...is a crook or a fool. You can reduce the probability of hacking... by an amount that is not easy to quantify.
I heard an interview with an enthusiastic Indian programmer/marketer (sorry, I don't recall if I heard his exact job description), in which he claimed that very soon Indians would be vote via mobile phones. What a recipe for disaster. It's difficult to think of a less reliable and verifiable voting mechanism-- though it would certainly destroy anonymity for honest voters. It's not impossible that someday an open source, mobile voting platform will be more secure than existing mechanisms. But that will be many years in the future, and not developed quickly and cheaply in a nation overrun with corruption (so our best bet is somewhere in Scandinavia).
Where there is a large incentive to cheat (to gain money, power, women), many people will try to cheat. Especially in societies with more habitual defectors than habitual cooperators (such as the US and India). Anybody who says otherwise is trying to cheat you.
Good point. We should be able to opt out of junk mail and flyers (maybe a simple no-flyers sign on the door would suffice for the latter, enforceable by fine). That crap goes directly into the recycling bin, so it's a pointless waste of resources. Businesses should be grateful to me for giving them a chance to direct their marketing dollars at the simps who are vulnerable to them. In fact, they should give me a discount for not using their stupid coupons.
There's no reasoning with these people. I know people who swore that within one year of being elected, Obama would have "taken all our guns" and Isreal would be utterly destroyed. But they always seem to forget they said these things, or they keep moving the goalposts. The fact that reality and their bed-wetting fantasies never intersect never sinks in.
No, most Top500 machines are composed of commercially available, unmodified parts. More than half use GigE interconnects, though Infiniband has nearly caught up. I'm not sure if you'd count Infiniband as COTS-- at least a couple of years ago, it was fairly involved to configure, and it's not cheap. But anybody who has the money can buy it.
I happen to know that they were not the only one. Intel gives huge discounts to HPC vendors to win high profile clusters bids and keep AMD from getting those wins. One of the ways they hide this is by awarding "marketing dollars".
It's preposterous to believe that Intel bribes Dell and the little guys, and not HP or IBM.
Yes. Or how about... let's see, it's Texas, and lots of people are complaining about all the violent illegal aliens. I see a solution with a good Bhyrdstone index. Execute a patent troll, free citizenship.
I think this explains the prevalence of closted gays (and diaper wearers) in the Republican Party. I think they're encouraged, because it's easy to keep them in line that way. You'll notice that when the Larry Craigs, David Vitters, and Mark Sanfords of the world are exposed by people outside of their own party, they are never forced to resign, and they rarely do. While the Dummies, when caught (Spitzer), almost always step down immediately (Clinton is the rare exception). Dems shouldn't be as vulnerable to criticism on this front, because they're not as hypocritical-- but they are pussies, and the media does apply different standards to them.
And yet the GOP purports to be hardcore family values... and maybe they are, in the raunchier sense of "hardcore". But when push comes to shove, it clearly means nothing to them. As long as they toed the party line up until then, they're fine.
Now, one wonders how this ties in with warrantless wiretapping. I said the Dems aren't as vulnerable on the sex front-- not that they're not blackmailed, extorted, or bribed in other ways. In all of Congress there are perhaps as many as three Senators and a handful of Representatives willing to seriously annoy the national security industry when it matters.
And as soon as you invest in one solution, we will discontinue it and introduce a completely incompatible one (wince/windows mobile win7; playsforsure/zune, etc). Why bother introducing a new product when we can repackage an old one and sell it again?
For some reason I read "Perfect Citizen" in the voice of the Combine soldiers in Half Life 2. It makes me picture cowering... Probably just coincidence.
Exactly. A large fraction of the games have been decided by clearly bad calls. Furthermore, in a tournament, especially with a small sample size of games (single elimination being the smallest), chance plays a huge role. The best team is more likely than the others to win, but unless there's a huge disparity in skill (for example, pro vs. high school), the best team is not likely to win the majority of times. For example, if Team A will win against teams B, C and D 2/3 of the time, and they have to beat each of those teams to win the tournament, they've got about a 29.6% chance of winning it all. If they only have to beat two, it's 44.4%.
And then there are the ways you match up vs. the teams you happen to play, injuries, etc. It's still fun. In fact, you might say those things make it more interesting. If you had a perfect way of predicting the games, because they perfectly reflected some ideal of skill, there would be no point in playing them.
But a single tournament doesn't really tell you who is "best."
Stop laughing, it's a serious mental illness
on
Microsoft Kills the Kin
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· Score: 4, Informative
They just can't help themselves, especially in mobile. It's like, if they ever stick to a plan for a full year, we'll all know what they're up to! Can't have that. Call it the Sun syndrome...
But on the bright side, one of their employees has come to the conclusion that, in principle anyway, it would be good if their software worked. And was easy to use.
I'll mostly leave it to others to enumerate the many flaws in this, except to note that under AT&T I often had text messages arrive hours or days late, or never. But I do have to applaud this group. This is, by a wide margin, the worst idea I have ever seen in a/. story. Are we sure this wasn't a belated April Fool's gag?
Agreed, the prices on ebooks are far too high. But if you are smart, ebook readers can be a good deal. There are a ton of free (and legal) ebooks out there. Old classics out of copyright are free, but also a decent library of newer SF. What pushed me to make the purchase was the price of a paper copy of Peter Watts' Behemoth... over $150 new, but free on his site. There's also Charles Stross, the Baen Free Library, etc... and I've barely started looking. The Nook store also has a fair number of freebies, but for the most part you'll have to download books from various sites and use Calibre to convert to one of the supported formats.
Factoring in the free books, the average cost of the books in my nook is about what used books would cost, or a bit less. I haven't had time to get serious about filling it with free books, or it would be even lower. I'd be happy to buy many more books through their store, but I won't do so aggressively until prices are reasonable (at $5, I'd go nuts, and their profits would skyrocket; everybody wins. But I guess they don't like money). So the Nook will save me money over the year, though not as much as I'd prefer. I read a couple thousand pages during my vacation, so it saves on weight, space, and trees as well.
If they raise the prices more (dick move, Steve Jobs), torrents of ebooks will become much more popular.
Slashdot Mirror
Just curious, how often do you thoroughly inspect the underside of your car?
...is a crook or a fool. You can reduce the probability of hacking... by an amount that is not easy to quantify.
I heard an interview with an enthusiastic Indian programmer/marketer (sorry, I don't recall if I heard his exact job description), in which he claimed that very soon Indians would be vote via mobile phones. What a recipe for disaster. It's difficult to think of a less reliable and verifiable voting mechanism-- though it would certainly destroy anonymity for honest voters. It's not impossible that someday an open source, mobile voting platform will be more secure than existing mechanisms. But that will be many years in the future, and not developed quickly and cheaply in a nation overrun with corruption (so our best bet is somewhere in Scandinavia).
Where there is a large incentive to cheat (to gain money, power, women), many people will try to cheat. Especially in societies with more habitual defectors than habitual cooperators (such as the US and India). Anybody who says otherwise is trying to cheat you.
Good point. We should be able to opt out of junk mail and flyers (maybe a simple no-flyers sign on the door would suffice for the latter, enforceable by fine). That crap goes directly into the recycling bin, so it's a pointless waste of resources. Businesses should be grateful to me for giving them a chance to direct their marketing dollars at the simps who are vulnerable to them. In fact, they should give me a discount for not using their stupid coupons.
Bah. I won't trust it until they use Voight-Kampff.
There's no reasoning with these people. I know people who swore that within one year of being elected, Obama would have "taken all our guns" and Isreal would be utterly destroyed. But they always seem to forget they said these things, or they keep moving the goalposts. The fact that reality and their bed-wetting fantasies never intersect never sinks in.
I wonder why they think giving people more justifications for violence will eliminate violence.
Really, /.? No UTF-8? WTF-8!
No, it'll play Motörhead, which is what you should have said anyway, you big girl's blouse.
What's that?
No, most Top500 machines are composed of commercially available, unmodified parts. More than half use GigE interconnects, though Infiniband has nearly caught up. I'm not sure if you'd count Infiniband as COTS-- at least a couple of years ago, it was fairly involved to configure, and it's not cheap. But anybody who has the money can buy it.
Actually, they sorted 100 trillion bits, then did a uniq. So it was a 0-1 tie.
You're welcome for that, by the way.
You're implying God created gremlins? That's ludicrous. There's no such thing as God.
I happen to know that they were not the only one. Intel gives huge discounts to HPC vendors to win high profile clusters bids and keep AMD from getting those wins. One of the ways they hide this is by awarding "marketing dollars".
It's preposterous to believe that Intel bribes Dell and the little guys, and not HP or IBM.
Yes. Or how about... let's see, it's Texas, and lots of people are complaining about all the violent illegal aliens. I see a solution with a good Bhyrdstone index. Execute a patent troll, free citizenship.
I think this explains the prevalence of closted gays (and diaper wearers) in the Republican Party. I think they're encouraged, because it's easy to keep them in line that way. You'll notice that when the Larry Craigs, David Vitters, and Mark Sanfords of the world are exposed by people outside of their own party, they are never forced to resign, and they rarely do. While the Dummies, when caught (Spitzer), almost always step down immediately (Clinton is the rare exception). Dems shouldn't be as vulnerable to criticism on this front, because they're not as hypocritical-- but they are pussies, and the media does apply different standards to them.
And yet the GOP purports to be hardcore family values... and maybe they are, in the raunchier sense of "hardcore". But when push comes to shove, it clearly means nothing to them. As long as they toed the party line up until then, they're fine.
Now, one wonders how this ties in with warrantless wiretapping. I said the Dems aren't as vulnerable on the sex front-- not that they're not blackmailed, extorted, or bribed in other ways. In all of Congress there are perhaps as many as three Senators and a handful of Representatives willing to seriously annoy the national security industry when it matters.
Marketing? I don't think I've ever bought a book I've seen an advertisement for. In my idealized world, nobody does the marketing.
And there's plenty of middle ground for both.
And as soon as you invest in one solution, we will discontinue it and introduce a completely incompatible one (wince/windows mobile win7; playsforsure/zune, etc). Why bother introducing a new product when we can repackage an old one and sell it again?
I don't know what's there, but it can't possibly be worth the risk.
For some reason I read "Perfect Citizen" in the voice of the Combine soldiers in Half Life 2. It makes me picture cowering... Probably just coincidence.
Exactly. A large fraction of the games have been decided by clearly bad calls. Furthermore, in a tournament, especially with a small sample size of games (single elimination being the smallest), chance plays a huge role. The best team is more likely than the others to win, but unless there's a huge disparity in skill (for example, pro vs. high school), the best team is not likely to win the majority of times. For example, if Team A will win against teams B, C and D 2/3 of the time, and they have to beat each of those teams to win the tournament, they've got about a 29.6% chance of winning it all. If they only have to beat two, it's 44.4%.
And then there are the ways you match up vs. the teams you happen to play, injuries, etc. It's still fun. In fact, you might say those things make it more interesting. If you had a perfect way of predicting the games, because they perfectly reflected some ideal of skill, there would be no point in playing them.
But a single tournament doesn't really tell you who is "best."
They just can't help themselves, especially in mobile. It's like, if they ever stick to a plan for a full year, we'll all know what they're up to! Can't have that. Call it the Sun syndrome...
But on the bright side, one of their employees has come to the conclusion that, in principle anyway, it would be good if their software worked. And was easy to use.
http://www.crn.com/software/225701869
So maybe they'll give that a shot soon.
I'll mostly leave it to others to enumerate the many flaws in this, except to note that under AT&T I often had text messages arrive hours or days late, or never. But I do have to applaud this group. This is, by a wide margin, the worst idea I have ever seen in a /. story. Are we sure this wasn't a belated April Fool's gag?
Agreed, the prices on ebooks are far too high. But if you are smart, ebook readers can be a good deal. There are a ton of free (and legal) ebooks out there. Old classics out of copyright are free, but also a decent library of newer SF. What pushed me to make the purchase was the price of a paper copy of Peter Watts' Behemoth... over $150 new, but free on his site. There's also Charles Stross, the Baen Free Library, etc... and I've barely started looking. The Nook store also has a fair number of freebies, but for the most part you'll have to download books from various sites and use Calibre to convert to one of the supported formats.
Factoring in the free books, the average cost of the books in my nook is about what used books would cost, or a bit less. I haven't had time to get serious about filling it with free books, or it would be even lower. I'd be happy to buy many more books through their store, but I won't do so aggressively until prices are reasonable (at $5, I'd go nuts, and their profits would skyrocket; everybody wins. But I guess they don't like money). So the Nook will save me money over the year, though not as much as I'd prefer. I read a couple thousand pages during my vacation, so it saves on weight, space, and trees as well.
If they raise the prices more (dick move, Steve Jobs), torrents of ebooks will become much more popular.