dear person or persons who wrote the whitehouse response, i'd like to respond by repeating back to you your exact words:
"If he felt his actions were consistent with civil disobedience, then he should do what those who have taken issue with their own government do: Challenge it, speak out, engage in a constructive act of protest, and — importantly — accept the consequences of his actions. He should come home to the United States, and be judged by a jury of his peers — not hide behind the cover of an authoritarian regime"
and, as an aside, dear whitehouse aides, may i remind you what happened to aaron schwartz.
nope. don't own a smartphone, don't want one. i design computers (libre hardware, FSF-Endorseable) and i've had it up to here with technology and with software, i spend most of my day sitting down in front of a computer, why the f**** would i want to be taking a break walking around... with a device that not only creates up to 2 watts of microwave-grade energy in close proximity to my body but also guarantees that the concept of "break" is entirely destroyed.
i carry a nokia 3310 - reluctantly. it makes phone calls. it does SMS. the battery lasts 10 days even though it's really old. no, the only reason i would carry a smartphone is because i designed it and made it myself, including vetting all the software and choosing what i wanted. the phone would have a *true* aircraft mode where the power would be absolutely cut from the GSM/3G radio.
i did this before, on a very small scale, for GBP 1,000 about 10 years ago. sales teams kept offering me 2ghz dual-core machines at GBP 300 each and i had to tell them this:
"look, i have a budget of 1,000 GBP. you're offering me a 2ghz system for 300. so i can only buy 3 machines, right? so that's a total of 6 ghz of computing power. on the other hand, if i buy this GBP 125 machine which has only a 1ghz processor, i can get 8 of those, which gives a total of 8 ghz of computing power. so _why_ would i want FASTER?"
so i bought qty 8 of motherboard, CPU, 128mb RAM, low-cost case containing a PSU already, and accidentally included a 3com network card because i didn't realise that the built-in ethernet on the motherboard could do PXE boot..... but still, all-in that was 125 GBP and each one took 15 minutes to assemble so it was no big deal. got myself 8ghz of raw computing power, which was the best that i could get for the money that i had.
and that's the question that you have to ask yourself. what's the highest performance / price metric that can be achieved?
the highly specific problem that i was endeavouring to parallelise was a very small memory footprint non-I/O-bound task: running the NIST.gov Statistical Test Suite. i booted all 8 machines off of my laptop, over PXE boot with an NFS read-only root filesystem. had to wait 30 seconds between each because my 800mhz P3 laptop with 256mb of RAM reaaallly couldn't cope with 8 machines hammering it... not over a 100mbit/sec link, anyway.
once started, i wrote a script that ssh'd into each and left them running the STS for a day at a time. very little actual data was generated: a report.
but the issue that you're solving may involve huge amounts of disk I/O, it may involve huge amounts of inter-connectivity (inter-dependence between the parallel tasks). you may even have to use a GPU (OpenCL) if it's that computationally expensive...... and that's where anyone's advice really ends, because unless you know exactly what it is you need to do - in real, concrete terms of I/O per second, GFLOPs/sec, GMACs/sec, inter-communication/sec, you really can't and shouldn't even remotely consider spending any money.
so please consider writing a spreadsheet, based on the performance/price metric, extending it to the domain(s) that you're interested in optimising. then the answer about what to buy should be fairly self-evident.
oh and don't forget to include the power budget (and cooling) because i think it will shock the hell out of you. remember you need to include the maximum specs, not the "average" or "scenario design power".
It should say, "Around the world, dictatorships and democracies with governments wanting to become dictatorships are attempting to restrict access to strong encryption that governments cannot decrypt or bypass on demand."
about six or seven years ago i used to go a lot further than that, but at the time people disregarded what i said as being completely outrageous. times change.... let me reiterate it by way of parallel example.
this sentence "Firms providing strong encryption to protect their users — such as Google and Apple — are now being accused by government spokesmen of "aiding" terrorism"
should read "Firms providing strong encryption to protect their users — such as Google and Apple — are now being accused by terrorist spokesmen...."
i believe it was joseph goebbels, hitler's right-hand man, who said that the way for a government to get what it wanted was to terrorise people by making them think that they were no longer safe in their own homes. that if they didn't cecede power to the goverment then someone who was beyond the ability of the government to control would possibly kill them in their own beds, or on their way to work, or would kill their children on the way to school.
this strategy is one that governments today are fully aware of (they saw how effective it was for stalin and hitler and mussolini after all), and they are quite happy to copy it. unfortunately, when people fully trust their governments and cecede all power to them, historically we've seen how quickly things can flip to become very very dangerous. the problem is that i don't see how, when power is ever so slowly eroded in small incremental steps, it is possible to reverse that situation for people's benefit, without a very large event occurring (such as a bloody riot or a civil war). maybe it's possible now, peacefully, with the internet the way it is, and with organisations like avaaz, al jazeera, 38degrees and more: i don't really know. should we have faith in people and the way the internet works, now?
Is this the same Chinese country that is building back doors into networking and computer equipment so they can later take it over as described in a previous article?
no because they forgot to ship it via the USA to have the backdoors installed.
Sure, the F35 is a boondoggle but are these jets really necessary?
i take it you've not seen "Independence Day", or "Ender's Game", then? we need these planes just in case there's ever an alien attack from outer space, man.
well dang, this is gonna get google banned in a few more countries that have human rights abuse issues and corrupt governments... with the possible exception of america, where google would fight tooth and nail to stop that happening. instead i suspect they'll work quite hard to twist what the definition of "verified editorial" is - most likely by deploying operatives within the team. this is gonna be fuun!
fuck me as if we don't have enough to contend with here on slashdot with moderators (users) getting into a bun-fight over what comments are appropriate and which aren't, under this ruling the slashdot web site owners would have to review all the comments *and* the moderations *and* all the meta-moderations *anyway*! let the moderation wars begin... starting with this comment, yaay!
Facebook is not doing encrypted messaging between users. Did you RTFA at all?
i did indeed... but it obviously wasn't clear enough. i believe that would come from the subject line saying "facebook is sending encrypted emails", rather than the subject saying "facebook allowing you to receive GPG-signed administrative notifications by email".
errr, so i want to send a communication, ok? it's supposed to be private, right? but it's a web service: facebook could, at any time (even under secret fascist subpoena) change or be forced to change (without informing us) the user interface so that the encrypted message is no longer encrypted, but is in fact entirely in cleartext.
you might think, "ok, well, surely we could then just have a messenger service or app which does the job, and we could trust that, right?" and the answer is "well no, absolutely not you can't... not unless the entire source code is available, and a chain of trust is established that guarantees a verifiable and traceable compile and distribution chain".
which, basically, means you need a software libre distribution (such as debian) because those have full source available, and GPG-signing right the way from the developers (whose identities are verified via key-signing parties that involve showing proof of ID on each signing), all the way through to distribution where a "Release" file containing the MD5 checksums of every package is, once again, GPG-signed by provably verified individuals.
the bottom line is that just because facebook *says* it's secure doesn't actually make it so, and announcing "yeah we provide a secure encrypted email service" is actually a dangerous DISSERVICE. you can't *EVER* guarantee that the servers have been compromised, and web browser *implicitly* trust what the servers give them to run.
the best thing that facebook could do is provide a programming API via which encrypted emails *may* be sent, and then sponsor software libre teams such as mutt, and everyone else, to provide 3rd party (entirely software libre) applications that deliver *and receive* encrypted mail. the only hurdle to get over there would be whether the software libre teams would view working with facebook to be endorsement of SaaSS (service as a software substitute - http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/...) which i can guarantee in advance that any GNU project will *not* do.
I'm afraid that willfull, destructive ignorance and barbarism isn't a problem that technology can solve. A digital copy, however perfect, remains a copy, and by nature, can't be used as proof that there ever *was* an original, which is the entire purpose of ISIS's destruction of these relics.
i disagree, outright. their aim is to destroy availability and access to anything that could cause people to have "thoughts" outside of the proscribed and permitted range as dictated by them. in that regard, it *doesn't matter* that the copies are imperfect replicas of the original.
in fact, now that i think about it: a second objection to what you say is that if anyone else notices a discrepancy, they may take a copy of the files and improve on it. so in that regard, the fact that these insane people have endeavoured to destroy the originals actually results in *more* people with access to - and thus thinking about - the origins of the artefacts that were destroyed.
either way, these insane people have *helped* spread the messages that they attempted to suppress. so i think i will mark this story as "stressandeffect".
i visited bangalore in 2006, to see a friend living there. he explained that when the trees were cut down in the cities (so that more housing could be built), temperatures soared by an additional 10 *centigrade*. so, the ambient temperature surrounding the cities would be 45 degrees, but in bangalore it would reach *fifty five* centigrade. the point of mentioning this is that it's a much more direct version of how man has an effect on his immediate environment. change the landscape, you change the weather, it's as simple as that. we can learn from that... or simply die. it's our choice.
hang on... didn't bunnie huang do the "chumby", and didn't barbie try doing something like this - putting an interactive wifi and mic aspect into one of their barbie dolls... with a huge back-lash as a result? so (a) why is there an expectation that this will succeed (b) why was the patent granted when there is clear prior art???
this is why debian has the GPG key-signing parties, and why all packages are GPG-signed by the package maintainer when they compile it, why the ftp masters sign the package when it's uploaded, and why the release files which include the checksums of all the packages are also GPG-signed. under this scenario there are an extremely limited number of extremely paranoid methods by which debian may be compromised. even the scenario of "cooperation between long-term sleeper agents within debian's ranks" would have a one-shot opportunity to get away with introducing malicious code, following the discovery of which their GPG keys would be revoked, the perpetrators kicked out of debian, their packages pulled immediately pending a review, and the already-effective procedures reviewed to involve multi-person GPG signing that would make it even harder for compromise to occur in the future.
now, if you recall, there was an announcement a couple of years back that the development of Mozilla's B2G was declared to be "open" to all, so i contributed with a thorough security-conscious review of how to do package distribution. it turns out that Mozilla is *NOT* open - at all. several other contributors have learned that the Mozilla Foundation is in direct violation of its charter.
basically, the Mozilla Foundation *completely* ignored the advice that i gave - which was that the use of SSL as a distribution mechanism would be vulnerable to *exactly* the kinds of attacks that we see the NSA attempting to do on google. they went so far as to enact censorship, preventing and prohibiting me from pointing out the severe security flaws inherent in their chosen method of package distribution. i remain deeply unimpressed with many aspects of so-called "open-ness" of well-funded software libre projects.
just to throw an appropriate spanner in the works, it's worthwhile mentioning the above article which notes a significant statistical correlation between variations in the measurement of the effect known as "gravity", and the (appx) 6.5 year cyclic variation of the earth's length of day.
now, before you go all "ooer" or "waah! gravity varies! we're all gonna dieeee spinning off into space", it's worthwhile pointing out that the author mentions, in the conclusion, that there *might* be some sort of unknown systemic errors in (a) how gravity is measured (b) how the length of day is measured which *happen* to coincide and give the *impression* that there is a statistical correlation between gravitational variation and the length of the earth's day. he does however state that in light of how the measurements are taken it would seem to be very unlikely that there are such systemic errors.
so, anyway, the point is: gravity appears not to be as simple as we assumed, hence why some long-distance space probes (Pioneer for example) have anomalous unexplained behaviour.
You'd find that people who aren't training to be pros, but work out that much, are probably more common than you think.
yep - count me in. i'm currently up to about the same level of exercise as you - about 2 hours a day: tennis or street-skating. tennis is for my eyes - and the social interaction. street-skating is because i find the explosive (sprinting) nature of tennis is causing huge knots in my arm and leg muscles. without this, i am... yeah, not a nice person either:)
two years ago i took up tennis at the recommendation of a friend. before that i'd done tai ji, full-contact karate (shin kyu-kshin), long-distance skating (86 miles athens-to-atlanta 1999, 65 miles new york park 1999, 26 miles rotterdam 2006) and yoga (ashtanga and T.M Asanas). it's a big list of different physical activities, which have the following things in common:
* complex coordinated movement * requiring or recommending very deep breathing (skating especially) * very long and regular practice
the reason why i specifically love tennis is that in addition to these things it is necessary to not only be extremely physically fit but also, if you would like to win, you require strategy and planning both on and off the court. tennis is particularly harsh on the body in that it is a series of very short explosive sprints, standing still, *then* hitting the ball, and then doing it all over again.
also the types of movement required are *unbelievably* complex! serving involves *six* degrees of freedom of movement (x-y-z, rotation in x-y-z) in order to impart the maximum amount of inspired deviousness into a small yellow round object.
to fully understand why it was that, aged 44, i started this sport and now practice over an hour a day, you have to understand that prior to that i was sitting 12 hours a day in front of a computer screen: average distance approx 1 metre. for the prior 4 years that was a 24in imac, so the panorama i *initially* thought was great.... turned out to have caused extreme alterations in my eyes.
just over two years ago i discovered that my eyes had gone "prism". this is a new development: i've always had -0.75 astigmatism, but prism basically means that i can focus easily on an object that's 1 metre away, but if i look at something 3 metres or greater away i see *DOUBLE*. in the dark, i can't bring the two together.
the implications of that are that not only has there been physical damage caused by long-term computer usage but that there has also been *NEURAL* damage caused by long-term computer usage.
the bottom line of this story is, in this context, that this football player is being extremely sensible. if a few neurons get knocked out of place by a concussion, so damn what: his pursuit of mathematics will, by virtue of it being so incredibly challenging, allow him to grow new pathways and literally grow new neurons. the reason why his peers get brain damage is because they *don't* have anything other than football to challenge them.
each of his pursuits therefore supports the others. the physical exertion keeps his body - and his heart - fit. that in turn allows him more oxygen with which to feed his brain and thus sustain the pursuit of mathematics. the increased mental alertness allows him to play with tactics and strategy that the average player would not be able to consider. his specialty in mathematics would allow him to apply physics (moments of inertia) in a *really* practical way that would keep both him and the people he smacks down safer than would otherwise be done by someone without his knowledge.
but the best part of all this is that if he has a successful long-term career, i predict that he will end up inspiring thousands of young football players to pay a bit closer attention to their other studies, and that coaches will have an example - a specific person - that they can quote as to why, when they go recruiting, they are looking for someone who has not only the physique but also the high academic aptitude as well.... wouldn't it be great to have an entire team of football players who not only kick ass (literally) but who have degrees and even PhDs? that would change how people think of football, forever.
andrew trigdell told me an amazing story back in 1999 about how he helped install Linux 0.99 on a solar-powered data collection computer in antarctica. Linux 0.99 was known to be highly stable, hence why it was chosen. it has a 56k modem which is enough to get the data back, and to check (very slowly) that it's still operational. so i think anything that's designed for long-term with those kinds of harsh remote and inaccessible conditions in mind, powered off of sustainable independent power, would be a good candidate for a device that would still be functioning even decades later.
I know my average has plummeted over the years; especially when I bought a second display, and then a third.
Fortunately, this year I may replace them all with a large 4k display and then I'll have a long attention span again.
DON'T DO IT. or if you do, please put it into landscape mode next to the other monitors, in a circle. i had a large wide-screen display (big mac) - 24 in. i thought it was wonderful. i sat in front of it for 4 years, at a distance of about 1 metre. now my eyes are "prism", meaning that anything over 3 metres away i see *DOUBLE*, especially if it is off to the left or the right. but anything that is exactly 1 metre away, i see perfectly with extremely fast reaction time.
time and time again it has been shown that our eyes adjust to the conditions that we put them under. it is sheer arrogance of the optician industry to state "your eyes degrade with age". it is total shit. our eyes contain MUSCLES. therefore our eyes degrade with LACK OF EXERCISE, just like any other part of our body that has muscles.
the solution: i got plugable.com USB-to-VGA converters and surrounded my workstation with 4:3 aspect ratio monitors, in a semi-circle.... and threw away the "standard" prescription glasses given to me by the ignorant opticians, and bought glasses that were *two* diopters less than the prescription (which had to come from china). there are now opticians in the UK where you can give them exactly the prescription that you want. i recommend using them instead of buying cheap glasses from china.
the key skill needed for programming is to be *able to pay attention to detail*. if you are unable, by any means, to focus on one thing for any length of time (because, for example, you have the attention span of a spider on cocaine or worse caffeine, because, for example, you have been brought up on txting and IMing and twittah) then it should come as absolutely no surprise that you are utterly useless at programming.
another person mentions that creativity is needed in programming. well, yes, this is true. if you have a bug that you don't know how it got there, you need to be extraordinarily patient [attention to detail] with yourself and your work, going over it *creatively* in different ways until such time as you have found, understood and then fixed the bug.
if you do not have the patience because you are, once again, brought up on a diet of twitter, instant gratitfication and refined sugar products, *no amount* of creativity is going to help if you cannot apply it.
i call myself a programmer: what i actually have is obsessive compulsion to be able to pay attention to one task for spans of time that exceed healthy limits. i can be freezing cold and not even notice... because i'm debugging something. only sheer complete exhaustion can get through under those circumstances. this is where it helps to be working in part of a team, as it sets some structure for social interaction. it's no accident, then, that there are entrepreneurs [this goes back a few years on slashdot - there's an article somewhere] who *only* take on *english language* majors [US i presume], and train them to be programmers. why? because people who can *communicate* turn out to make better programmers than people who have been through a university-driven programming course.
Microsoft has an "Open License" which allows you to look at Windows NT source code. it's "open", yes? pay them $USD 1m per year, you get an "open" look at the source code of Windows NT. but if you ever dare to use it, talk about it, or do ANYTHING other than *read* it.... they will sue the fuck out of you.
bottom line: can we PLEASE stop using the word "open" in context with these types of stupid, stupid proprietary arrangements? it really isn't helping.
there are plenty of *LIBRE* licensed implementations of MIPS out there: many people have pointed that out (in comments i can see above this one), they're on http://opencores.org/ - there are at least eight MIPS core implementations that i can see, there, possibly the best one (most complete) is this: http://opencores.org/project,m... which has a 5-stage pipeline and a harvard architecture.
so please, stop using the word "open" to refer to proprietary, restricted and patented material.
the issue that i have with "artificial" intelligence is this: there *is* no such thing as "artificial" - i.e. "fake" or "unreal" intelligence. intelligence just *IS*. no matter the form it takes, if it's "intelligent" then it is pure and absolute arrogance on our part to call it "artificial". the best possible subsitute words that i could come up with were "machine-based" intelligence. the word "simulated" cannot be applied, because, again, if it's intelligent, it just *is* - and, again, to imply that intelligence is "simulated" is, again, a direct falsehood. so we have a bit of a problem, there.
the other problem is this: if those who are creating intelligent machines are themselves of insufficient intelligence to recognise the existence of intelligence, then how on earth would they know that it had actually been created?? it's the "million monkeys" problem in a subtle new light.
but i think people are beginning to confuse "intelligence" with "consciousness". we already have intelligent networks - the next phase is CONSCIOUSNESS. self-awareness. and here we begin to get into interesting territory, not least because we have the very pertinent question "how can scientists who are themselves not truly consciously aware even of themselves possibly begin to *recognise* consciousness when they've created it??"
the problem is highlighted by the example of a friend of mine who refuses to help create machine consciousness. he's a researcher into the concept of consciousness, so he knows what goes into it - how to recognise it, and, by inference, how to make consciousness "happen" so to speak. and when i approached him about helping to make machine consciousness, he said, "sure i can help... but only if you can guarantee that the resultant beings would be in bliss (i.e. happy) rather than being permanently tortured".
and there you have the key, that anything that is self-aware and conscious - anything that has the ability to communicate and feel - *automatically* gains the right to freedom of expression and all the other rights that we *believe* humans - as the arrogant self-appointed "top of the food chain" - should also have...... and until the arrogant quotes artificial quotes intelligence community recognises that and fights *IN ADVANCE* for the right of machine consciousness to have the same rights as humans, nobody who is a truly conscious and intelligent being is going to help that scientific community to create such advanced conscious beings, because the risks associated with such conscious machines being tortured - just because the scientists think they can - are too great.
Slashdot Mirror
dear person or persons who wrote the whitehouse response, i'd like to respond by repeating back to you your exact words:
"If he felt his actions were consistent with civil disobedience, then he should do what those who have taken issue with their own government do: Challenge it, speak out, engage in a constructive act of protest, and — importantly — accept the consequences of his actions. He should come home to the United States, and be judged by a jury of his peers — not hide behind the cover of an authoritarian regime"
and, as an aside, dear whitehouse aides, may i remind you what happened to aaron schwartz.
nope. don't own a smartphone, don't want one. i design computers (libre hardware, FSF-Endorseable) and i've had it up to here with technology and with software, i spend most of my day sitting down in front of a computer, why the f**** would i want to be taking a break walking around... with a device that not only creates up to 2 watts of microwave-grade energy in close proximity to my body but also guarantees that the concept of "break" is entirely destroyed.
i carry a nokia 3310 - reluctantly. it makes phone calls. it does SMS. the battery lasts 10 days even though it's really old. no, the only reason i would carry a smartphone is because i designed it and made it myself, including vetting all the software and choosing what i wanted. the phone would have a *true* aircraft mode where the power would be absolutely cut from the GSM/3G radio.
i did this before, on a very small scale, for GBP 1,000 about 10 years ago. sales teams kept offering me 2ghz dual-core machines at GBP 300 each and i had to tell them this:
"look, i have a budget of 1,000 GBP. you're offering me a 2ghz system for 300. so i can only buy 3 machines, right? so that's a total of 6 ghz of computing power. on the other hand, if i buy this GBP 125 machine which has only a 1ghz processor, i can get 8 of those, which gives a total of 8 ghz of computing power. so _why_ would i want FASTER?"
so i bought qty 8 of motherboard, CPU, 128mb RAM, low-cost case containing a PSU already, and accidentally included a 3com network card because i didn't realise that the built-in ethernet on the motherboard could do PXE boot..... but still, all-in that was 125 GBP and each one took 15 minutes to assemble so it was no big deal. got myself 8ghz of raw computing power, which was the best that i could get for the money that i had.
and that's the question that you have to ask yourself. what's the highest performance / price metric that can be achieved?
the highly specific problem that i was endeavouring to parallelise was a very small memory footprint non-I/O-bound task: running the NIST.gov Statistical Test Suite. i booted all 8 machines off of my laptop, over PXE boot with an NFS read-only root filesystem. had to wait 30 seconds between each because my 800mhz P3 laptop with 256mb of RAM reaaallly couldn't cope with 8 machines hammering it... not over a 100mbit/sec link, anyway.
once started, i wrote a script that ssh'd into each and left them running the STS for a day at a time. very little actual data was generated: a report.
but the issue that you're solving may involve huge amounts of disk I/O, it may involve huge amounts of inter-connectivity (inter-dependence between the parallel tasks). you may even have to use a GPU (OpenCL) if it's that computationally expensive... ... and that's where anyone's advice really ends, because unless you know exactly what it is you need to do - in real, concrete terms of I/O per second, GFLOPs/sec, GMACs/sec, inter-communication/sec, you really can't and shouldn't even remotely consider spending any money.
so please consider writing a spreadsheet, based on the performance/price metric, extending it to the domain(s) that you're interested in optimising. then the answer about what to buy should be fairly self-evident.
oh and don't forget to include the power budget (and cooling) because i think it will shock the hell out of you. remember you need to include the maximum specs, not the "average" or "scenario design power".
It should say, "Around the world, dictatorships and democracies with governments wanting to become dictatorships are attempting to restrict access to strong encryption that governments cannot decrypt or bypass on demand."
about six or seven years ago i used to go a lot further than that, but at the time people disregarded what i said as being completely outrageous. times change.... let me reiterate it by way of parallel example.
this sentence "Firms providing strong encryption to protect their users — such as Google and Apple — are now being accused by government spokesmen of "aiding" terrorism"
should read "Firms providing strong encryption to protect their users — such as Google and Apple — are now being accused by terrorist spokesmen...."
i believe it was joseph goebbels, hitler's right-hand man, who said that the way for a government to get what it wanted was to terrorise people by making them think that they were no longer safe in their own homes. that if they didn't cecede power to the goverment then someone who was beyond the ability of the government to control would possibly kill them in their own beds, or on their way to work, or would kill their children on the way to school.
this strategy is one that governments today are fully aware of (they saw how effective it was for stalin and hitler and mussolini after all), and they are quite happy to copy it. unfortunately, when people fully trust their governments and cecede all power to them, historically we've seen how quickly things can flip to become very very dangerous. the problem is that i don't see how, when power is ever so slowly eroded in small incremental steps, it is possible to reverse that situation for people's benefit, without a very large event occurring (such as a bloody riot or a civil war). maybe it's possible now, peacefully, with the internet the way it is, and with organisations like avaaz, al jazeera, 38degrees and more: i don't really know. should we have faith in people and the way the internet works, now?
i'm surprised it's not called "faithbook.com"
Is this the same Chinese country that is building back doors into networking and computer equipment so they can later take it over as described in a previous article?
no because they forgot to ship it via the USA to have the backdoors installed.
Sure, the F35 is a boondoggle but are these jets really necessary?
i take it you've not seen "Independence Day", or "Ender's Game", then? we need these planes just in case there's ever an alien attack from outer space, man.
well dang, this is gonna get google banned in a few more countries that have human rights abuse issues and corrupt governments... with the possible exception of america, where google would fight tooth and nail to stop that happening. instead i suspect they'll work quite hard to twist what the definition of "verified editorial" is - most likely by deploying operatives within the team. this is gonna be fuun!
fuck me as if we don't have enough to contend with here on slashdot with moderators (users) getting into a bun-fight over what comments are appropriate and which aren't, under this ruling the slashdot web site owners would have to review all the comments *and* the moderations *and* all the meta-moderations *anyway*! let the moderation wars begin... starting with this comment, yaay!
Facebook is not doing encrypted messaging between users. Did you RTFA at all?
i did indeed... but it obviously wasn't clear enough. i believe that would come from the subject line saying "facebook is sending encrypted emails", rather than the subject saying "facebook allowing you to receive GPG-signed administrative notifications by email".
that's... amazing! i'm very impressed.
errr, so i want to send a communication, ok? it's supposed to be private, right? but it's a web service: facebook could, at any time (even under secret fascist subpoena) change or be forced to change (without informing us) the user interface so that the encrypted message is no longer encrypted, but is in fact entirely in cleartext.
you might think, "ok, well, surely we could then just have a messenger service or app which does the job, and we could trust that, right?" and the answer is "well no, absolutely not you can't... not unless the entire source code is available, and a chain of trust is established that guarantees a verifiable and traceable compile and distribution chain".
which, basically, means you need a software libre distribution (such as debian) because those have full source available, and GPG-signing right the way from the developers (whose identities are verified via key-signing parties that involve showing proof of ID on each signing), all the way through to distribution where a "Release" file containing the MD5 checksums of every package is, once again, GPG-signed by provably verified individuals.
the bottom line is that just because facebook *says* it's secure doesn't actually make it so, and announcing "yeah we provide a secure encrypted email service" is actually a dangerous DISSERVICE. you can't *EVER* guarantee that the servers have been compromised, and web browser *implicitly* trust what the servers give them to run.
the best thing that facebook could do is provide a programming API via which encrypted emails *may* be sent, and then sponsor software libre teams such as mutt, and everyone else, to provide 3rd party (entirely software libre) applications that deliver *and receive* encrypted mail. the only hurdle to get over there would be whether the software libre teams would view working with facebook to be endorsement of SaaSS (service as a software substitute - http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/...) which i can guarantee in advance that any GNU project will *not* do.
I'm afraid that willfull, destructive ignorance and barbarism isn't a problem that technology can solve. A digital copy, however perfect, remains a copy, and by nature, can't be used as proof that there ever *was* an original, which is the entire purpose of ISIS's destruction of these relics.
i disagree, outright. their aim is to destroy availability and access to anything that could cause people to have "thoughts" outside of the proscribed and permitted range as dictated by them. in that regard, it *doesn't matter* that the copies are imperfect replicas of the original.
in fact, now that i think about it: a second objection to what you say is that if anyone else notices a discrepancy, they may take a copy of the files and improve on it. so in that regard, the fact that these insane people have endeavoured to destroy the originals actually results in *more* people with access to - and thus thinking about - the origins of the artefacts that were destroyed.
either way, these insane people have *helped* spread the messages that they attempted to suppress. so i think i will mark this story as "stressandeffect".
actually... what's now "top news" for when you search "what happened to the dinosaurs" is... greg's post and associated discussions...
i visited bangalore in 2006, to see a friend living there. he explained that when the trees were cut down in the cities (so that more housing could be built), temperatures soared by an additional 10 *centigrade*. so, the ambient temperature surrounding the cities would be 45 degrees, but in bangalore it would reach *fifty five* centigrade. the point of mentioning this is that it's a much more direct version of how man has an effect on his immediate environment. change the landscape, you change the weather, it's as simple as that. we can learn from that... or simply die. it's our choice.
hang on... didn't bunnie huang do the "chumby", and didn't barbie try doing something like this - putting an interactive wifi and mic aspect into one of their barbie dolls... with a huge back-lash as a result? so (a) why is there an expectation that this will succeed (b) why was the patent granted when there is clear prior art???
this is why debian has the GPG key-signing parties, and why all packages are GPG-signed by the package maintainer when they compile it, why the ftp masters sign the package when it's uploaded, and why the release files which include the checksums of all the packages are also GPG-signed. under this scenario there are an extremely limited number of extremely paranoid methods by which debian may be compromised. even the scenario of "cooperation between long-term sleeper agents within debian's ranks" would have a one-shot opportunity to get away with introducing malicious code, following the discovery of which their GPG keys would be revoked, the perpetrators kicked out of debian, their packages pulled immediately pending a review, and the already-effective procedures reviewed to involve multi-person GPG signing that would make it even harder for compromise to occur in the future.
now, if you recall, there was an announcement a couple of years back that the development of Mozilla's B2G was declared to be "open" to all, so i contributed with a thorough security-conscious review of how to do package distribution. it turns out that Mozilla is *NOT* open - at all. several other contributors have learned that the Mozilla Foundation is in direct violation of its charter.
basically, the Mozilla Foundation *completely* ignored the advice that i gave - which was that the use of SSL as a distribution mechanism would be vulnerable to *exactly* the kinds of attacks that we see the NSA attempting to do on google. they went so far as to enact censorship, preventing and prohibiting me from pointing out the severe security flaws inherent in their chosen method of package distribution. i remain deeply unimpressed with many aspects of so-called "open-ness" of well-funded software libre projects.
http://iopscience.iop.org/0295...
just to throw an appropriate spanner in the works, it's worthwhile mentioning the above article which notes a significant statistical correlation between variations in the measurement of the effect known as "gravity", and the (appx) 6.5 year cyclic variation of the earth's length of day.
now, before you go all "ooer" or "waah! gravity varies! we're all gonna dieeee spinning off into space", it's worthwhile pointing out that the author mentions, in the conclusion, that there *might* be some sort of unknown systemic errors in (a) how gravity is measured (b) how the length of day is measured which *happen* to coincide and give the *impression* that there is a statistical correlation between gravitational variation and the length of the earth's day. he does however state that in light of how the measurements are taken it would seem to be very unlikely that there are such systemic errors.
so, anyway, the point is: gravity appears not to be as simple as we assumed, hence why some long-distance space probes (Pioneer for example) have anomalous unexplained behaviour.
You'd find that people who aren't training to be pros, but work out that much, are probably more common than you think.
yep - count me in. i'm currently up to about the same level of exercise as you - about 2 hours a day: tennis or street-skating. tennis is for my eyes - and the social interaction. street-skating is because i find the explosive (sprinting) nature of tennis is causing huge knots in my arm and leg muscles. without this, i am... yeah, not a nice person either :)
two years ago i took up tennis at the recommendation of a friend. before that i'd done tai ji, full-contact karate (shin kyu-kshin), long-distance skating (86 miles athens-to-atlanta 1999, 65 miles new york park 1999, 26 miles rotterdam 2006) and yoga (ashtanga and T.M Asanas). it's a big list of different physical activities, which have the following things in common:
* complex coordinated movement
* requiring or recommending very deep breathing (skating especially)
* very long and regular practice
the reason why i specifically love tennis is that in addition to these things it is necessary to not only be extremely physically fit but also, if you would like to win, you require strategy and planning both on and off the court. tennis is particularly harsh on the body in that it is a series of very short explosive sprints, standing still, *then* hitting the ball, and then doing it all over again.
also the types of movement required are *unbelievably* complex! serving involves *six* degrees of freedom of movement (x-y-z, rotation in x-y-z) in order to impart the maximum amount of inspired deviousness into a small yellow round object.
to fully understand why it was that, aged 44, i started this sport and now practice over an hour a day, you have to understand that prior to that i was sitting 12 hours a day in front of a computer screen: average distance approx 1 metre. for the prior 4 years that was a 24in imac, so the panorama i *initially* thought was great.... turned out to have caused extreme alterations in my eyes.
just over two years ago i discovered that my eyes had gone "prism". this is a new development: i've always had -0.75 astigmatism, but prism basically means that i can focus easily on an object that's 1 metre away, but if i look at something 3 metres or greater away i see *DOUBLE*. in the dark, i can't bring the two together.
the implications of that are that not only has there been physical damage caused by long-term computer usage but that there has also been *NEURAL* damage caused by long-term computer usage.
the bottom line of this story is, in this context, that this football player is being extremely sensible. if a few neurons get knocked out of place by a concussion, so damn what: his pursuit of mathematics will, by virtue of it being so incredibly challenging, allow him to grow new pathways and literally grow new neurons. the reason why his peers get brain damage is because they *don't* have anything other than football to challenge them.
each of his pursuits therefore supports the others. the physical exertion keeps his body - and his heart - fit. that in turn allows him more oxygen with which to feed his brain and thus sustain the pursuit of mathematics. the increased mental alertness allows him to play with tactics and strategy that the average player would not be able to consider. his specialty in mathematics would allow him to apply physics (moments of inertia) in a *really* practical way that would keep both him and the people he smacks down safer than would otherwise be done by someone without his knowledge.
but the best part of all this is that if he has a successful long-term career, i predict that he will end up inspiring thousands of young football players to pay a bit closer attention to their other studies, and that coaches will have an example - a specific person - that they can quote as to why, when they go recruiting, they are looking for someone who has not only the physique but also the high academic aptitude as well. ... wouldn't it be great to have an entire team of football players who not only kick ass (literally) but who have degrees and even PhDs? that would change how people think of football, forever.
andrew trigdell told me an amazing story back in 1999 about how he helped install Linux 0.99 on a solar-powered data collection computer in antarctica. Linux 0.99 was known to be highly stable, hence why it was chosen. it has a 56k modem which is enough to get the data back, and to check (very slowly) that it's still operational. so i think anything that's designed for long-term with those kinds of harsh remote and inaccessible conditions in mind, powered off of sustainable independent power, would be a good candidate for a device that would still be functioning even decades later.
I know my average has plummeted over the years; especially when I bought a second display, and then a third.
Fortunately, this year I may replace them all with a large 4k display and then I'll have a long attention span again.
DON'T DO IT. or if you do, please put it into landscape mode next to the other monitors, in a circle. i had a large wide-screen display (big mac) - 24 in. i thought it was wonderful. i sat in front of it for 4 years, at a distance of about 1 metre. now my eyes are "prism", meaning that anything over 3 metres away i see *DOUBLE*, especially if it is off to the left or the right. but anything that is exactly 1 metre away, i see perfectly with extremely fast reaction time.
time and time again it has been shown that our eyes adjust to the conditions that we put them under. it is sheer arrogance of the optician industry to state "your eyes degrade with age". it is total shit. our eyes contain MUSCLES. therefore our eyes degrade with LACK OF EXERCISE, just like any other part of our body that has muscles.
the solution: i got plugable.com USB-to-VGA converters and surrounded my workstation with 4:3 aspect ratio monitors, in a semi-circle.... and threw away the "standard" prescription glasses given to me by the ignorant opticians, and bought glasses that were *two* diopters less than the prescription (which had to come from china). there are now opticians in the UK where you can give them exactly the prescription that you want. i recommend using them instead of buying cheap glasses from china.
the key skill needed for programming is to be *able to pay attention to detail*. if you are unable, by any means, to focus on one thing for any length of time (because, for example, you have the attention span of a spider on cocaine or worse caffeine, because, for example, you have been brought up on txting and IMing and twittah) then it should come as absolutely no surprise that you are utterly useless at programming.
another person mentions that creativity is needed in programming. well, yes, this is true. if you have a bug that you don't know how it got there, you need to be extraordinarily patient [attention to detail] with yourself and your work, going over it *creatively* in different ways until such time as you have found, understood and then fixed the bug.
if you do not have the patience because you are, once again, brought up on a diet of twitter, instant gratitfication and refined sugar products, *no amount* of creativity is going to help if you cannot apply it.
i call myself a programmer: what i actually have is obsessive compulsion to be able to pay attention to one task for spans of time that exceed healthy limits. i can be freezing cold and not even notice... because i'm debugging something. only sheer complete exhaustion can get through under those circumstances. this is where it helps to be working in part of a team, as it sets some structure for social interaction. it's no accident, then, that there are entrepreneurs [this goes back a few years on slashdot - there's an article somewhere] who *only* take on *english language* majors [US i presume], and train them to be programmers. why? because people who can *communicate* turn out to make better programmers than people who have been through a university-driven programming course.
Microsoft has an "Open License" which allows you to look at Windows NT source code. it's "open", yes? pay them $USD 1m per year, you get an "open" look at the source code of Windows NT. but if you ever dare to use it, talk about it, or do ANYTHING other than *read* it.... they will sue the fuck out of you.
bottom line: can we PLEASE stop using the word "open" in context with these types of stupid, stupid proprietary arrangements? it really isn't helping.
there are plenty of *LIBRE* licensed implementations of MIPS out there: many people have pointed that out (in comments i can see above this one), they're on http://opencores.org/ - there are at least eight MIPS core implementations that i can see, there, possibly the best one (most complete) is this: http://opencores.org/project,m... which has a 5-stage pipeline and a harvard architecture.
so please, stop using the word "open" to refer to proprietary, restricted and patented material.
the issue that i have with "artificial" intelligence is this: there *is* no such thing as "artificial" - i.e. "fake" or "unreal" intelligence. intelligence just *IS*. no matter the form it takes, if it's "intelligent" then it is pure and absolute arrogance on our part to call it "artificial". the best possible subsitute words that i could come up with were "machine-based" intelligence. the word "simulated" cannot be applied, because, again, if it's intelligent, it just *is* - and, again, to imply that intelligence is "simulated" is, again, a direct falsehood. so we have a bit of a problem, there.
the other problem is this: if those who are creating intelligent machines are themselves of insufficient intelligence to recognise the existence of intelligence, then how on earth would they know that it had actually been created?? it's the "million monkeys" problem in a subtle new light.
but i think people are beginning to confuse "intelligence" with "consciousness". we already have intelligent networks - the next phase is CONSCIOUSNESS. self-awareness. and here we begin to get into interesting territory, not least because we have the very pertinent question "how can scientists who are themselves not truly consciously aware even of themselves possibly begin to *recognise* consciousness when they've created it??"
the problem is highlighted by the example of a friend of mine who refuses to help create machine consciousness. he's a researcher into the concept of consciousness, so he knows what goes into it - how to recognise it, and, by inference, how to make consciousness "happen" so to speak. and when i approached him about helping to make machine consciousness, he said, "sure i can help... but only if you can guarantee that the resultant beings would be in bliss (i.e. happy) rather than being permanently tortured".
and there you have the key, that anything that is self-aware and conscious - anything that has the ability to communicate and feel - *automatically* gains the right to freedom of expression and all the other rights that we *believe* humans - as the arrogant self-appointed "top of the food chain" - should also have... ... and until the arrogant quotes artificial quotes intelligence community recognises that and fights *IN ADVANCE* for the right of machine consciousness to have the same rights as humans, nobody who is a truly conscious and intelligent being is going to help that scientific community to create such advanced conscious beings, because the risks associated with such conscious machines being tortured - just because the scientists think they can - are too great.