Guys, proofread. Fact check. Communicate among yourselves. Read your own site. Spell-check ("Wiresless?").
This, right on the heels of the default-password crack... well, as the dandruff commercial used to say, "that little itch should be telling you something."
Fascinating how in ROT13, the T and G in The Giver exchange places, and the iv and er in Giver also each reverse, making the phrase only change by two letters; it's almost an anagram as much as a cipher.
No point, I just noticed that and found it interesting....
Dunno why I'm even bothering, but if you do some simple subtraction, you'd see by user numbers that 'emerson' has been around since basically day one, and Willowick is a newbie.
>after hearing a professor of English explaining it as being acceptable I am less bothered by it.:-)
Yah. I've heard a lot of things described as acceptable that I still think of as inelegant. Mostly it seems to me that if you have to split an infinitive, your sentence is constructed in an unclear fashion in the first place. But that's just me.
>elision: the act of dropping out or suppresing a letter or syllable in pronunciation.
>liaison: french phonetics. The joining of a final consonant (which would in pause or before a consonant be silent) to a following word beginning with a vowel or 'mute' h.
Le Doh! I thought I had those two straight. Been a few years since high school, it seems. I stand corrected.
>No-one has told me why USians use "of" in the way I mentioned though....:-)
At least it's not as bad as 'should of' or 'would of,' which I see in print from people that should know better, all the time....
>I suppose that it comes from the programming mindset - sort of analagous to avoiding overlapping tags in html?
I tend to think of it sort of programmatically, too -- precedence of operators... "" go outside punctuation, () inside, etc, etc.... In any case, programmatic language conventions ("asdf","foo","bar") are as inapplicable to English as German ones (compound words, capitalized common nouns, etc).
(*shrug) All of this stemming from me being anal-retentive Grammar Cop; I'm the one that corrects my friends when they split infinitives.
>Leaving aside that I ought to say "an unix" and not "a unix" that is.
Not necessarily -- the a/an rule is one of what the French call elison, which is a rule of spoken language, putting in a spare consonant between distinct vowel sounds in separate words. You wouldn't say 'an unix' any more than you'd say 'an yo-yo' -- conversely, 'an historical event' is correct for the same reason 'an isthmus' is.
And, yeah, the rules for quoting have been slipping (sadly) over the years, but the exceptions that are allowable have to do with changing the meaning of an actual quotation. In this case, quotation marks are being used to set off a word as interesting, not as an indicator of something someone actually said. So, the punctuation-inside rule should hold here.
I can't believe I'm still paying attention to this non-thread... (*grin)
http://archives.ne ohapsis.com/archives/bugtraq/2000-08/0457.html describes a format string vulnerability (and sample exploit code) in the locale system of most Unixes; OpenBSD appears not to be vulnerable, and FreeBSD is not remotely exploitable, but all other major Unixes appear to be vulnerable.
> They will start by assuming that the data is written along the rings, indicated by it's
> circular nature.
Hopefully not. DAT data are written diagonally in a helical scan fashion striped across the tape. Making an assupmtion based on the form factor of the medium is not the best idea. It's possible that a future civilization will simply not think about the idea of actually mechanically spinning a storage medium, and will be looking for holographic data created by a laser striking the pits. Circular doesn't help.
> All the specifics do not matter, as when you encrypt data, just moving it around and adding
> headers will not stop any decent cryptanalyst.
Recall, though, that most cryptographic analysis is performed based on known characteristics of the output -- frequency of letters in the target language, for instance.
"Decrypting" a CD is much more analagous to trying to crack a one-time pad cipher, where you don't have any idea what the plaintext looks like, nor whether the output is even textual in nature. For all the analyzing party knows, the CD itself is just a random string of bits to be USED as a one-time pad in some ancient cryptographic system, or a sound recording of white noise (roughly the same thing, actually...).
I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying that it seems to be a very short-sighted way of trying to communicate to the future, putting a lot of unnecessary obstacles in the way of archaeologists. If we're designing a project explicitly for time-capsule use, the fewest possible layers of abstraction would seem to be called for. IMHO.
This is one of those cases where digital media are the wrong answer to the question.
Consider these scenarios. 50,000 years from now, our descendants uncover a long-buried city. New York, let's say. They find many inscriptions carved into rock and marble and metal, and can recognize this as language and start to work on it. There's almost no abstraction -- visual symbols encoding meaning. A direct long-lasting representation of our words and thoughts. A difficult exercise, but one with clear and direct input data.
Up in space, space, however, another group of descendants finds an orbiting collection of CD media. What are they? There's no telling. Closer inspection reveals that the surfaces of the discs contain microscopic pits in ordered rows. Aha, the ancients have recorded something in binary on here. But the effort grinds to a halt, right there.
How do they even know what the pits represent? Is a pit a 0 and a flat space a 1? Or vice versa? Or is the disk encoded in that skip-bop format where a pit means flip-the-bit and a flat space means don't? Or vice versa? Or something altogether else? Does the bitstream start on the outside edge and read inward clockwise? Does it spiral from inside to outside edge, reading counter-clockwise? Where does it start? Where does it end?
And then, suppose they guess right and get past that part. Then they have have 0110101010010101010101001101101010101010101010... for days. What is it? Which bits of this are significant meaning, and which are meta meaning? Is there a format-specific header? How long is it and what does it mean? Are the data written into a filesystem, and if so, which parts are inodes or FAT tables or the like? How do they extract the actual significance from the housekeeping data?
And suppose again that they somehow guess correctly, or that it's all just written out as raw data, and the above questions are somehow moot. What format? ASCII? Unicode? Will the folks from the future know that we thought in terms of 8-bit bytes? Will they remember ASCII or UTF-8? Will there be endian issues? How will they know to try to read it as text, as opposed to JPG or MP3 or any of an arbitrarily huge number of other formats that may not have even been invented yet?
All of these layers of abstraction are taken care of for us by our digital toys, but people in the future will almost assuredly have no idea about the layout of the physical CDROM format and ASCII and ISO9660 and all of the layers and layers of stuff they'd have to weed through just to get to the actual LANGUAGE on the CD that we're wanting them to take the time to decode.
Somehow I'm still sold on the letters-carved-deep-into-rock encoding scheme as the best way to talk to the future. --
I don't think Russia's too worried about US invasion plans in this day and age; I suspect they lose most of their sleep over their much more populous neighbor to the south and east....
On a solar-system-wide scale, the Moon and the Earth are really quite close together, so a scheme where you start at the Moon to take advantage of the lower gravity, but return to the Earth to take advantage of atmospheric braking and water landings could be the best of all worlds, pun intended.
"Beggars are distinguished by the fact that instead of working for their money, they harass people who do in the hopes that they will be given money for nothing; an unmistakably negative thing." Again, I ask you to try begging for a day and then come tell me how it's not work just as hard as the work you do. Really. Unless you've tried it, you're just blowing hot air. I have, so I can talk. It's not 'nothing.' It's an act of profound debasing desperation, and it's HARD WORK.
"What does Kent do to justify you giving him money to buy food and drive up the price so another child starves in a 3rd-world country?" Sigh. I'm not sure how helping Kent eat makes third-world children starve, but if you want to do with the standard propaganda think-of-the-children heartstring tack, you're welcome to. What I know is that Kent shares stories with me, makes me laugh, is good company when I see him, and generally is a good person in bad times. That's justification enough for me. You might try judging people by some other marker than money. There's a whole world out there of really really excellent poor people that need no 'justification' to the likes of you.
"who has the potential to become self-supporting" The implication being that panhandlers don't have that potential? Ah, I see, if they had that potential, they'd get a haircut and have "proper" jobs, right? You need to get out more. Really. Stop working those 14-hour days and 7-day weeks for your own personal gain and go see how the other half REALLY lives.
"But it is not your public area to pollute" Hmmn. If it's public, I can do just about whatever I want that's legal. But, assuming your assertion is right, neither is it your public area to post "no jobless people here" signs and drive my friends away.
"Like feeding wild animals." No, it's like feeding hungry people. Dehumanization of panhandlers may make YOU feel good, but it's not helping the situation any.
"Maybe if she knew someone who was attacked by aggressive panhandlers" Does that make all panhandlers aggressive and dangerous? I suppose we should all avoid blacks, too, because I know someone that was beaten up by a black man. Oh, and don't forget those damned COMPUTER GEEKS. One of them cracked into my friend's website, so we should throw them all in jail, right? Bigotry is ugly.
"In a busy area with sympathetic people, a panhandler can often get over twice as much as he could earn at the kind of job he can get." You think begging isn't work, isn't a full-time job itself? Put down the TV remote and go try it one night. I did. It was excruciating. I was on the receiving end of more emotional and physical abuse that one evening than in the previous year of my life. It's hard work, with sporadic results. If you really think they're out there pulling down double minimum wage x 8 hours ($90 a day or so), you need to have your head examined.
"Whether panhandlers are con artists, drug addicts, or deranged lunatics, you don't want to encourage them." Cluestick: some of them, MOST of them, are _NONE_ of those things. Most are hungry, genuine people, like my friend Kent who works the Cala foods near my house. Some can't work due to physical ailments, but their VA check doesn't cover the cost of living, like my friend Robert who works in front of the Wherehouse up the street.
I suppose, though, it's just easier to sit in your climate-controlled house in front of your expensive computer and use your luxury dollars on ISP time to type up screeds trying to convince other well-off folks that there's an Untouchable Caste in society that should be feared and shunned. Yeah, that would be easier than actually doing something to help.
But you can count me out of the easier path. I'm off to Cala to get my nightly dinner stuff, and drop my change and maybe a spare buck or two with my friend Kent, and take a few minutes to hear whether his rent went up this month like he was worried about last week. Maybe I'll tell him about what you said; he likes a good laugh just as much as I do.
No, I stand by my analogy. You made the incorrect jump to copyright-infringing-music=morphine, which is not at all what I'm saying.
My analogy is that network-shared-music=morphine. Under some circumstances, it's legal, under others, it's not. And folks who sell/distribute it must therefore take great pains to ensure they're on the right side of the law.
This argument only holds up if Napster use CAUSES more sales. Really, all we know is that Napster users are also record buyers, but the arrow of causation could point the other way -- that record buyers are more likely to use Napster.
It could be shown that Napster users buy a more-than-average number of records in the first place, and that Napster is causing them to buy fewer than they would, although still more than average. Then Napster would be hurting potential sales.
I don't at all know what the truth of the matter is, but the stat that Napster users buy more music than the average consumer is interesting, but really doesn't at all speak to whether Napster use causes more or fewer sales. --
There are legitimate purposes for injectable morphine, but that doesn't mean that anyone who sets up shop to sell it should be allowed to.
Not that I'm taking a stand on RIAA versus Napster -- I'm just pointing out that your logic doesn't stand up. Having a legitimate purpose is not the same thing as being immune from prosecution.
Didn't we get an edict from on high that non-Linux-viewable trailers, specifically Quicktime ones, were no longer going to be considered in the submission queue?
The ironic part is that someone made this into a little Newton movie, complete with sound, available for free download...
Very very fun to see Palm Pilot owners' faces drop when I showed them a movie making fun of the Newton, on my MessagePad, playing with full motion and sound (albeit in 4-bit greyscale), back in 1997.... Got yr 200 MHz StrongARM lovin', right here.
Slashdot Mirror
>News flash: Nerds like to laugh, too.
Totally. So wake me up when something actually FUNNY gets posted.
--
OK, the previous article on this is STILL ON THE FRONT PAGE.
Guys, proofread. Fact check. Communicate among yourselves. Read your own site. Spell-check ("Wiresless?").
This, right on the heels of the default-password crack... well, as the dandruff commercial used to say, "that little itch should be telling you something."
--
>Gur Tvire
Fascinating how in ROT13, the T and G in The Giver exchange places, and the iv and er in Giver also each reverse, making the phrase only change by two letters; it's almost an anagram as much as a cipher.
No point, I just noticed that and found it interesting....
--
Umn.
Dunno why I'm even bothering, but if you do some simple subtraction, you'd see by user numbers that 'emerson' has been around since basically day one, and Willowick is a newbie.
Different folks. Don't confuse the two.
Thanks.
--
For a second, I thought we were going to have the biggest flame-fest in Slashdot history: I read that as "Akamai & Digital Island Patent CASH."
--
>after hearing a professor of English explaining it as being acceptable I am less bothered by it. :-)
:-)
Yah. I've heard a lot of things described as acceptable that I still think of as inelegant. Mostly it seems to me that if you have to split an infinitive, your sentence is constructed in an unclear fashion in the first place. But that's just me.
>elision: the act of dropping out or suppresing a letter or syllable in pronunciation.
>liaison: french phonetics. The joining of a final consonant (which would in pause or before a consonant be silent) to a following word beginning with a vowel or 'mute' h.
Le Doh! I thought I had those two straight. Been a few years since high school, it seems. I stand corrected.
>No-one has told me why USians use "of" in the way I mentioned though....
At least it's not as bad as 'should of' or 'would of,' which I see in print from people that should know better, all the time....
--
>I suppose that it comes from the programming mindset - sort of analagous to avoiding overlapping tags in html?
I tend to think of it sort of programmatically, too -- precedence of operators... "" go outside punctuation, () inside, etc, etc.... In any case, programmatic language conventions ("asdf","foo","bar") are as inapplicable to English as German ones (compound words, capitalized common nouns, etc).
(*shrug) All of this stemming from me being anal-retentive Grammar Cop; I'm the one that corrects my friends when they split infinitives.
>Leaving aside that I ought to say "an unix" and not "a unix" that is.
Not necessarily -- the a/an rule is one of what the French call elison, which is a rule of spoken language, putting in a spare consonant between distinct vowel sounds in separate words. You wouldn't say 'an unix' any more than you'd say 'an yo-yo' -- conversely, 'an historical event' is correct for the same reason 'an isthmus' is.
--
I think you mean "not the first."
And, yeah, the rules for quoting have been slipping (sadly) over the years, but the exceptions that are allowable have to do with changing the meaning of an actual quotation. In this case, quotation marks are being used to set off a word as interesting, not as an indicator of something someone actually said. So, the punctuation-inside rule should hold here.
I can't believe I'm still paying attention to this non-thread... (*grin)
--
>Emerson: telling moderators what to do isn't "Informative", it's "Anal Retentive"
The comma after "Informative" should go inside the quotation marks; also don't forget your closing punctuation.
--
Everyone brace yourselves for the standard barrage of really dorky BSOD-in-space jokes moderated up as funny.
--
You're not following Bugtraq closely enough then.
http://archives.ne ohapsis.com/archives/bugtraq/2000-08/0457.html describes a format string vulnerability (and sample exploit code) in the locale system of most Unixes; OpenBSD appears not to be vulnerable, and FreeBSD is not remotely exploitable, but all other major Unixes appear to be vulnerable.
This isn't FUD; the article is pretty dead-on.
--
> They will start by assuming that the data is written along the rings, indicated by it's
> circular nature.
Hopefully not. DAT data are written diagonally in a helical scan fashion striped across the tape. Making an assupmtion based on the form factor of the medium is not the best idea. It's possible that a future civilization will simply not think about the idea of actually mechanically spinning a storage medium, and will be looking for holographic data created by a laser striking the pits. Circular doesn't help.
> All the specifics do not matter, as when you encrypt data, just moving it around and adding
> headers will not stop any decent cryptanalyst.
Recall, though, that most cryptographic analysis is performed based on known characteristics of the output -- frequency of letters in the target language, for instance.
"Decrypting" a CD is much more analagous to trying to crack a one-time pad cipher, where you don't have any idea what the plaintext looks like, nor whether the output is even textual in nature. For all the analyzing party knows, the CD itself is just a random string of bits to be USED as a one-time pad in some ancient cryptographic system, or a sound recording of white noise (roughly the same thing, actually...).
I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm just saying that it seems to be a very short-sighted way of trying to communicate to the future, putting a lot of unnecessary obstacles in the way of archaeologists. If we're designing a project explicitly for time-capsule use, the fewest possible layers of abstraction would seem to be called for. IMHO.
--
This is one of those cases where digital media are the wrong answer to the question.
Consider these scenarios. 50,000 years from now, our descendants uncover a long-buried city. New York, let's say. They find many inscriptions carved into rock and marble and metal, and can recognize this as language and start to work on it. There's almost no abstraction -- visual symbols encoding meaning. A direct long-lasting representation of our words and thoughts. A difficult exercise, but one with clear and direct input data.
Up in space, space, however, another group of descendants finds an orbiting collection of CD media. What are they? There's no telling. Closer inspection reveals that the surfaces of the discs contain microscopic pits in ordered rows. Aha, the ancients have recorded something in binary on here. But the effort grinds to a halt, right there.
How do they even know what the pits represent? Is a pit a 0 and a flat space a 1? Or vice versa? Or is the disk encoded in that skip-bop format where a pit means flip-the-bit and a flat space means don't? Or vice versa? Or something altogether else? Does the bitstream start on the outside edge and read inward clockwise? Does it spiral from inside to outside edge, reading counter-clockwise? Where does it start? Where does it end?
And then, suppose they guess right and get past that part. Then they have have 0110101010010101010101001101101010101010101010... for days. What is it? Which bits of this are significant meaning, and which are meta meaning? Is there a format-specific header? How long is it and what does it mean? Are the data written into a filesystem, and if so, which parts are inodes or FAT tables or the like? How do they extract the actual significance from the housekeeping data?
And suppose again that they somehow guess correctly, or that it's all just written out as raw data, and the above questions are somehow moot. What format? ASCII? Unicode? Will the folks from the future know that we thought in terms of 8-bit bytes? Will they remember ASCII or UTF-8? Will there be endian issues? How will they know to try to read it as text, as opposed to JPG or MP3 or any of an arbitrarily huge number of other formats that may not have even been invented yet?
All of these layers of abstraction are taken care of for us by our digital toys, but people in the future will almost assuredly have no idea about the layout of the physical CDROM format and ASCII and ISO9660 and all of the layers and layers of stuff they'd have to weed through just to get to the actual LANGUAGE on the CD that we're wanting them to take the time to decode.
Somehow I'm still sold on the letters-carved-deep-into-rock encoding scheme as the best way to talk to the future.
--
I don't think Russia's too worried about US invasion plans in this day and age; I suspect they lose most of their sleep over their much more populous neighbor to the south and east....
--
On a solar-system-wide scale, the Moon and the Earth are really quite close together, so a scheme where you start at the Moon to take advantage of the lower gravity, but return to the Earth to take advantage of atmospheric braking and water landings could be the best of all worlds, pun intended.
--
"Beggars are distinguished by the fact that instead of working for their money, they harass people who do in the hopes that they will be given money for nothing; an unmistakably negative thing." Again, I ask you to try begging for a day and then come tell me how it's not work just as hard as the work you do. Really. Unless you've tried it, you're just blowing hot air. I have, so I can talk. It's not 'nothing.' It's an act of profound debasing desperation, and it's HARD WORK.
"What does Kent do to justify you giving him money to buy food and drive up the price so another child starves in a 3rd-world country?" Sigh. I'm not sure how helping Kent eat makes third-world children starve, but if you want to do with the standard propaganda think-of-the-children heartstring tack, you're welcome to. What I know is that Kent shares stories with me, makes me laugh, is good company when I see him, and generally is a good person in bad times. That's justification enough for me. You might try judging people by some other marker than money. There's a whole world out there of really really excellent poor people that need no 'justification' to the likes of you.
"who has the potential to become self-supporting" The implication being that panhandlers don't have that potential? Ah, I see, if they had that potential, they'd get a haircut and have "proper" jobs, right? You need to get out more. Really. Stop working those 14-hour days and 7-day weeks for your own personal gain and go see how the other half REALLY lives.
"But it is not your public area to pollute" Hmmn. If it's public, I can do just about whatever I want that's legal. But, assuming your assertion is right, neither is it your public area to post "no jobless people here" signs and drive my friends away.
--
Oh dear GOD, get off it.
"Like feeding wild animals." No, it's like feeding hungry people. Dehumanization of panhandlers may make YOU feel good, but it's not helping the situation any.
"Maybe if she knew someone who was attacked by aggressive panhandlers" Does that make all panhandlers aggressive and dangerous? I suppose we should all avoid blacks, too, because I know someone that was beaten up by a black man. Oh, and don't forget those damned COMPUTER GEEKS. One of them cracked into my friend's website, so we should throw them all in jail, right? Bigotry is ugly.
"In a busy area with sympathetic people, a panhandler can often get over twice as much as he could earn at the kind of job he can get." You think begging isn't work, isn't a full-time job itself? Put down the TV remote and go try it one night. I did. It was excruciating. I was on the receiving end of more emotional and physical abuse that one evening than in the previous year of my life. It's hard work, with sporadic results. If you really think they're out there pulling down double minimum wage x 8 hours ($90 a day or so), you need to have your head examined.
"Whether panhandlers are con artists, drug addicts, or deranged lunatics, you don't want to encourage them." Cluestick: some of them, MOST of them, are _NONE_ of those things. Most are hungry, genuine people, like my friend Kent who works the Cala foods near my house. Some can't work due to physical ailments, but their VA check doesn't cover the cost of living, like my friend Robert who works in front of the Wherehouse up the street.
I suppose, though, it's just easier to sit in your climate-controlled house in front of your expensive computer and use your luxury dollars on ISP time to type up screeds trying to convince other well-off folks that there's an Untouchable Caste in society that should be feared and shunned. Yeah, that would be easier than actually doing something to help.
But you can count me out of the easier path. I'm off to Cala to get my nightly dinner stuff, and drop my change and maybe a spare buck or two with my friend Kent, and take a few minutes to hear whether his rent went up this month like he was worried about last week. Maybe I'll tell him about what you said; he likes a good laugh just as much as I do.
--
No, I stand by my analogy. You made the incorrect jump to copyright-infringing-music=morphine, which is not at all what I'm saying.
My analogy is that network-shared-music=morphine. Under some circumstances, it's legal, under others, it's not. And folks who sell/distribute it must therefore take great pains to ensure they're on the right side of the law.
Which Napster hasn't.
--
This argument only holds up if Napster use CAUSES more sales. Really, all we know is that Napster users are also record buyers, but the arrow of causation could point the other way -- that record buyers are more likely to use Napster.
It could be shown that Napster users buy a more-than-average number of records in the first place, and that Napster is causing them to buy fewer than they would, although still more than average. Then Napster would be hurting potential sales.
I don't at all know what the truth of the matter is, but the stat that Napster users buy more music than the average consumer is interesting, but really doesn't at all speak to whether Napster use causes more or fewer sales.
--
There are legitimate purposes for injectable morphine, but that doesn't mean that anyone who sets up shop to sell it should be allowed to.
Not that I'm taking a stand on RIAA versus Napster -- I'm just pointing out that your logic doesn't stand up. Having a legitimate purpose is not the same thing as being immune from prosecution.
--
Good to know that story submissions basically rely on a crapshoot of which editor happens to see them first... (*sigh)
--
Didn't we get an edict from on high that non-Linux-viewable trailers, specifically Quicktime ones, were no longer going to be considered in the submission queue?
--
The ironic part is that someone made this into a little Newton movie, complete with sound, available for free download...
Very very fun to see Palm Pilot owners' faces drop when I showed them a movie making fun of the Newton, on my MessagePad, playing with full motion and sound (albeit in 4-bit greyscale), back in 1997.... Got yr 200 MHz StrongARM lovin', right here.
--
Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you... just one word.
Benjamin Braddock: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin Braddock: Yes, sir I am.
Mr. McGuire: "Plasma."
--
Ah, yes, I wouldn't have thought of that. A very good point. See? See, Mr. Original Poster? I'm _helping_ starving Somalians by helping SETI@home....
(*grin)
--