I know next to nothing about superstring theory and all this multiple dimensions stuff, but let me display my ignorance for everyone.
I seem to remember having read somewhere that the whole point of the multiple dimensions in string theory was that they were incredibly tiny and curled up on themselves. And they were supposed to be less than the planck length in total size, if I remember right. I understand how the dimensions could dissipate the force of gravity, but how does the gravitational force increase at small distances? Wouldn't the multiple dimensions of the two particles somehow have to collide/interact? And wouldn't that only occur if the two particles were closer than the planck length, which is closer than they could possibly get anyway? I know I am missing something here, and I am interested to hear exactly what it is.
Everybody already knows black holes spontaneously appear. Here's an experiment to prove it.
Place two matching socks in a washer machine. turn the washer machine on, wait for it to finish. Remove the single sock. Voila. Black holes.
Now place that single sock into the drier. Turn it on, wait for it to finish. Remove one entirely different sock, which you have never owned. Kazow. Alternate Dimensions.
The field of pairingsocks physics solved the Black Hole question years before the cosmologists or those silly particle physicists. This article is old news.
It looks to me like the NSA is fishing for new hires. Let me explain. Every post here seems to be extrememly paranoid about the NSA. "Don't trust them. They're massively powerful. They're trying to trick us." But Slashdot represents a fair slice of the technophile community. If all the geeks fear the NSA, then who is working for them? I think the Good Will Hunting monologue is a fair representation of how most intelligent people feel about the NSA. The NSA needs geniuses to work for them, but the geniuses will have none of it. The NSA is nothing if it doesn't have great minds working for it, so I really have no doubt that it is waning in power. If it loses smart people, it produces fewer results and suddenly it is less necessary, and less funded, etc., etc.
So, it seems to me that they have changed their strategy in an attempt to become more attractive to the people they want to hire. They got burned on their whole attempt to regulate cryptography, and managed to alienate everyone who believes in freedom of inquiry in the process. Maybe they've realized that they can't rely on secrecy anymore, because it doesn't work, and have decided they need to stay ahead technologically. And in order to do this, they need smart people, and in order to get these people, they have to be open and trusted by the public.
In the end, the only thing the NSA is about is National Security. They have a history of being sneaky and untrustworthy and classified, but if they finally realize that it doesn't help national security to be that way, then why wouldn't they change? In government agencies, old habits die hard, but the other thing that dies hard is government agencies. If they get pushed into a corner (which I think they have been by the availability of good public cryptography tools), then I wouldn't be surprised if they suddenly did a policy 180. And I think that would be a good thing.
>seeing hot girls again , instead of your greasy cubicle mates?
>keggers instead of the watercooler?
You obviously didn't read the article. Most of these people are going back to STANFORD. As John McEnroe once said "Nine out of ten girls in California are beautiful. The other one goes to Stanford."
Trust me, I go back there in a week and a half. Damn the wireless startups. Remember when "I work at a dotcom" could get you dates?
From the article: prompted me to analyze its technical merits, using insights from the book 'Nonzero' by Richard Wright
He said he was using work from this book, which is an excellent text analyzing human progress using game theory. The book has all the groundwork you are looking for, including examples, etc. I think that if you read it, the basis for his argument becomes much more apparent. In fact I suggest everyone read it, because it presents an interesting means of analyzing almost any social situation, and it is very relevant to current goings on in the software community.
Not at all! It's just been remodelled to allow for new levels of mayhem. In the new internet era, cracking a payphone just seemed so boring. Now, ATT is poised to change all that with the introduction of the Internet Payphone! All your cracking AND phreaking needs in one machine! What more could a script kiddy want?
As an open source developer who's sharp, motivated and genuinely interested in games, I find that . . .
yadda yadda yadda in my vast personal experience yadda yadda yadda love coding for code's sake yadda yadda yadda you should hire people like me yadda yadda yadda link to open source project yadda yadda yadda link to my webpage and resume
yadda yadda yadda my two cents
You're right! That article wasn't terribly informative, I'll just call all my friends at NASA and see what they think. I don't have any? Then I'll go to www.spacescientistsondemand.com where friendly NASA engineers and scientists are sitting online waiting to handle all my inane questions. That site went down with the dot com crash? Oh fuck it, I'll just post it on slashdot and have someone hunt down the actual paper the article was based on, and have the son of the author of the paper verify the most likely theories.
A lot of those reading this are probably programmers. Surely we're all familiar with The Closest Thing I'm Going To Bother Doing Before I Go Get A Coffee. If you REALLY want to know, you look elsewhere, but if you kinda want to know and your boss is looking, it's Slashdot all the way.
I have to be honest, everything I know about cryptography I got from the book Crypto, so maybe I'm misinformed, but it really seems to me like the government has given up the fight on crypto. I mean, they seem to have removed export restrictions, and they've basically approved a 256 bit crypto standard developed overseas no less. This seems a lot different from their attitude ten years ago.
So, what gives? Has the government stopped fighting the "good fight", or have they just found this quantum computer solution whihc Taco's delusions would gift them with? It seems really hard to believe that they could possibly be breaking our encryption by brute force, but it also seems impossible that the NSA would just roll over and die. anybody know what's up?
Did anyone ever claim that Slashdot was impartial or consistent? The fact that it isn't is what makes it fun to read.
Most people who read this site are linux fanatics. What makes linux look good is good. What makes linux look bad is bad. And we naturally want to read about that which is good.
If we wanted to read about Microsoft gaining the top spot on a benchmark, or how a benchmark showing linux at the top was probably worthless, we would be reading another site. Plain and simple.
Slashdot helps me to remain safe in my belief that linux and open source are great gifts from the heavens sent to bring peace and harmony to the earth, and that Microsoft is the surly spawn of Satan struggling vainly against its own ineptitude in a doomed attempt to keep its claws firmly entrenched in the fleshy parts of the ignorant of the world.
In summation, if you're going to read my Bible, please have the courtesy not to point out its inconsistencies, because you're not going to change my mind, but you might piss me off.
Eazel was an attempt to make a commercial software company that built really cool open source applications for the Linux desktop. It didn't work.
The sad thing is, if we want linux to succeed on the desktop, we need commercial software companies that do this.
Open source software is starting to rock the enterprise space because geeks are the ones deciding what software to use. The sysadmin knows open source software is better and he makes sure the webserver runs Apache on Linux.
But the ones buying the desktops and desktop apps are not geeks. Even in the big companies.
You need a legitimate company with a marketing division and money to get people to use OSS on the desktop. Plus, when geeks develop software, we develop it for other geeks. That's fine if it's an RDBMS, but if it's a file manager, you better hope to hell there's no config file or command line options. You need idiots to stupid proof your software, and we all know there's no better place to find those than in upper management in a commercial software company.
The demise of Eazel is sad because they were an actual software company, acting like one, yet developing for linux. As much as it sucks, we need that. And if the Eazel way won't work, we need to come up with a legitimate way for a company to make money building desktop software that's open source. Or else Linux will never be the MicrosoftKilla it yearns to be.
I actually made it a point to read the article before I posted that comment, even though it was only intended to be an (apparently not very)humorous reply to a humorous thread.
But your response brings up a point that I think a few people may be missing here. Not changing the wording is stupid, but changing the wording doesn't make it not cheating. The point is that the cheaters copied the IDEAS verbatim from someone else's paper. (without citing, etc., etc.) Whether they used the same words is irrelevant. The fact that they did just made them easier to catch.
The point of having rules against cheating isn't so students have to spend a bunch of time rephrasing sentences they took from other places, the point is to force students to learn something about the subject they are studying. So, even if a paper passes this professor's test, it doesn't mean that it isn't plagiarism.
The example from the beginning of this thread was plagiarism AND it would have failed the test. Hence the author would have been expelled. Now, if the second guy had worked a little harder, it would have been plagiarism that didn't fail the test. And thus he couldn't have been caught AND he wouldn't have been expelled. But he still plagiarized. And he still deserved to be expelled. . . If it had been a real paper. . . Which it wasn't. . . And I realize that.
And here's a revenge story with the included mastercard parody. A trend? I think so.
By the way, I'm SURE MasterCard's lawyers are reading this by now, and I guess they might feel compelled to send another cease and desist letter to Computer Pranks (The site that has the referenced parody). The sad part is, for every letter they have some intern write up, I can probably find another 5 sites with a Mastercard parody. In fact, that's not a bad business model. ..
MR. MASTERCARD LAWYER, for every 50 dollars you give me, I will tell you a site with another mastercard parody. Then you can charge MasterCard 500 dollars to send that site a piece of paper with some legalese on it. You get paid, I get paid, and MasterCard gets to harass people and look stupid. Everybody's happy!
Of course, parody is protected and it doesn't cost me anything to make sure these websites know that, but that's not the point is it? The point is to keep that money flowing, and to keep those interns typing.
Slashdot Mirror
I know next to nothing about superstring theory and all this multiple dimensions stuff, but let me display my ignorance for everyone.
I seem to remember having read somewhere that the whole point of the multiple dimensions in string theory was that they were incredibly tiny and curled up on themselves. And they were supposed to be less than the planck length in total size, if I remember right. I understand how the dimensions could dissipate the force of gravity, but how does the gravitational force increase at small distances? Wouldn't the multiple dimensions of the two particles somehow have to collide/interact? And wouldn't that only occur if the two particles were closer than the planck length, which is closer than they could possibly get anyway? I know I am missing something here, and I am interested to hear exactly what it is.
Everybody already knows black holes spontaneously appear. Here's an experiment to prove it.
Place two matching socks in a washer machine. turn the washer machine on, wait for it to finish. Remove the single sock. Voila. Black holes.
Now place that single sock into the drier. Turn it on, wait for it to finish. Remove one entirely different sock, which you have never owned. Kazow. Alternate Dimensions.
The field of pairingsocks physics solved the Black Hole question years before the cosmologists or those silly particle physicists. This article is old news.
It looks to me like the NSA is fishing for new hires. Let me explain. Every post here seems to be extrememly paranoid about the NSA. "Don't trust them. They're massively powerful. They're trying to trick us." But Slashdot represents a fair slice of the technophile community. If all the geeks fear the NSA, then who is working for them? I think the Good Will Hunting monologue is a fair representation of how most intelligent people feel about the NSA. The NSA needs geniuses to work for them, but the geniuses will have none of it. The NSA is nothing if it doesn't have great minds working for it, so I really have no doubt that it is waning in power. If it loses smart people, it produces fewer results and suddenly it is less necessary, and less funded, etc., etc.
So, it seems to me that they have changed their strategy in an attempt to become more attractive to the people they want to hire. They got burned on their whole attempt to regulate cryptography, and managed to alienate everyone who believes in freedom of inquiry in the process. Maybe they've realized that they can't rely on secrecy anymore, because it doesn't work, and have decided they need to stay ahead technologically. And in order to do this, they need smart people, and in order to get these people, they have to be open and trusted by the public.
In the end, the only thing the NSA is about is National Security. They have a history of being sneaky and untrustworthy and classified, but if they finally realize that it doesn't help national security to be that way, then why wouldn't they change? In government agencies, old habits die hard, but the other thing that dies hard is government agencies. If they get pushed into a corner (which I think they have been by the availability of good public cryptography tools), then I wouldn't be surprised if they suddenly did a policy 180. And I think that would be a good thing.
Feel free to disagree =)
>seeing hot girls again , instead of your greasy cubicle mates?
>keggers instead of the watercooler?
You obviously didn't read the article. Most of these people are going back to STANFORD. As John McEnroe once said "Nine out of ten girls in California are beautiful. The other one goes to Stanford."
Trust me, I go back there in a week and a half. Damn the wireless startups. Remember when "I work at a dotcom" could get you dates?
He said he was using work from this book, which is an excellent text analyzing human progress using game theory. The book has all the groundwork you are looking for, including examples, etc. I think that if you read it, the basis for his argument becomes much more apparent. In fact I suggest everyone read it, because it presents an interesting means of analyzing almost any social situation, and it is very relevant to current goings on in the software community.
Check it out at FatBrain
Looks like somebody just got a monopoly on internet censorship. =)
Not at all! It's just been remodelled to allow for new levels of mayhem. In the new internet era, cracking a payphone just seemed so boring. Now, ATT is poised to change all that with the introduction of the Internet Payphone! All your cracking AND phreaking needs in one machine! What more could a script kiddy want?
yadda yadda yadda in my vast personal experience yadda yadda yadda love coding for code's sake yadda yadda yadda you should hire people like me yadda yadda yadda link to open source project yadda yadda yadda link to my webpage and resume yadda yadda yadda my two cents
krazo prays for +5 Insightful
"Gee, John, what was everything you could think of?" -Interested Reader
"" -John
For an answer to that question, reference this discussion.
A lot of those reading this are probably programmers. Surely we're all familiar with The Closest Thing I'm Going To Bother Doing Before I Go Get A Coffee. If you REALLY want to know, you look elsewhere, but if you kinda want to know and your boss is looking, it's Slashdot all the way.
So, what gives? Has the government stopped fighting the "good fight", or have they just found this quantum computer solution whihc Taco's delusions would gift them with? It seems really hard to believe that they could possibly be breaking our encryption by brute force, but it also seems impossible that the NSA would just roll over and die. anybody know what's up?
Most people who read this site are linux fanatics. What makes linux look good is good. What makes linux look bad is bad. And we naturally want to read about that which is good. If we wanted to read about Microsoft gaining the top spot on a benchmark, or how a benchmark showing linux at the top was probably worthless, we would be reading another site. Plain and simple.
Slashdot helps me to remain safe in my belief that linux and open source are great gifts from the heavens sent to bring peace and harmony to the earth, and that Microsoft is the surly spawn of Satan struggling vainly against its own ineptitude in a doomed attempt to keep its claws firmly entrenched in the fleshy parts of the ignorant of the world.
In summation, if you're going to read my Bible, please have the courtesy not to point out its inconsistencies, because you're not going to change my mind, but you might piss me off.
The sad thing is, if we want linux to succeed on the desktop, we need commercial software companies that do this.
Open source software is starting to rock the enterprise space because geeks are the ones deciding what software to use. The sysadmin knows open source software is better and he makes sure the webserver runs Apache on Linux.
But the ones buying the desktops and desktop apps are not geeks. Even in the big companies.
You need a legitimate company with a marketing division and money to get people to use OSS on the desktop. Plus, when geeks develop software, we develop it for other geeks. That's fine if it's an RDBMS, but if it's a file manager, you better hope to hell there's no config file or command line options. You need idiots to stupid proof your software, and we all know there's no better place to find those than in upper management in a commercial software company.
The demise of Eazel is sad because they were an actual software company, acting like one, yet developing for linux. As much as it sucks, we need that. And if the Eazel way won't work, we need to come up with a legitimate way for a company to make money building desktop software that's open source. Or else Linux will never be the MicrosoftKilla it yearns to be.
But your response brings up a point that I think a few people may be missing here. Not changing the wording is stupid, but changing the wording doesn't make it not cheating. The point is that the cheaters copied the IDEAS verbatim from someone else's paper. (without citing, etc., etc.) Whether they used the same words is irrelevant. The fact that they did just made them easier to catch.
The point of having rules against cheating isn't so students have to spend a bunch of time rephrasing sentences they took from other places, the point is to force students to learn something about the subject they are studying. So, even if a paper passes this professor's test, it doesn't mean that it isn't plagiarism. The example from the beginning of this thread was plagiarism AND it would have failed the test. Hence the author would have been expelled. Now, if the second guy had worked a little harder, it would have been plagiarism that didn't fail the test. And thus he couldn't have been caught AND he wouldn't have been expelled. But he still plagiarized. And he still deserved to be expelled. . . If it had been a real paper. . . Which it wasn't. . . And I realize that.
-krazo
Unfortunately, "until you decide you're ready to" = 6 words in common and . . . You're expelled. Thanks for playing, though. Come back soon.
By the way, I'm SURE MasterCard's lawyers are reading this by now, and I guess they might feel compelled to send another cease and desist letter to Computer Pranks (The site that has the referenced parody). The sad part is, for every letter they have some intern write up, I can probably find another 5 sites with a Mastercard parody. In fact, that's not a bad business model. . .
MR. MASTERCARD LAWYER, for every 50 dollars you give me, I will tell you a site with another mastercard parody. Then you can charge MasterCard 500 dollars to send that site a piece of paper with some legalese on it. You get paid, I get paid, and MasterCard gets to harass people and look stupid. Everybody's happy!
Of course, parody is protected and it doesn't cost me anything to make sure these websites know that, but that's not the point is it? The point is to keep that money flowing, and to keep those interns typing.
I'm here to help.