The idea of using fairly random or non-musical elements in composing music is definitely not a new idea: John Cage famously created a piece using the I Ching as the source of randomness. The thing is, how it sounds depends largely on how you set the parameters you randomize. For instance, if you allow pitch to change because somebody played Qd2, but have all the notes at the same volume, the most noticeable effect will be the relatively constant volume.
And yes, I am a music geek who's even composed a few things this way that came out not half-bad.
Some things really aren't hard, though: There are plenty of well-known programming practices that make SQL injections and XSS attacks a thing of the distant past.
What is absolutely true in your post is that any company that says "buy this security product and you'll be perfectly safe" is talking nonsense. And yes, I'm including McAfee and Symantec in that kind of company.
My semi-educated guess here is that any sort of proprietary encryption protocol is more open to attack than a well-known publicly documented system, because once it becomes a valuable target (and public voting mechanisms are definitely high value targets) its security-by-obscurity goes away rapidly. Once security-by-obscurity is gone, then the proprietary algorithm is at a significant disadvantage just because there were fewer White Hats looking for bugs.
In other words, I won't support any proprietary protocol until Bruce Schneier and other smart folks like him have taken their stab at it.
But that's not a problem since no one besides the taxpayer would want to voluntarily contribute money, so there is little incentive for someone to falsify their identity for that.
I could turn it into a problem easily enough: Electronically submit a tax return for somebody who's due for a large refund. Change the place the refund is sent to go to an account I own rather than an account my target owns. I'd actually be somewhat surprised if there haven't been crooked tax preparers trying this exact maneuver.
The reasons that doesn't work have nothing to do with verifying identity online (which you correctly identify as being damn near impossible), and a lot to do with banks being smart about verifying specific transactions. For instance, they'd take note when the names or SSNs don't match up and flag it for further investigation.
This is how real totalitarianism works. It's not necessarily how real socialism works.
For instance, by US standards, Norway is a socialist country (with high taxes, an extensive welfare state, etc). It's also a parliamentary democracy for intents and purposes. And Norway would never seriously propose that sort of law.
Re:Another great Python 3.x series release
on
Python 3.2 Released
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Counterargument A: The stupid design decisions and approaches that are now obsolete and make no sense should be forced out of code. Otherwise, the Bad and Wrong version persists a lot longer than it should: some mediocre developer will Google how to solve a Python problem, get something that explains the Bad and Wrong version, puts it into their code, may get a bunch of deprecation warnings, but figures "hey it works, good enough". And if you need an example of how badly out of hand that can get, look at PHP, which still has to support really really stupid things from PHP2 or so because of backwards-compatability, and thus leaving behind a legacy of horrific PHP code.
Counterargument B: Ensuring backwards-compatibility always forever and ever ensures that the language complexity can only grow, never shrink. And thus you grow and grow and grow until eventually the language cannot even be completely defined using BNF or anything similar. Case in point: C++.
"It's all very well to laugh at the military, but when one considers the meaning of life, it is a struggle between alternative viewpoints of life itself. And without the ability to defend one's own viewpoint against other perhaps more aggressive ideologies, then reasonableness and moderation could quite simply disappear. That is why we will always need an army, and may God strike me down if it were to be otherwi..." ZAP!
They're not scamming you like spammers. They're trying to scam you about 1000000 times more than spammers. (Just look at how much money goes into each organization.)
Implying that by not allowing ISPs to charge Google or Netflix for disproportionate use of bandwidth, those ISPs would give up their pursuit and absorb the costs themselves rather than pass it on to subscribers.
A very common misconception that you brought up here:
If the cost to produce a widget increases by $10, you might think that the sellers will increase the consumer price by $10 per widget to compensate. But in most markets an economically rational seller will do no such thing, because raising the prices too much reduces the quantity sold, which reduces profits. So what actually happens depends on how much elasticity there is in the market, but typically what you'll see is a portion of that $10 is covered by, say, a $7 increase in consumer prices while the remainder ($3 in our example) is covered by a reduction in profits for the seller.
The misconception gets trotted out whenever we're talking about taxing or regulating business, because businesses don't want to have that $3 per wdget taken out of their profits. But it's basically nonsense, and been well-understood economics for quite some time.
Not quite. If you're (for example) a Green, go ahead and vote in the Democratic or Republican primary (whichever is most contested) to get the most Green-like candidate you can, which will encourage candidates in that party to at least sound like a Green and make Green ideas mainstream. Then in the general election, vote Green unless your most Green-like candidate won in the primary.
While I recognize the U.S. is totally fucked, economically, this is a mistake. Throwing a minor budget item with huge potential like this under the bus in the name of pretending to become fiscally responsible is beyond short-sighted.
The reason that's happened is that the US is totally fucked politically as well as economically.
Why do you think it is infinite, without any proof whatsoever? All evidence we have is that the observable universe is finite, and observations of the early universe (thanks to the finite speed of light) match what the Big Bang Theory predicted. Ergo, it's the best answer we've got right now, and the burden of proof is on those who have evidence to the contrary to produce it.
Is it possible there's an unobservable universe outside of the observable universe? Of course. But you can't do science with it because it is simply impossible to observe.
Or alternately, it's exactly what she said happened. Her story is perfectly plausible, and her behavior afterwords totally consistent with being raped, and then freaking out because it appeared as though her rapist just threatened her life.
Although women are (rightly) encouraged to seek medical aid after being raped and get a rape kit, it's not at all uncommon for a woman who's just been raped to want to go home, take a shower, and do her best to forget the trauma of what just happened. And she might have gotten over it and not pressed charges, except that this moron then posted something up making it appear that he wanted her dead, at which point she very correctly went to the police.
She should have gone to an ER to get a rape kit right away. She should have gone to the police the next morning rather than 2 days later. But there's nothing in her story that remotely suggests she's lying. And frankly, that you would immediately assume that she's making this up in order to ruin this guy's life is offensive to anyone who has or is a friend or relative of anyone who has been raped.
If your faith is encouraging you to make your religious convictions known and be willing to provide information for those who ask for it, that's one thing. If your faith is telling you that in order to remaining in good standing with the group you need to go out and find 10 more members, that's something else entirely. And yes, by that definition the Church of Latter Day Saints has a more dangerous level of proselytizing (by sending out its youth to go door-to-door soliciting membership) than does your friendly neighborhood Voudoun priestess.
On reason I like that questionnaire is it focuses on behavior more than size or beliefs. If you focused more on beliefs, you might think the Branch Davidians were ok because they were a particular kind of Christian and you were a Christian, or that the People's Temple was fine because it was socialist and you were a socialist. If you were focused on size, you might think the Church of Scientology was a safer organization than a local Wiccan coven when the exact opposite is true.
There are reasonable fears and unreasonable fears.
Reasonable fear: George W Bush will lead the country into a military quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan. Unreasonable fear: George W Bush will refuse to step down when his term of office is up.
Reasonable fear: Sarah Palin is basically an idiot who has no business holding public office. Unreasonable fear: Sarah Palin wants all Democratic politicians rounded up and shot, and ordered the hit on Gabrielle Giffords.
Reasonable fear: Fox News has a political agenda, and is willing to do what it takes to further that political agenda, including lying on the air and promoting astroturf campaigns. Unreasonable fear: Fox News is controlled by a secret fascist cabal involving the Koch brothers, the Carlyle Group, the Bush family, Saudi princes, and the bin Laden family.
I can keep going. The point is that not all fears are idiocy. I can do this another way too: Conservatives can reasonably fear that Barack Obama will raise their taxes. They shouldn't reasonably fear that he's a secret Iranian agent here for the sole purpose of eliminating Christianity from the United States.
Yes and no. There is such a thing as a dangerous cult, and there's also such a thing as a totally harmless new and/or tiny religious group. Many researchers have done work on how to tell the difference, and created tools like this questionnaire to tell the difference (Disclaimer: The author of that questionnaire, the late Isaac Bonewits, was a close friend of many people I'm acquainted with). And yes, the official Church of Scientology rates very badly in nearly all of those measurements.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea of using fairly random or non-musical elements in composing music is definitely not a new idea: John Cage famously created a piece using the I Ching as the source of randomness. The thing is, how it sounds depends largely on how you set the parameters you randomize. For instance, if you allow pitch to change because somebody played Qd2, but have all the notes at the same volume, the most noticeable effect will be the relatively constant volume.
And yes, I am a music geek who's even composed a few things this way that came out not half-bad.
Some things really aren't hard, though: There are plenty of well-known programming practices that make SQL injections and XSS attacks a thing of the distant past.
What is absolutely true in your post is that any company that says "buy this security product and you'll be perfectly safe" is talking nonsense. And yes, I'm including McAfee and Symantec in that kind of company.
All I know is that I'm sick and tired of these motherfuckin' comments on this motherfuckin' server!
Just ask Dweezil or Moon Unit Zappa.
Look, this is just a way for the film industry to reward an old man for his many decades of service to their bottom lines^H^H^Hhis country.
My semi-educated guess here is that any sort of proprietary encryption protocol is more open to attack than a well-known publicly documented system, because once it becomes a valuable target (and public voting mechanisms are definitely high value targets) its security-by-obscurity goes away rapidly. Once security-by-obscurity is gone, then the proprietary algorithm is at a significant disadvantage just because there were fewer White Hats looking for bugs.
In other words, I won't support any proprietary protocol until Bruce Schneier and other smart folks like him have taken their stab at it.
But that's not a problem since no one besides the taxpayer would want to voluntarily contribute money, so there is little incentive for someone to falsify their identity for that.
I could turn it into a problem easily enough: Electronically submit a tax return for somebody who's due for a large refund. Change the place the refund is sent to go to an account I own rather than an account my target owns. I'd actually be somewhat surprised if there haven't been crooked tax preparers trying this exact maneuver.
The reasons that doesn't work have nothing to do with verifying identity online (which you correctly identify as being damn near impossible), and a lot to do with banks being smart about verifying specific transactions. For instance, they'd take note when the names or SSNs don't match up and flag it for further investigation.
This is how real totalitarianism works. It's not necessarily how real socialism works.
For instance, by US standards, Norway is a socialist country (with high taxes, an extensive welfare state, etc). It's also a parliamentary democracy for intents and purposes. And Norway would never seriously propose that sort of law.
Counterargument A: The stupid design decisions and approaches that are now obsolete and make no sense should be forced out of code. Otherwise, the Bad and Wrong version persists a lot longer than it should: some mediocre developer will Google how to solve a Python problem, get something that explains the Bad and Wrong version, puts it into their code, may get a bunch of deprecation warnings, but figures "hey it works, good enough". And if you need an example of how badly out of hand that can get, look at PHP, which still has to support really really stupid things from PHP2 or so because of backwards-compatability, and thus leaving behind a legacy of horrific PHP code.
Counterargument B: Ensuring backwards-compatibility always forever and ever ensures that the language complexity can only grow, never shrink. And thus you grow and grow and grow until eventually the language cannot even be completely defined using BNF or anything similar. Case in point: C++.
Of course, real gamers know that the hardest part of doing anything on the moon is just landing.
There is already no place on Earth that couldn't be completely destroyed by a determined military attack in a matter of hours. What's your point?
"It's all very well to laugh at the military, but when one considers the meaning of life, it is a struggle between alternative viewpoints of life itself. And without the ability to defend one's own viewpoint against other perhaps more aggressive ideologies, then reasonableness and moderation could quite simply disappear. That is why we will always need an army, and may God strike me down if it were to be otherwi..." ZAP!
They're not scamming you like spammers. They're trying to scam you about 1000000 times more than spammers. (Just look at how much money goes into each organization.)
Actually, the best tactics are, in order:
1. Completely ignore them. Don't feed the trolls.
2. Have a positive, uplifting experience in response to their antics. For instance, organize a pride party (colorful fun for all), or hold up American flags between the WBC and the families attending military funerals.
Implying that by not allowing ISPs to charge Google or Netflix for disproportionate use of bandwidth, those ISPs would give up their pursuit and absorb the costs themselves rather than pass it on to subscribers.
A very common misconception that you brought up here:
If the cost to produce a widget increases by $10, you might think that the sellers will increase the consumer price by $10 per widget to compensate. But in most markets an economically rational seller will do no such thing, because raising the prices too much reduces the quantity sold, which reduces profits. So what actually happens depends on how much elasticity there is in the market, but typically what you'll see is a portion of that $10 is covered by, say, a $7 increase in consumer prices while the remainder ($3 in our example) is covered by a reduction in profits for the seller.
The misconception gets trotted out whenever we're talking about taxing or regulating business, because businesses don't want to have that $3 per wdget taken out of their profits. But it's basically nonsense, and been well-understood economics for quite some time.
Not quite. If you're (for example) a Green, go ahead and vote in the Democratic or Republican primary (whichever is most contested) to get the most Green-like candidate you can, which will encourage candidates in that party to at least sound like a Green and make Green ideas mainstream. Then in the general election, vote Green unless your most Green-like candidate won in the primary.
Actually, it doesn't even take a word, it just takes a gesture, modeled here by William Shatner.
While I recognize the U.S. is totally fucked, economically, this is a mistake. Throwing a minor budget item with huge potential like this under the bus in the name of pretending to become fiscally responsible is beyond short-sighted.
The reason that's happened is that the US is totally fucked politically as well as economically.
Why do you think it is infinite, without any proof whatsoever? All evidence we have is that the observable universe is finite, and observations of the early universe (thanks to the finite speed of light) match what the Big Bang Theory predicted. Ergo, it's the best answer we've got right now, and the burden of proof is on those who have evidence to the contrary to produce it.
Is it possible there's an unobservable universe outside of the observable universe? Of course. But you can't do science with it because it is simply impossible to observe.
Or alternately, it's exactly what she said happened. Her story is perfectly plausible, and her behavior afterwords totally consistent with being raped, and then freaking out because it appeared as though her rapist just threatened her life.
Although women are (rightly) encouraged to seek medical aid after being raped and get a rape kit, it's not at all uncommon for a woman who's just been raped to want to go home, take a shower, and do her best to forget the trauma of what just happened. And she might have gotten over it and not pressed charges, except that this moron then posted something up making it appear that he wanted her dead, at which point she very correctly went to the police.
She should have gone to an ER to get a rape kit right away. She should have gone to the police the next morning rather than 2 days later. But there's nothing in her story that remotely suggests she's lying. And frankly, that you would immediately assume that she's making this up in order to ruin this guy's life is offensive to anyone who has or is a friend or relative of anyone who has been raped.
You're just being paranoid. Those government agencies don't exist. And if you don't believe me, just ask them.
Gotta secure the pres in a town that's right for me
Town to keep me movin' keep me shootin' with some energy.
Well, I talk about it
Talk about it (x3)
Talk about, Talk about
Talk about movin'
Gotta move on (x3)
Won't you take me to
Tiny Town. (x4)
If your faith is encouraging you to make your religious convictions known and be willing to provide information for those who ask for it, that's one thing. If your faith is telling you that in order to remaining in good standing with the group you need to go out and find 10 more members, that's something else entirely. And yes, by that definition the Church of Latter Day Saints has a more dangerous level of proselytizing (by sending out its youth to go door-to-door soliciting membership) than does your friendly neighborhood Voudoun priestess.
On reason I like that questionnaire is it focuses on behavior more than size or beliefs. If you focused more on beliefs, you might think the Branch Davidians were ok because they were a particular kind of Christian and you were a Christian, or that the People's Temple was fine because it was socialist and you were a socialist. If you were focused on size, you might think the Church of Scientology was a safer organization than a local Wiccan coven when the exact opposite is true.
There are reasonable fears and unreasonable fears.
Reasonable fear: George W Bush will lead the country into a military quagmire in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Unreasonable fear: George W Bush will refuse to step down when his term of office is up.
Reasonable fear: Sarah Palin is basically an idiot who has no business holding public office.
Unreasonable fear: Sarah Palin wants all Democratic politicians rounded up and shot, and ordered the hit on Gabrielle Giffords.
Reasonable fear: Fox News has a political agenda, and is willing to do what it takes to further that political agenda, including lying on the air and promoting astroturf campaigns.
Unreasonable fear: Fox News is controlled by a secret fascist cabal involving the Koch brothers, the Carlyle Group, the Bush family, Saudi princes, and the bin Laden family.
I can keep going. The point is that not all fears are idiocy. I can do this another way too: Conservatives can reasonably fear that Barack Obama will raise their taxes. They shouldn't reasonably fear that he's a secret Iranian agent here for the sole purpose of eliminating Christianity from the United States.
Yes and no. There is such a thing as a dangerous cult, and there's also such a thing as a totally harmless new and/or tiny religious group. Many researchers have done work on how to tell the difference, and created tools like this questionnaire to tell the difference (Disclaimer: The author of that questionnaire, the late Isaac Bonewits, was a close friend of many people I'm acquainted with). And yes, the official Church of Scientology rates very badly in nearly all of those measurements.