As someone who's done his fair share of windows admin work (10 years, 3000+ users and PC's), I can tell you that the same is VERY true of Windows. With the exception of device support, which is unparalleled in Windows, there are just as many times when the shit hits the fan, and there's no quick solution in Windows, as there is in Linux.
This is so true, but I feel I should add one more thing: In Windows, when it doesn't work, you're hosed.
After you've tried all the different drivers you can get your hands on and that new foobar card still doesn't work, that's it. There's nothing you can do. The only people who can fix the problem for you are the card manufacturer and MS.
Under Linux, when the video input on my Gainward Geforce 2 TI VIVO Golden Sample (a fairly rare card) didn't work, I could send an email to the guy who actually wrote the driver and after and email or two, it actually worked.
I'd also much rather edit plaintext config files than dork with some fragile, proprietary registry.
Here's anther example for you:
My win2k laptop doesn't undock properly because I have some stupid parallel port dongle. What can I do under windows? Get rid of the hardware or deal with it. I can't edit undock.sh to add a line "rmmod stupiddongle". (Or whatever the proper way to handle it under Linux would be)
That's great. And the Titanic was designed to be unsinkable.
(I love it when people underestimate entropy)
And I love it when people who don't understand how something works use it as the basis for a bad argument.
Sure there's a chance that ABS might engage without your foot on the break, but there's also a chance all the gas molecules in your tank would randomly organize in such a way that your car explodes.
Now if you want to have a RATIONAL discussion of something, you need to admit the chances of either happening are ridiculously small.
FYI, the Titanic didn't sink becuase of "entropy" either. The design was flawed, hence the failure rate off 100%. If ABS systems were failing on at a significant rate, we'd be hearing about it, but we aren't because they were designed to prevent this from happening.
And yet, Einstein would not accept QM because it offended his concept of God.
As we've said, humans aren't always interested in the correct answer, sometimes their various traits get in the way.
That is not bunk, and many excellent theories exist which describe a Universe in which any number of variables which encompas "truth" can never be known (from Plank to Heisenberg to Hawking to Wolfram, many have cited differing reasons why reality as we know it might not be something that can be fully measured, or if it is, might exist within a mechanism which cannot be measured by us).
But what you're doing right there is twisting the definition of truth. While we may never know the location and velocity of a particle with absolute certainty, it doesn't mean we can't know anything. If you're accepting Heisnberg, there's one truth right off the bat. Maybe it's a confusing one, and not the way you normally look at the world, but if you accept that as true you at least know something.
Which leads here....
That would include QM. I don't get your definition of "bad" here.
No, my definition WOULDN'T include QM. QM is testable. It's confusing, yes, but it's something THAT CAN ACTUALLY BE PROVEN OR DISPROVEN.
One of the marks of a bad theory is that it cannot be proven and/or disproven. And I don't mean just emperically using current tecnology, I meant can't be proven/disproven EVER because the theory is defined in such a way that it is impossible.
For example:
"I have an undetectable Nerf ball that floats above my head everywhere I go."
While that theory may be useful for exploring our own psychology/philosophy, the actual statement being made is junk. There is no Nerf ball above my head. It does not exist, but you can't prove that.
The theory is worthless though. By definition, this theory can NEVER have an impact on the world in which we live. Thinking about it might have effects. But there will be no actual consequences from the theory itself, it guarantees that.
While it linguistically has all the elements necessary to be a statement of a theory, conceptually it falls short.
As for Occam's Razor, obviously it can't be applied as the ONLY means for judging a theory.
ABS will not engage without your foot pressing the brake. It's designed that way.
This system, however, is designed to engage on it's own. That's why it's 100% stupid. One of the things people need to be able to do to keep control of their car is to be able to predict what it's going to do.
There is an absolutely HUGE difference between a system that is designed to assist a human and a system that is designed to do something totally on its own.
If they think the driver is asleep, they should kill the engine, roll down the windows and blast the radio (like a crescendo alarm clock, not suddenly).
While that might annoy the hell out of someone in the event of a false alarm, at least it wouldn't get them killed.
Altering the course of the vehicle is a very dangerous idea. It's about as bad as designing a gun to go off went it thinks it's being stolen so that the bullets can't be used in a crime later on.
If you could design the system PERFECTLY it might make sense, but the reality is that either system is a bad idea because even the slightest mistake could have disastrous consequences and mistakes are pretty much guaranteed.
Re:Uh...anyone see a double-standard?
on
A Babe in Tuxland
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· Score: 5, Informative
Uh...anyone see a double-standard?
Microsoft posting this kind of story and passing it off as real news = "astroturfing."
What I see is someone who doesn't know what "astroturfing" means./. is not attempting to hide the source of the article.
No, magic/myth/religion are the symptoms of the human though process.
Which isn't mutally exclusive with what I said. Wanting an answer without being that concerned about whether it's right or not is part of the way (many) humans think.
When we attempt to understand something, we start by externalizing it (that is to say, examining how it is or is not "us") and then anthropomorphizing it (that is, examining what it wants, how dangerous it is to us, and how we should react to it socially).
Perhaps for an anthropologist/sociologist/etc. Scientists came up with the scietific method to try and cope with just the sort of behavior you're suggesting. It's useful to come up with analogies that relate a phenonema to something we're familiar with, but science attempts to understand things on their own terms, whereas religion/myth/magic do not. They seek to provide easily digestible answers, correctness be damned.
What's more, you should not be so quick to use the word "truth" when refering to unknown phenomenon. Yeah, you're playing it fairly safe saying that "Yoda started the fires," isn't correct, but you don't actually KNOW that.
Well sure I don't actually "know" that. If you let a philosopher have his way with you, you'll eventually decide that there's no way we can know ANYTHING. The whole world could be a trick, etc, etc.
Now a scientist will tell you that all that's bunk, because:
A)Any theory this is guaranteed unprovable is "bad" theory.
B)Occam's Razon cuts it to shreds.
What is magic, if not simply something we do not (yet) understand?
An excuse for not understanding something.
Rather than being bothered to actually try and understand something you just shrug your shoulders and say "magic".
It all reminds me of one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips:
Calvin: Dad, what makes the wind?
Dad: Trees sneezing.
Calvin: Really?
Dad: No, but the real answer is a lot more complex.
Magic/Myth/Religion are all ways to explain the world to those who can't bother to be interested in the actual truth.
Being smart is not just above being able to solve random puzzles on an IQ test. It is also about being able to critically evaluate what someone is telling you.
As for "outsmarting" the FBI, they didn't outsmart them anymore than I outsmart my local police by running a stoplight at 3am.
Heck, even that isn't a fair comparison because I would actually get away with running a stoplight at 3am.
Bottom line, it doesn't take a lot of brainpower to kill people. If I blow up some woman who was out getting groceries, it didn't "outsmart" her, I murdered her.
If I were to go buy a gun at Walmart, come to your house and kill you, then myself, I'm not "outsmarting" Walmart, you, or the police. I'm making a stupid, short-sighted decision that doesn't help anybody.
You seem to have a naive view of suicide bombers in that they get someone off the street, give them a bomb and send them off the next day.
And you seem to think they have to go to four years of "Suicide Bomber School" and graduate first in their class.
These people are nothing but a bunch of crazy jackasses.
They're destroying their own lives and those of others over a bunch of lies. It's pretty much THE stupidest thing you can do. It unrecoverably stupid.
My favourite in devious encryption is currently Spam Mimic
Technically that's jsut stenography not crypto, but it's still a cool idea.
I noticed one key thing that no one else pointed out:
A nice thing about this is that if you screw up and send you super-secret message to someone you didn't mean to, it will get deleted as spam instead of scrutinized.
Ah, but they later suddenly dropped their opposition, without comment. Methinks they have a way, or they've arranged for a backdoor.
A backdoor is pretty much impossible. The algorithm is public and there are open-source implementations.
Perhaps they found a hole, but it's probably more likely that the realized the benefits of publicly availible GOOD crypto outweighted the negatives.
For example, imagine how much it would cost businesses if we couldn't have secure online shopping. (and businesses do take online security very seriously)
Give NSA a couple of factors of ten to err on the side of caution, that puts them in the decade range. Moore's law being what it is, we're buggered.
Well there's an easy solution to that: Just add some more bits.
If my message is going to take N years to brute-force with some number of bits of encryption. It will take 2^X * N years to crack if I add X more bits to the key.
The really nice part of that is that while it gets exponentially harder for them to break your key, the problem on your side is of order N*log(N).
This means that if you double your key length, the problem gets LESS than twice as hard for you and MUCH, MUCH harder for them.
Actually, if you look at the Palestinian suicide bombers a lot of them are well-educated and middle class (by Palestinian standards).
There are plently of well-educated idiots all over the place. Some even graduate from Ivy League colleges and get elected to public office.
This takes as much intelligence as any good spy in a foreign country. To hide your true self, blend in, become one of the enemy.
Get real. There's a big difference between doing things that any member of the public may legally do in a free society and infiltrating an actively secretive organization.
A suicide bomber has to be smart to succeed. They have to be someone who can act on their own.
Nope. An eight-year-old video-gamer could probably have done what they did.
Once they are set loose they are on their own. They have to negotiate their way to the target.
So they have to walk down the street towards a crowd of people, or maybe board a plane. Not exactly difficult tasks.
They have to be able to act well enough to blend in to the crowd to do the maximum damage.
That's just absolutely stupid. All they have to do is not wave the bomb around in the air.
If something goes wrong they have to negotiate the obstacles by themselves with no one to help them.
Which they usually FAIL at because they're idiots.
Of course there is a lot of psychological preparation as well (brainwashing) but that's nowhere near the same thing as stupidity.
So letting someone else convince you to kill yourself and a bunch of civilians is a SMART thing to do?
Of course there are stupid ones as well but that's true for everything.
The MAJORITY are stupid. Very stupid.
Suicide bombers are nothing but a bunch of moronic, easily-led sheep. They deserve absolutely no respect. There is nothing smart about what they do. It's not "clever". It not "good strategy". It's just a filthy disgusting waste of life.
You have to have a truely perverted mind to believe that killing a bunch of civilians to get you point across is ok.
These people are absolute scum and they aren't any smarter than the average crackhead robbing a liquor store.
Please, that is SO pre Bush Administration. Their stye of communications would give the following press release:
"There is no Senator, there never has, and there never will be. And if their was, the notion that he is in rehab is insulting and unpatriotic. You must be a member of the Taliban"
Why is everyone so hell bent on Sun to open source Java ?
Simple: .NET
.NET is coming, without REAL community support, Java is probably going to die.
Developers are going to be making the decision between.NET or Java. Open sourcing Java makes Java much more attractive. Suddenly you're not choosing between Sun and MS, you're choosing Sun+IBM+community vs. MS.
Don't forget that linux is gaining acceptance in the corporate world , mostly because of the efforts of IBM , rather than the collective RTFM attitude of most kernel developers.
How trollish! And how dare those kernel developers tell you the RTFM rather than installing the software for you. If only Linus would quit egging the headquarters of those Fortune 500 companies.
why not divert some of those efforts in creating a cross platform development language
Why not just replace C while we're at it?
It's not like it would take any work or any applications already use it. [/sarcasm]
Weapons in space are a given.
on
Weapons in Space
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· Score: 1, Insightful
Am I the only one who sees this as no big deal?
IMO, weapons in space are a given. At a minimum, we want to be able to stop someone else from shooting down our own satellites.
A good example would be the GPS system. This system is responsible for not just military navigation, but civilian aircraft landings and navigation (w/ WAAS), and synchronizing both our communications networks and our power grid.
A loss of the GPS satellites above our country could be a VERY big problem:
blackouts, plane crashes, network and telephone outages (both wired and cellular), and probably some more issues I'm not aware of.
And that's never even considering the consequences it would have on our military.
Although it would have less shock value, losing a bunch of satellites could possibly disrupt this country MORE than 9/11.
Am I the only one who isn't yelling: "OMG weapons in space! We're all gonna get zapped by lasers like in Real Genius!"
I just don't see weapons in space as a big issue. They're only going to be used for very specfic applications because they're going to be really fucking expensive.
Weapons is space will be used for protecting valuable assets (satellites and space stations) and shooting down ICBMs.
If we want to rain death from above on some earth-based taget, we're going to use an airplane. The only real offensive use I see for space-based weapons would be to shoot down someone else's satellites.
So is a Linux monopoly better than a Microsoft monopoly all of a sudden? Some may say yes, but no monopoly is good.
I hate to break the blindingly obvious to you but: No one has a monopoly on Linux!
They can't! It's free software. I can sell Linux, you can sell Linux, we all can sell Linux. And we can all have our own versions too.
You're worrying about a problem that does not exist.
Some may say this is a good thing, but to me this is government intereferance in a sector they should not touch.
And why shouldn't they touch it? So they can keep sending money off to a foreign country for something that could be handled domestically?
God forbid the g'ovt step forward and support something which benfits everyone, and only gets BETTER the more people use it. The g'ovt has no business getting people to come together and help each other find a solution to a common problem at little or no cost?
It might destroy someone's profits and as we all know, once you make a profit with your business, the gov't is supposed to do anything in their power to continue that profit, even if your business model is totally outmoded.
Mr. Smarty Pants,
If this is so blindingly obvious maybe you should have invented it and started selling low-cost refridgeration equipment in Africa. If you read up on the effects of this device you would find that young women in families that use the device are now allowed to go to school instead of being sent to the market to sell goods? Why? Because crops last longer so they don't have to sell them as soon as they pick them.
Hello Mr. Let's-pretend-third-world-countries-are-full-of-mo rons,
So does this mean I should start selling circular transportation devices in Africa? Just think of all those hours it could save those poor Africans trying to get to school on their square-wheeled bicycles!
I think it's pretty safe to assume that these Africans already had and were using 4000+ year old technology. Just take a look at some of the posts in this thread from those who've ACTUALLY been to Africa and seen it in use.
And -- pssst -- here's a secret... you are already earning a subsistence level wage.
You don't understand the concept of a subsistence level wage. I presently earn ABOVE a subsitence level wage.
The Prisoner's Dilemma, by the way, is simply stupid. Two people who can't communicate making decisions that only affect themselves doesn't really represent anything in today's economy, does it?
The prisoners decsions affect EACH OTHER. It an analogy for an economy in which the most attactive descsion for a single company (outsourcing) is actually bad for the overall economy (nobody has any money to buy anything because they have no job).
Now, I like "The Grapes of Wrath," but Steinbeck was wrong. Economies run by the government don't work.
Are you trying to claim the gov't policys had nothing to do with us getting out of the depression?
In a store where no one cares what's selling or what's not, because some "committee" or politician makes educated guesses about what needs to be supplied, supply and demand never match, because one person can never determine the wants of another.)
Gov't regualtion doesn't mean communism and a command economy.
Your argumentation implies an uncontrolled development towards third-world-status which IMHO is neither prudent nor warranted.
Perhaps, but I think it's a real possibility.
My feeling is that, because only a very small fraction of the people in this country are employed making goods that are 100% necessary for survival, our economy is a rather fragile thing.
Imagine if I was able to convincingly tell everyone in the country that the next "Great Depression" was going to happen tomorrow:
1. Spending on those goods not 100% necessary would basically cease.
2. Shortly after, production would cease and a large amount of people would loose their jobs.
3. Those people then no longer have money to buy goods, so back to step two again, with more jobs lost.
4. The cycle would terminate with wages at a subsitence level. (Any lower and I expect you'd have a revolution on your hands.)
This is why (at least one reason) I think the gov't has both the right and the obligation to step in and interfere with the economy. Things like Gov't spending on goods/services, fiscal policy, unemployment insurance, etc all work to fight against the scenario above happening.
You know, there's a similar situation going on in the farming industry. It's been declining since the 70s - THE 1770s. Back then I think 90% of people were farmers, and thanks to *progress*, we don't need that many people working to feed the country.
The thing here is that you don't understand the key difference in the two situations.
In the case of farming, those jobs were no longer needed.
In the case of off-shoring, those jobs still exist, just elsewhere.
It's also shame that we weren't willing to learn anything from the great depression. Sometimes government intervention in the economy is absolutely necessary.
"Americans seemed to be more concerned with taking their own lifestyles from 10 to 11 than to help others bring theirs from 0 to 1."
But the idea that sending subsistence-level jobs to those countries is a good thing is blatantly ignorant.
It amazes me how many people don't understand the concept of "the race to the bottom": (I posted this explanation earlier as well.)
It's basically the concept that, if there's someone else willing to work cheaper, you have to work cheaper too. And that guy has to work cheaper than the guy who's willing to work cheaper than him. And on and on.
What you end up with in the end is a situation where workers are earning subsistence-level wages.
This results in no one having the money to actually BUY anything and further economic collapse.
Ask yourself this question:
If everyone in America quit buying anything but food what would happen to the economy? How many people are actually employed producing that food?
The result is that everyone who can't get a job making subsistence-level wages providing goods necessary to provide that subsistence will have no job at all.
In short, you get to be your own real-live character in "the Grapes of Wrath".
You have lots of competition, and right now you can't compete. Or can you?
Sure we can compete. All we need to do is give up our standard of living and economy.
The point is: that would be a stupid thing to do.
Sometimes it makes sense to compete, and sometimes it makes sense not to play the game.
Those familiar with economic theory will recognize the following example as "The prisoner's dilemma"
Two guys are in jail. The committed a crime together. If neither one confesses they both get two years. If one confesses, he gets one year and the other guy gets ten. If both confess, the both get seven years.
What happens is that each prisoner confesses and they both end up worse off than if neither had confessed.
What's the point of this example? Companies are doing things that they think benefit them, but don't look at the big picture. Their decisions are hurting the US economy as a whole, not helping it.
This is the point where the gov't should step in and stop them because EVERYONE (including the companies themselves) will be better off.
If the gov't does nothing, all it takes is one company to make the shortsighted decision and everyone else must do it to compete on price.
There's no good reason why a company should keep jobs in the US if they can get the same quality of work somewhere else for half the price or less.
Wrong.
There are all kind of good reasons:
What if that labor is provided by slaves?
What if the "outsoucing" destroys the home country's economy.
You clearly don't understand the problem with outsourcing. It's called the "race to the bottom".
It's basically the concept that, if there's someone else willing to work cheaper, you have to work cheaper too. And that guy has to work cheaper than the guy who's willing to work cheaper than him. And on and on.
What you end up with in the end is a situation where workers are earning subsistence-level wages.
This results in no one having the money to actually BUY anything and further economic collapse.
Ask yourself this question:
If everyone in America quit buying anything but food what would happen to the economy? How many people are actually employed producing that food?
The result is that everyone who can't get a job making subsistence-level wages providing goods necessary to provide that subsistence will have no job at all.
In short, you get to be your own real-live character in "the Grapes of Wrath".
By that logic, no one would ever buy a laptop, because they're more expensive that a desktop.
I have an SL-5500 and it really is a great tool. It was invauable during my college days, when I could connect via 802.11b just about anywhere, and run just about anything I wanted. The ability to do mobile IM alone made it worth it (no monthly fee), but it also functioned for web-browsing, email, MP3 player, etc.
Would you want to walk 10 miles a day with a laptop on your back?
I remeber when I got word that the Chem. dept. had a surplus a various chemicals they were looking to get rid of. I went to their webpage (which listed the chemicals and quantities and resquest the following from the surplus:
Everything was going fine until I told them to deliver the chemicals to my dorm room. It seems they didn't like that for some reason.
So I never did get my 100 grams of pure caffine. I could've had a lot of fun with that around finals.
Oh well, they probably saved my from killing myself with the hydroflouric acid. (That stuff will eat through Pyrex!)
Slashdot Mirror
Why, it's more accurate than FOX...
Exactly what I was thinking.
As someone who's done his fair share of windows admin work (10 years, 3000+ users and PC's), I can tell you that the same is VERY true of Windows. With the exception of device support, which is unparalleled in Windows, there are just as many times when the shit hits the fan, and there's no quick solution in Windows, as there is in Linux.
This is so true, but I feel I should add one more thing: In Windows, when it doesn't work, you're hosed.
After you've tried all the different drivers you can get your hands on and that new foobar card still doesn't work, that's it. There's nothing you can do. The only people who can fix the problem for you are the card manufacturer and MS.
Under Linux, when the video input on my Gainward Geforce 2 TI VIVO Golden Sample (a fairly rare card) didn't work, I could send an email to the guy who actually wrote the driver and after and email or two, it actually worked.
I'd also much rather edit plaintext config files than dork with some fragile, proprietary registry.
Here's anther example for you:
My win2k laptop doesn't undock properly because I have some stupid parallel port dongle. What can I do under windows? Get rid of the hardware or deal with it. I can't edit undock.sh to add a line "rmmod stupiddongle". (Or whatever the proper way to handle it under Linux would be)
That's great. And the Titanic was designed to be unsinkable. (I love it when people underestimate entropy)
And I love it when people who don't understand how something works use it as the basis for a bad argument.
Sure there's a chance that ABS might engage without your foot on the break, but there's also a chance all the gas molecules in your tank would randomly organize in such a way that your car explodes.
Now if you want to have a RATIONAL discussion of something, you need to admit the chances of either happening are ridiculously small.
FYI, the Titanic didn't sink becuase of "entropy" either. The design was flawed, hence the failure rate off 100%. If ABS systems were failing on at a significant rate, we'd be hearing about it, but we aren't because they were designed to prevent this from happening.
And yet, Einstein would not accept QM because it offended his concept of God.
As we've said, humans aren't always interested in the correct answer, sometimes their various traits get in the way.
That is not bunk, and many excellent theories exist which describe a Universe in which any number of variables which encompas "truth" can never be known (from Plank to Heisenberg to Hawking to Wolfram, many have cited differing reasons why reality as we know it might not be something that can be fully measured, or if it is, might exist within a mechanism which cannot be measured by us).
But what you're doing right there is twisting the definition of truth. While we may never know the location and velocity of a particle with absolute certainty, it doesn't mean we can't know anything. If you're accepting Heisnberg, there's one truth right off the bat. Maybe it's a confusing one, and not the way you normally look at the world, but if you accept that as true you at least know something.
Which leads here....
That would include QM. I don't get your definition of "bad" here.
No, my definition WOULDN'T include QM. QM is testable. It's confusing, yes, but it's something THAT CAN ACTUALLY BE PROVEN OR DISPROVEN.
One of the marks of a bad theory is that it cannot be proven and/or disproven. And I don't mean just emperically using current tecnology, I meant can't be proven/disproven EVER because the theory is defined in such a way that it is impossible.
For example:
"I have an undetectable Nerf ball that floats above my head everywhere I go."
While that theory may be useful for exploring our own psychology/philosophy, the actual statement being made is junk. There is no Nerf ball above my head. It does not exist, but you can't prove that. The theory is worthless though. By definition, this theory can NEVER have an impact on the world in which we live. Thinking about it might have effects. But there will be no actual consequences from the theory itself, it guarantees that.
While it linguistically has all the elements necessary to be a statement of a theory, conceptually it falls short.
As for Occam's Razor, obviously it can't be applied as the ONLY means for judging a theory.
You could say the same about anti-lock brakes. "What happens if the computer decides to release your brakes at the wrong time!!?".
Actually, YOU CAN'T say that about ABS, that's not how it works.
ABS will not engage without your foot pressing the brake. It's designed that way.
This system, however, is designed to engage on it's own. That's why it's 100% stupid.
One of the things people need to be able to do to keep control of their car is to be able to predict what it's going to do.
There is an absolutely HUGE difference between a system that is designed to assist a human and a system that is designed to do something totally on its own.
If they think the driver is asleep, they should kill the engine, roll down the windows and blast the radio (like a crescendo alarm clock, not suddenly).
While that might annoy the hell out of someone in the event of a false alarm, at least it wouldn't get them killed.
Altering the course of the vehicle is a very dangerous idea. It's about as bad as designing a gun to go off went it thinks it's being stolen so that the bullets can't be used in a crime later on.
If you could design the system PERFECTLY it might make sense, but the reality is that either system is a bad idea because even the slightest mistake could have disastrous consequences and mistakes are pretty much guaranteed.
Uh...anyone see a double-standard?
/. is not attempting to hide the source of the article.
Microsoft posting this kind of story and passing it off as real news = "astroturfing."
What I see is someone who doesn't know what "astroturfing" means.
No, magic/myth/religion are the symptoms of the human though process.
Which isn't mutally exclusive with what I said. Wanting an answer without being that concerned about whether it's right or not is part of the way (many) humans think.
When we attempt to understand something, we start by externalizing it (that is to say, examining how it is or is not "us") and then anthropomorphizing it (that is, examining what it wants, how dangerous it is to us, and how we should react to it socially).
Perhaps for an anthropologist/sociologist/etc. Scientists came up with the scietific method to try and cope with just the sort of behavior you're suggesting. It's useful to come up with analogies that relate a phenonema to something we're familiar with, but science attempts to understand things on their own terms, whereas religion/myth/magic do not. They seek to provide easily digestible answers, correctness be damned.
What's more, you should not be so quick to use the word "truth" when refering to unknown phenomenon. Yeah, you're playing it fairly safe saying that "Yoda started the fires," isn't correct, but you don't actually KNOW that.
Well sure I don't actually "know" that. If you let a philosopher have his way with you, you'll eventually decide that there's no way we can know ANYTHING. The whole world could be a trick, etc, etc.
Now a scientist will tell you that all that's bunk, because:
A)Any theory this is guaranteed unprovable is "bad" theory.
B)Occam's Razon cuts it to shreds.
What is magic, if not simply something we do not (yet) understand?
An excuse for not understanding something.
Rather than being bothered to actually try and understand something you just shrug your shoulders and say "magic".
It all reminds me of one of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips:
Calvin: Dad, what makes the wind? Dad: Trees sneezing. Calvin: Really? Dad: No, but the real answer is a lot more complex.
Magic/Myth/Religion are all ways to explain the world to those who can't bother to be interested in the actual truth.
Being smart is not just above being able to solve random puzzles on an IQ test. It is also about being able to critically evaluate what someone is telling you.
As for "outsmarting" the FBI, they didn't outsmart them anymore than I outsmart my local police by running a stoplight at 3am.
Heck, even that isn't a fair comparison because I would actually get away with running a stoplight at 3am.
Bottom line, it doesn't take a lot of brainpower to kill people. If I blow up some woman who was out getting groceries, it didn't "outsmart" her, I murdered her.
If I were to go buy a gun at Walmart, come to your house and kill you, then myself, I'm not "outsmarting" Walmart, you, or the police. I'm making a stupid, short-sighted decision that doesn't help anybody.
You seem to have a naive view of suicide bombers in that they get someone off the street, give them a bomb and send them off the next day.
And you seem to think they have to go to four years of "Suicide Bomber School" and graduate first in their class.
These people are nothing but a bunch of crazy jackasses.
They're destroying their own lives and those of others over a bunch of lies. It's pretty much THE stupidest thing you can do. It unrecoverably stupid.
My favourite in devious encryption is currently Spam Mimic
Technically that's jsut stenography not crypto, but it's still a cool idea.
I noticed one key thing that no one else pointed out:
A nice thing about this is that if you screw up and send you super-secret message to someone you didn't mean to, it will get deleted as spam instead of scrutinized.
This benefit alone could make it worth using.
Ah, but they later suddenly dropped their opposition, without comment. Methinks they have a way, or they've arranged for a backdoor.
A backdoor is pretty much impossible. The algorithm is public and there are open-source implementations.
Perhaps they found a hole, but it's probably more likely that the realized the benefits of publicly availible GOOD crypto outweighted the negatives.
For example, imagine how much it would cost businesses if we couldn't have secure online shopping. (and businesses do take online security very seriously)
Give NSA a couple of factors of ten to err on the side of caution, that puts them in the decade range. Moore's law being what it is, we're buggered.
Well there's an easy solution to that:
Just add some more bits.
If my message is going to take N years to brute-force with some number of bits of encryption. It will take 2^X * N years to crack if I add X more bits to the key.
The really nice part of that is that while it gets exponentially harder for them to break your key, the problem on your side is of order N*log(N).
This means that if you double your key length, the problem gets LESS than twice as hard for you and MUCH, MUCH harder for them.
Actually, if you look at the Palestinian suicide bombers a lot of them are well-educated and middle class (by Palestinian standards).
There are plently of well-educated idiots all over the place. Some even graduate from Ivy League colleges and get elected to public office.
This takes as much intelligence as any good spy in a foreign country. To hide your true self, blend in, become one of the enemy.
Get real. There's a big difference between doing things that any member of the public may legally do in a free society and infiltrating an actively secretive organization.
A suicide bomber has to be smart to succeed. They have to be someone who can act on their own.
Nope. An eight-year-old video-gamer could probably have done what they did.
Once they are set loose they are on their own. They have to negotiate their way to the target.
So they have to walk down the street towards a crowd of people, or maybe board a plane. Not exactly difficult tasks.
They have to be able to act well enough to blend in to the crowd to do the maximum damage.
That's just absolutely stupid. All they have to do is not wave the bomb around in the air.
If something goes wrong they have to negotiate the obstacles by themselves with no one to help them.
Which they usually FAIL at because they're idiots.
Of course there is a lot of psychological preparation as well (brainwashing) but that's nowhere near the same thing as stupidity.
So letting someone else convince you to kill yourself and a bunch of civilians is a SMART thing to do?
Of course there are stupid ones as well but that's true for everything.
The MAJORITY are stupid. Very stupid.
Suicide bombers are nothing but a bunch of moronic, easily-led sheep. They deserve absolutely no respect. There is nothing smart about what they do. It's not "clever". It not "good strategy". It's just a filthy disgusting waste of life.
You have to have a truely perverted mind to believe that killing a bunch of civilians to get you point across is ok.
These people are absolute scum and they aren't any smarter than the average crackhead robbing a liquor store.
I'm more concerned with the surgeons who gain their 27% speed increase from performing incisions using a chainsaw instead of a scalpel myself.
What you need to do is find a surgeon who can beat Hitman II using only the scalpel (a real weapon in the game).
Of course it might get annoying that they keep sneaking up on you from behind......
Please, that is SO pre Bush Administration. Their stye of communications would give the following press release: "There is no Senator, there never has, and there never will be. And if their was, the notion that he is in rehab is insulting and unpatriotic. You must be a member of the Taliban"
Not only that, we will find WMD's IN ONE HOUR!
Why is everyone so hell bent on Sun to open source Java ?
.NET
.NET is coming, without REAL community support, Java is probably going to die. .NET or Java. Open sourcing Java makes Java much more attractive. Suddenly you're not choosing between Sun and MS, you're choosing Sun+IBM+community vs. MS.
Simple:
Developers are going to be making the decision between
Don't forget that linux is gaining acceptance in the corporate world , mostly because of the efforts of IBM , rather than the collective RTFM attitude of most kernel developers.
How trollish! And how dare those kernel developers tell you the RTFM rather than installing the software for you. If only Linus would quit egging the headquarters of those Fortune 500 companies.
why not divert some of those efforts in creating a cross platform development language
Why not just replace C while we're at it?
It's not like it would take any work or any applications already use it. [/sarcasm]
Am I the only one who sees this as no big deal?
IMO, weapons in space are a given. At a minimum, we want to be able to stop someone else from shooting down our own satellites.
A good example would be the GPS system. This system is responsible for not just military navigation, but civilian aircraft landings and navigation (w/ WAAS), and synchronizing both our communications networks and our power grid.
A loss of the GPS satellites above our country could be a VERY big problem:
blackouts, plane crashes, network and telephone outages (both wired and cellular), and probably some more issues I'm not aware of.
And that's never even considering the consequences it would have on our military.
Although it would have less shock value, losing a bunch of satellites could possibly disrupt this country MORE than 9/11.
Am I the only one who isn't yelling: "OMG weapons in space! We're all gonna get zapped by lasers like in Real Genius!"
I just don't see weapons in space as a big issue. They're only going to be used for very specfic applications because they're going to be really fucking expensive.
Weapons is space will be used for protecting valuable assets (satellites and space stations) and shooting down ICBMs.
If we want to rain death from above on some earth-based taget, we're going to use an airplane. The only real offensive use I see for space-based weapons would be to shoot down someone else's satellites.
So is a Linux monopoly better than a Microsoft monopoly all of a sudden? Some may say yes, but no monopoly is good.
I hate to break the blindingly obvious to you but:
No one has a monopoly on Linux!
They can't! It's free software. I can sell Linux, you can sell Linux, we all can sell Linux. And we can all have our own versions too.
You're worrying about a problem that does not exist.
Some may say this is a good thing, but to me this is government intereferance in a sector they should not touch.
And why shouldn't they touch it? So they can keep sending money off to a foreign country for something that could be handled domestically?
God forbid the g'ovt step forward and support something which benfits everyone, and only gets BETTER the more people use it.
The g'ovt has no business getting people to come together and help each other find a solution to a common problem at little or no cost?
It might destroy someone's profits and as we all know, once you make a profit with your business, the gov't is supposed to do anything in their power to continue that profit, even if your business model is totally outmoded.
Mr. Smarty Pants, If this is so blindingly obvious maybe you should have invented it and started selling low-cost refridgeration equipment in Africa. If you read up on the effects of this device you would find that young women in families that use the device are now allowed to go to school instead of being sent to the market to sell goods? Why? Because crops last longer so they don't have to sell them as soon as they pick them.
o rons,
Hello Mr. Let's-pretend-third-world-countries-are-full-of-m
So does this mean I should start selling circular transportation devices in Africa? Just think of all those hours it could save those poor Africans trying to get to school on their square-wheeled bicycles!
I think it's pretty safe to assume that these Africans already had and were using 4000+ year old technology. Just take a look at some of the posts in this thread from those who've ACTUALLY been to Africa and seen it in use.
And -- pssst -- here's a secret... you are already earning a subsistence level wage.
You don't understand the concept of a subsistence level wage. I presently earn ABOVE a subsitence level wage.
The Prisoner's Dilemma, by the way, is simply stupid. Two people who can't communicate making decisions that only affect themselves doesn't really represent anything in today's economy, does it?
The prisoners decsions affect EACH OTHER. It an analogy for an economy in which the most attactive descsion for a single company (outsourcing) is actually bad for the overall economy (nobody has any money to buy anything because they have no job).
Now, I like "The Grapes of Wrath," but Steinbeck was wrong. Economies run by the government don't work.
Are you trying to claim the gov't policys had nothing to do with us getting out of the depression?
In a store where no one cares what's selling or what's not, because some "committee" or politician makes educated guesses about what needs to be supplied, supply and demand never match, because one person can never determine the wants of another.)
Gov't regualtion doesn't mean communism and a command economy.
Your argumentation implies an uncontrolled development towards third-world-status which IMHO is neither prudent nor warranted.
Perhaps, but I think it's a real possibility.
My feeling is that, because only a very small fraction of the people in this country are employed making goods that are 100% necessary for survival, our economy is a rather fragile thing.
Imagine if I was able to convincingly tell everyone in the country that the next "Great Depression" was going to happen tomorrow:
1. Spending on those goods not 100% necessary would basically cease.
2. Shortly after, production would cease and a large amount of people would loose their jobs.
3. Those people then no longer have money to buy goods, so back to step two again, with more jobs lost.
4. The cycle would terminate with wages at a subsitence level. (Any lower and I expect you'd have a revolution on your hands.)
This is why (at least one reason) I think the gov't has both the right and the obligation to step in and interfere with the economy. Things like Gov't spending on goods/services, fiscal policy, unemployment insurance, etc all work to fight against the scenario above happening.
You know, there's a similar situation going on in the farming industry. It's been declining since the 70s - THE 1770s. Back then I think 90% of people were farmers, and thanks to *progress*, we don't need that many people working to feed the country.
The thing here is that you don't understand the key difference in the two situations.
In the case of farming, those jobs were no longer needed.
In the case of off-shoring, those jobs still exist, just elsewhere.
It's also shame that we weren't willing to learn anything from the great depression. Sometimes government intervention in the economy is absolutely necessary.
"Americans seemed to be more concerned with taking their own lifestyles from 10 to 11 than to help others bring theirs from 0 to 1."
But the idea that sending subsistence-level jobs to those countries is a good thing is blatantly ignorant.
It amazes me how many people don't understand the concept of "the race to the bottom": (I posted this explanation earlier as well.)
It's basically the concept that, if there's someone else willing to work cheaper, you have to work cheaper too. And that guy has to work cheaper than the guy who's willing to work cheaper than him. And on and on.
What you end up with in the end is a situation where workers are earning subsistence-level wages. This results in no one having the money to actually BUY anything and further economic collapse.
Ask yourself this question:
If everyone in America quit buying anything but food what would happen to the economy? How many people are actually employed producing that food?
The result is that everyone who can't get a job making subsistence-level wages providing goods necessary to provide that subsistence will have no job at all.
In short, you get to be your own real-live character in "the Grapes of Wrath".
You have lots of competition, and right now you can't compete. Or can you?
Sure we can compete. All we need to do is give up our standard of living and economy.
The point is: that would be a stupid thing to do.
Sometimes it makes sense to compete, and sometimes it makes sense not to play the game.
Those familiar with economic theory will recognize the following example as "The prisoner's dilemma"
Two guys are in jail. The committed a crime together. If neither one confesses they both get two years. If one confesses, he gets one year and the other guy gets ten. If both confess, the both get seven years.
What happens is that each prisoner confesses and they both end up worse off than if neither had confessed.
What's the point of this example?
Companies are doing things that they think benefit them, but don't look at the big picture. Their decisions are hurting the US economy as a whole, not helping it.
This is the point where the gov't should step in and stop them because EVERYONE (including the companies themselves) will be better off.
If the gov't does nothing, all it takes is one company to make the shortsighted decision and everyone else must do it to compete on price.
Wrong.
There are all kind of good reasons:
You clearly don't understand the problem with outsourcing. It's called the "race to the bottom".
It's basically the concept that, if there's someone else willing to work cheaper, you have to work cheaper too. And that guy has to work cheaper than the guy who's willing to work cheaper than him. And on and on.
What you end up with in the end is a situation where workers are earning subsistence-level wages.
This results in no one having the money to actually BUY anything and further economic collapse.
Ask yourself this question:
If everyone in America quit buying anything but food what would happen to the economy? How many people are actually employed producing that food?
The result is that everyone who can't get a job making subsistence-level wages providing goods necessary to provide that subsistence will have no job at all.
In short, you get to be your own real-live character in "the Grapes of Wrath".
That is a price of a cheap laptop.
That's an absolutely silly comparison.
By that logic, no one would ever buy a laptop, because they're more expensive that a desktop.
I have an SL-5500 and it really is a great tool. It was invauable during my college days, when I could connect via 802.11b just about anywhere, and run just about anything I wanted. The ability to do mobile IM alone made it worth it (no monthly fee), but it also functioned for web-browsing, email, MP3 player, etc.
Would you want to walk 10 miles a day with a laptop on your back?
I remeber when I got word that the Chem. dept. had a surplus a various chemicals they were looking to get rid of. I went to their webpage (which listed the chemicals and quantities and resquest the following from the surplus:
100 grams Caffine
1 pound Hydroflouric acid (non-aqueus)
some nitric acid
etc, etc
Everything was going fine until I told them to deliver the chemicals to my dorm room. It seems they didn't like that for some reason.
So I never did get my 100 grams of pure caffine. I could've had a lot of fun with that around finals.
Oh well, they probably saved my from killing myself with the hydroflouric acid. (That stuff will eat through Pyrex!)