This is what I love about slashdot. Every biotech article gets tagged "whatcouldpossiblygowrong", yet every article which mentions religious people saying the same, it's all "religion is all lies".
Newsflash: if there exist invisible super-beings, then there's no way to tell! If you get all holier-than-thou because you are so certain that unprovability is equal to nonexistance, you really need to read up on Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Your faith that there do not exist invisible super-beings is just as irrational as the Pope's faith that there are.
You can't have a treaty for some other competition to replace war--if that was the case, FIFA would have replaced the UN by now and Brazil would be a superpower. No way in hell that would work. The US would never sign that treaty... we'd go from being the #1 superpower, to very last place. The only way to coerce us would be all-out war. They'd send their millions of soccer players, and we'd have guns. Fun for the gun-havers, but the soccer afficianados would be very sad.
Simple! Just don't upgrade. Problem solved! Don't worry, the rootkit seems to be spreading malware to windows users. They're used to it anyway -- it won't actually harm your linux box, so what's to worry?
You people seem to forget that the first big worm spread around the internet and brought the entire thing to a halt... all running on Unix. Linux-targeted malware is malware that has been crafted to take advantage of a hole in Linux. Find a hole in firefox on linux, and you're 99% the way there. If you don't think that's possible, I've got a bridge to sell you...
No, my first thought was, no male developers are going to use a tech pronouced "sparkle", since it sounds so fruity. And no female developers are going to use it either, for fear that the boys wouldn't take them seriously. Honestly, WTF is up with the name -- it's so... OMG, Ponies!
As a linux user, I am under no delusion that my system is "more secure" than a windows box or a mac.
For me, the worst thing that can possibly happen, is somebody destroys my home directory. Ok, that's easy, if a virus is logged in as me. If they hose my system, so what? I can always re-install linux, that isn't a problem. There aren't any other users. I allow myself access to the internet and to email, so if a virus starts spamming the world, well, that isn't stopped by security policy either.
What you're talking about is a linux server. There, it's hard to root the machine and cross-infect, sure. But what spreads viruses the most these days is users downloading shit in email and not knowing that their browser just executed something. Linux is *not* more secure. *I* am a user am less prone to viruses because I maintain a strict policy of which sites I use each browser for, where I take cookies from, and I browse sketchy shit only inside vmware and restore from a clean image frequently. But I'm still vulnerable to all sorts of attacks -- if google pushes an ad with linux-targeted malware, for example.
If you think linux is somehow inherently virus-proof, you're deluding yourself. Using linux on the desktop is the same as using any other desktop system -- if somebody else knows how to make an executable for your system, it's probably vulnerable.
What? For most programmers that I know, unemployment is a welcome opportunity to spend more time on the FOSS projects. That's one of the things I love about being back in school -- the school throws money at me for contributing to FOSS projects! It's like paid vacation from the daily grind... only, if I play my cards right, the vacation will never end!
Don't worry. It's a hydrogen cloud, not a cloud of hydrogen and oxygen. Without oxygen, hydrogen won't burn. The time-scale this stuff happens on is ridiculously slow. Stars, or masses not quite large enough to become stars, will syphon bits of cloud off, and grow. There will be some star formation going on, and some enlargement going on. OTOH, it's a *huge* amount of mass, so I'd hazard to guess that the orbits of things nearby will go pretty screwy... so this could mess stuff up pretty bad, without any "explosion" until millions of years have passed and the inflated stars go supernova.
It's simple to put a price on the privacy of others, for a telco -- cost to build & maintain the required infrastructure, plus markup to make it profitable.
Actually, the lazy god theory makes a lot of sense. In this model, God came into being at the same time as the universe. The infantile God watched as the universe exploded into reality, bedazzled by the show of shiny lights. This God bumbles around, putting conveniently-sized objects into its mouth -- leaving a trail of slime, germs and all manner of excrement; hence life on Earth. Perhaps the God is not lazy, but in some phase akin to "terrible twos" (or perhaps teen angst, it's hard to know the difference from our perspective), alternating between wanton destruction, bemused obeservation, and boredom.
Belief in God doesn't necessarily imply belief in ID. If the universe *were* a simulation, whoever had access to the machine that the simulation runs on would effectively be a god. This computer must have been designed by something intelligent, but that intelligent thing might not know about the Earth -- and won't unless humans effect a change in the universe so incredibly large that an outside observer can't help but notice and respond do -- perhaps we create a time machine, and send the energy from billions of stars towards a single point in space-time and cause something like a big bang. Or worse, we find and exploit a bug in the simulation, which causes the whole thing to crash (whoops).
I have trouble remembering my 8-character passwords, too. So, I came up with a better way. Crunching numbers is easy, and has a pavlovian benefit -- if you don't remember the password, recovering your password is a pain in the ass -- so your brain makes more of an effort to remember next time.
It's pretty easy to securely store a bunch of passwords on a piece of paper. A friend / co-worker I knew had a book of poetry. He'd pick a page out of the book for every security contract, and take passwords out of rows & columns of letters. I thought this was a good idea, but it's weak in that it only gives letters, no numbers or funny characters.
First, print out block of random (as random as possible, anyway) characters onto a business card. Then, any time you need a new password, pick a starting point, direction, and number of characters -- this can be represented with 5 numbers. Now's where it gets tricky -- you don't want to write those numbers down, but you want to be able to remember them -- construct an invertable function, run the numbers through that function, and write the result down on the back of the business card.
Do we really need a law against every obnoxious behaviour? Or is it possible for people just not to cross reasonable lines? No, and no. But it's a free country, with a free economy, and we're pretty lenient with most stuff. If there's a huge outrage against it, then it will be regulated. We allow people to try out new stuff until it's obviously harmful or excessively distracting / obnoxious. You can't just blanket outlaw stuff because you *think* it's going to be bad - wait and see if there's real damage done and then act.
...as well as the invasion of your personal space... You realize that you claim that your "personal space" is "invaded" by people making sound at you. If you're on the street and I stand 5 feet away and say, "hey buddy, got the time?" and you punch me in the face - you think that's reasonable behavior?
Really. They *force* you to hear their message. You're walking down a public street. And they point a speaker at you. And you hear their advertisement. Oh my! This is an invasion of privacy, you're totally entitled to destroy their property! Yeah, you're right, that's really quite rational.
Now, you're walking down the streets of New York, and a street vendor calls out, "Hot dogs! Roasted nuts!". OMG! He's *forced* you to hear his message. That's *totally* an invasion of your privacy. The cops will *totally* support you when you trash the guy's cart & kick his head in.
What the *hell* is wrong with you people? Free speech is OK unless you're in a public place and somebody talks to you, or uses some new-fangled sound-emitting device that talks to you. If they drive by your house, and point this thing at you through the window, and it somehow works that well, then you've got something. But in public? Don't go out if you think making noise is a crime.
Actually, most of us find atheists to be the total nut jobs, especially when you guys butchered over 100 million people in the last century in the pursuit of your perfect atheist States. Ok... now *what* are you talking about here?
Speak not of what you do not know. I didn't say, "well defined ordering", I said, "well-ordered". A well-ordered set is a set in which every nonempty subset has a least element. The well-ordering theorem is equivalent to the axiom of choice, and to the Kuratowski-Zorn lemma.
What you meant to say, was that the complex numbers cannot be ordered in such a way that the ordering respects the standard metric on them. There are perfectly good orderings on the complex number. One might like "lexicographic" ordering, where a+bi < c+di if a < c or a = c and b < c. That's a great ordering. It just isn't useful for proving theorems that one might like, for example the squeeze theorem.
Slashdot Mirror
Soon, every surveillance camera video will be enhanced, and we'll see the face of Elvis on every criminal where there was once a blur...
One such project is Cython. It enables you to write in Python which gets compiled to C; trivializes using Python objects in C and vise verse.
This is what I love about slashdot. Every biotech article gets tagged "whatcouldpossiblygowrong", yet every article which mentions religious people saying the same, it's all "religion is all lies".
Newsflash: if there exist invisible super-beings, then there's no way to tell! If you get all holier-than-thou because you are so certain that unprovability is equal to nonexistance, you really need to read up on Gödel's incompleteness theorem. Your faith that there do not exist invisible super-beings is just as irrational as the Pope's faith that there are.
Simple! Just don't upgrade. Problem solved! Don't worry, the rootkit seems to be spreading malware to windows users. They're used to it anyway -- it won't actually harm your linux box, so what's to worry?
You people seem to forget that the first big worm spread around the internet and brought the entire thing to a halt... all running on Unix. Linux-targeted malware is malware that has been crafted to take advantage of a hole in Linux. Find a hole in firefox on linux, and you're 99% the way there. If you don't think that's possible, I've got a bridge to sell you...
No, my first thought was, no male developers are going to use a tech pronouced "sparkle", since it sounds so fruity. And no female developers are going to use it either, for fear that the boys wouldn't take them seriously. Honestly, WTF is up with the name -- it's so... OMG, Ponies!
As a linux user, I am under no delusion that my system is "more secure" than a windows box or a mac.
For me, the worst thing that can possibly happen, is somebody destroys my home directory. Ok, that's easy, if a virus is logged in as me. If they hose my system, so what? I can always re-install linux, that isn't a problem. There aren't any other users. I allow myself access to the internet and to email, so if a virus starts spamming the world, well, that isn't stopped by security policy either.
What you're talking about is a linux server. There, it's hard to root the machine and cross-infect, sure. But what spreads viruses the most these days is users downloading shit in email and not knowing that their browser just executed something. Linux is *not* more secure. *I* am a user am less prone to viruses because I maintain a strict policy of which sites I use each browser for, where I take cookies from, and I browse sketchy shit only inside vmware and restore from a clean image frequently. But I'm still vulnerable to all sorts of attacks -- if google pushes an ad with linux-targeted malware, for example.
If you think linux is somehow inherently virus-proof, you're deluding yourself. Using linux on the desktop is the same as using any other desktop system -- if somebody else knows how to make an executable for your system, it's probably vulnerable.
Tiny fleshlights.
What? For most programmers that I know, unemployment is a welcome opportunity to spend more time on the FOSS projects. That's one of the things I love about being back in school -- the school throws money at me for contributing to FOSS projects! It's like paid vacation from the daily grind... only, if I play my cards right, the vacation will never end!
Don't worry. It's a hydrogen cloud, not a cloud of hydrogen and oxygen. Without oxygen, hydrogen won't burn. The time-scale this stuff happens on is ridiculously slow. Stars, or masses not quite large enough to become stars, will syphon bits of cloud off, and grow. There will be some star formation going on, and some enlargement going on. OTOH, it's a *huge* amount of mass, so I'd hazard to guess that the orbits of things nearby will go pretty screwy... so this could mess stuff up pretty bad, without any "explosion" until millions of years have passed and the inflated stars go supernova.
It's simple to put a price on the privacy of others, for a telco -- cost to build & maintain the required infrastructure, plus markup to make it profitable.
Actually, the lazy god theory makes a lot of sense. In this model, God came into being at the same time as the universe. The infantile God watched as the universe exploded into reality, bedazzled by the show of shiny lights. This God bumbles around, putting conveniently-sized objects into its mouth -- leaving a trail of slime, germs and all manner of excrement; hence life on Earth. Perhaps the God is not lazy, but in some phase akin to "terrible twos" (or perhaps teen angst, it's hard to know the difference from our perspective), alternating between wanton destruction, bemused obeservation, and boredom.
Belief in God doesn't necessarily imply belief in ID. If the universe *were* a simulation, whoever had access to the machine that the simulation runs on would effectively be a god. This computer must have been designed by something intelligent, but that intelligent thing might not know about the Earth -- and won't unless humans effect a change in the universe so incredibly large that an outside observer can't help but notice and respond do -- perhaps we create a time machine, and send the energy from billions of stars towards a single point in space-time and cause something like a big bang. Or worse, we find and exploit a bug in the simulation, which causes the whole thing to crash (whoops).
I have trouble remembering my 8-character passwords, too. So, I came up with a better way. Crunching numbers is easy, and has a pavlovian benefit -- if you don't remember the password, recovering your password is a pain in the ass -- so your brain makes more of an effort to remember next time.
Direction (in my implementation) is a vector -- 3,-2 would be 3 up, 2 left for the next letter.
It's pretty easy to securely store a bunch of passwords on a piece of paper. A friend / co-worker I knew had a book of poetry. He'd pick a page out of the book for every security contract, and take passwords out of rows & columns of letters. I thought this was a good idea, but it's weak in that it only gives letters, no numbers or funny characters.
First, print out block of random (as random as possible, anyway) characters onto a business card. Then, any time you need a new password, pick a starting point, direction, and number of characters -- this can be represented with 5 numbers. Now's where it gets tricky -- you don't want to write those numbers down, but you want to be able to remember them -- construct an invertable function, run the numbers through that function, and write the result down on the back of the business card.
Blue-staters get it too. We watch the Tour.
It's just an audio speaker. It's not magic.
...as well as the invasion of your personal space... You realize that you claim that your "personal space" is "invaded" by people making sound at you. If you're on the street and I stand 5 feet away and say, "hey buddy, got the time?" and you punch me in the face - you think that's reasonable behavior?Really. They *force* you to hear their message. You're walking down a public street. And they point a speaker at you. And you hear their advertisement. Oh my! This is an invasion of privacy, you're totally entitled to destroy their property! Yeah, you're right, that's really quite rational.
Now, you're walking down the streets of New York, and a street vendor calls out, "Hot dogs! Roasted nuts!". OMG! He's *forced* you to hear his message. That's *totally* an invasion of your privacy. The cops will *totally* support you when you trash the guy's cart & kick his head in.
What the *hell* is wrong with you people? Free speech is OK unless you're in a public place and somebody talks to you, or uses some new-fangled sound-emitting device that talks to you. If they drive by your house, and point this thing at you through the window, and it somehow works that well, then you've got something. But in public? Don't go out if you think making noise is a crime.
Pranks? No. Bald-faced deception? Plenty.
a) You met a total nutjob who claimed to be a SR-71 pilot, and you believed him?
b) Of course that's who the government hires to fly their uber-secret missions. What kind of idiot would believe a total nutjob?
Speak not of what you do not know. I didn't say, "well defined ordering", I said, "well-ordered". A well-ordered set is a set in which every nonempty subset has a least element. The well-ordering theorem is equivalent to the axiom of choice, and to the Kuratowski-Zorn lemma.
What you meant to say, was that the complex numbers cannot be ordered in such a way that the ordering respects the standard metric on them. There are perfectly good orderings on the complex number. One might like "lexicographic" ordering, where a+bi < c+di if a < c or a = c and b < c. That's a great ordering. It just isn't useful for proving theorems that one might like, for example the squeeze theorem.