I know the best way to learn to use Vim is to use it every day.
That's the only way. Getting to like vi (or vim) requires that you damage your brain, and a tool to do that is already to hand - vi. After using it every day for a while, it will seem quite natural to you that the letter "l" is the command to move the cursor to the right.
The total number of victims is used, without regard to whether these are civilian or military deaths. Soldiers operating against terrorists are at much higher risk than the general population
It also includes "members of paramilitary groups" - broadly speaking, 2 different gangs of terrorists (though of course each group would claim that only the other group were terrorists), some of whom were killed while conducting terrorist attacks
So I think that the number of "civilians" killed (excluding the above groups) is more relevant. This number is given in Wikipedia as 1857. Giving a chance of about 0.006% of being killed by terrorism in a lifetime.
For comparison with chances of dying from a range of other causes, see here. For example, an American has about a 1.3% chance of dying by suicide.
If it's a choice between giving up civil liberties to the government, and putting up with a risk of dying because of some terrorist attack, I'll take the risk of being killed by terrorists, thanks.
If he was smart, half his assets should be in a Swiss bank account
Swiss banking secrecy does not apply to someone convicted of a crime (in any country), if the deed would also have been a crime under Swiss law. (And what this guy did would definitely meet that requirement.)
There is also some special agreement between Switzerland and the US which AFAIK waives banking secrecy for US citizens and US green-card holders anyway, to some degree. I don't know the details but I know that when a US citizen opens an account with a Swiss bank, he/she has to sign a bunch of forms agreeing to waive certain secrecy protections. Your government protecting you against those nasty Swiss:-)
Research reports are only as good as the work that goes into them.
I stopped reading this one when I reached the bit where it says:
SCO, a small Swiss-based "vulture" firm
Goodness knows where they got this "Swiss-based" nonsense. SCO's web site doesn't even
list Switzerland among the countries where it has a sales office!
You take a straightforward, uncontroversial statement (Shuttleworth's blog entry) that practically everyone agrees with. Then you publish a headline saying there's a "conflict", and pretend there's a huge row going on.
Pretty soon you've got a heated argument going on, mostly between people who haven't read the statement that allegedly started it all.
What does it all prove? That Slashdot isn't "stuff that matters" any more, it's stuff that draws mass readership. Just what we were trying to get away from when we first started reading Slashdot...
Telemarketers though, I have to choose between getting up during dinner / sleeping to answer the phone or dealing with the damn thing ringing every 5 minutes.
Another possibility is to leave your phone permanently connected to an answering machine. The message tells the caller to communicate with you by email.
You can take it off the machine if you are expecting a specific call.
I'd guess from your post that you would feel uncomfortable with this solution - you may feel that if someone wants to be able to reach you urgently, they should be able to do so. I'm just pointing out that this is your choice.
How is this different from any other product?
on
Crypto Snake Oil
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Products that implement cryptography are probably credence goods. It requires expensive and uncommon skills to verify that data is really being protected by the use of cryptography, and most people cannot easily distinguish between very weak and very strong cryptography.
Can you distinguish, by inspection, between a reliable automobile and a piece of junk that will barely last 2 years? I certainly can't. So I rely on reviews by people I trust when I buy a new car.
In the field of cryptography there are several people who have written peer-reviewed books about cryptography, are trusted in the community, and who occasionally review products. Bruce Schneier is one (there are others, use Google, this is not mean to be a puff for Schneier or his company).
because the reviewer does not understand the concept and is not willing to spend time understanding it.
The SIGGRAPH reviewers are highly competent, and within their time constraints, thorough (the process is described here). If they don't understand the concept in your paper, maybe you didn't explain it clearly enough.
The purpose of publishing a paper is not to boost the authors' egos. It's to convey ideas to other people. A paper which does not communicate concepts clearly does not deserve to be published.
Talk to any student about the price of the college textbooks, and you're likely to hear similar complaints
I wonder if the person who wrote that has talked to enough students.
On my desk is the 3rd edition of "Classical Electrodynamics", by J. D. Jackson. This title has been the standard text for advanced classical electromagnetism for about 40 years. The 2nd edition came out in 1974, and the 3rd edition (the latest) in 1998.
The book is a sturdy hardback, designed for decades of use. I still use it occasionally, and I have a PhD in Physics. It's priced at $97 direct from Amazon, or "Used and new from $55" from Amazon's resellers. This is cheap for such a book.
Any student who thinks he/she can afford an iPod, but not a book like this, has got seriously screwed-up priorities.
The real problem is that Iran is not letting international inspectors see their installations. Remember what happened to Iraq in a similar case?
Actually no, I don't remember any similar case in Iraq.
In January and February 2003, Iraq was cooperating with UN inspectors. UN inspections were not stopped by Iraq, they were stopped because the Bush Administration wanted to go to war, which they did in March 2003.
I'm a developer. I develop for Linux (actually for the GNU/Linux environment; I'm not a kernel developer) because I value programming freedom. I don't care a rat's ass for "market share". Why would I? I get the same amount of money, $0.00, for my apps whether they're used by one person or 10 million people.
The phrase "the iPod generation" means to me a bunch of kids who are pure consumers. They produce nothing I want. I despise their sheep-like following of fashion, I despise their inability to think for themselves, and I despise their taste in music. To consider giving up any part of my programming freedom to please these people is absurd.
No, you do a meet-in-the-middle attack, which is basically 2^64 in complexity if you're using two 2^64 keys.
There are some optimizations that can be done, but the basic idea is this: You start with one ciphertext block and its corresponding known plaintext.
Huh? The plaintext is not known. If it were, there'd be nothing to do.
Possibly you are thinking of a known-plaintext attack aimed at recovering the keys. That's not the problem being discussed.
Have you ever read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck?
It was written in 1939, but set in the 1920's. The Joad kids lived on a farm all their life and have never seen a 'real' toilet and when they flush one,
Have you ever read the post you were replying to? It said, and I quote, "a toilet seat, which arguably has been around since Roman times." The toilet seat has definitely been around since Roman times - I have seen remains of Roman public toilets in the ruins of Ephesus and they surely exist in other places too.
It is well known, and irrelevant, that the flush toilet was not widespread until the 19th century.
Well, if you want one, why haven't you written one?
Seriously, most developers choose not to spend their time developing for what you correctly describe as "decades-old display technology". (I'm a developer, by the way.) I can't speak for all developers, but personally, I don't get much of a kick out of developing something that I will never use myself, that will have very few users anyway, and that will have fewer users every year.
Now, if you really, really want a good text-based browser and you're not a developer yourself, you can get others to develop one by paying them to do it. There are web sites which will help you to find people, for example GetAFreelancer.com (Google will find others).
If, as I suspect, you don't want one enough to pay for it with your money, don't be surprised that others aren't willing to pay for it with their time.
And in a flash 22000 Indiana students can't use websites using Flash.
Of course they can see Flash animations. Personally, I find more than 95% of Flash animations on websites to be a waste of time and bandwidth, and currently disable Flash, but there are several Flash plugins for Linux, including one from Adobe.
The belief that "education does all" is the kind of belief you have before you see enough students, and especially, before you have children. After that, you know very well that kids are born with very definite personalities and abilities
Correct, insightful, and an explanation of why so many slashdotters hold that erroneous belief. (Note to moderators: that's not meant to be funny. Mod up the parent to this post, not this one.)
There has been a lot of progress, but as soon as a problem in AI is solved, that problem is re-classified as "not AI". Thus, although a lot of AI problems have been solved, there are no solved AI problems. (If that seems nonsensical to you, re-read the sentence preceding it.)
An example is the problem of playing a good game of chess. 50 years ago, this was definitely seen as a problem in AI. Now it is solved - we have chess programs that play about as well as the current World Chess Champion. But it is not seen as "AI".
Just because the authorities say they uncovered the plot by a wiretap, doesn't mean it's true.
The most likely way they got the info was by infiltrating the groups likely to organize plots. It sounds too much like James Bond, but it is in fact one of the ways the Brits countered the threat of IRA terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s. When you get information from agents, you always deny the existence of the agents to protect them, and say you got the information from somewhere else. The job agents do is dangerous enough - telling the enemy that they definitely have a spy in their midst makes it even more dangerous.
Having got the names/locations of some plot members through agents, the Brits probably used precisely targeted wiretaps to get confirmation and evidence they could use in a trial.
Actually, no, none of these really benefit from "truly random numbers"
A random number generator is the best way to generate good cryptographic keys. Pseudo-random numbers are not good enough, in fact that is the commonest kind of "snake oil" in the encryption world. See Bruce Schneier's site for examples.
A very long random sequence can be used as a one-time pad, giving completely unbreakable encryption if the sequence is truly random.
The correct conclusion is not that virtualization is better done entirely in software, but that current hardware assists to virtualization are badly designed. As the complete article points out, the hardware features need to be designed to support the software - not in isolation.
It reminds me of an influential paper in the RISC/CISC debate, about 20 years ago. Somebody wrote a C compiler for the VAX that output only a RISC-like subset of the VAX instruction set. The generated code ran faster than the output of the standard VAX compiler, which used the whole (CISC) VAX instruction set. The naive conclusion was that complex instructions are useless. The correct conclusion was that the original VAX compiler was a pile of manure.
The similarity of the two situations is that it's a mistake to draw a general conclusion about the relative merits of two technologies, based on just one example of each. You have to consider the quality of the implementations - how the technology has been used.
You think politicians don't do anything useful now? Imagine the levels of inactivity you are going to force them into if you tell them that if they mess up too many times, their career is over.
And that would be a very good thing. As Jefferson said, "that government governs best which governs least". Our problem today is not that there are too few laws. In fact, if you ask a practicing attorney how many laws apply to a person residing in the state where that attorney practices, he/she won't be able to tell you, even to the nearest 100. And the legal system presumes that everyone knows all the laws.
I would feel much better if I thought there would be any lasting effects to any of these "wars".
Sure, there is a lasting effect. The Bill of Rights was pretty much gutted in the name of the "War on Drugs" and what little was left of it has been put thru the shredder in the name of the "War on Terror". Those are the lasting effects.
Meanwhile, the US Government actually operates a price-support program to keep producers of one of the most addictive drugs in business.
The recall of Gary Davis was just about as dirty a move as I've seen in politics
Congratulations on learning to read and write at such an early age.
By the standards of American politics, the recall of Gary Davis was squeaky clean. He was very unpopular; California law provides for recall elections; the procedure was followed, and he was duly recalled. The voting system (which the ACLU attacked) was exactly the same as the voting system under which Gary Davis had been elected.
You might find it interesting to research some truly dirty moves in American politics, all of which, I assume, occurred before you were born:
Chicago Mayor Daley's role in the 1960 presidential election. I couldn't find a nonpartisan American source on this; the BBC has an article, though. Incidentally, even many pro-Democrat accounts, e.g. this, conclude that "fraud clearly occurred in Cook County".
Gerrymandering, by both parties, in all House elections in some states. Here is a short account of gerrymandering in Texas - by the Democrats in 1991 and by the Republicans in 2003. Perfectly legal. Happens in several other states.
Voting irregularities in Ohio in the 2004 presidential election. I don't have a URL, but since you're obviously a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat I'm sure you'll believe it without one. My recollection of the news at the time is that in districts which were likely to vote overwhelmingly for Kerry, there weren't enough voting stations, so people had to queue for several hours to cast their votes. Not surprisingly, many of them gave up.
There is LOTS more dirt in American politics. By the time you're old enough to vote, a smart kid like you will have figured that out, I'm sure.
Give $10 bucks instead each month to the EFF or ACLU or whatever
One of the reasons the government has successfully eliminated many rights which we thought were guaranteed by the Constitution, is that there has been no focus of opposition.
The ACLU should have focussed our attention on the violations as they happened. But the ACLU is very partisan. For example, it opposed the recall of Governor Gray Davis, a Democrat, in California, on completely spurious grounds. It should keep out of party politics. People who care deeply about the Bill of Rights can be found among Republicans as well as among Democrats, and we need all such people. The ACLU drove them away, by this and many other campaigns.
By all means support the EFF, by the way, though I'm not sure it's as relevant to this particular case as a properly-functioning ACLU would have been.
Slashdot Mirror
I know the best way to learn to use Vim is to use it every day.
That's the only way. Getting to like vi (or vim) requires that you damage your brain, and a tool to do that is already to hand - vi. After using it every day for a while, it will seem quite natural to you that the letter "l" is the command to move the cursor to the right.
There are several problems with your analysis.
So I think that the number of "civilians" killed (excluding the above groups) is more relevant. This number is given in Wikipedia as 1857. Giving a chance of about 0.006% of being killed by terrorism in a lifetime.
For comparison with chances of dying from a range of other causes, see here. For example, an American has about a 1.3% chance of dying by suicide.
If it's a choice between giving up civil liberties to the government, and putting up with a risk of dying because of some terrorist attack, I'll take the risk of being killed by terrorists, thanks.
If he was smart, half his assets should be in a Swiss bank account
Swiss banking secrecy does not apply to someone convicted of a crime (in any country), if the deed would also have been a crime under Swiss law. (And what this guy did would definitely meet that requirement.)
There is also some special agreement between Switzerland and the US which AFAIK waives banking secrecy for US citizens and US green-card holders anyway, to some degree. I don't know the details but I know that when a US citizen opens an account with a Swiss bank, he/she has to sign a bunch of forms agreeing to waive certain secrecy protections. Your government protecting you against those nasty Swiss :-)
Research reports are only as good as the work that goes into them.
I stopped reading this one when I reached the bit where it says:
SCO, a small Swiss-based "vulture" firm
Goodness knows where they got this "Swiss-based" nonsense. SCO's web site doesn't even list Switzerland among the countries where it has a sales office!
You take a straightforward, uncontroversial statement (Shuttleworth's blog entry) that practically everyone agrees with. Then you publish a headline saying there's a "conflict", and pretend there's a huge row going on.
Pretty soon you've got a heated argument going on, mostly between people who haven't read the statement that allegedly started it all.
What does it all prove? That Slashdot isn't "stuff that matters" any more, it's stuff that draws mass readership. Just what we were trying to get away from when we first started reading Slashdot ...
Telemarketers though, I have to choose between getting up during dinner / sleeping to answer the phone or dealing with the damn thing ringing every 5 minutes.
Another possibility is to leave your phone permanently connected to an answering machine. The message tells the caller to communicate with you by email.
You can take it off the machine if you are expecting a specific call.
I'd guess from your post that you would feel uncomfortable with this solution - you may feel that if someone wants to be able to reach you urgently, they should be able to do so. I'm just pointing out that this is your choice.
Products that implement cryptography are probably credence goods. It requires expensive and uncommon skills to verify that data is really being protected by the use of cryptography, and most people cannot easily distinguish between very weak and very strong cryptography.
Can you distinguish, by inspection, between a reliable automobile and a piece of junk that will barely last 2 years? I certainly can't. So I rely on reviews by people I trust when I buy a new car.
In the field of cryptography there are several people who have written peer-reviewed books about cryptography, are trusted in the community, and who occasionally review products. Bruce Schneier is one (there are others, use Google, this is not mean to be a puff for Schneier or his company).
There are also open-source cryptographic programs, which are peer-reviewed and definitely not snake-oil.
because the reviewer does not understand the concept and is not willing to spend time understanding it.
The SIGGRAPH reviewers are highly competent, and within their time constraints, thorough (the process is described here). If they don't understand the concept in your paper, maybe you didn't explain it clearly enough.
The purpose of publishing a paper is not to boost the authors' egos. It's to convey ideas to other people. A paper which does not communicate concepts clearly does not deserve to be published.
Talk to any student about the price of the college textbooks, and you're likely to hear similar complaints
I wonder if the person who wrote that has talked to enough students.
On my desk is the 3rd edition of "Classical Electrodynamics", by J. D. Jackson. This title has been the standard text for advanced classical electromagnetism for about 40 years. The 2nd edition came out in 1974, and the 3rd edition (the latest) in 1998.
The book is a sturdy hardback, designed for decades of use. I still use it occasionally, and I have a PhD in Physics. It's priced at $97 direct from Amazon, or "Used and new from $55" from Amazon's resellers. This is cheap for such a book.
Any student who thinks he/she can afford an iPod, but not a book like this, has got seriously screwed-up priorities.
The real problem is that Iran is not letting international inspectors see their installations. Remember what happened to Iraq in a similar case?
Actually no, I don't remember any similar case in Iraq.
In January and February 2003, Iraq was cooperating with UN inspectors. UN inspections were not stopped by Iraq, they were stopped because the Bush Administration wanted to go to war, which they did in March 2003.
I'm a developer. I develop for Linux (actually for the GNU/Linux environment; I'm not a kernel developer) because I value programming freedom. I don't care a rat's ass for "market share". Why would I? I get the same amount of money, $0.00, for my apps whether they're used by one person or 10 million people.
The phrase "the iPod generation" means to me a bunch of kids who are pure consumers. They produce nothing I want. I despise their sheep-like following of fashion, I despise their inability to think for themselves, and I despise their taste in music. To consider giving up any part of my programming freedom to please these people is absurd.
No, you do a meet-in-the-middle attack, which is basically 2^64 in complexity if you're using two 2^64 keys. There are some optimizations that can be done, but the basic idea is this: You start with one ciphertext block and its corresponding known plaintext.
Huh? The plaintext is not known. If it were, there'd be nothing to do.
Possibly you are thinking of a known-plaintext attack aimed at recovering the keys. That's not the problem being discussed.
Have you ever read The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck? It was written in 1939, but set in the 1920's. The Joad kids lived on a farm all their life and have never seen a 'real' toilet and when they flush one,
Have you ever read the post you were replying to? It said, and I quote, "a toilet seat, which arguably has been around since Roman times." The toilet seat has definitely been around since Roman times - I have seen remains of Roman public toilets in the ruins of Ephesus and they surely exist in other places too.
It is well known, and irrelevant, that the flush toilet was not widespread until the 19th century.
Why are there no good text-based browsers?
Well, if you want one, why haven't you written one?
Seriously, most developers choose not to spend their time developing for what you correctly describe as "decades-old display technology". (I'm a developer, by the way.) I can't speak for all developers, but personally, I don't get much of a kick out of developing something that I will never use myself, that will have very few users anyway, and that will have fewer users every year.
Now, if you really, really want a good text-based browser and you're not a developer yourself, you can get others to develop one by paying them to do it. There are web sites which will help you to find people, for example GetAFreelancer.com (Google will find others).
If, as I suspect, you don't want one enough to pay for it with your money, don't be surprised that others aren't willing to pay for it with their time.
And in a flash 22000 Indiana students can't use websites using Flash.
Of course they can see Flash animations. Personally, I find more than 95% of Flash animations on websites to be a waste of time and bandwidth, and currently disable Flash, but there are several Flash plugins for Linux, including one from Adobe.
The belief that "education does all" is the kind of belief you have before you see enough students, and especially, before you have children. After that, you know very well that kids are born with very definite personalities and abilities
Correct, insightful, and an explanation of why so many slashdotters hold that erroneous belief. (Note to moderators: that's not meant to be funny. Mod up the parent to this post, not this one.)
Somebody ought to say it:
Well done, HP! I hope this boosts your sales!
And on the day HP overtakes Dell in PC sales, I'll be opening the champagne.
but shit, where is ANY PROGRESS?
There has been a lot of progress, but as soon as a problem in AI is solved, that problem is re-classified as "not AI". Thus, although a lot of AI problems have been solved, there are no solved AI problems. (If that seems nonsensical to you, re-read the sentence preceding it.)
An example is the problem of playing a good game of chess. 50 years ago, this was definitely seen as a problem in AI. Now it is solved - we have chess programs that play about as well as the current World Chess Champion. But it is not seen as "AI".
Just because the authorities say they uncovered the plot by a wiretap, doesn't mean it's true.
The most likely way they got the info was by infiltrating the groups likely to organize plots. It sounds too much like James Bond, but it is in fact one of the ways the Brits countered the threat of IRA terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s. When you get information from agents, you always deny the existence of the agents to protect them, and say you got the information from somewhere else. The job agents do is dangerous enough - telling the enemy that they definitely have a spy in their midst makes it even more dangerous.
Having got the names/locations of some plot members through agents, the Brits probably used precisely targeted wiretaps to get confirmation and evidence they could use in a trial.
Actually, no, none of these really benefit from "truly random numbers"
A random number generator is the best way to generate good cryptographic keys. Pseudo-random numbers are not good enough, in fact that is the commonest kind of "snake oil" in the encryption world. See Bruce Schneier's site for examples.
A very long random sequence can be used as a one-time pad, giving completely unbreakable encryption if the sequence is truly random.
The correct conclusion is not that virtualization is better done entirely in software, but that current hardware assists to virtualization are badly designed. As the complete article points out, the hardware features need to be designed to support the software - not in isolation.
It reminds me of an influential paper in the RISC/CISC debate, about 20 years ago. Somebody wrote a C compiler for the VAX that output only a RISC-like subset of the VAX instruction set. The generated code ran faster than the output of the standard VAX compiler, which used the whole (CISC) VAX instruction set. The naive conclusion was that complex instructions are useless. The correct conclusion was that the original VAX compiler was a pile of manure.
The similarity of the two situations is that it's a mistake to draw a general conclusion about the relative merits of two technologies, based on just one example of each. You have to consider the quality of the implementations - how the technology has been used.
You think politicians don't do anything useful now? Imagine the levels of inactivity you are going to force them into if you tell them that if they mess up too many times, their career is over.
And that would be a very good thing. As Jefferson said, "that government governs best which governs least". Our problem today is not that there are too few laws. In fact, if you ask a practicing attorney how many laws apply to a person residing in the state where that attorney practices, he/she won't be able to tell you, even to the nearest 100. And the legal system presumes that everyone knows all the laws.
I would feel much better if I thought there would be any lasting effects to any of these "wars".
Sure, there is a lasting effect. The Bill of Rights was pretty much gutted in the name of the "War on Drugs" and what little was left of it has been put thru the shredder in the name of the "War on Terror". Those are the lasting effects.
Meanwhile, the US Government actually operates a price-support program to keep producers of one of the most addictive drugs in business.
The recall of Gary Davis was just about as dirty a move as I've seen in politics
Congratulations on learning to read and write at such an early age.
By the standards of American politics, the recall of Gary Davis was squeaky clean. He was very unpopular; California law provides for recall elections; the procedure was followed, and he was duly recalled. The voting system (which the ACLU attacked) was exactly the same as the voting system under which Gary Davis had been elected.
You might find it interesting to research some truly dirty moves in American politics, all of which, I assume, occurred before you were born:
There is LOTS more dirt in American politics. By the time you're old enough to vote, a smart kid like you will have figured that out, I'm sure.
Give $10 bucks instead each month to the EFF or ACLU or whatever
One of the reasons the government has successfully eliminated many rights which we thought were guaranteed by the Constitution, is that there has been no focus of opposition.
The ACLU should have focussed our attention on the violations as they happened. But the ACLU is very partisan. For example, it opposed the recall of Governor Gray Davis, a Democrat, in California, on completely spurious grounds. It should keep out of party politics. People who care deeply about the Bill of Rights can be found among Republicans as well as among Democrats, and we need all such people. The ACLU drove them away, by this and many other campaigns.
By all means support the EFF, by the way, though I'm not sure it's as relevant to this particular case as a properly-functioning ACLU would have been.