Boyce Rensberger, your erstwhile editor at the Washington Post, said this a year ago in the comments section of this article:
Gladwell is the same Gladwell as when I was his editor at The Washington Post. At first, I fell for his approach and brought him over to the science pod from the Post's business staff. Then I realized that he cherry picks research findings to support just-so stories. Every time I sent him back to do more reporting on the rest of the story, he moaned and fumed.
When I read his proposal for "The Tipping Point," I found it to be warmed over epidemiology. It was based on a concept and a perception so old it was already an ancient saying about straw and a camel's back. But gussied up in Malcolm's writing style, it struck the epidemiologically naive as brilliant. Brilliant enough to win an advance of more than $1 million.
I think that you're out of touch. Sure, plenty of people TiVo their drama programs or just download them. But tens of millions of Americans schedule their Sundays around their team's football game and their weeknights around basketball, baseball, hockey, and soccer. Live sports are still a multi-billion dollar industry and will be for at least several more decades.
Indeed. I turn off all animations they waste time and resources.
Counter-intuitively, and contrary to the label "Adjust [Visual Effects] for best performance", turning off animations on Windows Vista and above will make your system slower because it disables hardware acceleration.
Read an account about it here:http://www.violinist.com/blog/laurie/20121/13039/
First of all, the violinists were able to tell the difference between old and new violins.
It was a double blind study about which violin the violinists preferred to play. And since musicians that play the same instrument have different ideas of what kind of sound they prefer, it should not be a surprise that some preferred newer models. Of course, no two violins are created equal, and some Stradivariuses sound better than others. There were some constraints to the study, however. The older violins are worth several million of dollars and they were loaned on the condition that they could not be tuned.
This story isn't bullshit, and might make for mildly interesting cocktail party chat, but it isn't really newsworthy.
As future versions of the AI improve, the end result could be an artificial intelligence that "understands" human storytelling in a way no species on Earth can match.
This probably does qualify as bullshit, and it was only was only added because the author thought the story itself isn't strong enough to stand without it. Tech writers have to fill quotas. The problem with this peroration isn't just that it's stupid and wrong—it is—the problem is that it gives people the wrong expectations for what AI can do. AI has already had significant payoffs. The Dynamic Analysis and Planning Tool (DART), an "intelligent agent" (a dirty word after the AI winter) written in Common Lisp and used by the U.S military was introduced in 1991 and by 1995 had saved enough money to pay for all of the money DARPA has spent on AI in the previous thirty years.
Thanks, but I know what SHA-2 is. I also know that there was so much concern that SHA-2 would be broken that SHA-3 was created. My joke was that the NSA might have broken SHA-2 (they haven't) and that's why they were encouraging us to use it.
Recently, cryptanalysts have found collisions on the MD4, MD5, and SHA– 0 algorithms; moreover, a method for finding SHA–1 collisions with less than the expected amount of work has been published, although at this time SHA– 1 collisions have not yet been demonstrated. Although there is no specific reason to believe that a practical attack on any of the SHA–2 family of hash functions is imminent, a successful collision attack on an algorithm in the SHA–2 family could have catastrophic effects for digital signatures. NIST has decided that it is prudent to develop a new hash algorithm to augment and revise FIPS 180–2. The new hash algorithm will be referred to as ‘‘SHA–3’’
This was published in 2007. My joke was about the general uneasiness in the community about SHA-2, even if it hasn't been broken yet. Unfortunately, it seems that the members of \. who responded to me were too thick to understand this. You could have just pointed out that SHA-2 hasn't been broken yet. Instead you evinced your lack of ability to make clever insults.
...you dolt...You're clearly an ignorant fuck.
If you use the word "dolt" in conversation in a non-facetious manner it means that you're either a horribly self-conscious member of the middle class who is afraid of appearing "unprofessional", or a dummkopf who hasn't learned that using "dolt" is a shibboleth of immaturity. If you're going to call someone a motherfucker, as any other confident fellow with an iota of social intelligence would, please do it at the outset. Your prose will have a more even tone and you won't be downmodded for flaimbaiting.
For password storage and protection, the general best practice is to use an algorithm designed for password protection, the top options being bcrypt, scrypt, PBKDF2, or SHA-2.
Of course, they can do whatever they want. It's not like anybody's going to read their book.
The OED is widely considered to the finest and most authoritative dictionary of the English language. Every serious English language scholar has access to and consults the OED.
That's not the OED definition. This is the OED definition:
1. a. A book which explains or translates, usually in alphabetical order, the words of a language or languages (or of a particular category of vocabulary)...
"Particular category of vocabulary" is understood to include phrases.
This gem was written about Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science":
Why you are reading this review
I can only imagine how fortunate you must feel to be reading my review. This review is the product of my lifetime of experience in meeting important people and thinking deep thoughts. This is a new kind of review, and will no doubt influence the way you think about the world around you and the way you think of yourself.
Bigger than infinity
Although my review deserves thousands of pages to articulate, I am limiting many of my deeper thoughts to only single characters. I encourage readers of my review to dedicate the many years required to fully absorb the significance of what I am writing here. Fortunately, we live in exactly the time when my review can be widely disseminated by "internet" technology and stored on "digital media", allowing current and future scholars to delve more deeply into my original and insightful use of commas, numbers, and letters.
My place in history
My review allows, for the first time, a complete and total understanding not only of this but *every single* book ever written. I call this "the principle of book equivalence." Future generations will decide the relative merits of this review compared with, for example, the works of Shakespeare. This effort will open new realms of scholarship.
I am the author of all things
It is staggering to contemplate that all the great works of literature can be derived from the letters I use in writing this review. I am pleased to have shared them with you, and hereby grant you the liberty to use up to twenty (20) of them consecutively without attribution. Any use of additional characters in print must acknowledge this review as source material since it contains, implicitly or explicitly, all future written documents.
The term "weapon of mass destruction" has a legal definition, which you can find here. The definition of a "destructive device" is here, which I'll quote parts of.
Relevant part of 18 USC 2332a:
(2) the term “weapon of mass destruction” means— (A) any destructive device as defined in section 921 of this title; (B) any weapon that is designed or intended to cause death or serious bodily injury through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals, or their precursors; (C) any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector (as those terms are defined in section 178 of this title); or (D) any weapon that is designed to release radiation or radioactivity at a level dangerous to human life; and (3) the term “property” includes all real and personal property.
Relevant part of 18 USC 921
(4) The term “destructive device” means— (A) any explosive, incendiary, or poison gas— (i) bomb, (ii) grenade, (iii) rocket having a propellant charge of more than four ounces, (iv) missile having an explosive or incendiary charge of more than one-quarter ounce, (v) mine, or (vi) device similar to any of the devices described in the preceding clauses; (B) any type of weapon (other than a shotgun or a shotgun shell which the Attorney General finds is generally recognized as particularly suitable for sporting purposes) by whatever name known which will, or which may be readily converted to, expel a projectile by the action of an explosive or other propellant, and which has any barrel with a bore of more than one-half inch in diameter; and (C) any combination of parts either designed or intended for use in converting any device into any destructive device described in subparagraph (A) or (B) and from which a destructive device may be readily assembled. The term “destructive device” shall not include any device which is neither designed nor redesigned for use as a weapon; any device, although originally designed for use as a weapon, which is redesigned for use as a signaling, pyrotechnic, line throwing, safety, or similar device; surplus ordnance sold, loaned, or given by the Secretary of the Army pursuant to the provisions of section 4684 (2), 4685, or 4686 of title 10; or any other device which the Attorney General finds is not likely to be used as a weapon, is an antique, or is a rifle which the owner intends to use solely for sporting, recreational or cultural purposes.
The reason ZTE and Huawei aren't allowed to sell to US Government is because they (the US) can't wire-tap that gear.
That doesn't make sense. If the equipment already belong to the U.S government then they don't need to wiretap it; it would just be called "logging" of their own hardware. ZTE and Huawei are banned from selling to the U.S because of the way the Chinese government spies. Chinese spying isn't limited to attempts to break into corporate networks; their attempts are usually much more subtle. The Chinese government's approach to spying, unlike the U.S or Russian approach, doesn't use highly trained agents, because they don't need to.
What usually happens is that they will ask a person that still has relatives in China who has access to secret information to find out one small, minor thing for them. In exchange, the Chinese government will take care of your relatives back in China. If you don't comply, then the government might make things more difficult for your relatives. If the person is caught, then the espionage penalty will not be harsh because the information stolen is insignificant, and they won't reveal anything about the larger spying effort because they truthfully don't know. Then the stolen information is slowly pieced together to reveal something more significant.
Chinese companies that have branches in foreign countries that conduct legitimate business but are also used to fund and abet this kind of spying with the profits that they make. Its sort of like Los Pollos Hermanos from Breaking Bad, except that the company has an allegiance to a Latin American country and sells state secrets, not methamphetamine.
Actually, this is a good example of how wearing Google Glass can protect you from the police. If you have a video recording of the incident, it is much less like that the police BS will work in court. Unless they suppress it, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
Boyce Rensberger, your erstwhile editor at the Washington Post, said this a year ago in the comments section of this article:
Gladwell is the same Gladwell as when I was his editor at The Washington Post. At first, I fell for his approach and brought him over to the science pod from the Post's business staff. Then I realized that he cherry picks research findings to support just-so stories. Every time I sent him back to do more reporting on the rest of the story, he moaned and fumed.
When I read his proposal for "The Tipping Point," I found it to be warmed over epidemiology. It was based on a concept and a perception so old it was already an ancient saying about straw and a camel's back. But gussied up in Malcolm's writing style, it struck the epidemiologically naive as brilliant. Brilliant enough to win an advance of more than $1 million.
What's your response?
I think that you're out of touch. Sure, plenty of people TiVo their drama programs or just download them. But tens of millions of Americans schedule their Sundays around their team's football game and their weeknights around basketball, baseball, hockey, and soccer. Live sports are still a multi-billion dollar industry and will be for at least several more decades.
Indeed. I turn off all animations they waste time and resources.
Counter-intuitively, and contrary to the label "Adjust [Visual Effects] for best performance", turning off animations on Windows Vista and above will make your system slower because it disables hardware acceleration.
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnew...
Practical Common Lisp by Peter Seibel is available online for free.
Strunk & White were "grammatical incompetents," and The Elements of Style is considered by linguists to be a pretty awful book.
Oops. The study was blinded, not double blinded.
Read an account about it here:http://www.violinist.com/blog/laurie/20121/13039/
First of all, the violinists were able to tell the difference between old and new violins.
It was a double blind study about which violin the violinists preferred to play. And since musicians that play the same instrument have different ideas of what kind of sound they prefer, it should not be a surprise that some preferred newer models. Of course, no two violins are created equal, and some Stradivariuses sound better than others. There were some constraints to the study, however. The older violins are worth several million of dollars and they were loaned on the condition that they could not be tuned.
This story isn't bullshit, and might make for mildly interesting cocktail party chat, but it isn't really newsworthy.
As future versions of the AI improve, the end result could be an artificial intelligence that "understands" human storytelling in a way no species on Earth can match.
This probably does qualify as bullshit, and it was only was only added because the author thought the story itself isn't strong enough to stand without it. Tech writers have to fill quotas. The problem with this peroration isn't just that it's stupid and wrong—it is—the problem is that it gives people the wrong expectations for what AI can do. AI has already had significant payoffs. The Dynamic Analysis and Planning Tool (DART), an "intelligent agent" (a dirty word after the AI winter) written in Common Lisp and used by the U.S military was introduced in 1991 and by 1995 had saved enough money to pay for all of the money DARPA has spent on AI in the previous thirty years.
Thanks, but I know what SHA-2 is. I also know that there was so much concern that SHA-2 would be broken that SHA-3 was created. My joke was that the NSA might have broken SHA-2 (they haven't) and that's why they were encouraging us to use it.
Recently, cryptanalysts have found collisions on the MD4, MD5, and SHA– 0 algorithms; moreover, a method for finding SHA–1 collisions with less than the expected amount of work has been published, although at this time SHA– 1 collisions have not yet been demonstrated. Although there is no specific reason to believe that a practical attack on any of the SHA–2 family of hash functions is imminent, a successful collision attack on an algorithm in the SHA–2 family could have catastrophic effects for digital signatures. NIST has decided that it is prudent to develop a new hash algorithm to augment and revise FIPS 180–2. The new hash algorithm will be referred to as ‘‘SHA–3’’
This was published in 2007. My joke was about the general uneasiness in the community about SHA-2, even if it hasn't been broken yet. Unfortunately, it seems that the members of \. who responded to me were too thick to understand this. You could have just pointed out that SHA-2 hasn't been broken yet. Instead you evinced your lack of ability to make clever insults.
...you dolt...You're clearly an ignorant fuck.
If you use the word "dolt" in conversation in a non-facetious manner it means that you're either a horribly self-conscious member of the middle class who is afraid of appearing "unprofessional", or a dummkopf who hasn't learned that using "dolt" is a shibboleth of immaturity. If you're going to call someone a motherfucker, as any other confident fellow with an iota of social intelligence would, please do it at the outset. Your prose will have a more even tone and you won't be downmodded for flaimbaiting.
For password storage and protection, the general best practice is to use an algorithm designed for password protection, the top options being bcrypt, scrypt, PBKDF2, or SHA-2.
SHA-2? Was that sentence edited by an NSA intern?
Some mathematicians, however, argue that maths aptitude is not born so much as made.
What about Srinivasa Ramanujan?
Story title should be:
We don't think that Apple is the most innovative innovater in the innovative history of innovating innovaters (which is in itself an innovation).
and the summary should be:
Boy, have we made sure to make this story fanboy/troll bait!
They probably noticed that scientists can do things like prove that Russian elections are rigged.
Of course, they can do whatever they want. It's not like anybody's going to read their book.
The OED is widely considered to the finest and most authoritative dictionary of the English language. Every serious English language scholar has access to and consults the OED.
http://www.langner.com/en/2013/09/04/what-a-cyber-security-framework-for-industrial-control-systems-needs-to-look-like/
That's not the OED definition. This is the OED definition:
1. a. A book which explains or translates, usually in alphabetical order, the words of a language or languages (or of a particular category of vocabulary) ...
"Particular category of vocabulary" is understood to include phrases.
A phrase doesn't deserve its own entry
So you would exclude "fait accompli" and "juste milieu" from the dictionary?
You go from on the order of 170,000 words to practically damn uncountable
Wikipedia says that the OED has about 750,000 entries.
They should add
Twerk'); DROP TABLE Verbs; --
Read Brett Victor's A Brief Rant on the Future of Interactive Design if you want to understand why haptic feedback designs are superior.
This gem was written about Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science":
Why you are reading this review
I can only imagine how fortunate you must feel to be reading my review. This review is the product of my lifetime of experience in meeting important people and thinking deep thoughts. This is a new kind of review, and will no doubt influence the way you
think about the world around you and the way you think of yourself.
Bigger than infinity
Although my review deserves thousands of pages to articulate, I am limiting many of my deeper thoughts to only single characters. I encourage readers of my review to dedicate the many years required to fully absorb the significance of what I am writing here. Fortunately, we live in exactly the time when my review can be widely disseminated by "internet" technology and stored on "digital media", allowing current and future scholars to delve more deeply into my original and insightful use of commas, numbers, and letters.
My place in history
My review allows, for the first time, a complete and total understanding not only of this but *every single*
book ever written. I call this "the principle of book equivalence." Future generations will decide the relative merits of this review compared with, for example, the works of Shakespeare. This effort will open new realms of scholarship.
I am the author of all things
It is staggering to contemplate that all the great works of literature can be derived from the letters I use in writing this review. I am pleased to have shared them with you, and hereby grant you the liberty to use up to twenty (20) of them consecutively without attribution. Any use of additional characters in print must acknowledge this review as source material since it contains, implicitly or explicitly, all future written documents.
This story was in the Washington Post back in April.
The term "weapon of mass destruction" has a legal definition, which you can find here. The definition of a "destructive device" is here, which I'll quote parts of.
Relevant part of 18 USC 2332a:
(2) the term “weapon of mass destruction” means—
(A) any destructive device as defined in section 921 of this title;
(B) any weapon that is designed or intended to cause death or serious bodily injury through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals, or their precursors;
(C) any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector (as those terms are defined in section 178 of this title); or
(D) any weapon that is designed to release radiation or radioactivity at a level dangerous to human life; and
(3) the term “property” includes all real and personal property.
Relevant part of 18 USC 921
(4) The term “destructive device” means—
(A) any explosive, incendiary, or poison gas—
(i) bomb,
(ii) grenade,
(iii) rocket having a propellant charge of more than four ounces,
(iv) missile having an explosive or incendiary charge of more than one-quarter ounce,
(v) mine, or
(vi) device similar to any of the devices described in the preceding clauses;
(B) any type of weapon (other than a shotgun or a shotgun shell which the Attorney General finds is generally recognized as particularly suitable for sporting purposes) by whatever name known which will, or which may be readily converted to, expel a projectile by the action of an explosive or other propellant, and which has any barrel with a bore of more than one-half inch in diameter; and
(C) any combination of parts either designed or intended for use in converting any device into any destructive device described in subparagraph (A) or (B) and from which a destructive device may be readily assembled.
The term “destructive device” shall not include any device which is neither designed nor redesigned for use as a weapon; any device, although originally designed for use as a weapon, which is redesigned for use as a signaling, pyrotechnic, line throwing, safety, or similar device; surplus ordnance sold, loaned, or given by the Secretary of the Army pursuant to the provisions of section 4684 (2), 4685, or 4686 of title 10; or any other device which the Attorney General finds is not likely to be used as a weapon, is an antique, or is a rifle which the owner intends to use solely for sporting, recreational or cultural purposes.
The reason ZTE and Huawei aren't allowed to sell to US Government is because they (the US) can't wire-tap that gear.
That doesn't make sense. If the equipment already belong to the U.S government then they don't need to wiretap it; it would just be called "logging" of their own hardware. ZTE and Huawei are banned from selling to the U.S because of the way the Chinese government spies. Chinese spying isn't limited to attempts to break into corporate networks; their attempts are usually much more subtle. The Chinese government's approach to spying, unlike the U.S or Russian approach, doesn't use highly trained agents, because they don't need to.
What usually happens is that they will ask a person that still has relatives in China who has access to secret information to find out one small, minor thing for them. In exchange, the Chinese government will take care of your relatives back in China. If you don't comply, then the government might make things more difficult for your relatives. If the person is caught, then the espionage penalty will not be harsh because the information stolen is insignificant, and they won't reveal anything about the larger spying effort because they truthfully don't know. Then the stolen information is slowly pieced together to reveal something more significant.
Chinese companies that have branches in foreign countries that conduct legitimate business but are also used to fund and abet this kind of spying with the profits that they make. Its sort of like Los Pollos Hermanos from Breaking Bad, except that the company has an allegiance to a Latin American country and sells state secrets, not methamphetamine.
Actually, this is a good example of how wearing Google Glass can protect you from the police. If you have a video recording of the incident, it is much less like that the police BS will work in court. Unless they suppress it, of course.
> With the machines well and truly taking over, will we be using them or will they be controlling us?
The machines run Unix or Unix descendents. They'll crash, dump core and reboot before they can take over the world.