If that's true the software tokens are badly broken: their serial number is just a hash of the hostname and the User SID, both of which are easy enough to get remorety.
Nah, I'm sure it's a keyed hash. The server can do this because it has the key.
What makes you think I pirate? I don't. I'm just observing that any time the majority of the people do something, it's silly for society to try to call that thing wrong.
I agree that reservoirs -- and many of the uses we make of the water -- increase evaporation, which Just Some Guy mentioned. But that's not what the sentence you quoted says. I also find it hard to believe that reservoirs, even though all of their direct and follow-on effects, add up to anything in the context of ocean levels.
"Artificial reservoirs, such as the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River and the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China, have the opposite effect, locking up water that would otherwise flow into the seas."
But they don't. When you build a new one, then for a few years afterwards they may reduce the flow to the seas, but only as long as the reservoir level is rising. Eventually, they get full, and inflow equals outflow, or we draw them down, and outflow exceeds inflow.
When the majority of people break a law, it's the law that's wrong. Laws exist to support and further societal norms. When the norm is illegal, the law needs to be corrected.
Note that I'm not saying copyright should be eliminated, or that it has no value. Just that the present implementation is wrong.
Montana tried getting rid of speed limits. They changed their minds after a few years, and a bunch of dead drivers. That many people break a law does not necessarily imply that the law is bad.
Oh, I should also mention that Montana didn't change their minds after "a bunch of dead drivers". They were forced to change their minds after the Montana Supreme Court ruled that the "Reasonable and Prudent" standard (they hadn't really gotten rid of all limits, just declined to set a numeric value on them) was so vague as to be unenforceable and that it therefore violated constitutional due process requirements. Even after that, it took six months for the Montana state legislature to get around to creating a new law -- and the reason they weren't in any hurry is because it wasn't really a problem.
When the majority of people break a law, it's the law that's wrong. Laws exist to support and further societal norms. When the norm is illegal, the law needs to be corrected.
Note that I'm not saying copyright should be eliminated, or that it has no value. Just that the present implementation is wrong.
Montana tried getting rid of speed limits. They changed their minds after a few years, and a bunch of dead drivers. That many people break a law does not necessarily imply that the law is bad.
Your example doesn't imply your conclusion. They tried one fix to a broken law, and it didn't work. But there may well be another that does.
When the majority of people break a law, it's the law that's wrong. Laws exist to support and further societal norms. When the norm is illegal, the law needs to be corrected.
Note that I'm not saying copyright should be eliminated, or that it has no value. Just that the present implementation is wrong.
Nothing you say is in any way unique to Facebook, or even to any stock. Every point you made is equally true of dividend-paying stocks, with the small exception that as soon as you capture a dividend you've converted some of that theoretical value to dollars. Of course, a dividend payout generally coincides with a small drop in the stock price, as, essentially, that bit of the stock's value is paid out.
If you own FB stock, you the value of each share is defined by the market AND by the number of future shares that FB decides that they want to issue.
No, unless something weird happens, issuance of more (sold) shares does not dilute the value of the stock you own. This is because the issuance and sale of another share increases the book value of the company, because it's cash inflow.
For example, suppose a company had a total of 10 shares outstanding, each valued at $100, and you own one share. The company's market value is 10 * $100 = $1000. Let's suppose that half of this book value and half is NPV of future profits. Now suppose this company decides to issue another 10 shares to raise capital. There are now 20 shares outstanding, so your ownership of the company has declined from 10% to 5%. However, because the 10 shares were sold at market price, $100, the company has received $1000 in additional capital. So the book value has increased to $1500, plus the company is still poised to earn the future profits which comprised the other $500 of its value. So the company is now worth $2000, and your single share, though now representing only 5% ownership, is still worth $100.
Of course, it's not quite that clean in real life. Issuance of shares can cause the share market value to change. Ideally, it should actually increase because the company has issued the stock to raise capital in order to be able to expand and increase future profits. But it can go the other way as well. Also, there are other ways stock can be issued. Stock grants to employees, for example, can be argued to dilute the outstanding shares without providing any direct revenue. But this is ultimately no different from taking more money out of the bank to pay a cash bonus. Stock option grants are similar, but more complicated.
Anyway, again, none of this is in any way particular to Facebook. Facebook still has to demonstrate that it can generate revenues many times larger than what it has achieved to date in order to justify its stock price. Or the market will hammer the stock in line with the revenues. Personally, I think the latter is what will happen. I'm not buying any Facebook stock.
Does anybody realistically believe that Facebook will EVER pay its investors a meaningful dividend? HELL NO!
The classical theory of stock valuation is that the current value of a stock is the net present value of its future dividend stream, but there are plenty of companies out there that don't pay dividends, and don't ever plan to pay dividends and they're not worthless. There are plenty of investment properties which are bought and sold on the price change, not for any dividend or rent stream. Much real estate investment is like that: It's perfectly reasonable to buy a piece of property because you expect its value to appreciate, not because you anticipate any direct revenue from it.
Determining a value for stocks that don't pay a dividend isn't even much different from those that do. In both cases you look at the book value plus estimates of future profits. In the case of dividend-paying companies, those future profits are expected to be paid out to shareholders. In the case of non-dividend companies, they increase book value.
Note that I'm not arguing that Facebook isn't overpriced. I think it is. Significantly. But not because they're not going to pay dividends.
The story is how you and I and every other nerd on the planet is going to have to answer dumb questions about Metro just to be polite. Repeatedly. Until Windows 9.
Not me. I'll happily answer all the Windows questions you want to ask... as long as they're about Windows 2000 Professional, the most recent version of Windows I've used any significant amount. I highly recommend ceasing to use Windows. There are two huge benefits: First, you don't have to use Windows. Second, people eventually stop asking you questions about their computers.
Not really. If you look at the latest password cracking speeds (e.g. Speeding up GPU-based password cracking by Martijn Sprengers and Lejla Batina, proceedings of SHARCS 2012), 44-bit MD5-crypt can be brute-forced in 3 years with one graphics card. If you assume that the idiots who wrote the software are using MD5 rather than MD5-crypt, that drops to 1 day. With one graphics card.
Granted that 44 bits isn't enough if the password hashing implementation sucks. An implementation that uses, say, PBKDF2 with HMAC_SHA1 as the PRF would increase the cracking time by about four or five orders of magnitude, making it safe against anyone who isn't willing to buy thousands of GPUs (keeping in mind that Amazon EC2 and similar means that buying thousands of GPUs isn't as costly as it once was -- renting, say, 100K GPUs for a few weeks would cost a lot of money, but
So, if you're concerned about bad password hashers, add a fifth word and another 11 bits of entropy. Assuming you can. The sorts of systems with lousy password hashers tend to be the same systems that don't allow you to use long passphrases. On those, you have to fall back on maximizing your character set. Of course, many crappy systems restrict that as well.
The trouble with the pass phrase concept is that the whole words just become tokens. Most people's vocabulary is not that large.
Both facts that Randall Munroe considered when he drew the XKCD strip. He claimed 44 bits of entropy for the four-word passphrase. If you work that backward it's not hard to calculate that he was assuming four tokens selected at random from a dictionary of 2000 entries. That's an entirely reasonable dictionary size, and 44 bits is a respectable amount of entropy.
Theoretically, this is one of the arguments in favor of Federalism. Local communities can beta-test new ideas before they go into general deployment.
Doesn't always quite work that way, but that's the idea.
I think that was one of the understood and therefore unstated goals of the designer of the US system: to enable n parallel experiments in government, with the ability of individuals to vote with their feet if they realized that too many of their local fellows disagreed with their personal theories. Unfortunately, one of the legacies of the civil war was a drive toward national unification, and not just in terms of keeping all of the states in the federation. Over a roughly 50-year period after the war, states harmonized their criminal and civil codes to a large degree, and we started to introduce lots of federal oversight/interference, culminating eventually in the 16th and 17th amendments which gutted state authority and put the federal government firmly in the driver's seat.
Personally, I'd like to see us go back to much greater local control. I'd like to repeal the 16th and 17th amendments, replacing the 17th with a system of mandatory levies by the federal government on the states, proportioned by state GDP. Each year, the federal budget would be apportioned out to the states, whose legislatures would have to figure out how to come up with their share, whether through taxation or debt. Meanwhile, state legislatures would regain the ability to sack Senators who displeased them. I'd also like to see the federal criminal code mostly repealed, retaining only crimes whose interstate nature clearly cannot be addressed by states.
There's no point for democracy when ignorance is celebrated
Political scientists think the same one vote that some monkeys are inbred
Majority rule, don't work in mental institutions
Sometimes the smallest softest voice carries the grand biggest solutions
What are we left with?
A nation of god-fearing pregnant nationalists
Who feel it's their duty to populate the homeland
Pass on traditions
How to get ahead religions
And prosperity be a symbol to culture
-- Fat Mike, NOFX The Idiots Are Taking Over
If Fat Mike would like to make statements decrying anti-intellectualism, he should first learn to compose a coherent sentence.
They could be useful in a few small circumstances, but for the vast majority of cases, I'd be interested in how a speed payoff is going to be beneficial given you don't know whether you got the correct answer. You could run a check to see whether it's correct, but then you can't trust the check to give you the right answer either... so you could run a third check...
I just type the circle name in the To field and it auto completes to the circle's user email addresses.
Huh. Doesn't work for me. Either on my personal account or on my corporate google.com account -- and I thought the internal versions got all the new features first. This is on the gmail web interface, right?
Most people don't post publicly, if that is your only gauge of success, it will show up as not being that active. That's the wonderful this about circles
+1
90% of my posts are non-public, and 90% of my friends and family on Google+ never post publicly.
I signed up for G+ to see what it was all about and after putting people in Circles, I now communicate (email) using circle names instead of email addresses/people names...
Really? I want to do that, but hadn't thought it was possible (yet?). How do you do it? I've tried typing a circle into the "To" field, dragging a circle into the "To" field, clicking on the arrow next to the circle name to find a "mail to" link, etc. I haven't found a way to e-mail a circle. I'd love it if I could.
In my case, I didn't join Google+ because it was linked to my GMail account along with the rest of my Google profile. The Real Name issue led to people being booted from G+, with the side effect of losing the rest of their Google profile. I can't afford to lose my Google Mail over some silly issue with G+. My mail is too important.
Except that nobody ever lost their GMail over a name dispute. That was a widely-publicized misunderstanding which Google quickly denied (in vain, it appears). Google will yank your Google+ account for using a fake name, but not any of the other services related to the mail address.
Slashdot Mirror
You can also set it to be a two-button trackpad.
I stand corrected.
If that's true the software tokens are badly broken: their serial number is just a hash of the hostname and the User SID, both of which are easy enough to get remorety.
Nah, I'm sure it's a keyed hash. The server can do this because it has the key.
What makes you think I pirate? I don't. I'm just observing that any time the majority of the people do something, it's silly for society to try to call that thing wrong.
By an utterly insignificant amount. Do the math, you're talking about raising the ocean levels by micrometers.
I agree that reservoirs -- and many of the uses we make of the water -- increase evaporation, which Just Some Guy mentioned. But that's not what the sentence you quoted says. I also find it hard to believe that reservoirs, even though all of their direct and follow-on effects, add up to anything in the context of ocean levels.
"Artificial reservoirs, such as the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River and the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China, have the opposite effect, locking up water that would otherwise flow into the seas."
But they don't. When you build a new one, then for a few years afterwards they may reduce the flow to the seas, but only as long as the reservoir level is rising. Eventually, they get full, and inflow equals outflow, or we draw them down, and outflow exceeds inflow.
When the majority of people break a law, it's the law that's wrong. Laws exist to support and further societal norms. When the norm is illegal, the law needs to be corrected.
Note that I'm not saying copyright should be eliminated, or that it has no value. Just that the present implementation is wrong.
Montana tried getting rid of speed limits. They changed their minds after a few years, and a bunch of dead drivers. That many people break a law does not necessarily imply that the law is bad.
Oh, I should also mention that Montana didn't change their minds after "a bunch of dead drivers". They were forced to change their minds after the Montana Supreme Court ruled that the "Reasonable and Prudent" standard (they hadn't really gotten rid of all limits, just declined to set a numeric value on them) was so vague as to be unenforceable and that it therefore violated constitutional due process requirements. Even after that, it took six months for the Montana state legislature to get around to creating a new law -- and the reason they weren't in any hurry is because it wasn't really a problem.
When the majority of people break a law, it's the law that's wrong. Laws exist to support and further societal norms. When the norm is illegal, the law needs to be corrected.
Note that I'm not saying copyright should be eliminated, or that it has no value. Just that the present implementation is wrong.
Montana tried getting rid of speed limits. They changed their minds after a few years, and a bunch of dead drivers. That many people break a law does not necessarily imply that the law is bad.
Your example doesn't imply your conclusion. They tried one fix to a broken law, and it didn't work. But there may well be another that does.
When the majority of people break a law, it's the law that's wrong. Laws exist to support and further societal norms. When the norm is illegal, the law needs to be corrected.
Note that I'm not saying copyright should be eliminated, or that it has no value. Just that the present implementation is wrong.
Nothing you say is in any way unique to Facebook, or even to any stock. Every point you made is equally true of dividend-paying stocks, with the small exception that as soon as you capture a dividend you've converted some of that theoretical value to dollars. Of course, a dividend payout generally coincides with a small drop in the stock price, as, essentially, that bit of the stock's value is paid out.
If you own FB stock, you the value of each share is defined by the market AND by the number of future shares that FB decides that they want to issue.
No, unless something weird happens, issuance of more (sold) shares does not dilute the value of the stock you own. This is because the issuance and sale of another share increases the book value of the company, because it's cash inflow.
For example, suppose a company had a total of 10 shares outstanding, each valued at $100, and you own one share. The company's market value is 10 * $100 = $1000. Let's suppose that half of this book value and half is NPV of future profits. Now suppose this company decides to issue another 10 shares to raise capital. There are now 20 shares outstanding, so your ownership of the company has declined from 10% to 5%. However, because the 10 shares were sold at market price, $100, the company has received $1000 in additional capital. So the book value has increased to $1500, plus the company is still poised to earn the future profits which comprised the other $500 of its value. So the company is now worth $2000, and your single share, though now representing only 5% ownership, is still worth $100.
Of course, it's not quite that clean in real life. Issuance of shares can cause the share market value to change. Ideally, it should actually increase because the company has issued the stock to raise capital in order to be able to expand and increase future profits. But it can go the other way as well. Also, there are other ways stock can be issued. Stock grants to employees, for example, can be argued to dilute the outstanding shares without providing any direct revenue. But this is ultimately no different from taking more money out of the bank to pay a cash bonus. Stock option grants are similar, but more complicated.
Anyway, again, none of this is in any way particular to Facebook. Facebook still has to demonstrate that it can generate revenues many times larger than what it has achieved to date in order to justify its stock price. Or the market will hammer the stock in line with the revenues. Personally, I think the latter is what will happen. I'm not buying any Facebook stock.
Does anybody realistically believe that Facebook will EVER pay its investors a meaningful dividend? HELL NO!
The classical theory of stock valuation is that the current value of a stock is the net present value of its future dividend stream, but there are plenty of companies out there that don't pay dividends, and don't ever plan to pay dividends and they're not worthless. There are plenty of investment properties which are bought and sold on the price change, not for any dividend or rent stream. Much real estate investment is like that: It's perfectly reasonable to buy a piece of property because you expect its value to appreciate, not because you anticipate any direct revenue from it.
Determining a value for stocks that don't pay a dividend isn't even much different from those that do. In both cases you look at the book value plus estimates of future profits. In the case of dividend-paying companies, those future profits are expected to be paid out to shareholders. In the case of non-dividend companies, they increase book value.
Note that I'm not arguing that Facebook isn't overpriced. I think it is. Significantly. But not because they're not going to pay dividends.
The story is how you and I and every other nerd on the planet is going to have to answer dumb questions about Metro just to be polite. Repeatedly. Until Windows 9.
Not me. I'll happily answer all the Windows questions you want to ask... as long as they're about Windows 2000 Professional, the most recent version of Windows I've used any significant amount. I highly recommend ceasing to use Windows. There are two huge benefits: First, you don't have to use Windows. Second, people eventually stop asking you questions about their computers.
44 bits is a respectable amount of entropy
Not really. If you look at the latest password cracking speeds (e.g. Speeding up GPU-based password cracking by Martijn Sprengers and Lejla Batina, proceedings of SHARCS 2012), 44-bit MD5-crypt can be brute-forced in 3 years with one graphics card. If you assume that the idiots who wrote the software are using MD5 rather than MD5-crypt, that drops to 1 day. With one graphics card.
Granted that 44 bits isn't enough if the password hashing implementation sucks. An implementation that uses, say, PBKDF2 with HMAC_SHA1 as the PRF would increase the cracking time by about four or five orders of magnitude, making it safe against anyone who isn't willing to buy thousands of GPUs (keeping in mind that Amazon EC2 and similar means that buying thousands of GPUs isn't as costly as it once was -- renting, say, 100K GPUs for a few weeks would cost a lot of money, but
So, if you're concerned about bad password hashers, add a fifth word and another 11 bits of entropy. Assuming you can. The sorts of systems with lousy password hashers tend to be the same systems that don't allow you to use long passphrases. On those, you have to fall back on maximizing your character set. Of course, many crappy systems restrict that as well.
The trouble with the pass phrase concept is that the whole words just become tokens. Most people's vocabulary is not that large.
Both facts that Randall Munroe considered when he drew the XKCD strip. He claimed 44 bits of entropy for the four-word passphrase. If you work that backward it's not hard to calculate that he was assuming four tokens selected at random from a dictionary of 2000 entries. That's an entirely reasonable dictionary size, and 44 bits is a respectable amount of entropy.
>mandatory levies by the federal government on the states
The Federalist Papers discussed this idea.
Taxation depends on coercion, by definition. You can coerce an individual with a few police officers and little or no disruption of the peace.
Coercing a state requires a civil war. Ghastly.
Very cogent point. State levies could turn really ugly, and probably would, eventually. I'll have to rethink that.
Theoretically, this is one of the arguments in favor of Federalism. Local communities can beta-test new ideas before they go into general deployment.
Doesn't always quite work that way, but that's the idea.
I think that was one of the understood and therefore unstated goals of the designer of the US system: to enable n parallel experiments in government, with the ability of individuals to vote with their feet if they realized that too many of their local fellows disagreed with their personal theories. Unfortunately, one of the legacies of the civil war was a drive toward national unification, and not just in terms of keeping all of the states in the federation. Over a roughly 50-year period after the war, states harmonized their criminal and civil codes to a large degree, and we started to introduce lots of federal oversight/interference, culminating eventually in the 16th and 17th amendments which gutted state authority and put the federal government firmly in the driver's seat.
Personally, I'd like to see us go back to much greater local control. I'd like to repeal the 16th and 17th amendments, replacing the 17th with a system of mandatory levies by the federal government on the states, proportioned by state GDP. Each year, the federal budget would be apportioned out to the states, whose legislatures would have to figure out how to come up with their share, whether through taxation or debt. Meanwhile, state legislatures would regain the ability to sack Senators who displeased them. I'd also like to see the federal criminal code mostly repealed, retaining only crimes whose interstate nature clearly cannot be addressed by states.
I'm just dreaming, of course.
There's no point for democracy when ignorance is celebrated Political scientists think the same one vote that some monkeys are inbred Majority rule, don't work in mental institutions Sometimes the smallest softest voice carries the grand biggest solutions What are we left with? A nation of god-fearing pregnant nationalists Who feel it's their duty to populate the homeland Pass on traditions How to get ahead religions And prosperity be a symbol to culture
-- Fat Mike, NOFX The Idiots Are Taking Over
If Fat Mike would like to make statements decrying anti-intellectualism, he should first learn to compose a coherent sentence.
Yes, sure, and you can get battery-powered analog quartz watches that look like a mechanical analog watch, and you don't have to wind them either.
But you do have to change the batteries every few years, unlike an eco-drive.
They could be useful in a few small circumstances, but for the vast majority of cases, I'd be interested in how a speed payoff is going to be beneficial given you don't know whether you got the correct answer. You could run a check to see whether it's correct, but then you can't trust the check to give you the right answer either... so you could run a third check...
Clearly, the answer is to run 14 checks.
Regardless, there's no danger that you'd lose your Gmail account, which is what the poster I responded to was claiming.
I just type the circle name in the To field and it auto completes to the circle's user email addresses.
Huh. Doesn't work for me. Either on my personal account or on my corporate google.com account -- and I thought the internal versions got all the new features first. This is on the gmail web interface, right?
Most people don't post publicly, if that is your only gauge of success, it will show up as not being that active. That's the wonderful this about circles
+1
90% of my posts are non-public, and 90% of my friends and family on Google+ never post publicly.
I signed up for G+ to see what it was all about and after putting people in Circles, I now communicate (email) using circle names instead of email addresses/people names...
Really? I want to do that, but hadn't thought it was possible (yet?). How do you do it? I've tried typing a circle into the "To" field, dragging a circle into the "To" field, clicking on the arrow next to the circle name to find a "mail to" link, etc. I haven't found a way to e-mail a circle. I'd love it if I could.
In my case, I didn't join Google+ because it was linked to my GMail account along with the rest of my Google profile. The Real Name issue led to people being booted from G+, with the side effect of losing the rest of their Google profile. I can't afford to lose my Google Mail over some silly issue with G+. My mail is too important.
Except that nobody ever lost their GMail over a name dispute. That was a widely-publicized misunderstanding which Google quickly denied (in vain, it appears). Google will yank your Google+ account for using a fake name, but not any of the other services related to the mail address.