Telephone : patented 1876 Radio : patented 1898 Water Supply and Distribution : Roman Empire Automobile : patented 1886 by Benz, later to join with Mercedes, obviously.
I'm embarrassed to have read that page. I'd be mortified to have written it. I might be being a bit pedantic in using dates at which certain things were patented. Going from dates that things became reasonably common sights, or in the case of civic services such as telephones, radio might be considered a 20th century achievement. The others were common enough before 1900 to be considered developments of the 19th century
I believe Bertrand Russell demonstrated that relativism, particularly in the field of ethics, is the enemy of useful philosophy. He went so far as to call it "the anthropologist's heresy" in the article I read.
It doesn't help us answer any difficult ethical questions, of which there are many. It states that all possible answers are just as correct as each other, and there the discussion ends. How can it possibly go on?
The purpose of ethics is to provide a method of answering difficult questions. Relativism answers none.
Re:This Discussion is scary
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Solving Chess?
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I think the people who build the computer and write the software that solve chess will get far more respect than the computer itself. I'll start worrying when computers can write their own software, but not much.
Absolutely true. But absolutely impractical.
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Solving Chess?
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The machine that could do this sort of think has a name: non-deterministic turing machine. Sadly, it doesn't exist. Yet.
That's a pretty weak conclusion
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Solving Chess?
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There are several problems that, by their nature, can only be solved by the exhaustive search method you have proposed, or more accurately, an optimised search heuristic. I have never heard of chess being included in this class of problem.
It shouldn't be necessary to examine every possible branching that exists. You can eliminate stupid moves at the start, such as moving your bishops all the way to the other side of the board.
It would be better to write a program that only ever chooses sensible moves, and thus eliminate the need to filter out dumb moves. This is no particular leap of logic. It is plainly obvious. It also cuts a large swathe out of your search space.
I really don't think that discussion of branching factors is necessarily relevant to the problem of solving chess. It is an impressive way of indicating that the problem is difficult, but it isn't all that representative, really.
Assuming that problems should be solved by an exhaustive search, or even a heuristic, may be a form of computer-brutishness. The assumption that this is the ideal use of resources to solve a difficult mathematical problem may cost valuable time and ultimately prove futile.
Re:Have you ever watched a game of chess?
on
Solving Chess?
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· Score: 1
It has in the past been quite popular for spectators. It isn't really part of the social background of most people to watch a game of chess. It is for some though.
I remember watching a bunch of guys play on one of those big boards they have in parks some places. There were a fair few othe people watching as well. It's less boring than say, cricket. Or baseball.
It's human nature, you utter goose. No matter what you decide the "internet language" should be, people will use what they please. I didn't say it will always be their first language. I said english is frequently the most convenient for international communication. There are certainly languages that are more widely spoken, but none of these are widely spoken by populations that regularly use the internet.
I add that it is amusing to have my diction questioned by a pompous ass who is still grappling with the finer points of sentence structure himself.
If I speak english as my first language, I'll post in english, whether you say esperanto, lojban, french or swahili. This is how people work. People will always make their web-pages in the most convenient language. This is frequently english. It will never be esperanto. You're wasting our time with stupid questions like this.
I wke up this morning at the defacto standard hour of 6:30am. I don't have to wake up this early for anything, but since everyone else wakes up this early, it must be a defacto standard. Who am I to disagree? After my defacto standard Nescafe, which I drank despite the presence in my kitchen of better, more fulfilling, coffees, I browsed the web using Internet Explorer. It's the defacto standard web browser. I have Linux on my computer, but I never use it, because Windows 98 is the defacto standard...
...and I could probably go on like this. But I'll spare you.
A defacto standard music format is ridiculous. There's no defacto standard. Network standards are needed so that computers can talk to each other and not get confused. What on Earth would you want a defacto standard audio format for? So Joe sixpack don't gotta download two music players? What about open standards? Patent or no, MP3 is far more open than RealAudio.
The voice over ruined most of the underlying themes of the film. It took away all the subtlety of the plot and presented you with the studio-approved explanation of what was going on. You aren't necesarily supposed to know what's going on all the time. What's more, it humanised Deckard far too much. Deckard was supposed to be pretty emotionless and perhaps a little depressed. He was never supposed to be a futuristic Sam Spade.
Good science fiction films often deal with philosophical issues in some form. It's a part of dealing with the future or the effects of technology as a focus of a movie. The difference between good sci-fi and great sci-fi is often whether these concepts are woven into the fabric of the movie with a subtle hand (Total Recall, Bladerunner-director's cut), or thrown at you and beaten into you with a sledgehammer because someone thinks it may all be a bit beyond you(The Matrix, Bladerunner with the voice-over).
There are so many interesting themes in Bladerunner, but when you watch the version with the voice-over, you miss most of them, and just see a slightly irritating film-noir detective story set in 2019.
Not bad, but certainly not great
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The Code Book
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I remember laughing out loud several times on the page where Singh describes the origins of the internet. I think he managed to cram most of the common misconceptions into a single paragraph at one point. But besides that, it is good light reading on the history of cryptography.
You will notice that with the exception of a few dead people, most addicts are quite happy with heroin.
Seriously, that comment is fallacious and a miserable way thing to base an argument on. People are happy with loads of things. I know people who are happy with television, you do too. Just because people are happy, doesn't mean they can't be happier. What's more, the longer MS goes unpunished, the more obstacles that will exist between people and greater happiness.
Besides being pointless and irrelevant, it is plain wrong. If people such an overwhelming group of people were so happy with Microsoft, they wouldn't get derided so often. The only people who deride GNU/Linux are a bunch of MS fanatics.
I honestly have no idea why you would feel it is annoying that so much anti-MS sentiment here. Slashdot is, after all, well-known for it's support of free software, Open Source, Linux, GNU, BSD and in general, a great many things non-MS. It isn't an even-handed provider of tech news, and I'm fairly sure it never has been. Why on Earth are you annoyed to find anti-MS sentiment here? It is where I come to find anti-MS sentiment!
I suppose you're doing it to show the MS flag or something. Fine. If I were you, I'd do it in a more neutral forum, but it takes all types, I guess.
MS isn't being punished for being successful. Only a fool would claim that they were, only an idiot would believe them, and only a complete chimp would repeat this nonsense. MS is being punished for employing criminal means to eliminate competition. They attempted to enter into an illegal agreement with Netscape to split the market for web browsers. When Netscape refused, Microsoft, out of fear of losing their monopoly, bullied, badgered and bribed a small horde of companies into providing their product and ignoring Netscape's. This is ILLEGAL! Why can't you imbeciles comprehend that there are laws that govern the country in which you live, and success does not exempt you from them!
Microsoft has done things that nobody else in the industry have done. Thay have broken the law with no regard for the consequences. Repeatedly. They routinely violate standards as a means of controlling another application area (most recently their broken Kerberos implementation).
They flouted the last settlement they made with the DoJ. No wonder the government is baying for blood.
You claim that MS's politically connected competitors are driving this lawsuit. This is paranoid drivel to support your lopsided world view. What competitors? Monopolies don't have competitors. Apple? I think not.
So it is not a travesty of justice. It is not punishment for success. It is not a shadow back door deal done between the government and some unspecified competitors. It is the long awaited come-uppance of the biggest problem of the computer industry.
Do you really think the majority of programmers work in the commercial software industry? Don't fool yourself. More coders work in house for banks, or hardware manufacturers or things like web-site design, or database design and maintenance. I would be surprised if more than 20% of coders work for companies that actually sell software.
Don't shovel that old line about free software being equivalent to starving penniless code-grinders. It just don't fly.
Don't overlook the fact that the potato famine was going on in Ireland as well. There were many people who preferred transportation to starvation, and many magistrates who were sympathetic to their plight.
The typical "History of Australia" you get in Australian high schools is in some ways as unrelated to reality as the "I cannot tell a lie" nonsense most US students are familiar with.
Conditions in the early Sydney colony were never as bad as you are frequently told they were. Not even under Admiral Bligh, who is presented as a drunkard and a fool. Sure, there was a lot of rum making the rounds, but you have to understand, this was a naval colony. In the English Navy, rum was as traditional as the lash.
As for the commonly touted "descended from convicts" garbage, I have this response. Australia was a penal colony for around seventy years. It was settled after England lost their old penal colony. Wanna guess what that old penal colony was? U...S...
To say Australian population density is low is quite misleading. Whilst as a whole, population density is low, I agree, this fails to take into account the fact that Australia has ~85% urbanisation. That is to say, 85% of Australian citizens live in cities. That's actually 5% more than the US. I'm not sure what level of urbanistion England has.
So I'm not worried about DSLs not reaching most of Australia. Very few of us live on farms in the outback, you know.
Re:Debian Linux does public betas too.
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RedHat 6.2 - RSN
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Uh...They do make updates to the stable release every once in a while. Not sure how far reaching the updates get, though. The last one mostly dealt with security stuff, plus some y2k stuff. I don't know if they update things like gnome. 'course you could just grab the latest gnome debs off the unstable tree if you were that desperate for them.
You could try writing articles targeted at people with a reading age greater than 10. Better yet, you could hire reporters with a reading age greater than 10.
Some other ideas:
1 - Try printing a few articles that you didn't just crib from Reuters or AP newswires.
2 - Stop printing IT sections that deal with anything but the business end of IT. Unless you hire actual IT professionals to write the IT sections of your papers, you will always look like fumbling idiots. (by IT professionals I mean people who have worked for at least 5 years in the industry)
3 - Provide a means for us to add over one hundred whiny, irrelevant comments to the end of your articles. If you want to increase your readership, you must enable your readers to get first post.
4 - Include the word linux in all your printed material, particularly in every headline. IPO after a year or two and nobody on NASDAQ will care that your readership is zero.
5 - Provide some worthwhile news. Try and scoop everyone, just like you used to, back in the day. Woodward and Bernstein didn't hear about Watergate from the AP newswire, now did they? Make your reporters go out and find stories.
Exactly. If Phil Zimmerman did his work properly, non-brute force attacks against PGP signatures should be impossible without the ability to factor large numbers very quickly. Since as far as we know, nobody has a method of rapidly factoring large numbers, PGP signatures are theoretically uncrackable by anything other than brute-force. The times to do this to any reasonable cryptoscheme with a sufficiently large key are astronomical. Unless there are severe problems with the implementation (dubious but not impossible...the Nazis were pretty confident in enigma, too), or this cluster was cracking a key of length ~56 bits, they would have to be the greatest mathemeticians living or dead. If someone had managed to crack a pgp signature in that short a time, the news would be causing tidal waves in the worlds of encryption and mathematics.
In any case, public-private key encryption is the only way this electronic signature thing could possibly function. I wonder how long the US government will take to realise that this just won't fly on DES.
It's somewhat possible that the US government has a new encryption standard prepared for this. One that could allow federal organistions to acquire your private key through backdoor channels. Now what would they call something like that, do you think?
Of course Microsoft care. It's a company that places a higher value on effective marketing than on good engineering. Effective marketing involves listening to the market.
I'll admit, the opinions of Slashdot may not have the marketing department running around in a mad panic, but in so much as the readers of/. are indicative of a market segment, and a fairly central one to a product like win2k, they are no doubt upset at the reputation they have among the particular area of the OS buying population which includes/. readers. That is to say, those who know at least a little more about *nixes than you can learn from the Linux Myths page.
Amongst these people, NT has developed a certain reputation for instability and poor security. This is, to the marketing hacks at MS, unfortunate. MS is billing win2k as the OS that will secure their position against the various unix platforms, particularly GNU/Linux. Since stability and security are major concerns to unix users and administrators, MS has every reason to care about their opinions.
To put it simply, you don't steal market segments from other products by ignoring their markets and the opinions generally held there.
I would have expected pitchforks and flaming torches on this one. I'm surprised to find that many of the posts are readily admitting that IE is a better browser than Netscape.
Well, I DON'T feel even-handed at all. I don't care if IE is the first browser to be written by a team of crack ubergeeks assembled by God himself. Neither it nor Netscape approaches full compliance with the HTTP/1.1 spec, and most of the stuff that they leave out is stuff that I want.
Just glancing at Microsoft's "Conclusions of Law", I gasped in stunned bemusement many times before the end of the contents page. I liken my bafflement to the increasing sense of horror, confusion, and ulimately, frustration that occured last time I tried to repair a non-functional Windows 98 system.
Is it just me seeing this, or is every single chapter titled to directly contradict an element of the judge's earlier findings? Of what possible use can this document be, if it is merely a reassertion of Microsoft's belief in it's inalienable right to crush opposition in any arena by any means. We already know that they believe this about themselves. I'm sure we don't need to be reminded on a monthly basis.
From my point of view, the entire document is an attempt by MS to cloud the issues surrounding the case, to better their chances in the inevitable appeals process. It strikes me more as an effort to continue an argument about the findings of fact more than an attempt to draw conlusions from the facts.
I've heard a lot of spurious nonsense about this case, from the "MS is being victimised for being successful" line (No, they are being tried for breaking certain laws. Broken with gusto, I might add), to "MS's competitors can't keep up on a level playing field, so they try to beat MS in court." (What level playing field?)
I'm just as happy to see MS eliminated in court as to see them lose their market share outside of court. It makes absolutely no difference to me, as long as they are out of business, and their ridiculous attempt at a modern operating system is gone with them.
I tend to think Descartes felt he had to "prove" the existance of God, or else the church would put him under house arrest, or worse, burn him at the stake. It was common for anyone writing a religiously sensitive paper, such as the meditations, to kow-tow to the church and it's view of reality. He can't honestly have believed he had proven the existance of God in this way.
I agree that the meditations seem to prove the existance of things outside yourself. At the very least, for a demon to be deceiving you, the demon must exist, along with the vat in which he is storing your brain.
What if, however, it were not that some massive deceit is being committed to fool you into seeing a reality which does not exist, but that all that exists in reality is you, filling reality completely, so that there are no gaps in which actual nothing could exist, and in some sort of psychosis brought about by being the only existing entity, you deceive yourself by hallucinating an entire universe of perception? This leaves you with an existing you, and an abstract concept of nothing, which by definition does not exist. In order for this to be valid, you would have to admit to the possibility that you could be an entity entirely different from how you imagine yourself to be. It's not very relevant to The Matrix and it's take on the whole idea.
In any case, I'd ordinarily find it annoying that someone somewhere has deemed it useful to base a philosophy course on a film that spends ten minutes explaining painstakingly what the audience figured out in less than two, but it seems that since www.philosophy.com now sells cosmetics, philosophy has less value in the 3rd millenium than than a blemish free face. Drag.
Spoken like a man who has barely grazed the surface of philosophy. There are many more perplexing questions than "How can I be sure I'm not a brain in a vat?" Questions like "Is morality fundamental to the structure of the universe, or is it something that we have invented ourselves?" lead to a lot more disagreements in philosophical circles than the cogito ergo sum. It is incredibly naive of you to claim that since you can't think of any more "deep thoughts" and in your limited studies have yet to encounter one you haven't yet credited yourself with, there must be no philosophy that a child can't figure out.
Absolutely. Both of the times I called tech support I felt ashamed and somehow weakened by the experience. As you say, I felt that I was implying to the tech supporters that I was, in fact, an idiot.
On the other hand, it is too seldom pointed out that a large number of people who work in phone-in tech support are barely any more intelligent than the people who they seem to enjoy snickering at. Face it: no sensible company places their most adept technicians in the support role. Phone support is for the dregs, usually.
Tech support laughing at users is like Colonel Clink laughing at Sergeant Schwartz. Neither end is especially knowledgeable. The difference is that users admit it, while tech supporters are often incapable of admitting that they don't know everything.
Slashdot Mirror
And there's me griping about other people not doing their research...
Telephone : patented 1876
Radio : patented 1898
Water Supply and Distribution : Roman Empire
Automobile : patented 1886 by Benz, later to join with Mercedes, obviously.
I'm embarrassed to have read that page. I'd be mortified to have written it. I might be being a bit pedantic in using dates at which certain things were patented. Going from dates that things became reasonably common sights, or in the case of civic services such as telephones, radio might be considered a 20th century achievement. The others were common enough before 1900 to be considered developments of the 19th century
I believe Bertrand Russell demonstrated that relativism, particularly in the field of ethics, is the enemy of useful philosophy. He went so far as to call it "the anthropologist's heresy" in the article I read.
It doesn't help us answer any difficult ethical questions, of which there are many. It states that all possible answers are just as correct as each other, and there the discussion ends. How can it possibly go on?
The purpose of ethics is to provide a method of answering difficult questions. Relativism answers none.
I think the people who build the computer and write the software that solve chess will get far more respect than the computer itself. I'll start worrying when computers can write their own software, but not much.
The machine that could do this sort of think has a name: non-deterministic turing machine. Sadly, it doesn't exist. Yet.
There are several problems that, by their nature, can only be solved by the exhaustive search method you have proposed, or more accurately, an optimised search heuristic. I have never heard of chess being included in this class of problem.
It shouldn't be necessary to examine every possible branching that exists. You can eliminate stupid moves at the start, such as moving your bishops all the way to the other side of the board.
It would be better to write a program that only ever chooses sensible moves, and thus eliminate the need to filter out dumb moves. This is no particular leap of logic. It is plainly obvious. It also cuts a large swathe out of your search space.
I really don't think that discussion of branching factors is necessarily relevant to the problem of solving chess. It is an impressive way of indicating that the problem is difficult, but it isn't all that representative, really.
Assuming that problems should be solved by an exhaustive search, or even a heuristic, may be a form of computer-brutishness. The assumption that this is the ideal use of resources to solve a difficult mathematical problem may cost valuable time and ultimately prove futile.
It has in the past been quite popular for spectators. It isn't really part of the social background of most people to watch a game of chess. It is for some though.
I remember watching a bunch of guys play on one of those big boards they have in parks some places. There were a fair few othe people watching as well. It's less boring than say, cricket. Or baseball.
It's human nature, you utter goose. No matter what you decide the "internet language" should be, people will use what they please. I didn't say it will always be their first language. I said english is frequently the most convenient for international communication. There are certainly languages that are more widely spoken, but none of these are widely spoken by populations that regularly use the internet.
I add that it is amusing to have my diction questioned by a pompous ass who is still grappling with the finer points of sentence structure himself.
No.
If I speak english as my first language, I'll post in english, whether you say esperanto, lojban, french or swahili. This is how people work. People will always make their web-pages in the most convenient language. This is frequently english. It will never be esperanto. You're wasting our time with stupid questions like this.
The law? I believe that sort of thing is illegal too. If they were to do that, they would find themselves right back in court.
I wke up this morning at the defacto standard hour of 6:30am. I don't have to wake up this early for anything, but since everyone else wakes up this early, it must be a defacto standard. Who am I to disagree? After my defacto standard Nescafe, which I drank despite the presence in my kitchen of better, more fulfilling, coffees, I browsed the web using Internet Explorer. It's the defacto standard web browser. I have Linux on my computer, but I never use it, because Windows 98 is the defacto standard...
...and I could probably go on like this. But I'll spare you.
A defacto standard music format is ridiculous. There's no defacto standard. Network standards are needed so that computers can talk to each other and not get confused. What on Earth would you want a defacto standard audio format for? So Joe sixpack don't gotta download two music players? What about open standards? Patent or no, MP3 is far more open than RealAudio.
The voice over ruined most of the underlying themes of the film. It took away all the subtlety of the plot and presented you with the studio-approved explanation of what was going on. You aren't necesarily supposed to know what's going on all the time. What's more, it humanised Deckard far too much. Deckard was supposed to be pretty emotionless and perhaps a little depressed. He was never supposed to be a futuristic Sam Spade.
Good science fiction films often deal with philosophical issues in some form. It's a part of dealing with the future or the effects of technology as a focus of a movie. The difference between good sci-fi and great sci-fi is often whether these concepts are woven into the fabric of the movie with a subtle hand (Total Recall, Bladerunner-director's cut), or thrown at you and beaten into you with a sledgehammer because someone thinks it may all be a bit beyond you(The Matrix, Bladerunner with the voice-over).
There are so many interesting themes in Bladerunner, but when you watch the version with the voice-over, you miss most of them, and just see a slightly irritating film-noir detective story set in 2019.
I remember laughing out loud several times on the page where Singh describes the origins of the internet. I think he managed to cram most of the common misconceptions into a single paragraph at one point. But besides that, it is good light reading on the history of cryptography.
You will notice that with the exception of a few dead people, most addicts are quite happy with heroin.
Seriously, that comment is fallacious and a miserable way thing to base an argument on. People are happy with loads of things. I know people who are happy with television, you do too. Just because people are happy, doesn't mean they can't be happier. What's more, the longer MS goes unpunished, the more obstacles that will exist between people and greater happiness.
Besides being pointless and irrelevant, it is plain wrong. If people such an overwhelming group of people were so happy with Microsoft, they wouldn't get derided so often. The only people who deride GNU/Linux are a bunch of MS fanatics.
I honestly have no idea why you would feel it is annoying that so much anti-MS sentiment here. Slashdot is, after all, well-known for it's support of free software, Open Source, Linux, GNU, BSD and in general, a great many things non-MS. It isn't an even-handed provider of tech news, and I'm fairly sure it never has been. Why on Earth are you annoyed to find anti-MS sentiment here? It is where I come to find anti-MS sentiment!
I suppose you're doing it to show the MS flag or something. Fine. If I were you, I'd do it in a more neutral forum, but it takes all types, I guess.
MS isn't being punished for being successful. Only a fool would claim that they were, only an idiot would believe them, and only a complete chimp would repeat this nonsense. MS is being punished for employing criminal means to eliminate competition. They attempted to enter into an illegal agreement with Netscape to split the market for web browsers. When Netscape refused, Microsoft, out of fear of losing their monopoly, bullied, badgered and bribed a small horde of companies into providing their product and ignoring Netscape's. This is ILLEGAL! Why can't you imbeciles comprehend that there are laws that govern the country in which you live, and success does not exempt you from them!
Microsoft has done things that nobody else in the industry have done. Thay have broken the law with no regard for the consequences. Repeatedly. They routinely violate standards as a means of controlling another application area (most recently their broken Kerberos implementation).
They flouted the last settlement they made with the DoJ. No wonder the government is baying for blood.
You claim that MS's politically connected competitors are driving this lawsuit. This is paranoid drivel to support your lopsided world view. What competitors? Monopolies don't have competitors. Apple? I think not.
So it is not a travesty of justice. It is not punishment for success. It is not a shadow back door deal done between the government and some unspecified competitors. It is the long awaited come-uppance of the biggest problem of the computer industry.
Do you really think the majority of programmers work in the commercial software industry? Don't fool yourself. More coders work in house for banks, or hardware manufacturers or things like web-site design, or database design and maintenance. I would be surprised if more than 20% of coders work for companies that actually sell software.
Don't shovel that old line about free software being equivalent to starving penniless code-grinders. It just don't fly.
Don't overlook the fact that the potato famine was going on in Ireland as well. There were many people who preferred transportation to starvation, and many magistrates who were sympathetic to their plight.
The typical "History of Australia" you get in Australian high schools is in some ways as unrelated to reality as the "I cannot tell a lie" nonsense most US students are familiar with.
Conditions in the early Sydney colony were never as bad as you are frequently told they were. Not even under Admiral Bligh, who is presented as a drunkard and a fool. Sure, there was a lot of rum making the rounds, but you have to understand, this was a naval colony. In the English Navy, rum was as traditional as the lash.
As for the commonly touted "descended from convicts" garbage, I have this response. Australia was a penal colony for around seventy years. It was settled after England lost their old penal colony. Wanna guess what that old penal colony was? U...S...
To say Australian population density is low is quite misleading. Whilst as a whole, population density is low, I agree, this fails to take into account the fact that Australia has ~85% urbanisation. That is to say, 85% of Australian citizens live in cities. That's actually 5% more than the US. I'm not sure what level of urbanistion England has.
So I'm not worried about DSLs not reaching most of Australia. Very few of us live on farms in the outback, you know.
Uh...They do make updates to the stable release every once in a while. Not sure how far reaching the updates get, though. The last one mostly dealt with security stuff, plus some y2k stuff. I don't know if they update things like gnome. 'course you could just grab the latest gnome debs off the unstable tree if you were that desperate for them.
You could try writing articles targeted at people with a reading age greater than 10. Better yet, you could hire reporters with a reading age greater than 10.
Some other ideas:
1 - Try printing a few articles that you didn't just crib from Reuters or AP newswires.
2 - Stop printing IT sections that deal with anything but the business end of IT. Unless you hire actual IT professionals to write the IT sections of your papers, you will always look like fumbling idiots. (by IT professionals I mean people who have worked for at least 5 years in the industry)
3 - Provide a means for us to add over one hundred whiny, irrelevant comments to the end of your articles. If you want to increase your readership, you must enable your readers to get first post.
4 - Include the word linux in all your printed material, particularly in every headline. IPO after a year or two and nobody on NASDAQ will care that your readership is zero.
5 - Provide some worthwhile news. Try and scoop everyone, just like you used to, back in the day. Woodward and Bernstein didn't hear about Watergate from the AP newswire, now did they? Make your reporters go out and find stories.
Exactly. If Phil Zimmerman did his work properly, non-brute force attacks against PGP signatures should be impossible without the ability to factor large numbers very quickly. Since as far as we know, nobody has a method of rapidly factoring large numbers, PGP signatures are theoretically uncrackable by anything other than brute-force. The times to do this to any reasonable cryptoscheme with a sufficiently large key are astronomical. Unless there are severe problems with the implementation (dubious but not impossible...the Nazis were pretty confident in enigma, too), or this cluster was cracking a key of length ~56 bits, they would have to be the greatest mathemeticians living or dead. If someone had managed to crack a pgp signature in that short a time, the news would be causing tidal waves in the worlds of encryption and mathematics.
In any case, public-private key encryption is the only way this electronic signature thing could possibly function. I wonder how long the US government will take to realise that this just won't fly on DES.
It's somewhat possible that the US government has a new encryption standard prepared for this. One that could allow federal organistions to acquire your private key through backdoor channels. Now what would they call something like that, do you think?
Of course Microsoft care. It's a company that places a higher value on effective marketing than on good engineering. Effective marketing involves listening to the market.
/. are indicative of a market segment, and a fairly central one to a product like win2k, they are no doubt upset at the reputation they have among the particular area of the OS buying population which includes /. readers. That is to say, those who know at least a little more about *nixes than you can learn from the Linux Myths page.
I'll admit, the opinions of Slashdot may not have the marketing department running around in a mad panic, but in so much as the readers of
Amongst these people, NT has developed a certain reputation for instability and poor security. This is, to the marketing hacks at MS, unfortunate. MS is billing win2k as the OS that will secure their position against the various unix platforms, particularly GNU/Linux. Since stability and security are major concerns to unix users and administrators, MS has every reason to care about their opinions.
To put it simply, you don't steal market segments from other products by ignoring their markets and the opinions generally held there.
I would have expected pitchforks and flaming torches on this one. I'm surprised to find that many of the posts are readily admitting that IE is a better browser than Netscape.
Well, I DON'T feel even-handed at all. I don't care if IE is the first browser to be written by a team of crack ubergeeks assembled by God himself. Neither it nor Netscape approaches full compliance with the HTTP/1.1 spec, and most of the stuff that they leave out is stuff that I want.
Just glancing at Microsoft's "Conclusions of Law", I gasped in stunned bemusement many times before the end of the contents page. I liken my bafflement to the increasing sense of horror, confusion, and ulimately, frustration that occured last time I tried to repair a non-functional Windows 98 system.
Is it just me seeing this, or is every single chapter titled to directly contradict an element of the judge's earlier findings? Of what possible use can this document be, if it is merely a reassertion of Microsoft's belief in it's inalienable right to crush opposition in any arena by any means. We already know that they believe this about themselves. I'm sure we don't need to be reminded on a monthly basis.
From my point of view, the entire document is an attempt by MS to cloud the issues surrounding the case, to better their chances in the inevitable appeals process. It strikes me more as an effort to continue an argument about the findings of fact more than an attempt to draw conlusions from the facts.
I've heard a lot of spurious nonsense about this case, from the "MS is being victimised for being successful" line (No, they are being tried for breaking certain laws. Broken with gusto, I might add), to "MS's competitors can't keep up on a level playing field, so they try to beat MS in court." (What level playing field?)
I'm just as happy to see MS eliminated in court as to see them lose their market share outside of court. It makes absolutely no difference to me, as long as they are out of business, and their ridiculous attempt at a modern operating system is gone with them.
I tend to think Descartes felt he had to "prove" the existance of God, or else the church would put him under house arrest, or worse, burn him at the stake. It was common for anyone writing a religiously sensitive paper, such as the meditations, to kow-tow to the church and it's view of reality. He can't honestly have believed he had proven the existance of God in this way.
I agree that the meditations seem to prove the existance of things outside yourself. At the very least, for a demon to be deceiving you, the demon must exist, along with the vat in which he is storing your brain.
What if, however, it were not that some massive deceit is being committed to fool you into seeing a reality which does not exist, but that all that exists in reality is you, filling reality completely, so that there are no gaps in which actual nothing could exist, and in some sort of psychosis brought about by being the only existing entity, you deceive yourself by hallucinating an entire universe of perception? This leaves you with an existing you, and an abstract concept of nothing, which by definition does not exist. In order for this to be valid, you would have to admit to the possibility that you could be an entity entirely different from how you imagine yourself to be. It's not very relevant to The Matrix and it's take on the whole idea.
In any case, I'd ordinarily find it annoying that someone somewhere has deemed it useful to base a philosophy course on a film that spends ten minutes explaining painstakingly what the audience figured out in less than two, but it seems that since www.philosophy.com now sells cosmetics, philosophy has less value in the 3rd millenium than than a blemish free face. Drag.
Spoken like a man who has barely grazed the surface of philosophy. There are many more perplexing questions than "How can I be sure I'm not a brain in a vat?" Questions like "Is morality fundamental to the structure of the universe, or is it something that we have invented ourselves?" lead to a lot more disagreements in philosophical circles than the cogito ergo sum. It is incredibly naive of you to claim that since you can't think of any more "deep thoughts" and in your limited studies have yet to encounter one you haven't yet credited yourself with, there must be no philosophy that a child can't figure out.
Absolutely. Both of the times I called tech support I felt ashamed and somehow weakened by the experience. As you say, I felt that I was implying to the tech supporters that I was, in fact, an idiot.
On the other hand, it is too seldom pointed out that a large number of people who work in phone-in tech support are barely any more intelligent than the people who they seem to enjoy snickering at. Face it: no sensible company places their most adept technicians in the support role. Phone support is for the dregs, usually.
Tech support laughing at users is like Colonel Clink laughing at Sergeant Schwartz. Neither end is especially knowledgeable. The difference is that users admit it, while tech supporters are often incapable of admitting that they don't know everything.