In the MIT experiment, the boat was arguably a very poor replica of a trireme. It was painted black to optimize the energy transfer (which in the end didn't matter). The target was not moving, only the sun. The target was not in water. Highly polished silver on a superflat surface would have been the closest thing that the ancient greeks could have had to simulate those mirrors, and if such a thing were possible, it would have been enormously expensive. The greeks would have had people holding the mirrors, not tables and stands.
At 100 feet, your each soldier's heartbeat would have defocused the weapon, even if he could otherwise hold perfectly still (which he couldn't). To protect the soldiers from archers, Archimedes' weapon would have to hold focus at a much greater distance.
All these things the MythBusters got much close to right and the MIT folks avoided.
Nobody is arguing that focusing the sun on something won't result in transfer of lots and lots of energy. That would be just silly (the web page says they wanted to see if it was at least possible - damn, they had to go to MIT to figure out a finite amount of energy will cause wood to burn?!). The question is could such a thing have been constructed and put into use by the Greeks. And that's something the MIT folks answered far less effectively.
The size of the focused target is way too big for light wave interference to have an effect. Parabolic mirrors are useful because if we take the sun to be a point source (which it isn't, but it's close enough) then all the rays from the sun will converge towards the mirrors focal point. It's the same principle as burning ants with a magnifying glass - if you put a 3 inch diameter patch of sun into a 1/4 inch diameter circle, you'll have a very, very intense spot of sunlight. Here we're using a mirror to focus the sun.
This pro-Kevin rhetoric is so typical of those who never bothered to actual read both sides of the Kevin story... Let's see..
Never harmed a soul? Read what he did to make his ex-wife's life miserable.
Kevin disappeared while on probation. He violated the terms of his probation. He committed further crimes of the sort that got him on probation in the first place, and he hid for years. He was only caught because he couldn't STOP doing what got him into trouble in the first place. Two words: FLIGHT RISK.
Was Kevin denied his right to a speedy trial? NO. Read the court documents. HE WAIVED THAT RIGHT.
You have no right to make a phone call by the way. Was it so terrible to block his access to a telephone? Once again, look at what he did to make his ex-wife's life miserable. What nobody seems to bring up is that he is a master of social engineering. He has the know how to corrupt another phone system into letting him make phone calls and once he has that his social engineering skills will allow him to create havoc.
A judge had to approve such a measure, and the prosecution put up the argument that if Kevin did this, it wouldn't be the first time.
So what rights was he denied that should make us all shed a bitter tear? And don't even try the suddenly-became-religious and needs-a-special-diet line.
Yes, all nice points, but I wasn't discussing the costs incurred by a consultant. I was discussing whether or not the cost of an employee to a company is 2x that of the employee's pay.
The units are wrong, the numbers are sufficiently correct for computing the "tiny fraction" ratio. Of all the greenhouse gasses that Kyoto regulates, China is now the #2 producer in the world - and still exempt!
Second, Kyoto regulates FAR MORE pollutants than just CO2.
HAHAHAHA... you guys are such a fucking joke. FIVE. Kyoto regulates FIVE more pollutants than just CO2.
Hey, here's the actual text of the Kyoto protocol. Why don't you read that and tell me what the world's #2 polluter's reduction commitment is.
Yeah, I'm tired of hearing your fucking shit. When China signed the kyoto protocol, they were the world's #3 CO2 producer, producing 3100 tons of CO2 to the United State's 5900 tons. Tiny fraction my ass. Why the hell would China NOT sign the kyoto protocol? It allows them to produce energy cheaper than any other major economic power.
You know, I keep hearing this "2X your pay is your cost to the company" myth, and I just think that is a bunch of crap. Let's take this consultant for instance. When he left the company he was making at least $8,000 per month (about $100K/yr, which is what a senior mainframe guy would be expecting to make at a rather small company).
Now how is it that the company is forking out another $8,000 per month on top of that?
SSI+Medicare is what? 10% And they stop pulling at a certain income amount, so say $1,000/month.
Medical Insurance: Maybe $500/month?
Dental: Maybe $100/month?
Your office space: Maybe $3/sq.ft. * 250 sqft (a large 16*16 office with window space). $750/month. (this is space that will be paid for and used regardless of whether or not you use it)
Worker's Comp: Not much for this type of job, very little risk. Say $400/month (probably more like $20/month)
Voice Line + Fax Line + Fast Net Connection (A resource typically shared by lots of people) = $200/month
Electricity (most business paying that kind of office space premium usually do not pay for electricity or HVAC): $50/month
That's about $3000/month on some *VERY* liberal numbers. Not even 50% over the base salary.
Unless this guy is chugging $5,000 per month in free coffee, I just don't buy it.
There's really not much to tell, the mini-itx has most of the peripherals on board. It's an EPIA MII 6000 mainboard sporting a 600MHz processor that I think I've clocked down to 533... or maybe it always ran at 533... Anyway,/proc/cpuinfo assures me it's at 533 MHz.
I'd like to say I had a good reason for only putting a 256MB DIMM on the board, but the truth is I had a 256MB DIMM harvested from another machine upgrade lying around, so I didn't even shop for something larger. There is only one DIMM slot on the board though.
Since that board has only one network interface, the lone PCI slot on the machine has another network card in it. I seem to remember that the motherboard had some problems with many PCI NICs, I had to shuffle through a few before finding one that worked.
The hard disks are samsung spinpoint V series 160GB drives which are raid mirrors of one another. Each drive is on a separate IDE cable (the Linux RAID HOWTO said that putting both drives on the same IDE cable was a sure way to kill performance). I'm sure someone out there is incredulous with the meager storage I have, but to be fair when I built the machine a couple years ago, 160GB was a fair sized drive and I haven't filled the drive up anyway.
It has an old CD-ROM I had lying around attached to it, but I don't think it has been used since the OS was installed.
The power supply I got from mini-box.com I believe. It has two parts: one that looks like a laptop power supply and another that attaches to the mini-itx board.
The server is running Gentoo Linux. I have several machines pick up and do a distcc to help the poor server through the big compiles. I've got my own set of iptables running as well as dhcpd, samba, apache2, tomcat, exim, sshd, courier-imap, postgres and named. Sadly, uptime right now is only 111 days. Every so often I want to download the latest Fedora Core, Knoppix, MAME ROMs or whatever and I'll use the server to do that as well (soaks a lot of CPU cycles to do bit torrent though). It's cheaper to have the server download the latest fedora DVDs than to leave one of my bigger machines on overnight.
The only thing it's not doing anymore is print serving. Although it could, the printer is doing fine attached to another box right now.
My server at home, which sits on a static IP address, is a mini-itx based machine. It provides me with: web hosting, email hosting, storage, inside network services and firewalls outside access to my TiVo. Why did I do this with a mini-itx instead of a shuttle? Well, there are several disadvantages to Shuttle over Mini-itx:
Noise. The shuttle will likely produce a lot more. The only moving part on my server is the hard drive platters, and they are hermetically sealed and use fluid dynamic bearings. As hard drives go, they are whisper quiet. I've bought a lot of fans in my time, even some rather expensive ultra-quiet ones. Given enough time, all of them eventually get dust in the bearings and start making a racket.
Size. Shuttle is small, this thing is smaller.
Heat. There is not a single fan running on my server. The hottest component by far is the hard drives.
Power. This goes along with heat. The power supply's peak sustained output is 60W. I'd be suprised if the unit consumed more than 25W except during hard drive spin up.
Battery back up lifetime. This goes along with power. A standard consumer UPS will run this thing for many hours. No, I haven't tested how long. It has survived 3 hour power outtages.
Put all this together, and I can hide the server in a closet and forget about it. Just need a power drop and two network connections.
If I read the gp post correctly, he said if his NFL game had the flag, he would not be able to save it until delete, and this is indeed true. The original article is correct, TiVo is adding functionality so that it no longer "gives you the freedom to watch your favorite shows any time, anywhere." Promises that this feature would only be used for pay per view and video on demand were, in fact, broken.
I'm not too worried about it myself, my TiVo is hacked in just about every way except stealing service. I can just yank the data off the TiVo drive without their blessing.
people just get sick of being asked if they want to allow something, and end up clicking "yes" on every box they see.
I don't think that is "Default Deny," that is "No Default." Default Deny would not ask, it would just deny it. His intention is that you should have to stop and think about what is and is not okay. For example your server should allow SSH and HTTP traffic and you will have to explicitly allow those two. Everything else is denied with prejudice.
With spyware it's very hard for a computer to tell the difference between a program you wanted installing and one you didn't. How do you expect it to tell?
I think the article was aimed more at corporate security. If the software could contain spyware, it should not be installed it all. You should be fully aware of everything installed on your computer. I can't practically do this myself on my machines, but I wish I could install each of my windows applications in the equivalent of a chroot jail.
So you are saying we should write code without bugs and holes?
He's saying that the normal security fixing schedule is to identify a vulnerability and then write special code to work around it. This is problematic because it doesn't address the underlying issue. His suggestion is to go back and think about why the vulnerability was there in the first place and re-engineer a piece of the product.
You think people should learn how to stop hacking and intrusion without learning how existing hacks work?
I think his whole point is that there is the aura and mystique about hacking that makes it appealing to people and we need to rid ourselves of this romanticized notion. Breaking into a person's computers without that person's permission isn't a cool thing to do.
That just isn't going to work unless you never let users install their own applications or plug-ins.
I again suspect this is part of his corporate leaning. In a corporate environment, users don't need to install their own applications or plug-ins.
So, after saying the state we are in is rubbish, you now say we shouldn't actually change anything. Eh?
He's saying let someone else beta test a new product for you. It wouldn't be the first time that a supposedly great new security product opened you up worse than you were before.
I think the plumbing industry is probably much the same. Moving a dishwasher this weekend, I snapped an improperly soldered joint the previous home owners had done themselves. I call in a plumber. He says he can't resolder the joint and he would have to charge me $125 to open the wall and see what is going on.
He heads out to his truck and in the 5 minutes he is out there, I grab my rotozip and open the wall (Wow, 5 minutes of work just saved me $125). He looks at it and comes up with some other stuff that is problematic (this stuff was genuinely problematic). Now he says he would have re-do the entire last 3 feet of pipeline up to the outlet, but this time he's not going to charge me to open the wall (as I've already shown that I can do it myself). So he writes me up an invoice for $650 to cut the old pipe off and replace it after the wall is opened up.
Included in the quote is a $50 3-way outlet. I already know that Home Depot sells those for $8.
So I did it myself. And as it turns out, I didn't need to open up any more wall than I already had. I spent $50 on parts to learn how to sweat copper pipes together. Another $75 on a MAPP torch, solder, flux, wire pipe cleaner, pipe cutting tool, etc.. About 2 hours with a book reading up on how to sweat the fittings. 4 hours practicing soldering with copper. Voila! Problem solved!
Now had the plumber charged $200 instead, I would have just paid him to do it and not learned how to fix the pipes myself.
How do you explain it when modern medicine says a person will die, that there is nothing else that can be done, but a priest comes and the person wakes up?
Oh this straw man again... Okay, tell you what: have a priest bring a brain dead individual back to full function and I'll bite. There has never been a documented case of a brain dead person coming back to any mental function. So you get that done then come back.
If you really want to know, it goes something like this: Doctors generally predict based on their experience, and very simple statistics will show that their sample set is not very good. Further investigation will show that if a doctor expects a person with a particular condition to die, then those who do die will be remembered as reaffirming his hypothesis and those who do not will be forgotten as being non-events.
This has been researched many times. Doctors are skilled artisans of medicine and surgery but, with very rare exception, they do not practice science and subject all their diagnoses and prognoses to scientific rigor. They use personal experience and anecdote, and those are quite fallible.
Besides, you FSM types are not interested in alternative theories. Teach the controversy, I say!
There is no controversy. Pastafarianism is a fact, supported by the vast numbers of True Believers. A false creator could never hope to sway such a large audience. False religions, such as the cult of the Invisible Pink Unicorn, simply cannot stand against the light of the truth as shown to us by Him and His noodly appendage.
evolution is a theory. It is not fact. It is not a scientific law.
Theory and fact are not exclusive. Stating something is a theory and is not a fact implies that the theory is wrong. Scientific laws are just "convenience" wrappers for theories. The things we call "laws" are theories just the same. They are still subject to the same rigor as theory.
The cool thing Intelligent Design is we know God made us.
And that is why you are NOT a science. Because you "know." You've moved from theory to statement of fact.
For any people who know statistics, what is the probability of that happening?
The probability of the event cannot be determined because we lack understanding of the state space.
How many times would I have to flip a quarter and get heads in a row? 100,000,000,000 times? 100,000,000,000,000 times?
The probability of getting N heads in a row is 1/(2^N). But that is irrelevant to the discussion.
You would have a better chance at taking a watch, hitting it with a hammer until it was broken into 1000 peices, and then putting it in a bag, shaking the bag, and having the watch come back together out of the random movements.
And you've calculated the probability of this how?
God made life. It is called a soul.
That it is incorrect. Life was bestowed upon the earth when the Flying Spaghetti Monster extended His noodly appendage and brought forth a midget in full pirate regalia.
Here was the problem: "You have a number of cities mapped on an x,y grid. A travelling salesman wants to find the shortest route between the cities. Calculate the shortest route." We had two hours or something.
I still think it was goddamn unfair to give an UNSOLVED PROBLEM in a programming contest for high school students.
Not sure if I'm being pedantic or not, but the problem, as you stated it, is neither NP nor unsolved. The shortest distance between two points is solvable in better than factorial time. You could convince yourself of this by thinking carefully about it: if all path costs are positive and my current path cost is greater than the best candidate path I've found so far, then this path, and all possible sub-paths need not be considered any longer. The traditional traveling salesman problem involves finding the shortest path that visits every point.
The data is a lot less useful than I think you may be giving it credit for. I go over this occasionally with social scientist PhDs who have at most one or two semesters of formal statistics training. They also think that it is fair to generalize from mailed questionaires. If you do not know the degree of the bias, you really have no idea of the skew of your results.
Case in point, the study says that an average of 2.09 hours is spent "wasting time." Now you know that time wasters were more likely to answer the questionaire, so the bias is out in the open. Now... How far is 2.09 hours from the true mean? Just pick a confidence interval of say 90%. Do you have enough information to figure that out? Unfortunately you don't. There is information in the study, but you don't know enough about the bias to separate signal from noise.
And also keep in mind that no matter how many lengths one goes to to make a survey sample representative, it is never going to be perfectly so. There is always some error, and there is always some insight to be gained, "scientific" or not.
This is all taken into account in proper statistics - which require a random sample. If the sample is random, you will know how likely it is to be a "good" fit. But I'm curious, what exactly is non "scientific" insight?
so you might as well spare energy for the instruments.
How much energy does an electric motor consume when not being used? Couldn't they dedicate most, if not all, of their power to the science instruments at one site, and only direct power to the motors when moving to another site?
Actually history bears record that a lot of scientific advance was brought about by Christian societies.
History also bears record that a lot of scientific advance was brought about by Islamic, Greek, Egyptian and Roman societies.
The Christian society as a whole does advocate scientific advancement
So Christian society as a whole opposes teaching intelligent design?
Evolution is an unproven
"proven" is one of those things science uses when communicating with non-scientific folks. Science doesn't work in irrefutable proof (as opposed to say, mathematics). There is however compelling evidence of evolution.
unobserved,
Definitely false. We have seen evolution occur.
piece of literature
It's scientific literature, yes.
It has no scientific basis.
Absolutely false. Evolution has scientific basis clear down to molecular biology.
As a scientist if anyone says, they have scientific proof
They probably would not have proof. They likely would have evidence.
this unrepeatable event
That's a bold statement. How could you divine that it is unrepeatable? If evolution is happening now (the evidence for which is overwhelming), why would you think it is unrepeatable?
Try _really_ searching for the truth.
Indeed. I hope you aren't implying that we could search for such in the bible. That's an issue of faith.
This summer I interned at a national lab and part of the requirements of the internship was creation of a scientific research style poster highlighting what I did. The people in charge of the posters were of the belief that there were only two correct tools for creating a poster: MS Powerpoint and Adobe Acrobat.
Unfortunately the poster people didn't mention such requirements to the IT people who had the interns all set up with Fedora Core 2 systems. Fortunately OpenOffice was installed on these systems. I could only hope Impress was on par with Powerpoint.
I was a little skeptical going in, I knew that the OOo guys had worked fairly hard to make their tools as good or better than the commercial products, but this was a fairly unusual niche requirement. I was creating a single 48x30 inch slide with all graphics being very high quality so they don't look like crap when blown up.
The results were superb! I used Calc to do graphs, and cut-n-paste between Calc and Impress worked flawlessly. I used Draw to do line art graphics, and once again cut-n-paste worked perfectly. Throw in a touch of gimp to clean up some of the graphics being used and the whole thing had a professional look to it on par with any of the Powerpoint posters from years past.
The only thing that didn't work was exporting as.ppt. Exporting as pdf worked perfectly though.
My assumption was that gcc and glibc would form the bulk of the GNU code on my machine. Glibc is big, but compared to KDE or OpenOffice... I don't even think twice about emerging glibc. If I have to emerge a new KDE, I know that even overnight will not be enough time.
His point is that 22% of the code in a typical "Linux" distribution is written by the GNU, more than (pulling a number out my ass) any 3 other "authors" (or organisations) put together,
I don't know. First, that 22% number sounds a little weird. A typical Linux kernel from your average distribution has at least a million lines of code compiled in. Do the GNU programs on your machine constitute over 22 million lines of code?
Without doing a semicolon count (the thing I usually do for a lower bound line # count) I'm guessing that KDE (which isn't a GNU project) OpenOffice (which isn't a GNU project) and one of the other big non-GNU project packages (maybe x.org or apache) constitute over 22% of the code in many linux distributions, or at least more than GNU projects.
Based on compile time (a horrible measure, I know) KDE + OpenOffice + X.org would constitute about 60% of the code in my Gentoo distribution. Text mode terminal only interface is anything but "typical" these days.
I call it "Linux" because it's more than just the kernel, "Linux" represents a movement that started to really get rolling, and accelerate, once we had the Linux kernel.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, if we're going to use this argument...
In the MIT experiment, the boat was arguably a very poor replica of a trireme. It was painted black to optimize the energy transfer (which in the end didn't matter). The target was not moving, only the sun. The target was not in water. Highly polished silver on a superflat surface would have been the closest thing that the ancient greeks could have had to simulate those mirrors, and if such a thing were possible, it would have been enormously expensive. The greeks would have had people holding the mirrors, not tables and stands.
At 100 feet, your each soldier's heartbeat would have defocused the weapon, even if he could otherwise hold perfectly still (which he couldn't). To protect the soldiers from archers, Archimedes' weapon would have to hold focus at a much greater distance.
All these things the MythBusters got much close to right and the MIT folks avoided.
Nobody is arguing that focusing the sun on something won't result in transfer of lots and lots of energy. That would be just silly (the web page says they wanted to see if it was at least possible - damn, they had to go to MIT to figure out a finite amount of energy will cause wood to burn?!). The question is could such a thing have been constructed and put into use by the Greeks. And that's something the MIT folks answered far less effectively.
The size of the focused target is way too big for light wave interference to have an effect. Parabolic mirrors are useful because if we take the sun to be a point source (which it isn't, but it's close enough) then all the rays from the sun will converge towards the mirrors focal point. It's the same principle as burning ants with a magnifying glass - if you put a 3 inch diameter patch of sun into a 1/4 inch diameter circle, you'll have a very, very intense spot of sunlight. Here we're using a mirror to focus the sun.
This pro-Kevin rhetoric is so typical of those who never bothered to actual read both sides of the Kevin story... Let's see..
Never harmed a soul? Read what he did to make his ex-wife's life miserable.
Kevin disappeared while on probation. He violated the terms of his probation. He committed further crimes of the sort that got him on probation in the first place, and he hid for years. He was only caught because he couldn't STOP doing what got him into trouble in the first place. Two words: FLIGHT RISK.
Was Kevin denied his right to a speedy trial? NO. Read the court documents. HE WAIVED THAT RIGHT.
You have no right to make a phone call by the way. Was it so terrible to block his access to a telephone? Once again, look at what he did to make his ex-wife's life miserable. What nobody seems to bring up is that he is a master of social engineering. He has the know how to corrupt another phone system into letting him make phone calls and once he has that his social engineering skills will allow him to create havoc.
A judge had to approve such a measure, and the prosecution put up the argument that if Kevin did this, it wouldn't be the first time.
So what rights was he denied that should make us all shed a bitter tear? And don't even try the suddenly-became-religious and needs-a-special-diet line.
Yes, all nice points, but I wasn't discussing the costs incurred by a consultant. I was discussing whether or not the cost of an employee to a company is 2x that of the employee's pay.
The units are wrong, the numbers are sufficiently correct for computing the "tiny fraction" ratio. Of all the greenhouse gasses that Kyoto regulates, China is now the #2 producer in the world - and still exempt!
Second, Kyoto regulates FAR MORE pollutants than just CO2.
HAHAHAHA... you guys are such a fucking joke. FIVE. Kyoto regulates FIVE more pollutants than just CO2.
Hey, here's the actual text of the Kyoto protocol. Why don't you read that and tell me what the world's #2 polluter's reduction commitment is.
Yeah, I'm tired of hearing your fucking shit. When China signed the kyoto protocol, they were the world's #3 CO2 producer, producing 3100 tons of CO2 to the United State's 5900 tons. Tiny fraction my ass. Why the hell would China NOT sign the kyoto protocol? It allows them to produce energy cheaper than any other major economic power.
You know, I keep hearing this "2X your pay is your cost to the company" myth, and I just think that is a bunch of crap. Let's take this consultant for instance. When he left the company he was making at least $8,000 per month (about $100K/yr, which is what a senior mainframe guy would be expecting to make at a rather small company).
Now how is it that the company is forking out another $8,000 per month on top of that?
SSI+Medicare is what? 10% And they stop pulling at a certain income amount, so say $1,000/month.
Medical Insurance: Maybe $500/month?
Dental: Maybe $100/month?
Your office space: Maybe $3/sq.ft. * 250 sqft (a large 16*16 office with window space). $750/month. (this is space that will be paid for and used regardless of whether or not you use it)
Worker's Comp: Not much for this type of job, very little risk. Say $400/month (probably more like $20/month)
Voice Line + Fax Line + Fast Net Connection (A resource typically shared by lots of people) = $200/month
Electricity (most business paying that kind of office space premium usually do not pay for electricity or HVAC): $50/month
That's about $3000/month on some *VERY* liberal numbers. Not even 50% over the base salary.
Unless this guy is chugging $5,000 per month in free coffee, I just don't buy it.
There's really not much to tell, the mini-itx has most of the peripherals on board. It's an EPIA MII 6000 mainboard sporting a 600MHz processor that I think I've clocked down to 533... or maybe it always ran at 533... Anyway, /proc/cpuinfo assures me it's at 533 MHz.
I'd like to say I had a good reason for only putting a 256MB DIMM on the board, but the truth is I had a 256MB DIMM harvested from another machine upgrade lying around, so I didn't even shop for something larger. There is only one DIMM slot on the board though.
Since that board has only one network interface, the lone PCI slot on the machine has another network card in it. I seem to remember that the motherboard had some problems with many PCI NICs, I had to shuffle through a few before finding one that worked.
The hard disks are samsung spinpoint V series 160GB drives which are raid mirrors of one another. Each drive is on a separate IDE cable (the Linux RAID HOWTO said that putting both drives on the same IDE cable was a sure way to kill performance). I'm sure someone out there is incredulous with the meager storage I have, but to be fair when I built the machine a couple years ago, 160GB was a fair sized drive and I haven't filled the drive up anyway.
It has an old CD-ROM I had lying around attached to it, but I don't think it has been used since the OS was installed.
The power supply I got from mini-box.com I believe. It has two parts: one that looks like a laptop power supply and another that attaches to the mini-itx board.
The server is running Gentoo Linux. I have several machines pick up and do a distcc to help the poor server through the big compiles. I've got my own set of iptables running as well as dhcpd, samba, apache2, tomcat, exim, sshd, courier-imap, postgres and named. Sadly, uptime right now is only 111 days. Every so often I want to download the latest Fedora Core, Knoppix, MAME ROMs or whatever and I'll use the server to do that as well (soaks a lot of CPU cycles to do bit torrent though). It's cheaper to have the server download the latest fedora DVDs than to leave one of my bigger machines on overnight.
The only thing it's not doing anymore is print serving. Although it could, the printer is doing fine attached to another box right now.
Put all this together, and I can hide the server in a closet and forget about it. Just need a power drop and two network connections.
If I read the gp post correctly, he said if his NFL game had the flag, he would not be able to save it until delete, and this is indeed true. The original article is correct, TiVo is adding functionality so that it no longer "gives you the freedom to watch your favorite shows any time, anywhere." Promises that this feature would only be used for pay per view and video on demand were, in fact, broken.
I'm not too worried about it myself, my TiVo is hacked in just about every way except stealing service. I can just yank the data off the TiVo drive without their blessing.
people just get sick of being asked if they want to allow something, and end up clicking "yes" on every box they see.
I don't think that is "Default Deny," that is "No Default." Default Deny would not ask, it would just deny it. His intention is that you should have to stop and think about what is and is not okay. For example your server should allow SSH and HTTP traffic and you will have to explicitly allow those two. Everything else is denied with prejudice.
With spyware it's very hard for a computer to tell the difference between a program you wanted installing and one you didn't. How do you expect it to tell?
I think the article was aimed more at corporate security. If the software could contain spyware, it should not be installed it all. You should be fully aware of everything installed on your computer. I can't practically do this myself on my machines, but I wish I could install each of my windows applications in the equivalent of a chroot jail.
So you are saying we should write code without bugs and holes?
He's saying that the normal security fixing schedule is to identify a vulnerability and then write special code to work around it. This is problematic because it doesn't address the underlying issue. His suggestion is to go back and think about why the vulnerability was there in the first place and re-engineer a piece of the product.
You think people should learn how to stop hacking and intrusion without learning how existing hacks work?
I think his whole point is that there is the aura and mystique about hacking that makes it appealing to people and we need to rid ourselves of this romanticized notion. Breaking into a person's computers without that person's permission isn't a cool thing to do.
That just isn't going to work unless you never let users install their own applications or plug-ins.
I again suspect this is part of his corporate leaning. In a corporate environment, users don't need to install their own applications or plug-ins.
So, after saying the state we are in is rubbish, you now say we shouldn't actually change anything. Eh?
He's saying let someone else beta test a new product for you. It wouldn't be the first time that a supposedly great new security product opened you up worse than you were before.
I think the plumbing industry is probably much the same. Moving a dishwasher this weekend, I snapped an improperly soldered joint the previous home owners had done themselves. I call in a plumber. He says he can't resolder the joint and he would have to charge me $125 to open the wall and see what is going on.
He heads out to his truck and in the 5 minutes he is out there, I grab my rotozip and open the wall (Wow, 5 minutes of work just saved me $125). He looks at it and comes up with some other stuff that is problematic (this stuff was genuinely problematic). Now he says he would have re-do the entire last 3 feet of pipeline up to the outlet, but this time he's not going to charge me to open the wall (as I've already shown that I can do it myself). So he writes me up an invoice for $650 to cut the old pipe off and replace it after the wall is opened up.
Included in the quote is a $50 3-way outlet. I already know that Home Depot sells those for $8.
So I did it myself. And as it turns out, I didn't need to open up any more wall than I already had. I spent $50 on parts to learn how to sweat copper pipes together. Another $75 on a MAPP torch, solder, flux, wire pipe cleaner, pipe cutting tool, etc.. About 2 hours with a book reading up on how to sweat the fittings. 4 hours practicing soldering with copper. Voila! Problem solved!
Now had the plumber charged $200 instead, I would have just paid him to do it and not learned how to fix the pipes myself.
How do you explain it when modern medicine says a person will die, that there is nothing else that can be done, but a priest comes and the person wakes up?
Oh this straw man again... Okay, tell you what: have a priest bring a brain dead individual back to full function and I'll bite. There has never been a documented case of a brain dead person coming back to any mental function. So you get that done then come back.
If you really want to know, it goes something like this: Doctors generally predict based on their experience, and very simple statistics will show that their sample set is not very good. Further investigation will show that if a doctor expects a person with a particular condition to die, then those who do die will be remembered as reaffirming his hypothesis and those who do not will be forgotten as being non-events.
This has been researched many times. Doctors are skilled artisans of medicine and surgery but, with very rare exception, they do not practice science and subject all their diagnoses and prognoses to scientific rigor. They use personal experience and anecdote, and those are quite fallible.
Besides, you FSM types are not interested in alternative theories. Teach the controversy, I say!
There is no controversy. Pastafarianism is a fact, supported by the vast numbers of True Believers. A false creator could never hope to sway such a large audience. False religions, such as the cult of the Invisible Pink Unicorn, simply cannot stand against the light of the truth as shown to us by Him and His noodly appendage.
evolution is a theory. It is not fact. It is not a scientific law.
Theory and fact are not exclusive. Stating something is a theory and is not a fact implies that the theory is wrong. Scientific laws are just "convenience" wrappers for theories. The things we call "laws" are theories just the same. They are still subject to the same rigor as theory.
The cool thing Intelligent Design is we know God made us.
And that is why you are NOT a science. Because you "know." You've moved from theory to statement of fact.
For any people who know statistics, what is the probability of that happening?
The probability of the event cannot be determined because we lack understanding of the state space.
How many times would I have to flip a quarter and get heads in a row? 100,000,000,000 times? 100,000,000,000,000 times?
The probability of getting N heads in a row is 1/(2^N). But that is irrelevant to the discussion.
You would have a better chance at taking a watch, hitting it with a hammer until it was broken into 1000 peices, and then putting it in a bag, shaking the bag, and having the watch come back together out of the random movements.
And you've calculated the probability of this how?
God made life. It is called a soul.
That it is incorrect. Life was bestowed upon the earth when the Flying Spaghetti Monster extended His noodly appendage and brought forth a midget in full pirate regalia.
Here was the problem: "You have a number of cities mapped on an x,y grid. A travelling salesman wants to find the shortest route between the cities. Calculate the shortest route." We had two hours or something.
I still think it was goddamn unfair to give an UNSOLVED PROBLEM in a programming contest for high school students.
Not sure if I'm being pedantic or not, but the problem, as you stated it, is neither NP nor unsolved. The shortest distance between two points is solvable in better than factorial time. You could convince yourself of this by thinking carefully about it: if all path costs are positive and my current path cost is greater than the best candidate path I've found so far, then this path, and all possible sub-paths need not be considered any longer. The traditional traveling salesman problem involves finding the shortest path that visits every point.
Wow... That's one of the most uninformed posts about TopCoder I've read.
TopCoder runs algorithm competitions weekly. The top 5 algorithm coders in TC are:
SnapDragon - A Canadian
Petr - A Russian
Tomek - A Pole
Eryx - Another Pole
Misof - A Slovakian
Too bad TC hasn't figured out that its best coders aren't US citizens. Why, those people might get kicked out!
The data is a lot less useful than I think you may be giving it credit for. I go over this occasionally with social scientist PhDs who have at most one or two semesters of formal statistics training. They also think that it is fair to generalize from mailed questionaires. If you do not know the degree of the bias, you really have no idea of the skew of your results.
Case in point, the study says that an average of 2.09 hours is spent "wasting time." Now you know that time wasters were more likely to answer the questionaire, so the bias is out in the open. Now... How far is 2.09 hours from the true mean? Just pick a confidence interval of say 90%. Do you have enough information to figure that out? Unfortunately you don't. There is information in the study, but you don't know enough about the bias to separate signal from noise.
And also keep in mind that no matter how many lengths one goes to to make a survey sample representative, it is never going to be perfectly so. There is always some error, and there is always some insight to be gained, "scientific" or not.
This is all taken into account in proper statistics - which require a random sample. If the sample is random, you will know how likely it is to be a "good" fit. But I'm curious, what exactly is non "scientific" insight?
Eschew your sinful thoughts or the noodly appendage will smite you!
Can't we just go one day without a creation v. evolution thread?!
so you might as well spare energy for the instruments.
How much energy does an electric motor consume when not being used? Couldn't they dedicate most, if not all, of their power to the science instruments at one site, and only direct power to the motors when moving to another site?
Actually history bears record that a lot of scientific advance was brought about by Christian societies.
History also bears record that a lot of scientific advance was brought about by Islamic, Greek, Egyptian and Roman societies.
The Christian society as a whole does advocate scientific advancement
So Christian society as a whole opposes teaching intelligent design?
Evolution is an unproven
"proven" is one of those things science uses when communicating with non-scientific folks. Science doesn't work in irrefutable proof (as opposed to say, mathematics). There is however compelling evidence of evolution.
unobserved,
Definitely false. We have seen evolution occur.
piece of literature
It's scientific literature, yes.
It has no scientific basis.
Absolutely false. Evolution has scientific basis clear down to molecular biology.
As a scientist if anyone says, they have scientific proof
They probably would not have proof. They likely would have evidence.
this unrepeatable event
That's a bold statement. How could you divine that it is unrepeatable? If evolution is happening now (the evidence for which is overwhelming), why would you think it is unrepeatable?
Try _really_ searching for the truth.
Indeed. I hope you aren't implying that we could search for such in the bible. That's an issue of faith.
This summer I interned at a national lab and part of the requirements of the internship was creation of a scientific research style poster highlighting what I did. The people in charge of the posters were of the belief that there were only two correct tools for creating a poster: MS Powerpoint and Adobe Acrobat.
.ppt. Exporting as pdf worked perfectly though.
Unfortunately the poster people didn't mention such requirements to the IT people who had the interns all set up with Fedora Core 2 systems. Fortunately OpenOffice was installed on these systems. I could only hope Impress was on par with Powerpoint.
I was a little skeptical going in, I knew that the OOo guys had worked fairly hard to make their tools as good or better than the commercial products, but this was a fairly unusual niche requirement. I was creating a single 48x30 inch slide with all graphics being very high quality so they don't look like crap when blown up.
The results were superb! I used Calc to do graphs, and cut-n-paste between Calc and Impress worked flawlessly. I used Draw to do line art graphics, and once again cut-n-paste worked perfectly. Throw in a touch of gimp to clean up some of the graphics being used and the whole thing had a professional look to it on par with any of the Powerpoint posters from years past.
The only thing that didn't work was exporting as
My assumption was that gcc and glibc would form the bulk of the GNU code on my machine. Glibc is big, but compared to KDE or OpenOffice... I don't even think twice about emerging glibc. If I have to emerge a new KDE, I know that even overnight will not be enough time.
His point is that 22% of the code in a typical "Linux" distribution is written by the GNU, more than (pulling a number out my ass) any 3 other "authors" (or organisations) put together,
I don't know. First, that 22% number sounds a little weird. A typical Linux kernel from your average distribution has at least a million lines of code compiled in. Do the GNU programs on your machine constitute over 22 million lines of code?
Without doing a semicolon count (the thing I usually do for a lower bound line # count) I'm guessing that KDE (which isn't a GNU project) OpenOffice (which isn't a GNU project) and one of the other big non-GNU project packages (maybe x.org or apache) constitute over 22% of the code in many linux distributions, or at least more than GNU projects.
Based on compile time (a horrible measure, I know) KDE + OpenOffice + X.org would constitute about 60% of the code in my Gentoo distribution. Text mode terminal only interface is anything but "typical" these days.
I call it "Linux" because it's more than just the kernel, "Linux" represents a movement that started to really get rolling, and accelerate, once we had the Linux kernel.