does Simon Morris think that he, single-handedly, can do better than the folks at the IETF, most of whom have PhDs in computer science?
You really have a very strange over-estimation of the value of a PhD. It doesn't mean you're a super-genius, you're smarter than everyone (or even anyone) else, or that you're always right. It simply means you've been willing to go through some schooling. That's it. Hopefully you've learned something from that education.
There's plenty of examples of non-PhD's making major contributions. The WWW was largely invented by someone with a degree in physics (undergrad I believe), with no degree in computer science. Linus Torvalds only attained a mere masters degree in Computer Science, but yet his OS seems to have become a bit more successful than quite a few other OS's written by people with more education.
So, where, pray tell, does the water in the air go when the sun strikes it?
If you weren't so snotty about it, you might realize that the article was referring to relative humidity. The water doesn't go anywhere. The air heats up, hotter air has a higher capacity for water in it. Thus the relative humidity will go down. There may be some other factors at work as well, but my guess is the higher capacity for water vapor in the air is the major factor here.
The rest of your post I largely agree with. The gadget sounds like nothing more than a toy for people with too much disposable income, and a poor understanding of "environmentalism".
I'm not a fluid mechanic, but I wonder what the effects would be of slowing down already slow moving river water. Increased silt deposits? More flooding upstream? Anyone with more knowledge about river flows care to comment?
I'm trying to figure out exactly what they're deciding. Yes, I understand it's a discussion about "upgrade to DNSSEC" vs. "implement the hacks". But these guys don't control the internet, and my understanding is they only make "recommendations", which nobody is obliged to follow.
So exactly what exactly are these guys debating about "doing"? Is it really just "recommend DNSSEC" or "recommend the hack"?
I certainly didn't real 44 pages of ramblings. What I _did_ read was examples all based on an environment of enormous competition where anyone could provide a solution. Does anyone really think this is the case with ISPs? For the physical lines coming into my house I have two options. The telco or the CableCo. If you're lucky you get to choose your ISP, but even that doesn't seem to guarantee you neutrality if the Bell Canada story summaries are correct.
The point being, when competition doesn't exist, like is the case with most peoples choice of who provides them internet service (i.e. legal monoplies), Lee's whole argument falls apart. Comparing THAT to someone inventing SMTP, or VoIP in an open environment is a ridiculous comparison.
I would bet there is a set of cons that hit smart people harder.
You mean something like this stuff?. Richard Feynman once observed that some smart people get taken because they don't want to believe they can be fooled. He was referring to people fooled by Uri Geller. He said he was different because "I'm smart enough to know that I'm dumb". Which is one of my favorite quotes of anything.
With "white van" scams, the mark thinks he's buying stolen goods.
Interesting. I didn't realize this was such a well known scam. About 10 years ago in College while walking from my car to class I would occasionally get stopped by slimy looking guys driving around in a van saying they were from "Sound Design", and repeated some ridiculous story about "extra" speakers being ordered, etc. This happened more than once, so I knew there was some form of scam here but didn't find out exactly what until later.
One day a co-worker told me he actually BOUGHT the speakers from these scum-bags. I told him they were likely stolen, or some such. He didn't believe they were stolen, he actually believed the ridiculous story. He actually contacted the police (not wanting to have bought stolen speakers), and they told him the essence of the White van speakers scam. Sadly my co-worker didn't want to believe these guys were bad guys (and he had still somehow gotten a good deal).
So what would you suggest? Writing an application with Spring and referencing the URL on the resume? Simply listing that I am proficient with it despite the lack of work experience? Or a Spring certification?
I take it you're not proficient in Spring?
If that's the case, don't pretend to be. If you're smart, frameworks are very easy to pickup if you're in an environment where they're already used. If a place is really adamant about "requiring framework or technology X", then it's a good sign there's something odd going on at that company. I'll choose someone who's intelligent and has good instincts over someone that knows the ins and outs of a technology every time. If you're really concerned about "not knowing technology X", then just go and learn it by producing something. A cert should be considered worthless.
I guess I'd be a lot more interested in the facts from which you derive your conclusions rather than the conclusions themselves. It sounds to me like PickupPal is simply an electronic "ride board", and little more.
Really? All it took was a a tiny company in Cupertino, CA, a rogue division in Boca Raton, FL, and a tiny company in Albuquerque, NM, to change IBM's world.
Right, and a market demand for inexpensive computers, several other computer companies ALSO competing for that same market, hundreds of other companies that went along for the ride to help support them. Let's not overplay the role's of Apple, Microsoft, and IBM. The PC succeeded not because these companies existed, but because the time was right for the PC.
I think the key word in the OP's post is _alone_. Ubuntu isn't going to change anything without an environment ready to accept and push that change.
I can't help but think that cancer is acting as a brake on the population explosion.
Not in a significant way. The truth is that the birth rate for most (all?) industrial nations is near or under replacement. The U.S. is only growing because of immigration. Curing cancer would have an almost nill effect on the population. and eventually we'd see wide spread poverty and famine.
Thomas Malthus had a similar fear. His theory was essentially that as resources expanded, the population also grew to consume all the extra resources. Malthus's fears didn't turn out to be real, as women will have less children as a country industrializes.
From an economic standpoint (which is what you're talking about) curing cancer would be an enormous boon. How much productivity is lost every year because people die of cancer? Quite a lot I'd guess.
Even the strongest crypto implementation and algorithm is still subject to Rubber Host Crypt-analysis, or even "court ordered cryptanalysis". In those cases stego would have some protection against these techniques.
*Set up an independent "Knuth's Mistake Fund" checking account. *If a mistake is found, deposit $2.56 and send paper check, valid within 30 days *If a month goes by and the guy didn't cash it, withdraw $2.56 and void the check.
Runtime Exception! Fraudster makes check for $2000! (handle exception) {banker complains to Knuth, tired of penny-anty fraud that's costing him time and money.}
From what I read Knuth is changing his procedures because it's causing people grief at the bank, not because he was robbed of some large sum of money. The money in the account isn't the problem here.
The graph is interesting, but I'd prefer a graph that's been adjusted for inflation. How they propose to handle it sounds fairly similar--more preventative regulation.
Not exactly. McCain isn't in favor of more regulation, he's in favor of shifting some power around. One economist (I forget who it was) said it was essentially like getting faster horses to round up the cows when you notice they've left the barn.
The economic policies of both candidates are very different. Calling them the same is just ignorant.
Wake up whenever you want. Get fed at regular intervals. The only job requirement is that you show a modicum of glee when your owner is around. What does a dog get depressed about?
Dogs are not people (or specifically, not you) and they don't share what you out of life. The breeds we have were bred for certain jobs like herding, hunting, or killing vermin. In general they weren't bred to be companion dogs. They desperately want to do this job and without that fulfillment, they have problems. I don't know if that specifically can cause depression, but I could see it.
I guess my point is, without actually having BEEN a dog or an Astronaut on a space station, it's difficult to know exactly what they go through. So I wouldn't be so quick to judge.
Not everybody should get A's. Once the majority of players reach a standard, the standard should be moved to motivate advancement in the field and show the better of the pack.... So all the power to making the standards hard to achieve.
I find these to be odd statements. It was my understanding that the test is supposed to exist to give me an idea if I'm actually being protected from a threat, not as a giant dick-measuring contest. What you propose is an infinite "advance the field for the sake of advancing the field", which is great for people who care about such things, but past a certain point, pointless for everyone else.
My point is that a product can at some point achieve a level that's "good enough", and further measurement of it is pointless. Sound recording has essentially reached that level with the CD. There's products that offer "better" quality, but we've reached a point in sound recording where the differences are relatively meaningless. We haven't reached that level in anti-virus software (and likely never will since the target is constantly moving), but I'd say that a testing methodology should measure where you want to be, not ever-increasing goals.
The whole argument boils down the published URE rate being both accurate, and a foregone conclusion. Will disk makers _really_ make drives that have a sector failure for every 2 terabytes, or will they improve whatever technology is causing these URE's to be much more rare? (if the rate was real in the first place).
That's the thing: all security can be broken. All security has some sort of a hole or another.
While this is true, you ignore the most important point. All security holes are not created equal. There's some VERY dumb security problems I've come across or heard about over the years that would be VERY easy to exploit. Most (if not all) of them have been fixed. There's others that would be much more difficult to exploit.
You're correct that people don't want to hear about "possible avenues of attack". They want a security guy to do his/her job and say "this problem should be fixed, as it's highly likely to be exploited, and can cause severe damage".
Security really comes down to trust: do you trust the person you hired to not sell the company out or do evil to the company?
All security isn't internal. But on some level, you're right that internally there's a lot riding on the trust relationships. For those cases where there isn't any trust, security is about economics. How hard is it to break the security, how much risk of getting caught is there, and what's the benefit to doing so? You only need to make it not worth it to jump the fence.
Value can only be attributed towards things that can be bought and sold.
Pure nonsense. Value can be attributed to things that produce value. Would you say the Brooklyn Bridge is worth nothing because it can't be bought or sold? I'd hope not.
Linux, like the Brooklyn Bridge produces economic value. Economists assign value to things that aren't bought and sold all the time. You can argue about how to go about this (and I'm certainly not qualified to do even that), but it's silly to say you can't give it a dollar value simply because nobody can "own" it.
So give me encryption that I can trust and I'll be able to assess my security based on the things that I can control / verify myself. Schneier has no business telling me "your set up is flawed so there's no point in giving you secure encryption."
You've missed the point. Scneire's point is that you already DO have "encryption I can trust". His point isn't that "your set up is flawed", his point is that "all setups have weaknesses, and the weakest point is almost never the encryption system." Giving you "more secure" encryption wouldn't make anyone any more secure. (BTW, Schneire is an encryption researcher, so he very much does have the ability to tell you that the existing encryption algorithms are already very strong).
why does the evolution of desktop operating systems like Windows go slower now than a decade ago?
I think this is a decent question. You'll note that other OS's actually DO evolve at a decent rate (Linux OSX, etc). So why does Windows such a dog?
The answer, I think is really all the accumulated weight that Windows has to carry. That's not just "code bloat" as some would have you believe, though that's part of it. It's all the OTHER pieces of software that simply HAVE to work on windows for them to continue to exist. Microsoft has resisted pruning much out since the Win32 architecture first came out, for fear of losing market share to the competition. This has been a mistake, and is costing them now.
The key differentiation between the cognitive abilities of men and women is that men are able to confront a problem by breaking things down into smaller parts and focus on solving those to form a complete solution while the minds of women take problems holistically and solve based on tradeoffs between different sections of a problem area.
That's a nice explanation, but it sure sounds to me like a lot of BS. Where has anyone found any solid, repeatable evidence for this? I think I'll go with the guy who explained that chess at a very high level takes single-minded concentration, and women are just less willing to do this. That at least jives with my own observations between the differences between men and women.
The grid can handle this. Millions of cars aren't going to be plugged in overnight.
No, they're not. But how much would the grid suffer if they were? Would power plant needs double, triple, quadruple?
You're correct that this won't happen (literally) tomorrow. But what if just 10% of drivers are using electric in 8 years? What about 20%? How much does the system need to increase if one of these two happen? These are the questions I'd like answers to, rather than just spit balling it a saying "both don't happen over night" in a literal sense.
Slashdot Mirror
does Simon Morris think that he, single-handedly, can do better than the folks at the IETF, most of whom have PhDs in computer science?
You really have a very strange over-estimation of the value of a PhD. It doesn't mean you're a super-genius, you're smarter than everyone (or even anyone) else, or that you're always right. It simply means you've been willing to go through some schooling. That's it. Hopefully you've learned something from that education.
There's plenty of examples of non-PhD's making major contributions. The WWW was largely invented by someone with a degree in physics (undergrad I believe), with no degree in computer science. Linus Torvalds only attained a mere masters degree in Computer Science, but yet his OS seems to have become a bit more successful than quite a few other OS's written by people with more education.
So, where, pray tell, does the water in the air go when the sun strikes it?
If you weren't so snotty about it, you might realize that the article was referring to relative humidity. The water doesn't go anywhere. The air heats up, hotter air has a higher capacity for water in it. Thus the relative humidity will go down. There may be some other factors at work as well, but my guess is the higher capacity for water vapor in the air is the major factor here.
The rest of your post I largely agree with. The gadget sounds like nothing more than a toy for people with too much disposable income, and a poor understanding of "environmentalism".
I'm not a fluid mechanic, but I wonder what the effects would be of slowing down already slow moving river water. Increased silt deposits? More flooding upstream? Anyone with more knowledge about river flows care to comment?
I'm trying to figure out exactly what they're deciding. Yes, I understand it's a discussion about "upgrade to DNSSEC" vs. "implement the hacks". But these guys don't control the internet, and my understanding is they only make "recommendations", which nobody is obliged to follow.
So exactly what exactly are these guys debating about "doing"? Is it really just "recommend DNSSEC" or "recommend the hack"?
I certainly didn't real 44 pages of ramblings. What I _did_ read was examples all based on an environment of enormous competition where anyone could provide a solution. Does anyone really think this is the case with ISPs? For the physical lines coming into my house I have two options. The telco or the CableCo. If you're lucky you get to choose your ISP, but even that doesn't seem to guarantee you neutrality if the Bell Canada story summaries are correct.
The point being, when competition doesn't exist, like is the case with most peoples choice of who provides them internet service (i.e. legal monoplies), Lee's whole argument falls apart. Comparing THAT to someone inventing SMTP, or VoIP in an open environment is a ridiculous comparison.
I would bet there is a set of cons that hit smart people harder.
You mean something like this stuff?. Richard Feynman once observed that some smart people get taken because they don't want to believe they can be fooled. He was referring to people fooled by Uri Geller. He said he was different because "I'm smart enough to know that I'm dumb". Which is one of my favorite quotes of anything.
What is the probability of the coin coming up heads on the 10th flip?
0%, since of course you switched out the coin with a two-tailed coin after flip 9.
With "white van" scams, the mark thinks he's buying stolen goods.
Interesting. I didn't realize this was such a well known scam. About 10 years ago in College while walking from my car to class I would occasionally get stopped by slimy looking guys driving around in a van saying they were from "Sound Design", and repeated some ridiculous story about "extra" speakers being ordered, etc. This happened more than once, so I knew there was some form of scam here but didn't find out exactly what until later.
One day a co-worker told me he actually BOUGHT the speakers from these scum-bags. I told him they were likely stolen, or some such. He didn't believe they were stolen, he actually believed the ridiculous story. He actually contacted the police (not wanting to have bought stolen speakers), and they told him the essence of the White van speakers scam. Sadly my co-worker didn't want to believe these guys were bad guys (and he had still somehow gotten a good deal).
So what would you suggest? Writing an application with Spring and referencing the URL on the resume? Simply listing that I am proficient with it despite the lack of work experience? Or a Spring certification?
I take it you're not proficient in Spring?
If that's the case, don't pretend to be. If you're smart, frameworks are very easy to pickup if you're in an environment where they're already used. If a place is really adamant about "requiring framework or technology X", then it's a good sign there's something odd going on at that company. I'll choose someone who's intelligent and has good instincts over someone that knows the ins and outs of a technology every time. If you're really concerned about "not knowing technology X", then just go and learn it by producing something. A cert should be considered worthless.
I guess I'd be a lot more interested in the facts from which you derive your conclusions rather than the conclusions themselves. It sounds to me like PickupPal is simply an electronic "ride board", and little more.
Really? All it took was a a tiny company in Cupertino, CA, a rogue division in Boca Raton, FL, and a tiny company in Albuquerque, NM, to change IBM's world.
Right, and a market demand for inexpensive computers, several other computer companies ALSO competing for that same market, hundreds of other companies that went along for the ride to help support them. Let's not overplay the role's of Apple, Microsoft, and IBM. The PC succeeded not because these companies existed, but because the time was right for the PC.
I think the key word in the OP's post is _alone_. Ubuntu isn't going to change anything without an environment ready to accept and push that change.
I can't help but think that cancer is acting as a brake on the population explosion.
Not in a significant way. The truth is that the birth rate for most (all?) industrial nations is near or under replacement. The U.S. is only growing because of immigration. Curing cancer would have an almost nill effect on the population.
and eventually we'd see wide spread poverty and famine.
Thomas Malthus had a similar fear. His theory was essentially that as resources expanded, the population also grew to consume all the extra resources. Malthus's fears didn't turn out to be real, as women will have less children as a country industrializes.
From an economic standpoint (which is what you're talking about) curing cancer would be an enormous boon. How much productivity is lost every year because people die of cancer? Quite a lot I'd guess.
Do we need to hide crypto anymore?
Even the strongest crypto implementation and algorithm is still subject to Rubber Host Crypt-analysis, or even "court ordered cryptanalysis". In those cases stego would have some protection against these techniques.
*Set up an independent "Knuth's Mistake Fund" checking account.
*If a mistake is found, deposit $2.56 and send paper check, valid within 30 days
*If a month goes by and the guy didn't cash it, withdraw $2.56 and void the check.
Runtime Exception! Fraudster makes check for $2000!
(handle exception)
{banker complains to Knuth, tired of penny-anty fraud that's costing him time and money.}
From what I read Knuth is changing his procedures because it's causing people grief at the bank, not because he was robbed of some large sum of money. The money in the account isn't the problem here.
The graph is interesting, but I'd prefer a graph that's been adjusted for inflation.
How they propose to handle it sounds fairly similar--more preventative regulation.
Not exactly. McCain isn't in favor of more regulation, he's in favor of shifting some power around. One economist (I forget who it was) said it was essentially like getting faster horses to round up the cows when you notice they've left the barn.
The economic policies of both candidates are very different. Calling them the same is just ignorant.
Wake up whenever you want. Get fed at regular intervals. The only job requirement is that you show a modicum of glee when your owner is around. What does a dog get depressed about?
Dogs are not people (or specifically, not you) and they don't share what you out of life. The breeds we have were bred for certain jobs like herding, hunting, or killing vermin. In general they weren't bred to be companion dogs. They desperately want to do this job and without that fulfillment, they have problems. I don't know if that specifically can cause depression, but I could see it.
I guess my point is, without actually having BEEN a dog or an Astronaut on a space station, it's difficult to know exactly what they go through. So I wouldn't be so quick to judge.
Not everybody should get A's. Once the majority of players reach a standard, the standard should be moved to motivate advancement in the field and show the better of the pack.
So all the power to making the standards hard to achieve.
I find these to be odd statements. It was my understanding that the test is supposed to exist to give me an idea if I'm actually being protected from a threat, not as a giant dick-measuring contest. What you propose is an infinite "advance the field for the sake of advancing the field", which is great for people who care about such things, but past a certain point, pointless for everyone else.
My point is that a product can at some point achieve a level that's "good enough", and further measurement of it is pointless. Sound recording has essentially reached that level with the CD. There's products that offer "better" quality, but we've reached a point in sound recording where the differences are relatively meaningless. We haven't reached that level in anti-virus software (and likely never will since the target is constantly moving), but I'd say that a testing methodology should measure where you want to be, not ever-increasing goals.
The whole argument boils down the published URE rate being both accurate, and a foregone conclusion. Will disk makers _really_ make drives that have a sector failure for every 2 terabytes, or will they improve whatever technology is causing these URE's to be much more rare? (if the rate was real in the first place).
That's the thing: all security can be broken. All security has some sort of a hole or another.
While this is true, you ignore the most important point. All security holes are not created equal. There's some VERY dumb security problems I've come across or heard about over the years that would be VERY easy to exploit. Most (if not all) of them have been fixed. There's others that would be much more difficult to exploit.
You're correct that people don't want to hear about "possible avenues of attack". They want a security guy to do his/her job and say "this problem should be fixed, as it's highly likely to be exploited, and can cause severe damage".
Security really comes down to trust: do you trust the person you hired to not sell the company out or do evil to the company?
All security isn't internal. But on some level, you're right that internally there's a lot riding on the trust relationships. For those cases where there isn't any trust, security is about economics. How hard is it to break the security, how much risk of getting caught is there, and what's the benefit to doing so? You only need to make it not worth it to jump the fence.
Value can only be attributed towards things that can be bought and sold.
Pure nonsense. Value can be attributed to things that produce value. Would you say the Brooklyn Bridge is worth nothing because it can't be bought or sold? I'd hope not.
Linux, like the Brooklyn Bridge produces economic value. Economists assign value to things that aren't bought and sold all the time. You can argue about how to go about this (and I'm certainly not qualified to do even that), but it's silly to say you can't give it a dollar value simply because nobody can "own" it.
So give me encryption that I can trust and I'll be able to assess my security based on the things that I can control / verify myself. Schneier has no business telling me "your set up is flawed so there's no point in giving you secure encryption."
You've missed the point. Scneire's point is that you already DO have "encryption I can trust". His point isn't that "your set up is flawed", his point is that "all setups have weaknesses, and the weakest point is almost never the encryption system." Giving you "more secure" encryption wouldn't make anyone any more secure. (BTW, Schneire is an encryption researcher, so he very much does have the ability to tell you that the existing encryption algorithms are already very strong).
It's a risk you take any time you let someone else handle something for you.
It's a risk you take, period. You're trying to tell me that you can guarantee no unplanned downtime if you were to handle it yourself?
why does the evolution of desktop operating systems like Windows go slower now than a decade ago?
I think this is a decent question. You'll note that other OS's actually DO evolve at a decent rate (Linux OSX, etc). So why does Windows such a dog?
The answer, I think is really all the accumulated weight that Windows has to carry. That's not just "code bloat" as some would have you believe, though that's part of it. It's all the OTHER pieces of software that simply HAVE to work on windows for them to continue to exist. Microsoft has resisted pruning much out since the Win32 architecture first came out, for fear of losing market share to the competition. This has been a mistake, and is costing them now.
The key differentiation between the cognitive abilities of men and women is that men are able to confront a problem by breaking things down into smaller parts and focus on solving those to form a complete solution while the minds of women take problems holistically and solve based on tradeoffs between different sections of a problem area.
That's a nice explanation, but it sure sounds to me like a lot of BS. Where has anyone found any solid, repeatable evidence for this? I think I'll go with the guy who explained that chess at a very high level takes single-minded concentration, and women are just less willing to do this. That at least jives with my own observations between the differences between men and women.
The grid can handle this. Millions of cars aren't going to be plugged in overnight.
No, they're not. But how much would the grid suffer if they were? Would power plant needs double, triple, quadruple?
You're correct that this won't happen (literally) tomorrow. But what if just 10% of drivers are using electric in 8 years? What about 20%? How much does the system need to increase if one of these two happen? These are the questions I'd like answers to, rather than just spit balling it a saying "both don't happen over night" in a literal sense.