I find it amusing that it would come to this. Hotmail keeps saying in TV ads that they're "perfectly secure and private" because they prompt you for a PASSWORD when you try to access your mailbox. Whatever means was used to crack Hotmail, I think it's a good thing. It will make people realise a system is not secure because the company hosting it says so.
This reminds me of Bruce Schneier's saying: There are two kinds of security: the one that will keep your sister out, and the one that will keep the Government out. Guess which Hotmail is. And nowadays, I've known 14 year-old female hackers, so Hotmail is probably not even secure against your little sister.:)
On a side-note, secure Web-based, free Email does exist. I urge everyone to visit HushMail for Email with a real security. At least their encryption isn't just XOR-based.:)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
A total solar eclipse going over Europe and passing through India, Irak and England? A meteor shower starting on a Friday the 13th??
This ain't astronomy, it's the end of the world! Pacco Rabanne is right!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Re:Why BWP makes you think *SPOILERS!!!!!!!*
on
Lo-Tech Cinema
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· Score: 1
speek, I did read your post correctly, but felt like being a little anal-retentive by answering your questions at face value. I respect your opinion of BWP.
I personally quite enjoyed BWP, and it did spook me, but what I found brilliant and enjoyable is that somewhat, this movie has a broad appeal while staying a student movie made on a dirt-poor budget. It also tries very honestly to reinvent the genre, and for that it should be commended.
As for being scary, that's just the Hollywood crowd that's reacting, and I don't think that matters a lot. I also heard of people calling The Haunting scary, Virus an enjoyable flick and Bruce Willis an actor.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Re:Not entirely original, but definitely good
on
Lo-Tech Cinema
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· Score: 1
Terror? I thought it was a funny movie. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved MBD, but I personally thought of it as a funnier 'Natural Born Killers'-type 'social commentary'. Well, It just sows to go ya.
IMO, it's not because parts of the movie are funny that the whole movie cannot inspire terror. If you call the orgy scene funny, then you, dear sir, are a sicko.:)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Re:Why BWP makes you think *SPOILERS!!!!!!!*
on
Lo-Tech Cinema
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· Score: 1
1. Was it fiction or non-fiction?
Fiction. They never claimed it was non-fiction.
2. What happened in the end?
Heather died after seeing Mike standing in the corner. As the villagers said, the hermit who worked for the Blair Witch's ghost would stand one child in the corner, so he could not see the other being killed. Thus, Mike was stood in the corner, foreshadowing Heather's quick demise.
3. What was in the bundle of sticks?
Fingers or body parts, just something to freak Heather out. My favourite theory is that it was his tongue, and that when the guy screamed, it was actually the witch putting her own tongue in his mouth... Heh heh.
4. What were the noises at night?
The hermit, freaking them out.
5. What were the piles of rocks?
Nothing, but they symbolised the graves of the children (there were seven children victims, and seven piles of rock.) The three piles of rock around the tent were a threat to our heroes.
6. Why didn't the students do (insert intelligent action here).
Because they were normal, freaked out people, and not some tightly-scripted Hollywood scream queens. You know, you're bound to act irrational when you're lost, hungry, afraid, cold and out of cigarettes.
7. Who or what killed them?
The hermit.
These sorts of questions don't make for an "intelligent" movie. Unless you consider that an intelligent movie is one that doesn't spell everything out to you like you were a 6 year-old recovering from lobotomy.
And it's sad that people think a movie is sub-par because they feel that if they couldn't figure out the nearly-obvious, then the movie was dumb.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Not entirely original, but definitely good
on
Lo-Tech Cinema
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· Score: 1
Will The Blair Witch Project topple Hollywood? Yeah right, like that will ever happen. Study the reaction of the Hollywood suits: they figure the movie made a fortune because of the Internet promotion. So now, actors are negociating their contracts by demanding an Internet campaign. Seems to me like they missed the point: that FX, big-name actors and a pseudo-alternative soundtrack does not a great movie make, and that sometimes, all you really, really need is a good idea and a good execution.
BWP is not entirely original: if you want to see what seems to be an inspiration for BWP (though it can be coincidental), hunt down Man Bites Dog, original title C'est arrivé près de chez vous, from Belgium. MBD follows a trio of film students wanting to make a documentary on a serial killer living in their town, so they follow him around, slowly being drawn into his madness and lust for blood.
In a way, Man Bites Dog is more unsettling than The Blair Witch Project, because there is no supernatural terror, only the fascinated terror of man's own madness. And if people walked out of BWP crying, I can tell you that most people walk out of MBD way before the end, trying to shake a spell of terror from their minds.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
lego has absoloutely nothing to lose by the OSS lego thing, since they don't sell software, they sell physical hardware.
Not entirely true. By publishing the specs on the web, that is, the specs of the hardware, you're allowing others the possibility to reproduce it. That was the main point; not the LegOS, but the specs for the RCX.
Secondly, the Minstorms kit comes bundled with software to program the RCX. That means they're tolerating that an open-source initiative beats the nice graphic-oriented software it probably cost them a lot to develop. Can you name one company other than Lego that would do that? Anyone?
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"Open-source is a cool idea because it is a lot like Lego," Noga says. "You can take things apart, see how they work and incorporate other people's ideas into yours."
Man do Lego kick butts!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Katz, I realize you're probably a good writer outside of Slashdot, but here, your attempts are pathetic.
Before claiming the right to proclaim what is geek and what is not, why don't you study your pet subjects a little more? Right now, you sound to me like a clumsy suit trying to appeal to what he thinks is an undiscovered market. But make no mistake: you are not a geek writer, and possibly even not a writer for geeks.
South Park is filled with geek sensibilities? It was funny as hell, yeah, but I fail to see what was geek about it. Oh, yeah. The scene when we see Cartman's mom in a German sex movie on the Internet.
A good example of a geek writer is Neal Stephenson. Contrast In the beginning was the command line with Katz's writing and see what I mean.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
It's only natural that in this day and age, SF would begin to be taken seriously at last. All fiction is speculative, and SF takes the concept of speculation much further than contemporary novels.
However, too often, SF speculation is mistaken for its true goal: providing matter for thought, presenting a particular paradigm, speculate on human nature itself. But all the neophite sees is, 'Hey, I like that method of space travel!' or 'Yeah right, as if men could live on Venus.'
While SF does provide some startling predictions, it ultimately becomes secondary whether SF's predictions will come true or not. We're only beginning to understand this. Take, for instance, the incredible movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. Yeah, so Klaatu had a giant robot, came from either Mars or Venus and drove an atomic spaceship. Thing is, it doesn't really matter whether the science was on target or not. On target science is impressive, but off-target (excluding Solarinite a la Ed Wood) is excusable.
Funny scholars are just beginning to realize it. I bet they'll consider SF the truly innovative literary genre of the 20th Century.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
A sequel to The Matrix? Somehow, I feel the first movie was self-contained enough, and explored its themes skillfully enough that we didn't need a sequel and/or prequel.
What irks me a little is that they signed Keanu Reeves on without even deciding on a story to tell. If they do a prequel, what will they do? Have Neo run around without a clue, as we wait for the cool stuff to happen? I don't think so.
I think Matrix2 and Matrix3 will be sequels, focused strongly on Keanu Reeves in the lead again. And I hope the Wachowski brothers will direct it. In this age when movies are not a director's creation, or a storyline-driven creation, but a franchise with big-name actors like advertising posters, I am very afraid.
But if the Wachowski brothers are in charge... Well, I don't care. They can cast the whole cast of Beverley Hills 90210 in it, and it's still gonna kick ass.
I hope WB takes the right decision. We're on the verge of a 90's Star Wars, a trilogy to redefine science-fiction in the new millennium. We're also on the verge of sequels so crappy they make the Jaws sequels into an awesome trilogy.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Fast encryption is nice. But the real way to advance cypherspace is first through software implementations like IPSEC. Optimize with dedicated hardware later.
I dunno. Sounds to me the way to advance cipherspace is first to apply decent crypto at fast transfer rates, then strenghten your crypto later.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
If I remember correctly, the last commercially successful game created by a single programmer was Out of this World for the Amiga. It became available on the PC around the time of the first mega-productions such as Wing Commander 2. Guess which one I played until my eyes bled?
Out of this World was the work of one guy, who scripted, programmed and did the artwork. Another guy did the music, but that's it.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Thing is, this isn't the first time that a recently new technological gizmo is questioned in regards to usefulness.
Well, alright, computers were hailed as useful from the start; but sound cards? VGA monitors? Back in the old days, having more than two colours on your monitor was strictly for fun. What about faster CPU's? Why need anything above a 33 MHz when you have WordPerfect 5.1? To play games, of course!
Same goes for laptops. What's the use of having a computer you carry around? I mean, you have a computer on your desk, and that's where you work, right?
I'm not surprised at this article, but it shows a lack of vision on the part of the journalist that wrote it. It's not because it doesn't improve productivity now (and I'm one of those who disagree on that idea) that it doesn't have the potential to improve productivity.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
It's things like this that makes me think I was born either a bit too late (I didn't get to play as an adult on the first computers and come up with ideas to make shitloads of money) or a bit too early (degree in gaming?? Why did I waste my time on Physics and Computing?)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Indeed! I had the fortune to discover Schneier before reading Cryptonomicon, which made the thing even more enjoyable. I was quite floored to see Schneier had written the Solitaire algorithm. It's, like, woah, all the cool people somehow hang out together!:)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
My understanding was that Rudy could break the one-time pad not just because of the nonuniform key distribution, but also because some of the members of unit 2072 reused the same pads. He didn't break out _all_ the messages, just enough to figure out what they were up to.
It was partly because they reused the same one-time pads, but also the big reason is that Rudy searched for patterns in the choosing of the one-time pad blocks. There was a long part about how the fact the Vicar's wife could select the bingo balls by their texture and could see the result and changed them for something "more random" was at fault.
Like I said, it's not that it's technically impossible; it's just that in practice, Rudy has to be an incredible genius (and he's established as such) to figure it out. Even with the help of cribs or additional ciphertext attacks.
Even though I understood what he did, it still left me thinking, "woah, that guy broke a one-time pad!"
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Geeze, if that's all it takes to turn you off a book...
I'm willing to forgive NS some of these mishaps (he tends to play technical prowess of his protagonists on their simple intelligence, like cracking a one-time pad because the letters aren't 100% random; wow!), because all the rest is to very accurate. Well, definitely more accurate than, say, Star Trek, and you'd be amazed how many consider that "hard" technology.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
That's what Cryptonomicon is: the ultimate nerd book. As you can guess from my choice of username, I am quite fond of this thing.:)
What worked for me was not just the techno-nerdism like the whole Van Eck freaking episode, but also the math-nerdism. I'm surprised no one mentionned the mathematical model of Lawrence Waterhouse's libido. I've never laughed so hard over mathematical equations before.
Does this book mean Stephenson has stepped away from sci-fi? I doubt it. He said the sequels to Cryptonomicon would take place in multiple timelines. I'm already guessing we'll see a medieval thriller at some point (and see how the Cryptonomicon was written.) I'm also suspecting we'll see just where the events in Cryptonomicon will take humanity next.
Side-note: anyone read An Instance of the Fingerpost? In one of Life's weird sequiturs, I read Cryptonomicon immediately following An Instance.... One character is a cryptographer under Cromwell, in 1660. I could almost picture him as the author of the Cryptonomicon...
Also: I'm grateful this review was filed under "Cryptography" here on Slashdot. I hope Cryptonomicon gets many techno enthusiasts to pick up Schneier's Applied Cryptography.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
This guy is claiming Unix and the Internet will fall because they are old technology. I guess that's also why Western Civilization will fall; it is, after all, 5000 year-old...
I think Metcalfe is just trying to be cool by voicing doom predictions that go against the current hype. Unfortunately for him, his article will be remembered as laughable when W2K (I like that name; it makes it appear as the bug it is) comes out and crashes miserably.
I've heard similar arguments in casual conversations that base their conclusions on feelings and pop analogies, but to write an article about it is less than professional and borders on sophism.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of Bruce Schneier's saying: There are two kinds of security: the one that will keep your sister out, and the one that will keep the Government out. Guess which Hotmail is. And nowadays, I've known 14 year-old female hackers, so Hotmail is probably not even secure against your little sister. :)
On a side-note, secure Web-based, free Email does exist. I urge everyone to visit HushMail for Email with a real security. At least their encryption isn't just XOR-based. :)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
This ain't astronomy, it's the end of the world! Pacco Rabanne is right!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I personally quite enjoyed BWP, and it did spook me, but what I found brilliant and enjoyable is that somewhat, this movie has a broad appeal while staying a student movie made on a dirt-poor budget. It also tries very honestly to reinvent the genre, and for that it should be commended.
As for being scary, that's just the Hollywood crowd that's reacting, and I don't think that matters a lot. I also heard of people calling The Haunting scary, Virus an enjoyable flick and Bruce Willis an actor.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
IMO, it's not because parts of the movie are funny that the whole movie cannot inspire terror. If you call the orgy scene funny, then you, dear sir, are a sicko. :)
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Fiction. They never claimed it was non-fiction.
2. What happened in the end?
Heather died after seeing Mike standing in the corner. As the villagers said, the hermit who worked for the Blair Witch's ghost would stand one child in the corner, so he could not see the other being killed. Thus, Mike was stood in the corner, foreshadowing Heather's quick demise.
3. What was in the bundle of sticks?
Fingers or body parts, just something to freak Heather out. My favourite theory is that it was his tongue, and that when the guy screamed, it was actually the witch putting her own tongue in his mouth... Heh heh.
4. What were the noises at night?
The hermit, freaking them out.
5. What were the piles of rocks?
Nothing, but they symbolised the graves of the children (there were seven children victims, and seven piles of rock.) The three piles of rock around the tent were a threat to our heroes.
6. Why didn't the students do (insert intelligent action here).
Because they were normal, freaked out people, and not some tightly-scripted Hollywood scream queens. You know, you're bound to act irrational when you're lost, hungry, afraid, cold and out of cigarettes.
7. Who or what killed them?
The hermit.
These sorts of questions don't make for an "intelligent" movie. Unless you consider that an intelligent movie is one that doesn't spell everything out to you like you were a 6 year-old recovering from lobotomy.
And it's sad that people think a movie is sub-par because they feel that if they couldn't figure out the nearly-obvious, then the movie was dumb.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
BWP is not entirely original: if you want to see what seems to be an inspiration for BWP (though it can be coincidental), hunt down Man Bites Dog, original title C'est arrivé près de chez vous, from Belgium. MBD follows a trio of film students wanting to make a documentary on a serial killer living in their town, so they follow him around, slowly being drawn into his madness and lust for blood.
In a way, Man Bites Dog is more unsettling than The Blair Witch Project, because there is no supernatural terror, only the fascinated terror of man's own madness. And if people walked out of BWP crying, I can tell you that most people walk out of MBD way before the end, trying to shake a spell of terror from their minds.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Not entirely true. By publishing the specs on the web, that is, the specs of the hardware, you're allowing others the possibility to reproduce it. That was the main point; not the LegOS, but the specs for the RCX.
Secondly, the Minstorms kit comes bundled with software to program the RCX. That means they're tolerating that an open-source initiative beats the nice graphic-oriented software it probably cost them a lot to develop. Can you name one company other than Lego that would do that? Anyone?
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Man do Lego kick butts!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Before claiming the right to proclaim what is geek and what is not, why don't you study your pet subjects a little more? Right now, you sound to me like a clumsy suit trying to appeal to what he thinks is an undiscovered market. But make no mistake: you are not a geek writer, and possibly even not a writer for geeks.
South Park is filled with geek sensibilities? It was funny as hell, yeah, but I fail to see what was geek about it. Oh, yeah. The scene when we see Cartman's mom in a German sex movie on the Internet.
A good example of a geek writer is Neal Stephenson. Contrast In the beginning was the command line with Katz's writing and see what I mean.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
However, too often, SF speculation is mistaken for its true goal: providing matter for thought, presenting a particular paradigm, speculate on human nature itself. But all the neophite sees is, 'Hey, I like that method of space travel!' or 'Yeah right, as if men could live on Venus.'
While SF does provide some startling predictions, it ultimately becomes secondary whether SF's predictions will come true or not. We're only beginning to understand this. Take, for instance, the incredible movie The Day the Earth Stood Still. Yeah, so Klaatu had a giant robot, came from either Mars or Venus and drove an atomic spaceship. Thing is, it doesn't really matter whether the science was on target or not. On target science is impressive, but off-target (excluding Solarinite a la Ed Wood) is excusable.
Funny scholars are just beginning to realize it. I bet they'll consider SF the truly innovative literary genre of the 20th Century.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
What irks me a little is that they signed Keanu Reeves on without even deciding on a story to tell. If they do a prequel, what will they do? Have Neo run around without a clue, as we wait for the cool stuff to happen? I don't think so.
I think Matrix2 and Matrix3 will be sequels, focused strongly on Keanu Reeves in the lead again. And I hope the Wachowski brothers will direct it. In this age when movies are not a director's creation, or a storyline-driven creation, but a franchise with big-name actors like advertising posters, I am very afraid.
But if the Wachowski brothers are in charge... Well, I don't care. They can cast the whole cast of Beverley Hills 90210 in it, and it's still gonna kick ass.
I hope WB takes the right decision. We're on the verge of a 90's Star Wars, a trilogy to redefine science-fiction in the new millennium. We're also on the verge of sequels so crappy they make the Jaws sequels into an awesome trilogy.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
. I hope Team Mozilla will implement the new "tags" for the new browser, perhaps this is already implmentated in IE 5.0?
Smell plug-in support is already implemented in IE 5.0.
IE 5.0 stinks.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I dunno. Sounds to me the way to advance cipherspace is first to apply decent crypto at fast transfer rates, then strenghten your crypto later.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Out of this World was the work of one guy, who scripted, programmed and did the artwork. Another guy did the music, but that's it.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Well, alright, computers were hailed as useful from the start; but sound cards? VGA monitors? Back in the old days, having more than two colours on your monitor was strictly for fun. What about faster CPU's? Why need anything above a 33 MHz when you have WordPerfect 5.1? To play games, of course!
Same goes for laptops. What's the use of having a computer you carry around? I mean, you have a computer on your desk, and that's where you work, right?
I'm not surprised at this article, but it shows a lack of vision on the part of the journalist that wrote it. It's not because it doesn't improve productivity now (and I'm one of those who disagree on that idea) that it doesn't have the potential to improve productivity.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
Weird, I always thought the BS started with MS...
Sorry, couldn't resist.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
It was partly because they reused the same one-time pads, but also the big reason is that Rudy searched for patterns in the choosing of the one-time pad blocks. There was a long part about how the fact the Vicar's wife could select the bingo balls by their texture and could see the result and changed them for something "more random" was at fault.
Like I said, it's not that it's technically impossible; it's just that in practice, Rudy has to be an incredible genius (and he's established as such) to figure it out. Even with the help of cribs or additional ciphertext attacks.
Even though I understood what he did, it still left me thinking, "woah, that guy broke a one-time pad!"
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
I'm willing to forgive NS some of these mishaps (he tends to play technical prowess of his protagonists on their simple intelligence, like cracking a one-time pad because the letters aren't 100% random; wow!), because all the rest is to very accurate. Well, definitely more accurate than, say, Star Trek, and you'd be amazed how many consider that "hard" technology.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
What worked for me was not just the techno-nerdism like the whole Van Eck freaking episode, but also the math-nerdism. I'm surprised no one mentionned the mathematical model of Lawrence Waterhouse's libido. I've never laughed so hard over mathematical equations before.
Does this book mean Stephenson has stepped away from sci-fi? I doubt it. He said the sequels to Cryptonomicon would take place in multiple timelines. I'm already guessing we'll see a medieval thriller at some point (and see how the Cryptonomicon was written.) I'm also suspecting we'll see just where the events in Cryptonomicon will take humanity next.
Side-note: anyone read An Instance of the Fingerpost? In one of Life's weird sequiturs, I read Cryptonomicon immediately following An Instance.... One character is a cryptographer under Cromwell, in 1660. I could almost picture him as the author of the Cryptonomicon...
Also: I'm grateful this review was filed under "Cryptography" here on Slashdot. I hope Cryptonomicon gets many techno enthusiasts to pick up Schneier's Applied Cryptography .
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
This guy is claiming Unix and the Internet will fall because they are old technology. I guess that's also why Western Civilization will fall; it is, after all, 5000 year-old...
I think Metcalfe is just trying to be cool by voicing doom predictions that go against the current hype. Unfortunately for him, his article will be remembered as laughable when W2K (I like that name; it makes it appear as the bug it is) comes out and crashes miserably.
I've heard similar arguments in casual conversations that base their conclusions on feelings and pop analogies, but to write an article about it is less than professional and borders on sophism.
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."