I remember when I first started posting one Usenet in the very early 1990s (1990-91 or so), that there were many flamewars that ended with everything from legal threats to, at least in one case, a poster threatening to show up at another poster's house and beat him senseless
Yes, but in the good old days basically everyone was in via an university and if things really got out of hand, one would contact the respective postmaster@foo.bar, who would walk over and have a stern talk with the offender. A homogeneous user group, peer pressure, and the threat of cancled usenet access (without x other IP providers waiting for you) work wonders. Those good old days are gone.
Even people who try to ram the gates of a federal military facility still deserve their right to a fair trial.
Nope. There are huge signs posted along the fence of military compounds which read "Keep out! Weapon use!" (or similar, I only know the German version). If you enter nevertheless, the patrols on the inside will assume that you are part of an enemy force trying to sabotage the equipment as part of a starting military action. And if you act stupidly, especially in a way the patrol feels threatened, you might get shot.
Your entrance to such a prohibited area alone makes you an immediate and obvious danger as there is no other reason to climb the fence/break the gate.
So, assuming your post you are referencing is correct (IANAP), what you are saying is "Things (including 'space') can move faster than c as long as the people (aliens, computers, rocks,...) relative to which it moves faster than c never know about it." (The laser light in your example never reaching us.)
Gives some great setting for SciFi: "People of Earth, we come in peace. When we left Alpha Centauri just 2 months ago....." *instant disappearance*;-)
Why leave it to the papers? Why leave it to the (cowardly according to American opinion) French?
EVERYONE should put one of Charlie Hebdo's caricature onto one's homepage.
This one seems to be fitting especially if you are a Jew (Texts reads in my miserable translation "You shall not critizise us").
Another nice one reads again miserably translated "Darling, I 'm just downstairs for 5 Minutes to search for that Journal" (not sure that actually is from Charlie Hebdo but it came up on google).
If you want others, especially if you are a Muslim and consider the above not annoying enough, there are more examples although lacking translation.
The article tells us that "...hackers managed to access production networks..." The question is, why was this allowed?
When I was in university we wrote an optimizer in "Operations Research" for a still-mill as a practise which determined optimum cutting lengths of steel 'bars' based on customer orders.
Orders probably arrive in the office network. I can well understand people don't want to walk with a USB stick (if that would survive the environment at all) from their office to the plant to feed instructions into the industrial control units. So probably some network connection was introduced and thought to be sufficiently secured. And then the Windows on the "safe" side was never updated because it couldn't connect to the internet anyway. Wind forward 10 years and you have a Windows full of completely unimaginable holes (which are easy to exploit because Windows is the same everywhere) which is indirectly accessible from the internet.
Translation to English to the best of my abilities:
3.3 Incidents in private enterprises In contrast to governmental offices there is no duty up to now for private companies to report grave security incidents to the BSI. [.... ] 3.3.1 APT attacks on plants in Germany Issue Targeted attack on a steal plant in Germany Method Using spear-phishing and advaced social engineering the attackers gained initial access to the office network of the plant. From there they gradually penetrated into the production networks. Damage Failures of individual control units or complete facilities occured increasingly. The failures prevented the controlled shut down of one blast furnance and brought it into an undefined state. As a result the facility sustained heavy damage. Targets Operators of plants Technical capabilites The attackers showed very advanced technical capabilities. Several different internal systems up to industrial components were compromised. The know-how of the attackers did not only cover IT-security very thoroughly but also included detailed technical knowledge on the running industrial control units and production processes.
This has nothing to do with monkey-brain logic but with you either not reading or not understanding related wikipedia articles. E.g. this article clearly says "A summation method can be seen as a function from a set of sequences of partial sums to values."
Thus your 1+2+3+4+....'='-1/12 'non-monkey-brain science' actually says that if you apply a certain function (other than standard summation) to map a divergent series to a number that number will be -1/12. Or, to say it in another way, a nice pasttime for mathematcians wanting to classify (not solve) series.
But unless you also want to claim that -1/12=infinity that number is definitely not "the sum of all positive integer".
Yes, but with collecting and processing data from the internet the attacker opens himself for attacks. Or how bug-free is the analysis software. And once you go illegal it becomes difficult to sue counter-attackers. "Intrusion into government computers" might look strange on a warrant if the perpetrator claims he just shut down a C&C server.
The arbitrary requirements you linked are to be allowed to use buslanes and taxi parking spaces in Amsterdam not to be a taxi driver in the Netherlands (it explicitely says that taxi drivers from outside Amsterdam are still allowed to drive into and out of Amsterdam without the "Taxxxivergunning"). So how about some information on the real requirements? Another page on the same site you linked mentions e.g. the "regels van de Wet Personenvervoer 2000" but my Dutch is not the best.
At least in Germany the "proper credentials" do include e.g. a special driver license which includes a medical analysis, a police clearance, a check of the driving penalty points registry, check of local knowledge,... .
> it would be interesting to learn more about the people involved and their backgrounds
You mean the authors? Russian KGB.
Note the section about Russian "shock and awe". They couldn't abstain from hurling only lightly veiled threats even when faking a letter from US intelligence. It happens if you select people based on common school education instead of competency.
Therefore I think it may be correct that the police department that established the dangerous policy is held responsible. I don't see any serious crime commited by this particular officer, based on the facts available.
May I suggest a bit more than the police department's procedures be changed? Like U.S. laws? German traffic law (StVO) says about special rules (my translation)
35 Special rights (1) Excempt from these regulations are the following: Army, Federal Police, Emergancy Services,.... , State Police,...., as far as urgently necessary to fulfill their tasks. ..... (8) These special rights may only be used if public safety and order are sufficiently respected.
As the completly innocent dead byciclist shows the officer did not sufficiently respect public safety, so according to German law he would not get off. Conclusion: Change your laws!
If you really are Chinese, I think you are deluding yourself. Why? Simply because what you write and how you write it sounds like propaganda. Some things might be true, but you make it sound the Chinese government is about to fall in a few months. I would guess even in a worst case scenario (for them) they will hold out for years to come given the fact they have a garnered a lot of public goodwill (within China) with their improvement of the economics.
Don't fall for the propaganda of the Chinese government but neither fall for the propaganda of some exile groups. Those too have proven wrong before.
The hands-on detection on the steering wheel is there for a reason. The reason is that drivers might not read the manual telling them about all the dangers of letting the car drive without human supervision. Reading the manual is not something the car manufacturer can force people to do.
But by manipulating the hands-on detection the driver shows that he had understood the car's restrictions but willingly circumvented it. If there is an accident, it will be thus the driver who will be charged with negligent homicide, not the car manufacturer.
Now let's just hope that no aliens listening in to our broadcasting and no far future humans actually believe this and try to recreate the "groundbreaking compression algorithm" the whiz humans of the digital age came up with.
> if such an algorithm existed, you could run it repeatedly on a data source until you were down to a single bit.
Ah, but you are not describing universal lossless compression but universal lossless compression with a guaranteed compression ratio of better than 1:1. That indeed isn't possible but I can't see it claimed in TFA.
Munich decided to move completely to Linux (so not only from MS Office on MS Windows to LibreOffice on MS Windows) 10 years ago and managed to complete the move last year. One of the main complaints of users seems to be lack of compatibility when exchanging documents with the MS world. Now if more cities move to Open/LibreOffice, companies trading with them might have to produce more compatible documents and MS might finally loose its compatibility "strangle" on its user.
Leaving aside all the froth-mouthed name-calling there is an important detail the author does not write in
> This guy says in an interview:
Namely that the interview was to Al-Jazeera, the premier Muslim news channel. Normally politicians (and the NASA chief definitely counts as that) try to tell something nice to foreigners they talk to. You know, I can't remember the huge outcry of "Lies!", "Pampering Foreigners!", "Forgets his U.S. values and heritage!" when Kennedy said "Ich bin ein Berliner.".
To come back to "News for Nerds" it should also be noted that the statement about Muslim contributions to science, math and engineering is definitely true. There is a reason the numbers we are using are called "Arabic Numbers".
The final text will be made available a debated when, and if, the countries involved vote on it.
Care to explain how much "debating" will go on on the - as you point out - final text? After all, the standard argument will be that "this has already been negatioated and cannot be changed".
And one of the main difference of these trade agreements nowadays to other treaties is that they try to change a huge set of existing laws along the way. Without discussion. And add extra-judical avenues for corporations to sue for compensation against existing laws, which basically annuls the whole legislative and judicative system.
Yes, if you look at the first video on http://www.ttip2014.eu/blog-de... around 0:20 you will see in the background a protestor holding out his hand to get it tight. Looks to me extremely civilized from both side. I don't see any overreaction. And if - possibly - the protest was unauthorized, participants might be offered a trip to the next police station for IDing. Civil disobidience has its price.
And now before the US side claims that there is no freedom in Europe if protests need to be authorized: If authorization is denied, you can sue against it on a quick track. That's the reason why even the extreme right, which most people would like to deny protesting rights, can do it again and again.
So TTIP might be bad and all but exagerating things just to prolong the attention (Protest was already last Thursday) is not the way to go.
Even though I didn't really understood the math, two important points stick out from their description:
a) Complexity is still n^O(log(n)). This is better than O(e^n) but still worse than O(n^c) for any fixed c.
b) It is a heuristic and I couldn't find in their paper a statement how well this heuristics work, i.e. in how many cases it will find its (optimal/only) result and in how many not or only in a much more time.
As far as I understood they empirically showed their approach to work on one example. A study showing the general feasibility of the heuristics would be more convincing (yeah, that's the engineer speaking not the mathematician).
It should also be noted that the authors themselves write in their conclusion: "Compared to existing approaches, and in particular to the line of recent works [15,10], the practical relevance of our algorithm is not clear, and will be explored by further work."
So, before running to conclusions maybe we should wait for the "further work".
Slashdot Mirror
I remember when I first started posting one Usenet in the very early 1990s (1990-91 or so), that there were many flamewars that ended with everything from legal threats to, at least in one case, a poster threatening to show up at another poster's house and beat him senseless
Yes, but in the good old days basically everyone was in via an university and if things really got out of hand, one would contact the respective postmaster@foo.bar, who would walk over and have a stern talk with the offender. A homogeneous user group, peer pressure, and the threat of cancled usenet access (without x other IP providers waiting for you) work wonders.
Those good old days are gone.
Even people who try to ram the gates of a federal military facility still deserve their right to a fair trial.
Nope. There are huge signs posted along the fence of military compounds which read "Keep out! Weapon use!" (or similar, I only know the German version). If you enter nevertheless, the patrols on the inside will assume that you are part of an enemy force trying to sabotage the equipment as part of a starting military action. And if you act stupidly, especially in a way the patrol feels threatened, you might get shot.
Your entrance to such a prohibited area alone makes you an immediate and obvious danger as there is no other reason to climb the fence/break the gate.
So, assuming your post you are referencing is correct (IANAP), what you are saying is "Things (including 'space') can move faster than c as long as the people (aliens, computers, rocks, ...) relative to which it moves faster than c never know about it." (The laser light in your example never reaching us.)
Gives some great setting for SciFi: "People of Earth, we come in peace. When we left Alpha Centauri just 2 months ago ....." *instant disappearance* ;-)
The Moebius Strip was at most non-existant in nature until the first child had clumsy fingers when tinkering together a paper bracelet.
Why leave it to the papers? Why leave it to the (cowardly according to American opinion) French?
EVERYONE should put one of Charlie Hebdo's caricature onto one's homepage.
This one seems to be fitting especially if you are a Jew (Texts reads in my miserable translation "You shall not critizise us").
Another nice one reads again miserably translated "Darling, I 'm just downstairs for 5 Minutes to search for that Journal" (not sure that actually is from Charlie Hebdo but it came up on google).
If you want others, especially if you are a Muslim and consider the above not annoying enough, there are more examples although lacking translation.
Googling for "steel furnance shutdown" finds more reports on unexpected shutdowns this year.
Two in Ashland, Ky, and one or two somewhere in Indiana and one in Bhopal, India. Note that they all seem to have occured in June/July.
Maybe some competitor trying to up his margin by reducing supply?
The article tells us that "...hackers managed to access production networks..." The question is, why was this allowed?
When I was in university we wrote an optimizer in "Operations Research" for a still-mill as a practise which determined optimum cutting lengths of steel 'bars' based on customer orders.
Orders probably arrive in the office network. I can well understand people don't want to walk with a USB stick (if that would survive the environment at all) from their office to the plant to feed instructions into the industrial control units. So probably some network connection was introduced and thought to be sufficiently secured. And then the Windows on the "safe" side was never updated because it couldn't connect to the internet anyway. Wind forward 10 years and you have a Windows full of completely unimaginable holes (which are easy to exploit because Windows is the same everywhere) which is indirectly accessible from the internet.
Translation to English to the best of my abilities:
3.3 Incidents in private enterprises
In contrast to governmental offices there is no duty up to now for private companies to report grave security incidents to the BSI.
[.... ]
3.3.1 APT attacks on plants in Germany
Issue
Targeted attack on a steal plant in Germany
Method
Using spear-phishing and advaced social engineering the attackers gained initial access to the office network of the plant. From there they gradually penetrated into the production networks.
Damage
Failures of individual control units or complete facilities occured increasingly. The failures prevented the controlled shut down of one blast furnance and brought it into an undefined state. As a result the facility sustained heavy damage.
Targets
Operators of plants
Technical capabilites
The attackers showed very advanced technical capabilities. Several different internal systems up to industrial components were compromised. The know-how of the attackers did not only cover IT-security very thoroughly but also included detailed technical knowledge on the running industrial control units and production processes.
Actual science can some time feel "weird" and defy logic, because it defies the monkey-brain logic. - e.g.: the sum of all positive integer is a negative fraction)
You do thoroughly prove that by the numbers.
This has nothing to do with monkey-brain logic but with you either not reading or not understanding related wikipedia articles. E.g. this article clearly says "A summation method can be seen as a function from a set of sequences of partial sums to values."
Thus your 1+2+3+4+....'='-1/12 'non-monkey-brain science' actually says that if you apply a certain function (other than standard summation) to map a divergent series to a number that number will be -1/12. Or, to say it in another way, a nice pasttime for mathematcians wanting to classify (not solve) series.
But unless you also want to claim that -1/12=infinity that number is definitely not "the sum of all positive integer".
Any sufficiently advanced communication technology is indistinguishable from noise.
Especially if it is encrypted to prevent the GSA (Galactic Security Agency) of reading everyone'e private thoughts.
Yes, but with collecting and processing data from the internet the attacker opens himself for attacks. Or how bug-free is the analysis software.
And once you go illegal it becomes difficult to sue counter-attackers. "Intrusion into government computers" might look strange on a warrant if the perpetrator claims he just shut down a C&C server.
The arbitrary requirements you linked are to be allowed to use buslanes and taxi parking spaces in Amsterdam not to be a taxi driver in the Netherlands (it explicitely says that taxi drivers from outside Amsterdam are still allowed to drive into and out of Amsterdam without the "Taxxxivergunning"). So how about some information on the real requirements? Another page on the same site you linked mentions e.g. the "regels van de Wet Personenvervoer 2000" but my Dutch is not the best.
At least in Germany the "proper credentials" do include e.g. a special driver license which includes a medical analysis, a police clearance, a check of the driving penalty points registry, check of local knowledge, ... .
> it would be interesting to learn more about the people involved and their backgrounds
You mean the authors? Russian KGB.
Note the section about Russian "shock and awe". They couldn't abstain from hurling only lightly veiled threats even when faking a letter from US intelligence. It happens if you select people based on common school education instead of competency.
Therefore I think it may be correct that the police department that established the dangerous policy is held responsible. I don't see any serious crime commited by this particular officer, based on the facts available.
May I suggest a bit more than the police department's procedures be changed? Like U.S. laws?
German traffic law (StVO) says about special rules (my translation)
35 Special rights .... , State Police, ...., as far as urgently necessary to fulfill their tasks.
.....
(1) Excempt from these regulations are the following: Army, Federal Police, Emergancy Services,
(8) These special rights may only be used if public safety and order are sufficiently respected.
As the completly innocent dead byciclist shows the officer did not sufficiently respect public safety, so according to German law he would not get off.
Conclusion: Change your laws!
If you really are Chinese, I think you are deluding yourself. Why? Simply because what you write and how you write it sounds like propaganda. Some things might be true, but you make it sound the Chinese government is about to fall in a few months. I would guess even in a worst case scenario (for them) they will hold out for years to come given the fact they have a garnered a lot of public goodwill (within China) with their improvement of the economics.
Don't fall for the propaganda of the Chinese government but neither fall for the propaganda of some exile groups. Those too have proven wrong before.
Or to say it in a different way:
The hands-on detection on the steering wheel is there for a reason. The reason is that drivers might not read the manual telling them about all the dangers of letting the car drive without human supervision. Reading the manual is not something the car manufacturer can force people to do.
But by manipulating the hands-on detection the driver shows that he had understood the car's restrictions but willingly circumvented it. If there is an accident, it will be thus the driver who will be charged with negligent homicide, not the car manufacturer.
Now let's just hope that no aliens listening in to our broadcasting and no far future humans actually believe this and try to recreate the "groundbreaking compression algorithm" the whiz humans of the digital age came up with.
> if such an algorithm existed, you could run it repeatedly on a data source until you were down to a single bit.
Ah, but you are not describing universal lossless compression but universal lossless compression with a guaranteed compression ratio of better than 1:1.
That indeed isn't possible but I can't see it claimed in TFA.
Munich decided to move completely to Linux (so not only from MS Office on MS Windows to LibreOffice on MS Windows) 10 years ago and managed to complete the move last year. One of the main complaints of users seems to be lack of compatibility when exchanging documents with the MS world.
Now if more cities move to Open/LibreOffice, companies trading with them might have to produce more compatible documents and MS might finally loose its compatibility "strangle" on its user.
Leaving aside all the froth-mouthed name-calling there is an important detail the author does not write in
> This guy says in an interview:
Namely that the interview was to Al-Jazeera, the premier Muslim news channel.
Normally politicians (and the NASA chief definitely counts as that) try to tell something nice to foreigners they talk to.
You know, I can't remember the huge outcry of "Lies!", "Pampering Foreigners!", "Forgets his U.S. values and heritage!" when Kennedy said "Ich bin ein Berliner.".
To come back to "News for Nerds" it should also be noted that the statement about Muslim contributions to science, math and engineering is definitely true. There is a reason the numbers we are using are called "Arabic Numbers".
The final text will be made available a debated when, and if, the countries involved vote on it.
Care to explain how much "debating" will go on on the - as you point out - final text? After all, the standard argument will be that "this has already been negatioated and cannot be changed".
And one of the main difference of these trade agreements nowadays to other treaties is that they try to change a huge set of existing laws along the way. Without discussion. And add extra-judical avenues for corporations to sue for compensation against existing laws, which basically annuls the whole legislative and judicative system.
Actually it is Dutch and means Police. Belgium is half french-speaking half dutch-speaking.
Yes, if you look at the first video on http://www.ttip2014.eu/blog-de... around 0:20 you will see in the background a protestor holding out his hand to get it tight. Looks to me extremely civilized from both side. I don't see any overreaction. And if - possibly - the protest was unauthorized, participants might be offered a trip to the next police station for IDing. Civil disobidience has its price.
And now before the US side claims that there is no freedom in Europe if protests need to be authorized: If authorization is denied, you can sue against it on a quick track. That's the reason why even the extreme right, which most people would like to deny protesting rights, can do it again and again.
So TTIP might be bad and all but exagerating things just to prolong the attention (Protest was already last Thursday) is not the way to go.
Even though I didn't really understood the math, two important points stick out from their description:
As far as I understood they empirically showed their approach to work on one example. A study showing the general feasibility of the heuristics would be more convincing (yeah, that's the engineer speaking not the mathematician).
It should also be noted that the authors themselves write in their conclusion:
"Compared to existing approaches, and in particular to the line of recent works [15,10], the practical relevance of our algorithm is not clear, and will be explored by further work."
So, before running to conclusions maybe we should wait for the "further work".
Please note that the algortihm is not O(n^log(n)) but n^O(log(n)). This puts the constant factor in the exponent which is a bit worse.