No, the random text your put in can be random or not.
Yes, I'm aware of that. I didn't make myself clear. The prompt that used to appear as part of the config process for the openssl package asked you to press a bunch of random keys in order to help seed the random number generator. The prompt was very similar to whats described on this page:
I remember installing openSSL on debian long ago and being prompted to type some random text or to move the mouse while the key was generated. More recently, when I installed debian or ubuntu, it just magically generated a key. I guess that was the part that was removed.
I would argue that to qualify as 'alive', an organism should be self-sufficient at the very least.
I don't think that works. You have just created a definition that lists most slashdotters (who live in their parents' basement) as not alive. Or, on a more serious note, your definition suggests that parasites aren't alive. I disagree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life#Definitions
If you look at the wiki definition, an embryo meets all of that. You might quibble and say that an embryo can't reproduce - but in truth, it can't reproduce *yet* and if left alone it will develop into something that can reproduce. If you get hung up on the "it can't reproduce" issue then my response will be, you have just created a definition in which prepubescent children aren't alive.
This is ridiculous. Clearly, an embryo is alive. Just like a hair follicle is alive. Just like a hair follicle is human life. This isn't an argument against abortion, it's just an argument for honesty. If you (not you in particular, just in general) want to support legal abortion, you can do it without lying and living in a fantasy world where you say that embryos aren't human live.
You can't test anything about religion, it's indoctrination.
I'm an atheist, and even I know this statement isn't true. Religion works because our brains are predisposed to make us seek out those kind of group identities (read Dawkins' book, the God Delusion).
The point is, religion works. Note that I didn't say religion was true. Religion works. They tell you that if you follow along you'll feel good - you'll feel like you belong. And for the people who can suspend their disbelief, whatta-you-know! they do feel good!
That's something that can (and has) been tested and proven time and again, through the process of cultural selection. Religion works. It is repeatable. It does what it's supposed to do: it makes people feel good.
So long as we atheists cling to the delusion that religious people are stupid, we are going to make little progress. They aren't stupid. They feel something. Their minds make it real. You don't make someone an atheist by telling them they're stupid, because that simply isn't true.
I have no design sense, so I usually have an artsy person sketch up what they want (they do it in photoshop a lot of times). Then I do a prototype in bare HTML/CSS and make sure it validates against the strict DTD and renders correctly in the big five browsers (and I still test with IE6 too). They I write the code to make it dynamic.
This is a winning strategy. Everybody should do it this way. WYSIWYG editors are never going to work until every browser uses the same rendering engine.
LOL. I guess you're the netcraft bot. Languages don't live or die based on what a bunch of fanboys with no actual programming skill put on their resume. **everybody** claims that know C++ but very few people do. By contrast, **nobody** bothers to put coldfusion on their resume unless they actually have experience with it. In other words, the numbers for the sexy (meaning, talked about on slashdot) languages are way over inflated, and the numbers for other languages are actually more accurate. Coldfusion is dying the way Linux is dying - in other words, just because you personally can go your whole day in a microsoft shop hearing about how awesome windows is, that doesn't mean that linux doesn't exist or isn't superior.
Has anyone ever heard of a SQL injection vulnerability in a Coldfusion app? I know some smartass is going to say, "that's because nobody uses it" but that's not true. If there are a million ASP apps out there and 500,000 SQL injection vulnerabilities, then there have to be at least 100,000 coldfusion sites. Show me the 50,000 coldfusion SQL injections. Or show me 10,000, or 5,000 or even just 1.
I have some experience with coldfusion and it is my opinion that a SQL injection vulnerability is pretty difficult to create even when you intend to create one. The reason is because, unlike every other language (java, ruby, PHP, etc.) coldfusion doesn't have this idea that you take any old random string and pass it off to the ODBC. Instead, you build the query inside special tags, and the interpreter can keep an eye out for errant quotes.
a SQL injection vulnerability in coldfusion will involve a special function, preserveSingleQuotes() that you only need in very rare circumstances.
So maybe everyone should switch to a safer language, eh?
Chlorophyll works by means of Resonance Energy Transfer and that's also a quantum effect - though admittedly, not as cool as the bird navigation thing.
I'd be willing to bet that this didn't evolve in birds. A lot of animals perform long distance migrations. In fact, I bet that this sense is found in most animals. We apes are probably the exception. We probably lost it while swinging from trees. But the genes are probably still there. So, one day you might be able to turn this on in your children.
Looks like you could use some enlightenment yourself. here's their top 10 list. According to them, the worst spammer is Russian. Number 2 is in the Ukraine. You have to go all the way down to number 10 before you see anyone in the US.
Most of the world's spam ORIGINATES in the USA, is PAID FOR by USA companies.
I disagree. Most of the world's spam may be sent by zombie computers in the US, but it originates in countries like Russia, where the owners of those large bot-nets reside. And the spam isn't being sent by US companies. Stock pump-and-dump schemes seem to come mostly from Europe.
The reason so much spam comes from the US is simply that we have so many idiots with zombie computers over here. The "owners" of those zombie nets are not in the US.
Thanks for posting that. Now I feel like going back through the thread and finding anyone who posted, "har har NASA kant dew math!" or "har har, it's a german kid because we don't teach math in the US!!" and replying with a link to your post and the word "owned"
People are *incredibly* quick to assume NASA is wrong.
even tiny velocity changes (well below 1m/s) had huge effects on the rest of the trajectory.
Yes, but a strike from a satellite will impart certainly less than 1mm/s. And you're talking about your senior design program. This is a schoolboy we're talking about here. I doubt he has bested you.
I remain skeptical of this story. I'd like to see it *researched* and reported by a reputable source. I'd like to see it posted on a NASA website. So far, what I've seen is that what amounts to a tabloid posted the story and some other news agencies have parroted it, apparently without doing any original research.
blaming uranium deposits on vague forces that we don't really understand
That's an odd statement. Who said that these forces are vague and not well understood?? Plate tectonics is very well understood. How do you think geologists find mineral deposits? Do you think they just randomly dig a hole and hope for the best?? No. They look for geological features that form or aggregate certain minerals. I learned this in grade school. Didn't you??
You might want to have a look at this wiki article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ore_genesis
whatever causes lumps of mostly iron to form so purely might also cause lumps of mostly heavier metals to form in other places in the solar system.
Wow. You're really clueless. Iron deposits are the result of cyanobacteria. Without cyanobacteria, any atmospheric oxygen will oxidize out and you'll end up with a red planet, like mars. I don't think there are cyanobacteria on asteroids.
When I first replied to you, I thought you knew what you were talking about, but now I see that you don't. I'm all in favor of mining asteroids, I'm just wondering if it's going to be done with earth-like mines where you dig in an area of high concentration, or if it's going to be a matter of sifting through the entire asteroid. And you seem to have no idea what I'm talking about.
You mentioned mining fissionable materials. See, on earth, when we mine something, we go to a place where that something is concentrated.
My question is, do asteroids have concentrations? Could you survey an asteroid and find a spot with extra uranium? I suspect that plate techtonics and biological activity is needed to concentrate anything. As a result, I suspect that the uranium in an asteroid is mixed evenly throughout the asteroid.
That means that to mine uranium from an asteroid, you would have to tear the entire asteroid apart. It'd be like mining He3 from ocean water. Sure, there is a lot more He3 in Earth's ocean than there is on the moon. But it's *still* cheaper to fly to the moon and get it, because on the moon it is concentrated on the surface. To get it from ocean water you would have to process many thousands of tons in order to get a single atom.
So that was my question. You answered by pointing out the mineral wealth of asteroids. I'm aware of that. I'm asking if that wealth is concentrated or diffuse within a given asteroid
Some vapor deposition for making mirrors but that's about it.
Just to lend some support to your point: the mirrors are actually aluminum, not silver. It takes a lot of energy to extract aluminum from rock, hardly any to recycle it, but I'm not aware of any pollution created by simply forming it into mirrors.
Do asteroids have concentrations of materials - or maybe nobody yet knows the answer to that question? I was under the impression that the reason we find concentrated deposits (veins of iron ore for example) on Earth is because of plate tectonics or biological processes. I think that, while an asteroid might have a lot of fissionable material in total, it's scattered about evenly - an atom here and an atom there.
But I'm not sure. You seem to know, so I'm asking.
So if your brain is hardwired to tell you that killing is wrong, then the idea of free will, is a little less free.
Well, our brains are hardwired to make us want to reproduce, but many people choose not to.
If you believe in determinism, then you respond to that with "well, those people's brains are wired differently, therefore they don't have a choice, it was determined that they should choose not to reproduce."
This is why these "debates" are so frustrating. I want (I demand that) the people who believe in determinism specify an experiment that would falsify their belief. Let's imagine a hypothetical being with free will. Show me an experiment that proves it has free will.
Because I can think of an experiment that determinists would use to prove there is no free will! We put our hypothetical free-will being under a heavy weight that has a mechanism with a clock and a button. If the clock counts down to zero then the weight will be dropped, killing the free-will being. But if they push the button, the clock will stop.
Do this experiment 100 times and every time, the being will push the button. See? See there? They don't have free will!
Except that they do.
The purpose of this exercise is to show that it's possible to design an experiment that appears to show determinism, even when we've stipulated that there is a free will component. If you constrain a person enough - if you give them only one choice, then you shouldn't be surprised that they choose that choice.
The worst possible thing you could do is eliminate the visible problems and pretend that means you have a good PC on which to do work.
This is *so* true. You know what, I once saw a system administrator respond to a known compromise (discovered by the presence of drop-site files) by "deleting the files the hacker uploaded and installing all windows patches"
There are just so many things wrong with that sentence that I don't even know where to start. "How did the hackers get in?" "I'm not sure, but I deleted their files." *sigh* The machine was discovered compromised again some time later. In reality, it was never uncompromised.
Why does spam work? Who are these stupid people and why do they click? Also, if you get 80 spam a day for the same fake product, why would pick one at random and say, "der, I think I'll go buy this!"
Can someone please tell me why?
I wish some news reporter would send out a billion spam but then, instead of taking money from the people who click, contact them and do an interview. I want to know who these people are and what the hell they are thinking.
I'm sure slashdotters can suggest some good educational games. My favorite is Oribter, it's a spaceflight simulator, but based on real physics. Playing it teaches kids about the scale of the universe, the energies involved in space travel, general math, and of course, orbital mechanics.
Well, if you're smart, you create an abstraction layer between your business logic code and the database code. Then, if you ever need to get away from google, you just have to extract the data somehow, import it into some other database, and switch out the database layer.
And when I say "smart" I mean "unrealistically idealistic"
Slashdot Mirror
No, the random text your put in can be random or not.
Yes, I'm aware of that. I didn't make myself clear. The prompt that used to appear as part of the config process for the openssl package asked you to press a bunch of random keys in order to help seed the random number generator. The prompt was very similar to whats described on this page:
https://search.thawte.com/support/ssl-digital-certificates/index?page=content&id=SO2632
which says:
Generating 1024 bits of randomness:
Generating 1024 random bits based on measuring the time interval between your keystrokes. Please enter random text on your keyboard.
I remember installing openSSL on debian long ago and being prompted to type some random text or to move the mouse while the key was generated. More recently, when I installed debian or ubuntu, it just magically generated a key. I guess that was the part that was removed.
If the world is destroyed by religion-based warfare in the next 50 years that's a pretty good definition of "not-working" for the species.
So, by your logic, if the world is destroyed by science-based weapons in the next 50 years that's a pretty good indication that science "doesn't work"
hmm. I don't think I agree with that.
I would argue that to qualify as 'alive', an organism should be self-sufficient at the very least.
I don't think that works. You have just created a definition that lists most slashdotters (who live in their parents' basement) as not alive. Or, on a more serious note, your definition suggests that parasites aren't alive. I disagree.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life#Definitions
If you look at the wiki definition, an embryo meets all of that. You might quibble and say that an embryo can't reproduce - but in truth, it can't reproduce *yet* and if left alone it will develop into something that can reproduce. If you get hung up on the "it can't reproduce" issue then my response will be, you have just created a definition in which prepubescent children aren't alive.
This is ridiculous. Clearly, an embryo is alive. Just like a hair follicle is alive. Just like a hair follicle is human life. This isn't an argument against abortion, it's just an argument for honesty. If you (not you in particular, just in general) want to support legal abortion, you can do it without lying and living in a fantasy world where you say that embryos aren't human live.
You can't test anything about religion, it's indoctrination.
I'm an atheist, and even I know this statement isn't true. Religion works because our brains are predisposed to make us seek out those kind of group identities (read Dawkins' book, the God Delusion).
The point is, religion works. Note that I didn't say religion was true. Religion works. They tell you that if you follow along you'll feel good - you'll feel like you belong. And for the people who can suspend their disbelief, whatta-you-know! they do feel good!
That's something that can (and has) been tested and proven time and again, through the process of cultural selection. Religion works. It is repeatable. It does what it's supposed to do: it makes people feel good.
So long as we atheists cling to the delusion that religious people are stupid, we are going to make little progress. They aren't stupid. They feel something. Their minds make it real. You don't make someone an atheist by telling them they're stupid, because that simply isn't true.
I find that hand-coding works for HTML/CSS
+1 from me too.
I have no design sense, so I usually have an artsy person sketch up what they want (they do it in photoshop a lot of times). Then I do a prototype in bare HTML/CSS and make sure it validates against the strict DTD and renders correctly in the big five browsers (and I still test with IE6 too). They I write the code to make it dynamic.
This is a winning strategy. Everybody should do it this way. WYSIWYG editors are never going to work until every browser uses the same rendering engine.
coldfusion is dead or dying.
LOL. I guess you're the netcraft bot. Languages don't live or die based on what a bunch of fanboys with no actual programming skill put on their resume. **everybody** claims that know C++ but very few people do. By contrast, **nobody** bothers to put coldfusion on their resume unless they actually have experience with it. In other words, the numbers for the sexy (meaning, talked about on slashdot) languages are way over inflated, and the numbers for other languages are actually more accurate. Coldfusion is dying the way Linux is dying - in other words, just because you personally can go your whole day in a microsoft shop hearing about how awesome windows is, that doesn't mean that linux doesn't exist or isn't superior.
Has anyone ever heard of a SQL injection vulnerability in a Coldfusion app? I know some smartass is going to say, "that's because nobody uses it" but that's not true. If there are a million ASP apps out there and 500,000 SQL injection vulnerabilities, then there have to be at least 100,000 coldfusion sites. Show me the 50,000 coldfusion SQL injections. Or show me 10,000, or 5,000 or even just 1.
I have some experience with coldfusion and it is my opinion that a SQL injection vulnerability is pretty difficult to create even when you intend to create one. The reason is because, unlike every other language (java, ruby, PHP, etc.) coldfusion doesn't have this idea that you take any old random string and pass it off to the ODBC. Instead, you build the query inside special tags, and the interpreter can keep an eye out for errant quotes.
a SQL injection vulnerability in coldfusion will involve a special function, preserveSingleQuotes() that you only need in very rare circumstances.
So maybe everyone should switch to a safer language, eh?
158 billion hours of digital video
or 18 million years of porn.
Chlorophyll works by means of Resonance Energy Transfer and that's also a quantum effect - though admittedly, not as cool as the bird navigation thing.
I'd be willing to bet that this didn't evolve in birds. A lot of animals perform long distance migrations. In fact, I bet that this sense is found in most animals. We apes are probably the exception. We probably lost it while swinging from trees. But the genes are probably still there. So, one day you might be able to turn this on in your children.
Looks like you could use some enlightenment yourself. here's their top 10 list. According to them, the worst spammer is Russian. Number 2 is in the Ukraine. You have to go all the way down to number 10 before you see anyone in the US.
Most of the world's spam ORIGINATES in the USA, is PAID FOR by USA companies.
I disagree. Most of the world's spam may be sent by zombie computers in the US, but it originates in countries like Russia, where the owners of those large bot-nets reside. And the spam isn't being sent by US companies. Stock pump-and-dump schemes seem to come mostly from Europe.
The reason so much spam comes from the US is simply that we have so many idiots with zombie computers over here. The "owners" of those zombie nets are not in the US.
Thanks for posting that. Now I feel like going back through the thread and finding anyone who posted, "har har NASA kant dew math!" or "har har, it's a german kid because we don't teach math in the US!!" and replying with a link to your post and the word "owned"
People are *incredibly* quick to assume NASA is wrong.
even tiny velocity changes (well below 1m/s) had huge effects on the rest of the trajectory.
Yes, but a strike from a satellite will impart certainly less than 1mm/s. And you're talking about your senior design program. This is a schoolboy we're talking about here. I doubt he has bested you.
I remain skeptical of this story. I'd like to see it *researched* and reported by a reputable source. I'd like to see it posted on a NASA website. So far, what I've seen is that what amounts to a tabloid posted the story and some other news agencies have parroted it, apparently without doing any original research.
I think this story is a hoax.
blaming uranium deposits on vague forces that we don't really understand
That's an odd statement. Who said that these forces are vague and not well understood?? Plate tectonics is very well understood. How do you think geologists find mineral deposits? Do you think they just randomly dig a hole and hope for the best?? No. They look for geological features that form or aggregate certain minerals. I learned this in grade school. Didn't you??
You might want to have a look at this wiki article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ore_genesis
whatever causes lumps of mostly iron to form so purely might also cause lumps of mostly heavier metals to form in other places in the solar system.
Wow. You're really clueless. Iron deposits are the result of cyanobacteria. Without cyanobacteria, any atmospheric oxygen will oxidize out and you'll end up with a red planet, like mars. I don't think there are cyanobacteria on asteroids.
When I first replied to you, I thought you knew what you were talking about, but now I see that you don't. I'm all in favor of mining asteroids, I'm just wondering if it's going to be done with earth-like mines where you dig in an area of high concentration, or if it's going to be a matter of sifting through the entire asteroid. And you seem to have no idea what I'm talking about.
I think you misunderstand my question.
You mentioned mining fissionable materials. See, on earth, when we mine something, we go to a place where that something is concentrated.
My question is, do asteroids have concentrations? Could you survey an asteroid and find a spot with extra uranium? I suspect that plate techtonics and biological activity is needed to concentrate anything. As a result, I suspect that the uranium in an asteroid is mixed evenly throughout the asteroid.
That means that to mine uranium from an asteroid, you would have to tear the entire asteroid apart. It'd be like mining He3 from ocean water. Sure, there is a lot more He3 in Earth's ocean than there is on the moon. But it's *still* cheaper to fly to the moon and get it, because on the moon it is concentrated on the surface. To get it from ocean water you would have to process many thousands of tons in order to get a single atom.
So that was my question. You answered by pointing out the mineral wealth of asteroids. I'm aware of that. I'm asking if that wealth is concentrated or diffuse within a given asteroid
Some vapor deposition for making mirrors but that's about it.
Just to lend some support to your point: the mirrors are actually aluminum, not silver. It takes a lot of energy to extract aluminum from rock, hardly any to recycle it, but I'm not aware of any pollution created by simply forming it into mirrors.
mine heavy asteroids for fissionable materials
Do asteroids have concentrations of materials - or maybe nobody yet knows the answer to that question? I was under the impression that the reason we find concentrated deposits (veins of iron ore for example) on Earth is because of plate tectonics or biological processes. I think that, while an asteroid might have a lot of fissionable material in total, it's scattered about evenly - an atom here and an atom there.
But I'm not sure. You seem to know, so I'm asking.
So if your brain is hardwired to tell you that killing is wrong, then the idea of free will, is a little less free.
Well, our brains are hardwired to make us want to reproduce, but many people choose not to.
If you believe in determinism, then you respond to that with "well, those people's brains are wired differently, therefore they don't have a choice, it was determined that they should choose not to reproduce."
This is why these "debates" are so frustrating. I want (I demand that) the people who believe in determinism specify an experiment that would falsify their belief. Let's imagine a hypothetical being with free will. Show me an experiment that proves it has free will.
Because I can think of an experiment that determinists would use to prove there is no free will! We put our hypothetical free-will being under a heavy weight that has a mechanism with a clock and a button. If the clock counts down to zero then the weight will be dropped, killing the free-will being. But if they push the button, the clock will stop.
Do this experiment 100 times and every time, the being will push the button. See? See there? They don't have free will!
Except that they do.
The purpose of this exercise is to show that it's possible to design an experiment that appears to show determinism, even when we've stipulated that there is a free will component. If you constrain a person enough - if you give them only one choice, then you shouldn't be surprised that they choose that choice.
Every time this comes up, the "debate" goes the same way. People argue back and forth without ever actually defining what they are arguing about.
The worst possible thing you could do is eliminate the visible problems and pretend that means you have a good PC on which to do work.
This is *so* true. You know what, I once saw a system administrator respond to a known compromise (discovered by the presence of drop-site files) by "deleting the files the hacker uploaded and installing all windows patches"
There are just so many things wrong with that sentence that I don't even know where to start. "How did the hackers get in?" "I'm not sure, but I deleted their files." *sigh* The machine was discovered compromised again some time later. In reality, it was never uncompromised.
Reinstall. Always reinstall.
WHO IS CLICKING ON THE LINKS IN THESE EMAILS?
Why does spam work? Who are these stupid people and why do they click? Also, if you get 80 spam a day for the same fake product, why would pick one at random and say, "der, I think I'll go buy this!"
Can someone please tell me why?
I wish some news reporter would send out a billion spam but then, instead of taking money from the people who click, contact them and do an interview. I want to know who these people are and what the hell they are thinking.
Well, they made the switch from PPC to IA. If PPC becomes cheaper and faster, they could probably make the switch back.
I'm sure slashdotters can suggest some good educational games. My favorite is Oribter, it's a spaceflight simulator, but based on real physics. Playing it teaches kids about the scale of the universe, the energies involved in space travel, general math, and of course, orbital mechanics.
http://orbit.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/orbit.html
Well, if you're smart, you create an abstraction layer between your business logic code and the database code. Then, if you ever need to get away from google, you just have to extract the data somehow, import it into some other database, and switch out the database layer.
And when I say "smart" I mean "unrealistically idealistic"