Re:"unknown"? Light article...
on
Einstein Unveiled
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I always loved that quote, but when I was studying E&M and QM in college in the late 80's, I coined my own response:
"God does not play dice." - Einstein
"God may or may not play dice, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't use a pocket calculator." - G. Steve Arnold (me) c.1988
My point was that the universe does not know equations -- it just is. The photons are not sitting there with QED books and Feynman diagrams trying to figure out what they are supposed to be doing next. Every bit of it is accounted for in itself quite automatically and the ultimate goal of the physics we do is not understanding, but only description. Understanding requires you to answer "why?", and that is beyond the scope of science.
In all due fairness (and with an extra heaping helping of nitpick on the side), none of the products (ZA, BlackIce, TPF, firmware *shudder* "routers") is a firewall. A firewall is an entirely different animal. Look, I have a "router" myself, and I love it - but it's not a router and it's not a firewall, it's a NAT device. It does NAT and proxies a few services if needed, but it doesn't do the same things routers and firewalls do. I know *why* we've started calling them routers, but that doesn't diminish the fact that the language is being lost here because LinkSys is not interested in explaining to Joe Homeuser what NAT is.
Now, having said that, I would also point out that my gripe here is almost entirely with the verbage. most home users do not need an actual firewall; NAT + PacketFilter + Don't-blindly-click-OK-on-EULAs is quite sufficient.
Ok, I got that off my chest -- bitch mode=off, and you can now all go back to trolling.:)
Percent off means subtracting a certain percentile of the old price.... you put the new price on the rhs, which resulted in a divide by zero error.
new = old - (%off/100)*old
Wrong equation?!?!
Witness Algebra:
new = old - (%off/100)*old
(new - old) = - (%off/100) * old
(old - new) = + (%off/100) * old
(old-new)/(old) = (%off/100)
Which yields:
%off = 100* (old-new)/(old)
which is my equation, except for (possibly) a negative sign, which I conveniently discounted by using abolute value bars to avoid starting a flamewar about whether a discount should be positive or negative.
Now, if you want to get pedantic, subtracting a percent from the original price is what my equation does because:
Originally, I scaled it by multiplying by 100 to format the result as a more "traditional" percentage, but the 1 here indicates 100% of original price and the (new/old) is the percentage to which you are referring.
Now, having cleared *that* up, for those of you coming up with ridiculous (and/or satirical) criticism of my NAN result, (any-number-including-possibly-zero)/old is ALWAYS undefined (i.e., Not-A-Number) if old is zero. This is not debateable. The only way around this is to REDEFINE what happens if old=0, (creating a new function that does what you want it to do there). Hopefully, you discover that there are non-constantly-zero algebraic expressions for old and new that produce a finite limit as old,new -> 0 and use THAT as the value there. (Note that if the limit as old->0 goes to +/-infinity, you can't make the function continuous). However, since old and new in this case *are* constants, this doesn't work either!
CRIMINY! WHAT ARE THEY TEACHING YOU PEOPLE IN MATH THESE DAYS -- FEELINGS?!?! IT WAS A LAME ATTEMPT AT A STUPID JOKE, WHICH I REGRET FOR HAVING CAUSED SO MUCH HYSTERIA!!!!
SOMEBODY MOD MY ORIGINAL POST (AND THIS ONE) AS TROLLS SO I CAN GET ON WITH MY LIFE AND STOP GETTING MESSAGES ABOUT THIS!!!!!
Well, technically, %off = ABS[(old-new)/(old)]*100, so since the old price is zero, you have a NAN exception and the result is undefined, so in a sense you can define it to be whatever you want.
However, the marketing department has an easier time with things if you use round numbers.
So today, one of my bosses walks into my office and sez, "so what program do you use to download music?" I sez, "legal or illegal?" And he sez, "Well, it's *ALL* illegal."
Any that's when it hits me: the RIAA is right -- it's doomed.
Fortunately, more people will be making more music than ever before, and the companies that arise to replace the RIAA members will do so with more realistic expectations.
Ultimately, this is going to be legal whether they want it or not -- it's too powerful to be contained.
The focus has definitely shifted away from algorithms and toward abstraction. This was supposed to make things easier, by letting the software do what it does best and keep track of bookkeeping, while we concentrate on building models and governing interations between them.
Some of it actually makes sense - the object oriented paridigm, component models, virtual machines. (VM's, by the way, go back at least 20 years in the literature -- I studied them in college in the late 80's. However, like Pascal, they were originally considered as an instructional tool, and nobody at the time thought that anyone would be damn fool enough to actually try and *implement* such a thing!)
But just like letting grade-school students use calculators for their arithmetic, I'm not certain these things are best for students. Sure, you get usable code out quickly, but without an understanding of the underlying algorithms and logic. I doubt many modern 'c0derz' could properly knock out a simple quick-sort, let alone a fully ACID SQL DBMS.
Microsoft has a well-established history of being terrible with security, of treating it as a P.R. problem that can be fixed with lies as opposed to an engineering problem that can be fixed with quality programming.
The quality of the programming isn't the problem and this isn't a bug -- IE works exactly as MS intended. The problem is the design.
To actually *FIX* *THE* *PROBLEM*, MS is going to have to rewrite and redeploy every app, development tool and API they have released in the last ~eight years that provides a mechanism to embed code inside of data. THEN, they have to get everyone already using those tools and apps to switch to the feature-depleted versions, costing big bucks up front, as well as lost time redesigning and redeveloping software we already have from scratch. In short, this isn't going to happen. It's prohibitively expensive, and a logistical impossibility.
Realistically, we'd need a catastrophic event on the order of the Y2K bug that makes everyone want/need to rebuy their software on a new platform that does a worse job of blindly executing code at the arbitrary request of a 'server'. The only sort of event I can imagine that might come close is a court order breaking up Microsoft. Apparently, this isn't going to happen either.
The compromise would be to develop an authentication system for the code itself and build it into the OS and Hardware. I would submit that this (and not the control and licensing issues - even though they are ominous and merit SERIOUS opposition) is actually the primary reason MS is pushing Palladium. (Boy am I starting to sound like a broken record!)
We need to block undesired mail at the host, not filter it at the client. That way the spam never gets sent, the spammer gets the message that their attempt was futile, and bandwidth is conserved. Many ISPs already provide this service...we need to improve on it. And we need better tools for identifying and dealing with spammers. The current mail standards are woefully inadequate to this task.
Not that this would be practical or feasible, but suppose we designed a software system specification consisting of:
1) Decentralized database servers that communicates P2P-like to track and exchange statistics about what is spam and what is not....
2) Mail Server Plug-In/Filter that uses (1) to decide whether to deliver/mark/throw out mail based on a....
3) Mail Client Plug-In/Filter that receives mail from (2) according to a level of filtering you specify. Oh, and you can also vote on the mail that does get through to ID it as spam so the rest of the system gets it's statistics updated from your misfortune.
I guess the submitter has never read anything by Linus on the Linux mailing list. He is constantlymaking changes to the kernel and saying "screw stupid userland apps, this is the right way to do things". Even about non-security issues. And he's right, the only way to avoid massive layers of backwards-compatible cruft is to just slough off the existing infrastructure and create the OS anew for every release.
And as a bonus, developers are trained to properly code to the API instead of relying on MSDOS-style quickie kludge hacks. A moving target is harder to hit when you aren't using the "official" tools to line up the shot. (Not that anyone does that anymore, right? Remember the 80's?)
"We come very much from the side of the consumer and we believe the consumer should have the right to reproduce content for their own use," said Philips spokesman Jeremy Cohen.
So you purchased a company that deals in copy protection?!?!
In all fairness, that's a little, well, unfair. IIRC, Phillips was the company that ran the first ads on TV ADVERTISING the fact that their products let you rip, copy and mix CDs. Ok, ok, so they're the lame overpriced audio-only stereo component variety and not the slim, sexy dirt-cheap PC variety, but they did it.
(Remember? The Beatles?: [musicnote][musicnote]You got to admit it's getting better, better all the time! [musicnote][musicnote])
I'll have an extra helping of OT with extra cheese, please....
The argument put forth in the movie and the book is that the Rex's vision is movement-based, like our peripheral vision is. Is this another case about theory being presented as fact? I really don't see how fossilized bones will give any indication of vision.
Even more ludicrous is the notion that somehow the hunting behavior of the velociraptor can be divined from the fossil record. However, IIRC, that was just in the movie. In the book, I think this was unknown until they started breeding the raptors in captivity on the island. (Then, of course, the visiting scientists learned this during the tour before AHBR.)
I've been telling folks this for a while - the *lawyers* aren't the problem. It's the *marketing* people who ultimately decide where the lawyers are aimed that need to be dealt with.
Why can't you understand that just because you can convert the arithmetic value of a year's wages in China to US Dollars, it doesn't actually mean that it has the same *monetary* value? There's this thing called "cost of living", you see. It turns out that for the most part, barring extremes of wealth and poverty, everything consts *proportionally* the same wherever you are in the world. By your argument, buying a chocolate bar in China would cost about the same as buying a DVD in the US. Clearly, this is nonsense.
Which is why economists spend time trying to come up with stuff like this.
Slashdot Mirror
I always loved that quote, but when I was studying E&M and QM in college in the late 80's, I coined my own response:
"God does not play dice." - Einstein
"God may or may not play dice, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't use a pocket calculator." - G. Steve Arnold (me) c.1988
My point was that the universe does not know equations -- it just is. The photons are not sitting there with QED books and Feynman diagrams trying to figure out what they are supposed to be doing next. Every bit of it is accounted for in itself quite automatically and the ultimate goal of the physics we do is not understanding, but only description. Understanding requires you to answer "why?", and that is beyond the scope of science.
In all due fairness (and with an extra heaping helping of nitpick on the side), none of the products (ZA, BlackIce, TPF, firmware *shudder* "routers") is a firewall. A firewall is an entirely different animal. Look, I have a "router" myself, and I love it - but it's not a router and it's not a firewall, it's a NAT device. It does NAT and proxies a few services if needed, but it doesn't do the same things routers and firewalls do. I know *why* we've started calling them routers, but that doesn't diminish the fact that the language is being lost here because LinkSys is not interested in explaining to Joe Homeuser what NAT is.
Now, having said that, I would also point out that my gripe here is almost entirely with the verbage. most home users do not need an actual firewall; NAT + PacketFilter + Don't-blindly-click-OK-on-EULAs is quite sufficient.
Ok, I got that off my chest -- bitch mode=off, and you can now all go back to trolling.
Freenix?
I'm sorry - you're right. Note to me: No posting after midnight. Now, how 'bout them Lego(tm)'s!
Wrong equation.
Percent off means subtracting a certain percentile of the old price.... you put the new price on the rhs, which resulted in a divide by zero error.
new = old - (%off/100)*old
Wrong equation?!?!
Witness Algebra:
new = old - (%off/100)*old
(new - old) = - (%off/100) * old
(old - new) = + (%off/100) * old
(old-new)/(old) = (%off/100)
Which yields:
%off = 100* (old-new)/(old)
which is my equation, except for (possibly) a negative sign, which I conveniently discounted by using abolute value bars to avoid starting a flamewar about whether a discount should be positive or negative.
Now, if you want to get pedantic, subtracting a percent from the original price is what my equation does because:
(old-new)/(old) = (old/old) - (new/old) = 1 - (new/old)
Originally, I scaled it by multiplying by 100 to format the result as a more "traditional" percentage, but the 1 here indicates 100% of original price and the (new/old) is the percentage to which you are referring.
Now, having cleared *that* up, for those of you coming up with ridiculous (and/or satirical) criticism of my NAN result, (any-number-including-possibly-zero)/old is ALWAYS undefined (i.e., Not-A-Number) if old is zero. This is not debateable. The only way around this is to REDEFINE what happens if old=0, (creating a new function that does what you want it to do there). Hopefully, you discover that there are non-constantly-zero algebraic expressions for old and new that produce a finite limit as old,new -> 0 and use THAT as the value there. (Note that if the limit as old->0 goes to +/-infinity, you can't make the function continuous). However, since old and new in this case *are* constants, this doesn't work either!
CRIMINY! WHAT ARE THEY TEACHING YOU PEOPLE IN MATH THESE DAYS -- FEELINGS?!?! IT WAS A LAME ATTEMPT AT A STUPID JOKE, WHICH I REGRET FOR HAVING CAUSED SO MUCH HYSTERIA!!!!
SOMEBODY MOD MY ORIGINAL POST (AND THIS ONE) AS TROLLS SO I CAN GET ON WITH MY LIFE AND STOP GETTING MESSAGES ABOUT THIS!!!!!
Well, technically, %off = ABS[(old-new)/(old)]*100, so since the old price is zero, you have a NAN exception and the result is undefined, so in a sense you can define it to be whatever you want.
However, the marketing department has an easier time with things if you use round numbers.
So today, one of my bosses walks into my office and sez, "so what program do you use to download music?" I sez, "legal or illegal?" And he sez, "Well, it's *ALL* illegal."
Any that's when it hits me: the RIAA is right -- it's doomed.
Fortunately, more people will be making more music than ever before, and the companies that arise to replace the RIAA members will do so with more realistic expectations.
Ultimately, this is going to be legal whether they want it or not -- it's too powerful to be contained.
Oops, you're absolutely right.
I was thinking of the *BRAILLE* cell phone.
Now there are going to be BLIND drivers swerving all over the road because the're talking on the phone!
The focus has definitely shifted away from algorithms and toward abstraction. This was supposed to make things easier, by letting the software do what it does best and keep track of bookkeeping, while we concentrate on building models and governing interations between them.
Some of it actually makes sense - the object oriented paridigm, component models, virtual machines. (VM's, by the way, go back at least 20 years in the literature -- I studied them in college in the late 80's. However, like Pascal, they were originally considered as an instructional tool, and nobody at the time thought that anyone would be damn fool enough to actually try and *implement* such a thing!)
But just like letting grade-school students use calculators for their arithmetic, I'm not certain these things are best for students. Sure, you get usable code out quickly, but without an understanding of the underlying algorithms and logic. I doubt many modern 'c0derz' could properly knock out a simple quick-sort, let alone a fully ACID SQL DBMS.
Hmmmmmm. Well, that explains the "DARPA funding statement" at the bottom of the posting linked in the article.
Lets use standard units here people!
YEAH! What is it in FPS?
For those of you who don't know who John Bloom is, check it out.
You've also seen him in the movies.
No blood, no breasts, one beast (Disney). Copyright-fu, literature-fu, argument-fu. Four stars. Joe-bob sez 'check it out.'
"I begin by taking. I shall find scholars later to demonstrate my perfect right." - Frederick (II) the Great
"Sometimes it's easier to apologize than to ask permission." - Clifford Stoll (paraphrased - it's been a while)
NOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Next, you're going to tell us Janie Porche is an athiest!
(Psst.... pay attention to the *last* line of the ad!)
Microsoft has a well-established history of being terrible with security, of treating it as a P.R. problem that can be fixed with lies as opposed to an engineering problem that can be fixed with quality programming.
The quality of the programming isn't the problem and this isn't a bug -- IE works exactly as MS intended. The problem is the design.
To actually *FIX* *THE* *PROBLEM*, MS is going to have to rewrite and redeploy every app, development tool and API they have released in the last ~eight years that provides a mechanism to embed code inside of data. THEN, they have to get everyone already using those tools and apps to switch to the feature-depleted versions, costing big bucks up front, as well as lost time redesigning and redeveloping software we already have from scratch. In short, this isn't going to happen. It's prohibitively expensive, and a logistical impossibility.
Realistically, we'd need a catastrophic event on the order of the Y2K bug that makes everyone want/need to rebuy their software on a new platform that does a worse job of blindly executing code at the arbitrary request of a 'server'. The only sort of event I can imagine that might come close is a court order breaking up Microsoft. Apparently, this isn't going to happen either.
The compromise would be to develop an authentication system for the code itself and build it into the OS and Hardware. I would submit that this (and not the control and licensing issues - even though they are ominous and merit SERIOUS opposition) is actually the primary reason MS is pushing Palladium. (Boy am I starting to sound like a broken record!)
We need to block undesired mail at the host, not filter it at the client. That way the spam never gets sent, the spammer gets the message that their attempt was futile, and bandwidth is conserved. Many ISPs already provide this service...we need to improve on it. And we need better tools for identifying and dealing with spammers. The current mail standards are woefully inadequate to this task.
Not that this would be practical or feasible, but suppose we designed a software system specification consisting of:
1) Decentralized database servers that communicates P2P-like to track and exchange statistics about what is spam and what is not....
2) Mail Server Plug-In/Filter that uses (1) to decide whether to deliver/mark/throw out mail based on a....
3) Mail Client Plug-In/Filter that receives mail from (2) according to a level of filtering you specify. Oh, and you can also vote on the mail that does get through to ID it as spam so the rest of the system gets it's statistics updated from your misfortune.
Sound good? Ok, now GO WRITE IT!
I guess the submitter has never read anything by Linus on the Linux mailing list. He is constantlymaking changes to the kernel and saying "screw stupid userland apps, this is the right way to do things". Even about non-security issues. And he's right, the only way to avoid massive layers of backwards-compatible cruft is to just slough off the existing infrastructure and create the OS anew for every release.
And as a bonus, developers are trained to properly code to the API instead of relying on MSDOS-style quickie kludge hacks. A moving target is harder to hit when you aren't using the "official" tools to line up the shot. (Not that anyone does that anymore, right? Remember the 80's?)
"We come very much from the side of the consumer and we believe the consumer should have the right to reproduce content for their own use," said Philips spokesman Jeremy Cohen.
So you purchased a company that deals in copy protection?!?!
In all fairness, that's a little, well, unfair. IIRC, Phillips was the company that ran the first ads on TV ADVERTISING the fact that their products let you rip, copy and mix CDs. Ok, ok, so they're the lame overpriced audio-only stereo component variety and not the slim, sexy dirt-cheap PC variety, but they did it.
(Remember? The Beatles?: [musicnote][musicnote]You got to admit it's getting better, better all the time! [musicnote][musicnote])
I'll have an extra helping of OT with extra cheese, please....
The argument put forth in the movie and the book is that the Rex's vision is movement-based, like our peripheral vision is. Is this another case about theory being presented as fact? I really don't see how fossilized bones will give any indication of vision.
Even more ludicrous is the notion that somehow the hunting behavior of the velociraptor can be divined from the fossil record. However, IIRC, that was just in the movie. In the book, I think this was unknown until they started breeding the raptors in captivity on the island. (Then, of course, the visiting scientists learned this during the tour before AHBR.)
Remember Wolfenstein?
...
Or, my personal favorite:
GUTEN TAG! [BLAM][BLAM][BLAM][BLAM][BLAM][BLAM]
It's hard to believe that actually scared me at one point in my life, but it did.
Apple Gives Laptops Speed Bumps
Oh, is Apple putting Windows on their laptops now? [*rimshot*]
(HA! I kill me!)
Seriously, this would make a great
7) ???
8) PROFIT!!!!
Maybe lawyers aren't all so bad,
I've been telling folks this for a while - the *lawyers* aren't the problem. It's the *marketing* people who ultimately decide where the lawyers are aimed that need to be dealt with.
Why can't you understand that just because you can convert the arithmetic value of a year's wages in China to US Dollars, it doesn't actually mean that it has the same *monetary* value? There's this thing called "cost of living", you see. It turns out that for the most part, barring extremes of wealth and poverty, everything consts *proportionally* the same wherever you are in the world. By your argument, buying a chocolate bar in China would cost about the same as buying a DVD in the US. Clearly, this is nonsense.
Which is why economists spend time trying to come up with stuff like this.