If this is a publicity stunt, it's certainly horribly misguided. It's been a while since I last went there so I just headed over to kuro5hin to see what if anything is going on. The place is an absolute dump now. There is little if any content, just an endless stream of trash posts and comments. It doesn't look as if Rusty or in fact any other moderators mind at all.
For some reason this really gets to me. With all the residual fame and search engine glory it would be so damn easy to just go in there, throw all the garbage out, terminate the trolls, modernize the site, and open up for business again. Why is Rusty not doing anything?
Designing a functional FTL drive with the knowledge of today is the equivalent of a prehistorical human observing a lightning strike and then speculating about electrical household appliances. Yes, we have made some observations, we can even grasp some of the phenomena intuitively and mathematically, we do have some idea of the power behind the thing, but actually accessing it and doing things with it is so far off it's not even funny from today's perspective.
So yeah, if you told a cave dweller that some day everything on earth will be powered by vast amounts of electricity, he'd have to assume this would involve incinerating the planet too.
There is no parade to rain in on, but I do think it's premature to argue categorical impossibilities like the one you're citing - not only from a logical perspective but also historically people like you have almost always been proven wrong. People like me also get proven wrong all the time, the only difference is that sooner or later something almost like the thing we envisioned does come along. Let me put it this way: tech/sci optimists are always on the advance, whereas naysayers have to retreat constantly.
The Alcubierre drive is just one approach to warp drives that we cobbled together with our extremely limited understanding today. If we knew a lot more about the nature of gravity and spacetime (and let's face it: to manipulate it in this fashion we'd have to) I'm sure we'll come up with tons of new ideas.
Even if the impossibility of negative gravity and/or gravity dampening does hold up, there is still a million cool things we could do if we could manipulate positive gravity directly without having to expend the usual amount of energy - especially things for space flight such as true artificial gravity*, efficient nuclear fusion, cheap launch technologies, fast propulsion systems and even FTL drives. Not that this technology is even remotely within our reach, but if we discovered some kind of catalyst for manipulating the Higgs field directly that would really open up the universe for us, science fiction-style. Should we ever be able to make something like this work, this would be the biggest thing since mastering electricity.
* though on second thought that would probably require the capability of negating gravity or at least the option to put it in a tightly confined loop to be really useful for making spaceships habitable.
I can see where you're coming from, but I worry about the fact that "power users" are nobody's core audience anymore. What does consequently catering to the lowest common denominator do to a society? We now have UI that actually spreads tech illiteracy to a whole generation of young people, how is that a good thing? I also worry that we're losing any but the most basic functionalities, instead we're increasingly having advanced features being handed down to us "auto-magically" and behind the scenes whenever the UI designer sees fit - a process that lacks transparency and dis-empowers the user in a tremendous fashion. As users we're now spending a lot of time on deceiving the UI, tricking it really, into whatever we actually want it to do (and software gets better at thwarting us at this with every version that goes by).
And people who say that I can always drop OS X in favor of some open source pseudo-GUI wrapper around a commandline don't get it, either.
Crohn is not an autoimmine disease, it's a bacterial infection
While this is technically not a lie, it's at least a very misleading statement that obfuscates the underlying problem. Crohn is a disease of the immune system. Newer research indicates that it might be a deficiency in some immune cells' ability to produce immuno-modulating agents that are needed for a coordinated response to bacteria occuring inside the colon. This allows those bacteria to stage an attack on the colon's tissue. The bacterial infection itself is, however, just a symptom of the immune defect.
The Mac Mini is hampered mainly by its very slow hard drive. At work we recently replaced the hard drives of a couple of (very old, like 1.8 GHz Core Solo) Mac Minis with smallish SSDs, this made a whole lot of difference. Of course, if you need raw CPU power, this isn't going to help you - but if your typical usage profile is just "normal" productivity apps, this will definitely give your Mini a new lease on life.
As an aside, I then bought an SSD for my MacBook Pro - wow, the battery life and performance of this thing is just incredible now.
Have you tried putting a + in front of your words on Google recently? The plus is deprecated, they are going to drop it, it was all over the news. But even if the plus was supported in the future, it's a usability nightmare.
If they don't know why they're slipping, they should take a long hard look at their own front lawn instead of glancing nervously sideways at Bing. Google Search is getting more worthless by the day. Each time they "tweak" the algorithm it gets worse. The quality of the search results themselves isn't even the most problematic issue.
The main problem is that Google refuses to search for the actual terms you entered. They search for things that are sometimes kind of related to what you're looking for and they don't even show you which parts of your search term they ignored! The only way you're getting a real search result out of Google is when you trick it into doing its job by putting quotes around every single word of your search term (and even then it sometimes ignores you). It's mind-boggling to me how they fucked this up so badly, but it sure doesn't look like they're even aware of the problem.
I'm curious: why do they think it's fake? Are they flat-earth creationists or something? Or do they simply believe it's too expensive to launch an actual probe into the outer solar system? What's their motivation?
When one is a scientist, i.e. when he/she believes in the scientific method, he/she cannot believe in religion, for the simple reason that, when the scientific method is applied to religion, religion is falsified.
Exactly. I never understood those people who claim to be scientists and religious persons in one. If they're religious, they simply cannot be "real" scientists. They may still perform scientific work, but their mindset is clearly religious. In many cases, the difference between performing scientific work and being a scientist may not be so important for day-to-day activities, though.
I also guess there are many ways to support and overcome the obvious cognitive dissonance - for example, by moving the realm of the supernatural into areas that are not covered by whatever research is being performed. I vaguely remember a religious astrophysicist who acknowledged and believed in the veracity of the scientific models of the universe but couldn't bring himself to "believe" in evolution.
This trend of combining religion and science into an unholy chimera worries me, especially when the underlying assumption is that the two must somehow be brought together (by force if necessary) for our lives to make sense.
Our reference frame does not magically cause a photon to travel 21 million LY in zero time, so this did not happen hours ago for anybody. Just because information travels at the speed of light doesn't mean events don't happen before we see them. By your line of reasoning, the Big Bang just happened because photons from around that time are still hitting our detectors today.
It's amazing how many people get this stuff wrong. I blame physicists who make it a habit to formulate anything related to relativistic effects (or quantum physics for that matter) as misleadingly as humanly possible.
Damn'd. Now RealNetworks will confiscate all the/. servers. See what have you done?
Not only that, apparently they'd have the power to confiscate all the desktop and laptop computers of Slashdot editors' families as well if interpret this precedent correctly. To me, this is the most disturbing part of the entire thing. There is no way all of their computers are connected in any meaningful way to the site that this guy ran. Also, it's apparently enough to be related to an alleged copyright infringer in order for them to come and take your stuff away.
Then I'm wondering: if this code is not used for, you know, actual panty shots - where is all the consternation coming from? Lots of projects have not-so-clever names that are in no way connected to how they work. If the stink caused over this non-issue was actually enough to make a developer quit the project, then it's a big red flag for everyone to stay the hell away from this toxic community.
That's why they give you the option to get the stamp on a separate piece of paper that you can just take out of your passport when you no longer need it.
They can turn the phone on remotely without your knowledge.
No, they cannot, it's an urban legend. For "them" to activate any kind of backdoor (of which there are some) the device must be turned on. In order for a phone to receive and execute remote commands, its operating system must be running.
Well, God is about the only entity which almost no one expects to do evil (or even bad by mistake)
I'm just glad he's imaginary, because that sky wizard dude portrayed in scripture comes pretty close to any modern definition of evil. Also, I'm no expert on this, but isn't this devil character just the other side of the same coin?
This guy is trying to establish himself as some kind of authority on futurism, but I just perceive him as an attention whore who actually contributes very little. Maybe I'm alone in thinking this, but his TV series "Physics of the Impossible" was one big self-aggrandizing marketing gig. I barely made it through two episodes that essentially consisted of the professor rehashing old science fiction concepts and passing them off as his own inventions. Every episode ended with a big "presentation" in front of dozens of fawning admirers. Before the credits rolled, they made sure to cram in as many people as possible saying how great and ground-breaking his ideas were. It was disgusting.
Are there physical limits to Moore's law? Sure. We already knew that. Circuits can't keep getting smaller and smaller indefinitely, and we have already run into the limit on reasonable clock speeds several years ago. And despite this, the computer industry hasn't cataclysmically imploded.
I was having trouble imagining the 8:6:4:3 resonance pattern, so I dug out this very cool visualisation: http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/WebGL/KOI-730.html (needs a WebGL-capable browser, for some reason FF 4 doesn't work though).
Yesterday I removed a friend because I got a notification that he answered a question about me on some Facebook application. I didn't join this app, and a friend who is willing to give details about me out to a third party so casually isn't someone I am willing to share a link with on this type of system.
Sadly, those apps are lying. Chances are, nobody answered anything about you. It's a ploy. I can almost guarantee you that the app only had access to that person's friend list and used the friend list to contact you. It's probably not your friend's fault at all. Most of the time, when you're trying out a new FB game, it wants access to your friends list before you can even find out whether the game is legit. Even if you remove the app again immediately, it still had enough time to siphon off your data.
Exactly. We don't have any problem seeing emotional life-likeness in even very schematic comic characters, plush animals, and occasionally even objects that don't have a face at all. I'm willing to bet if tomorrow very strange aliens descended from the sky, having totally un-earthlike features, we would still connect with them emotionally without a problem, because we can learn to interpret non-human reactions and features. Yet somehow human characters that are "not quite right" irritate us.
Since even clearly perceived falseness doesn't trip us up at all when interacting with non-human characters, I hypothesize that the uncanny valley could actually be caused by a visual subsystem that deals with recognizing sickness and death in humans, triggering an involuntary repulsion that then is rationalized after the brain realizes it has this reaction mainly when looking at dolls. People do appear to have associations with death as they jokingly described the Polar Express as something reminiscent of a zombie movie. This is probably also the reason why zombie movies (where the undead don't look like live people with excessive makeup) are so effective. That legless zombie girl in "The Walking Dead" pilot creeped me out to no end...
The salt just complicates the rainbowtable lookup method. It's not supposed to be super secret. It makes every password require a expensive brute force lookup rather than a O(1) operation.
While that is true, it just delays the inevitable. In fact, even with salt, any large scale leaks such as the Gawker crack will always contain a good number of stupid passwords that are easily brute-forceable even without a rainbow table. It will always be relatively easy to either crack a single account you're really interested in, or alternatively crack a huge number of accounts that are particularly low-hanging fruit, even if every single account was salted differently. Rainbow tables are nice for crackers on a budget of 0, but today everyone can rent dirt-cheap GPU-assisted brute force cracking power.
Hashed passwords provide a degree of protection, so long as you salt the hash, and store a different salt for each password (for maximum protection [codinghorror.com]).
In cases where the pertinent part of the codebase/config was lifted as well, such as in the current example with the Gawker data, this doesn't help. At some point, the password algorithm has to have access to the salt. An attacker who has both the complete code and the database will also have access to the same salt, no matter how "secure" the individual hashes are computed.
At some point, adding complexity does very little to the actual security of software. There is always information supposedly internal to the system that is needed for decoding or verifying security info. Once that info gets out, it's out, and those logins can be reconstructed never mind how convoluted the hashing function behind them may (or may not) be. The only viable option for Gawker would be to set the entire password column to null and send out notifications with a confirmation code to all registered email addresses, prompting them for a new password.
Slashdot Mirror
If this is a publicity stunt, it's certainly horribly misguided. It's been a while since I last went there so I just headed over to kuro5hin to see what if anything is going on. The place is an absolute dump now. There is little if any content, just an endless stream of trash posts and comments. It doesn't look as if Rusty or in fact any other moderators mind at all.
For some reason this really gets to me. With all the residual fame and search engine glory it would be so damn easy to just go in there, throw all the garbage out, terminate the trolls, modernize the site, and open up for business again. Why is Rusty not doing anything?
Wow, that's a gross misrepresentation of my position. If this is what you took away from my post, there is really nothing more to say.
Designing a functional FTL drive with the knowledge of today is the equivalent of a prehistorical human observing a lightning strike and then speculating about electrical household appliances. Yes, we have made some observations, we can even grasp some of the phenomena intuitively and mathematically, we do have some idea of the power behind the thing, but actually accessing it and doing things with it is so far off it's not even funny from today's perspective.
So yeah, if you told a cave dweller that some day everything on earth will be powered by vast amounts of electricity, he'd have to assume this would involve incinerating the planet too.
There is no parade to rain in on, but I do think it's premature to argue categorical impossibilities like the one you're citing - not only from a logical perspective but also historically people like you have almost always been proven wrong. People like me also get proven wrong all the time, the only difference is that sooner or later something almost like the thing we envisioned does come along. Let me put it this way: tech/sci optimists are always on the advance, whereas naysayers have to retreat constantly.
The Alcubierre drive is just one approach to warp drives that we cobbled together with our extremely limited understanding today. If we knew a lot more about the nature of gravity and spacetime (and let's face it: to manipulate it in this fashion we'd have to) I'm sure we'll come up with tons of new ideas.
Even if the impossibility of negative gravity and/or gravity dampening does hold up, there is still a million cool things we could do if we could manipulate positive gravity directly without having to expend the usual amount of energy - especially things for space flight such as true artificial gravity*, efficient nuclear fusion, cheap launch technologies, fast propulsion systems and even FTL drives. Not that this technology is even remotely within our reach, but if we discovered some kind of catalyst for manipulating the Higgs field directly that would really open up the universe for us, science fiction-style. Should we ever be able to make something like this work, this would be the biggest thing since mastering electricity.
* though on second thought that would probably require the capability of negating gravity or at least the option to put it in a tightly confined loop to be really useful for making spaceships habitable.
I can see where you're coming from, but I worry about the fact that "power users" are nobody's core audience anymore. What does consequently catering to the lowest common denominator do to a society? We now have UI that actually spreads tech illiteracy to a whole generation of young people, how is that a good thing? I also worry that we're losing any but the most basic functionalities, instead we're increasingly having advanced features being handed down to us "auto-magically" and behind the scenes whenever the UI designer sees fit - a process that lacks transparency and dis-empowers the user in a tremendous fashion. As users we're now spending a lot of time on deceiving the UI, tricking it really, into whatever we actually want it to do (and software gets better at thwarting us at this with every version that goes by).
And people who say that I can always drop OS X in favor of some open source pseudo-GUI wrapper around a commandline don't get it, either.
While this is technically not a lie, it's at least a very misleading statement that obfuscates the underlying problem. Crohn is a disease of the immune system. Newer research indicates that it might be a deficiency in some immune cells' ability to produce immuno-modulating agents that are needed for a coordinated response to bacteria occuring inside the colon. This allows those bacteria to stage an attack on the colon's tissue. The bacterial infection itself is, however, just a symptom of the immune defect.
The Mac Mini is hampered mainly by its very slow hard drive. At work we recently replaced the hard drives of a couple of (very old, like 1.8 GHz Core Solo) Mac Minis with smallish SSDs, this made a whole lot of difference. Of course, if you need raw CPU power, this isn't going to help you - but if your typical usage profile is just "normal" productivity apps, this will definitely give your Mini a new lease on life.
As an aside, I then bought an SSD for my MacBook Pro - wow, the battery life and performance of this thing is just incredible now.
Have you tried putting a + in front of your words on Google recently? The plus is deprecated, they are going to drop it, it was all over the news. But even if the plus was supported in the future, it's a usability nightmare.
If they don't know why they're slipping, they should take a long hard look at their own front lawn instead of glancing nervously sideways at Bing. Google Search is getting more worthless by the day. Each time they "tweak" the algorithm it gets worse. The quality of the search results themselves isn't even the most problematic issue.
The main problem is that Google refuses to search for the actual terms you entered. They search for things that are sometimes kind of related to what you're looking for and they don't even show you which parts of your search term they ignored! The only way you're getting a real search result out of Google is when you trick it into doing its job by putting quotes around every single word of your search term (and even then it sometimes ignores you). It's mind-boggling to me how they fucked this up so badly, but it sure doesn't look like they're even aware of the problem.
I'm curious: why do they think it's fake? Are they flat-earth creationists or something? Or do they simply believe it's too expensive to launch an actual probe into the outer solar system? What's their motivation?
Exactly. I never understood those people who claim to be scientists and religious persons in one. If they're religious, they simply cannot be "real" scientists. They may still perform scientific work, but their mindset is clearly religious. In many cases, the difference between performing scientific work and being a scientist may not be so important for day-to-day activities, though.
I also guess there are many ways to support and overcome the obvious cognitive dissonance - for example, by moving the realm of the supernatural into areas that are not covered by whatever research is being performed. I vaguely remember a religious astrophysicist who acknowledged and believed in the veracity of the scientific models of the universe but couldn't bring himself to "believe" in evolution.
This trend of combining religion and science into an unholy chimera worries me, especially when the underlying assumption is that the two must somehow be brought together (by force if necessary) for our lives to make sense.
Don't worry, if the 3G precedent holds up in 4G, the actual data rates will be MUCH lower and latency will be atrocious.
Our reference frame does not magically cause a photon to travel 21 million LY in zero time, so this did not happen hours ago for anybody. Just because information travels at the speed of light doesn't mean events don't happen before we see them. By your line of reasoning, the Big Bang just happened because photons from around that time are still hitting our detectors today.
It's amazing how many people get this stuff wrong. I blame physicists who make it a habit to formulate anything related to relativistic effects (or quantum physics for that matter) as misleadingly as humanly possible.
Not only that, apparently they'd have the power to confiscate all the desktop and laptop computers of Slashdot editors' families as well if interpret this precedent correctly. To me, this is the most disturbing part of the entire thing. There is no way all of their computers are connected in any meaningful way to the site that this guy ran. Also, it's apparently enough to be related to an alleged copyright infringer in order for them to come and take your stuff away.
Then I'm wondering: if this code is not used for, you know, actual panty shots - where is all the consternation coming from? Lots of projects have not-so-clever names that are in no way connected to how they work. If the stink caused over this non-issue was actually enough to make a developer quit the project, then it's a big red flag for everyone to stay the hell away from this toxic community.
That's why they give you the option to get the stamp on a separate piece of paper that you can just take out of your passport when you no longer need it.
No, they cannot, it's an urban legend. For "them" to activate any kind of backdoor (of which there are some) the device must be turned on. In order for a phone to receive and execute remote commands, its operating system must be running.
I'm just glad he's imaginary, because that sky wizard dude portrayed in scripture comes pretty close to any modern definition of evil. Also, I'm no expert on this, but isn't this devil character just the other side of the same coin?
This guy is trying to establish himself as some kind of authority on futurism, but I just perceive him as an attention whore who actually contributes very little. Maybe I'm alone in thinking this, but his TV series "Physics of the Impossible" was one big self-aggrandizing marketing gig. I barely made it through two episodes that essentially consisted of the professor rehashing old science fiction concepts and passing them off as his own inventions. Every episode ended with a big "presentation" in front of dozens of fawning admirers. Before the credits rolled, they made sure to cram in as many people as possible saying how great and ground-breaking his ideas were. It was disgusting.
Are there physical limits to Moore's law? Sure. We already knew that. Circuits can't keep getting smaller and smaller indefinitely, and we have already run into the limit on reasonable clock speeds several years ago. And despite this, the computer industry hasn't cataclysmically imploded.
How bizarre, I'm on 4.0b12pre (Mac) and I firmly recall WebGL working just a few days ago - not so much now. Oh well... Chrome did the job.
Whenever I hear about observations like these I basically fall into an infinite loop imagining what it would be like to actually see this in person.
I was having trouble imagining the 8:6:4:3 resonance pattern, so I dug out this very cool visualisation: http://www.princeton.edu/~rvdb/WebGL/KOI-730.html (needs a WebGL-capable browser, for some reason FF 4 doesn't work though).
Sadly, those apps are lying. Chances are, nobody answered anything about you. It's a ploy. I can almost guarantee you that the app only had access to that person's friend list and used the friend list to contact you. It's probably not your friend's fault at all. Most of the time, when you're trying out a new FB game, it wants access to your friends list before you can even find out whether the game is legit. Even if you remove the app again immediately, it still had enough time to siphon off your data.
Exactly. We don't have any problem seeing emotional life-likeness in even very schematic comic characters, plush animals, and occasionally even objects that don't have a face at all. I'm willing to bet if tomorrow very strange aliens descended from the sky, having totally un-earthlike features, we would still connect with them emotionally without a problem, because we can learn to interpret non-human reactions and features. Yet somehow human characters that are "not quite right" irritate us.
Since even clearly perceived falseness doesn't trip us up at all when interacting with non-human characters, I hypothesize that the uncanny valley could actually be caused by a visual subsystem that deals with recognizing sickness and death in humans, triggering an involuntary repulsion that then is rationalized after the brain realizes it has this reaction mainly when looking at dolls. People do appear to have associations with death as they jokingly described the Polar Express as something reminiscent of a zombie movie. This is probably also the reason why zombie movies (where the undead don't look like live people with excessive makeup) are so effective. That legless zombie girl in "The Walking Dead" pilot creeped me out to no end...
While that is true, it just delays the inevitable. In fact, even with salt, any large scale leaks such as the Gawker crack will always contain a good number of stupid passwords that are easily brute-forceable even without a rainbow table. It will always be relatively easy to either crack a single account you're really interested in, or alternatively crack a huge number of accounts that are particularly low-hanging fruit, even if every single account was salted differently. Rainbow tables are nice for crackers on a budget of 0, but today everyone can rent dirt-cheap GPU-assisted brute force cracking power.
In cases where the pertinent part of the codebase/config was lifted as well, such as in the current example with the Gawker data, this doesn't help. At some point, the password algorithm has to have access to the salt. An attacker who has both the complete code and the database will also have access to the same salt, no matter how "secure" the individual hashes are computed.
At some point, adding complexity does very little to the actual security of software. There is always information supposedly internal to the system that is needed for decoding or verifying security info. Once that info gets out, it's out, and those logins can be reconstructed never mind how convoluted the hashing function behind them may (or may not) be. The only viable option for Gawker would be to set the entire password column to null and send out notifications with a confirmation code to all registered email addresses, prompting them for a new password.