By absolute certainty he received the message, guaranteed, 100%. Any recorders in the vicinity would record it. They just wouldn't be able to determine the source. But nothing there would affect the "future self" that sent it because THAT future self never sent it at all. Parallel timelines, to simplify. And thus there's no "global" causality problem, only a "local" one to us 4-dimensional-perception beings. The energy *appears* to come out of nowhere but in fact just comes from somewhere we can't perceive. Similar the energy *appears* to disappear into nowhere from the sender, but in fact it just goes somewhere they can't perceive.
It's origin is extra-universal, in that little scenario, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means it originated from another universe and we happened to receive / measure the result. It *doesn't* mean that if the future self from that universe "forgets" to send the message that the universe will implode. Causality is still intact, paradoxes wouldn't happen, and useful communication is effectively zero (which seems to fit nicely with nobody bothering to use it to talk to us yet). It's just not been sent by that universe.
That other universe "sent" some message "somewhere" deliberately. It knows and never expects to see the outcome of that message because it's gone *outside* that universe into something else (even if "outside" refers not to standard four dimensions, hence no worries about speed-of-light and/or energy loss of the universe).
It's about not limiting your perception of causality and potential paradox to four dimensions (one of them "one-way"). Future Self A sent a message from Universe A to Universe B. Guy In Past B in Universe B received it and acted upon it. However Future Self B may not ever exist, or have any knowledge of events. And yet nothing was "broken". Future Self A is pretty much thwarted from using the past to achieve his dastardly end or gain infinite energy or break several billion physical laws (like re-using the same energy, etc. which again fits nicely with how we like the universe to run). And Future Self B, who MIGHT never have been born because of the message, will be completely unaware of it and not obligated to fulfill any paradoxical requirements.
Sucks for Guy In Past B, though, but he's already a bit loopy listening to messages from a stranger in the future.
I always considered myself a geek, so like the sci-fi genre. But that list... wow. That's enough to turn me off going to the movies forever. It's like "Remakes meet Bad Plotlines", to paraphrase the article.
Apollo 18 - some made up crap about something that never flew (see U-571).
Attack The Block - gangsters take on aliens with baseball bats in London (Left4Dead in a movie, badly).
Cowboys & Aliens - "When aliens invade the 19th century West," - 'nuff said.
Super 8 - kids see alien walk away from train crash.
Real Steel - regurgitated Twilight Zone crap with fighting robots.
Contagion - disease-killing-everyone movie.
The Thing (a prequel) - dear God, no!
Now - vaguely interesting "live forever" soap opera.
Rise Of The Apes - dear God, no!
The Divide - apocalyptic survival movie.
Serious, the sci-fi genre has become this pile of trash? God. Yeah, once in a while maybe, as a light relief, but that's not "sci-fi".
We don't understand how a single-celled amoeba works. I think we can leave the question of "where does extra-universal energy come from to create multiple alternate realities?" until we understand a bit more (like, say, where the energy comes from to create our universe?). Which is kinda my point. We don't know. But a paradox to *us* doesn't mean a paradox to physics.
And saying "energy" that many times in a paragraph without justifying how to measure it, the kind of it, or indeed the source of it smells more like some alternative therapy or advertisement than science...:-)
Hitman acts on message from "man from the future". Kills someone. That someone never has a child. That child never sent the message back. Hitman still claims that he received the message until the day he dies.
A paradox only occurs if you believe time is linear. What if time bifurcates at every decision, as some philosophers/scientists have posited? Then the "you" that sent the message wasn't the "you" that was never born, hence it's still valid and the hitman still *received* the message to act on, even if, from that point on in that particular "Trouser of Time", the message never got sent back.
In either "leg" of the universe, however, causality is intact. In one, you send a message "to the past" that seems to never have been received or acted upon, and in the other, some loony kills a guy and says he was told to by space aliens from the future who turn out to never have existed, or sent any message.
By killing X, there would be no need to send the message, hence no reason to send (or memory of promising to send) the results backwards, which means no incentive to ever do anything that someone in the future asks you to do based on a promise of future knowledge.
And nobody says that time is linear. We just don't know. We assume so, because of the way we perceive it (but we also only perceive it "forwards" and that might not be true either), but we don't know. Maybe it would create an instantaneous alternate universe where those actions DID happen and two "you"'s branch off down two separate universes, one where X did die and you knew you'd ordered it, maybe one where X disappeared and was never heard of again, maybe one whereby X changes something and you were never born (but the order came from "nowhere" in the future back into the past)? Who knows?
Vice versa ("with position turned", or some Latin equivalent, instead of "visa" versa, which comes via French meaning roughly "paper that has been seen" and, presumably, turned).
And that would mean you don't buy good products over a good mechanism, because of the way you worded the sentence.
1) British law has no interpretation of "free speech". None. It's an assumed "right", not an actual one. Funnily, we seem to do a better job than those countries *WITH* such laws.
2) Even in countries that proclaim "free speech", nobody is ever obliged to provide you with a platform. They can't *stop* you from saying what you want, but they aren't obliged to publish your every word online, or in the papers, or the 10 o'clock news.
You can say what you like (under certain limitations, in ANY country that has "free speech") but nobody is obliged to give you a soapbox. Certainly not your ISP, who can cut you off if their T&C's say you shouldn't swear on their forums, in theory.
3) The ISP's are putting out a code to discuss traffic management, which most of the big ISP's are signed up to. Nowhere does it mention an inherent restriction on free speech. You might have to pay for to push your speech over bittorrent than over email, but see #2.
4) The UK is actually pretty aware of what's happening. ID cards were scrapped last year, by public demand, before they were ever used. It's actually the second time we've scrapped them because they were made compulsory during the War for security reasons and then we got rid of them when they were no longer required. It's MUCH harder to get rid of something you've spent government money on to establish and which would be cheaper to keep running, but we've done it twice.
We are one of the few countries in the world that *doesn't* have an ID system - I do *not* have to own any ID whatsoever, I certainly don't have to carry it on me at any time, and if I don't drive/fly then I probably don't have a passport or driver's license and thus no formal ID whatsoever, and yet I still could live quite happily in the country. You can open a bank account with a birth certificate and an electricity bill, if you want (i.e. something that says X was born on day Y with no way to prove you're X).
I *do* now drive and fly so I have license and passport but I've only *ever* been asked for them when driving (to ensure I had a valid licence, and it was only by luck I was carrying it because I'm not required to, and could instead present it within 14 days at the police station of my choice at a police officer's insistence AT BEST) and for crossing international borders - at the insistence of a foreign entity (the British passport has a kind of mystique about it outside the UK - nobody bothers to check them, or see the "UK" part and then wave you through).
My ID spends more of its life gathering dust than anything else. Sure sign of 1984, that is. Or I could mention that our privacy and data protection laws are some of the best in the world. Or I could mention that we have things like Hyde Park Corner. Or I could mention that, actually, for a country with NO formal rights to free speech, etc. that we're actually pretty damn high up on the list of freedoms we *do* enjoy.
Stop reading the tabloids, and instead look at what a UK person does during their lives compared to any other country (including the US!). Driving laws (ever roll through a stop sign in the US? I once saw a guy who "failed to come to a complete stop" at the line and he was taken out of the car at gunpoint. Do it in the UK and nobody would even notice. Which one is more reminiscent of 1984?). Privacy laws. Data laws. Telecoms laws (we made BT scrap Phorm, and initiated a legal case). Equality laws. And they *work*, for the most part. Sure, Phorm should have never got off the ground, or the ID card scheme, but when they do and come to the public knowledge, they end up dying a death.
Come live in the UK, and see what a real country is like. You can cross the road where you like, and everything.
The problem is that at least some of the time, the disaster that strikes a foreign nation is the US "helping". Admittedly, sometimes there an earthquake or something instead but at that point *every* country rushes to help because they know they might want the same in return some day.
The US creates vastly more problems that it solves and, worse, drags its allies in to those problems too.
I don't think that would affect the supposed "evidence" that has been bandied about in public, which *was* thoroughly debunked as the OP claimed.
And let's not forget, SCO vs IBM/Novell etc. is STILL going on nearly 10 years later with not a shred of evidence that anything copyright-infringement-wise actually came close to happening like they said it did.
Don't worry. I'm sure it won't be long before it's actually easier and safer to run IE on something not made by Microsoft at all, and almost certainly done without any MS assistance, or access to any of their sourcecode.
But by then, they might have fixed the first round of bugs into a service pack, too.
Unless I can buy it *today*, *this second*, from a supplier that I'm willing to buy from, it's not worth getting excited about except from a purely scientific standpoint (the same as someone claiming to have invented a new type of tile to use on the Space Shuttle - interesting but I will *never* hype the company that sells it, or end up using the product myself). Until it exists, is in a store I can order from, is in a standard format of some kind, and at a sensible price, I can't plan budgets for it, I can't investigate upgrades, I can't do even preliminary testing, I can't try it out, I can't see my friend's one, I can't do anything about it. So it's not worth anything more than "Oh, that's interesting" and going back to work on a *real*, live, purchased, computer product that exists today. There's no point worrying about the wonderful new operating system that *will* come to replace the current heap-of-junk until it's here, and been tested. Until that point, I *still* have to plan as if it doesn't exist.
This means I steer clear of anything "pre-order" whatsoever. When I can buy it, yeah, then is a good time to wonder if I should buy it. Thus, so far, I haven't wasted money on things like Duke Nukem Forever, or the Pandora console that people are still trying to ship out to the first-day pre-orderers even after 3 years "in production", the "Phantom" console, nor other similar vapourware.
The "new memory technology" thing has been crowed about since I was a child. We'd all have this amazing memory that would survive a reboot, be huge, cheap and fast etc. etc. etc. Flash drives came along and made headlines but until I could actually buy them (i.e. it was not only available but at a price I was willing to pay for those features) it wasn't worth any of my time. In the meantime, several HUNDRED other technologies that all claimed they could do this have come and gone without being used in a single commercial product that I have an interest in using.
If it doesn't exist, you can't "buy" it. Therefore, it's pointless to try to plan for having it at any particular point, even as a future plan because you have no idea whether it will exist or not at the point you need it.
So do what I do. Read about how this particular instance of a technology that's come-and-gone a million times is supposed to work, then carry on as normal. When you first see a commercial PC that supports it, or you first see the chips on sale at your normal suppliers, THEN it's worth looking into them (and that usually means having some other poor mug try it out on your behalf so you don't waste your money on junk).
Er... I was actually thinking that was an incredibly generous cap.
In the UK, 30Gb/month is pretty standard, and much less is available on the cheaper packages (http://www.plus.net/ - owned by the former-government-department British Telecom).
Americans...
on
Happy Pi Day
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· Score: -1, Redundant
Come the 31st of April (31st of the 4th), or possible even the 22nd of July (22/7) I will be glad to celebrate a Pi day as expected (i.e. not care, despite being a mathematician and despite having spent YEARS in the past writing programs and algorithms to approximate pi).
I honestly do not understand why the mm/dd/yyyy format EVER caught on over there. You can't sort by date either way without having to "rearrange" the order of the columns and who ever sorts by month before day? Even if you wanted to start all the January invoices, etc. it's still infinitely more sensible to sort in reverse (yyyy/mm/dd) in order to handle that and avoid mistakes.
YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS-mm. Name your date-ordered files like that and you can't go wrong (oldest files will appear at the top, newest at the bottom, rathee than having all the January's, then all the February's etc.). Notice how EVERYTHING is in descending order.
What exactly is the reasoning behind putting the MONTH as the most important factor of a date?
"You'd think it'd just be a matter of passively connecting to a neuron to sniff it's traffic and then observing which nearby neurons carry the signals to and from it"
You'd think. Except not only have people tried this but it's inherently gibberish and never gets anything useful.
A neuron is an extremely complex biochemical cellular device that we don't understand. It is *not* just a biochem transistor, as some would have you think.
It retains some information, reacts to historical stimuli, reacts to chemical and hormonal processes, parses multitudes of information in ways that we have never fully observed for even a single neuron. It joins in excruciatingly odd and random ways to others and it's interconnected with millions of others in increasingly complex feedback loops and patterns that are unique to every single individual on the planet, formed by pure chance, and honed over years before it gets anywhere near a sensible, stable, (theoretically) understandable response.
(Also, my personal bugbear is timing - people think you can just "slap some neurons together", in proportions vastly less than even the tiniest of ants, and the thing will work immediately and solve the world's problems. Tell me, if a baby was "grown" in a room with a keyboard, and you could only observe that baby via the output of what letters it pressed on the keyboard, at which point would you declare it intelligent? Would it even be in the first few years while it still hasn't connected tapping one button with "good" things and another with "bad" things? At which point do you expect to have an English conversation via the only possible input/output device it has to you, but just you flashing up lots of magazine articles at it occasionally and awaiting it's response? It's like when people try genetic-algorithms. A few thousand generations and they stop. Give it a few BILLION and you might get something useful, but instead they throw it away and start from Generation 1 with something else instead.)
And people assume that some kind of quasi-statistical, or logical, basis must underpin a neuron to basically be a series of noughts and ones. Neural networks are on the syllabus of almost every AI course in every university in the world. There are hundreds of thousands of people exposed to them in every way. And yet, when it comes to finding an actual practical application for them, even in robotics and simulating life, we've yet to make any practical use of them whatever, basically because the principles are okay but there's a huge gaping chasm in our knowledge of how such things actually work.
We don't know how a single neuron works. They provide us with some interesting ideas that are worth chasing and can provide (limited) results, but the fact of the matter is that we're mixing charcoal together like alchemists because we once witnessed someone build a space elevator out of carbon nanotubes and we think we're doing the same thing if we can just get it right...
Mac is secure is in aggregate. It all depends on how you view it.
I *KNOW* that if I cross a road, I'm putting my life at more risk than if I stay at home. It doesn't mean that I will never have an accident at home.
Similarly, if you put all your eggs in the Windows basket, you're more likely, on aggregate, to be a victim of something. It doesn't mean that a locked-down Windows PC is any less secure than a wide-open Mac. It's just a statistical average.
By that measure, Windows is excruciatingly far behind on using proper security practices to make sure it's HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of users aren't affected. Whereas Apple can afford to be a little lax because it TENS OF MILLIONS of users don't exhibit those problems in such numbers.
That said, any PC is at risk if you don't manage it well. However, statistically, if I pick a machine that we *KNOW* to be infected, it's much more likely to be a Windows machine than any other.
"Mac is more secure" doesn't cover it in enough detail (i.e. what Mac, what model, what software, what user, what configuration, how well managed, what connection, what services, etc.") but it has a statistical truth. Your problem is not people telling lies, it's people failing to clarify their argument.
Opera treats this as an "insecure" page but doesn't warn you. It just doesn't show it as "secure" (with yellow, green or anything else for the padlock icon).
It is, in effect, an "insecure" page because of that a single missing SSL element, which is correct, but not worth shouting about because you should be checking for the padlock before you eve TYPE anything sensitive in. And it's a completely worthless site to have SSL on, except to bump up the system requirements.
To be honest, most data recovery from a hard drive is foiled by a simple zero anyway. All this "must wipe several times with certain patterns" thing is cobblers. Yes, if I was the military, I'd be doing it too, just to make sure, but no-one has yet provided convincing proof that "magnetic history" from drives can actually be recovered in anywhere near a cost-effective or reliable way.
Digital forensics consists of taking an image of the drive and seeing what you can get from that. Any half-decent implementation that encrypts, zeroes and deletes things properly is going to foil any digital forensics.
SSD's make it harder but digital forensics recovering useful data is next-to-impossible for the storage devices of anyone that actually *KNOWS* about PC's and wants to keep that info secret.
Correct. You have no idea how many people I've managed to drop in it by producing an email record of something. From large suppliers, to tiny little in-house spats, it's invaluable to have a record. Most of the time, I wouldn't have even *thought* of archiving that email specifically, but it ended up being crucial.
As a rule, I don't drop people in it, but when the finger points, some people will do ANYTHING to avoid the blame, even when they KNEW it was their fault. Rather than put their hands up, they'll think of a convincing excuse, point at someone else who they genuinely believe has NO way to prove otherwise (at least not any more) and hope the whole thing dies into an irresolvable mess.
When you have decades of email backup, after the first few times people STOP pointing at you because they've already made fools of themselves the first few times.
My record at the moment is about 5-years - that's the oldest email / computer record I've had to pull out to prove someone was lying. If they hadn't blamed me personally, for something their own fault, I wouldn't have cared. Once they do, having an email archive in Opera (so searchable even going back decades as-you-type, like Google autocomplete) is the best tool in the world.
"I'm sorry - *WHO* said this software was compatible with Windows 7 when we bought it? Me? Don't think so, as you can see from this 2005 email where I specifically ask you to check it as I didn't think it would be..." Or the other way round: "You said in 2005 that this software would be supported through Windows 7 and that's why we bought it. Look. I can quote you. That'll be one HUMUNGOUS refund please."
Utterly fake, obviously, but you can find nicer patterns in even the most horrible of PINs. Works well for door-entry too because you literally move you finger up, left, down, right, etc. on the keypad rather than remember what numbers you're actually pressing.
Works well until some bastard changes the keypad, though.:-)
Those are "techniques"? In that case I've been using "techniques" since I was born. I have a notoriously terrible "memory" but actually I can remember just about anything people ask me to.
I remember my card PINs through their differences between successive digits (up 2, down 1, up 6, etc.). With that and simple PINs that I'm allocated, it's very difficult *NOT* to find an obscure but simple pattern that then sticks in my memory. I'm a mathematician, I can find a pattern in any list of numbers you happen to give me if I try hard enough.
More likely, my hand remembers the pattern to type on a ATM keypad (which is annoying when all you have is a numpad because they are upside-down to each other, and even worse when you have to close your eyes and "tap out" the numbers in order to remember what they actually were)
I'm currently learning Italian. When a word doesn't come from a Latin base, linking it to its English analogue is tricky so it's simpler to make up some association than it is to remember the word. The Italian for "where" is "dove" (which is pronounced a little like "duvet"). Where's the dove? Under the duvet. I can't forget it or get it confused with when, why, how or who. When an Italian wants me to say "Where", I link dove, duvet and the image/sound of my girlfriend saying that word on the phone one day. (Still doesn't mean I can pronounce it properly, though!)
But this "memorise tons by associating with a bizarre image" thing is DECADES old. It doesn't work for me, and I've tried many times. I honestly have zero problems memorising huge strings of digits, or facts, or words, or images, or faces, or even sounds if I need to.
I can recite the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, and I can say pi to 32 decimal places without even blinking an eyelid, entirely from memory and the last time I *committed* them to memory was when I was 14/15 (yeah, I was a geeky kid). I could probably read out every line from the largest AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS that I ever had, too.
I can do the balcony scene because we were told to memorise it for English class and we would be performing it in front of the class the next day. I still know every word. I can remember pi because I went through a phase of writing computer programs to calculate it and it was simpler to have it stuck in my mind to see how fast they converged. I can do the AUTOEXEC.BAT because I wrote the thing and changed it every day for a year in order to get *anything* to run and ended up with a set of "perfect" configs. I can still remember whole conversations from primary school, and weird things like what my dad said to me on a trip I took when I was 8 and things like that.
It just matters more which type of learner you are - teachers have been teaching to a certain number of learning styles for DECADES - visual (has to see / imagine something to learn it), tactile (has to play / touch something to learn a principle), auditory (has to hear something to learn it), etc. and any decent teacher knows which of their kids are which style and how best to explain new problems to them.
The problem I have is that on every "learning styles" quiz that I've ever done I come out as every learning style evenly. So does my brother, who also went to university. That means that mere exposure to something is enough for me to learn it which means I pick up lots of useless information and my memory doesn't get any "special" exercise - it just does it's job and doesn't have to struggle for *anything* that I'm interested in. If I'm not interested in it, though, it struggles because I have to physically commit it to memory, but then it's there forever.
The problem with random memorisation is that I just don't care enough about it to memorise it specifically, and thus often miss the entire opportunity when the information is exposed to me of committing it to memory (e.g. people's face - I work in schools so I see thousands of unique faces every day and it's not worth me memorising even 1% of them, so I don't re
"Say what you will, the nice thing about Windows is that no matter how it is damaged and how bad the situation is, it will attempt to come back up in something resembling a working state. Probably not a known state. Probably not a secure state. But usually a workable state."
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
There speaks a person who's never rebooted a Windows server to have it suddenly decide to wipe out its registry, its AD, etc. and then throw an absolute fit. UNIX-alikes either do something, or tell you why they can't. At worst you get hideous warnings and a chance to fix the system.
Windows has a tendancy to mask the real problem whether that be an unfinished write (and thus a boot off a CD into recovery console to run a CHKDSK util which seems to just destroy whatever it feels like until it thinks order is restored and then reboot-and-cross-your-fingers to hope it wasn't anything too vital - because you won't ever know what it decided to wipe out),
I've seen Windows refuse to boot because a Java certificate inside a well-known UPS manufacturer's monitoring utility expired and it threw all the toys out of the pram - Windows honestly could not boot because of that problem and the server on the UPS totally destroyed the point of HAVING a UPS in the first place. In Linux? At worst your load average would go throw the roof and you could kill the process. In Windows, you couldn't even get to a logon dialog or start any remote services.
Windows doesn't take "damage" at all well - it boots or doesn't and if it does boot not everything will start (I routinely carry MS's WMI diagnostics utility because that service has a tendency to fall over on every Windows server I've ever seen and take lots of things with it (e.g. the ability to backup!)). And what *doesn't* start, you won't know about unless you check *everything* religiously.
UNIX-alikes log everything and throw fits if prerequisites are broken, in hugely verbose messages.
And don't even *breathe* when you see a Windows server "starting network connections".
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By absolute certainty he received the message, guaranteed, 100%. Any recorders in the vicinity would record it. They just wouldn't be able to determine the source. But nothing there would affect the "future self" that sent it because THAT future self never sent it at all. Parallel timelines, to simplify. And thus there's no "global" causality problem, only a "local" one to us 4-dimensional-perception beings. The energy *appears* to come out of nowhere but in fact just comes from somewhere we can't perceive. Similar the energy *appears* to disappear into nowhere from the sender, but in fact it just goes somewhere they can't perceive.
It's origin is extra-universal, in that little scenario, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It just means it originated from another universe and we happened to receive / measure the result. It *doesn't* mean that if the future self from that universe "forgets" to send the message that the universe will implode. Causality is still intact, paradoxes wouldn't happen, and useful communication is effectively zero (which seems to fit nicely with nobody bothering to use it to talk to us yet). It's just not been sent by that universe.
That other universe "sent" some message "somewhere" deliberately. It knows and never expects to see the outcome of that message because it's gone *outside* that universe into something else (even if "outside" refers not to standard four dimensions, hence no worries about speed-of-light and/or energy loss of the universe).
It's about not limiting your perception of causality and potential paradox to four dimensions (one of them "one-way"). Future Self A sent a message from Universe A to Universe B. Guy In Past B in Universe B received it and acted upon it. However Future Self B may not ever exist, or have any knowledge of events. And yet nothing was "broken". Future Self A is pretty much thwarted from using the past to achieve his dastardly end or gain infinite energy or break several billion physical laws (like re-using the same energy, etc. which again fits nicely with how we like the universe to run). And Future Self B, who MIGHT never have been born because of the message, will be completely unaware of it and not obligated to fulfill any paradoxical requirements.
Sucks for Guy In Past B, though, but he's already a bit loopy listening to messages from a stranger in the future.
I always considered myself a geek, so like the sci-fi genre. But that list... wow. That's enough to turn me off going to the movies forever. It's like "Remakes meet Bad Plotlines", to paraphrase the article.
Apollo 18 - some made up crap about something that never flew (see U-571).
Attack The Block - gangsters take on aliens with baseball bats in London (Left4Dead in a movie, badly).
Cowboys & Aliens - "When aliens invade the 19th century West," - 'nuff said.
Super 8 - kids see alien walk away from train crash.
Real Steel - regurgitated Twilight Zone crap with fighting robots.
Contagion - disease-killing-everyone movie.
The Thing (a prequel) - dear God, no!
Now - vaguely interesting "live forever" soap opera.
Rise Of The Apes - dear God, no!
The Divide - apocalyptic survival movie.
Serious, the sci-fi genre has become this pile of trash? God. Yeah, once in a while maybe, as a light relief, but that's not "sci-fi".
We don't understand how a single-celled amoeba works. I think we can leave the question of "where does extra-universal energy come from to create multiple alternate realities?" until we understand a bit more (like, say, where the energy comes from to create our universe?). Which is kinda my point. We don't know. But a paradox to *us* doesn't mean a paradox to physics.
And saying "energy" that many times in a paragraph without justifying how to measure it, the kind of it, or indeed the source of it smells more like some alternative therapy or advertisement than science... :-)
Hitman acts on message from "man from the future". Kills someone. That someone never has a child. That child never sent the message back. Hitman still claims that he received the message until the day he dies.
A paradox only occurs if you believe time is linear. What if time bifurcates at every decision, as some philosophers/scientists have posited? Then the "you" that sent the message wasn't the "you" that was never born, hence it's still valid and the hitman still *received* the message to act on, even if, from that point on in that particular "Trouser of Time", the message never got sent back.
In either "leg" of the universe, however, causality is intact. In one, you send a message "to the past" that seems to never have been received or acted upon, and in the other, some loony kills a guy and says he was told to by space aliens from the future who turn out to never have existed, or sent any message.
By killing X, there would be no need to send the message, hence no reason to send (or memory of promising to send) the results backwards, which means no incentive to ever do anything that someone in the future asks you to do based on a promise of future knowledge.
And nobody says that time is linear. We just don't know. We assume so, because of the way we perceive it (but we also only perceive it "forwards" and that might not be true either), but we don't know. Maybe it would create an instantaneous alternate universe where those actions DID happen and two "you"'s branch off down two separate universes, one where X did die and you knew you'd ordered it, maybe one where X disappeared and was never heard of again, maybe one whereby X changes something and you were never born (but the order came from "nowhere" in the future back into the past)? Who knows?
I came, I saw, I brought my flexible friend?
Vice versa ("with position turned", or some Latin equivalent, instead of "visa" versa, which comes via French meaning roughly "paper that has been seen" and, presumably, turned).
And that would mean you don't buy good products over a good mechanism, because of the way you worded the sentence.
1) British law has no interpretation of "free speech". None. It's an assumed "right", not an actual one. Funnily, we seem to do a better job than those countries *WITH* such laws.
2) Even in countries that proclaim "free speech", nobody is ever obliged to provide you with a platform. They can't *stop* you from saying what you want, but they aren't obliged to publish your every word online, or in the papers, or the 10 o'clock news.
You can say what you like (under certain limitations, in ANY country that has "free speech") but nobody is obliged to give you a soapbox. Certainly not your ISP, who can cut you off if their T&C's say you shouldn't swear on their forums, in theory.
3) The ISP's are putting out a code to discuss traffic management, which most of the big ISP's are signed up to. Nowhere does it mention an inherent restriction on free speech. You might have to pay for to push your speech over bittorrent than over email, but see #2.
4) The UK is actually pretty aware of what's happening. ID cards were scrapped last year, by public demand, before they were ever used. It's actually the second time we've scrapped them because they were made compulsory during the War for security reasons and then we got rid of them when they were no longer required. It's MUCH harder to get rid of something you've spent government money on to establish and which would be cheaper to keep running, but we've done it twice.
We are one of the few countries in the world that *doesn't* have an ID system - I do *not* have to own any ID whatsoever, I certainly don't have to carry it on me at any time, and if I don't drive/fly then I probably don't have a passport or driver's license and thus no formal ID whatsoever, and yet I still could live quite happily in the country. You can open a bank account with a birth certificate and an electricity bill, if you want (i.e. something that says X was born on day Y with no way to prove you're X).
I *do* now drive and fly so I have license and passport but I've only *ever* been asked for them when driving (to ensure I had a valid licence, and it was only by luck I was carrying it because I'm not required to, and could instead present it within 14 days at the police station of my choice at a police officer's insistence AT BEST) and for crossing international borders - at the insistence of a foreign entity (the British passport has a kind of mystique about it outside the UK - nobody bothers to check them, or see the "UK" part and then wave you through).
My ID spends more of its life gathering dust than anything else. Sure sign of 1984, that is. Or I could mention that our privacy and data protection laws are some of the best in the world. Or I could mention that we have things like Hyde Park Corner. Or I could mention that, actually, for a country with NO formal rights to free speech, etc. that we're actually pretty damn high up on the list of freedoms we *do* enjoy.
Stop reading the tabloids, and instead look at what a UK person does during their lives compared to any other country (including the US!). Driving laws (ever roll through a stop sign in the US? I once saw a guy who "failed to come to a complete stop" at the line and he was taken out of the car at gunpoint. Do it in the UK and nobody would even notice. Which one is more reminiscent of 1984?). Privacy laws. Data laws. Telecoms laws (we made BT scrap Phorm, and initiated a legal case). Equality laws. And they *work*, for the most part. Sure, Phorm should have never got off the ground, or the ID card scheme, but when they do and come to the public knowledge, they end up dying a death.
Come live in the UK, and see what a real country is like. You can cross the road where you like, and everything.
The problem is that at least some of the time, the disaster that strikes a foreign nation is the US "helping". Admittedly, sometimes there an earthquake or something instead but at that point *every* country rushes to help because they know they might want the same in return some day.
The US creates vastly more problems that it solves and, worse, drags its allies in to those problems too.
I don't think that would affect the supposed "evidence" that has been bandied about in public, which *was* thoroughly debunked as the OP claimed.
And let's not forget, SCO vs IBM/Novell etc. is STILL going on nearly 10 years later with not a shred of evidence that anything copyright-infringement-wise actually came close to happening like they said it did.
Don't worry. I'm sure it won't be long before it's actually easier and safer to run IE on something not made by Microsoft at all, and almost certainly done without any MS assistance, or access to any of their sourcecode.
But by then, they might have fixed the first round of bugs into a service pack, too.
Which is why I have a rule.
Unless I can buy it *today*, *this second*, from a supplier that I'm willing to buy from, it's not worth getting excited about except from a purely scientific standpoint (the same as someone claiming to have invented a new type of tile to use on the Space Shuttle - interesting but I will *never* hype the company that sells it, or end up using the product myself). Until it exists, is in a store I can order from, is in a standard format of some kind, and at a sensible price, I can't plan budgets for it, I can't investigate upgrades, I can't do even preliminary testing, I can't try it out, I can't see my friend's one, I can't do anything about it. So it's not worth anything more than "Oh, that's interesting" and going back to work on a *real*, live, purchased, computer product that exists today. There's no point worrying about the wonderful new operating system that *will* come to replace the current heap-of-junk until it's here, and been tested. Until that point, I *still* have to plan as if it doesn't exist.
This means I steer clear of anything "pre-order" whatsoever. When I can buy it, yeah, then is a good time to wonder if I should buy it. Thus, so far, I haven't wasted money on things like Duke Nukem Forever, or the Pandora console that people are still trying to ship out to the first-day pre-orderers even after 3 years "in production", the "Phantom" console, nor other similar vapourware.
The "new memory technology" thing has been crowed about since I was a child. We'd all have this amazing memory that would survive a reboot, be huge, cheap and fast etc. etc. etc. Flash drives came along and made headlines but until I could actually buy them (i.e. it was not only available but at a price I was willing to pay for those features) it wasn't worth any of my time. In the meantime, several HUNDRED other technologies that all claimed they could do this have come and gone without being used in a single commercial product that I have an interest in using.
If it doesn't exist, you can't "buy" it. Therefore, it's pointless to try to plan for having it at any particular point, even as a future plan because you have no idea whether it will exist or not at the point you need it.
So do what I do. Read about how this particular instance of a technology that's come-and-gone a million times is supposed to work, then carry on as normal. When you first see a commercial PC that supports it, or you first see the chips on sale at your normal suppliers, THEN it's worth looking into them (and that usually means having some other poor mug try it out on your behalf so you don't waste your money on junk).
I say it's twenty past three. Doesn't mean I write 20:3pm. It's not an explanation of why, it's just a statement of fact that you do.
Er... I was actually thinking that was an incredibly generous cap.
In the UK, 30Gb/month is pretty standard, and much less is available on the cheaper packages (http://www.plus.net/ - owned by the former-government-department British Telecom).
Come the 31st of April (31st of the 4th), or possible even the 22nd of July (22/7) I will be glad to celebrate a Pi day as expected (i.e. not care, despite being a mathematician and despite having spent YEARS in the past writing programs and algorithms to approximate pi).
I honestly do not understand why the mm/dd/yyyy format EVER caught on over there. You can't sort by date either way without having to "rearrange" the order of the columns and who ever sorts by month before day? Even if you wanted to start all the January invoices, etc. it's still infinitely more sensible to sort in reverse (yyyy/mm/dd) in order to handle that and avoid mistakes.
YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS-mm. Name your date-ordered files like that and you can't go wrong (oldest files will appear at the top, newest at the bottom, rathee than having all the January's, then all the February's etc.). Notice how EVERYTHING is in descending order.
What exactly is the reasoning behind putting the MONTH as the most important factor of a date?
"You'd think it'd just be a matter of passively connecting to a neuron to sniff it's traffic and then observing which nearby neurons carry the signals to and from it"
You'd think. Except not only have people tried this but it's inherently gibberish and never gets anything useful.
A neuron is an extremely complex biochemical cellular device that we don't understand. It is *not* just a biochem transistor, as some would have you think.
It retains some information, reacts to historical stimuli, reacts to chemical and hormonal processes, parses multitudes of information in ways that we have never fully observed for even a single neuron. It joins in excruciatingly odd and random ways to others and it's interconnected with millions of others in increasingly complex feedback loops and patterns that are unique to every single individual on the planet, formed by pure chance, and honed over years before it gets anywhere near a sensible, stable, (theoretically) understandable response.
(Also, my personal bugbear is timing - people think you can just "slap some neurons together", in proportions vastly less than even the tiniest of ants, and the thing will work immediately and solve the world's problems. Tell me, if a baby was "grown" in a room with a keyboard, and you could only observe that baby via the output of what letters it pressed on the keyboard, at which point would you declare it intelligent? Would it even be in the first few years while it still hasn't connected tapping one button with "good" things and another with "bad" things? At which point do you expect to have an English conversation via the only possible input/output device it has to you, but just you flashing up lots of magazine articles at it occasionally and awaiting it's response? It's like when people try genetic-algorithms. A few thousand generations and they stop. Give it a few BILLION and you might get something useful, but instead they throw it away and start from Generation 1 with something else instead.)
And people assume that some kind of quasi-statistical, or logical, basis must underpin a neuron to basically be a series of noughts and ones. Neural networks are on the syllabus of almost every AI course in every university in the world. There are hundreds of thousands of people exposed to them in every way. And yet, when it comes to finding an actual practical application for them, even in robotics and simulating life, we've yet to make any practical use of them whatever, basically because the principles are okay but there's a huge gaping chasm in our knowledge of how such things actually work.
We don't know how a single neuron works. They provide us with some interesting ideas that are worth chasing and can provide (limited) results, but the fact of the matter is that we're mixing charcoal together like alchemists because we once witnessed someone build a space elevator out of carbon nanotubes and we think we're doing the same thing if we can just get it right...
Single example, there are many others.
Privilege separation in the default configuration
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/255281
versus
http://www.losurs.org/docs/tips/sysadmin/bind-nonroot
for DNS, for instance, resulting in things like: http://www.cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2007-1748 giving you "root" access to the server itself.
Mac is secure is in aggregate. It all depends on how you view it.
I *KNOW* that if I cross a road, I'm putting my life at more risk than if I stay at home. It doesn't mean that I will never have an accident at home.
Similarly, if you put all your eggs in the Windows basket, you're more likely, on aggregate, to be a victim of something. It doesn't mean that a locked-down Windows PC is any less secure than a wide-open Mac. It's just a statistical average.
By that measure, Windows is excruciatingly far behind on using proper security practices to make sure it's HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS of users aren't affected. Whereas Apple can afford to be a little lax because it TENS OF MILLIONS of users don't exhibit those problems in such numbers.
That said, any PC is at risk if you don't manage it well. However, statistically, if I pick a machine that we *KNOW* to be infected, it's much more likely to be a Windows machine than any other.
"Mac is more secure" doesn't cover it in enough detail (i.e. what Mac, what model, what software, what user, what configuration, how well managed, what connection, what services, etc.") but it has a statistical truth. Your problem is not people telling lies, it's people failing to clarify their argument.
Opera treats this as an "insecure" page but doesn't warn you. It just doesn't show it as "secure" (with yellow, green or anything else for the padlock icon).
It is, in effect, an "insecure" page because of that a single missing SSL element, which is correct, but not worth shouting about because you should be checking for the padlock before you eve TYPE anything sensitive in. And it's a completely worthless site to have SSL on, except to bump up the system requirements.
To be honest, most data recovery from a hard drive is foiled by a simple zero anyway. All this "must wipe several times with certain patterns" thing is cobblers. Yes, if I was the military, I'd be doing it too, just to make sure, but no-one has yet provided convincing proof that "magnetic history" from drives can actually be recovered in anywhere near a cost-effective or reliable way.
Digital forensics consists of taking an image of the drive and seeing what you can get from that. Any half-decent implementation that encrypts, zeroes and deletes things properly is going to foil any digital forensics.
SSD's make it harder but digital forensics recovering useful data is next-to-impossible for the storage devices of anyone that actually *KNOWS* about PC's and wants to keep that info secret.
Correct. You have no idea how many people I've managed to drop in it by producing an email record of something. From large suppliers, to tiny little in-house spats, it's invaluable to have a record. Most of the time, I wouldn't have even *thought* of archiving that email specifically, but it ended up being crucial.
As a rule, I don't drop people in it, but when the finger points, some people will do ANYTHING to avoid the blame, even when they KNEW it was their fault. Rather than put their hands up, they'll think of a convincing excuse, point at someone else who they genuinely believe has NO way to prove otherwise (at least not any more) and hope the whole thing dies into an irresolvable mess.
When you have decades of email backup, after the first few times people STOP pointing at you because they've already made fools of themselves the first few times.
My record at the moment is about 5-years - that's the oldest email / computer record I've had to pull out to prove someone was lying. If they hadn't blamed me personally, for something their own fault, I wouldn't have cared. Once they do, having an email archive in Opera (so searchable even going back decades as-you-type, like Google autocomplete) is the best tool in the world.
"I'm sorry - *WHO* said this software was compatible with Windows 7 when we bought it? Me? Don't think so, as you can see from this 2005 email where I specifically ask you to check it as I didn't think it would be..." Or the other way round: "You said in 2005 that this software would be supported through Windows 7 and that's why we bought it. Look. I can quote you. That'll be one HUMUNGOUS refund please."
4/1 - 4/3 + 4/5 - 4/7 + 4/9 - 4/11 ..... to infinity.
There are also dozens of others, but that's probably the easiest to remember.
Utterly fake, obviously, but you can find nicer patterns in even the most horrible of PINs. Works well for door-entry too because you literally move you finger up, left, down, right, etc. on the keypad rather than remember what numbers you're actually pressing.
Works well until some bastard changes the keypad, though. :-)
Those are "techniques"? In that case I've been using "techniques" since I was born. I have a notoriously terrible "memory" but actually I can remember just about anything people ask me to.
I remember my card PINs through their differences between successive digits (up 2, down 1, up 6, etc.). With that and simple PINs that I'm allocated, it's very difficult *NOT* to find an obscure but simple pattern that then sticks in my memory. I'm a mathematician, I can find a pattern in any list of numbers you happen to give me if I try hard enough.
More likely, my hand remembers the pattern to type on a ATM keypad (which is annoying when all you have is a numpad because they are upside-down to each other, and even worse when you have to close your eyes and "tap out" the numbers in order to remember what they actually were)
I'm currently learning Italian. When a word doesn't come from a Latin base, linking it to its English analogue is tricky so it's simpler to make up some association than it is to remember the word. The Italian for "where" is "dove" (which is pronounced a little like "duvet"). Where's the dove? Under the duvet. I can't forget it or get it confused with when, why, how or who. When an Italian wants me to say "Where", I link dove, duvet and the image/sound of my girlfriend saying that word on the phone one day. (Still doesn't mean I can pronounce it properly, though!)
But this "memorise tons by associating with a bizarre image" thing is DECADES old. It doesn't work for me, and I've tried many times. I honestly have zero problems memorising huge strings of digits, or facts, or words, or images, or faces, or even sounds if I need to.
I can recite the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, and I can say pi to 32 decimal places without even blinking an eyelid, entirely from memory and the last time I *committed* them to memory was when I was 14/15 (yeah, I was a geeky kid). I could probably read out every line from the largest AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS that I ever had, too.
I can do the balcony scene because we were told to memorise it for English class and we would be performing it in front of the class the next day. I still know every word. I can remember pi because I went through a phase of writing computer programs to calculate it and it was simpler to have it stuck in my mind to see how fast they converged. I can do the AUTOEXEC.BAT because I wrote the thing and changed it every day for a year in order to get *anything* to run and ended up with a set of "perfect" configs. I can still remember whole conversations from primary school, and weird things like what my dad said to me on a trip I took when I was 8 and things like that.
It just matters more which type of learner you are - teachers have been teaching to a certain number of learning styles for DECADES - visual (has to see / imagine something to learn it), tactile (has to play / touch something to learn a principle), auditory (has to hear something to learn it), etc. and any decent teacher knows which of their kids are which style and how best to explain new problems to them.
The problem I have is that on every "learning styles" quiz that I've ever done I come out as every learning style evenly. So does my brother, who also went to university. That means that mere exposure to something is enough for me to learn it which means I pick up lots of useless information and my memory doesn't get any "special" exercise - it just does it's job and doesn't have to struggle for *anything* that I'm interested in. If I'm not interested in it, though, it struggles because I have to physically commit it to memory, but then it's there forever.
The problem with random memorisation is that I just don't care enough about it to memorise it specifically, and thus often miss the entire opportunity when the information is exposed to me of committing it to memory (e.g. people's face - I work in schools so I see thousands of unique faces every day and it's not worth me memorising even 1% of them, so I don't re
"Say what you will, the nice thing about Windows is that no matter how it is damaged and how bad the situation is, it will attempt to come back up in something resembling a working state. Probably not a known state. Probably not a secure state. But usually a workable state."
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
There speaks a person who's never rebooted a Windows server to have it suddenly decide to wipe out its registry, its AD, etc. and then throw an absolute fit. UNIX-alikes either do something, or tell you why they can't. At worst you get hideous warnings and a chance to fix the system.
Windows has a tendancy to mask the real problem whether that be an unfinished write (and thus a boot off a CD into recovery console to run a CHKDSK util which seems to just destroy whatever it feels like until it thinks order is restored and then reboot-and-cross-your-fingers to hope it wasn't anything too vital - because you won't ever know what it decided to wipe out),
I've seen Windows refuse to boot because a Java certificate inside a well-known UPS manufacturer's monitoring utility expired and it threw all the toys out of the pram - Windows honestly could not boot because of that problem and the server on the UPS totally destroyed the point of HAVING a UPS in the first place. In Linux? At worst your load average would go throw the roof and you could kill the process. In Windows, you couldn't even get to a logon dialog or start any remote services.
Windows doesn't take "damage" at all well - it boots or doesn't and if it does boot not everything will start (I routinely carry MS's WMI diagnostics utility because that service has a tendency to fall over on every Windows server I've ever seen and take lots of things with it (e.g. the ability to backup!)). And what *doesn't* start, you won't know about unless you check *everything* religiously.
UNIX-alikes log everything and throw fits if prerequisites are broken, in hugely verbose messages.
And don't even *breathe* when you see a Windows server "starting network connections".