> *show* me any election, anywhere, that genuinely elected their > government by a majority... Meaning.. 51% or more of the populace
I believe Reagan had something like 58% of the popular vote in '84. Granted, that was several elections ago, and it shows up on every single list of political landslides that you'll ever see. Still, it does happen. Occasionally.
A dictionary containing only twenty thousand word forms would be completely useless in the English-speaking world, even for children. A basic spelling-checker dictionary would have over fifty thousand words, not counting proper nouns (which DO get used in passwords, probably more frequently than common nouns proportionally), and that's still leaving out A LOT, including some words that I use on an everyday basis.
> Or you could just create a mnemonic device to remember the 10 digit one. > Sure, it's a few extra words to remember, depending on your system, but > it's FORTY FEWER characters to actually TYPE.
If you're willing to remember more than you're willing to type (e.g., because you're paralyzed from the neck down and have to do all your input by blowing into a straw or something), a reasonably good technique is to make up a sentence (which you remember) and just type the first letter of each word. Including some proper nouns in the sentence gives you mixed case, and if you like you can throw in the punctuation as well. This technique gives you somewhat less entropy than a password of equal length made of legitimately random characters (because, some letters are much more common on the beginnings of words than others), but adding an extra word/letter or two should pretty well make up the difference.
However, most people can type better than they can memorize, in which case the main advantage of this technique is largely unimportant.
Also, if you do use it, it is important (at least in theory -- assuming enough people use this technique for password crackers to take it into consideration) to *make up* a sentence, not use a famous quotation. Fsasyaofbfotcannciladttptamace for example would not be a particularly good password, despite its length. ItbGcthate is even worse.
> Add even one Unicode character to the mix, and suddenly you got an insane amount of possibilities: 110182^n
No.
At *best*, adding one Unicode character improves your password strength to about the same extent as making your password three characters longer. In practice, it's not even that good, because Unicode characters are not all equally likely, not by a long shot.
> regardless of the amount of words in there, dictionary attacks are *always* > way more effective against passwords made out of simple words.
Yes, that's true. However, the amount of entropy in a password composed of N elements goes up as N increases, and it goes up MUCH faster if there are a lot of possibilities for N than if there are only a few. This is why a password composed only of numeric digits has to be very long in order to be secure, because there are only ten possibilities for each digit. An alphanumeric password can get the same amount of entropy with fewer characters. For the same reason, a passphrase made out of words does not need nearly as many words (as the number of characters that would be needed if constructing the password out of characters). A four-character password made out of traditional mixed-case alphanumeric ASCII (like J8xU or pk7Y) has roughly 36^4 or around 1.6 million possibilites. A four-character password made out of ISO-8859-1 has about a hundred extra possibilities per character, so for the whole password there are more like 600 million possibilities. Throwing in one Kanji makes that more like 1.2 billion possibilities. Using Kanji for all four characters gives you about 16 trillion possibilities.
However, a four-word passphrase generated from even a relatively small dictionary (say,/usr/share/dict/words -- which is intended for use by spelling checkers and such -- with the capitalized entries removed from consideration) contains something like 1.6(10^19) possibilities -- about a million times as many as the password made out of (the same number of) Kanji. Switch to a larger dictionary, and the numbers become even more impressive.
The English language contains far more words than the number of characters in all the world's writing systems combined.
(Yes, there are more Unicode characters than Kanji or even Hanzi: about a hundred and ten thousand altogether, as of January this year. SOWPODS contains more than twice that many words, and it claims, in theory, not to have proper nouns or abbreviations unless they are also words, although whether it really adheres strictly to this is rather arguable. A really thorough dictionary, including proper nouns and such, would have at least three hundred thousand entries, maybe more.)
> (As an aside, the most heinous are the websites where > you Forgot your password? and they email it right back > to you in plaintext.)
They can only do that if you give them your real email address. To be safe, I always give them a Mailinator address. That way my real email address isn't compromised and nobody can email me junk password reminders and advertisements and whatnot.
You don't ask about your actual password. You check one that's similarly complex.
However, I noticed that he's not *checking* a dictionary file when evaluating password strength. The actual strength of a password like "spastic-elongated-kremlinitude" is pretty good, but his checker's figure of four hundred thousand trillion trillion centuries to crack with a high-end cluster is optimistic beyond the bounds of all reason. That would be naively building it up character by character, and *nobody* does naive character-by-character brute forcing for passwords that long. That's like building a skyscraper without power tools.
> So since the vast majority of women can't get this job that > sucks, the ones who have it but think it sucks should like it?
No, absolutely not. If they don't like it, they should get another job -- probably one in a field other than modeling, because if they don't like wearing heels and showing skin, modeling is really not the ideal career.
Let's talk about career choices here.
I don't like walking, hate uniforms, and am absolutely terrified of dogs. I think I'll be a... mailman! Yes!
I prefer to remain fully clothed, especially in public, don't like wearing uncomfortable clothing such as high heels, and I don't like to have people stare at me. I want to be a... model! Yeah!
That would make sense if we were talking about people who hate their job in fast food or retail or something like that, but that's not the kind of work we're talking about here. Modeling is a competitive, high-prestige field that can only ever employ a small fraction of the people who (at least think that they) want desperately to get into that line of work. It's kind of like being a trial lawyer or an astronaut or a professional athlete. Anyone capable of getting work in this kind of field is certainly capable of getting other kinds of work as well, but the problem is they're emotionally invested in their dream of being a model.
What's going on here is some of them *thought* they wanted to be models and then they found out that this dream job is not exactly made out of pure pleasure like they anticipated. Okay, so it's now time to decide whether that's *really* what you want to do, or not. There are plenty of other options.
Of course, some of them had their hearts so set on the dream of what they thought modeling would be like as a career, that they proceed to tell themselves that it's just _this particular_ modeling job that sucks, and modeling in general will be five kinds of awesome once they get a different modeling job other than their current one. Which is, I absolutely guarantee, not in fact the case. If you don't like wearing uncomfortable clothing and showing off your skin to lots of people (two of the complaints in the summary), your lack of enjoyment is not specific to working a convention booth. I can confidently guarantee that other modeling jobs will also be less than altogether thrilling for you.
Officially, you want it in the contract that support past a certain date is billable. If they want a later date, you can charge more for that. Work all that out ahead of time, in writing, before you do any work on the project.
However, there are some cases wherein you ought to "forget" to bill them. Significant security flaws are one good example of this. Bugs that case significant data loss are another. Your programmers should be instructed to just fix those kinds of mistakes and not bother the billing department about them, and your customer service people should be apologizing to the client for their inconvenience. This is basic "implied warranty" stuff. It may technically be legally possible to disclaim it, but that's unethical and also bad for business.
Forgot to say: in addition to your native language, you would of course also want the TLDs for the main countries associated with any foreign language you are studying.
No, actually, he failed to kill Stalin. Hitler is the time traveler's *name*.
Stalin, of course, was the previous guy who tried to travel back in time to stop WWII by killing the horrible tyrant. He eventually succeeded in killing Trotsky, but by then the war was well underway.
They both swore to prevent the war and its atrocities and then either return to their own time or die trying, but of course they were both driven mad by the temporal displacement. Happens every time.
Also, you mean "whoever". The relative clause is the subject (of the verb "traveled" and thus of the clause introduced by "that"), so you use the subjective case. "Whomever" is objective.
Amelia Earhart was actually abducted, taken to the delta quadrant, and kept in suspended animation for some 430 years before being revived by the crew of the USS Voyager. HTH.HAND.
First you said she had a degree in math. Then you said she was a teacher. That's an impossible combination. To be a teacher your bachelor's degree isn't allowed to be in anything except Education. To be a math teacher, for example, you major in "math education" -- which is fundamentally an education degree, not a math degree. (Yes, I suppose, theoretically, someone could double-major in math and education; but education is a very "heavy" major, class-schedule-wise, so said someone would pretty much have to be independently wealthy in order to pay for three or four extra semesters of undergraduate classes, which would not be eligible for any significant financial aid...)
If you're asking what she can do with a math _education_ degree, besides teach, the answer is "anything that requires a bachelor's degree and doesn't care what your major was". HTH.HAND. (There are more such positions than you might think. Statistically, about a third or so of the people whose highest degree is a bachelor's are working outside their major. I am one of them. When applying for such a position, you can legitimately leave irrelevant Masters degrees off your resume, on the grounds that they do not pertain in any way to the work you'll be doing.)
However, based on the rest of your post, it sounds like the real problem isn't teaching per se but the deplorable state of the public schools in your specific geographical location, which from the way you describe it must be a big city. Big cities are unpleasant places to live and work, everyone knows that. What she needs to do is not so much get out of teaching as get out of the city. Tell her to polish up her resume and send it round to some less urban school districts -- you know, school districts in cities with a population of ten thousand or so, separated from the next town over by some intervening countryside -- the kind of place where even the really bad kids are at least a little bit intimidated by the vice principal's scowl. The commute shouldn't be any worse than what the people who live in those places do when they drive into the city to work, which is quite commonly done -- up to 20% of the population in many small towns commutes to work in the city.
Where I come from, $500 is not cheap for a remote-control vehicle, not by an order of magnitude. Granted, ones that operate in water cost significantly more than ones that don't, but still $500 sounds pretty steep.
A clearly illiterate death threat might be more likely to be sincere and acted upon, but I wouldn't expect the perpetrator to be particularly competent. I might try to pay a bit more attention for a while, but ultimately I'd expect to be able to outwit the would-be assailant. That goes double if you're a public figure, like a celebrity or a major elected official.
On the whole, most people who are going to make an even vaguely competent attempt to kill you aren't going to warn you about it first. I don't mean to suggest that the secret service or whoever shouldn't take such threats seriously. That's part of their job. I'm just saying, a badly-written, horribly-misspelled death threat is unlikely to have been written by someone who can successfully evade their efforts and manage to actually complete an assassination. They're overwhelmingly more likely to fail and get caught.
The assassins you really have to worry about are the ones who don't make any threats.
Ve haf a plan. In order to eliminate ze President, ve are goink to build a giant laser... in space. Zen ve vill rule ze entire vorld! Mwahahahahahahaha. And ven ve rule ze vorld, ve vill make lawsuits illegal, and zen ve vill round up all ze lawyers and launch zem into ze sun. Also, ve vill make molasses cookies ze official world food, vich vill be served as ze main course at all formal state dinners. And ve vill make it a misdemeanor to carry a cellphone into a public building vithout turning it off first, and everyone who does it vill owe ze government a fine equal to one month's phone bill per offense. And ve vill use ze fine money for ze cookies. Ve vill also outlaw ze posting lolcats, or any other meme that started on ze 4chan, to anyplace except 4chan -- but instead of a fine ze penalty for zat vill be only one entire day vithout access to ze internet, for each offense.
Ve are lookink for investors. Ve vill need to raise substantial capital to pay for buildink ze giant laser, in space. If you invest now, ve promise to at least read any proposals you write us for laws zat you sink ve should pass once we rule ze entire vorld. Zis is chance you do not vant to miss, yes?
> These days we no longer believe that Silverlight is a > suitable platform for write-once-run-anywhere technology
It took you HOW long to figure this out? It wasn't extremely obvious to you, for example, when you saw the original Silverlight announcement from Microsoft?
Better late than never I guess. At this rate it'll be 2105 before they finally realize there's absolutely no point in emulating.NET either.
Re:No, that doesn't even do it justice.
on
Where's HAL 9000?
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· Score: 1
> Unless you believe that the human brain has magical > properties, it must be possible to simulate its operation
My point was that nobody has any idea how to even get started. Nobody even knows what research to do to find out how to get started.
To clarify: it is not my position that creating artificial intelligence is *ultimately* impossible as such. I'm only saying that nobody has any idea how to do it or what would be involved, so asking an engineer to design it is ridiculous, not to mention grossly unfair to the engineer.
It has also not been shown that the mind is necessarily entirely contained within the brain, but that's really a separate issue. For the purposes of this discussion I am willing to proceed on the premise that the mind may be purely a function of the physical brain and various inputs. (The inputs are known to be rather complicated; for example the endocrine system is not entirely straightforward to simulate; nonetheless, this does not make simulation theoretically impossible, just very difficult.) I am willing to grant this, because it doesn't have any significant impact on my point. I will explain further...
If the mind is a function of purely physical phenomena, primarily the brain, that does NOT imply that we know how to simulate it, because, straightforwardly, we have absolutely no idea how those physical phenomena work, particularly the brain. If we did have such information, we could easily cure Alzheimer's and any number of other conditions and probably could start to work on the mortality problem itself (by transferring the consciousness from the original brain to some other physical housing; after all, if you really understand how a design works, you can build your own). But we don't even know how many more decades -- or perhaps even centuries, or even millennia -- of research and study we will need in order to get to that point. We don't know *if* we'll ever figure that stuff out, let alone when. So far, every time some brilliant biologist thinks he has an idea how the brain might work, it turns out to be wrong, or at least entirely inadequate to explain observed phenomena. If you don't count ruling out wrong ideas as progress, we've made basically no progress at all. Okay, sure, we now understand some of the minutia, such as how neurotransmitters convey signals from one neuron to another, but we have absolutely no idea how any of that relates to the whole function of the brain as an organ.
So the problem, "design an artificial intelligence that's smart in the same way as a human mind", is currently an impossible problem for engineers, even if it's not categorically theoretically possible in the absolute sense.
Engineers design based on their understanding of how things work. That's the basic starting point they work from. Otherwise, nothing gets designed -- or, at least, nothing that works as intended. Without this understanding, you're asking the engineers, metaphorically, to make bricks not only without straw but also without mud or clay. It's completely impossible, in every way that matters.
Intellectual property law is a very specialized subfield. Most lawyers don't know much about it. It is entirely believable to me that a lawyer (who is NOT an intellectual property lawyer) might think a non-profit organization could legitimately claim fair use for this sort of thing. She'd be wrong, but you know, sometimes people are wrong.
With that said, she's got serious credibility problems, for other reasons.
Throwing around threats of legal action like she did, in public, containing words like "defamation" and "libel", is extremely irrational and would do material harm to her case, if she had one. No competent lawyer would ever behave in this fashion, especially if they believed for one minute that they had anything resembling a valid case. Real lawyers handle 100% of their communication about legal matters using properly formal legal verbiage, no exceptions. They do not write email messages and blog posts containing informal trash talk like "You make me vomit. I'm going to sue you for libel and defamation." They send you certified mail containing extremely formal legal trash talk, much more along the lines of "Be it known that insofar as the first party, one Jay Lee, residing at [address] and being responsible for the content hosted on the website accessible via [URL], hereinafter 'THE DEFENDANT', has knowingly undertaken or been party to undertaking the following specific actions..." et cetera ad infinitum ad nauseam. A real lawyer would no doubt be able to point out flaws in the preceding attempt at legal verbiage, but it is MUCH more similar to authentic legalese than anything this Shwagger wrote.
Consequently, I have considerable difficulty believing that she is an actual lawyer.
GoDaddy's policies, like those of any ISP, are between them and their customers.
Normal, reasonable ISPs, on receipt of a takedown notice for a single file, first fire off some form of communication to the party responsible for the site content, and then if they don't hear back promptly they take down the file.
But hey, if this lawyer lady wants to use an ISP that handles it differently, that is kind of up to her.
To me, the real story here is "GoDaddy handles DMCA notifications in an extremely heavy-handed manner." If I'd been previously considering using them as a hosting provider, I probably wouldn't be considering it any more.
But, you know, maybe that's just me.
No, that doesn't even do it justice.
on
Where's HAL 9000?
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· Score: 1
> akin to demanding an aircraft maker constructs > a plane that is indistinguishable from a bird
On the contrary, a plane that's indistinguishable from a bird may be beyond today's technology, but if so it's only beyond our current technology in definable ways. Engineers who were working on such a problem would be able to break it down into subgoals and immediately start making measurable progress.
The Turing Test is more like demanding that aircraft makers design a plane that is larger on the inside than on the outside and can travel faster than the speed of light without using any fuel or reaction mass. *If* it's even theoretically possible, we would have to revise our current fundamental understanding of how things work rather substantially in order to even begin to have any idea at all how to get started working on the problem.
Why has the quest for real strong AI fallen by the wayside? Because we've learned a lot more about computers and what they can easily be made to do. We no longer think of a computer as a "giant electronic brain" that might somehow magically become self-aware if we just give it a database of words and program it to use subject-verb-object word order or some similar ridiculously simplistic approach. We've seen what happens when you send a paragraph of text through an online translation engine from English to Japanese and back to English, and we've come to understand that computers are not, in fact, anywhere near as smart as people.
Computers are great at memorizing and searching and sorting, but they absolutely suck at understanding what any of it means, and the top AI researchers in the world do not have ANY practical ideas about how to change that. If strong AI is possible at all, it requires a scientific breakthrough that will make general relativity look like small potatoes.
> a 13 digit string. It's an absolute nightmare to do on the top row
Only if you never learned to type.
The keypad is a very important feature to me -- but I never use it for the numbers. It's much faster to type the numbers on the top row, because your hands don't need to move from their home position.
I use the keypad for quick cursor navigation because, unlike with the "new" cursor keys added in the 101-key layout, you can easily reach all of the cursor-movement keys with your hand in a single position over the pad.
No, see, it'll actually be a _benefit_, because when the sulfur compounds in the ash get into the upper atmosphere it will create a cooling effect that will offset a hundred years or so of global warming -- kind of like a bigger, cooler, 1816 on steroids.
(Yeah, now you have to decide if you think I'm serious or just making jokes. Good luck with that; I'm not entirely sure I know the answer to that question myself.)
It's not like anyone who knows how to change the theme would leave Aero Glass turned on anyway. It looks even more ridiculous than the Fisher Price theme they introduced with Windows XP, nevermind about the performance issues and the excess screen real estate it consumes with its gratuitously oversized window decorations and the fact that you can't even customize (most of) the colors.
Slashdot Mirror
> *show* me any election, anywhere, that genuinely elected their ... Meaning.. 51% or more of the populace
> government by a majority
I believe Reagan had something like 58% of the popular vote in '84. Granted, that was several elections ago, and it shows up on every single list of political landslides that you'll ever see. Still, it does happen. Occasionally.
A dictionary containing only twenty thousand word forms would be completely useless in the English-speaking world, even for children. A basic spelling-checker dictionary would have over fifty thousand words, not counting proper nouns (which DO get used in passwords, probably more frequently than common nouns proportionally), and that's still leaving out A LOT, including some words that I use on an everyday basis.
> Or you could just create a mnemonic device to remember the 10 digit one.
> Sure, it's a few extra words to remember, depending on your system, but
> it's FORTY FEWER characters to actually TYPE.
If you're willing to remember more than you're willing to type (e.g., because you're paralyzed from the neck down and have to do all your input by blowing into a straw or something), a reasonably good technique is to make up a sentence (which you remember) and just type the first letter of each word. Including some proper nouns in the sentence gives you mixed case, and if you like you can throw in the punctuation as well. This technique gives you somewhat less entropy than a password of equal length made of legitimately random characters (because, some letters are much more common on the beginnings of words than others), but adding an extra word/letter or two should pretty well make up the difference.
However, most people can type better than they can memorize, in which case the main advantage of this technique is largely unimportant.
Also, if you do use it, it is important (at least in theory -- assuming enough people use this technique for password crackers to take it into consideration) to *make up* a sentence, not use a famous quotation. Fsasyaofbfotcannciladttptamace for example would not be a particularly good password, despite its length. ItbGcthate is even worse.
> Add even one Unicode character to the mix, and suddenly you got an insane amount of possibilities: 110182^n
/usr/share/dict/words -- which is intended for use by spelling checkers and such -- with the capitalized entries removed from consideration) contains something like 1.6(10^19) possibilities -- about a million times as many as the password made out of (the same number of) Kanji. Switch to a larger dictionary, and the numbers become even more impressive.
No.
At *best*, adding one Unicode character improves your password strength to about the same extent as making your password three characters longer. In practice, it's not even that good, because Unicode characters are not all equally likely, not by a long shot.
> regardless of the amount of words in there, dictionary attacks are *always*
> way more effective against passwords made out of simple words.
Yes, that's true. However, the amount of entropy in a password composed of N elements goes up as N increases, and it goes up MUCH faster if there are a lot of possibilities for N than if there are only a few. This is why a password composed only of numeric digits has to be very long in order to be secure, because there are only ten possibilities for each digit. An alphanumeric password can get the same amount of entropy with fewer characters. For the same reason, a passphrase made out of words does not need nearly as many words (as the number of characters that would be needed if constructing the password out of characters). A four-character password made out of traditional mixed-case alphanumeric ASCII (like J8xU or pk7Y) has roughly 36^4 or around 1.6 million possibilites. A four-character password made out of ISO-8859-1 has about a hundred extra possibilities per character, so for the whole password there are more like 600 million possibilities. Throwing in one Kanji makes that more like 1.2 billion possibilities. Using Kanji for all four characters gives you about 16 trillion possibilities.
However, a four-word passphrase generated from even a relatively small dictionary (say,
The English language contains far more words than the number of characters in all the world's writing systems combined.
(Yes, there are more Unicode characters than Kanji or even Hanzi: about a hundred and ten thousand altogether, as of January this year. SOWPODS contains more than twice that many words, and it claims, in theory, not to have proper nouns or abbreviations unless they are also words, although whether it really adheres strictly to this is rather arguable. A really thorough dictionary, including proper nouns and such, would have at least three hundred thousand entries, maybe more.)
> (As an aside, the most heinous are the websites where
> you Forgot your password? and they email it right back
> to you in plaintext.)
They can only do that if you give them your real email address. To be safe, I always give them a Mailinator address. That way my real email address isn't compromised and nobody can email me junk password reminders and advertisements and whatnot.
You don't ask about your actual password. You check one that's similarly complex.
However, I noticed that he's not *checking* a dictionary file when evaluating password strength. The actual strength of a password like "spastic-elongated-kremlinitude" is pretty good, but his checker's figure of four hundred thousand trillion trillion centuries to crack with a high-end cluster is optimistic beyond the bounds of all reason. That would be naively building it up character by character, and *nobody* does naive character-by-character brute forcing for passwords that long. That's like building a skyscraper without power tools.
> So since the vast majority of women can't get this job that
> sucks, the ones who have it but think it sucks should like it?
No, absolutely not. If they don't like it, they should get another job -- probably one in a field other than modeling, because if they don't like wearing heels and showing skin, modeling is really not the ideal career.
Let's talk about career choices here.
I don't like walking, hate uniforms, and am absolutely terrified of dogs. I think I'll be a... mailman! Yes!
I prefer to remain fully clothed, especially in public, don't like wearing uncomfortable clothing such as high heels, and I don't like to have people stare at me. I want to be a... model! Yeah!
Really? Are you totally sure about that?
> Maybe, just maybe, they can't find another job?
That would make sense if we were talking about people who hate their job in fast food or retail or something like that, but that's not the kind of work we're talking about here. Modeling is a competitive, high-prestige field that can only ever employ a small fraction of the people who (at least think that they) want desperately to get into that line of work. It's kind of like being a trial lawyer or an astronaut or a professional athlete. Anyone capable of getting work in this kind of field is certainly capable of getting other kinds of work as well, but the problem is they're emotionally invested in their dream of being a model.
What's going on here is some of them *thought* they wanted to be models and then they found out that this dream job is not exactly made out of pure pleasure like they anticipated. Okay, so it's now time to decide whether that's *really* what you want to do, or not. There are plenty of other options.
Of course, some of them had their hearts so set on the dream of what they thought modeling would be like as a career, that they proceed to tell themselves that it's just _this particular_ modeling job that sucks, and modeling in general will be five kinds of awesome once they get a different modeling job other than their current one. Which is, I absolutely guarantee, not in fact the case. If you don't like wearing uncomfortable clothing and showing off your skin to lots of people (two of the complaints in the summary), your lack of enjoyment is not specific to working a convention booth. I can confidently guarantee that other modeling jobs will also be less than altogether thrilling for you.
Officially, you want it in the contract that support past a certain date is billable. If they want a later date, you can charge more for that. Work all that out ahead of time, in writing, before you do any work on the project.
However, there are some cases wherein you ought to "forget" to bill them. Significant security flaws are one good example of this. Bugs that case significant data loss are another. Your programmers should be instructed to just fix those kinds of mistakes and not bother the billing department about them, and your customer service people should be apologizing to the client for their inconvenience. This is basic "implied warranty" stuff. It may technically be legally possible to disclaim it, but that's unethical and also bad for business.
Forgot to say: in addition to your native language, you would of course also want the TLDs for the main countries associated with any foreign language you are studying.
> whomever time traveled failed to kill Hitler.
No, actually, he failed to kill Stalin. Hitler is the time traveler's *name*.
Stalin, of course, was the previous guy who tried to travel back in time to stop WWII by killing the horrible tyrant. He eventually succeeded in killing Trotsky, but by then the war was well underway.
They both swore to prevent the war and its atrocities and then either return to their own time or die trying, but of course they were both driven mad by the temporal displacement. Happens every time.
Also, you mean "whoever". The relative clause is the subject (of the verb "traveled" and thus of the clause introduced by "that"), so you use the subjective case. "Whomever" is objective.
Amelia Earhart was actually abducted, taken to the delta quadrant, and kept in suspended animation for some 430 years before being revived by the crew of the USS Voyager. HTH.HAND.
First you said she had a degree in math. Then you said she was a teacher. That's an impossible combination. To be a teacher your bachelor's degree isn't allowed to be in anything except Education. To be a math teacher, for example, you major in "math education" -- which is fundamentally an education degree, not a math degree. (Yes, I suppose, theoretically, someone could double-major in math and education; but education is a very "heavy" major, class-schedule-wise, so said someone would pretty much have to be independently wealthy in order to pay for three or four extra semesters of undergraduate classes, which would not be eligible for any significant financial aid...)
If you're asking what she can do with a math _education_ degree, besides teach, the answer is "anything that requires a bachelor's degree and doesn't care what your major was". HTH.HAND. (There are more such positions than you might think. Statistically, about a third or so of the people whose highest degree is a bachelor's are working outside their major. I am one of them. When applying for such a position, you can legitimately leave irrelevant Masters degrees off your resume, on the grounds that they do not pertain in any way to the work you'll be doing.)
However, based on the rest of your post, it sounds like the real problem isn't teaching per se but the deplorable state of the public schools in your specific geographical location, which from the way you describe it must be a big city. Big cities are unpleasant places to live and work, everyone knows that. What she needs to do is not so much get out of teaching as get out of the city. Tell her to polish up her resume and send it round to some less urban school districts -- you know, school districts in cities with a population of ten thousand or so, separated from the next town over by some intervening countryside -- the kind of place where even the really bad kids are at least a little bit intimidated by the vice principal's scowl. The commute shouldn't be any worse than what the people who live in those places do when they drive into the city to work, which is quite commonly done -- up to 20% of the population in many small towns commutes to work in the city.
Will you claim it in a StreetView van? Will you claim it as a Google fan?
I will not claim it in a van, I will not claim it as a fan.
I do not like this prior art, I do not like it Sam Thou Art.
Where I come from, $500 is not cheap for a remote-control vehicle, not by an order of magnitude. Granted, ones that operate in water cost significantly more than ones that don't, but still $500 sounds pretty steep.
A clearly illiterate death threat might be more likely to be sincere and acted upon, but I wouldn't expect the perpetrator to be particularly competent. I might try to pay a bit more attention for a while, but ultimately I'd expect to be able to outwit the would-be assailant. That goes double if you're a public figure, like a celebrity or a major elected official.
On the whole, most people who are going to make an even vaguely competent attempt to kill you aren't going to warn you about it first. I don't mean to suggest that the secret service or whoever shouldn't take such threats seriously. That's part of their job. I'm just saying, a badly-written, horribly-misspelled death threat is unlikely to have been written by someone who can successfully evade their efforts and manage to actually complete an assassination. They're overwhelmingly more likely to fail and get caught.
The assassins you really have to worry about are the ones who don't make any threats.
Ve haf a plan. In order to eliminate ze President, ve are goink to build a giant laser... in space. Zen ve vill rule ze entire vorld! Mwahahahahahahaha. And ven ve rule ze vorld, ve vill make lawsuits illegal, and zen ve vill round up all ze lawyers and launch zem into ze sun. Also, ve vill make molasses cookies ze official world food, vich vill be served as ze main course at all formal state dinners. And ve vill make it a misdemeanor to carry a cellphone into a public building vithout turning it off first, and everyone who does it vill owe ze government a fine equal to one month's phone bill per offense. And ve vill use ze fine money for ze cookies. Ve vill also outlaw ze posting lolcats, or any other meme that started on ze 4chan, to anyplace except 4chan -- but instead of a fine ze penalty for zat vill be only one entire day vithout access to ze internet, for each offense.
Ve are lookink for investors. Ve vill need to raise substantial capital to pay for buildink ze giant laser, in space. If you invest now, ve promise to at least read any proposals you write us for laws zat you sink ve should pass once we rule ze entire vorld. Zis is chance you do not vant to miss, yes?
> These days we no longer believe that Silverlight is a
.NET either.
> suitable platform for write-once-run-anywhere technology
It took you HOW long to figure this out? It wasn't extremely obvious to you, for example, when you saw the original Silverlight announcement from Microsoft?
Better late than never I guess. At this rate it'll be 2105 before they finally realize there's absolutely no point in emulating
> Unless you believe that the human brain has magical
> properties, it must be possible to simulate its operation
My point was that nobody has any idea how to even get started. Nobody even knows what research to do to find out how to get started.
To clarify: it is not my position that creating artificial intelligence is *ultimately* impossible as such. I'm only saying that nobody has any idea how to do it or what would be involved, so asking an engineer to design it is ridiculous, not to mention grossly unfair to the engineer.
It has also not been shown that the mind is necessarily entirely contained within the brain, but that's really a separate issue. For the purposes of this discussion I am willing to proceed on the premise that the mind may be purely a function of the physical brain and various inputs. (The inputs are known to be rather complicated; for example the endocrine system is not entirely straightforward to simulate; nonetheless, this does not make simulation theoretically impossible, just very difficult.) I am willing to grant this, because it doesn't have any significant impact on my point. I will explain further...
If the mind is a function of purely physical phenomena, primarily the brain, that does NOT imply that we know how to simulate it, because, straightforwardly, we have absolutely no idea how those physical phenomena work, particularly the brain. If we did have such information, we could easily cure Alzheimer's and any number of other conditions and probably could start to work on the mortality problem itself (by transferring the consciousness from the original brain to some other physical housing; after all, if you really understand how a design works, you can build your own). But we don't even know how many more decades -- or perhaps even centuries, or even millennia -- of research and study we will need in order to get to that point. We don't know *if* we'll ever figure that stuff out, let alone when. So far, every time some brilliant biologist thinks he has an idea how the brain might work, it turns out to be wrong, or at least entirely inadequate to explain observed phenomena. If you don't count ruling out wrong ideas as progress, we've made basically no progress at all. Okay, sure, we now understand some of the minutia, such as how neurotransmitters convey signals from one neuron to another, but we have absolutely no idea how any of that relates to the whole function of the brain as an organ.
So the problem, "design an artificial intelligence that's smart in the same way as a human mind", is currently an impossible problem for engineers, even if it's not categorically theoretically possible in the absolute sense.
Engineers design based on their understanding of how things work. That's the basic starting point they work from. Otherwise, nothing gets designed -- or, at least, nothing that works as intended. Without this understanding, you're asking the engineers, metaphorically, to make bricks not only without straw but also without mud or clay. It's completely impossible, in every way that matters.
Intellectual property law is a very specialized subfield. Most lawyers don't know much about it. It is entirely believable to me that a lawyer (who is NOT an intellectual property lawyer) might think a non-profit organization could legitimately claim fair use for this sort of thing. She'd be wrong, but you know, sometimes people are wrong.
With that said, she's got serious credibility problems, for other reasons.
Throwing around threats of legal action like she did, in public, containing words like "defamation" and "libel", is extremely irrational and would do material harm to her case, if she had one. No competent lawyer would ever behave in this fashion, especially if they believed for one minute that they had anything resembling a valid case. Real lawyers handle 100% of their communication about legal matters using properly formal legal verbiage, no exceptions. They do not write email messages and blog posts containing informal trash talk like "You make me vomit. I'm going to sue you for libel and defamation." They send you certified mail containing extremely formal legal trash talk, much more along the lines of "Be it known that insofar as the first party, one Jay Lee, residing at [address] and being responsible for the content hosted on the website accessible via [URL], hereinafter 'THE DEFENDANT', has knowingly undertaken or been party to undertaking the following specific actions..." et cetera ad infinitum ad nauseam. A real lawyer would no doubt be able to point out flaws in the preceding attempt at legal verbiage, but it is MUCH more similar to authentic legalese than anything this Shwagger wrote.
Consequently, I have considerable difficulty believing that she is an actual lawyer.
GoDaddy's policies, like those of any ISP, are between them and their customers.
Normal, reasonable ISPs, on receipt of a takedown notice for a single file, first fire off some form of communication to the party responsible for the site content, and then if they don't hear back promptly they take down the file.
But hey, if this lawyer lady wants to use an ISP that handles it differently, that is kind of up to her.
To me, the real story here is "GoDaddy handles DMCA notifications in an extremely heavy-handed manner." If I'd been previously considering using them as a hosting provider, I probably wouldn't be considering it any more.
But, you know, maybe that's just me.
> akin to demanding an aircraft maker constructs
> a plane that is indistinguishable from a bird
On the contrary, a plane that's indistinguishable from a bird may be beyond today's technology, but if so it's only beyond our current technology in definable ways. Engineers who were working on such a problem would be able to break it down into subgoals and immediately start making measurable progress.
The Turing Test is more like demanding that aircraft makers design a plane that is larger on the inside than on the outside and can travel faster than the speed of light without using any fuel or reaction mass. *If* it's even theoretically possible, we would have to revise our current fundamental understanding of how things work rather substantially in order to even begin to have any idea at all how to get started working on the problem.
Why has the quest for real strong AI fallen by the wayside? Because we've learned a lot more about computers and what they can easily be made to do. We no longer think of a computer as a "giant electronic brain" that might somehow magically become self-aware if we just give it a database of words and program it to use subject-verb-object word order or some similar ridiculously simplistic approach. We've seen what happens when you send a paragraph of text through an online translation engine from English to Japanese and back to English, and we've come to understand that computers are not, in fact, anywhere near as smart as people.
Computers are great at memorizing and searching and sorting, but they absolutely suck at understanding what any of it means, and the top AI researchers in the world do not have ANY practical ideas about how to change that. If strong AI is possible at all, it requires a scientific breakthrough that will make general relativity look like small potatoes.
> a 13 digit string. It's an absolute nightmare to do on the top row
Only if you never learned to type.
The keypad is a very important feature to me -- but I never use it for the numbers. It's much faster to type the numbers on the top row, because your hands don't need to move from their home position.
I use the keypad for quick cursor navigation because, unlike with the "new" cursor keys added in the 101-key layout, you can easily reach all of the cursor-movement keys with your hand in a single position over the pad.
No, see, it'll actually be a _benefit_, because when the sulfur compounds in the ash get into the upper atmosphere it will create a cooling effect that will offset a hundred years or so of global warming -- kind of like a bigger, cooler, 1816 on steroids.
(Yeah, now you have to decide if you think I'm serious or just making jokes. Good luck with that; I'm not entirely sure I know the answer to that question myself.)
It's not like anyone who knows how to change the theme would leave Aero Glass turned on anyway. It looks even more ridiculous than the Fisher Price theme they introduced with Windows XP, nevermind about the performance issues and the excess screen real estate it consumes with its gratuitously oversized window decorations and the fact that you can't even customize (most of) the colors.