Yeah, but calculate the odds of your computer leaving the surface of the Earth, going around for a while, and landing on some other planet. Pretty bloody unlikely. Now, calculate the odds that all that would happen *naturally*, with no man-made forces at work. Yeah, damn near impossible now.
Pity the rest of your replies missed it, but this statement is flatly incorrect. In conjunction with the news about the Mars meteorite found in the Antartic that alledgedly has some evidence of life left on it, most stories contained numbers for the number of chunks of one planet that end up on another per year. IIRC (and I probably don't completely), it's something like 11 chunks of Mars end up on Eart per century, with fewer making the trip up the well to Mars from Earth (but it's actually not that hard, it just takes time). Large impacts (which happen rarely) can blast chunks right into orbit, at which point gravitational permutations can, with time, take those chunks anywhere. The vast majority fall back, some beat the odds.
Bearing in mind that the odds are such that on the cosmic scale, a piece of one planet being sent to another is a routine occurrance, your argument is shot to hell.
(In fact, if we discover life in the solar system, the first thing we will need to do is prove that it didn't come from Earth, because every significant body in the system has been hit by chunks of Earth before. If it came from Earth, it proves nothing about how frequently life may arise.)
It's dead, get over it - Using gopher instead of http is like using nntp instead of slash.
I've never seen someone shoot their own argument down so quickly. Slash is a replacement for NNTP like a 14.4 modem is a replacement for an T-1. (Not an OC-3, but definately a T-1.)
Is slash distributable? Think how nice it'd be nice to access the local Slash node next time Slashdot is slow for you. Can Slash sustain long-term conversation, like over a period of weeks rather then about 4 hours per article on a high-traffic site? Can it be accessed by a myriad of different clients (there's a big HELL NO!)? Distributing binaries? How do you DOS Usenet?
NNTP is superior to slash in essentially all ways (and the ones you're thinking of are solvable if you're willing to have one centralized news server), except for one and only one: It's relatively hard to load up a news reader to comment on an article rather then just type something into a comment box and press "submit", like you say. For this convenience we pay a stiff price, as do all other web implementations of "discussion boards" that ignore decades of previous art.
Nor do they have to be completely seperate entities: Consider Conversant, which does it all, all at once, and integrated. Pretty cool.
Personally, I think your point about Gopher stands, but your example sucked pretty hard.
So one big corporate giant is allowing another big corporate giant, with the exact same interests ($$$ at all costs) and motivations (see interests) as AT&T. Big hairy deal.
Tell me when they allow small-time local providers onto the network that can actually show the large providers up. Then I'll believe that "anti-competive" action has occurred. This is just a big smokescreen behind which AT&T will get to behave almost exactly as they would have before.
Look, it's easy to self-rightously say "We should use Almighty Technology to solve this problem!", but when you sit down and think about it, it's just not that easy.
Others have thought about it already, and despite my positive view of technology, I have to agree that we're not ready to vote in the home, and won't be for a long time. Where's all those people decrying SDMI for having the "trusted client" problem? This one is thousands of times worse! What if someone plants a lil' program on your computer that causes your vote to magically change from Democrat to Republican between the time you click "Vote" and the transmission of the results?
An excellent essay that has actual thought involved instead of just knee-jerf reaction is this study from the Voting Integrity Project, Is Internet Voting Safe? It's a great essay, it doesn't say "Yes" or "No", it says both and qualifies them.
Think, people, think! This is too importent to just throw technology at the problem and assume it will magically make the problems just go away!
I'm sorry I don't have moderation points today or I'd mod you up:-)
Two honest questions:
Google uses some sort of metric-of-trust system that is supposed to prevent this sort of abuse. None of us know the internal mathematics of this system, so we don't know if self-referential loops are given no weight, or merely reduced weight.
Given that a search for "[celebrity] nude" has little information to go on, significantly less then "[celebrity] nude pictures", as demonstrated by your finding some interesting results like honest conversations, exactly how is Google supposed to tell that these pages are fake?
If one could see the trust metric on all of the search page hits, I'd lay money that as compared to the trust metric for Microsoft, none of those pages are very trustworthy. There are probably a couple of external links validating the "Nude Celebrity World News", and despite the self-referential loops in their pages, this slight boost may have been enough to give them the advantage over all of the other results you cite, which are meaningful only in the broad sense... I can't say any of the ones you cited are "definately" what "[celebrity] nude" would be searching for.
Thus, in all probability, we are looking at a "fraud" where on a 100 point scale that I'm making up right now, some site scams its way into giving itself an extra point. w00p! I don't think this scam could even come close to displacing the Microsoft Windows Home Page from the top result of searching for "Windows", which may have a trust of 99.9%. The only reason you can even see the effect of this "scam" is because you are plumbing around in the lowest trust areas of the Google database. In four weeks (or however long it takes Google to index these pages) I'll lay money that the top two hits for Liv Taylor nude will be this slashdot discussion and your site. The trust metrics of Slashdot and the one your site obtains by being linked from Slashdot will blow this "scam" out of the water.
Unfortunately, this discussion will also validate the Nude Celebrity World News (which is why I'm not linking to it here). In fact, this scam will work vastly better now that it's only two clicks from Slashdot. To really pull this off, you need trusted domain names, which we just handed them on a silver platter.
Looked at in this light, I think Google's reaction makes sense. I regret needing this lengthy explanation, but my questions are, what exactly do you think Google should do, and in light of the fact that the "scam" is probably almost (but not quite!) complete ineffective, why is this a problem?
Unfortunately, patent reviewers who don't grant patents aren't patent reviewers for long. Even if I was to become a patent reviewer, I would be out of there in a week.
1. The dreamcast is mature, the PS2 is not. In terms of "fair" maybe we should compare releaserelease... but who gives a damn about "fair"? This is what's here _now_.
2. Actually, most of the release titles are mentioned in that round up. There was a startling array of good ones in the US release.
When I was just a lad my father gave to me,
a video game of delicious sim-pli-c-ity,
with bouncing balls and bleeps and bloops,
and paddles and switches and scoring loops,
a game I would remember my whole life long,
fun... (music sting) thy name is pong.
I recall the fun I had, playing the hours away,
pong'ing always was the climax of my day,
Now I'm a techie and what do I want most?
A thing to show my nerdy friends, a thing that I can boast,
Let them look with eyes of green up so very high,
and envy me my giant game of pong in the sky!
Chorus:pong in the sky, pong in the sky,
oh I'd like to play some pong before I die,
just take your Quake and Diablo and let them fry,
I just wanna play my pong in the sky!
While I think JK writes well, and sometimes does bring something new to the story board, most of the time it seems that it's just an endless spew of redundancies.
That's my opinion in a nutshell too:-) I wish he'd write less often but better.
In recent years, people have not had a general meeting place to discuss politics, which is bad because democracies need public debate. Fortunately, the power of the net allows people to meet in many different kinds of environments that closely parellel the meeting places of old, which is good and may save democracy.
This will affect our political system in ways that nobody understands, but a lot of people think they do. It will probably diversify the discourse.
How does he expand that into that much text? I've written long things before, but usually I'm explaining the unobvious, or a whole new way of looking at the obvious. For this audience, this article is neither.
Hmmm, I thought I responded to this earlier... maybe I just previewed?
Anyhow, I believe that the Notepad in question is the one with Windows 3.1. Because of this ability of simple tools to perform "hacking", Microsoft in later years made Notepad acts as you described, and have also blocked Wordpad from loading files ending in.EXE. (Easily dodged with the obvious dodge.)
(It is also remotely possible I did it with the 6.1 MS-DOS edit.com utility, which probably also won't work that way anymore. Either way, it's Notepad.exe and edit.com that have changed.)
There's no such thing as a "hacking tool"... unless you count all computers as hacking tools. With time, patience, and skill, a hack can be performed in Notepad. (Done it... nothing significant, mind you, I'm not bragging, I'm just saying it can be done. Somehow the first byte of an MS-DOS executable got corrupted and I changed it back to "M" (as all MS-DOS exes start with the magic number "MZ" in ASCII).)
To me, that's the real problem; the line is so fuzzy about what a "hacking tool" is, and there's no way to "de-fuzz" that line. This law stems from nothing but fear, and knee-jerf reactions to legislative fear tend to only make things worse.
Wouldn't a bouncing robot harm the pristine natural setting of the planet?
What "natural" setting? In case you haven't noticed, there isn't much "nature" on Mars!
Concern for the enviroment stems from concerns about life, not about "pristine states". Earth's "pristine natural setting" is a planet with no life and not much in the way of free oxygen. Concerns about the condition of Mars are limited to how the inhabitants of Mars feels about that environment. As of right now, there aren't very many.
The universe doesn't give a damn!
(not to mention Mars is pretty big; if our robot was a nuclear bomb it still would have no particular effect on Mars!)
? Well, you do have a right to free speach, but you generally need to obtain a permit to hold a public protest. So by that reasoning the governemant should be allowed to block that stuff from government funded public terminals.
These two sentances cuts to the core of the problem with your thinking. When I place a message on the web, such as this one, it is publicly accessible. I am responsible for the contents of this message; frankly, my psuedonym is more to fit in around here, not for protection.
It's a horrible idea to allow where a message is accessed to affect the message. Just because my message is accessed from a public terminal does not make it a "public protest" or anything like a "public protest"... the message hasn't moved into the public domain, it's already been there. It's the same principle as just because I link to something doesn't mean I magically have responsibility for the contents of that link (it can change without my control, responsibility is impossible).
Speech is on the internet, not on your terminal. If you block speech on the internet then you are indeed blocking free speech, not just 'public' speech. It may or may not be justified, but don't fool yourself into thinking you're not really "blocking" speech, just "denying permits".
IP addresses and domain/host names are related through DNS, which is just a big, distributed index. What would it take to build an alternate index, accessed via a different protocol?
Those of you who do not have a TiVo may think the above is a joke. It is not. I love Battlebots, I hate the crappy announcers who seem to think that this is some sort of WWF episode.
You do not have the Cosmic Zen. You live in the Now. You should seek Enlightenment into the nature of Time and the Smallness of your Being.
Re:There are no NP problems, only NP solutions.
on
Does P = NP?
·
· Score: 3
There are many problems we can't think of P solution for, but until we know everything there is to know we don't know for sure that there isn't another way to solve a problem.
Not necessarily. There are problems there is no solution for, the canonical example being the Halting Problem (look it up in Google). We know there's no solution to that. In fact, if a solution were to pop up, it would invalidate a couple hundred years worth of math, which would be a great surprise.
Sometimes you can know there's no other way. Should someday a proof emerge that P!=NP, then for all NP-complete problems, it will have been proved that there are no easier ways, no matter how long you search for one.
Just because a domain is infinite (such as the domain "solutions to problems") does not mean that it MUST contain an element that has any particular set of particular charecteristics. Just because there are an infinite number of integers does not mean that one of them MUST have a fractional component, if we just look hard enough!
I do not have all the numbers and I hope to prompt someone more knowlegable to reply to me.
Your facts may be more then a little off. When patents first started being granted, there were far fewer. The head of the patent office could review each one personally. This is obviously impossible today.
I do not think that you would find anywhere near the volume of patents being generated in Edison's time... not counting Edison, who was patent happy even by modern standards.
You're screwed because the burden of proof is on you... and it's oh-so-easy to hit 10 stores & legal agreements with your sig; it's a lot harder to get out of 10 purchases and legal agreements.
Postscript: Current fraud laws may provide some level of protection, which is why I hope claiming that you've never ever used one might help somehow, but as our society found them unacceptable when credit cards were developed, I think what protections may exist are just as unacceptable now.
I've been tracking this on my site for a while now (see URL in header above), and the Slashdot has unfortunately picked one of the crappier online articles on the topic to post a link to.
The linked article talks about the potential dangers but tries to reassure us that "the experts" are saying it's OK. The problem is, the critics are right about the dangers of your signiture being stolen. (Cryptographic-type people may note that reasonably safe systems can be created, but you can still hack a computer and snarf the signiture key itself, which is pretty darned hard to protect against and still have a system usable by normal people in the real world.) What this article doesn't mention is the total lack of online fraud protection.
Under the terms of this law, if your electronic signiture gets stolen and used, there are no provisions to make you not liable for any charges that are racked up, meaning at the very least that if a signiture is stolen, you could be looking at a total destruction of your credit rating, should you choose not to pay for the theif's actions, or arbitrarily large bills, if you choose to.
This is in stark contrast to credit cards, where, subject to certain rules involving speed of notification of fraud upon discovery, your liability is limited to $50, no matter how much your stolen credit card number is used against your will.
Despite my excitement at seeing the idea of digital signitures accepted, I must strongly recommend against using them in their current form. I'm hoping "That couldn't possibly have been my signiture because I've never used a digital signiture before" will be an adequate defense...
I've worked a bit with Adobe's software, and for what it's worth, it's not a flaw in Adobe's software, rather it just has too many features (and I don't mean bugs).
The real problem is people treating computers like glorified typewriters. They yank up their software, figure out how to "black out" the names by placing opaque black boxes over the name, and figure that's as secure as it is in the real world. Except that PDF is just a varient of PostScript, a fully fledged display language, so all they were really doing was causing the over-writing of a black box on perfectly intact data, which would be and was easily extracted by people with the right know-how (or the ability to try copying and pasting:-) ).
Adobe's software works as advertised, and there are definately uses for this sort of thing (like overlaying form elements, which can be useful), but they've been no more successful at removing the need to understand computers then anybody else, so you can still get yourself in trouble!
ps: Do you think that in 50 years, people will think our obsession with making computers "easy" to use (as distinct from user friendly, which is quite a different thing!) was a hopeless task?
Slashdot Mirror
Pity the rest of your replies missed it, but this statement is flatly incorrect. In conjunction with the news about the Mars meteorite found in the Antartic that alledgedly has some evidence of life left on it, most stories contained numbers for the number of chunks of one planet that end up on another per year. IIRC (and I probably don't completely), it's something like 11 chunks of Mars end up on Eart per century, with fewer making the trip up the well to Mars from Earth (but it's actually not that hard, it just takes time). Large impacts (which happen rarely) can blast chunks right into orbit, at which point gravitational permutations can, with time, take those chunks anywhere. The vast majority fall back, some beat the odds.
Bearing in mind that the odds are such that on the cosmic scale, a piece of one planet being sent to another is a routine occurrance, your argument is shot to hell.
(In fact, if we discover life in the solar system, the first thing we will need to do is prove that it didn't come from Earth, because every significant body in the system has been hit by chunks of Earth before. If it came from Earth, it proves nothing about how frequently life may arise.)
I've never seen someone shoot their own argument down so quickly. Slash is a replacement for NNTP like a 14.4 modem is a replacement for an T-1. (Not an OC-3, but definately a T-1.)
Is slash distributable? Think how nice it'd be nice to access the local Slash node next time Slashdot is slow for you. Can Slash sustain long-term conversation, like over a period of weeks rather then about 4 hours per article on a high-traffic site? Can it be accessed by a myriad of different clients (there's a big HELL NO!)? Distributing binaries? How do you DOS Usenet?
NNTP is superior to slash in essentially all ways (and the ones you're thinking of are solvable if you're willing to have one centralized news server), except for one and only one: It's relatively hard to load up a news reader to comment on an article rather then just type something into a comment box and press "submit", like you say. For this convenience we pay a stiff price, as do all other web implementations of "discussion boards" that ignore decades of previous art.
Nor do they have to be completely seperate entities: Consider Conversant, which does it all, all at once, and integrated. Pretty cool.
Personally, I think your point about Gopher stands, but your example sucked pretty hard.
Tell me when they allow small-time local providers onto the network that can actually show the large providers up. Then I'll believe that "anti-competive" action has occurred. This is just a big smokescreen behind which AT&T will get to behave almost exactly as they would have before.
Others have thought about it already, and despite my positive view of technology, I have to agree that we're not ready to vote in the home, and won't be for a long time. Where's all those people decrying SDMI for having the "trusted client" problem? This one is thousands of times worse! What if someone plants a lil' program on your computer that causes your vote to magically change from Democrat to Republican between the time you click "Vote" and the transmission of the results?
An excellent essay that has actual thought involved instead of just knee-jerf reaction is this study from the Voting Integrity Project, Is Internet Voting Safe? It's a great essay, it doesn't say "Yes" or "No", it says both and qualifies them.
Think, people, think! This is too importent to just throw technology at the problem and assume it will magically make the problems just go away!
Two honest questions:
Google uses some sort of metric-of-trust system that is supposed to prevent this sort of abuse. None of us know the internal mathematics of this system, so we don't know if self-referential loops are given no weight, or merely reduced weight.
Given that a search for "[celebrity] nude" has little information to go on, significantly less then "[celebrity] nude pictures", as demonstrated by your finding some interesting results like honest conversations, exactly how is Google supposed to tell that these pages are fake?
If one could see the trust metric on all of the search page hits, I'd lay money that as compared to the trust metric for Microsoft, none of those pages are very trustworthy. There are probably a couple of external links validating the "Nude Celebrity World News", and despite the self-referential loops in their pages, this slight boost may have been enough to give them the advantage over all of the other results you cite, which are meaningful only in the broad sense... I can't say any of the ones you cited are "definately" what "[celebrity] nude" would be searching for.
Thus, in all probability, we are looking at a "fraud" where on a 100 point scale that I'm making up right now, some site scams its way into giving itself an extra point. w00p! I don't think this scam could even come close to displacing the Microsoft Windows Home Page from the top result of searching for "Windows", which may have a trust of 99.9%. The only reason you can even see the effect of this "scam" is because you are plumbing around in the lowest trust areas of the Google database. In four weeks (or however long it takes Google to index these pages) I'll lay money that the top two hits for Liv Taylor nude will be this slashdot discussion and your site. The trust metrics of Slashdot and the one your site obtains by being linked from Slashdot will blow this "scam" out of the water.
Unfortunately, this discussion will also validate the Nude Celebrity World News (which is why I'm not linking to it here). In fact, this scam will work vastly better now that it's only two clicks from Slashdot. To really pull this off, you need trusted domain names, which we just handed them on a silver platter.
Looked at in this light, I think Google's reaction makes sense. I regret needing this lengthy explanation, but my questions are, what exactly do you think Google should do, and in light of the fact that the "scam" is probably almost (but not quite!) complete ineffective, why is this a problem?
Unfortunately, patent reviewers who don't grant patents aren't patent reviewers for long. Even if I was to become a patent reviewer, I would be out of there in a week.
1. The dreamcast is mature, the PS2 is not. In terms of "fair" maybe we should compare releaserelease... but who gives a damn about "fair"? This is what's here _now_.
2. Actually, most of the release titles are mentioned in that round up. There was a startling array of good ones in the US release.
When I was just a lad my father gave to me,
a video game of delicious sim-pli-c-ity,
with bouncing balls and bleeps and bloops,
and paddles and switches and scoring loops,
a game I would remember my whole life long,
fun... (music sting) thy name is pong.
I recall the fun I had, playing the hours away,
pong'ing always was the climax of my day,
Now I'm a techie and what do I want most?
A thing to show my nerdy friends, a thing that I can boast,
Let them look with eyes of green up so very high,
and envy me my giant game of pong in the sky!
Chorus: pong in the sky, pong in the sky,
oh I'd like to play some pong before I die,
just take your Quake and Diablo and let them fry,
I just wanna play my pong in the sky!
That's my opinion in a nutshell too :-) I wish he'd write less often but better.
Anyhow, I believe that the Notepad in question is the one with Windows 3.1. Because of this ability of simple tools to perform "hacking", Microsoft in later years made Notepad acts as you described, and have also blocked Wordpad from loading files ending in .EXE. (Easily dodged with the obvious dodge.)
(It is also remotely possible I did it with the 6.1 MS-DOS edit.com utility, which probably also won't work that way anymore. Either way, it's Notepad.exe and edit.com that have changed.)
There's no such thing as a "hacking tool"... unless you count all computers as hacking tools. With time, patience, and skill, a hack can be performed in Notepad. (Done it... nothing significant, mind you, I'm not bragging, I'm just saying it can be done. Somehow the first byte of an MS-DOS executable got corrupted and I changed it back to "M" (as all MS-DOS exes start with the magic number "MZ" in ASCII).) To me, that's the real problem; the line is so fuzzy about what a "hacking tool" is, and there's no way to "de-fuzz" that line. This law stems from nothing but fear, and knee-jerf reactions to legislative fear tend to only make things worse.
Thanks for the warning! :-)
What "natural" setting? In case you haven't noticed, there isn't much "nature" on Mars!
Concern for the enviroment stems from concerns about life, not about "pristine states". Earth's "pristine natural setting" is a planet with no life and not much in the way of free oxygen. Concerns about the condition of Mars are limited to how the inhabitants of Mars feels about that environment. As of right now, there aren't very many.
The universe doesn't give a damn!
(not to mention Mars is pretty big; if our robot was a nuclear bomb it still would have no particular effect on Mars!)
These two sentances cuts to the core of the problem with your thinking. When I place a message on the web, such as this one, it is publicly accessible. I am responsible for the contents of this message; frankly, my psuedonym is more to fit in around here, not for protection.
It's a horrible idea to allow where a message is accessed to affect the message. Just because my message is accessed from a public terminal does not make it a "public protest" or anything like a "public protest"... the message hasn't moved into the public domain, it's already been there. It's the same principle as just because I link to something doesn't mean I magically have responsibility for the contents of that link (it can change without my control, responsibility is impossible).
Speech is on the internet, not on your terminal. If you block speech on the internet then you are indeed blocking free speech, not just 'public' speech. It may or may not be justified, but don't fool yourself into thinking you're not really "blocking" speech, just "denying permits".
A post on slashdot.
OK, I'll grant you that second point. :-)
Those of you who do not have a TiVo may think the above is a joke. It is not. I love Battlebots, I hate the crappy announcers who seem to think that this is some sort of WWF episode.
You do not have the Cosmic Zen. You live in the Now. You should seek Enlightenment into the nature of Time and the Smallness of your Being.
Not necessarily. There are problems there is no solution for, the canonical example being the Halting Problem (look it up in Google). We know there's no solution to that. In fact, if a solution were to pop up, it would invalidate a couple hundred years worth of math, which would be a great surprise.
Sometimes you can know there's no other way. Should someday a proof emerge that P!=NP, then for all NP-complete problems, it will have been proved that there are no easier ways, no matter how long you search for one.
Just because a domain is infinite (such as the domain "solutions to problems") does not mean that it MUST contain an element that has any particular set of particular charecteristics. Just because there are an infinite number of integers does not mean that one of them MUST have a fractional component, if we just look hard enough!
Your facts may be more then a little off. When patents first started being granted, there were far fewer. The head of the patent office could review each one personally. This is obviously impossible today.
I do not think that you would find anywhere near the volume of patents being generated in Edison's time... not counting Edison, who was patent happy even by modern standards.
Could anyone clear me up/correct me?
And there's nothing limiting it to 10.
Postscript: Current fraud laws may provide some level of protection, which is why I hope claiming that you've never ever used one might help somehow, but as our society found them unacceptable when credit cards were developed, I think what protections may exist are just as unacceptable now.
The linked article talks about the potential dangers but tries to reassure us that "the experts" are saying it's OK. The problem is, the critics are right about the dangers of your signiture being stolen. (Cryptographic-type people may note that reasonably safe systems can be created, but you can still hack a computer and snarf the signiture key itself, which is pretty darned hard to protect against and still have a system usable by normal people in the real world.) What this article doesn't mention is the total lack of online fraud protection.
Under the terms of this law, if your electronic signiture gets stolen and used, there are no provisions to make you not liable for any charges that are racked up, meaning at the very least that if a signiture is stolen, you could be looking at a total destruction of your credit rating, should you choose not to pay for the theif's actions, or arbitrarily large bills, if you choose to.
This is in stark contrast to credit cards, where, subject to certain rules involving speed of notification of fraud upon discovery, your liability is limited to $50, no matter how much your stolen credit card number is used against your will.
Despite my excitement at seeing the idea of digital signitures accepted, I must strongly recommend against using them in their current form. I'm hoping "That couldn't possibly have been my signiture because I've never used a digital signiture before" will be an adequate defense...
The real problem is people treating computers like glorified typewriters. They yank up their software, figure out how to "black out" the names by placing opaque black boxes over the name, and figure that's as secure as it is in the real world. Except that PDF is just a varient of PostScript, a fully fledged display language, so all they were really doing was causing the over-writing of a black box on perfectly intact data, which would be and was easily extracted by people with the right know-how (or the ability to try copying and pasting :-) ).
Adobe's software works as advertised, and there are definately uses for this sort of thing (like overlaying form elements, which can be useful), but they've been no more successful at removing the need to understand computers then anybody else, so you can still get yourself in trouble!
ps: Do you think that in 50 years, people will think our obsession with making computers "easy" to use (as distinct from user friendly, which is quite a different thing!) was a hopeless task?