and it will be glorious...when your pet dies, revive it by installing Linux, as long as you have the right materials. Infinite uptime, as long as you keep it well fed (even Linux computers crash when they lose power).
lol i don't think they use md5! its more like a specialised code that picks out certain features and generates more of a geek-code style hash
Geek codes are easily reversible. The OP was about one way hashes so that theft of some of the hashes could not be used to produce fraudulent fingerprints. I've never formally studied one way hashes, but I thought that if similar sources produced similar hashes, then that property could be used to crack (reverse) the hashing system.
You're right about pure PR. I've been thinking lately about giving everyone one PR vote and one FPTP vote. The ideal mix is probably something else, but 50%-50% is simple enough and it seems a lot better than 100% of either.
Multiballot (possibly simultaneous) systems like Australia's have their places*, but I don't think Canada is one of them. Since the vast majority of people lean a little to the right or the left, the middle party is almost guaranteed to be everybody's first or second choice, while the right and left parties are more likely to be last choices. i.e. when you're voting against someone the middle party has an advantage. Which is mathematically OK (after all, the electorate said they'd settle for them), but bad in practice once the middle party realizes they are invulnerable.
* like say, president of a professional society, where there's little incentive to deeply entrench oneself.
I think the NDP are the only ones talking about proportional representation (PR), which would fix the problem at its root - the problem being that it is too easy to play the regions against one another. With First Past The Post (FPTP), ridings that are solidly either for or against a party don't matter to that party, and the party is not going to go out of their way to please, or even refrain from intensely annoying, those ridings.
But it'll never happen since governing parties by definition want to maintain the status quo. How about voting to make elections close within ridings, i.e. make parties think they have a chance/have to sweat?
And no offense Malc, but how did your post get modded funny? I can't believe they fell for that HAHAHAHAHA. Well, we'll see how this gets modded. Don't drink and mod, folks.
if you want to compare it with a print you compare the codes for a match but you cant recreate an image of a fingerprint from a hash code
That would be (relatively) nice if it were true, but isn't one of the properties of a one way hash that a small change in the source makes a wildly large change in the hash result? That seems like an insurmountable problem for hashing fingerprints and then comparing them to hashes of fingerprints taken months or years later. Even without hashes, don't take a bath or wash the dishes before going to the airport! Just leave them sitting in the sink during your 2 week vacation...tourists love coming home to that sort of thing.
Re:Done right, CSS can help multi-platform use.
on
CSS for the LDP?
·
· Score: 1
Surely downloading all referenced stylesheets on page load vs. as needed should be an option in the browser preferences.
How do they really really know for certain, that these numbers are truly random?
There are statistical tests (see Knuth), like spectral flatness and incompressibility, but complete "certainty" has to rest on the theoretical underpinnings of QM, with testing by Bell's inequality (discussed elsewhere on this page).
And what kinds of applications might they be used for?
Secure communications, ignoring for now the problem of distributing the random bits.
Why does it need to be a quantum random number generator? How come you cant use an aerial and pick up white noise?
That "white noise" is contaminated by a jumble of deterministic TV and radio signals, that potential attackers could also detect or predict. It would be better to detach the aerial and amplify the output from a warm resistor, which is I think what the VIA motherboards do. Conceivably, though, somebody with far too much time and money on their hands could watch (or have watched) the molecules in your resistor unreasonably closely, and attempt guessing what they'll do. Using smaller particles is better, since observing them perturbs them so that their behavior can't be predicted, but that's QM by definition. You (and VIA) could also argue that warm resistors already include lots of quantum noise.
if there was some comet out in the Ort cloud with an incredibly eccentric orbit around the sun that was the size of Titan, that'd be a planet too. IMHO.
IMHO, orbit does matter, because it points to the object's origin. Circular and in the ecliptic? Planetary disk -> planet. Highly inclined and/or eccentric? Oort cloud or Kuiper Belt object, i.e. comet. That leaves the asteroids (unless they are captured comets...but are we all captured comets? Let's not go there right now...;-), but you can bring in sphericity, possibly differentiation, or Crowscape's definitions to take care of them.
Not enough astronomers come right out and say it or even consciously realize it, but they are looking more at the orbit than the size. There is more of a size difference between Earth and Jupiter than Sedna, Pluto, Mercury, or probably even Mars. But the acknowledged planets all have fairly circular orbits in the ecliptic. Also, newly discovered things tend to be the brightest/biggest/exceptional examples of relatively small and common things. Sheer size can be misleading.
Try reading a dictionary that was written in 1800 or earlier.
Why? The original point of the article was, that based on new data, maybe it's time to refine the definition of planet.
You are reading a definition that is the result of the taxonomists having won
???? What is defining but taxonomy?
The farmers classified the tomato as a vegetable because it has a thin skin and is perishable.
Bull. The nonbotanical, i.e. gastronomical, definition of fruit is a plant part that would be used by most people in a dessert. Tomatoes aren't much more thin skinned or perishable than other berries, while some gastronomical vegetables like squashes are thick skinned and durable.
There is some logic to a taxonomy of fruits and veg based on genetics,
I think you mean function, not genetics.
there is equal logic to a taxonomy based on how well it keeps.
Wrong, as pointed out above.
The farmers lost out to the scientists here because the scientists got to write the taxonomy.
That sentence is meaningless. Why did the scientists get to write the taxonomy?
It is a silly dispute as are most taxonomic disputes, Pluto and Seldane are planets if people chose to call them such.
No, IIRC Seldane is an anti-dandruff shampoo.
Witgenstein was right.
Ah, Wittgenstein, favorite philosopher of trolls. Think you can't lose an argument if you redefine "lose"? The incompleteness theorem only lets you do that some of the time. It does not guarantee the existence of a solution that agrees with you.
What's wrong with that partition that it needs to be swapped out? It worked fine in windoze...
The partitioner screen struck me as potentially scary. "swap" should be replaced with "virtual memory (a.k.a. swap)", ideally with context sensitive, or even clickable, help for a few of the buzzwords. Predicting how much swap you'll need isn't easy, anyway, and pretty hopeless for a newbie.
Instead of asking "How much for the swap partition?", why not "Do you want a
swap partition? (n)". That way Bob Default doesn't have to worry about whether a drive needs exchanging, and the installer will put a swapfile in the partition containing/home later.
If they're going to allow (even recommend!) putting all non-swap in a single partition, maybe it's time to embrace the swapfile. Off the top of my head the only big advantage I can think of for the swap partition is that in theory it can be shared by multiple OSes in a multiboot system. How many people bother with that trick anymore?
The news article says that some people saw it but it got away.
And after they took all those pictures they didn't think to take it inside? What really makes me suspicious is that a 3-frog fusion managed to get away and hide from a whole daycare full of kids and their parents. How fast could it possibly go?
Sounds good, but it also sounds like Usenet, i.e. a big spam target.
Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that. Anything that shuts off traditional avenues for spammers, but leaves some relatively open, is going to put a lot of spam pressure on the open avenues. In this case the spammers can only attack lists where subscribers can post - "1-way" lists, like an ISP announcing things to its customers, would be immune.
I don't run an ISP, but mailing lists could be saved if the required computation scheme were parceled with sender verification and user controlled whitelisting. Most mailing lists today have a web page where you can subscribe and receive a confirmation message a few minutes later. Next year's mailing lists could drop the subscription if the user has not whitelisted the mailing list sender. Wanna be on the list? Gotta give ol' Majordomo (or whatever) a free pass. Ideally browsers and/or MUAs will have convenience functions for subscribing and whitelisting at the same time.
That would of course make mailing lists somewhat* juicy targets for spammers, since a computational challenge would not matter so much here. Mailing list managers would need content and poster based filtering.
*Only somewhat because it seems that most people who've discovered mailing lists have too much of a clue to buy something from a spammer. Educating the user is the ultimate solution.
I would have given that troll a mod point, if it had included perl code for producing it (featuring format, of course), and an option for changing the perspective and/or lighting direction.
second half of your post is, I hope, a comedy and not serious.
Sheesh...
especially since you used the relativistic E=mc^2.
No. Ever heard of E = 1/2 m v^2? E = mc^2 wasn't published until Einstein came along, much LATER than Newton. Admittedly applying E = 1/2 m v^2 recklessly assumes that the energy of a photon is completely kinetic, but that's not the point. The point is that the possibility of gravity affecting light was not, as you claimed, inconceivable before Einstein, or even Michaelson and Morley. The proof of that point is that gravitational lensing was predicted using Newtonian mechanics. Look it up.
CPAN is nice, but it should not be the starting point for a beginner, unless they don't care about the language.
The 1st chapter would have to quickly segue into writing wrapper code to adapt CPAN packages to your needs, and take a more traditional approach from there.
CPAN modules are "one size fits all" which can be slow
Slower than DIY? Even if you're a newbie?
CPAN modules don't teach.
Reinventing the wheel can be educational, but you could also learn by tinkering with a car. (Maybe not the safest example, but lots of things in real life are learned by clueless tinkering.)
Installing CPAN modules requires at least a little understanding of Perl.
Well I wasn't thinking of just reprinting the CPAN manpage. Merely suggesting that the CPAN chapter should come closer to the front than the back. The problem with many perl texts is that CPAN can be lumped in or behind networking, or OO, and people have a tendency to stop reading as soon as they hit something that they don't need right now.
Newtonian mechanics figures that since photons have zero rest mass
Newtonian physics doesn't talk about rest mass.
(Without SR you don't get the mass-energy equivelence.)
Oh? Let's use my wormhole to tell Newton the value of c, and nothing else:
Hmm, let's see. Light carries energy, and now we've found that it has a finite speed c. That suggests that the corpuscles have mass m = 2E/c^2.
I should add a new chapter concerning gravity to my Treatise on Opticks.
Once the speed of light is known, Newtonian gravity can be used (and was, IIRC, for lensing) to predict both gravitational lensing and gravitational redshift. It's off by a factor of 2 for lensing, but qualitatively correct.
It's very rare that a good understanding of Newtonian physics doesn't give you some insight, and in less time than a string theory calculation would.
fix the broken software that doesn't allow filenames with spaces in.
Utterly wrong. According to the philosophy that software should help humans, and bend over backwards if necessary to do so, it should only present humans with filenames that are easy to parse at a glance. That means sticking to the "filenames are separated by spaces" system:
% ls a b.mp3 c
Is that "a", "b.mp3", and "c", or "a b.mp3" and "c", or "a" and "b.mp3 c"(, etc.)? It's only obvious if
The "filenames are separated by spaces" system is used.
...or the UI is hobbled by displaying only 1 file per line, or attaching a big icon to each file, drastically reducing the number of files that can be displayed in a given screen area.
Another poster pointed out how spaces in filenames can break awk 1-liners, etc., and was told to write a smarter script. The point of a 1-liner is that it's off the cuff and saves time. Writing a "smarter" (really, more robust) script is simply not smart in such cases.
You could argue that humans prefer to put spaces instead of _ or UpperCase in filenames at creation time, but filenames tend to be write once, read many. Avoiding spaces to begin with, or running a space removal script in a directory (tree) is better than dealing with the spaces over and over again.
Personally I'd just type " before and after pasting the filename with the spaces in.
It's often easier to type the first few letters and let tab completion fill in the escaping for you.
the footprint of that thing is not enough to make the flybar usable on grass
Shouldn't be that hard to add a bigger foot, like say, a snowshoe. Then you could use it on snow if it was packed hard enough (still probably better than grass).
Or...a ski! You could really get some freestyle air that way!
You'd lose your easy rock supply. Which I guess was the point of the MADMEN, that they would not have to boost any mass beside themselves to the asteroid's orbit. If the MADMEN were sufficiently small, efficient, and early, the energy required to decelerate them for landing on the asteroid could be less than the energy required for railgunning a lot of rock at the asteroid.
More seriously, I don't see how to get a lot of aimability (radians, not just fine tuning) from a lunar rail gun without building several, or slingshotting past the Earth. The latter would make people nervous, and there's a velocity dependent maximum achievable turning angle without grazing the Earth's atmosphere. Something that spins faster than the Moon, like Phobos or Deimos, would give more flexibility. My thinking here is that we might not have time to wait 2 weeks or so if the asteroid's coming from the wrong direction.
That would be a tricky weapon to use. You would have to choose an asteroid with exactly the right mass to destroy an enemy without ending life on Earth.
Maybe the user wants to destroy all life on Earth. As with nukes, mutually assured destruction is vulnerable to nutbars. And nutbars do get into power every now and then.
For the slightly less nutty, or the more common merely idiotic, there are lots of asteroids, with a wide variety of sizes. Small (but large enough to make it through the atmosphere) asteroids have (or will have) the same sickening attraction to weapons aficionados as small nukes.
Eventually this technology will become available. After all, it's just rocket science. We'll just have to keep an eye out for rocks headed our way.
Slashdot Mirror
and it will be glorious...when your pet dies, revive it by installing Linux, as long as you have the right materials. Infinite uptime, as long as you keep it well fed (even Linux computers crash when they lose power).
Geek codes are easily reversible. The OP was about one way hashes so that theft of some of the hashes could not be used to produce fraudulent fingerprints. I've never formally studied one way hashes, but I thought that if similar sources produced similar hashes, then that property could be used to crack (reverse) the hashing system.
Multiballot (possibly simultaneous) systems like Australia's have their places*, but I don't think Canada is one of them. Since the vast majority of people lean a little to the right or the left, the middle party is almost guaranteed to be everybody's first or second choice, while the right and left parties are more likely to be last choices. i.e. when you're voting against someone the middle party has an advantage. Which is mathematically OK (after all, the electorate said they'd settle for them), but bad in practice once the middle party realizes they are invulnerable.
* like say, president of a professional society, where there's little incentive to deeply entrench oneself.
But it'll never happen since governing parties by definition want to maintain the status quo. How about voting to make elections close within ridings, i.e. make parties think they have a chance/have to sweat?
And no offense Malc, but how did your post get modded funny? I can't believe they fell for that HAHAHAHAHA. Well, we'll see how this gets modded. Don't drink and mod, folks.
That would be (relatively) nice if it were true, but isn't one of the properties of a one way hash that a small change in the source makes a wildly large change in the hash result? That seems like an insurmountable problem for hashing fingerprints and then comparing them to hashes of fingerprints taken months or years later. Even without hashes, don't take a bath or wash the dishes before going to the airport! Just leave them sitting in the sink during your 2 week vacation...tourists love coming home to that sort of thing.
Surely downloading all referenced stylesheets on page load vs. as needed should be an option in the browser preferences.
There are statistical tests (see Knuth), like spectral flatness and incompressibility, but complete "certainty" has to rest on the theoretical underpinnings of QM, with testing by Bell's inequality (discussed elsewhere on this page).
And what kinds of applications might they be used for?
Secure communications, ignoring for now the problem of distributing the random bits.
Why does it need to be a quantum random number generator? How come you cant use an aerial and pick up white noise?
That "white noise" is contaminated by a jumble of deterministic TV and radio signals, that potential attackers could also detect or predict. It would be better to detach the aerial and amplify the output from a warm resistor, which is I think what the VIA motherboards do. Conceivably, though, somebody with far too much time and money on their hands could watch (or have watched) the molecules in your resistor unreasonably closely, and attempt guessing what they'll do. Using smaller particles is better, since observing them perturbs them so that their behavior can't be predicted, but that's QM by definition. You (and VIA) could also argue that warm resistors already include lots of quantum noise.
IMHO, orbit does matter, because it points to the object's origin. Circular and in the ecliptic? Planetary disk -> planet. Highly inclined and/or eccentric? Oort cloud or Kuiper Belt object, i.e. comet. That leaves the asteroids (unless they are captured comets...but are we all captured comets? Let's not go there right now...;-), but you can bring in sphericity, possibly differentiation, or Crowscape's definitions to take care of them.
Not enough astronomers come right out and say it or even consciously realize it, but they are looking more at the orbit than the size. There is more of a size difference between Earth and Jupiter than Sedna, Pluto, Mercury, or probably even Mars. But the acknowledged planets all have fairly circular orbits in the ecliptic. Also, newly discovered things tend to be the brightest/biggest/exceptional examples of relatively small and common things. Sheer size can be misleading.
Why? The original point of the article was, that based on new data, maybe it's time to refine the definition of planet.
You are reading a definition that is the result of the taxonomists having won
???? What is defining but taxonomy?
The farmers classified the tomato as a vegetable because it has a thin skin and is perishable.
Bull. The nonbotanical, i.e. gastronomical, definition of fruit is a plant part that would be used by most people in a dessert. Tomatoes aren't much more thin skinned or perishable than other berries, while some gastronomical vegetables like squashes are thick skinned and durable.
There is some logic to a taxonomy of fruits and veg based on genetics,
I think you mean function, not genetics.
there is equal logic to a taxonomy based on how well it keeps.
Wrong, as pointed out above.
The farmers lost out to the scientists here because the scientists got to write the taxonomy.
That sentence is meaningless. Why did the scientists get to write the taxonomy?
It is a silly dispute as are most taxonomic disputes, Pluto and Seldane are planets if people chose to call them such.
No, IIRC Seldane is an anti-dandruff shampoo.
Witgenstein was right.
Ah, Wittgenstein, favorite philosopher of trolls. Think you can't lose an argument if you redefine "lose"? The incompleteness theorem only lets you do that some of the time. It does not guarantee the existence of a solution that agrees with you.
You should try emacsclient. It's great for things like email, but I still keep jed around for use over ssh connections.
So? Rocket fuel can increase the speed of lots of things..you just have to put them in the payload ;-)
The partitioner screen struck me as potentially scary. "swap" should be replaced with "virtual memory (a.k.a. swap)", ideally with context sensitive, or even clickable, help for a few of the buzzwords. Predicting how much swap you'll need isn't easy, anyway, and pretty hopeless for a newbie.
Instead of asking "How much for the swap partition?", why not "Do you want a swap partition? (n)". That way Bob Default doesn't have to worry about whether a drive needs exchanging, and the installer will put a swapfile in the partition containing /home later.
If they're going to allow (even recommend!) putting all non-swap in a single partition, maybe it's time to embrace the swapfile. Off the top of my head the only big advantage I can think of for the swap partition is that in theory it can be shared by multiple OSes in a multiboot system. How many people bother with that trick anymore?
And after they took all those pictures they didn't think to take it inside? What really makes me suspicious is that a 3-frog fusion managed to get away and hide from a whole daycare full of kids and their parents. How fast could it possibly go?
Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with that. Anything that shuts off traditional avenues for spammers, but leaves some relatively open, is going to put a lot of spam pressure on the open avenues. In this case the spammers can only attack lists where subscribers can post - "1-way" lists, like an ISP announcing things to its customers, would be immune.
That would of course make mailing lists somewhat* juicy targets for spammers, since a computational challenge would not matter so much here. Mailing list managers would need content and poster based filtering.
*Only somewhat because it seems that most people who've discovered mailing lists have too much of a clue to buy something from a spammer. Educating the user is the ultimate solution.
I would have given that troll a mod point, if it had included perl code for producing it (featuring format, of course), and an option for changing the perspective and/or lighting direction.
Sheesh...
especially since you used the relativistic E=mc^2.
No. Ever heard of E = 1/2 m v^2? E = mc^2 wasn't published until Einstein came along, much LATER than Newton. Admittedly applying E = 1/2 m v^2 recklessly assumes that the energy of a photon is completely kinetic, but that's not the point. The point is that the possibility of gravity affecting light was not, as you claimed, inconceivable before Einstein, or even Michaelson and Morley. The proof of that point is that gravitational lensing was predicted using Newtonian mechanics. Look it up.
The 1st chapter would have to quickly segue into writing wrapper code to adapt CPAN packages to your needs, and take a more traditional approach from there.
CPAN modules are "one size fits all" which can be slow
Slower than DIY? Even if you're a newbie?
CPAN modules don't teach.
Reinventing the wheel can be educational, but you could also learn by tinkering with a car. (Maybe not the safest example, but lots of things in real life are learned by clueless tinkering.)
Installing CPAN modules requires at least a little understanding of Perl.
Well I wasn't thinking of just reprinting the CPAN manpage. Merely suggesting that the CPAN chapter should come closer to the front than the back. The problem with many perl texts is that CPAN can be lumped in or behind networking, or OO, and people have a tendency to stop reading as soon as they hit something that they don't need right now.
Newtonian physics doesn't talk about rest mass.
(Without SR you don't get the mass-energy equivelence.)
Oh? Let's use my wormhole to tell Newton the value of c, and nothing else:
Hmm, let's see. Light carries energy, and now we've found that it has a finite speed c. That suggests that the corpuscles have mass m = 2E/c^2. I should add a new chapter concerning gravity to my Treatise on Opticks.
It's very rare that a good understanding of Newtonian physics doesn't give you some insight, and in less time than a string theory calculation would.
And editor and/or compilers could raise an error if the code doesn't have enough use/#includes near the start ;->
Correct.
fix the broken software that doesn't allow filenames with spaces in.
Utterly wrong. According to the philosophy that software should help humans, and bend over backwards if necessary to do so, it should only present humans with filenames that are easy to parse at a glance. That means sticking to the "filenames are separated by spaces" system:
Is that "a", "b.mp3", and "c", or "a b.mp3" and "c", or "a" and "b.mp3 c"(, etc.)? It's only obvious if- The "filenames are separated by spaces" system is used.
- ...or the UI is hobbled by displaying only 1 file per line, or attaching a big icon to each file, drastically reducing the number of files that can be displayed in a given screen area.
Another poster pointed out how spaces in filenames can break awk 1-liners, etc., and was told to write a smarter script. The point of a 1-liner is that it's off the cuff and saves time. Writing a "smarter" (really, more robust) script is simply not smart in such cases.You could argue that humans prefer to put spaces instead of _ or UpperCase in filenames at creation time, but filenames tend to be write once, read many. Avoiding spaces to begin with, or running a space removal script in a directory (tree) is better than dealing with the spaces over and over again.
Personally I'd just type " before and after pasting the filename with the spaces in.
It's often easier to type the first few letters and let tab completion fill in the escaping for you.
Shouldn't be that hard to add a bigger foot, like say, a snowshoe. Then you could use it on snow if it was packed hard enough (still probably better than grass).
Or...a ski! You could really get some freestyle air that way!
You'd lose your easy rock supply. Which I guess was the point of the MADMEN, that they would not have to boost any mass beside themselves to the asteroid's orbit. If the MADMEN were sufficiently small, efficient, and early, the energy required to decelerate them for landing on the asteroid could be less than the energy required for railgunning a lot of rock at the asteroid.
More seriously, I don't see how to get a lot of aimability (radians, not just fine tuning) from a lunar rail gun without building several, or slingshotting past the Earth. The latter would make people nervous, and there's a velocity dependent maximum achievable turning angle without grazing the Earth's atmosphere. Something that spins faster than the Moon, like Phobos or Deimos, would give more flexibility. My thinking here is that we might not have time to wait 2 weeks or so if the asteroid's coming from the wrong direction.
- Maybe the user wants to destroy all life on Earth. As with nukes, mutually assured destruction is vulnerable to nutbars. And nutbars do get into power every now and then.
- For the slightly less nutty, or the more common merely idiotic, there are lots of asteroids, with a wide variety of sizes. Small (but large enough to make it through the atmosphere) asteroids have (or will have) the same sickening attraction to weapons aficionados as small nukes.
Eventually this technology will become available. After all, it's just rocket science. We'll just have to keep an eye out for rocks headed our way.