I can believe this. Intelligence isn't an absolute value. Sure, you can take a whole bunch of measures and add them up, but the fact is that your brain is a complex organ capable of doing all kinds of things, and it can do all of them to varying degrees.
I'm married to somebody who is fairly intelligent, but due to a recent stroke she went through a period of time where her vocabulary was all of about 20 words. Now she struggles but does fairly well verbally, but still struggles with written language. However, in most areas of intelligence she was always every bit as proficient as before the stroke, which has created all kinds of struggles. People assume that a lack of better than an elementary school vocabulary translates into a lack of "intelligence."
People think about the mind like it is some kind of mystical thing, but it is really just a big modular computer. If you damage part of it, that manifests itself in particular ways. It only stands to reason that due to environment or genetics that parts can also be enhanced. Having seen the effects of brain damage first hand I'm convinced that basically everybody is born "brain damaged" relative to others in various ways, and the only things that differ are manifestation and degree.
Yup, realized that. I was referring only to spending more time in the inner solar system - as long as your thrust was directed along your velocity vector any speed you pick up on the way towards the sun will translate directly into speed on the way out.
I did quite well in math by almost any measure, but I wouldn't say I'm anywhere near the level Ramanujan achieved at. Sure, I read books on math and such and didn't get out much, but I wouldn't have called myself a particularly hard worker. For the most part performing a few standard deviations above my peers in my areas of talent was fairly effortless. No doubt for me to achieve at a world-class level would have required considerable effort, but for most people no amount of effort would have made that possible.
I'm fairly convinced that talent is something you're born with. Sure, you can choose to develop it more or less, and somebody who auditions for the violin after days of continuous practice will outperform somebody who doesn't even bother to show up for the audition. However, those with extraordinary talent will easily outperform those without it almost completely without regard to effort expended.
Agreed. You can get a lot of energy from solar in the inner solar system, but ion engines are about long durations, and you're not going to be spending that much time in the inner solar system. I guess you could launch it towards the sun and do a slingshot around it. That will let you pick up a lot more velocity due to spending more time where your panels are effective, but it obviously adds a lot more distance to your trip as well.
You could just use a much larger RTG, or perhaps even a reactor. Not sure how that works out in terms of mass trade-off vs just using a conventional rocket.
4.-Gives a large portion of the population a negative experience when using it, and they wonder why its bombing? Maybe when they come up with holograms or at least 3D without glasses then i could see it maybe taking off, but this current tech sucks just as bad as the tech used back in the 50s, it just sucks in a different way.
I think it is a big improvement on the 50s, and most of the headache issues have to do with how it is shot. I found Avatar worked pretty well - I had minimal headache issues with that movie. A big part of it was that for the most part the effect was used in moderation, and the depth was almost always projected INTO the screen.
Traditional filming uses focus to direct your eye, and it works well in 2D. It does NOT work well in 3D, because as your eye looks around it tries to focus on objects and they refuse to come into focus, causing massive eye strain as the muscles yank away at your eye lens trying to make the image behave. If the depth of the effect is minimal then this is minimized as your eye at least doesn't try as hard, but it is still a problem. Filmmakers need to abandon the use of focus if they want to go 3D and shoot everything with a VERY wide depth of field instead. Even holographic images should suffer this problem. When you walk into a room nobody forces you to look at one person and not at any others, though your attention will of course be drawn to certain things. Oh, and sound is a big part of that, so improved surround sound probably wouldn't hurt as you need more resolution than forward/backward/left/right.
Yup, especially when you're talking about things like biological products.
Order a plasmid in the mail from a supply house. You'll probably get about a microgram of DNA for $75 or something. That is WAY more expensive than gold. However, you need next to nothing to use it - if you can get a single molecule to be taken up by a bacteria you can generate as much more as you want.
Interestingly enough, you can. Information can be converted to energy, at a rate of kTln2 per bit. Energy can of course be converted to mass. Of course, boltzmann's constant is small.
So, one bit at room temperature works out to about 4 × 10-21 joules. That works out to be about 4 x 10-28 kg per bit.
I'm pretty sure that whoever creates the HITs assigns their value. Market forces essentially dictate the price.
If somebody wants to pay you $20/hr they can, or if they want to pay $2/hr they can do that instead. If they offer too little then nobody will work on them, in theory. However, it is a global market.
The PM is doing what is best for their career, and the developer is trying to do what is best for their career.
Sure, the PM wants to deliver on time. However, the PM also wants to show that he can manage a super-complex project by using all the latest buzzwords.
Yet, 99.999% of the time obese people are eating processed sugar and fat by the pound.
99.999% of the time people with a healthy weight are eating processed sugar and fat by the pound as well. Could it be possible that there are other factors involved beyond diet, or for that matter factors that influence diet?
Your body is a unique machine. How it reacts to what it eats depends on how it is built. What it chooses to eat depends on how it is built. How it reacts to being called a "fat ass" depends on how it is built.
Telling an obese person to lose weight is kind of like telling the average person to do better in math - they're just not built for it.
Uh, if you actually extracted all the mass-energy of a french fry with 100% efficiency you could wipe out a city with the fire coming out of your mouth...
Since your digestive system is somewhat less efficient than an active galactic nucleus, you'll have to settle for a few paltry calories, and the number will vary by individual.
Tend to agree. The next time they buy speakers, will they spend more to buy the fancy ones with media controls that plug into the lightning adapter, or just ones with a regular headphone jack? A year ago they might have opted for the dock, thus ensuring that the next time they buy a phone they'll be more likely to get another iphone (network effect). Now their new phone isn't compatible with any of the gear they stocked up on, and the next time they buy accessories they might figure that if they're going to end up with dumb peripherals in a few years they might as well save money buying them and get more dumb ones. Then when they get a new phone there is no longer the Apple tie-in.
It really makes sense for Apple to carefully coordinate their connectors when they make a change like this. They are throwing away a LOT of lock-in with the change.
The iPhone is priced at what the market will bear, not more, and not less. Prices for premium products have nothing to do with their costs. If it cost Apple more to build the iPhone they'd charge the same for it. If it cost Apple less to build the iPhone they'd charge the same for it.
The only thing that is going to affect the price of the iPhone is the price and popularity of other comparable products in the market.
The only time cost comes into play is if the cost is so high that the product cannot be sold at a profit. In that case, the product would be discontinued. Why wouldn't they just charge more for it? They already figured out that charging more brings in less money, otherwise they'd already be doing it. So, if you lose money bringing in as much as possible and anything you do brings in less, your only option is to discontinue and cut your losses, unless you're trying to break into a market and operating at a loss is a strategic decision.
This logic applies to all manner of products - just basic microeconomics. It applies most strongly to premium products, which tend to be priced way above their marginal cost. Commodity products tend to be priced close to cost, but that is all the market will bear anyway.
If I had a nickel for every time I've seen someone propose that two satellites get together in orbit when such a thing is practically impossible, I'd be hundreds of dollars richer...
Oh, getting satellites in polar and equatorial orbits together is easy. The only hard part is getting them together unspectacularly.
Yes there are US Laws. Trouble is Wikileaks broke them.
Hmm, you say they broke the law. Lots of people here disagree.
Hey, let's invent some kind of organization that can hold hearings when an organization is accused of breaking the law so that we can all be satisfied that justice is done. Maybe we could call it a court.
Seizing the assets of criminal organizations is common practice. However, there is this pesky thing called due process that you're supposed to follow before you do it. However, the problem with due process is that sometimes things like the constitutional right to free speech get in the way, so it seems like everybody is in a rush to just skip all the red tape and let might make right.
When you generate a self-signed certificate you typically generate a private key in one file, and a certificate in another. The certificate contains the public key. So, if Google just allowed you to upload a certificate that would be sufficient. You could use a self-signed or a CA-signed certificate, and if a rogue CA created a false certificate for you, the connection would be refused since it didn't match the one you configured.
It's up to you to determine which CA's you trust. I don't consider that part of the infrastructure to be terribly broken.
Gmail doesn't let you select which CAs you trust. Besides, the only CA I trust is the one I run, and this whole article is about blocking self-signed certificates.:)
Look at the list of CA roots in just about any device or browser you use. Have you even heard of half of those companies? What are the chances that one of them ISN'T doing something nefarious, or at least incompetent?
The only reason they're on the list is that at one time in the past they paid a bunch of money to an auditing company to say that at that point in time everything looked fine. That point of time could have been a decade ago, and they can delegate all the intermediates they care to.
A self signed cert is useless other than testing. Anyone can walk right through it.
Self signed certificates defeat all attacks other than active MITM attacks.
Trusted certificates defeat active MITM attacks, but they are vulnerable to the compromise of the CA.
Unencrypted connections are vulnerable to countless attacks, including active MITM attacks.
Self-signed certificates are useful - they're better than not using SSL at all, which is what most connections online are doing anyway. They're only "useless" in some fantasy world where everybody is using SSL for everything.
Now the MITM has to at least get a certificate from a trusted source that will have to, at a minimum, perform some sort of domain validation.
Google still allows unencrypted connections. So, the MITM just needs to use SSL to talk to the POP3 server, and unencrypted POP3 to talk to Google, and Google will be fine with it.
Rejecting self-signed certificates provides no security at all unless you also reject unencrypted connections.
I don't own a gun and don't really plan on owning one, but one thing that I would think would make either a rifle or shotgun less useful for home defense would be the need to secure them when not in use. Handguns are easy to store close to the bed, and there are models with fingerprint recognition. I doubt such features are available in shotguns. I doubt I'd want to just leave a loaded shotgun leaning against the night stand.
If you're going to lock the gun in a big safe and keep the ammo separate then about the only thing you're going to defend against is somebody who just starts banging on the door loudly for a minute before making any serious attempt to enter the house. Somebody determined to enter your house is not going to be kept outside for more than about 30 seconds unless you have serious door hardware and barred windows, and of course the real scenario that worries most people is that the first indication that something wrong is the sound of somebody walking around the house when they wake up.
Otherwise, I tend to agree that as an indoor defensive weapon I'd think a shotgun would be almost impossible to beat. Even if you just load it with birdshot you could point it in the general direction of an intruder and they're not going to be causing you too much trouble anytime soon, unless they're wearing full body armor and a helmet.
I don't believe that the distinction between submachine gun and (assault) rifle has anything to do with size. I believe the distinction is entirely in the ammo - a submachine gun fires ammo typically associated with pistols. Rifles and machine guns fire much larger rounds. Of course, larger rounds tend to involve larger barrels, so there is a relationship with weapon size.
Uh, nearly half the population is unemployed. The whole "everyone who looks for a job" bit is impossible to measure. The only thing that actually is measured is how long people are out of work. And even with the optimistic measurements unemployment is still quite high.
I know this will get 400 replies about how self-signed certificates don't provide complete security.
I'd buy that argument if Google configured their servers to only accept connections over SSL with trusted certificates, and then refused to connect at all otherwise.
However, they're still allowing unencrypted connections as well. There isn't a single attack you can mount on an SSL connection with a self-signed certificate that you can't also mount on an unencrypted connection.
Trusted vs untrusted SSL is a false dichotomy - it neglects the most commonly used option of not using SSL at all, which is completely insecure.
Slashdot Mirror
I can believe this. Intelligence isn't an absolute value. Sure, you can take a whole bunch of measures and add them up, but the fact is that your brain is a complex organ capable of doing all kinds of things, and it can do all of them to varying degrees.
I'm married to somebody who is fairly intelligent, but due to a recent stroke she went through a period of time where her vocabulary was all of about 20 words. Now she struggles but does fairly well verbally, but still struggles with written language. However, in most areas of intelligence she was always every bit as proficient as before the stroke, which has created all kinds of struggles. People assume that a lack of better than an elementary school vocabulary translates into a lack of "intelligence."
People think about the mind like it is some kind of mystical thing, but it is really just a big modular computer. If you damage part of it, that manifests itself in particular ways. It only stands to reason that due to environment or genetics that parts can also be enhanced. Having seen the effects of brain damage first hand I'm convinced that basically everybody is born "brain damaged" relative to others in various ways, and the only things that differ are manifestation and degree.
Yup, realized that. I was referring only to spending more time in the inner solar system - as long as your thrust was directed along your velocity vector any speed you pick up on the way towards the sun will translate directly into speed on the way out.
I did quite well in math by almost any measure, but I wouldn't say I'm anywhere near the level Ramanujan achieved at. Sure, I read books on math and such and didn't get out much, but I wouldn't have called myself a particularly hard worker. For the most part performing a few standard deviations above my peers in my areas of talent was fairly effortless. No doubt for me to achieve at a world-class level would have required considerable effort, but for most people no amount of effort would have made that possible.
I'm fairly convinced that talent is something you're born with. Sure, you can choose to develop it more or less, and somebody who auditions for the violin after days of continuous practice will outperform somebody who doesn't even bother to show up for the audition. However, those with extraordinary talent will easily outperform those without it almost completely without regard to effort expended.
Agreed. You can get a lot of energy from solar in the inner solar system, but ion engines are about long durations, and you're not going to be spending that much time in the inner solar system. I guess you could launch it towards the sun and do a slingshot around it. That will let you pick up a lot more velocity due to spending more time where your panels are effective, but it obviously adds a lot more distance to your trip as well.
You could just use a much larger RTG, or perhaps even a reactor. Not sure how that works out in terms of mass trade-off vs just using a conventional rocket.
4.-Gives a large portion of the population a negative experience when using it, and they wonder why its bombing? Maybe when they come up with holograms or at least 3D without glasses then i could see it maybe taking off, but this current tech sucks just as bad as the tech used back in the 50s, it just sucks in a different way.
I think it is a big improvement on the 50s, and most of the headache issues have to do with how it is shot. I found Avatar worked pretty well - I had minimal headache issues with that movie. A big part of it was that for the most part the effect was used in moderation, and the depth was almost always projected INTO the screen.
Traditional filming uses focus to direct your eye, and it works well in 2D. It does NOT work well in 3D, because as your eye looks around it tries to focus on objects and they refuse to come into focus, causing massive eye strain as the muscles yank away at your eye lens trying to make the image behave. If the depth of the effect is minimal then this is minimized as your eye at least doesn't try as hard, but it is still a problem. Filmmakers need to abandon the use of focus if they want to go 3D and shoot everything with a VERY wide depth of field instead. Even holographic images should suffer this problem. When you walk into a room nobody forces you to look at one person and not at any others, though your attention will of course be drawn to certain things. Oh, and sound is a big part of that, so improved surround sound probably wouldn't hurt as you need more resolution than forward/backward/left/right.
Yup, especially when you're talking about things like biological products.
Order a plasmid in the mail from a supply house. You'll probably get about a microgram of DNA for $75 or something. That is WAY more expensive than gold. However, you need next to nothing to use it - if you can get a single molecule to be taken up by a bacteria you can generate as much more as you want.
Interestingly enough, you can. Information can be converted to energy, at a rate of kTln2 per bit. Energy can of course be converted to mass. Of course, boltzmann's constant is small.
So, one bit at room temperature works out to about 4 × 10-21 joules. That works out to be about 4 x 10-28 kg per bit.
I'm pretty sure that whoever creates the HITs assigns their value. Market forces essentially dictate the price.
If somebody wants to pay you $20/hr they can, or if they want to pay $2/hr they can do that instead. If they offer too little then nobody will work on them, in theory. However, it is a global market.
Or they could both be right.
The PM is doing what is best for their career, and the developer is trying to do what is best for their career.
Sure, the PM wants to deliver on time. However, the PM also wants to show that he can manage a super-complex project by using all the latest buzzwords.
Yet, 99.999% of the time obese people are eating processed sugar and fat by the pound.
99.999% of the time people with a healthy weight are eating processed sugar and fat by the pound as well. Could it be possible that there are other factors involved beyond diet, or for that matter factors that influence diet?
Your body is a unique machine. How it reacts to what it eats depends on how it is built. What it chooses to eat depends on how it is built. How it reacts to being called a "fat ass" depends on how it is built.
Telling an obese person to lose weight is kind of like telling the average person to do better in math - they're just not built for it.
Uh, if you actually extracted all the mass-energy of a french fry with 100% efficiency you could wipe out a city with the fire coming out of your mouth...
Since your digestive system is somewhat less efficient than an active galactic nucleus, you'll have to settle for a few paltry calories, and the number will vary by individual.
How about this. We'll have researchers lock both of us in chambers for a few months.
In your chamber you'll be given 2000 calories per day of sawdust.
In my chamber I'll be given 2000 calories per day of restaurant food.
Care to predict the outcome? After all, a calorie is a calorie, right?
Now, repeat the experiment but with termites, and note the different outcome.
...in exchange for a simplified licensing system that gives them long term royalties from virtually every mobile device manufacturer.
Virtually every mobile device manufacturer, except Apple, apparently.
What is the point in having a FRAND patent if people can choose to not license it and be free from legal action?
Tend to agree. The next time they buy speakers, will they spend more to buy the fancy ones with media controls that plug into the lightning adapter, or just ones with a regular headphone jack? A year ago they might have opted for the dock, thus ensuring that the next time they buy a phone they'll be more likely to get another iphone (network effect). Now their new phone isn't compatible with any of the gear they stocked up on, and the next time they buy accessories they might figure that if they're going to end up with dumb peripherals in a few years they might as well save money buying them and get more dumb ones. Then when they get a new phone there is no longer the Apple tie-in.
It really makes sense for Apple to carefully coordinate their connectors when they make a change like this. They are throwing away a LOT of lock-in with the change.
The iPhone is priced at what the market will bear, not more, and not less. Prices for premium products have nothing to do with their costs. If it cost Apple more to build the iPhone they'd charge the same for it. If it cost Apple less to build the iPhone they'd charge the same for it.
The only thing that is going to affect the price of the iPhone is the price and popularity of other comparable products in the market.
The only time cost comes into play is if the cost is so high that the product cannot be sold at a profit. In that case, the product would be discontinued. Why wouldn't they just charge more for it? They already figured out that charging more brings in less money, otherwise they'd already be doing it. So, if you lose money bringing in as much as possible and anything you do brings in less, your only option is to discontinue and cut your losses, unless you're trying to break into a market and operating at a loss is a strategic decision.
This logic applies to all manner of products - just basic microeconomics. It applies most strongly to premium products, which tend to be priced way above their marginal cost. Commodity products tend to be priced close to cost, but that is all the market will bear anyway.
If I had a nickel for every time I've seen someone propose that two satellites get together in orbit when such a thing is practically impossible, I'd be hundreds of dollars richer...
Oh, getting satellites in polar and equatorial orbits together is easy. The only hard part is getting them together unspectacularly.
Yes there are US Laws. Trouble is Wikileaks broke them.
Hmm, you say they broke the law. Lots of people here disagree.
Hey, let's invent some kind of organization that can hold hearings when an organization is accused of breaking the law so that we can all be satisfied that justice is done. Maybe we could call it a court.
Seizing the assets of criminal organizations is common practice. However, there is this pesky thing called due process that you're supposed to follow before you do it. However, the problem with due process is that sometimes things like the constitutional right to free speech get in the way, so it seems like everybody is in a rush to just skip all the red tape and let might make right.
When you generate a self-signed certificate you typically generate a private key in one file, and a certificate in another. The certificate contains the public key. So, if Google just allowed you to upload a certificate that would be sufficient. You could use a self-signed or a CA-signed certificate, and if a rogue CA created a false certificate for you, the connection would be refused since it didn't match the one you configured.
It's up to you to determine which CA's you trust. I don't consider that part of the infrastructure to be terribly broken.
Gmail doesn't let you select which CAs you trust. Besides, the only CA I trust is the one I run, and this whole article is about blocking self-signed certificates. :)
Look at the list of CA roots in just about any device or browser you use. Have you even heard of half of those companies? What are the chances that one of them ISN'T doing something nefarious, or at least incompetent?
The only reason they're on the list is that at one time in the past they paid a bunch of money to an auditing company to say that at that point in time everything looked fine. That point of time could have been a decade ago, and they can delegate all the intermediates they care to.
A self signed cert is useless other than testing. Anyone can walk right through it.
Self signed certificates defeat all attacks other than active MITM attacks.
Trusted certificates defeat active MITM attacks, but they are vulnerable to the compromise of the CA.
Unencrypted connections are vulnerable to countless attacks, including active MITM attacks.
Self-signed certificates are useful - they're better than not using SSL at all, which is what most connections online are doing anyway. They're only "useless" in some fantasy world where everybody is using SSL for everything.
Now the MITM has to at least get a certificate from a trusted source that will have to, at a minimum, perform some sort of domain validation.
Google still allows unencrypted connections. So, the MITM just needs to use SSL to talk to the POP3 server, and unencrypted POP3 to talk to Google, and Google will be fine with it.
Rejecting self-signed certificates provides no security at all unless you also reject unencrypted connections.
I don't own a gun and don't really plan on owning one, but one thing that I would think would make either a rifle or shotgun less useful for home defense would be the need to secure them when not in use. Handguns are easy to store close to the bed, and there are models with fingerprint recognition. I doubt such features are available in shotguns. I doubt I'd want to just leave a loaded shotgun leaning against the night stand.
If you're going to lock the gun in a big safe and keep the ammo separate then about the only thing you're going to defend against is somebody who just starts banging on the door loudly for a minute before making any serious attempt to enter the house. Somebody determined to enter your house is not going to be kept outside for more than about 30 seconds unless you have serious door hardware and barred windows, and of course the real scenario that worries most people is that the first indication that something wrong is the sound of somebody walking around the house when they wake up.
Otherwise, I tend to agree that as an indoor defensive weapon I'd think a shotgun would be almost impossible to beat. Even if you just load it with birdshot you could point it in the general direction of an intruder and they're not going to be causing you too much trouble anytime soon, unless they're wearing full body armor and a helmet.
I don't believe that the distinction between submachine gun and (assault) rifle has anything to do with size. I believe the distinction is entirely in the ammo - a submachine gun fires ammo typically associated with pistols. Rifles and machine guns fire much larger rounds. Of course, larger rounds tend to involve larger barrels, so there is a relationship with weapon size.
Uh, nearly half the population is unemployed. The whole "everyone who looks for a job" bit is impossible to measure. The only thing that actually is measured is how long people are out of work. And even with the optimistic measurements unemployment is still quite high.
I know this will get 400 replies about how self-signed certificates don't provide complete security.
I'd buy that argument if Google configured their servers to only accept connections over SSL with trusted certificates, and then refused to connect at all otherwise.
However, they're still allowing unencrypted connections as well. There isn't a single attack you can mount on an SSL connection with a self-signed certificate that you can't also mount on an unencrypted connection.
Trusted vs untrusted SSL is a false dichotomy - it neglects the most commonly used option of not using SSL at all, which is completely insecure.