I think you've kind of missed the point here. The question isn't "Is Open Source invincible?", the question is "Is deliberate program corruption more likely to occur, all else being equal, in an Open Source program or a commercial program?"
And while I'm not a free or open source fanatic, I have to say that I can't marshall any rational arguments that the commercial program is somehow safer from authorial corruption. It's virtually inconceivable that a large scale open-source program could have a backdoor or anything like that in it for any significant amount of time, and as for smaller projects, a one-man open source project may be just as likely to be corrupted as the one-man closed source product, but which is more likely to be detected before significant damage is done? The one with the source you can look at, hands down. (And the phrase "just as likely" is for rhetorical purposes; in the real world, the prospect of revealing the source surely impedes anybody who would put something nasty in there! That's way too accountable for someone like that's taste!)
No system can be made perfectly safe. But to claim that commercial software is safer from deliberate authorial corruption takes willful and deliberate ignorance. I mean, seriously, claiming that the software I can't see, that I'm not allowed to see, is more likely to be pure then the stuff anybody (or anybody I hire) can look at is? That flies in the face of both logic and common sense, and is the kind of claim that has be inflated into an long article to blind the reader with words before it can even come close to being seriously entertained; a paragraph summary doesn't pass the laugh test.
And remember, it's not only "Will it happen?", but "Which will do more damage?" Even when break-ins happen in Open Source, the damage is typically swiftly controlled; people's reputations are on the line! Who even knows how much closed-source damage has been caused from breakins? Again, people's reputations are on the line, and the incentives to cover such things up are high.
I just don't see a way, even in theory, where commercial software is safer against this sort of attack.
When I try to upgrade my version of GAIM and there happens to be a better version of GTK available, Portage will upgrade GTK first, regardless of whether you actually need the very latest GTK to run GAIM. I'd rather see Portage know what the minimum version a dependency has to be in order to get a program running. As far as I know, it'll just upgrade everything in the dep tree.
Basically, this is wrong. Sorry.;-)
The "-u" parameter to emerge will make it work as you described. However, if you just typed "emerge gaim", it would only emerge the minimum required. You have to ask for the "emerge all depencies, too" behavior.
I quite frequently emerge -up world, then just pick and choose what I want updated.
(I just checked "emerge -p world" against "emerge -up world", and "emerge -up" did significantly more packages on my system, where over 100 packages can be updated. On Gentoo, IIRC, the "world" is the list of things that you explicitly emerged; "emerge mozilla" will put mozilla in the "world" list but not any of its dependencies. So "emerge world" can update the packages you cared enough about to explicitly ask for them, and -u will add all possible dependency update.)
Context. Context context context. As clearly indicated by the quotes, I was putting words in the mouth of a graduate student in astrophysics, not an average Slashdot denizen. Not surprisingly, they have different standards when it comes to the coherence of theories.
Now perhaps you get some glimmers of the dangers of translation technical things down to "common language"; restricting oneself to the OED renders one nearly incapable of communication within a field. Count yourself lucky if your only objection to my message is the sense I used "imagining" in; the gulf betwixt the original post and mine is large enough that I'd have thought a nit-picker could find a lot more.
At the level I'm talking about, "imagine" means having a set of equations that describe the universe and match all observations, not an abstract "Gee, you know, I bet that the answer is really something else."
We all know there's something wrong with QM + SR, but that doesn't mean that anybody has anything better then "there's something wrong". Anybody can write a post like yours, but nobody's getting the Nobel for this unless they've got hard math.
Would someone please translate this and tell me what the hell is being said?
"Nobody knows for sure whether Dark Matter exists or not. But there are a whole lot of independent reasons to believe it exists, all of which result in very, very similar numbers for how much Dark Matter there is. If the Dark Matter theory is wrong, it's very hard to imagine what else could possibly explain all those numbers, all at once. (It's easy enough to explain one or two of those, but that's not an improvement over current theories, that's a step back.) Dark Matter hasn't made it to 100% certainty, but other theories have a lot to explain if Dark Matter doesn't explain what we're seeing."
I think that's about right. I Am Not A Physicist, but I follow this and generally understand math, so I think I'm at least competent to translate...;-) (Perhaps Pi_0's don't shower would like to confirm/deny this translation?)
(On my own, I'd note that giving how flexible geometry can be, I can easily imagine someone constructing a geometry of the universe that doesn't need dark matter that turns out to be mathematically equivalent to a universe that does have dark matter. I'd give some of the geometry-based theories some time to be vetted by real astrophysicists before assuming they provide a real alternative; they may well just encode the Dark Matter into the structure of the Universe itself, which really isn't an alternate theory, just a restatement of the original in a different form. Until someone produces some Dark Matter, or the Universe is explored to our satisfaction to determine no such matter exists, this may remain unresolvable.)
Actually, with Einstein's relativity, doesn't Ptolemy's theories hold true? Everything is relative to a point of view?
No, because rotational motion isn't linear motion. A given linear motion will look like any other linear motion from the correct point of view. There is no (sub-light) vantage point from which the Earth does not have a path that describes an orbit around the sun. (That orbit, the Earth, and the Sun can appear squished and time dilated, but the path the Earth follows will always be around the Sun.)
You can define a Point Of View where your position on the surface of the Earth is the constant zero point, but it's going to be very exicting defining the rest of physics usably. Anything further then a light-(day / (pi*2)) away is traveling faster then the speed of light, for instance (appears to travel more then one light-day per day). Again, this is because rotation isn't linear motion.
I think you could theoretically kludge physics to work that way, but what you have is a God-awful physics where the speed of light varies based on which direction you're traveling and how from the zero point you are, and in the end, it makes the exact same predictions as what we have now. There are an infinite variety of theories that make equivalent predictions to any given theory, and are thus in some sense equivalent, but as humans, we prefer the simplest for a lot of reasons. You could build a consistent Ptolemaic theory, but you wouldn't want to.
Maybe. Along with the annoyance factor mentioned by another poster, if you were a politician, would you prefer to:
Use a well-established channel like Television that gives full motion video and puts you in good company with other professionally-done advertisements, or
End up with your campaign spam sandwiched between penis enlargers, pyramid schemes, viruses, phishing, viagra offers, and "undeliverable mail" notifications?
Oh, I'm sure a couple of candidates will try this, but consider the company their campaign email will be keeping. Personally, I wouldn't want my campaign within ten feet of any of that stuff, let alone fractions of an inch away from them on the recipient's screen; I expect the net impact would be negative. Long-term I think campaign spam will have to wait until the rest of spam has been contained.
Based on that quote, it doesn't sound like they are trying to shoot cations into the cloud itself, just using the cations being "shot" as the sound source, instead of the more traditional magnetic and paper cone (which may not be fea$ible for 120dB and the other characteristics, such as extreme focus, they're looking for in the sound).
The cations themselves may only make it inches but the sound they make can easily propogate for a mile if the sound is directed and has a strength of 120dB.
Rule one of globalisation (ie being dictated to by the US) - the country with the most enlightened position will take it up the arse.
In your zeal to make an Anti-American snide comment, did you miss this part of the posting: The US had some perfectly reasonable copyright laws up until 1976, when we changed our laws so we could join the Berne convention. We changed our laws to "harmonize" with Europe. And then in 1995, Europe extended their laws from life+50 to life+70, and shortly thereafter [1996], the US extended its laws to match. ?
The real problem here isn't dictation by the US, it's the apparent zest for dropping to the lowest common denominator by the countries of the world. A few more years, and we'll probably see laws getting passed by the Dictator-for-a-day of Zaire and getting the entire world automatically harmonized by some ill-conceived international treaty.
LOL, you act as if these features are going to have to be designed in, rather then designed out!
Nanotech bends a few of the rules, but it doesn't bend all of them. While you can make nano-scale machines hard to physically destroy, it's going to be a lot of generations before we have a machine that is still "nano", and can function in direct sunlight, a wide range of pH, and a wide range of temperatures. (It is unlikely that we'll ever get away from "environmental nutrient" as a requirement, ever; that's a fundamental effect of the Second Law of Thermodynamic. An energy source is strictly required in order to do any work.)
I can imagine machines that may meet those criteria but to get to the point where the machines don't instantly die in sunlight (a rather dangerous thing; there's a reason the sun touches almost nothing on us that isn't already dead), you're probably going to have to leave "nano" and get up to merely "micro". You simply need some amount of mass just for the thermal inertia, so the slightest thermal impetus doesn't send you directly to thermal death.
(Same goes for EM concerns as well; truthfully, I'm still skeptical (albeit in the open minded sense) that what we're all thinking of as "nano" machines (machines in the thousands or merely millions of atoms) will ever work outside of a Faraday cage; it remains to be see, I guess.)
Yup. Bummer. Shit happens. But you're still arguing in nothing but negatives. Like I said, cooling is a disaster, warming is a disaster, everything is a disaster. That's not rational thinking, that's twitchy panicking.
If the globe cools, we'll lose more land to ice. If the globe warms, we lose land to rising sea levels.
Don't you see the problem with this logic? If this were true, we'd have long since lost all land on Earth to ice and sea. If the globe warms, we may lose islands, but we get more of Siberia. If the globe cools, we lose the poles but we get more coastline. This sort of one-dimensional arguing is what I'm speaking out against... bad things are going to happen. The question is, will the balance turn out in our favor or not, and that's not a question with an answer so easy one can build a semi-religious cause around it.
And I personally guarentee you that both of these outcomes will occur, sometime in the future, even if humanity keels over dead right now. Holding up the disasters that are a given is much less interesting then talking about the ones that aren't, like pollution with various exotic, totally unnatural chemicals.
You question my claim that warming will occur, followed by cooling, and you question my knowlege of paleoclimatology?!?! I suppose that it is faintly possible that starting from this moment, cooling will occur followed by warming, but that is the only other possibility. Period. Stasis is not in the cards.
when the earth's climate changes, does it do so:
a) Slowly and smoothly, or
b) Rapidly with fairly extreme local noise levels.
Yes.
Answers with scientific references, please.
Do your own damned research; you're so ignorant of history that "specific scientific references" seem likely to fly over your head. This is Slashdot, not a peer-reviewed journal.
Warming and cooling will occur; climates will shift. The question is not whether climate change will happen, but whether the final configuration of "civilization" will be better or worse then the initial. The cost of changing is a given.
ignore the proper knock so that if somebody's trying to brute force all the possible knocks, they'll never get feedback when they have the right one.
Re "brute forcing"... the number of possible knocks is (ports used for knocking) ** (ports in knock sequence). Yes, that's exponentiation.
In fact, I'd suggest making the knock sequence much longer then in the article; ten might be good. Then, if you allocate 100 ports to the knocked and randomly select a 10 port sequence for the knocking, you get 100 ** 10 possible knocks, or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 (100 sextillion) possible knocks.
With just a few more ports in the sequence and just a modest investment in ports, you can make brute forcing impossible.
(And if you mix up the ports so they aren't sequential and the attacker has to guess THOSE ports, it goes to approx. (2**16)**(number of knock), so for a 10-port sequence on potentially all TCP ports it's 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019, 655,932,542,976 possible knocks, a.k.a. "way the hell more then can be brute-forced".
(I love posting big numbers on Slashdot.)
You need to worry about sniffers way more then brute forcers. (And as this is another layer of security, hopefully on top of an already fairly secure protocol like SSH, it's a good thing; now the 'man in the middle' has to have advanced knowlege to even know there's something to get into the middle of!)
Oh, and any change away from the conditions that are viable for life can be considered detrimental.
Are you so sure that the conditions we are experiencing right now are the precisely optimal conditions for life?
Are you so sure that a couple of degrees warmer might not be a good thing? Or that a couple of degrees colder might not be a good thing?
How are you so sure?
If the global temperature drops a degree, it's a catastrophe. If the global temperature rises a degree, it's a catastrophe. If the global CO2 levels wiggle by a percent, it's a catastrophe. If the global aldebo level wiggles byt a fraction of a percent, it's a catastrophe. If the ice at some local lake averages thinner then 50 years ago, it's a catastrophe. If some lake freezes a month sooner then 50 years ago, it's a catastrophe. If the glaciers melt, it's a catastrophe. If the glaciers grow, it's a catastrophe. If the sea levels rise, it's a catastrophe. If the sea levels sink, it's a catastrophe. If the acidity in the rain rises, it's a catastrophe. If the acidity in the rain falls, it's a catastrophe. If the suns output increases, it's a catastrophe. If the suns output decreases, it's a catastrophe. If some species goes extinct, it's a catastrophe. (Remarkably, nobody seems to get too uptight about new species, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.)
If some natural climatic process occurs, it's a catastrophe. If some natural climatic process doesn't occur, it's a catastrophe.
Climates change. It's what they do. The conditions right now aren't the only viable ones for life, as exemplified by the vast array of conditions life has thrived in throughout Earth's history.
This kind of panicking every time an indicator wiggles is tiring and pointless. The indicators will wiggle. Global warming will occur, and it will be followed by a period of global cooling. The sea level will rise, and it will subsequently fall. The CO2 levels will rise, and they will subsequently fall. The sun's output will rise, and it will subsequently fall. All of these things have occured several times, even within humanity's life time and even within yours, for some of these indicators.
There is some merit in debating how these things will affect us, but acting as if a statement like "don't make the mistake of assuming that the planet might become uninhabitable by members of your niche within short order at some point" is worth panicking over is unjustified. Debating the impact of long terms trends is interesting; twitching, having a fit, and screaming at everyone else who refuses to have a fit every time an indicator goes somewhere is not.
Chill out. Pun intended.
(Personally, I'm still thinking a couple of degrees warmer will be a net benefit; one should not analyse merely the costs without considering the benefits, and surprise surprise, that's exactly what twitchy, panicky, screamy environmentalists do. Sure, we lose a couple of inches of coastline, but we get a lot more arable land and perhaps more rain will help roll some deserts back. Who knows? Nobody, that's who. But I can tell you it's been warmer before and life seemed to be quite prolific. Fortunately nothing at those times was smart enough to panic at unstoppable changes.)
I had a fairly negative message about not really having the time, but I note the next conferance is presumably a year away.
You've sorely tempted me, and I could write an even simpler attack then what I was going for in that piece (no obvious blocks of ham text, no "cheating" whatsoever). The worst part is the huge quantities of ham I need to collect!
Maybe I'll futz with spam bayes a bit more and see if I can break this down into little managable chunks. (I wish there was some easy way to grab thousands of Usenet messages without having to hand mark spam vs. ham...)
Somewhat. That's an effect of the poisoning the filter experiences as these "hammy spams" are marked as spam; the boundary between "spam" and "ham" gradually fuzzes until the computer can't tell them apart.
The initial phase of the attack lies in creating the spams that get past the filters in the first place. One direct use of this attack is to better those "random word" blocks, to turn them into "hammy word/phrase" blocks. (Then, of course, the bayesian filter authors stop processing those blocks, and the spammers put it somewhere else, and we're right back to an arms race.)
Well, I may not have made it into the BBC but my attack is much more effective and much, much harder to defend against: Bayes Attack Report.
It even counters the "personalization" quality of Bayes filters by finding the "common core" of personalization that we all share.
Fortunately, spammers continue to be too stupid to understand this attack. Last time I posted this on Slashdot I got joe jobbed, because apparently it's easier to do that then to actually figure out what I was talking about.
In summary, I wouldn't worry about your Bayes filters for a while: While they are attackable, spammers are too stupid to understand the attacks. (My article has been posted for over a year.) Thank goodness, sort of. (This will eventually be a temporary situation... but I see no particular evidence that the breakthrough will happen anytime soon.)
Centralized search engines can provide FASTER response but not necessary faster FIND of particular result. They already show less accuracy than P2P (for selected types of files)
Emphasis mine. It is trivial to beat Google in a restricted domain. I personally guarentee you that if you try to take your porn P2P search and extend it to all types of content you'll find it more miserably useless then you'd find the Alta Vista of 1997 today.
(Porn itself is a bad example; how often are you searching for a specific picture, versus just "something vaguely like 'lesbian porn'"? Misses are nowhere near as "annoying" with porn.)
"Decentralized search engine via P2P" and "sub-second response time" do not go together.
A centralized search engine has inherent speed advantages that can not be overcome by P2P systems until the speed of light is increased by a few factors of magnitude.
Normally, this is true. However, when discussing a company with billions in the bank, I think this is false. The company is not forced to raise prices to recoup the loss. In fact, the entire point of the fine is that the prices were already raised.
A tax on a company is a tax on consumers when the company is just barely staying afloat (which really describes most companies)... of course the customers may leave if it gets bad enough so it's still not a tax. (And again, the entire point is monopoly abuse, that customers can't just leave, so again, I don't think your comment applies in this case.)
I don't think any EU customers are going to see price hikes as a result of this; that would just get MS another, probably larger fine.
They didn't toss in the towel, they were forced to re-evaluate the viability of all stolen technology. Even "legit" technology would fall under scrutiny.
This would take time proportional to the amount of stolen technology, which is to say, a lot.
Sure, this didn't stop them, but add this and that and the other thing and that thing over there, and you get "lost the war".
Nobody in the article claimed more then "helped win the cold war" (emphasis mine), and I say that if you actually read the article insteading of projecting what you think it was going to say onto the article, you'd find that assertion perfectly defensible. I do.
Most software is still programmed this way,... thats why you change it when it stops meeting your needs.
Welcome to loud agreement. So you admit that top-down design never works in the real world and designs have to change as circumstances warrent? Why'd you bother posting such a cranky message when you agree with my point?
Re-read my post and tell me where I was advocating XP. My post was purely negative, as I've never actually tried XP and I'm quite skeptical about it in many ways.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you've kind of missed the point here. The question isn't "Is Open Source invincible?", the question is "Is deliberate program corruption more likely to occur, all else being equal, in an Open Source program or a commercial program?"
And while I'm not a free or open source fanatic, I have to say that I can't marshall any rational arguments that the commercial program is somehow safer from authorial corruption. It's virtually inconceivable that a large scale open-source program could have a backdoor or anything like that in it for any significant amount of time, and as for smaller projects, a one-man open source project may be just as likely to be corrupted as the one-man closed source product, but which is more likely to be detected before significant damage is done? The one with the source you can look at, hands down. (And the phrase "just as likely" is for rhetorical purposes; in the real world, the prospect of revealing the source surely impedes anybody who would put something nasty in there! That's way too accountable for someone like that's taste!)
No system can be made perfectly safe. But to claim that commercial software is safer from deliberate authorial corruption takes willful and deliberate ignorance. I mean, seriously, claiming that the software I can't see, that I'm not allowed to see, is more likely to be pure then the stuff anybody (or anybody I hire) can look at is? That flies in the face of both logic and common sense, and is the kind of claim that has be inflated into an long article to blind the reader with words before it can even come close to being seriously entertained; a paragraph summary doesn't pass the laugh test.
And remember, it's not only "Will it happen?", but "Which will do more damage?" Even when break-ins happen in Open Source, the damage is typically swiftly controlled; people's reputations are on the line! Who even knows how much closed-source damage has been caused from breakins? Again, people's reputations are on the line, and the incentives to cover such things up are high.
I just don't see a way, even in theory, where commercial software is safer against this sort of attack.
When I try to upgrade my version of GAIM and there happens to be a better version of GTK available, Portage will upgrade GTK first, regardless of whether you actually need the very latest GTK to run GAIM. I'd rather see Portage know what the minimum version a dependency has to be in order to get a program running. As far as I know, it'll just upgrade everything in the dep tree.
;-)
Basically, this is wrong. Sorry.
The "-u" parameter to emerge will make it work as you described. However, if you just typed "emerge gaim", it would only emerge the minimum required. You have to ask for the "emerge all depencies, too" behavior.
I quite frequently emerge -up world, then just pick and choose what I want updated.
(I just checked "emerge -p world" against "emerge -up world", and "emerge -up" did significantly more packages on my system, where over 100 packages can be updated. On Gentoo, IIRC, the "world" is the list of things that you explicitly emerged; "emerge mozilla" will put mozilla in the "world" list but not any of its dependencies. So "emerge world" can update the packages you cared enough about to explicitly ask for them, and -u will add all possible dependency update.)
Context. Context context context. As clearly indicated by the quotes, I was putting words in the mouth of a graduate student in astrophysics, not an average Slashdot denizen. Not surprisingly, they have different standards when it comes to the coherence of theories.
Now perhaps you get some glimmers of the dangers of translation technical things down to "common language"; restricting oneself to the OED renders one nearly incapable of communication within a field. Count yourself lucky if your only objection to my message is the sense I used "imagining" in; the gulf betwixt the original post and mine is large enough that I'd have thought a nit-picker could find a lot more.
At the level I'm talking about, "imagine" means having a set of equations that describe the universe and match all observations, not an abstract "Gee, you know, I bet that the answer is really something else."
We all know there's something wrong with QM + SR, but that doesn't mean that anybody has anything better then "there's something wrong". Anybody can write a post like yours, but nobody's getting the Nobel for this unless they've got hard math.
Would someone please translate this and tell me what the hell is being said?
;-) (Perhaps Pi_0's don't shower would like to confirm/deny this translation?)
"Nobody knows for sure whether Dark Matter exists or not. But there are a whole lot of independent reasons to believe it exists, all of which result in very, very similar numbers for how much Dark Matter there is. If the Dark Matter theory is wrong, it's very hard to imagine what else could possibly explain all those numbers, all at once. (It's easy enough to explain one or two of those, but that's not an improvement over current theories, that's a step back.) Dark Matter hasn't made it to 100% certainty, but other theories have a lot to explain if Dark Matter doesn't explain what we're seeing."
I think that's about right. I Am Not A Physicist, but I follow this and generally understand math, so I think I'm at least competent to translate...
(On my own, I'd note that giving how flexible geometry can be, I can easily imagine someone constructing a geometry of the universe that doesn't need dark matter that turns out to be mathematically equivalent to a universe that does have dark matter. I'd give some of the geometry-based theories some time to be vetted by real astrophysicists before assuming they provide a real alternative; they may well just encode the Dark Matter into the structure of the Universe itself, which really isn't an alternate theory, just a restatement of the original in a different form. Until someone produces some Dark Matter, or the Universe is explored to our satisfaction to determine no such matter exists, this may remain unresolvable.)
Actually, with Einstein's relativity, doesn't Ptolemy's theories hold true? Everything is relative to a point of view?
No, because rotational motion isn't linear motion. A given linear motion will look like any other linear motion from the correct point of view. There is no (sub-light) vantage point from which the Earth does not have a path that describes an orbit around the sun. (That orbit, the Earth, and the Sun can appear squished and time dilated, but the path the Earth follows will always be around the Sun.)
You can define a Point Of View where your position on the surface of the Earth is the constant zero point, but it's going to be very exicting defining the rest of physics usably. Anything further then a light-(day / (pi*2)) away is traveling faster then the speed of light, for instance (appears to travel more then one light-day per day). Again, this is because rotation isn't linear motion.
I think you could theoretically kludge physics to work that way, but what you have is a God-awful physics where the speed of light varies based on which direction you're traveling and how from the zero point you are, and in the end, it makes the exact same predictions as what we have now. There are an infinite variety of theories that make equivalent predictions to any given theory, and are thus in some sense equivalent, but as humans, we prefer the simplest for a lot of reasons. You could build a consistent Ptolemaic theory, but you wouldn't want to.
- Use a well-established channel like Television that gives full motion video and puts you in good company with other professionally-done advertisements, or
- End up with your campaign spam sandwiched between penis enlargers, pyramid schemes, viruses, phishing, viagra offers, and "undeliverable mail" notifications?
Oh, I'm sure a couple of candidates will try this, but consider the company their campaign email will be keeping. Personally, I wouldn't want my campaign within ten feet of any of that stuff, let alone fractions of an inch away from them on the recipient's screen; I expect the net impact would be negative. Long-term I think campaign spam will have to wait until the rest of spam has been contained.Based on that quote, it doesn't sound like they are trying to shoot cations into the cloud itself, just using the cations being "shot" as the sound source, instead of the more traditional magnetic and paper cone (which may not be fea$ible for 120dB and the other characteristics, such as extreme focus, they're looking for in the sound).
The cations themselves may only make it inches but the sound they make can easily propogate for a mile if the sound is directed and has a strength of 120dB.
Rule one of globalisation (ie being dictated to by the US) - the country with the most enlightened position will take it up the arse.
In your zeal to make an Anti-American snide comment, did you miss this part of the posting: The US had some perfectly reasonable copyright laws up until 1976, when we changed our laws so we could join the Berne convention. We changed our laws to "harmonize" with Europe. And then in 1995, Europe extended their laws from life+50 to life+70, and shortly thereafter [1996], the US extended its laws to match. ?
The real problem here isn't dictation by the US, it's the apparent zest for dropping to the lowest common denominator by the countries of the world. A few more years, and we'll probably see laws getting passed by the Dictator-for-a-day of Zaire and getting the entire world automatically harmonized by some ill-conceived international treaty.
LOL, you act as if these features are going to have to be designed in, rather then designed out!
Nanotech bends a few of the rules, but it doesn't bend all of them. While you can make nano-scale machines hard to physically destroy, it's going to be a lot of generations before we have a machine that is still "nano", and can function in direct sunlight, a wide range of pH, and a wide range of temperatures. (It is unlikely that we'll ever get away from "environmental nutrient" as a requirement, ever; that's a fundamental effect of the Second Law of Thermodynamic. An energy source is strictly required in order to do any work.)
I can imagine machines that may meet those criteria but to get to the point where the machines don't instantly die in sunlight (a rather dangerous thing; there's a reason the sun touches almost nothing on us that isn't already dead), you're probably going to have to leave "nano" and get up to merely "micro". You simply need some amount of mass just for the thermal inertia, so the slightest thermal impetus doesn't send you directly to thermal death.
(Same goes for EM concerns as well; truthfully, I'm still skeptical (albeit in the open minded sense) that what we're all thinking of as "nano" machines (machines in the thousands or merely millions of atoms) will ever work outside of a Faraday cage; it remains to be see, I guess.)
Yup. Bummer. Shit happens. But you're still arguing in nothing but negatives. Like I said, cooling is a disaster, warming is a disaster, everything is a disaster. That's not rational thinking, that's twitchy panicking.
If the globe cools, we'll lose more land to ice. If the globe warms, we lose land to rising sea levels.
Don't you see the problem with this logic? If this were true, we'd have long since lost all land on Earth to ice and sea. If the globe warms, we may lose islands, but we get more of Siberia. If the globe cools, we lose the poles but we get more coastline. This sort of one-dimensional arguing is what I'm speaking out against... bad things are going to happen. The question is, will the balance turn out in our favor or not, and that's not a question with an answer so easy one can build a semi-religious cause around it.
And I personally guarentee you that both of these outcomes will occur, sometime in the future, even if humanity keels over dead right now. Holding up the disasters that are a given is much less interesting then talking about the ones that aren't, like pollution with various exotic, totally unnatural chemicals.
Or just totally ignorant of paleoclimatology?
You question my claim that warming will occur, followed by cooling, and you question my knowlege of paleoclimatology?!?! I suppose that it is faintly possible that starting from this moment, cooling will occur followed by warming, but that is the only other possibility. Period. Stasis is not in the cards.
when the earth's climate changes, does it do so:
a) Slowly and smoothly, or
b) Rapidly with fairly extreme local noise levels.
Yes.
Answers with scientific references, please.
Do your own damned research; you're so ignorant of history that "specific scientific references" seem likely to fly over your head. This is Slashdot, not a peer-reviewed journal.
Warming and cooling will occur; climates will shift. The question is not whether climate change will happen, but whether the final configuration of "civilization" will be better or worse then the initial. The cost of changing is a given.
ignore the proper knock so that if somebody's trying to brute force all the possible knocks, they'll never get feedback when they have the right one.
, 655,932,542,976 possible knocks, a.k.a. "way the hell more then can be brute-forced".
Re "brute forcing"... the number of possible knocks is (ports used for knocking) ** (ports in knock sequence). Yes, that's exponentiation.
In fact, I'd suggest making the knock sequence much longer then in the article; ten might be good. Then, if you allocate 100 ports to the knocked and randomly select a 10 port sequence for the knocking, you get 100 ** 10 possible knocks, or 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 (100 sextillion) possible knocks.
With just a few more ports in the sequence and just a modest investment in ports, you can make brute forcing impossible.
(And if you mix up the ports so they aren't sequential and the attacker has to guess THOSE ports, it goes to approx. (2**16)**(number of knock), so for a 10-port sequence on potentially all TCP ports it's 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019
(I love posting big numbers on Slashdot.)
You need to worry about sniffers way more then brute forcers. (And as this is another layer of security, hopefully on top of an already fairly secure protocol like SSH, it's a good thing; now the 'man in the middle' has to have advanced knowlege to even know there's something to get into the middle of!)
Oh, and any change away from the conditions that are viable for life can be considered detrimental.
Are you so sure that the conditions we are experiencing right now are the precisely optimal conditions for life?
Are you so sure that a couple of degrees warmer might not be a good thing? Or that a couple of degrees colder might not be a good thing?
How are you so sure?
If the global temperature drops a degree, it's a catastrophe. If the global temperature rises a degree, it's a catastrophe. If the global CO2 levels wiggle by a percent, it's a catastrophe. If the global aldebo level wiggles byt a fraction of a percent, it's a catastrophe. If the ice at some local lake averages thinner then 50 years ago, it's a catastrophe. If some lake freezes a month sooner then 50 years ago, it's a catastrophe. If the glaciers melt, it's a catastrophe. If the glaciers grow, it's a catastrophe. If the sea levels rise, it's a catastrophe. If the sea levels sink, it's a catastrophe. If the acidity in the rain rises, it's a catastrophe. If the acidity in the rain falls, it's a catastrophe. If the suns output increases, it's a catastrophe. If the suns output decreases, it's a catastrophe. If some species goes extinct, it's a catastrophe. (Remarkably, nobody seems to get too uptight about new species, but I'm sure it's only a matter of time.)
If some natural climatic process occurs, it's a catastrophe. If some natural climatic process doesn't occur, it's a catastrophe.
Climates change. It's what they do. The conditions right now aren't the only viable ones for life, as exemplified by the vast array of conditions life has thrived in throughout Earth's history.
This kind of panicking every time an indicator wiggles is tiring and pointless. The indicators will wiggle. Global warming will occur, and it will be followed by a period of global cooling. The sea level will rise, and it will subsequently fall. The CO2 levels will rise, and they will subsequently fall. The sun's output will rise, and it will subsequently fall. All of these things have occured several times, even within humanity's life time and even within yours, for some of these indicators.
There is some merit in debating how these things will affect us, but acting as if a statement like "don't make the mistake of assuming that the planet might become uninhabitable by members of your niche within short order at some point" is worth panicking over is unjustified. Debating the impact of long terms trends is interesting; twitching, having a fit, and screaming at everyone else who refuses to have a fit every time an indicator goes somewhere is not.
Chill out. Pun intended.
(Personally, I'm still thinking a couple of degrees warmer will be a net benefit; one should not analyse merely the costs without considering the benefits, and surprise surprise, that's exactly what twitchy, panicky, screamy environmentalists do. Sure, we lose a couple of inches of coastline, but we get a lot more arable land and perhaps more rain will help roll some deserts back. Who knows? Nobody, that's who. But I can tell you it's been warmer before and life seemed to be quite prolific. Fortunately nothing at those times was smart enough to panic at unstoppable changes.)
I had a fairly negative message about not really having the time, but I note the next conferance is presumably a year away.
You've sorely tempted me, and I could write an even simpler attack then what I was going for in that piece (no obvious blocks of ham text, no "cheating" whatsoever). The worst part is the huge quantities of ham I need to collect!
Maybe I'll futz with spam bayes a bit more and see if I can break this down into little managable chunks. (I wish there was some easy way to grab thousands of Usenet messages without having to hand mark spam vs. ham...)
I've compiled Mozilla ~1.1 on a Pentium 133MHz with 40MB ram in about a day.
It's a close thing, though; LyX failed to compile on that machine because the compiler even ran out of swap. (LyX uses a lot of C++.)
Somewhat. That's an effect of the poisoning the filter experiences as these "hammy spams" are marked as spam; the boundary between "spam" and "ham" gradually fuzzes until the computer can't tell them apart.
The initial phase of the attack lies in creating the spams that get past the filters in the first place. One direct use of this attack is to better those "random word" blocks, to turn them into "hammy word/phrase" blocks. (Then, of course, the bayesian filter authors stop processing those blocks, and the spammers put it somewhere else, and we're right back to an arms race.)
I discuss why we need a new form of IP protection here. None of the existing models quite work, but taken as a whole, protecting "privacy sensitive information" does fit right into our current IP domain fairly cleanly; you need to recombine various aspects of the other domains but you don't need anything truly new, so it's hardly asking for a lot to protect private information. (I also cleanly define what I mean by "privacy sensitive information".)
Well, I may not have made it into the BBC but my attack is much more effective and much, much harder to defend against: Bayes Attack Report.
It even counters the "personalization" quality of Bayes filters by finding the "common core" of personalization that we all share.
Fortunately, spammers continue to be too stupid to understand this attack. Last time I posted this on Slashdot I got joe jobbed, because apparently it's easier to do that then to actually figure out what I was talking about.
In summary, I wouldn't worry about your Bayes filters for a while: While they are attackable, spammers are too stupid to understand the attacks. (My article has been posted for over a year.) Thank goodness, sort of. (This will eventually be a temporary situation... but I see no particular evidence that the breakthrough will happen anytime soon.)
You need to seriously think about the distinction between "Charging too much" (in the sense you use it) and "Monopoly abuse".
I am hopeful that if you chew on it long enough, the differences may become apparent.
Good luck.
Centralized search engines can provide FASTER response but not necessary faster FIND of particular result. They already show less accuracy than P2P (for selected types of files)
Emphasis mine. It is trivial to beat Google in a restricted domain. I personally guarentee you that if you try to take your porn P2P search and extend it to all types of content you'll find it more miserably useless then you'd find the Alta Vista of 1997 today.
(Porn itself is a bad example; how often are you searching for a specific picture, versus just "something vaguely like 'lesbian porn'"? Misses are nowhere near as "annoying" with porn.)
"Decentralized search engine via P2P" and "sub-second response time" do not go together.
A centralized search engine has inherent speed advantages that can not be overcome by P2P systems until the speed of light is increased by a few factors of magnitude.
It is an embedded tax on the consumer.
Normally, this is true. However, when discussing a company with billions in the bank, I think this is false. The company is not forced to raise prices to recoup the loss. In fact, the entire point of the fine is that the prices were already raised.
A tax on a company is a tax on consumers when the company is just barely staying afloat (which really describes most companies)... of course the customers may leave if it gets bad enough so it's still not a tax. (And again, the entire point is monopoly abuse, that customers can't just leave, so again, I don't think your comment applies in this case.)
I don't think any EU customers are going to see price hikes as a result of this; that would just get MS another, probably larger fine.
They didn't toss in the towel, they were forced to re-evaluate the viability of all stolen technology. Even "legit" technology would fall under scrutiny.
This would take time proportional to the amount of stolen technology, which is to say, a lot.
Sure, this didn't stop them, but add this and that and the other thing and that thing over there, and you get "lost the war".
Nobody in the article claimed more then "helped win the cold war" (emphasis mine), and I say that if you actually read the article insteading of projecting what you think it was going to say onto the article, you'd find that assertion perfectly defensible. I do.
Reading is fundamental.
Most software is still programmed this way, ... thats why you change it when it stops meeting your needs.
Welcome to loud agreement. So you admit that top-down design never works in the real world and designs have to change as circumstances warrent? Why'd you bother posting such a cranky message when you agree with my point?
Re-read my post and tell me where I was advocating XP. My post was purely negative, as I've never actually tried XP and I'm quite skeptical about it in many ways.