> Well, actually, the principle has held true. Perhaps not for chemical and biological weapons, nor bombers and battleships, but certainly nukes.
> The last time nuclear bombs were used during warfare occurred over 50 years ago. Though they have been developed by at least 9 nations* so far, not one has used them since each has realized that the ensuing devastation would outweigh whatever they were fighting for. So no, actually nukes did achieve what that ever-elusive state.
Pretty much my thoughts, e.g. if Saddam had gotten The Bomb he so eagerly wanted he probably would have figured out that he couldn't actually use it. (Yes, he's evil, but not obviously suicidal.)
However, the situation seems to be very unstable. It's only a matter of time until some member of the Nuclear Missle Club gets an insane Hitleresque play-Wagner-while-the-world-burns type, and then we'll make up for all those years of not using nukes in short order.
> Is there some reason that virus writers don't create their viruses to modify themselves automatically? It would be easy to defeat a checksum automatically.
Maybe some of them do do that, and the A-V firms haven't caught on yet.
Seriously, IMO the kind of worms we've seen so far are child's play compared to what we can expect when someone wants to do some serious damage. In the future we'll have stealth worms that just flip a few bits on your system and then erase themselves after propagating to another computer or two, worms that work as a genetic algorithm to optimize effectiveness and continually feed new variants into new "ecological niches" of the internet, worms that are mathematically optimized for the fastest spread, or conversely for the broadest under-the-radar spread, etc.
> i saw the news about the second (and third) versions and i just wondered if these (all three) we just a distraction. i wonder how many people looked for an awfully obvious process and if they did't see it, well, that was the end of the story? somethings smells here.
I've always wondered whether someone planning a criminal break-in somewhere might not release a virus as a cover, so that the victim would shrug off any anomalies on their system as side effects of the virus, and think the virus fix was end-of-story.
> I don't see how this has to do with deregulation.
Yes, but think how many page hits it's going to generate when the flamewar between the outspoken and politically polarized IANAEconomists populating Slashdot gets warmed up.
Just think how many would-be moderators in the northeast aren't contributing to your daily karma fix right now! Maybe Rob will open his vast stores and hand some out to the needy until this crisis is over!
> What can happen is, if all stations are working at or near capacity and a part of the network goes down for whatever reason (fire, or too much power being drawn for example) then when power is routed from the other switching stations they become overburdened as well and there is a ripple effect of outages across the grid.
However, there are supposedly safeguards against rippling across zones or even sub-zones of the grid. See what I gleaned from the news and just posted under the stale article.
> I'm just saying, I wouldn't put it past our government to try to coverup something like this just because it would show how useless all the things they've done really are.
Or conversely, blame an ordinary accident on terrorists if they needed all the sheep to orient their asses toward Washington for some more PATRIOT style legislation.
> So this one isn't terrorism (so they say), but I'm sure terrorists will be delighted to know that they can throw five major cities into utter chaos by taking out one substation and getting an assist from the domino effect.
My concern is that terrorists will accelerate some existing plan to take advantage of the chaos.
> I disagree. There are 'minor' (aka so small that it doesn't freak people out) power outages all the time. The odds of 'major' outages occuring like this are higher than someone being able to anticipate the dominos of such a massive failure and specifically engineering this.
> I bet if you asked most of the people who work in the electricty grids where there are major problems, they'd tell you they already fixed all the obvious ones after 9/11.
The following is from the televised news, mostly ABC; I never heard any of this before. Also, I didn't catch all the technical terms so I'm going to use generic words like "zones" instead.
The US power grid is split into three zones, two of them pretty much splitting the country down the middle, except for the third one pretty much corresponding to Texas. All the problems are currently in the eastern zone.
The zones are split into sub-zones, and there's software that's supposed to prevent a problem from spreading out of a sub-zone, but that has happened in this case. I think they said four sub-zones within the eastern zone are affected right now. Thus regardless of what caused the original problem, something is clearly wrong with that grid control software. They aren't even ruling out a hack-attack at this point, not even a hack-attack with terrorist intent. For that matter, they aren't even ruling out that it might be a side effect of the internet worm-of-the-week. (The power companies used to assert that they were not on the internet, but when they actually examined their systems they discovered that that was not strictly true.)
The grid is managed privately, with some regulation. Interestingly, the managers of the various grids voted three weeks ago to change some of the control policies or (not clear) the software that implements them, suggesting that they had perceived some problem with the current arrangement. However, the analyst reporting that said that the changes would not have been in effect this soon after the vote.
There doesn't seem to be much grounds for speculation about whether or not this-or-that was involved. However, for the speculative minded it is interesting to think what the social impact will be if it turns out to be a hack attack, or the PR impact if it turns out to be something to do with the RPC worm going around right now.
> > Yeah, but that's because we intellectually identify those numbers as "special", when they aren't really.
> Actually, those numbers are special in a particular way that makes them not random. They have a low Kormalagorov Complexity, so they're highly compressable. Good random data should be uncompressable.
Actually it's the representation of those numbers that is compressible, which is irrelevant to the randomness of a sequence of numbers.
For instance, the number 1,111,111,111 has a compressible base-10 representation, but if you were working in base 1,111,111,112 it would have an atomic, uncompressible representation. And that distinction is irrelevant to the question of how often it shows up in a random sequence.
> Bigger and better weapons? Does anyone really have to have the worst bad weapon out there? At the rate we're going, we might as well just wire the entire planet up with explosives and when one country disagrees with another, one country can send the other into orbit.
Like the Simpsons episode where the therapist wires them up to the buttons they can use to shock each other.
> The other advantage that these folks are talking about with gamma ray based weapons is that the infrastructure is relatively spared (and why the Communists wanted these things allowing them to move into cities after an explosion and co-opt the infrastructure.
As if the Capitalists didn't want them too. In fact they turned out to be a sort of PR disaster for the USA, since the commies portrayed them as "capitalist weapons" that killed people and preserved the precious property.
> While I don't condone weapons research, I think this is certainly interesting. If the RPGs flaunted around today were capable of Tomakawk-size destruction, i think we'd simple see skirmishes ending faster
Yeah, 'cause the guy with the RPG launcher would blow himself up along with the target, and there wouldn't be anyone left to fight after a few days of battle.
Ought to make an excellent additon to Quake, though.
> audio circuits often use diode junctions in reverse-breakdown mode as a source of "white noise". couldn't we computer folks do the same? seems a similar idea to the the dark CCD technique.
I think there are already a lot of solid-state solutions out there that use thermal noise to generate random bits. The lava-lamp solution and its derivatives sound like a lot of fun geeky fooling-around, but ultimately seem to be a solution in search of a niche.
> What always bothers me is when people want uniformly distributed random numbers. I know why its valuable but if you make sure that your numbers are uniformly distributed they aren't really random anymore.
Sure they are. There's a difference between "randomness" and "distribution". You could have random numbers with a uniform distribution, a gaussian distribution, an exponential distribution, some bimodal distribution, etc., and they would still be random.
But it's really convenient to have a RNG with a uniform distribution, since you can easily transform numbers drawn from that distribution to some other arbitrary distribution by taking f(x) with the desired f() and an x drawn from the uniform distribution.
BTW, "uniform distribution" doesn't mean that you get the same number of occurences of each number in the range; it only means they have the same probability of occuring. (OK, that distinction gets a bit tricky when you're talking about pseudo-random numbers, but let's pretend we're talking about genuinely random numbers.)
> Its just as likely to get all 0's or all 1's as it is to get any other single random number and yet 9 out of 10 people would probably say all 0's or all 1's isn't a random result, even when it comes from a random source.
Yeah, but that's because we intellectually identify those numbers as "special", when they aren't really. For instance, people would probably think the numeric representation of their birthdate was special, though someone else might think it a perfectly random number. Strictly speaking, randomness has nothing to do with the importance humans assign to the result.
> I guess the big misunderstanding is that once you have a number, its not random, you know what it is.
Yes, the a posteriori probability of an event, given that the even happened, is always one. Pseudoscientists are fond of constructing probability arguments that they think should be convincing, not realizing that they are just painting a bull's-eye around wherever the arrow happened to strike.
> A random pattern is probably better defined as one you can't predict, and once you have it, recreating it with the same process is not likely.
For most uses we would want to say that "you can't predict" means that all possible patterns are equally likely, i.e. that betting on one has the same expected pay-off as betting on any other, at least if we're talking about a uniform distribution. And as for re-creation, we usually want sequentially generated patterns to be independent, i.e. that knowing what has been produced in the past does not help you predict what's coming up next. In particular, if your generator produced pattern z last time, the probability of producing z next time is still the same as the probability of producing any other pattern.
Any time there is a preferred way to bet, whether considering the past or not, it means that your generator is biased in ways that you probably don't want for a basic RNG. If you want biases, introduce them by filtering the number produced by a RNG with a uniform distribution.
I wish people wouldn't modify this kind of stuff as flamebait. Some of us - maybe lots of us, given the other posts I'm seeing here - think the GNOME leadership has taken it down a seriously wrong path as far as usability goes, and IMO it would be best to mod the complaints up in hopes of calling more attention to the problem, rather than modding them down so the Potemkin Village can retain its facade of progress a little longer.
> Gnome has become more polished, and looks more like a mature desktop offering. The HIG had a really good impact on Gnome. Every close button is where it belongs, you don't even have to think about where it is.
Actually they're all on the wrong frikkin' side, which is very annoying if you run traditional applications as well as GNOME2 applications, or even for your GNOME applications when you first upgrade. IMO that gratuitous change was a very poor HIG decision.
Also things can be very unintuitive, because for lots of dialogs you have to click "close" when you expect to click "OK" to tell it you want to go with the selected changes.
> The last time I checked (RH 9 installation), metacity was gnome's default window-whatchamacallit, which had the annoying animated minimization, lacked some of the fine-tuning sawfish has/had, and was not-so-actively maintained. Any other up-and-coming, actively maintained, gnome2-ready/complaiant, non-fluxbox/blackbox-type, worthy replacement for metacity.
With sufficient patience you can rip Metacity out and run the most recent version of Sawfish. I'm doing that on RH 9, albeit with GARNOME rather than the RH 9 GNOME stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
> Well, actually, the principle has held true. Perhaps not for chemical and biological weapons, nor bombers and battleships, but certainly nukes.
> The last time nuclear bombs were used during warfare occurred over 50 years ago. Though they have been developed by at least 9 nations* so far, not one has used them since each has realized that the ensuing devastation would outweigh whatever they were fighting for. So no, actually nukes did achieve what that ever-elusive state.
Pretty much my thoughts, e.g. if Saddam had gotten The Bomb he so eagerly wanted he probably would have figured out that he couldn't actually use it. (Yes, he's evil, but not obviously suicidal.)
However, the situation seems to be very unstable. It's only a matter of time until some member of the Nuclear Missle Club gets an insane Hitleresque play-Wagner-while-the-world-burns type, and then we'll make up for all those years of not using nukes in short order.
> Is there some reason that virus writers don't create their viruses to modify themselves automatically? It would be easy to defeat a checksum automatically.
Maybe some of them do do that, and the A-V firms haven't caught on yet.
Seriously, IMO the kind of worms we've seen so far are child's play compared to what we can expect when someone wants to do some serious damage. In the future we'll have stealth worms that just flip a few bits on your system and then erase themselves after propagating to another computer or two, worms that work as a genetic algorithm to optimize effectiveness and continually feed new variants into new "ecological niches" of the internet, worms that are mathematically optimized for the fastest spread, or conversely for the broadest under-the-radar spread, etc.
The future is bleak, IMO.
> i saw the news about the second (and third) versions and i just wondered if these (all three) we just a distraction. i wonder how many people looked for an awfully obvious process and if they did't see it, well, that was the end of the story? somethings smells here.
I've always wondered whether someone planning a criminal break-in somewhere might not release a virus as a cover, so that the victim would shrug off any anomalies on their system as side effects of the virus, and think the virus fix was end-of-story.
> SCO declares that it holds the copyrights to LoveSan and demands that all clones pay a $1500 licensing fee.
Actually you only have to pay the fee if you run it on Linux.
If we're lucky the power will be out and the worms won't be able to carry out their attack.
> Don't let the legislature get wind of this story.. They'll try to use it as justification to ban cloning.
The scary part is that if they mutate and interbreed we could end up with a virus with four asses.
> I don't see how this has to do with deregulation.
Yes, but think how many page hits it's going to generate when the flamewar between the outspoken and politically polarized IANAEconomists populating Slashdot gets warmed up.
Just think how many would-be moderators in the northeast aren't contributing to your daily karma fix right now! Maybe Rob will open his vast stores and hand some out to the needy until this crisis is over!
> What can happen is, if all stations are working at or near capacity and a part of the network goes down for whatever reason (fire, or too much power being drawn for example) then when power is routed from the other switching stations they become overburdened as well and there is a ripple effect of outages across the grid.
However, there are supposedly safeguards against rippling across zones or even sub-zones of the grid. See what I gleaned from the news and just posted under the stale article.
> I'm just saying, I wouldn't put it past our government to try to coverup something like this just because it would show how useless all the things they've done really are.
Or conversely, blame an ordinary accident on terrorists if they needed all the sheep to orient their asses toward Washington for some more PATRIOT style legislation.
> So this one isn't terrorism (so they say), but I'm sure terrorists will be delighted to know that they can throw five major cities into utter chaos by taking out one substation and getting an assist from the domino effect.
My concern is that terrorists will accelerate some existing plan to take advantage of the chaos.
> Well, it doesn't help that Arnold's campaign slogan is "Vote for me if you want to live."
Doesn't help which side?
> But anyone using it to dump on one side or the other is just being pig ignorant and mentally ill.
That's an interesting definition of "partisan".
> I disagree. There are 'minor' (aka so small that it doesn't freak people out) power outages all the time. The odds of 'major' outages occuring like this are higher than someone being able to anticipate the dominos of such a massive failure and specifically engineering this.
> I bet if you asked most of the people who work in the electricty grids where there are major problems, they'd tell you they already fixed all the obvious ones after 9/11.
The following is from the televised news, mostly ABC; I never heard any of this before. Also, I didn't catch all the technical terms so I'm going to use generic words like "zones" instead.
The US power grid is split into three zones, two of them pretty much splitting the country down the middle, except for the third one pretty much corresponding to Texas. All the problems are currently in the eastern zone.
The zones are split into sub-zones, and there's software that's supposed to prevent a problem from spreading out of a sub-zone, but that has happened in this case. I think they said four sub-zones within the eastern zone are affected right now. Thus regardless of what caused the original problem, something is clearly wrong with that grid control software. They aren't even ruling out a hack-attack at this point, not even a hack-attack with terrorist intent. For that matter, they aren't even ruling out that it might be a side effect of the internet worm-of-the-week. (The power companies used to assert that they were not on the internet, but when they actually examined their systems they discovered that that was not strictly true.)
The grid is managed privately, with some regulation. Interestingly, the managers of the various grids voted three weeks ago to change some of the control policies or (not clear) the software that implements them, suggesting that they had perceived some problem with the current arrangement. However, the analyst reporting that said that the changes would not have been in effect this soon after the vote.
There doesn't seem to be much grounds for speculation about whether or not this-or-that was involved. However, for the speculative minded it is interesting to think what the social impact will be if it turns out to be a hack attack, or the PR impact if it turns out to be something to do with the RPC worm going around right now.
> > Yeah, but that's because we intellectually identify those numbers as "special", when they aren't really.
> Actually, those numbers are special in a particular way that makes them not random. They have a low Kormalagorov Complexity, so they're highly compressable. Good random data should be uncompressable.
Actually it's the representation of those numbers that is compressible, which is irrelevant to the randomness of a sequence of numbers.
For instance, the number 1,111,111,111 has a compressible base-10 representation, but if you were working in base 1,111,111,112 it would have an atomic, uncompressible representation. And that distinction is irrelevant to the question of how often it shows up in a random sequence.
> Huh? The US has not engaged in imperialism since before WW2, and it fights against evil.
Don't bogart that pipe, my friend.
> Bigger and better weapons? Does anyone really have to have the worst bad weapon out there? At the rate we're going, we might as well just wire the entire planet up with explosives and when one country disagrees with another, one country can send the other into orbit.
Like the Simpsons episode where the therapist wires them up to the buttons they can use to shock each other.
> The other advantage that these folks are talking about with gamma ray based weapons is that the infrastructure is relatively spared (and why the Communists wanted these things allowing them to move into cities after an explosion and co-opt the infrastructure.
As if the Capitalists didn't want them too. In fact they turned out to be a sort of PR disaster for the USA, since the commies portrayed them as "capitalist weapons" that killed people and preserved the precious property.
> While I don't condone weapons research, I think this is certainly interesting. If the RPGs flaunted around today were capable of Tomakawk-size destruction, i think we'd simple see skirmishes ending faster
Yeah, 'cause the guy with the RPG launcher would blow himself up along with the target, and there wouldn't be anyone left to fight after a few days of battle.
Ought to make an excellent additon to Quake, though.
> Anyone still asking where you really have to search if you want to find WMD? Small hint: not in the middle east...
Current theory is that Saddam's dog ate them.
> audio circuits often use diode junctions in reverse-breakdown mode as a source of "white noise". couldn't we computer folks do the same? seems a similar idea to the the dark CCD technique.
I think there are already a lot of solid-state solutions out there that use thermal noise to generate random bits. The lava-lamp solution and its derivatives sound like a lot of fun geeky fooling-around, but ultimately seem to be a solution in search of a niche.
> What always bothers me is when people want uniformly distributed random numbers. I know why its valuable but if you make sure that your numbers are uniformly distributed they aren't really random anymore.
Sure they are. There's a difference between "randomness" and "distribution". You could have random numbers with a uniform distribution, a gaussian distribution, an exponential distribution, some bimodal distribution, etc., and they would still be random.
But it's really convenient to have a RNG with a uniform distribution, since you can easily transform numbers drawn from that distribution to some other arbitrary distribution by taking f(x) with the desired f() and an x drawn from the uniform distribution.
BTW, "uniform distribution" doesn't mean that you get the same number of occurences of each number in the range; it only means they have the same probability of occuring. (OK, that distinction gets a bit tricky when you're talking about pseudo-random numbers, but let's pretend we're talking about genuinely random numbers.)
> Its just as likely to get all 0's or all 1's as it is to get any other single random number and yet 9 out of 10 people would probably say all 0's or all 1's isn't a random result, even when it comes from a random source.
Yeah, but that's because we intellectually identify those numbers as "special", when they aren't really. For instance, people would probably think the numeric representation of their birthdate was special, though someone else might think it a perfectly random number. Strictly speaking, randomness has nothing to do with the importance humans assign to the result.
> I guess the big misunderstanding is that once you have a number, its not random, you know what it is.
Yes, the a posteriori probability of an event, given that the even happened, is always one. Pseudoscientists are fond of constructing probability arguments that they think should be convincing, not realizing that they are just painting a bull's-eye around wherever the arrow happened to strike.
> A random pattern is probably better defined as one you can't predict, and once you have it, recreating it with the same process is not likely.
For most uses we would want to say that "you can't predict" means that all possible patterns are equally likely, i.e. that betting on one has the same expected pay-off as betting on any other, at least if we're talking about a uniform distribution. And as for re-creation, we usually want sequentially generated patterns to be independent, i.e. that knowing what has been produced in the past does not help you predict what's coming up next. In particular, if your generator produced pattern z last time, the probability of producing z next time is still the same as the probability of producing any other pattern.
Any time there is a preferred way to bet, whether considering the past or not, it means that your generator is biased in ways that you probably don't want for a basic RNG. If you want biases, introduce them by filtering the number produced by a RNG with a uniform distribution.
> Are they updating it to be usable?
I wish people wouldn't modify this kind of stuff as flamebait. Some of us - maybe lots of us, given the other posts I'm seeing here - think the GNOME leadership has taken it down a seriously wrong path as far as usability goes, and IMO it would be best to mod the complaints up in hopes of calling more attention to the problem, rather than modding them down so the Potemkin Village can retain its facade of progress a little longer.
> Gnome has become more polished, and looks more like a mature desktop offering. The HIG had a really good impact on Gnome. Every close button is where it belongs, you don't even have to think about where it is.
Actually they're all on the wrong frikkin' side, which is very annoying if you run traditional applications as well as GNOME2 applications, or even for your GNOME applications when you first upgrade. IMO that gratuitous change was a very poor HIG decision.
Also things can be very unintuitive, because for lots of dialogs you have to click "close" when you expect to click "OK" to tell it you want to go with the selected changes.
IMO the HIG have done GNOME more harm than good.
> The last time I checked (RH 9 installation), metacity was gnome's default window-whatchamacallit, which had the annoying animated minimization, lacked some of the fine-tuning sawfish has/had, and was not-so-actively maintained. Any other up-and-coming, actively maintained, gnome2-ready/complaiant, non-fluxbox/blackbox-type, worthy replacement for metacity.
With sufficient patience you can rip Metacity out and run the most recent version of Sawfish. I'm doing that on RH 9, albeit with GARNOME rather than the RH 9 GNOME stuff.