I'm reading a lot of people's statements about P(killed on ride) vs P(killed in car on way home). This isn't the only story: long-term effects are also a big deal. In addition, even that probability is so corrupted by noise (you can get great numbers for driving, but not so great numbers for flying, because the rates of injury/death for flying is so low) that even if such signs were posted, they would be completely meaningless. For example, if no one had ever died or been injured on coaster A, what would you post? "You have a 0% probability of being injured on this ride?" That's a liability lawsuit waiting to happen.
So what if we said "don't regulate dining establishments; if you don't want to get Hepatitis, then you can make your own evaluation of the place's cleanliness. On it's face, this seems outrageous; however, most of us have the skills to decide if a food preparation place is hygenically adequate. How many of us (or the general populace) has the skills to decide if a roller-coaster ride is safe, esp long-term? (I'm paranoid about things like this, to the extent that I don't do LASIK because there are no 50-year studies).
Summation: informed consent is a good thing; some level of protecting idiots from themselves is also important, especially since most of us don't have domain knowledge in roller-coaster design. Safety vs car is apples-to-oranges, hence we should require, for example, 99th percentile Gs/time and jerk/time graphs, just like we have "SAR" for cell phones, for which no one actually knows safety parameters... By this logic, however, we should grade food establishments, make them post their grades, but never shut someone down for an F...
Re:maybe the problem is the business model?
on
Hacking Web Services
·
· Score: 2
"Theft" or "copyright infringment," my argument still stands. The business model is sound, the attack is a violation of law.
Your definition if "theft" is lacking, at least under TX law. In particular, Penal Code 31.04 and 31.05 represent cases where the "theft" is not of chattels, but of nontangibles.
Re:maybe the problem is the business model?
on
Hacking Web Services
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I went to this talk (and this conference). He basically said that a lot of attacks are just sequences of actions, any of which individually are not a problem, but when combined are a problem. I'd call that a "security" issue. The result is that he can't offer certain services. There's a social good issue there, and an interstate commerce issue, so Congress could easily claim jurisdiction. Not that I'm suggesting that that's the right solution...
As for "theft," whether you like it or not, taking my data and selling it without permission is theft. Yes, spyware is theft; reposting NYT articles on/. is also theft. Selling premium services is a valid business model; some people subscribe once, scrape the screen, and have their own premium service. If that isn't "theft," you've effectively said that "information has no owner," in which case you have no recourse for your ISP selling all your packets.
Look at any mass-market manufacturer (Sony, Verizon, SprintPCS, AT&T,...)'s customer service. It universally, unquestionably sucks (Dell and IBM are notable exceptions). When you're in the cell phone business, and there are only 2-3 competitors, everybody's mass market, so customer service will continue to suck.
If my time is worth $200/hr, I should be able to pay an extra $10/mo (for example) for sane, decent customer service. (e.g. that which Diner's Club provides: instant customer service phone call pickup and competant service, all for $80/yr)
Bottom line on cell phones: I'm switching to Verizon for the coverage and unlimited off-peak time, but I don't expect better customer service, due to the gov't regulated monopoly...
IANAL, but AFAIK, it's illegal in the States and on US flag carriers, by FAA regulation, so it's not a airline policy matter, it's a federal regulation.
I hate having my data sold/being spammed as much as the next guy, but I wonder if banning this won't have the same effect as banning crypto export: they'll just develop and do it outside our borders. Then even federal law has no jurisdiction to stop them. For example, large US based web service provider could set up a shell company in the Bahamas which runs its website, collects all the marketable data, and sells it...
The problem with laws on the Internet is that they're not of a larger scale than just a nation, so the only way to deal with privacy violations, spam, etc. is: 1) on a global basis or 2) a technical solution or 3) to have people not be stupid and give out sensitive information. Since (2) doesn't apply, and (1)'s not going to happen any time in the near future, (3) is the only way to go?
Doesn't matter. You can detect a receiver; that's the concept behind the VG-2 radar detector detector. It's also the reason why you can't use devices that _receieve_ signals on an aircraft.
You might not turn on the GPS until the car rolls, but that's a different story...
And also that it's a pain in the rear to read on an electronic device.
I could see doing this as a preview, but you're still going to want a dead-tree-publisher. Also, warez'ed copies of your html book may not make you a happy camper.
WinWiFi would definately slow down Linux/FreeBSD/FreeOS support in the short term, but think about the bright side. People now are using winmodems as a phone line interface; it gives us free OS users a tool we wouldn't otherwise have. We may have the same thing with WinWiFi: imagine if you could adjust the speed at which RTS/CTS/ACK/broadcast are sent, or send certain packets with a PIFS interframe spacing, or change aSlotTime... Maybe even make fundamental changes to the MAC, such as CEDAR.
This could be really great! Can you imagine Linux DoS tools based on flooding frames without participating in the MAC?
a bijection is a function, not a number. "duh." The cipher itself is a random function (and inverse) generator, not an RNG.
And numbers are not "to the base x," they are "in base x." Get an education...
If you want to get really picky, a block cipher (with a key, in counter mode) is a list of 2^p elements of Z_2^p, which technically could be viewed as 2^{2p} numbers. But that's rarely how they're used; generally, in CBC mode for example, the "random number generator" actually depends on the input (and IV).
So, a (keyed) block cipher in CBC mode is NOT a random number generator. Hence, not _all_ (keyed) ciphers are random number generators.
Not possible if the key system uses public key encyption.
Assuming you keep the public key in the program and the private key for registrations, why not replace the public key with one for which you know the private key?
I'm suprised no one has brought up the cellular/wireless argument against this: with open standards, anyone can build a viewer. As much of a train wreck as WEP is, at least it's open.
Even if Flash were open spec, though, cell phones, PDAs, and other wireless systems (blackberry, anyone?) wouldn't be able to support it, due to insufficient CPU time, battery life, RAM, screen quality,... Even PDF with reflow is more usable than Flash on a PDA.
If you had half a clue about LyX and LaTeX, you wouldn't say that.
LyX can't edit that, either; at least not without inline LaTeX. Here's the actual problem: you build your own math fonts, based on TeX's original math fonts, but everything is now R 0.01 wider (that means 0.01 design units wider, for those of you unfamiliar with the art), since it's poor-man's bold (see Knuth's TeXbook for details). Having recompiled the METAFONT and installing the associated TFM (TeX font metric) and vf (virtual font) files, you find that TeX still has no clue about the font width, but instead lays out each character a bit too narrow, which visibly throws the justification of any paragraph with math mode in it.
One way to fix this is: \def\poormansboldhack#1{\setbox0=\hbox{$\myfont #1$}\hbox to 1.01\wd0{\unhcopy0}} but it looks ugly and has a bit more "badness" then you'd like, since it forces stretches of medmathskips and bigmathskips. You still think this is easier with LyX?
Since your average secretary has Office experience, are you going to waste the time to switch them over to StarOffice, then have them using incompatible documents with the rest of the world? (The Word converter is not perfect). Even if you internally are an all-StarOffice shop, you'll still get.doc emails.
Maybe living in suburbia has dulled your awareness to the "Real World" you seem so fond of mentioning
Funny you say that to a person who did middle school in the ghetto long enough to speak Ebonics as a native language. If you can cost-justify a computer, you probably can cost-justify Office and Windows. (And since when did CS grad students make so much money that they have a dulled awareness of the value of money in the Real World?)
some people cannot afford to pay $300 for Windows and $600 for Office.
When those people aren't technical, they tend to be the type of person who wouldn't buy a computer in the first place. When they are technical, they can run Linux.
That $900 is my rent and car payment for the month.
So, where'd you get the money for the computer in the first place, if finances are really that tight? Doesn't it seem a bit fiscally irresponsible, unless you're buying it as part of a business, to spend your rent check and car payment on a computer?
I'm not saying there shouldn't be free software. I'm saying that there's a reason the software costs money, and it's not entirely because MS is evil. I'm also saying that MS pricing is reasonable in the business world, something that might not occur to a college freshman to whom $100 is big bucks, a fact that he seemed to harp on endlessly.
In the business world, sure, the cost may be trivial. But not to those of us who are either in school or laid off by companies that spend too much money for their software.
Apologies for the overgeneralization. I guess I see the Real World as the businesses who use computers to improve productivity; to them, the extra cost of productivity software like Office isn't unreasonable. If you're a student, there are great academic pricing packages (I've never taken advantage of one, though, since I pretty much exclusively run FreeBSD, and Windows licenses seem to come with every computer I buy). If you have pals at MS, you can get cheap software too. Some schools get MS software free.
If you're a techie who absolutely HAS to have a computer, you probably know enough to run Linux. More power to you. The slashdot "MS is greedy because they charge for their software" theme is pretty obnoxious.
*sigh* saying M-x ispell-buffer is like saying M-x shell, then ispell filename. It's not an intrinsic, built-in function, in the same way that, say, echo is a built-in part of tcsh. tcsh can do echo "in its head," so echo is built-in. tcsh needs a fork(); exec() to run ispell, so ispell is not built into tcsh. I don't think Word requires a fork(); exec() to get to the spellcheck mode, so it seems safe to say that spell check is "built-in" to Word.
And for those of you who think that elisp == spell checker, I'll argue then that your CPU has a spell-checker, Postscript has a spell-checker, and the steam-powered Turing machine has a spell-checker...
1. Learn how to spell. It'll get you farther in life. Besides, if you do migrate away from Microsoft, emacs doesn't have a built-in spell checker, AFAIK.
2. I don't know how you ever felt enfranchised with Microsoft; maybe you held their stock and could vote by proxy? Or maybe Microsoft has now put shackles on your feet and made you their slave...
3. I worked inside MS, so I feel obligated to say that I think the code reviews done inside my unit (ISBU = Internet Services Business Unit) were pretty darn good. It's hard to catch every bug, and people like features. If you don't like the feature creep, use Windows 95 or 3.1. Sure, you can't use brand-spanking new hardware, but often you can't with Linux anyways, plus the lack of bloat will make up your speed difference. Better yet, run Win95 on VMware atop Linux.
4. Product activation is bad. Would you rather have a dongle?
5. Frankly, to anyone in the Real World, $600 for Office is _nothing_ compared to the productivity you get out of it. Sure, I enjoy tweaking every last parameter in LaTeX, but give LaTeX to the average secretary, and you'll be spending over 100 hours of their time with training and support and looking stupid things up in the manual. (Don't believe me? Tell me where TeX keeps all its hidden math font metrics... I spent a day looking. Not that MS gives you the control; it just lets you know that it's in control and there's nothing you can do about it) That'll make up your $600, even at salary alone, let alone fringe, office space, etc.
Life's too short to worry about cost for products like Windows and Office. The obnoxious thing about MS is how they implicitly encourage people to upgrade, then send non-backwards-compatible file formats around, so you pretty much _have_ to upgrade. Not to mention their wonderful security.
BTW You should consider reinstalling Windows and Office if your Word loads are taking 1 minute. I just timed my P3-850 at.95seconds for a Word load. And if it matters to you, Windows is not my primary desktop environment; this is being written on a FreeBSD machine.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm reading a lot of people's statements about P(killed on ride) vs P(killed in car on way home). This isn't the only story: long-term effects are also a big deal. In addition, even that probability is so corrupted by noise (you can get great numbers for driving, but not so great numbers for flying, because the rates of injury/death for flying is so low) that even if such signs were posted, they would be completely meaningless. For example, if no one had ever died or been injured on coaster A, what would you post? "You have a 0% probability of being injured on this ride?" That's a liability lawsuit waiting to happen.
So what if we said "don't regulate dining establishments; if you don't want to get Hepatitis, then you can make your own evaluation of the place's cleanliness. On it's face, this seems outrageous; however, most of us have the skills to decide if a food preparation place is hygenically adequate. How many of us (or the general populace) has the skills to decide if a roller-coaster ride is safe, esp long-term? (I'm paranoid about things like this, to the extent that I don't do LASIK because there are no 50-year studies).
Summation: informed consent is a good thing; some level of protecting idiots from themselves is also important, especially since most of us don't have domain knowledge in roller-coaster design. Safety vs car is apples-to-oranges, hence we should require, for example, 99th percentile Gs/time and jerk/time graphs, just like we have "SAR" for cell phones, for which no one actually knows safety parameters... By this logic, however, we should grade food establishments, make them post their grades, but never shut someone down for an F...
"Theft" or "copyright infringment," my argument still stands. The business model is sound, the attack is a violation of law.
Your definition if "theft" is lacking, at least under TX law. In particular, Penal Code 31.04 and 31.05 represent cases where the "theft" is not of chattels, but of nontangibles.
I went to this talk (and this conference). He basically said that a lot of attacks are just sequences of actions, any of which individually are not a problem, but when combined are a problem. I'd call that a "security" issue. The result is that he can't offer certain services. There's a social good issue there, and an interstate commerce issue, so Congress could easily claim jurisdiction. Not that I'm suggesting that that's the right solution...
/. is also theft. Selling premium services is a valid business model; some people subscribe once, scrape the screen, and have their own premium service. If that isn't "theft," you've effectively said that "information has no owner," in which case you have no recourse for your ISP selling all your packets.
As for "theft," whether you like it or not, taking my data and selling it without permission is theft. Yes, spyware is theft; reposting NYT articles on
Look at any mass-market manufacturer (Sony, Verizon, SprintPCS, AT&T, ...)'s customer service. It universally, unquestionably sucks (Dell and IBM are notable exceptions). When you're in the cell phone business, and there are only 2-3 competitors, everybody's mass market, so customer service will continue to suck.
If my time is worth $200/hr, I should be able to pay an extra $10/mo (for example) for sane, decent customer service. (e.g. that which Diner's Club provides: instant customer service phone call pickup and competant service, all for $80/yr)
Bottom line on cell phones: I'm switching to Verizon for the coverage and unlimited off-peak time, but I don't expect better customer service, due to the gov't regulated monopoly...
IANAL, but AFAIK, it's illegal in the States and on US flag carriers, by FAA regulation, so it's not a airline policy matter, it's a federal regulation.
I hate having my data sold/being spammed as much as the next guy, but I wonder if banning this won't have the same effect as banning crypto export: they'll just develop and do it outside our borders. Then even federal law has no jurisdiction to stop them. For example, large US based web service provider could set up a shell company in the Bahamas which runs its website, collects all the marketable data, and sells it...
The problem with laws on the Internet is that they're not of a larger scale than just a nation, so the only way to deal with privacy violations, spam, etc. is: 1) on a global basis or 2) a technical solution or 3) to have people not be stupid and give out sensitive information. Since (2) doesn't apply, and (1)'s not going to happen any time in the near future, (3) is the only way to go?
Doesn't matter. You can detect a receiver; that's the concept behind the VG-2 radar detector detector. It's also the reason why you can't use devices that _receieve_ signals on an aircraft.
You might not turn on the GPS until the car rolls, but that's a different story...
And also that it's a pain in the rear to read on an electronic device.
I could see doing this as a preview, but you're still going to want a dead-tree-publisher. Also, warez'ed copies of your html book may not make you a happy camper.
Trillian supports "SecureIM" over ICQ. But whether or not it's actually secure has been debated on the forums...
WinWiFi would definately slow down Linux/FreeBSD/FreeOS support in the short term, but think about the bright side. People now are using winmodems as a phone line interface; it gives us free OS users a tool we wouldn't otherwise have. We may have the same thing with WinWiFi: imagine if you could adjust the speed at which RTS/CTS/ACK/broadcast are sent, or send certain packets with a PIFS interframe spacing, or change aSlotTime... Maybe even make fundamental changes to the MAC, such as CEDAR.
This could be really great! Can you imagine Linux DoS tools based on flooding frames without participating in the MAC?
a bijection is a function, not a number. "duh." The cipher itself is a random function (and inverse) generator, not an RNG.
And numbers are not "to the base x," they are "in base x." Get an education...
If you want to get really picky, a block cipher (with a key, in counter mode) is a list of 2^p elements of Z_2^p, which technically could be viewed as 2^{2p} numbers. But that's rarely how they're used; generally, in CBC mode for example, the "random number generator" actually depends on the input (and IV).
So, a (keyed) block cipher in CBC mode is NOT a random number generator. Hence, not _all_ (keyed) ciphers are random number generators.
Also, given finite memory, Rip Van Winkle can't be cracked:h tml
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cachin97unconditional.
Not all ciphers are long sequences of random numbers.
Block ciphers are bijections between Z_2^p and Z_2^p, where p is the block size.
Assuming you keep the public key in the program and the private key for registrations, why not replace the public key with one for which you know the private key?
The spammers. At least there's a technical solution to that problem.
Seems like its good for simulating any bombs... otherwise how would you validate it?
Kinda scary, isn't it, that 750 years of current desktop runtime is one year of desktop runtime in 15 years, according to Moore's law?
Don't let that program get out... especially on a "misplaced" hard disk...
I'm suprised no one has brought up the cellular/wireless argument against this: with open standards, anyone can build a viewer. As much of a train wreck as WEP is, at least it's open.
... Even PDF with reflow is more usable than Flash on a PDA.
Even if Flash were open spec, though, cell phones, PDAs, and other wireless systems (blackberry, anyone?) wouldn't be able to support it, due to insufficient CPU time, battery life, RAM, screen quality,
Discussed before.
If you had half a clue about LyX and LaTeX, you wouldn't say that.
.doc emails.
LyX can't edit that, either; at least not without inline LaTeX. Here's the actual problem: you build your own math fonts, based on TeX's original math fonts, but everything is now R 0.01 wider (that means 0.01 design units wider, for those of you unfamiliar with the art), since it's poor-man's bold (see Knuth's TeXbook for details). Having recompiled the METAFONT and installing the associated TFM (TeX font metric) and vf (virtual font) files, you find that TeX still has no clue about the font width, but instead lays out each character a bit too narrow, which visibly throws the justification of any paragraph with math mode in it.
One way to fix this is:
\def\poormansboldhack#1{\setbox0=\hbox{$\myfont #1$}\hbox to 1.01\wd0{\unhcopy0}}
but it looks ugly and has a bit more "badness" then you'd like, since it forces stretches of medmathskips and bigmathskips. You still think this is easier with LyX?
Since your average secretary has Office experience, are you going to waste the time to switch them over to StarOffice, then have them using incompatible documents with the rest of the world? (The Word converter is not perfect). Even if you internally are an all-StarOffice shop, you'll still get
Maybe living in suburbia has dulled your awareness to the "Real World" you seem so fond of mentioning
Funny you say that to a person who did middle school in the ghetto long enough to speak Ebonics as a native language. If you can cost-justify a computer, you probably can cost-justify Office and Windows. (And since when did CS grad students make so much money that they have a dulled awareness of the value of money in the Real World?)
some people cannot afford to pay $300 for Windows and $600 for Office.
When those people aren't technical, they tend to be the type of person who wouldn't buy a computer in the first place. When they are technical, they can run Linux.
That $900 is my rent and car payment for the month.
So, where'd you get the money for the computer in the first place, if finances are really that tight? Doesn't it seem a bit fiscally irresponsible, unless you're buying it as part of a business, to spend your rent check and car payment on a computer?
I'm not saying there shouldn't be free software. I'm saying that there's a reason the software costs money, and it's not entirely because MS is evil. I'm also saying that MS pricing is reasonable in the business world, something that might not occur to a college freshman to whom $100 is big bucks, a fact that he seemed to harp on endlessly.
In the business world, sure, the cost may be trivial. But not to those of us who are either in school or laid off by companies that spend too much money for their software.
Apologies for the overgeneralization. I guess I see the Real World as the businesses who use computers to improve productivity; to them, the extra cost of productivity software like Office isn't unreasonable. If you're a student, there are great academic pricing packages (I've never taken advantage of one, though, since I pretty much exclusively run FreeBSD, and Windows licenses seem to come with every computer I buy). If you have pals at MS, you can get cheap software too. Some schools get MS software free.
If you're a techie who absolutely HAS to have a computer, you probably know enough to run Linux. More power to you. The slashdot "MS is greedy because they charge for their software" theme is pretty obnoxious.
*sigh* saying M-x ispell-buffer is like saying M-x shell, then ispell filename. It's not an intrinsic, built-in function, in the same way that, say, echo is a built-in part of tcsh. tcsh can do echo "in its head," so echo is built-in. tcsh needs a fork(); exec() to run ispell, so ispell is not built into tcsh. I don't think Word requires a fork(); exec() to get to the spellcheck mode, so it seems safe to say that spell check is "built-in" to Word.
And for those of you who think that elisp == spell checker, I'll argue then that your CPU has a spell-checker, Postscript has a spell-checker, and the steam-powered Turing machine has a spell-checker...
How about LyX? (Which I think would probably be a pain for a secretary to use for numerous other reasons, but...)
Hmmm, interesting, sounds like I'm beating your machine by a factor of 20, with a CPU only twice as fast.
In any case, 1 minute on a 1GHz is pretty unacceptable.
Dude,
.95seconds for a Word load. And if it matters to you, Windows is not my primary desktop environment; this is being written on a FreeBSD machine.
1. Learn how to spell. It'll get you farther in life. Besides, if you do migrate away from Microsoft, emacs doesn't have a built-in spell checker, AFAIK.
2. I don't know how you ever felt enfranchised with Microsoft; maybe you held their stock and could vote by proxy? Or maybe Microsoft has now put shackles on your feet and made you their slave...
3. I worked inside MS, so I feel obligated to say that I think the code reviews done inside my unit (ISBU = Internet Services Business Unit) were pretty darn good. It's hard to catch every bug, and people like features. If you don't like the feature creep, use Windows 95 or 3.1. Sure, you can't use brand-spanking new hardware, but often you can't with Linux anyways, plus the lack of bloat will make up your speed difference. Better yet, run Win95 on VMware atop Linux.
4. Product activation is bad. Would you rather have a dongle?
5. Frankly, to anyone in the Real World, $600 for Office is _nothing_ compared to the productivity you get out of it. Sure, I enjoy tweaking every last parameter in LaTeX, but give LaTeX to the average secretary, and you'll be spending over 100 hours of their time with training and support and looking stupid things up in the manual. (Don't believe me? Tell me where TeX keeps all its hidden math font metrics... I spent a day looking. Not that MS gives you the control; it just lets you know that it's in control and there's nothing you can do about it) That'll make up your $600, even at salary alone, let alone fringe, office space, etc.
Life's too short to worry about cost for products like Windows and Office. The obnoxious thing about MS is how they implicitly encourage people to upgrade, then send non-backwards-compatible file formats around, so you pretty much _have_ to upgrade. Not to mention their wonderful security.
BTW You should consider reinstalling Windows and Office if your Word loads are taking 1 minute. I just timed my P3-850 at