I've lost 60 that way (loosely following The Hacker's Diet), and in the course of it I developed a few tricks. For me, I found three kinds of hunger:
1) Peckishness. I just want to chew something. Having a box of sugar-free gum handy really helps with this.
2) Vitamin deficiency. When I first encountered this, I wandered into the kitchen looking for cheese. Man, I just wanted cheese. I felt like a pregnant woman, seriously. I had been cutting out milk, and was probably calcium-deficient. Also, when you eat less, you just get less vitamins. I take a multivitamin with calcium to counteract this kind of hunger, and that works really well.
3) Energy hunger. When it's bad, my head spins and I get really cranky. The weird thing is, this kind of hunger has nothing to do with how many calories you need: it's about rhythms (how long since you ate) and whether your stomach feels empty.
For #3, I look for foods with very low energy density. Happily, many of them tend to be fruits and vegetables, which helps with #2. For example, you can have a huge salad at only 200 kcal with the right dressing, and there are a lot of fantastic vinaigrettes out there. (Kraft's Sun Dried Tomato and Roasted Red Pepper Italian come to mind.) Sprinkle some real crumbled bacon and shredded cheese on it for extra taste. Make it easy on yourself: buy everything pre-packaged.
I watch what I drink, mostly just avoiding milk and soda pop. Water is great. Crystal Light (or a knock-off) and Diet Coke are wonderful when you need something sweet. I guzzle something before eating to feel more full with less.
You can do it no matter how cranky you tend to get, if you know some tricks.
I see it as 80 people who shouldn't have been allowed to breed.
Good grief. +5, Insightful? Did three or four someones misread that as "inciteful"?
You've obviously never had a young child. What you and apparently thousands of others (or at least three or four) here fail to understand is that you cannot control your children. This is an awful double standard: insisting that teenagers can't be controlled (and therefore you shouldn't try), and then insisting that parents should control their younger children...
As small as they are, they're their own people. They make their own little decisions, maximize their own expected utilities, based on nothing but partial and not-very-well-understood information. (As an earlier poster said, the difference between "do" and "do not" is very subtle to them.) The only way to guarantee that your child won't copycat something - say, get into a car with a stranger because he might take you to the beach - is to make sure your child never sees it in the first place.
It's fine to not agree with this tactic, but it makes me ill to see that Slashdotters in general can't bend their minds around someone else's point of view, to the point where they vilify (or stupidify, if that's a word) the people who hold it. This doesn't usually bother me, but, contrary to popular belief, most of you (or at least three or four) will be parents, and will grapple with these very issues. (They'll be very personal then.) Completely shutting yourself off to possible good solutions is fairly stupid.
I mean, a formal proof. You're making a pretty broad statement, after all. The fact that some DRMs were cracked doesn't necessarily mean that all of them are inherently crackable.
At some point between the information and your eyes and ears, the information must be in "plaintext." (Otherwise you can't see it or hear it.) At that very point, the information stream can be intercepted and stored. This is true even if we have jacks in the backs of our heads to accept personal AV signals.
Here's another way to look at it: in the theoretical environment in which the decryption takes place, the person playing the part of consumer also plays the part of adversary. DRM systems give information to the adversary in plaintext. Alice wants to send a message to Bob. But she wants to send it to Bob in a way that Bob can't comprehend it... but he can, but he can't...
Yeah, so it's brain-dead. But there you go.
Most cracks happen earlier than between the emitter and the eyeballs. As long as the digital signal is converted to an analog signal in an environment that can be totally observed, the process of decryption can be observed and replicated. If someone ever designs a perfect black box, we'll possibly have no way to capture the digital signal. But we'll still be able to capture it before it reaches the eyeballs.
This is as close to a proof as you're likely to get on Slashdot.:) I could formalize it, but I don't want to spend the time.
In the grand scheme of things, there was no need to create it.
Which is, of course, the reason hundreds of thousands flocked to it when it was created. Right? Heck, they weren't even forced into it. Microsoft simply made the tools available.
I've seen environmentalists view a heavily-trafficked road and declare that building it was completely unnecessary. This seems like some of the same attitude.
I have mod points today, and I was going to mod you down for being horribly, horribly misinformed and outright wrong, but I decided to reply instead.
You're horribly, horribly misinformed and outright wrong. Check out Shor's Algoirthm. There's a lot of crazy stuff in it, most of which has nothing to do with forcing a quantum system into its "only stable state."
Surely functional programming languages are where the idea of syntax design as UI problem came from! Lisp on the one hand has a very simple yet incredibly powerful syntax; whereas Haskell has an incredibly beautiful syntax with more sugar than you can dream of.
Okay, I'll be more specific: they need to address syntax as a human user interface design problem.
Lisp. UI. Heh. Lisp syntax is a good user interface if sendmail.cf is. Its near lack of consistent visual cues disqualifies it completely.
Haskell is a good UI for mathematicians, who spend much of their lives learning to not think like normal people. Computer scientists are somewhere between normal people and mathematicians. Target them.
Erlang also has a huge amount of overhead, and due to immutable data structures, has to spend a lot of time copying data around.
This is the problem inherent with pure languages. Compilers/runtime systems are simply not sophisticated enough yet to reason about and perform as well as a human can with mutable data structures.
Haskell comes pretty close, and it's designed from the beginning to be pure.
In fact, it may be these immutable data structures that make the pure functional languages able to perform well on multiple processors where sequential languages with mutable data structures fail miserably. If you don't have to worry about function's side effects and no specific execution order is guaranteed, you can run it on any processor you want whenever you want, as long as you don't hold up things too much that depend on it.
However, pure functional languages need to be made more palatable to your average Joe Programmer. (Or computer scientists need to get more mathematical. Or both.) We need the Python and Ruby of pure functional languages: languages in which the syntax design is regarded as a user-interface problem.
I've been modded overrated for making the same argument as one of the luminaries in my field! That's awesome.
Go read a theory book, moderator, or catch up on your Bayesian statistics. If you want clarification, reply. If it doesn't make sense, reply. If you think I'm full of it, first read Wolpert, then reply.
When Wolpert published his first "No Free Lunch" argument about inference, it took the machine-learning and AI research communities by storm. It simply hasn't found its way into all studies of inference yet, and it should. There is no way the topic is overrated - it can only be found to be so by people who are wholly or willfully ignorant of the subject.
Thanks. I don't usually reply to moderations, but this is ridiculous.
Heresy! I have the utmost faith in the scientific method! Don't tell me the persecutions scientific minds suffer for their beliefs are in vain.
Seriously...
Seriously? Science does make a number of untestable assumptions, without which it would be impossible to conduct. This is true of every kind of inference. The main difference between science and religion is that science claims to be objective.
We know that's hogwash: for example, in the simplest probability model for discrete parameter estimation (for example, and science does things like this all the time but generally without a strong statistical foundation), it's not possible to know anything useful about the parameter without making an assumption that can't be founded on logic alone. (That is, if you try uniform prior and uniform likelihood distributions - the most objective ("maximum entropy") model you can make - your posterior distribution must be uniform.) For continuous parameter estimation, which science concerns itself with more often, you often can't even formulate an objective model...
The collection of results similar to this are called the "No Free Lunch Theorems," which ought to be studied by everybody doing inference instead of just by machine-learning and AI researchers. These are very low-level proofs: there is no philosophy involved, only math.
The claim that the scientific process leads to objective truth is nothing more than axiomatic. Under certain conditions that, as far as we know, are impossible to verify, it may be true.
Not that I'm saying science should be classified as religion, but thinking rigorously about its claims ought to reduce errors in judgment.
Another way of putting it is that science driven by directly-applicable results is often only capable of finding local maxima on the "truth" landscape. In other words, it's a greedy search, which in a highly non-convex function like this, is sure to give us suboptimal answers.
Exactly. If Jay Leno said in his monologue that there was going to be a bandwidth shortage, everybody would jump online and horde as much bandwidth as they possibly could before it ran out altogether. They'd stuff it into drawers and under mattresses, and then ration it out to family members...
Okay, I'm having a hard time applying the principle, here. How could claiming a bandwidth shortage produce one?
I'm sure google could afford to lease the dark fiber in an area... the stuff is all over the place and plentiful supply normally -- cheap.
Well, if astrophysicists are to be believed, only 4% of all communications is visible fiber, 22% is dark fiber, and the remaining 74% is a strange and exotic substance called "dark light." Personally, I think they're on crack.
Wow. What great advice! I almost wish I'd said something about "going back to school to do something more rewarding with my life, probably major in mathematics and then either teach or maybe try engineering" in my original post!
Why is this not an option? I got sick of programming for a living, I discovered that I love teaching, and now I'm back in graduate school for a PhD. It's hard (sell your house, sell a car to pay off the other one; moreover, convince your wife that it's a good idea), but not impossible. For some it's the best choice overall.
But your comments made me finally realise that having Steam installed on my MacBook Pro is tantamount to allowing Valve employees to molest my dog, urinate in my tea and make lewd gestures at my grandmother.
Actually, it's worse than that: it's tantamount to allowing Valve employees make lewd gestures at your dog, molest your tea, and urinate on your grandmother.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought it was Chuck Norris.
I've lost 60 that way (loosely following The Hacker's Diet), and in the course of it I developed a few tricks. For me, I found three kinds of hunger:
1) Peckishness. I just want to chew something. Having a box of sugar-free gum handy really helps with this.
2) Vitamin deficiency. When I first encountered this, I wandered into the kitchen looking for cheese. Man, I just wanted cheese. I felt like a pregnant woman, seriously. I had been cutting out milk, and was probably calcium-deficient. Also, when you eat less, you just get less vitamins. I take a multivitamin with calcium to counteract this kind of hunger, and that works really well.
3) Energy hunger. When it's bad, my head spins and I get really cranky. The weird thing is, this kind of hunger has nothing to do with how many calories you need: it's about rhythms (how long since you ate) and whether your stomach feels empty.
For #3, I look for foods with very low energy density. Happily, many of them tend to be fruits and vegetables, which helps with #2. For example, you can have a huge salad at only 200 kcal with the right dressing, and there are a lot of fantastic vinaigrettes out there. (Kraft's Sun Dried Tomato and Roasted Red Pepper Italian come to mind.) Sprinkle some real crumbled bacon and shredded cheese on it for extra taste. Make it easy on yourself: buy everything pre-packaged.
I watch what I drink, mostly just avoiding milk and soda pop. Water is great. Crystal Light (or a knock-off) and Diet Coke are wonderful when you need something sweet. I guzzle something before eating to feel more full with less.
You can do it no matter how cranky you tend to get, if you know some tricks.
I always thought it was degrees Kelvins. Or was that Kelvin's degrees?
Good grief. +5, Insightful? Did three or four someones misread that as "inciteful"?
You've obviously never had a young child. What you and apparently thousands of others (or at least three or four) here fail to understand is that you cannot control your children. This is an awful double standard: insisting that teenagers can't be controlled (and therefore you shouldn't try), and then insisting that parents should control their younger children...
As small as they are, they're their own people. They make their own little decisions, maximize their own expected utilities, based on nothing but partial and not-very-well-understood information. (As an earlier poster said, the difference between "do" and "do not" is very subtle to them.) The only way to guarantee that your child won't copycat something - say, get into a car with a stranger because he might take you to the beach - is to make sure your child never sees it in the first place.
It's fine to not agree with this tactic, but it makes me ill to see that Slashdotters in general can't bend their minds around someone else's point of view, to the point where they vilify (or stupidify, if that's a word) the people who hold it. This doesn't usually bother me, but, contrary to popular belief, most of you (or at least three or four) will be parents, and will grapple with these very issues. (They'll be very personal then.) Completely shutting yourself off to possible good solutions is fairly stupid.
At some point between the information and your eyes and ears, the information must be in "plaintext." (Otherwise you can't see it or hear it.) At that very point, the information stream can be intercepted and stored. This is true even if we have jacks in the backs of our heads to accept personal AV signals.
Here's another way to look at it: in the theoretical environment in which the decryption takes place, the person playing the part of consumer also plays the part of adversary. DRM systems give information to the adversary in plaintext. Alice wants to send a message to Bob. But she wants to send it to Bob in a way that Bob can't comprehend it... but he can, but he can't...
Yeah, so it's brain-dead. But there you go.
Most cracks happen earlier than between the emitter and the eyeballs. As long as the digital signal is converted to an analog signal in an environment that can be totally observed, the process of decryption can be observed and replicated. If someone ever designs a perfect black box, we'll possibly have no way to capture the digital signal. But we'll still be able to capture it before it reaches the eyeballs.
This is as close to a proof as you're likely to get on Slashdot.
Which is, of course, the reason hundreds of thousands flocked to it when it was created. Right? Heck, they weren't even forced into it. Microsoft simply made the tools available.
I've seen environmentalists view a heavily-trafficked road and declare that building it was completely unnecessary. This seems like some of the same attitude.
I have mod points today, and I was going to mod you down for being horribly, horribly misinformed and outright wrong, but I decided to reply instead.
You're horribly, horribly misinformed and outright wrong. Check out Shor's Algoirthm. There's a lot of crazy stuff in it, most of which has nothing to do with forcing a quantum system into its "only stable state."
Okay, I'll be more specific: they need to address syntax as a human user interface design problem.
Lisp. UI. Heh. Lisp syntax is a good user interface if sendmail.cf is. Its near lack of consistent visual cues disqualifies it completely.
Haskell is a good UI for mathematicians, who spend much of their lives learning to not think like normal people. Computer scientists are somewhere between normal people and mathematicians. Target them.
Haskell comes pretty close, and it's designed from the beginning to be pure.
In fact, it may be these immutable data structures that make the pure functional languages able to perform well on multiple processors where sequential languages with mutable data structures fail miserably. If you don't have to worry about function's side effects and no specific execution order is guaranteed, you can run it on any processor you want whenever you want, as long as you don't hold up things too much that depend on it.
However, pure functional languages need to be made more palatable to your average Joe Programmer. (Or computer scientists need to get more mathematical. Or both.) We need the Python and Ruby of pure functional languages: languages in which the syntax design is regarded as a user-interface problem.
I've been modded overrated for making the same argument as one of the luminaries in my field! That's awesome.
Go read a theory book, moderator, or catch up on your Bayesian statistics. If you want clarification, reply. If it doesn't make sense, reply. If you think I'm full of it, first read Wolpert, then reply.
When Wolpert published his first "No Free Lunch" argument about inference, it took the machine-learning and AI research communities by storm. It simply hasn't found its way into all studies of inference yet, and it should. There is no way the topic is overrated - it can only be found to be so by people who are wholly or willfully ignorant of the subject.
Thanks. I don't usually reply to moderations, but this is ridiculous.
Seriously? Science does make a number of untestable assumptions, without which it would be impossible to conduct. This is true of every kind of inference. The main difference between science and religion is that science claims to be objective.
We know that's hogwash: for example, in the simplest probability model for discrete parameter estimation (for example, and science does things like this all the time but generally without a strong statistical foundation), it's not possible to know anything useful about the parameter without making an assumption that can't be founded on logic alone. (That is, if you try uniform prior and uniform likelihood distributions - the most objective ("maximum entropy") model you can make - your posterior distribution must be uniform.) For continuous parameter estimation, which science concerns itself with more often, you often can't even formulate an objective model...
The collection of results similar to this are called the "No Free Lunch Theorems," which ought to be studied by everybody doing inference instead of just by machine-learning and AI researchers. These are very low-level proofs: there is no philosophy involved, only math.
The claim that the scientific process leads to objective truth is nothing more than axiomatic. Under certain conditions that, as far as we know, are impossible to verify, it may be true.
Not that I'm saying science should be classified as religion, but thinking rigorously about its claims ought to reduce errors in judgment.
Another way of putting it is that science driven by directly-applicable results is often only capable of finding local maxima on the "truth" landscape. In other words, it's a greedy search, which in a highly non-convex function like this, is sure to give us suboptimal answers.
(I love your sig, by the way.)
Prove to me that we aren't.
Exactly. If Jay Leno said in his monologue that there was going to be a bandwidth shortage, everybody would jump online and horde as much bandwidth as they possibly could before it ran out altogether. They'd stuff it into drawers and under mattresses, and then ration it out to family members...
Okay, I'm having a hard time applying the principle, here. How could claiming a bandwidth shortage produce one?
Well, if astrophysicists are to be believed, only 4% of all communications is visible fiber, 22% is dark fiber, and the remaining 74% is a strange and exotic substance called "dark light." Personally, I think they're on crack.
Why does "serious games" == "mature themes"? Can someone explain this to me? How does violence and sex make something more mature?
I'm 30. Is it mostly teenagers that think this way?
Why is this not an option? I got sick of programming for a living, I discovered that I love teaching, and now I'm back in graduate school for a PhD. It's hard (sell your house, sell a car to pay off the other one; moreover, convince your wife that it's a good idea), but not impossible. For some it's the best choice overall.
I knew a bloke what was orange/black color-blind. Could never take him camping - he kept wandering into the fire.
Actually, it's worse than that: it's tantamount to allowing Valve employees make lewd gestures at your dog, molest your tea, and urinate on your grandmother.