carbon black over the course of hours any reasonable terrorist plot would be detected before anything of substance was accomplished. Similarly, SPECTRE might be able to install thousands of tons of explosive from their underground tunnels but any real terrorists wouldn't be able to install enough explosives before being detected.
So it sounds like a great plot for a James Bond movie, and I hope I'm not wrong about how much explosives it would take.
I can't say I think the NX bit is really that big a deal, it only makes things a little harder when you can't execute code on the stack since a stack overflow lets you return program execution to any address on the system you want. Often a cleverly designed system call or another non-stack user controlled data structure will still allow the attacker to gain control.
Still it really does provide some virus protection which is alot more than can be said about most commercials. I mean is the 'lemon strength cleanser' actually a better cleanser because of the lemon. Is 'oxygenation' or whatever really important for skin care.
Maybe they manage to stop all these types of advertising exageration over there, and if so my hat is off to them. At least if they can really manage to do it objectively. Often these sorts of rules aren't applied evenly, letting false but dear cultural assumptions slide by but blocking correct but disconerting claims. For instance I have no doubt that if we had these sort of tight 'truth in advertising' laws in the US we would find condom ads forced to produce 3 peer-reviewed studies for every claim they make while gun ads would be allow to imply or outright say that carrying a gun makes you safer. But maybe other countries can pull this off, after all I'm always amazed the U.K. can function so well without an explicit constitution so who knows. If they can do it objectively my hats off to them.
Sorry, you are correct I screwed up the terminology.
Anyway are you really saying that if I DELETE a file in a versioned file system I can't restore it but if I only fill it with null bytes I can restore it? This seems crazy.
In any case so long as versioning lets you restore deleted or null filled files you can claim no particular advantage for a delete permission in regards to malacious damage.
Slashdot Mirror
So I made this argument in a submission over on Plastic on the second. I wonder if this article about it just came up by coincedence.
In any case I'm wondering if this means there is any actual legal merit in the speculation. It seemed a compelling argument from a logical case but I haven't heard from anyone who might have enough constitutional law experience to know.
Automatically generate a contract and then force the user to write code which meets that contract when interpreted. This would be a very effective test for humans on the other hand unfortunatly it takes too much training to learn.
Basically this is the same effect that it is very easy for humans to prove a great many simple theorems but we can't write a good computer theorem prover. I teach logic and it is clear that even the worst student can be made to do better at proofs than computer based theorem provers suggests that this would be a very good test (in theory). Since there is a natural (Howard-curry?) conrrespondance between proving a statement and writing a function with a particular type another way to pose the problem is ask the user to write code implementing a particular contract.
Maybe the idea could be cleaned up with a really simply code system and explanation of what it meant to implement the contract. At the very least one could use it for geek only sites.
Automatically generate a contract and then force the user to write code which meets that contract when interpreted. This would be a very effective test for humans on the other hand unfortunatly it takes too much training to learn.
Basically this is the same effect that it is very easy for humans to prove a great many simple theorems but we can't write a good computer theorem prover. I teach logic and it is clear that even the worst student can be made to do better at proofs than computer based theorem provers suggests that this would be a very good test (in theory). Since there is a natural (Howard-curry?) conrrespondance between proving a statement and writing a function with a particular type another way to pose the problem is ask the user to write code implementing a particular contract.
Maybe the idea could be cleaned up with a really simply code system and explanation of what it meant to implement the contract. At the very least one could use it for geek only sites.
For instance looking at the pdf http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/captcha_crypt.pdf the following procedure suggests itself. Use newly aquired web pages that haven't been added to the search engine yet as seeds and ask the human to compare these to a paragraph generated by automated text generation and answer which makes sense. While the authors of the paper dismiss this approach because it relies on a particular secret (the human created paragraphs) I think they ignore the possibility that this secret can continually be updated.
While I understand the appeal of vision based tests as very easy to automate and simple to implement long term use of these kind of tests, especially in single use contexts like signing up for an account requires a more complex problem.
Quite simply vision is too simple, or at least the easily automated part of vision that is being used in these type of tests. What needs to be tested is ability to reason and detect patterns in data.
Basically we need to give people reading interpratation tests like they had on the SAT and GRE. Of course the simplest way to do this would just be to hire people to give the correct answers. Heck, this might even be the cheapest way to deal with the problem. You could pay people very little to work at home and give a one word/few word description of what a paragraph was about.
However, if you insist on making this entierly automated I think search data provides a useful basis to work from. Basically, I think you could get a vague idea of paragraph content by the semantic structure, i.e. the web pages which link here and the pages to which this links. Alternativly you might ask the person to give a related topic that wasn't one of a list of obviously related topics.
Sure spammers could duplicate this if they had the algorithm and the usage data. However, the idea behind this is that building an index to the whole www so they can locate the paragraph snippet in its semantic context is very expensive and is something yahoo and google can do easily and the spammers would have great trouble doing.
Of course maybe there is some really clever algorithm out there that is computationally one way for computers but easy to reverse for people.
Ehh, depends. If someone is using geek to describe their ideal state, like christian, I agree. On the other hand if they are just using it to be descriptive, the same way I might say I'm an american or otherwise describe my cultural background.
Furthermore, while I agree with you about what everyone thinks some people really are more abnormal, or at least less accepted by society, than non-geeks. Sure, there are some very charming socially conciouss geeks but the very fact of their interests does put them at a disadvantage (talking about technical details does not make for good chit-chat). Also many geeks have very limited social skills (still not sure why that is...some suggest apsergers).
Now many people do decide they are geeks in a very self-limiting fashion, they realize they are not accepted by society at large and retreat and only interact with other geeks. This I agree is to be avoided. However, others may realize this and use this knowledge to change their behavior and try talking about something else than chip design at the next party. Also some people really have gone out and seen the world and decided they like hanging out with geeks best and this may just be a sign of maturity, everyone should reach a point in their life when they realize who they enjoy and stop wasting their time trying to get others to like them.
Suppose the figure cited in the summary is true, most software prices have fallen only by 14% but areas microsoft has entered have fallen by 60%. Does this mean microsoft is making prices lower? Not at all!
If Microsoft picked software markets to enter at random this would be a strong argument. However, they most certainly do not which means that a statistic like this must be taken with caution.
Suppose microsoft's strategy is to break into a market gain dominance and then extract money once competition was crushed. Then microsoft would choose to enter those markets with overpriced software which they could undercut explaining the correlation between microsoft entering the market and lower prices.
In short the statistic we really need to see is a size weighted average of price reduction.
I understand that functional units are not the same thing as an APU. However, the fact that the G4 (and I think G5) have multiple functional units which can handle the same type of operation means there is silicon to spare in some sense.
As for the quesiton of eliminating the cache I thought this was true in name only. Isn't that 8K or whatever each APU is claimed to have access to supposed to be on chip?
Well, I think we all recognized that article was a little over enthusiastic but it does suggest some interesting possibilities.
First of all I want to say I think it is completly possible to make a processor with 8APUs and so forth. For starters PowerPC chips already have several seperate execution units on them, and I think they use fewer transitors than intel chips. Moreover, a huge chunk of the transitor budget goes to doing things like cache consistancy or complicated instruction prediction which is probably not used on the much simpler APUs.
Of course it seems like this is primarily of interest to game systems or signal processing applications (note that a 4 threaded 32 stream processors is just another way of saying 4 cell procesors, each has a PPC core with 8 APUs). However, I would not be so quick to dismiss this for the PC market. While it may be true that many individual applications may not easily multi-thread it seems we are approaching a point where the biggest complaint is not the maximum processing rate in one application but the ability to run multiple applications at once. On my computers I'm rarely if ever frustrated at the rate some program is running at, but slowdown in other programs when I run a processor intensive job or turn on a video. So while drawing a webpage may not be speed up by this processor drawing several webpages at the same time will be and that is the sort of thing which makes a big difference for the end user.
Also, a processor like this offers great possibilities for JIT and VM code. The main thread can dispatch instructions and threads to the APUs dynamically based on what is happening in the system. Also I find it interesting that IBM is going the same way as intel in pushing all the complexity on the compiler. It makes one wonder if itanium is really as dead as everyone thinks. Perhaps in 4 years when AMD can't squeeze anything more out of x86 intel will be ready to jump in having worked out all the bugs to their new chip.
Just to let everyone know this is not the only product or even the first product to do this.
Another option is EPL server by ispheres . Unlike the product mentioned here, which seems to be just some extra code thrown on top of a database EPL server is built from the ground up for this sort of application.
Quite frankly this is not worthwhile except for high end companies who do not particularly suffer from registar-lock (the trouble to deal with the registrar is low compared to the overhead in deciding to change domain management) so it can be offered to them by the third-party registrars as an extra feature. In fact in a situation like this PGP doesn't really provide that much more security than a stored hashed password like which seems to be offered by the procedure of for org, biz and the like domains.
PGP is all great to play spys with or if you are likely to be investigated by the government it is of limited use, and in fact a security risk for many people. If pgp was incorporated into the domain standard it would either have to be managed at the registrar level, which from a users point of view gives no more security than whatever password is used to access it. If it is managed by the user the week point will never be the PGP but the lost key recovery process. Besides, the week point when using good passwords over secure connections is likely to be trojans and key-loggers which actually may be more dangerous under PGP, if the user puts all his keys on one key ring he enters the password far more frequently than his password/passphrase at the registrar making it easier to catch with a keylogger.
Ohh, oops. I'm not a fish expert so my memory about those being shallow water fish may be completly bad. your sure these are the type of fish which never go in shallow water??
The recomendation in the linked discussion is that by using both restrar-lock and auth_info the system provides a reasonable comprimise between security and the incentive for registrars to make the domain transfer process as difficult as possible.
Now, I agree that there is certainly a worry that losing registrars could make sending a domain name very difficult if they initiated a transfer. However, a system which provides registrar-lock which many registrars initiate by default and require user action to remove is just as abuseable. So long as the registrar may put on registrar-lock by default they may incorporate any difficulty they want into the process of removing registrar lock. In fact this is even worse than just requiring the losing registrar to initiate a transfer. After all many domain holders like myself until today have no idea that registrar lock even exists and may attempt to do the transfer before we know we have to undo the registrar lock, adding additional difficulty on top of any difficulty for removing registrar-lock.
As it is we get the worst of both worlds. Since registrar-lock is not always turned on many domain names are left vulnerable but those registrars who want to make it difficult to leave have just as much incentive to turn on registrar-lock by default and make it hard to turn off as they would to initiate a transfer. At this point it would be strictly better to go to a loser-initiated system.
I think a good fix would be to require that registrar-lock be off by default. Those domains that wanted it could turn it on easily, after all the registrar has every incentive to make this as easy to do as possible. This is also a good match for the threat/benefit model. Big name domains are must liable to be attacked, but they have departments that can deal with a difficult transfer process, while private users can leave registrar-lock off knowing that they are unlikely to be targeted and being more likely to change registrars anyway.
Alright, I know this post is probablly too far down for anyone to ever notice but a couple points about the question of whether females are naturally worse at math and science.
So my first point is that there are *clearly* social and cultural factors at work here discouraging women from doing math and science. I'm a grad student in mathematics (well logic actually) and since this is an issue of some interest to me I've conducted some informal surveys of women I know around the department and elsewhere. Almost every one admits to feeling some pressure to be dumb or at least dumb in technical fields to attract men.
Unfortunatly, it really does seem like many men prefer women who they can protect and somehow fufill the masculine role with. Often girls believe that by acting dumb or ditzy they will pick up me, and they are probably right. I have had several women tell me they started acting dumb or hid their interest in math/science to attract men. This matches well with the data which suggests that women start falling out of math/science about when puberty hits.
On top of this is the issue that mathematics and the sciences are naturally somewhat combative and assertive. These are not some random cultural fact as many feminist thinkers would have us believe, but a reflection of the truth conditions in many of these fields. Scientific fields work best when their is a competition for the truth and everyone tries to tear down an idea before it becomes accepted. Now there *may* be a genetic component of ability to deal with competition but in this case I think the cultural component outweighs the genetic.
For instance my mother is an assertive argumentative woman, though much less so than me and other men I know. Yet she often gets shit for being a bitch or the like because she is so combative and stands up for her position. Even if my example is unconvincing, and hell I wouldn't believe someone talking about their mother either, I think it is clear that women are expected to be less confrontational by society. Just look at the way men relate to each other versus women, women are quite frequently big on cooperation and agreement while men will often take enjoyment in competition. This certainly may be rooted in genetics but for whatever reason this has a clear social impact on girls while growing up.
This all is not to mention plenty of people who still instill differnt values in their male and female children, often unconciouslly. For instance one of my female friends would be told 'stop thinking like a man' when she was exceptionally logical or the like while growing up.
So clearly there is a large social/cultural component. Yet it is far from clear that this is responsible for all of the large ratio between men and women in the sciences. After all, the effects I mentioned above should all be fully in gear in college yet women drop out of the math and sciences all the way up through grad school at a greater rate than men.
Now, I admit this surely doesn't prove that women have less ability, in fact if anything I think it suggests they have less interest. Though in a very real sense interest is an important facet of math/science ability. Moreover, it is quite possible that this continued drop out rate just reflects a greater opportunity to do have other engaging lifestyles.
It is quite possible, likely even, that many people in math and science would have bailed out if they were offered a chance at a family life, or even easy sex and partying. We should not dismiss the notion that women are dropping out of math and science because these are very demanding and time-consuming activities and they have the chance to life in some other manner (party, have children). While men might have similar attitudes often they simply don't have the opportunity, or temptation, to leave science for a relationship or another lifestyle.
In short there clearly are cultural influences but it is quite possible that these cultural attitudes arise out of real differ
Alright you want to make a robot that does a traditional dance. Fine I guess that has an appeal but don't pretend it is to preserve japanese culture, unless that is the culture of making crazy electronic gadgets. After all DVDs and Movies of *people* are alot easier to imitate than dancing robots.
Well if you have actually *read* my post you would see that I specifically talked about near shore creatures. Anyone who has seen the videos of the tsunami should realize that it can pick up an move things near shore.
While you are surely right that divers in the deep sea will not be affected those close in to the shore, where the water has started to rise up, can very well be picked up and carried ashore.
Those aren't particularly weird fish. They may be weird and some of them are fish but this certainly doesn't make them weird fish.
Alot of the things in the water look pretty damn strange but I recognized alot of these animals from science shows and not even ones about deep water fish. While I can't comment about all of them several looked to be the type one might find in fairly shallow water.
So in response to those who said a Tsunami could bring up these fish I have to disagree, it certainly could stir up fish which live close to shore and even throw them on to land. While it isn't going to stir up fish from the deep ocean my guess is that these are all just fish that live near land but people normally don't notice.
I don't think you understand the point of CORBA style objects. These objects are not just data but objects in the broader object oriented programing sense. It is probably better to think of something like CORBA as being an object orientated replacement to RPC than as a replacement for IPC.
If you want to implement programs relying on shared services, for instance a insert a graph object inside a spreadsheet you need some kind of remote procedure call. Often these services need persistant state data and simply *can't* be implemented by executing a whole program each time you need a redraw or something similar. Furthermore if you insist on each program to invent it's own mechanism for managing persistant state info, rather than using a general OO standard, then far *fewer* programs can intercommunicate.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against small text based utilities for command lines and the like. However, we don't insist that all programs which want a directory listing call the ls program and parse the output and we shouldn't insist programs do this instead of using an object model either.
What I meant is that AMD can claim advantages about the NX bit in one of two ways.
1: It is a technical innovation which increases the capabilities of the processor to stop exploits.
2: It is a pragmatic innovation which will cause OS's to have better virus protection.
AMD can choose either way to promote their product but not half of one and a little bit of the other. If you choose 1 you have to admit that NX does nothing technically that segment level protection does. If you choose 2 you can only consider the benefits that are likely to be implemented in the OS not theoretical ones.
Yes, it could be used to implement such a secure OS but it won't be in most mainstream operating systems. Dividing things strictly into writable and executable bins causes all sorts of backward compatibility problems for JIT compilers and the like (stack execution I think is more rare).
In any case this was already possible before the NX bit. Segment level protection prohibits the CPU from loading CS with any segment which isn't marked executeable. Unfortunatly, most OS's don't use segment level protection (someday I would like to find out why) so the only claims of improvement that AMD should be able to provide with the NX bit are in terms of OS adoption. Clearly openBSD was able to use this earlier feature in previous versions of OS so it is certainly technically possible. So at best AMD should be able to advertise "makes it easier for your OS programmers."
So I mostly agree with your conclusions, I even made a similar post about it being more a bond film device than something for real terrorists. However, just the weight of the rock isn't enough to guarantee this. Apparently this slab is particularly precarious or else we wouldn't be worrying about it in the first place. After all we aren't worried about the actual Isle of Man being knocked over into the sea. In theory you can balance an arbitrarily large amount of stuff in a manner which allows a fingertip to topple it over.
So I am inclined to believe that nothing on that scale could be affected reasonable amounts of conventional explosives (reasonable includes multiple jetliners filled with explosives). However, I would really like actual confirmation that things weren't balanced that carefully.
I've been in the bay area for 4 years and I have seen lightning only twice during that entire period, remembering that most lightning is cloud to cloud that's pretty damn unlikely. In fact I challenge you to find any record of lightning damage in the SF Bay area (modulo people flying kites into storms). Even the girl who had been hit by lightning 3 times moved here to escape it and nothing has happened since.
Arson and neighbors aren't *natural* disastors.
Exactly how loose is this giant slab of rock (I couldn't find any pictures). Is it a real possibility that terrorists could dislodge it with high explosives?
I imagine this is just another one of those grand doomsdays schemes that makes for a perfect movie but isn't actually practical. Just like covering the artic/antartic with carbon black (to change the albedo(sp?)) it is something people could do, but not without arousing great sucpiscion. So it's great to have your super secret organization with sub-ice airports launch an operation to cover the pole with carbon black over the course of hours any reasonable terrorist plot would be detected before anything of substance was accomplished. Similarly, SPECTRE might be able to install thousands of tons of explosive from their underground tunnels but any real terrorists wouldn't be able to install enough explosives before being detected.
So it sounds like a great plot for a James Bond movie, and I hope I'm not wrong about how much explosives it would take.
I can't say I think the NX bit is really that big a deal, it only makes things a little harder when you can't execute code on the stack since a stack overflow lets you return program execution to any address on the system you want. Often a cleverly designed system call or another non-stack user controlled data structure will still allow the attacker to gain control.
Still it really does provide some virus protection which is alot more than can be said about most commercials. I mean is the 'lemon strength cleanser' actually a better cleanser because of the lemon. Is 'oxygenation' or whatever really important for skin care.
Maybe they manage to stop all these types of advertising exageration over there, and if so my hat is off to them. At least if they can really manage to do it objectively. Often these sorts of rules aren't applied evenly, letting false but dear cultural assumptions slide by but blocking correct but disconerting claims. For instance I have no doubt that if we had these sort of tight 'truth in advertising' laws in the US we would find condom ads forced to produce 3 peer-reviewed studies for every claim they make while gun ads would be allow to imply or outright say that carrying a gun makes you safer. But maybe other countries can pull this off, after all I'm always amazed the U.K. can function so well without an explicit constitution so who knows. If they can do it objectively my hats off to them.
Sorry, you are correct I screwed up the terminology.
Anyway are you really saying that if I DELETE a file in a versioned file system I can't restore it but if I only fill it with null bytes I can restore it? This seems crazy.
In any case so long as versioning lets you restore deleted or null filled files you can claim no particular advantage for a delete permission in regards to malacious damage.