Actually a cookie such as you describe might well be vulnerable to a leaky-cipher problem like this one, since the HTTP headers are reasonably large, uniformly located (in part because of the punctuated way HTTP is used between browser and server), and generally much the same for subsequent requests. It seems this would probably be worse for, say, RC4 (for the same sorts of reasons as WEP is breakable).
This is why the cookie is only good for a session and has a short timeout. You may be able to grab some candy, but you can't steal the whole store.
It doesn't matter whether you're using webmail (the article is mistaken in this respect). The issue is if you're doing regular periodic mail checks to a POP or IMAP server where you authenticate over a TLS channel. Because you're constantly sending the same credentials, the SSL/TLS weakness can be exploited and the credentials extracted. This is as true of Pine as of Eudora or a browser that keeps refreshing the inbox page. It's somewhat akin to the way 802.11 WEP's weakness is exploited.
It's long been obvious that periodic mail checks are a great sniffing opportunity for credentials (especially since many people are using the same userid and password elsewhere). Doesn't surprise me that it can also be exploited to break SSL/TLS. From that angle I would say that part of the overall issue is after all the way we're using TLS (though the underlying leakiness is how the exploit actually occurs). The problem is, what do you do instead?
Not so. All it takes is a little planning to create great multimode pathways. I've used these in cities like Ottawa and Vancouver to walk, skate and ride, and it's fantastic how seamlessly it can all work together. It also creates a nice social fabric, as people learn to look at each other as something other than an accident waiting to happen.
I can see how you'd reach your conclusion looking at regular old city sidewalks, but keep in mind that those aren't really even designed for walking. They're designed for walking to and from your car. Really, they're just the leftover space after cutting a city up so people can drive cars absolutely everywhere. If you want one culprit transportation mode that's incompatible with absolutely everything else, look no further. Even motorcycles can't safely coexist with cars.
Squared-off road-shoulder sidewalks with a crosswalk over a busy road every block can barely support walkin any distance, and even a walking/jogging mix doesn't work. Ask yourself, why do we so often consider something as natural and even desirable as jogging or running to be unsafe - "no running in the halls!"? It's a question of designing spaces and throughways. It can be done - we just need to start playing down the single biggest spoiling element to every other mode of transport. Cities don't have to be laid out in square blocks, and wide, winding two-way paths can support lots more than walking without any danger to anyone.
The reason that many MP3 encoders filter out anything above 16 kHz is that around 25-30 years old, that is the maximum frequency the average human can hear.
Agreed but for one distinction - that's the maximum that (Western) adults have indicated they can hear in lab tests. This has some applicability, but it's also about the test. People thought they knew the resolving limits of human vision until someone developed the vernier acuity test. A lot depends on the test, and we've only begun to get clever in developing them. Things like threshold and JND tests are interesting and useful, but not the final word. There is no final word.
Ultrasound may (probably does) affect the perception and experience of other sound, just as the infrasound in the informal experiment cited in the article. This could be true even when it's clear that the cochlea isn't responding at the high end where it used to. There may be (are) other mechanisms of response we don't know about yet.
That doesn't change the utility of the studies of course, nor many of the inferential conclusions. For instance it's pretty ironclad that normal response to high frequency sounds declines steadily with age (and acutely with trauma) as you note. But I wouldn't assume from that that a low-pass filter (or 44kHz sampling resolution) can't change the listening experience for a 65 year old listener. I think it still can, even if subtly.
Re:see Toffler, also
on
Soundless Music?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Because it's not ultrasonic to you - you can hear the 15.75 (or therabouts) kHz horizontal scan of the TV. You may also be able to perceive the 60 Hz vertical scan as a low buzz. Some people can perceive that well into adulthood. I've just about lost it now (at 34), but in high school I could tell if the NTSC green-screen monitors in the Apple ][ lab were switched on from the floor above and a couple of hundred feet away (they were much louder if the computers were off, hence no video signal). It was really pretty irritating sometimes. As you note, tones near the top end can make you feel quite squidgy.
So you (and I) just happen to have a higher top-end than most people your age (I'm guessing), in your cochlea, cortex, or both. This is as much a curse as a blessing so don't go feeling too superior (after all if it were really superior, everyone would be that way). But don't worry, you won't be able to hear it in 5-10 years.;)
I'm not familiar with the sphere experiment. Possibly your physics teacher was some sort of alien spy. It sounds a bit like the inversion of the way some microphones work, so the sound would have been able to vary with the voltage. But if you could hear it, it was sound, not ultrasound - more or less by definition.
Re:Just so long as you're not a chicken...
on
Soundless Music?
·
· Score: 2
It's not just for chickens any more - 7 Hz has been urban legendised in a lot of different forms. 7 is a number that gets a lot of that, of course. It would be an interesting coincidence if the same resonance were lethal to both chickens and studio musicians.
TAFKAC has it as false, but without a full explanation. Not that it really needs one.
But hey, don't take my word for it - you can pretty easily create a 7 Hz pattern just by tapping your finger on something thumpy. If this is your last post, we'll know it really is dangerous to people. If instead you post from KFC, well, good for you. Personally I'm vegetarian so I'll hold back on risking any poultricide...just in case.
Re:deaf people fighting...
on
Soundless Music?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You are a bastard, naturally, but I still appreciate the anecdote. Deaf culture is pretty interesting. Hearing folk might do the same thing if one partner put their hands over their ears and went "nyah nyah nyah not listening".;)
Lately I've been watching Sue Thomas, F.B. Eye. That's gotta be the only thing that could have ever got me to watch PAX TV...but it totally kicks ass, taking me off guard with some new understated observation on Deaf life every week. The people in the article need to do some experiments looking at the effects of infrasound on deaf people's emotional state now.
True, but there's still always an interaction between the sound source and the environment. That applies both to the infrasound and the piano piece. The sound bounces around off walls and furniture and people, interferes with itself, beats, gets absorbed, gets concentrated, gets funky...the point being that even in a standard recital, no two people are exposed to the same aural experience because they're necessarily sitting in different places. It starts to get a bit Heisenbergian the more you think about it. And it's even more mixed-up with multiple sound sources.
This is why a live concert will always have value, no matter the fidelity of recording and reproduction. Even if you really could reproduce the sound at a location (which you can't), it'd just be the sweet spot chosen by the sound engineer.
I hope that Google can continue to maintain their lead
Why? Are you an angel investor?
Seriously, who cares who has the "lead"? As long as I have good search engines to use and they manage to stay in business and pay their people reasonable salaries, I have zero interest in some business horse race. In fact I'd be nothing but pleased if another decent search engine could come along. I dislike being quite so dependent on one (and I am, utterly, dependent on Google at this point). Google is good but their approach can't possibly be the be-all-end-all. Before Google I thought Altavista was pretty good in fact, and right now I'd seriously regret being forced to use it if Google were down or unreachable.
I realise the article is about ad strategy rather than search strategy per se, and I really don't care about the ads as long as I can continue to ignore them. What I don't get is the fanboyism. They're a for-profit company. The fact that they've been very sane and rational in their approach so far is nice and even laudable, but it's not really some supererogatory wonderful act. If they weren't, I'd be that much less likely to use their service. Doesn't make them my teddy bear.
all sorts of ideas like this, but not any real chance at viability until we get a space elevator:P
And some potential problems in building and using a space elevator as long as it has to go through the entire range of space crap between here and just above geostationary orbit, including the two worst rings. Seriously, a space elevator is the scheme that suffers the most from space debris - it extends through everything, it's immobile, and ascent is relatively slow so exposure is high. It's not so much the ribbon but the payload (though eventually the ribbon gets whacked too).
"Chicken, egg - I'm the guy with yolk on my face".
This is the "critical mass" problem, where at a certain point all the junk colliding with itself creates a self-propagating chain reaction. This has two effects - more smaller bits are harder to track, of course (particularly because there's a resolution limit that determines the smallest size per distance that ground radar can track), but also a spreading of the material into wilder orbits and outside the two bands where it's currently still concentrated. The shuttle & ISS altitude, for instance, is relatively clear right now. Once the chain reaction starts (and some people think it already is in the chaotic early stages) this will no longer be true, and all space travel will become a lot more difficult.
The NYT article only slightly alludes to this with the "10 or 20 years" bit, but it is the real problem. As you note it's a question of linear vs. exponential growth - manageable or unmanageable. There is a tipping point, and regardless of where it is, it's folly to keep approaching it without SOME sort of cleanup scheme. So save your chewing gum; it's going to come in handy one day for the great space sweepup.
There is a finite number of positions, but the number is too large for the game to be brute-forced (or even come usefully close). Go-solving belongs to that class of problems that may be algorithmically solvable, but where even if you created a hypothetical universal computer (make every proton in the universe a processor with an extremely small but finite switching rate and run the computer for the projected lifetime of the universe), you still don't have enough processing power (this continues to be true even if you can make larger dark matter or dark energy computers - the answer is just way too many orders of magnitude away).
A computer can never "think" as a human does because if it did, it would simply be a human and not a computer. When we speak of holy grails, they're relative. Go is just the hardest (for a computer) game anyone's yet tried to solve with a computer. And if you've ever played it - even as a complete novice with a half-decent opponent - it's easy to see why. It runs so deep it's a little scary (but beautiful). I actually think a complete understanding of Go is impossible, and this is what keeps people playing it.
And today if you did that to an onling RPG, you'd be in court on criminal cybervandalism & cyberterrorism charges, not to mention all the civil suits for pain and suffering from the ever-addicted.
(Which would be pretty ironic, since they should really be paying you for regained time and wages)
Oh, I've met lot of kittens. Like yours, none of them were meek.;) In fact I really wonder where that phrase could possibly originate, since it's not from anyone who's actually played "stringy pull" or any of the many other laceration-based amusements with a kitten.
This is why laser pointers were such an important invention (yes, I know about the patent).
I would guess that most historical utterances of "hogwash" have been made with precisely that hope, albeit a sort of pathetic one. People loudly deride and denounce with intent of pushing up their own agenda (and/or reputation). Yes, it's the lowest, most confrontational way to try and succeed - but the very existence of words like "hogwash" pretty much attests to it. By showing how incensed I am, I demonstrate that yes, I am in a position to know and to judge thee - fear my awesome opinion! Or something like that.
Note that the OP was merely making a joke, and may in fact be a meek little kitten (not that I've ever actually met a meek kitten IRL).
It's funny you should say that, because I think this is a big part of the reason online fora like slashdot have such a high lurking rate. Most readers here never post, just as has always been true on mailing lists and Usenet. There's only a small core of vocal posters (the 80-20 rule, except it's more like 98-2 here).
So if people were less concerned, slashdot would have even more posts than it does. You could raise an interesting debate about whether the steady climb in posts has been due to increased readership, or increased participation (or more accurately, how those components boil down).
They are firewalls. Not extremely featured or powerful firewalls, but a NAT box is a type of transport-layer proxy firewall. And for most people's home LAN needs they're probably enough.
I haven't really seen NAT being marketed as a major security feature to date, though I wouldn't doubt it. That sort of marketing does suck, but it doesn't harm the fact that a NAT really does provide some security benefits.
You can't actually separate sociocultural development from brain development in humans. They've evolved together in a kind of feedback loop. Brains that are adept at language can't be selected for until language exists, for instance. Brains that are good at creative expression can't be selected for until cultural outlets for that expression start to appear. Human brains are the selecting environment of culture, and culture is (a big part of) the selecting environment of human brains. This also applies to other aspects of human anatomy, like our vocal tracts - it's quite possible that the first protohuman languages were in Sign, because we already had manual dexterity from apelike forbears, and language needs to evolve between humans before the tools to refine language (brain specialisation, vocal tract) can be selected for within humans. Broca's and Wernicke's areas probably appeared to facilitate expression through manual movements (just as they're used today when a
person uses a Sign language, like ASL, whether they're hearing or not). Later those areas get used as speech becomes a popular strategy. And this is why any few-genes attempt to explain these sorts of structures and behaviours is doomed from the start. It's just never that simple.
So this is why psychoactive drugs do have a place in human neurological evolution - they alter culture, which alters physiology. It's also why the "creativity gene" idea is hopelessly simplistic and even meaningless (just as it is every week when a new "gene for X complex behaviour" is reported in the lay media). But note that this isn't really what the scientist was saying anyway - just because the media reports it that way doesn't make it so.
I think you'll see this sort of co-factor approach to evolution theory gain popularity in the years to come - it already is in some places. The dividing line between biology, anthropology, psychology and sociology is no line at all. It's all in your head.;)
btw I meant that "Windows (or Linux of FreeBSD) is even more sucky on a notebook" (well, Windows is sucky anyway). GUI usability issues become more pronounced on notebooks, hence the distinction.
They have, but only in notebooks. If it was a desktop question there'd be barely any mention of Apple. The iMac is a nice machine but nowhere near the price-for-features win that the iBook especially is. And I can't understand this.
I like Macs and I like notebooks (I'm typing this on an older Powerbook). But right now, Apple's winning position in notebooks is really more about everyone else's losing position - PC notebook hardware is sucky, and Windows (or Linux or FreeBSD) is even more sucky. Winning by your competitors' mistakes is not a very secure way to stay ahead.
I still don't understand why Apple can't offer the iMac (or another flat-panel desktop machine) in a more compelling, price-competitive way.
In this case, spam doesn't generally run for 21 pages with words like "cryptography," and "full disclosure."
Well, that I'm not so sure of. That pretty much does describe some of the spam I've received. I'm not sure there's any machine-detectable characteristic (or set of them) you can say wouldn't be in spam - that's why current approaches lean so heavily toward positive indicators. I'm not saying your idea doesn't have merit - I think it does - but it's tougher than it sounds to tell an MTA or client how to implement it. If we could predict everything worthwhile that would ever appear in mail, there'd be no point having mail.;)
The problem is that content filtering approaches usually only analyze the "spamminess" of a piece. They usually don't analyze the "goodness" of a piece. So if I put "hot teens go crazy for debt-free viagra while earning $$$ from home" in the middle of some fine Shakespeare, that will get flagged as spam.
Nor would you be wrong to insert that, since that's roughly the Cliff's Notes reduction of several Shakespeare plays.
Nope. If someone can't be bothered to learn what the paragraph symbol is, or come up with a better and less ambiguous description of it, they've got no business submitting questions like this. I assumed the poster was an idiot because the post is idiotic. That remains true.
The other points still stand too - how do you add keys for specific functions without bloating the keyboard to impossible size? Meta keys are the only workable solution anyone's found. And s/he's talking about a notebook for goodness sake!
Let alone the backquote key. Ironic that one of the requested functions - window switching - is command-backquote (or tilde), a one-hand press, and logically associated by proximity to command-tab (switch processes).
A lot of thought has already gone into that keyboard (and the shortcuts) by people apparently a lot smarter than the poster. The reasons why the less optimal components of keyboard layout are plainly obvious (retraining people who know the QWERTY layout, industry standardisation). The criticism presented is hopelessly naive at best. It STILL reads like a troll.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually a cookie such as you describe might well be vulnerable to a leaky-cipher problem like this one, since the HTTP headers are reasonably large, uniformly located (in part because of the punctuated way HTTP is used between browser and server), and generally much the same for subsequent requests. It seems this would probably be worse for, say, RC4 (for the same sorts of reasons as WEP is breakable).
This is why the cookie is only good for a session and has a short timeout. You may be able to grab some candy, but you can't steal the whole store.
It doesn't matter whether you're using webmail (the article is mistaken in this respect). The issue is if you're doing regular periodic mail checks to a POP or IMAP server where you authenticate over a TLS channel. Because you're constantly sending the same credentials, the SSL/TLS weakness can be exploited and the credentials extracted. This is as true of Pine as of Eudora or a browser that keeps refreshing the inbox page. It's somewhat akin to the way 802.11 WEP's weakness is exploited.
It's long been obvious that periodic mail checks are a great sniffing opportunity for credentials (especially since many people are using the same userid and password elsewhere). Doesn't surprise me that it can also be exploited to break SSL/TLS. From that angle I would say that part of the overall issue is after all the way we're using TLS (though the underlying leakiness is how the exploit actually occurs). The problem is, what do you do instead?
Not so. All it takes is a little planning to create great multimode pathways. I've used these in cities like Ottawa and Vancouver to walk, skate and ride, and it's fantastic how seamlessly it can all work together. It also creates a nice social fabric, as people learn to look at each other as something other than an accident waiting to happen.
I can see how you'd reach your conclusion looking at regular old city sidewalks, but keep in mind that those aren't really even designed for walking. They're designed for walking to and from your car. Really, they're just the leftover space after cutting a city up so people can drive cars absolutely everywhere. If you want one culprit transportation mode that's incompatible with absolutely everything else, look no further. Even motorcycles can't safely coexist with cars.
Squared-off road-shoulder sidewalks with a crosswalk over a busy road every block can barely support walkin any distance, and even a walking/jogging mix doesn't work. Ask yourself, why do we so often consider something as natural and even desirable as jogging or running to be unsafe - "no running in the halls!"? It's a question of designing spaces and throughways. It can be done - we just need to start playing down the single biggest spoiling element to every other mode of transport. Cities don't have to be laid out in square blocks, and wide, winding two-way paths can support lots more than walking without any danger to anyone.
Agreed but for one distinction - that's the maximum that (Western) adults have indicated they can hear in lab tests. This has some applicability, but it's also about the test. People thought they knew the resolving limits of human vision until someone developed the vernier acuity test. A lot depends on the test, and we've only begun to get clever in developing them. Things like threshold and JND tests are interesting and useful, but not the final word. There is no final word.
Ultrasound may (probably does) affect the perception and experience of other sound, just as the infrasound in the informal experiment cited in the article. This could be true even when it's clear that the cochlea isn't responding at the high end where it used to. There may be (are) other mechanisms of response we don't know about yet.
That doesn't change the utility of the studies of course, nor many of the inferential conclusions. For instance it's pretty ironclad that normal response to high frequency sounds declines steadily with age (and acutely with trauma) as you note. But I wouldn't assume from that that a low-pass filter (or 44kHz sampling resolution) can't change the listening experience for a 65 year old listener. I think it still can, even if subtly.
Because it's not ultrasonic to you - you can hear the 15.75 (or therabouts) kHz horizontal scan of the TV. You may also be able to perceive the 60 Hz vertical scan as a low buzz. Some people can perceive that well into adulthood. I've just about lost it now (at 34), but in high school I could tell if the NTSC green-screen monitors in the Apple ][ lab were switched on from the floor above and a couple of hundred feet away (they were much louder if the computers were off, hence no video signal). It was really pretty irritating sometimes. As you note, tones near the top end can make you feel quite squidgy.
;)
So you (and I) just happen to have a higher top-end than most people your age (I'm guessing), in your cochlea, cortex, or both. This is as much a curse as a blessing so don't go feeling too superior (after all if it were really superior, everyone would be that way). But don't worry, you won't be able to hear it in 5-10 years.
I'm not familiar with the sphere experiment. Possibly your physics teacher was some sort of alien spy. It sounds a bit like the inversion of the way some microphones work, so the sound would have been able to vary with the voltage. But if you could hear it, it was sound, not ultrasound - more or less by definition.
It's not just for chickens any more - 7 Hz has been urban legendised in a lot of different forms. 7 is a number that gets a lot of that, of course. It would be an interesting coincidence if the same resonance were lethal to both chickens and studio musicians.
TAFKAC has it as false, but without a full explanation. Not that it really needs one.
But hey, don't take my word for it - you can pretty easily create a 7 Hz pattern just by tapping your finger on something thumpy. If this is your last post, we'll know it really is dangerous to people. If instead you post from KFC, well, good for you. Personally I'm vegetarian so I'll hold back on risking any poultricide...just in case.
You are a bastard, naturally, but I still appreciate the anecdote. Deaf culture is pretty interesting. Hearing folk might do the same thing if one partner put their hands over their ears and went "nyah nyah nyah not listening". ;)
Lately I've been watching Sue Thomas, F.B. Eye. That's gotta be the only thing that could have ever got me to watch PAX TV...but it totally kicks ass, taking me off guard with some new understated observation on Deaf life every week. The people in the article need to do some experiments looking at the effects of infrasound on deaf people's emotional state now.
True, but there's still always an interaction between the sound source and the environment. That applies both to the infrasound and the piano piece. The sound bounces around off walls and furniture and people, interferes with itself, beats, gets absorbed, gets concentrated, gets funky...the point being that even in a standard recital, no two people are exposed to the same aural experience because they're necessarily sitting in different places. It starts to get a bit Heisenbergian the more you think about it. And it's even more mixed-up with multiple sound sources.
This is why a live concert will always have value, no matter the fidelity of recording and reproduction. Even if you really could reproduce the sound at a location (which you can't), it'd just be the sweet spot chosen by the sound engineer.
No substitute for being there.
Why? Are you an angel investor?
Seriously, who cares who has the "lead"? As long as I have good search engines to use and they manage to stay in business and pay their people reasonable salaries, I have zero interest in some business horse race. In fact I'd be nothing but pleased if another decent search engine could come along. I dislike being quite so dependent on one (and I am, utterly, dependent on Google at this point). Google is good but their approach can't possibly be the be-all-end-all. Before Google I thought Altavista was pretty good in fact, and right now I'd seriously regret being forced to use it if Google were down or unreachable.
I realise the article is about ad strategy rather than search strategy per se, and I really don't care about the ads as long as I can continue to ignore them. What I don't get is the fanboyism. They're a for-profit company. The fact that they've been very sane and rational in their approach so far is nice and even laudable, but it's not really some supererogatory wonderful act. If they weren't, I'd be that much less likely to use their service. Doesn't make them my teddy bear.
And some potential problems in building and using a space elevator as long as it has to go through the entire range of space crap between here and just above geostationary orbit, including the two worst rings. Seriously, a space elevator is the scheme that suffers the most from space debris - it extends through everything, it's immobile, and ascent is relatively slow so exposure is high. It's not so much the ribbon but the payload (though eventually the ribbon gets whacked too).
"Chicken, egg - I'm the guy with yolk on my face".
This is the "critical mass" problem, where at a certain point all the junk colliding with itself creates a self-propagating chain reaction. This has two effects - more smaller bits are harder to track, of course (particularly because there's a resolution limit that determines the smallest size per distance that ground radar can track), but also a spreading of the material into wilder orbits and outside the two bands where it's currently still concentrated. The shuttle & ISS altitude, for instance, is relatively clear right now. Once the chain reaction starts (and some people think it already is in the chaotic early stages) this will no longer be true, and all space travel will become a lot more difficult.
The NYT article only slightly alludes to this with the "10 or 20 years" bit, but it is the real problem. As you note it's a question of linear vs. exponential growth - manageable or unmanageable. There is a tipping point, and regardless of where it is, it's folly to keep approaching it without SOME sort of cleanup scheme. So save your chewing gum; it's going to come in handy one day for the great space sweepup.
There is a finite number of positions, but the number is too large for the game to be brute-forced (or even come usefully close). Go-solving belongs to that class of problems that may be algorithmically solvable, but where even if you created a hypothetical universal computer (make every proton in the universe a processor with an extremely small but finite switching rate and run the computer for the projected lifetime of the universe), you still don't have enough processing power (this continues to be true even if you can make larger dark matter or dark energy computers - the answer is just way too many orders of magnitude away).
A computer can never "think" as a human does because if it did, it would simply be a human and not a computer. When we speak of holy grails, they're relative. Go is just the hardest (for a computer) game anyone's yet tried to solve with a computer. And if you've ever played it - even as a complete novice with a half-decent opponent - it's easy to see why. It runs so deep it's a little scary (but beautiful). I actually think a complete understanding of Go is impossible, and this is what keeps people playing it.
And today if you did that to an onling RPG, you'd be in court on criminal cybervandalism & cyberterrorism charges, not to mention all the civil suits for pain and suffering from the ever-addicted.
(Which would be pretty ironic, since they should really be paying you for regained time and wages)
Oh, I've met lot of kittens. Like yours, none of them were meek. ;) In fact I really wonder where that phrase could possibly originate, since it's not from anyone who's actually played "stringy pull" or any of the many other laceration-based amusements with a kitten.
This is why laser pointers were such an important invention (yes, I know about the patent).
I would guess that most historical utterances of "hogwash" have been made with precisely that hope, albeit a sort of pathetic one. People loudly deride and denounce with intent of pushing up their own agenda (and/or reputation). Yes, it's the lowest, most confrontational way to try and succeed - but the very existence of words like "hogwash" pretty much attests to it. By showing how incensed I am, I demonstrate that yes, I am in a position to know and to judge thee - fear my awesome opinion! Or something like that.
Note that the OP was merely making a joke, and may in fact be a meek little kitten (not that I've ever actually met a meek kitten IRL).
Looks like the auction is over.
How much did you have to pay? Just ballpark for curiosity's sake.
It's funny you should say that, because I think this is a big part of the reason online fora like slashdot have such a high lurking rate. Most readers here never post, just as has always been true on mailing lists and Usenet. There's only a small core of vocal posters (the 80-20 rule, except it's more like 98-2 here).
So if people were less concerned, slashdot would have even more posts than it does. You could raise an interesting debate about whether the steady climb in posts has been due to increased readership, or increased participation (or more accurately, how those components boil down).
They are firewalls. Not extremely featured or powerful firewalls, but a NAT box is a type of transport-layer proxy firewall. And for most people's home LAN needs they're probably enough.
I haven't really seen NAT being marketed as a major security feature to date, though I wouldn't doubt it. That sort of marketing does suck, but it doesn't harm the fact that a NAT really does provide some security benefits.
You can't actually separate sociocultural development from brain development in humans. They've evolved together in a kind of feedback loop. Brains that are adept at language can't be selected for until language exists, for instance. Brains that are good at creative expression can't be selected for until cultural outlets for that expression start to appear. Human brains are the selecting environment of culture, and culture is (a big part of) the selecting environment of human brains. This also applies to other aspects of human anatomy, like our vocal tracts - it's quite possible that the first protohuman languages were in Sign, because we already had manual dexterity from apelike forbears, and language needs to evolve between humans before the tools to refine language (brain specialisation, vocal tract) can be selected for within humans. Broca's and Wernicke's areas probably appeared to facilitate expression through manual movements (just as they're used today when a person uses a Sign language, like ASL, whether they're hearing or not). Later those areas get used as speech becomes a popular strategy. And this is why any few-genes attempt to explain these sorts of structures and behaviours is doomed from the start. It's just never that simple.
So this is why psychoactive drugs do have a place in human neurological evolution - they alter culture, which alters physiology. It's also why the "creativity gene" idea is hopelessly simplistic and even meaningless (just as it is every week when a new "gene for X complex behaviour" is reported in the lay media). But note that this isn't really what the scientist was saying anyway - just because the media reports it that way doesn't make it so.
I think you'll see this sort of co-factor approach to evolution theory gain popularity in the years to come - it already is in some places. The dividing line between biology, anthropology, psychology and sociology is no line at all. It's all in your head. ;)
btw I meant that "Windows (or Linux of FreeBSD) is even more sucky on a notebook" (well, Windows is sucky anyway). GUI usability issues become more pronounced on notebooks, hence the distinction.
They have, but only in notebooks. If it was a desktop question there'd be barely any mention of Apple. The iMac is a nice machine but nowhere near the price-for-features win that the iBook especially is. And I can't understand this.
I like Macs and I like notebooks (I'm typing this on an older Powerbook). But right now, Apple's winning position in notebooks is really more about everyone else's losing position - PC notebook hardware is sucky, and Windows (or Linux or FreeBSD) is even more sucky. Winning by your competitors' mistakes is not a very secure way to stay ahead.
I still don't understand why Apple can't offer the iMac (or another flat-panel desktop machine) in a more compelling, price-competitive way.
"Stop the world - I want to get off"?
(Anyway, I'm all for it - anything that lets me sleep in a little extra is fine by me...)
Well, that I'm not so sure of. That pretty much does describe some of the spam I've received. I'm not sure there's any machine-detectable characteristic (or set of them) you can say wouldn't be in spam - that's why current approaches lean so heavily toward positive indicators. I'm not saying your idea doesn't have merit - I think it does - but it's tougher than it sounds to tell an MTA or client how to implement it. If we could predict everything worthwhile that would ever appear in mail, there'd be no point having mail. ;)
Nor would you be wrong to insert that, since that's roughly the Cliff's Notes reduction of several Shakespeare plays.
Nope. If someone can't be bothered to learn what the paragraph symbol is, or come up with a better and less ambiguous description of it, they've got no business submitting questions like this. I assumed the poster was an idiot because the post is idiotic. That remains true.
The other points still stand too - how do you add keys for specific functions without bloating the keyboard to impossible size? Meta keys are the only workable solution anyone's found. And s/he's talking about a notebook for goodness sake!
Let alone the backquote key. Ironic that one of the requested functions - window switching - is command-backquote (or tilde), a one-hand press, and logically associated by proximity to command-tab (switch processes).
A lot of thought has already gone into that keyboard (and the shortcuts) by people apparently a lot smarter than the poster. The reasons why the less optimal components of keyboard layout are plainly obvious (retraining people who know the QWERTY layout, industry standardisation). The criticism presented is hopelessly naive at best. It STILL reads like a troll.