As I've shown in previous posts, simple entropy considerations indicate the insecurity of MacOS in general and OSX in particular.
Another argument can be made on the basis chaos theory. Given two incompatible OS infrastructures plus numerous access methods into them (GUI, command line, etc) show that the incidence of failure cannot be smaller than 80%. This is an elementary problem in the mathematical world, which is why the mathematical world shuns Apple for an OS that can deliver the goods, like NT.
I like to watch my porn in full color with zoom-in capabilities just as much as the next red-blooded American male. But speaking with my brain instead of my penis I have to say that basic research is more important that electronic opiates.
The bandwidth the FCC is giving away used to be used for radio astronomy. Now not only can't it be used for that, but leaks from the broadcast towers (TV towers are among the most notoriously leaking broadcasters) are going to corrupt other vital bands as well.
Please, write to your congresscritter and ask them to consider the scientific ramifications of pushing HDTV down our throats.
The electronics embedded in the glass have a projected lifespan of 18 months.
First of all, great idea--put electronics inside a fragile item next to a liquid.
Second, 18 months? The peanuts and pretzels on the counter are gonna be older than the glasses. and I bet these things aren't cheap. Sounds really economical.
Nano technology for things like wires is one thing. But nanobots will never happen.
Something nobody seems to want to talk about is the feasibility of
propelling an object composed of somewhere between a few dozen and a
few hundred atoms. Remember Newton? F=ma ring a bell? To find the
acceleration of a nanobot, a = F/m where F is the thrust of the
propellant and m the mass of the nanobot. The thrust can be
calculated by multiplying the mass of the propellent by its
acceleration which in turn equals 2v/d (v = the final velocity and d
the atomic radius).
Plug these numbers in and you'll find that even if the propellant
consists of a single atom the forward velocity of the nanobot will be
somewhere in the region of 1/100th of the speed of light. That may
not sound like much, but even 1/1000 * 3e8 m/s = 3e5 m/s = 300 km/s =
1080000 km/h!
There's no way I'm letting one of these babies into my body..
Is that they are lining up, as the submitter notes, "in order of distance from the Sun". Planetary lineups occur frequently (about once a fortnight if I remember my astronomy classes) but what happens is that the lineup will be something like "mars, neptune, jupiter, venus"--out of order, see? Lining up in order is a pretty rare occurence, kind of like partial vs total eclipses of the sun.
The purpose of a UPS is to store power for later use. Supporting high-entropy ("random") strings of arbitrary length is going to consume a lot of energy. If you want your UPS to spend all its time being secure and none of its time being useful, go right ahead. Personally I think I'll just risk some hackers seeming I'm down to 90% battery levels...
Satellite TV and radio (as well as HDTV and the upcoming HD radio standard) use a lot of bandwidth. Bandwidth that, until now, had been the sole domain of radio astronomy. But the US must have it's opiate so full-steam ahead and damn the basic research!
Another just pops up in his place. The only way to stop a social problem like spamming or disk copying is via a technical solution. In the case of disk copying the proper and effective solution is encrypted CDs that can't be read on a computer.
In the case of spam the only effective solution is filters. Of course, if you download all the mail to your local spool and THEN apply the filter you haven't saved much. A better idea is a centralized filtering agency, set up by the government.
We'd all be assigned an email address (like we have a snail address) that email would be sent to. Automated programs would deleted "For Your Eyes Only #087A" crap and trained agents would sift through everything else.
Only by constance governmental vigilance can we keep our email freedom!
I like MacOS. Pretty colors, funny sounds and perky design brightens
up my day and is well worth the extra cost. However, I simply can't
recommend its use due to fundamental security issues.
Let's take a purely mathematical approach. Entropy S = k ln W where W
is the mulitplicity of the configuration: W = N!/nl!nr!. Now, if we
let N be the number of MacOS machines in existence with nl = number
that have been cracked and nr the number that haven't been (yet!), we
can plug in some numbers and find that the likelihood of break-in is
roughly 87.3%.
YMMV, obviously, but even in the case of simple home usage I don't
like to risk my data to such an insecure OS. That's why I stick to
Windows95 which, despite what some MS-bashers like to say, hasn't had
a single break-in attributable to design error ever.
If that doesn't whet your appetite, I have a great idea for next year: Research your stories and post them correctly, properly spelled. Hey, it's only once a year!
Young. Naive. Rankly odorous. Then I found the beauty that is Kuro5hin and I laughed from afar at the squalor of Slashdot. (The Squalor of Slashdot would make a great band name). Then I began trolling back. I'm having the time of my life and my intimacy levels (with your wife) have tripled!
As a teenager I was fascinated by anything robotic. This led me to a
study of the fundamentals of AI (Hofstadter, Lisp--the whole
schmeiel). But after two semesters I realized the whole field is
fooling itself. AI just won't work.
Biological neurons have been shown in the laboratory to grow new
connections based on information learned. In a robot, what possible
mechanism could guide such growth? Programming is the only answer,
but keep in mind that "programming" is just shorthand for "the
intelligence of the programmer". In other words, the AI itself isn't
self-contained, as it were.
There is no other way for "mental" activity to be guided, thus AI will
always be as unattainable as the Philosopher's Stone.
The IT professionals among us are rightly concerned about software
security implementations, especially from a well-known company in
Washington State. The even more knowledgeable are concerned about the
protocols themselves. This concern is 10 times greater when the
network data is whizzing through the air for anyone to intercept.
Luckily I've had an idea that may prove fruitful as a first line of
defense against tactics such as "war driving".
Despite the catchy slogan, sometimes obscurity can provide a
small measure of security. The first step in securing wireless
networks should be making the transmissions uninterceptable by
hackers. Therefore I would like to invoke the concept of "guided
wavefronts". What you do is you provide a contained medium that is
impervious to casual break-ins within which the signal can
propagate.
The scheme could prove bulky, so I propose that the contained medium
should be made of some material that will conduct an electric charge
quite well, such as metal. If this is done I suspect the guided
wavefront containers could be made as small as 1/8"-1/4" in diameter.
Also, there will be a certain amount of secondary leakage because of
electromagnetic radiation produced by the contained signal, but making
the container out of some kind of shielding matter would solve this
issue.
I haven't seen anything like this concept on the market but it seems
like a good idea. How come nobody is working on it?
As a professional physicist, let me tell you I spend a lot of time in
front of a computer console writing papers in various markups, solving
equations and running simulations. Because of this, I well know the
need for a powerful CPU and flexible OS/software to match.
That's why I choose Microsoft Windows for my computing work.
The easy setup and configuration let me get right to work and the
cross-platform standardizations let me easily port my work for
colleagues. Furthermore, the highly-optimized nature of the
Windows Operating System Kernel makes for blazingly fast
simulation runs even on the low-end hardware that my University is
willing to pay for.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. The quirky command-line interface
makes me nostalgic for my days as a student using fun but non-standard
packages like LaTeX and gnuplot. But when I want enterprise-level
support for my physic-al work, I always choose the software that I
know won't let me down.
As a professional physicist, let me tell you I spend a lot of time in
front of a computer console writing papers in various markups, solving
equations and running simulations. Because of this, I well know the
need for a powerful CPU and flexible OS/software to match.
That's why I choose Microsoft Windows for my computing work.
The easy setup and configuration let me get right to work and the
cross-platform standardizations let me easily port my work for
colleagues. Furthermore, the highly-optimized nature of the
Windows Operating System Kernel makes for blazingly fast
simulation runs even on the low-end hardware that my University is
willing to pay for.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. The quirky command-line interface
makes me nostalgic for my days as a student using fun but non-standard
packages like LaTeX and gnuplot. But when I want enterprise-level
support for my physic-al work, I always choose the software that I
know won't let me down.
...it will counteract the growing trend of "hands-free" talking and you'll have to hold the phone even closer to your head.
We are right to be skeptical of outrageous claims like "my cell phone
gave me cancer" and I applaud the many geeks who, in this story and
others, have stood up to suspected pseudo-science and brought to bear
a modicum of scientific knowledge.
However, there are significant reasons to believe the claim is true in
this case. For instance, consider electric fields. You may not be
aware of this or have thought of it this way, but a microwave oven is
basically just a big, unmodulated radio station broadcasting in the
microwave band instead of the radio band. And what do we use
microwave ovens for? Cooking things.
And microwaves, like all electromagnetic radiation, are caused by
what? Electric fields. And a major source of electric fields and
broadcast power is what? Cell phones. And we put cell phones where?
Next to our genitals and next to our brains[1].
So, while I love my personal computer, SUV, air-conditioning and other
marvels of modern life I Just Say No to cancer-causing cell phones.
I like my free MP3s, so don't spread this too widely: I've figured out
a fool-proof method that the RIAA can use to "digitally manage" their
intellectual property by using quantum computers.
You probably recall how quantum computation works: essentially you
shove all the extra computation off into parallel universes and then
get the answer back when it comes. Why not expand on that idea and
use quantum file storage? The RIAA can create CDs where only part of
the audio track exists in our universe and the rest is retrieved from
parallel universes by your quantum audio system. This makes file
copying mathematically impossible.
Now someone is probably going to pop up and say "well, I can pirate
the signal after it has been revirtualized from the quantum foam".
I'm glad you brought that up because it leads right into phase two of
my idea. In order to listen to music, all consumers would be have
sound-decoding chips implanted in their brains. The music would be
beamed directly into your head from your audio system.
Thus we see that file copying can be made impossible by those that are
willing to pay the price of our freedom. The only solution is to keep
quantum computers from becoming a reality
I like MacOS. Pretty colors, funny sounds and perky design brightens
up my day and is well worth the extra cost. However, I simply can't
recommend its use due to fundamental security issues.
Let's take a purely mathematical approach. Entropy S = k ln W where W
is the mulitplicity of the configuration: W = N!/nl!nr!. Now, if we
let N be the number of MacOS machines in existence with nl = number
that have been cracked and nr the number that haven't been (yet!), we
can plug in some numbers and find that the likelihood of break-in is
roughly 87.3%.
YMMV, obviously, but even in the case of simple home usage I don't
like to risk my data to such an insecure OS. That's why I stick to
Windows95 which, despite what some MS-bashers like to say, hasn't had
a single break-in attributable to design error ever.
While I applaud JPL for out-of-the-box thinking, I have to wonder what the chances are of finding an iceberg-wrecked cruise ship at the bottom of an ocean on a moon of Jupiter.
I hate spam. I get hundreds of offers for penis and breast
enlargments and only a few are intriguing. I wish there was a way to
stem the flood.
Unfortunately, if you examine the problem from an
information-theoretical viewpoint you'll find that that is impossible.
Shannon's basic theorem was that noise is a property of communication.
When you communicate, you have noise as a byproduct no matter what you
do. Email is communication, spam is the noise. Web traffic is
communication, popups are the noise. Slashdot is communication,
trolls and crapflooders are the noise.
One possibility for a solution is to reduce the communication itself
via filters. For instance, some central agency could set up a
computer to monitor all communication and delete targetted email
messages or web traffic. As an act of communication-reduction this
would guarantee at least a small amount of relief from noise. That's
why I support Ashcroft in his plan to set the FBI up with Carnivore.
Slashdot Mirror
Another argument can be made on the basis chaos theory. Given two incompatible OS infrastructures plus numerous access methods into them (GUI, command line, etc) show that the incidence of failure cannot be smaller than 80%. This is an elementary problem in the mathematical world, which is why the mathematical world shuns Apple for an OS that can deliver the goods, like NT.
The bandwidth the FCC is giving away used to be used for radio astronomy. Now not only can't it be used for that, but leaks from the broadcast towers (TV towers are among the most notoriously leaking broadcasters) are going to corrupt other vital bands as well.
Please, write to your congresscritter and ask them to consider the scientific ramifications of pushing HDTV down our throats.
First of all, great idea--put electronics inside a fragile item next to a liquid.
Second, 18 months? The peanuts and pretzels on the counter are gonna be older than the glasses. and I bet these things aren't cheap. Sounds really economical.
Something nobody seems to want to talk about is the feasibility of propelling an object composed of somewhere between a few dozen and a few hundred atoms. Remember Newton? F=ma ring a bell? To find the acceleration of a nanobot, a = F/m where F is the thrust of the propellant and m the mass of the nanobot. The thrust can be calculated by multiplying the mass of the propellent by its acceleration which in turn equals 2v/d (v = the final velocity and d the atomic radius).
Plug these numbers in and you'll find that even if the propellant consists of a single atom the forward velocity of the nanobot will be somewhere in the region of 1/100th of the speed of light. That may not sound like much, but even 1/1000 * 3e8 m/s = 3e5 m/s = 300 km/s = 1080000 km/h!
There's no way I'm letting one of these babies into my body..
Is that they are lining up, as the submitter notes, "in order of distance from the Sun". Planetary lineups occur frequently (about once a fortnight if I remember my astronomy classes) but what happens is that the lineup will be something like "mars, neptune, jupiter, venus"--out of order, see? Lining up in order is a pretty rare occurence, kind of like partial vs total eclipses of the sun.
The purpose of a UPS is to store power for later use. Supporting high-entropy ("random") strings of arbitrary length is going to consume a lot of energy. If you want your UPS to spend all its time being secure and none of its time being useful, go right ahead. Personally I think I'll just risk some hackers seeming I'm down to 90% battery levels...
Under no circumstances should a SMB server support UNIX-style long names.
Hey thanks for throwing out standards and compatibility, guys!
Satellite TV and radio (as well as HDTV and the upcoming HD radio standard) use a lot of bandwidth. Bandwidth that, until now, had been the sole domain of radio astronomy. But the US must have it's opiate so full-steam ahead and damn the basic research!
In the case of spam the only effective solution is filters. Of course, if you download all the mail to your local spool and THEN apply the filter you haven't saved much. A better idea is a centralized filtering agency, set up by the government.
We'd all be assigned an email address (like we have a snail address) that email would be sent to. Automated programs would deleted "For Your Eyes Only #087A" crap and trained agents would sift through everything else.
Only by constance governmental vigilance can we keep our email freedom!
Let's take a purely mathematical approach. Entropy S = k ln W where W is the mulitplicity of the configuration: W = N!/nl!nr!. Now, if we let N be the number of MacOS machines in existence with nl = number that have been cracked and nr the number that haven't been (yet!), we can plug in some numbers and find that the likelihood of break-in is roughly 87.3%.
YMMV, obviously, but even in the case of simple home usage I don't like to risk my data to such an insecure OS. That's why I stick to Windows95 which, despite what some MS-bashers like to say, hasn't had a single break-in attributable to design error ever.
nt
If that doesn't whet your appetite, I have a great idea for next year: Research your stories and post them correctly, properly spelled. Hey, it's only once a year!
This is like reading segfault. Remember them? They died because THEY WEREN'T FUNNY EITHER.
Reading Slashdot on April Fool's Day is like watching my grandmother do "airline food" jokes. Just sad.
Note to submitters: If you start your story with "In a shocking move..." just shoot yourself instead of thinking you are funny. BECAUSE YOU ARE NOT!
Young. Naive. Rankly odorous. Then I found the beauty that is Kuro5hin and I laughed from afar at the squalor of Slashdot. (The Squalor of Slashdot would make a great band name). Then I began trolling back. I'm having the time of my life and my intimacy levels (with your wife) have tripled!
Biological neurons have been shown in the laboratory to grow new connections based on information learned. In a robot, what possible mechanism could guide such growth? Programming is the only answer, but keep in mind that "programming" is just shorthand for "the intelligence of the programmer". In other words, the AI itself isn't self-contained, as it were.
There is no other way for "mental" activity to be guided, thus AI will always be as unattainable as the Philosopher's Stone.
Despite the catchy slogan, sometimes obscurity can provide a small measure of security. The first step in securing wireless networks should be making the transmissions uninterceptable by hackers. Therefore I would like to invoke the concept of "guided wavefronts". What you do is you provide a contained medium that is impervious to casual break-ins within which the signal can propagate.
The scheme could prove bulky, so I propose that the contained medium should be made of some material that will conduct an electric charge quite well, such as metal. If this is done I suspect the guided wavefront containers could be made as small as 1/8"-1/4" in diameter. Also, there will be a certain amount of secondary leakage because of electromagnetic radiation produced by the contained signal, but making the container out of some kind of shielding matter would solve this issue.
I haven't seen anything like this concept on the market but it seems like a good idea. How come nobody is working on it?
That's why I choose Microsoft Windows for my computing work. The easy setup and configuration let me get right to work and the cross-platform standardizations let me easily port my work for colleagues. Furthermore, the highly-optimized nature of the Windows Operating System Kernel makes for blazingly fast simulation runs even on the low-end hardware that my University is willing to pay for.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. The quirky command-line interface makes me nostalgic for my days as a student using fun but non-standard packages like LaTeX and gnuplot. But when I want enterprise-level support for my physic-al work, I always choose the software that I know won't let me down.
nt
That's why I choose Microsoft Windows for my computing work. The easy setup and configuration let me get right to work and the cross-platform standardizations let me easily port my work for colleagues. Furthermore, the highly-optimized nature of the Windows Operating System Kernel makes for blazingly fast simulation runs even on the low-end hardware that my University is willing to pay for.
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. The quirky command-line interface makes me nostalgic for my days as a student using fun but non-standard packages like LaTeX and gnuplot. But when I want enterprise-level support for my physic-al work, I always choose the software that I know won't let me down.
We are right to be skeptical of outrageous claims like "my cell phone gave me cancer" and I applaud the many geeks who, in this story and others, have stood up to suspected pseudo-science and brought to bear a modicum of scientific knowledge.
However, there are significant reasons to believe the claim is true in this case. For instance, consider electric fields. You may not be aware of this or have thought of it this way, but a microwave oven is basically just a big, unmodulated radio station broadcasting in the microwave band instead of the radio band. And what do we use microwave ovens for? Cooking things.
And microwaves, like all electromagnetic radiation, are caused by what? Electric fields. And a major source of electric fields and broadcast power is what? Cell phones. And we put cell phones where? Next to our genitals and next to our brains[1].
So, while I love my personal computer, SUV, air-conditioning and other marvels of modern life I Just Say No to cancer-causing cell phones.
[1] For me this is two separate locations, YMMV.
You probably recall how quantum computation works: essentially you shove all the extra computation off into parallel universes and then get the answer back when it comes. Why not expand on that idea and use quantum file storage? The RIAA can create CDs where only part of the audio track exists in our universe and the rest is retrieved from parallel universes by your quantum audio system. This makes file copying mathematically impossible.
Now someone is probably going to pop up and say "well, I can pirate the signal after it has been revirtualized from the quantum foam". I'm glad you brought that up because it leads right into phase two of my idea. In order to listen to music, all consumers would be have sound-decoding chips implanted in their brains. The music would be beamed directly into your head from your audio system.
Thus we see that file copying can be made impossible by those that are willing to pay the price of our freedom. The only solution is to keep quantum computers from becoming a reality
Let's take a purely mathematical approach. Entropy S = k ln W where W is the mulitplicity of the configuration: W = N!/nl!nr!. Now, if we let N be the number of MacOS machines in existence with nl = number that have been cracked and nr the number that haven't been (yet!), we can plug in some numbers and find that the likelihood of break-in is roughly 87.3%.
YMMV, obviously, but even in the case of simple home usage I don't like to risk my data to such an insecure OS. That's why I stick to Windows95 which, despite what some MS-bashers like to say, hasn't had a single break-in attributable to design error ever.
While I applaud JPL for out-of-the-box thinking, I have to wonder what the chances are of finding an iceberg-wrecked cruise ship at the bottom of an ocean on a moon of Jupiter.
Unfortunately, if you examine the problem from an information-theoretical viewpoint you'll find that that is impossible. Shannon's basic theorem was that noise is a property of communication. When you communicate, you have noise as a byproduct no matter what you do. Email is communication, spam is the noise. Web traffic is communication, popups are the noise. Slashdot is communication, trolls and crapflooders are the noise.
One possibility for a solution is to reduce the communication itself via filters. For instance, some central agency could set up a computer to monitor all communication and delete targetted email messages or web traffic. As an act of communication-reduction this would guarantee at least a small amount of relief from noise. That's why I support Ashcroft in his plan to set the FBI up with Carnivore.