They "lost" 24K files? You mean the attackers deleted and them and they didn't have backups?
Not-really-serious part (but wait, or is it?)
"Theft"? So the attacker has the files and the owners of the files don't have them anymore? Because that's what it means to steal a car or a diamond or cash.
Really, since they didn't do any of these things, shouldn't we say that these attackers "illegally copied" the documents and/or the information?
And are they really "intruders" or "attackers"? Maybe they're just "pirates".
An operating system is not like other software; it hosts other software. I shouldn't be forced to reinstall all my software every ten years, or five years, or two years. I shouldn't be forced to switch to a new version of the software that controls my access to all my other software if that new version has a different UI that forces me to relearn all sorts of new UI shortcuts, to abandon helpful utilities and add-ons that I've acquired or developed, etc. etc.
Of course it's not just Microsoft; Firefox has fucking up that last one with nearly ever major release.
I dunno, maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy or something, but after eighteen years of regular OS "must have" upgrades every couple years, yeah, I'm comfortable saying it's a huge fucking waste of my time, and it is stupid, and yes they should support the old versions.
If upgrading to new versions didn't involve changing the user experience and didn't require reinstalling everything, then it would be no different than a patch or service pack, except it would cost money and have a new version number... and that would be fine with me. (It's still lame to have to pay 50-200 dollars every couple years, but I could live with that at least. But that's not what's on the table.)
I remember what felt like 10 years ago we were griping about Google keeping search logs. At the time they didn't have a use for them, they just wanted to keep them around just in case.
So I never log in to google because I want to minimize how much they know about me. Of course they can still see my IP so who knows how effective this is, but at least I can try.
Except, wait! Then they bought youtube, and eventually merged the youtube and google login systems, so not only did you use the same account to log into both, but being logged into one meant you were logged into the other.
Now, youtube I was never that paranoid about the privacy of -- about them tracking what videos I watched. They could, but I didn't care much. So I had an account and I kept it logged in all the time, so I could see what my "subscriptions" had added recently and a few other useful things from being logged in.
But no, because google is so dedicated to privacy, if I wanted to stay logged in to youtube, I had to let google log every search I did under my own username. So to preserve my minimal privacy with google search, I had to stop logging in to youtube.
Those are the only two google services I use, but I bet there are similar stories for the rest of them.
So yeah. Google marketing a service based on "privacy"? No thanks.
This poll always totally broken, because the curators seemed to appear to totally fail to understand video games.
The poll was absurdly ambiguous about whether it was "the visual art found in videogames" or "videogames themselves as Art". You could see this ambiguity throughout the poll, from the language used talking casually about "art of games" and the choice of credits they provided for each games (typically artists and designers, almost as if they didn't understand what "designer" meant for games).
Now the results starts off with "explore the forty-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium" which is unambiguous (but makes the credits choice inexplicable), but the poll had nothing like that. So who knows what the voters took it to be.
I'd really like to do some BeagleBoard development, but it's clear from everything I read that the out-of-the-box experience is nothing like this--there's a litany of extra stuff you have to do to get it working, all of which puts me off even thinking about trying it.
"But, as someone who actually lived through that time frame, I'm here to tell you that he misses the point completely. C++ compatibility was in fact instrumental to it's success."
Jeez, read the fucking article: "In Stroustrop's mind, making C++ compatible with C was instrumental, crucial to its success. I don't disagree."
It was instrumental to its success in the marketplace of languages. It doesn't help it succeed at being a good language. That's the whole point of the article, Mister point-misser.
"By making it compatible, he got many C-language adherents to try it, and he got it on every platform so they could do so."
Yes, I know this. That is exactly the point. I was there for the whole thing too. (And to this day I still program in C.) The essay itself is like ten years old at this point.
C++ is a language that, given the choice between a feature/goal that made a good language or a feature/goal that made a popular language, made the choice in favor of popular.
Lots of things, e.g. compatibility with C, or choosing not to rewrite the linker, or sticking with header files, can be seen through this lens. I think those choices were made with an eye towards what would make the language "succeed in the marketplace", not what would make for the best programs or the best programming experience.
Obviously some of the times those things are correlated, but they're not always (e.g. the linker situation).
Now, you might think that being popular is a good thing. But the upshot of this is that in the marketplace of computer languages, computer languages that are designed to be popular will beat out computer languages that are actually good. (C.f. 'Worse is Better', etc.)
If they have 40 customers and they grow by 60 customers, they'll have grown by 150%.
To grow by 60%, they need to grow by 0.6*40 customers. That would be the same as 0.4*60 customers; in other words, they need 40% of the 60 customers remaining, not 100% of the 60 customers remaining.
In other words, to grow by 60% they need only 40% of the market they're talking about. That's why the grandparent was critizing their math.
It's true that they're not taken from the same spot, although what you describe could be true of photos taken from the same spot but in slight different directions, or just somebody screwing up the cropping.
However, comparing the prominent S-curves in the foreground reveals a significant difference in perspective/foreshortening that makes it clear that the color photo is taken from a higher elevation. The distant shapes seem to match pretty well so I don't think it's an aspect-ratio fuck-up, although that would be all too common in this modern world where nobody seems able to notice that effect either.
A mathematician poses a problem about a father with two children, mentioning that one child is known to be of a certain age and born on a certain day, and asks what the probability is that the other child is the same gender.
The answer to this question (assuming 50:50 birth rates) is 50%.
This is because I'm accumulating probability over sets of questions & fathers & children without omitting any cases, much as the non-50% answer accumulates probability over sets of children and omits some cases.
Long version:
If you try to understand probability without trying to count over large sets of examples (i.e. statistics), you will almost surely make mistakes.
Let's step back to just the Two Children Problem and, I'm going to try to point out what I hope is a slightly deeper intuition about the two answers.
The naive answer of 1/2 just assumes the child gender is independent. Woohoo, rock on.
The "clever" answer imagines that we have thousands of fathers with two children. Some of those fathers are the fathers of two girls. The rest are the fathers of at least one boy. Only the latter fathers can pose this problem; therefore, if we randomly select a father from that set of fathers who can pose this problem, we have only a 1/3rd chance of drawing a father who is the father of two boys.
But we're linking the fathers to the problem in an overly specific way. Suppose we draw a father randomly from the set of all fathers with two children. That father may have two boys, two girls, or one of each. If we draw a father with at least one boy, we can proffer him to the reader and ask what the odds are his other child is a boy. If we draw a father with at least one girl, we can proffer him to the reader and ask what the odds are his other child is a girl.
So, if you actually had to do this--pick one person, ask the question, and you're done--what would you do? Well, it's dumb to draw a random father and then go "oh crap, we can't actually ask a question, this whole thing was a waste of time". So you'd probably ask the "at least one boy" question if they had two boys, the "at least one girl" question if they had two girls, or... one or the other question in the other case. Maybe you always ask the boys question. Maybe you randomly pick. If your tie-breaker is to just always ask "at least one boy" if it's possible, then the answer to "at least one boy" is 1/3 chance the other is a boy, but the answer to "at least one girl" is a 100% chance the other is a girl!
If you choose "fairly", then when you draw a father with both a boy and a girl, then half the time you ask "at least one boy" and half the time you ask "at least one girl".
If you choose that way, and happen to draw a father with the "at least one boy" question, then the probability the other child of his is a boy is 50%. (That is, given 100 fathers, the three cases are 2 girls: 25; 2 boys 25; 1 each 50; you split the 1 each case between the 2 questions, so you have 50 cases where you ask "at least one girl"--25 of those are they have 2 girls, 25 of those they have one of each; and 50 cases where you ask "at least one boy" with the same odds.)
Thus a complete analysis of all the cases under a more plausible situation for where you might be asking this question returns to the naive solution: the other child will be a boy 50% of the time.
So, as other people have said it depends on context. If the context is that it's a mathematician posing the question once about a hypothetical non-real situation, and the mathematician is sexist or otherwise favors mentioning boys, then maybe it's 1/3rd. But if he's not--if he chose the question randomly based on the gender choices available to him--then it's 50%.
Moreover, even if you choose a sexist bias for how you split the middle cases, if you measure over asking ALL questions, both "at least one boy" and "at least one girl", no matter how you split up the cases, the average odds that the other c
Digital signatures rely on jacking up the odds. It makes a lot more sense to just jack up the odds on the already essentially working system then to go to all those lengths.
You're wrong; the problem is trivially solveable. For example, 128-bit transaction IDs would pretty much solve this particular scenario.
Unfortunately that requires a protocol change, which is a hard social problem. Adding 16 bits of source port randomization didn't require a protocol change, and they thought it was good enough. But maybe it wasn't (this particular demonstration is a little too laboratory-science for me; the flood of wrong responses would probably turn into a visible DoS attack in the real world). If it wasn't, though, no, it's not hard to fix on a technological front.
To a rough approximation, DNS is about trusting the servers the DNS system is configured to talk to. Other servers are only "trusted" about the data they're known to be responsible for. There is no fatal flaw to that design, as long as the DNS servers can't be spoofed. As long as a given DNS server always initiates "conversations" with the trusted servers, and uses a sufficiently large random transaction ID, and that conversation is private, the data it gets back is perfectly reliable. (DNSSEC attempts to tackle the problem from a different direction, by making sure all reports from the trusted servers can be verified as really being from them, which allows you to give up all three of those requirements.)
"I meant that traditional RAID devices are failures in my personal opinion because it is an absolute necessity to have two separate devices to guard against losing the entire array to various types of glitches with the RAID hardware itself."
This isn't really necessary. You may not find what I'm about to say satisfactory to your desires, but it flatly contradicts this repeated claim.
You can run ReadyNAS in RAID-1. (I have four drives in two RAID-1 pairs.) The ReadyNAS filesystem is ext3, so if the machine fails (or if the machine and one drive fails), you can still access your data. (Theoretically you can do this for any supported RAID setting, but RAID-1 has the advantage of only needing to mount one drive to access the data, so you can probably drop it in an existing linux box, and access is easy; others will be more work, and I've never tried.)
One-click was always trivially obvious to anyone and everyone who'd had anything to do with anything even remotely like thinking about the problem.
Received wisdom was that one-click was a bad idea, because (a) people would misclick and buy something they didn't want, and (b) people would be scared off from the site they were scared of misclicking. But this was received wisdom; everybody before Amazon thought one-click was a bad idea--but that means everyone knew about one click already.
Maybe Amazon gets points for figuring out how to make it work pyschologically for people (if they even have--I have one-click disabled), but that's not the part that's being patented, and is surely not the part that people are talking about being obvious. Of course the ideal of clicking once was obvious--that's how the vast majority of actions on the computer worked, e.g. following hyperlinks! Or submitting a form! How could the action 'buy' not be obvious as one click as well? How could you possibly think that? And the implementation is trivial (the site just needs to know who you are, which it does if you're you logged in, whether with cookies or just earlier in the session and you have a session ID in the url).
There's a GUI rule of thumb that everything should be undoable, and anything you can't make undoable should have a confirmation dialog? That's the exact same principle that underlies both the common wisdom against 1-click (require confirmation) and Amazon's specific solution (allow undoing the order).
If you think this wasn't obvious, you can choke on a turkey.
None of that is relevant to my complaint about asymmetry about uploaders vs downloaders, which, as I pointed out, entirely ignores the existence of pipes and entities between the uploader and downloader (who, under the model of the person I replied to, would never get paid).
I'm not denying there is asymmetry in the sense of some people have faster connects and some have slower connections. I'm not denying there are asymmetrical DSL connections. But none of this is relevant at all, and I really can't tell what you think you're replying to, or what the relevance of a strawman 'everyone has maximum connectivity to everyone else' is for.
Moreover, the post I was replying to seemed to think that bandwidth was somehow magically created and the cost the ISPs magically. In practice the total amount of bandwidth available at any given moment (which, as you say, is shared across everyone) IS fixed. If some of that bandwidth isn't being used, it really IS free, available bandwidth that can be leveraged by things like P2P. The whole model that "using more bandwidth costs somebody money" is the part that doesn't actually fit the reality!
I'd argue that using more bandwidth is free until it starts choking the circuits somewhere, and then "everybody"'s bandwidth drops, and eventually costs rise as somebody somewhere has to start physically adding more bandwidth to the system--but surely that takes time and represents largely fixed costs for deployment, not continuous costs over time (some maintainence cost, and power cost, but how high can those be?).
This is nonsense. If you have any backing for your claim that the internet somehow relied on asymmetrical bandwidth selling, [citation needed], because your presentation doesn't add up. (I certainly don't have any clue how it works behind the scenes, but your description of the endpoints sounds silly.)
Enter P2P, and now there's a lot of data being transferred between the users, with noone paying for it.... we're all on flat rate, so noone pays. Every 1 MB I download is 1 MB that Blizzard didn't pay for.
But somebody somewhere is uploading that data that's being downloaded. It's not magically coming from nowhere. If the trick is that the cost of bandwidth is supposed to be shouldered by the uploaders, then it's shouldered by the uploaders, and it doesn't matter if it's being downloaded by p2pers or anything.
Which you vaguely get at later in your reply, but this sort of comment is nonsense: "Legal" BitTorrent transfers tend to fall in that category. Someone thought he's smart if he, basically, cheats the ISPs of the bandwidth price. Instead of putting the file on a site and paying for the bandwidth, now he leaves it to a bunch of users that the ISP can't figure out how to bill for it. Nobody posting legal files thinks anything like they're "cheating"! Even if your theory is true, nobody out there knows it, so how could they think they're cheating? They think they're 'spreading the load' somehow. They're using 'available bandwidth' that's not being used for anything.
Then you say:
2. To make things work, paying for the receiving end too was based on oversell and... well, a self-throttling sharing scheme.
Ok then. If all download bandwidth requires corresponding upload bandwidth, and p2p uses "average users'" upload bandwidth, and upload bandwidth for "average users" was oversold... then that means your argument ends up being "broadband vendors oversold bandwidth"! (Just that it's upload bandwidth, not download bandwidth like everyone thinks.)
But this all hinges on a rather bizarre claim about how bandwidth is sold (by upload bandwidth only) that does things like ignore people in the middle... it may be true but your presentation is so sloppy that it doesn't seem trustworthy at all.
You can take it as an example of a problem their own massive oversell created, if it makes you feel any better.
Yeah, gee, I think I'll do that, since that's what your argument boils down to.
In order to deal with the very real threat of vandalism (let's not pretend it wasn't vandalism that sparked the changes in how wikipedia runs)
No, the "no original research" rule was instituted to deal with physics crackpots. This is documented on wikipedia itself if you actually delve into the pages about the rule.
There is no good way for wikipedia to differentiate between the personal experiences or knowledge of a 73-year-old rocket scientist wunderkind, a crackpot writing stuff in his garage, or a published scientist dabbling poorly outside his actual area of expertise. So wikipedia just disallows that sort of thing entirely, and draws instead on the difficulty in those people publishing their work in peer-reviewed journals or mainstream publications by setting threshholds in that direction.
And it's not wikipedia's fault if the knowledge of a 73-year-old-Jim-Yardley knower isn't preserved. Anecodes and anything else from him can be written down on any web page and preserved for posterity that way. (And if they get media attention because they're not crackpottery, they may make it into wikipedia someday.)
The goal of preserving absolutely everything known by every human, but only the good stuff, is unsatisifiable, and wikipedia aims on the extremely conservative side of the problem. It may not seem like that with all the pop culture crap to be found there, but wikipedia isn't a single coherent entity, it's a teeming mass of random people following the rules to varying degrees of accuracy and with no consistency at all. Somehow people care more about following the rules when it comes to rocket science than when it comes to character summaries of last year's big TV show. And isn't that awesome?
Even if this whole article is stupid, I still have to love the idea of the w3c--a consortium of big companies that "care" about the web (to the extent that the browser creators went off and formed their own w3c-independent working group to make new standards)--caring about transparency, about public accessibility.
I have to love it, because it was almost 10 years ago I noticed a problem with an algorithm recommended in the HTML specification and went to w3c.org and couldn't figure out any way to tell them about the problem. And, sure enough, browsers still use that algorithm today.
Correction: since I posted the parent, some other comments have bubbled up that point out (without detail) that the KSR ruling by the Supreme Court has changedthe rules for obviousness.
Somehow I missed when this happened, but it should mean patent litigiation is going to totally rebalance issues of obviousness vs. prior art.
I see a lot of comments talking about this idea being non-obvious in 1999.
You do not get a patent on a problem or an idea. You get a patent on a solution to a problem, an implementation of an idea.
"Location-based search" is an idea. "A machine that can trap/kill mice" is an idea. "A sturdy container made from cardboard" is an idea. "Heating water to create steam to power the motion of a vehicle" is an idea shading towards an implementation. The intention of patents was not to patent the idea. Yes, ideas are often clever, creative, novel, or "innovative": "nobody ever thought of doing that before". But that means very little; somebody has to think of it the first time. In the grand scheme of thing, ideas are cheap, and not what patents are supposed to protect (in the interests of encouraging).
You are supposed to patent an implementation of an idea: a detailed, specific approach to solving the problem. The solution is not supposed to be "obvious to a skilled practitioner", but there is no enforcement of this in the patent system, which is where many valid grumbles about patents arise.
I don't know anything about cardboard box patents, but there are some obvious constraints on the problem. You'd probably like to be able to tile the plane with the unfolded shape, so you can cut them out of a larger run of the material. You'd like to be able to fold the thing up into something along the lines of a box (a rectangular parallelpiped)--boxes pack well for shipping. You need overlapping flaps to allow sealing it.
Given those constraints, there are probably only a few basic plausible methods for a design for making a cardboard box that's efficient and effective. Given so few plausible designs, somebody who invents one and patents it is not significantly helping or advancing science (because the constrained solution space is so small, any skilled practioner could invent one of the few possible solutions). Actual advances are what patents are intended to encourage, but (at least as I've characterized the problem) I doubt anything like that happened in the basic design of cardboard boxes. (I also know nothing about what, if anything, got patented. This is just trying to offer an analogy.)
This happens constantly in software; most of the time the idea is the only novelty, and the patent is either interpreted as covering all possible solutions to the idea (making alternative implementations irrelevant), or it patents the obviously best solution (if you're going to draw a cursor in a manner that's reversible, XOR is the most effective algorithm; there were apple ][ / Atari 800 games that drew sprites the same way--but the patent only covered uses of the algorithm for drawing cursors on windowed workstations). Someone long ago patented the idea of a networked game with sound and was semi-recently extorting game companies with it; the patent was old enough that the most viable candidate for prior art fell through, because although people used a port on the old Commodore Pet computer to create a networked game, and used the same port to drive a simple sound output, nobody ever did both at the same time (I guess it only had the one port); and without prior art, nobody involved in the patent system accepts that the idea that combining the two is obvious, or at least that the two or three obvious ways of implementing game-sound-in-networked-game are, indeed, obvious. Or (more accurately, I expect) they've abandoned all pretense of 'obviousness' as meaning anything other than 'prior art'.
Slashdot Mirror
Serious part
They "lost" 24K files? You mean the attackers deleted and them and they didn't have backups?
Not-really-serious part (but wait, or is it?)
"Theft"? So the attacker has the files and the owners of the files don't have them anymore? Because that's what it means to steal a car or a diamond or cash.
Really, since they didn't do any of these things, shouldn't we say that these attackers "illegally copied" the documents and/or the information?
And are they really "intruders" or "attackers"? Maybe they're just "pirates".
An operating system is not like other software; it hosts other software. I shouldn't be forced to reinstall all my software every ten years, or five years, or two years. I shouldn't be forced to switch to a new version of the software that controls my access to all my other software if that new version has a different UI that forces me to relearn all sorts of new UI shortcuts, to abandon helpful utilities and add-ons that I've acquired or developed, etc. etc.
Of course it's not just Microsoft; Firefox has fucking up that last one with nearly ever major release.
I dunno, maybe I'm just an old fuddy-duddy or something, but after eighteen years of regular OS "must have" upgrades every couple years, yeah, I'm comfortable saying it's a huge fucking waste of my time, and it is stupid, and yes they should support the old versions.
If upgrading to new versions didn't involve changing the user experience and didn't require reinstalling everything, then it would be no different than a patch or service pack, except it would cost money and have a new version number... and that would be fine with me. (It's still lame to have to pay 50-200 dollars every couple years, but I could live with that at least. But that's not what's on the table.)
I remember what felt like 10 years ago we were griping about Google keeping search logs. At the time they didn't have a use for them, they just wanted to keep them around just in case.
So I never log in to google because I want to minimize how much they know about me. Of course they can still see my IP so who knows how effective this is, but at least I can try.
Except, wait! Then they bought youtube, and eventually merged the youtube and google login systems, so not only did you use the same account to log into both, but being logged into one meant you were logged into the other.
Now, youtube I was never that paranoid about the privacy of -- about them tracking what videos I watched. They could, but I didn't care much. So I had an account and I kept it logged in all the time, so I could see what my "subscriptions" had added recently and a few other useful things from being logged in.
But no, because google is so dedicated to privacy, if I wanted to stay logged in to youtube, I had to let google log every search I did under my own username. So to preserve my minimal privacy with google search, I had to stop logging in to youtube.
Those are the only two google services I use, but I bet there are similar stories for the rest of them.
So yeah. Google marketing a service based on "privacy"? No thanks.
This poll always totally broken, because the curators seemed to appear to totally fail to understand video games.
The poll was absurdly ambiguous about whether it was "the visual art found in videogames" or "videogames themselves as Art". You could see this ambiguity throughout the poll, from the language used talking casually about "art of games" and the choice of credits they provided for each games (typically artists and designers, almost as if they didn't understand what "designer" meant for games).
Now the results starts off with "explore the forty-year evolution of video games as an artistic medium" which is unambiguous (but makes the credits choice inexplicable), but the poll had nothing like that. So who knows what the voters took it to be.
But really, you can easily infer just about everything that's wrong with this sort of thinking and analysis by understanding one word: Viewmaster
Don't forget the one-click patent. True democracy/spirit of the Internet my ass.
"Secondly if you are going to invent an AI technique then picking emotive words for your jargon is a good way to ensure publicity."
Dear submitter: you are the one writing the submission summary which (a) goes on and on about the jargon term, and (b) gives them publicity. Wtf.
(Yes, I know that is what the article is about, so it is an accurate summary. It's still absurdly un-self-aware to then submit that to slashdot.)
I'd really like to do some BeagleBoard development, but it's clear from everything I read that the out-of-the-box experience is nothing like this--there's a litany of extra stuff you have to do to get it working, all of which puts me off even thinking about trying it.
Jeez, read the fucking article: "In Stroustrop's mind, making C++ compatible with C was instrumental, crucial to its success. I don't disagree."
It was instrumental to its success in the marketplace of languages. It doesn't help it succeed at being a good language. That's the whole point of the article, Mister point-misser.
"By making it compatible, he got many C-language adherents to try it, and he got it on every platform so they could do so."
Yes, I know this. That is exactly the point. I was there for the whole thing too. (And to this day I still program in C.) The essay itself is like ten years old at this point.
C++ is a language that, given the choice between a feature/goal that made a good language or a feature/goal that made a popular language, made the choice in favor of popular.
Lots of things, e.g. compatibility with C, or choosing not to rewrite the linker, or sticking with header files, can be seen through this lens. I think those choices were made with an eye towards what would make the language "succeed in the marketplace", not what would make for the best programs or the best programming experience.
Obviously some of the times those things are correlated, but they're not always (e.g. the linker situation).
Now, you might think that being popular is a good thing. But the upshot of this is that in the marketplace of computer languages, computer languages that are designed to be popular will beat out computer languages that are actually good. (C.f. 'Worse is Better', etc.)
I don't think that's a good thing.
If they have 40 customers and they grow by 60 customers, they'll have grown by 150%.
To grow by 60%, they need to grow by 0.6*40 customers. That would be the same as 0.4*60 customers; in other words, they need 40% of the 60 customers remaining, not 100% of the 60 customers remaining.
In other words, to grow by 60% they need only 40% of the market they're talking about. That's why the grandparent was critizing their math.
However, comparing the prominent S-curves in the foreground reveals a significant difference in perspective/foreshortening that makes it clear that the color photo is taken from a higher elevation. The distant shapes seem to match pretty well so I don't think it's an aspect-ratio fuck-up, although that would be all too common in this modern world where nobody seems able to notice that effect either.
"known to be a certain age" is supposed to be "known to be a certain gender", sigh
A mathematician poses a problem about a father with two children, mentioning that one child is known to be of a certain age and born on a certain day, and asks what the probability is that the other child is the same gender.
The answer to this question (assuming 50:50 birth rates) is 50%.
This is because I'm accumulating probability over sets of questions & fathers & children without omitting any cases, much as the non-50% answer accumulates probability over sets of children and omits some cases.
Long version:
If you try to understand probability without trying to count over large sets of examples (i.e. statistics), you will almost surely make mistakes.
Let's step back to just the Two Children Problem and, I'm going to try to point out what I hope is a slightly deeper intuition about the two answers.
The naive answer of 1/2 just assumes the child gender is independent. Woohoo, rock on.
The "clever" answer imagines that we have thousands of fathers with two children. Some of those fathers are the fathers of two girls. The rest are the fathers of at least one boy. Only the latter fathers can pose this problem; therefore, if we randomly select a father from that set of fathers who can pose this problem, we have only a 1/3rd chance of drawing a father who is the father of two boys.
But we're linking the fathers to the problem in an overly specific way. Suppose we draw a father randomly from the set of all fathers with two children. That father may have two boys, two girls, or one of each. If we draw a father with at least one boy, we can proffer him to the reader and ask what the odds are his other child is a boy. If we draw a father with at least one girl, we can proffer him to the reader and ask what the odds are his other child is a girl.
So, if you actually had to do this--pick one person, ask the question, and you're done--what would you do? Well, it's dumb to draw a random father and then go "oh crap, we can't actually ask a question, this whole thing was a waste of time". So you'd probably ask the "at least one boy" question if they had two boys, the "at least one girl" question if they had two girls, or... one or the other question in the other case. Maybe you always ask the boys question. Maybe you randomly pick. If your tie-breaker is to just always ask "at least one boy" if it's possible, then the answer to "at least one boy" is 1/3 chance the other is a boy, but the answer to "at least one girl" is a 100% chance the other is a girl!
If you choose "fairly", then when you draw a father with both a boy and a girl, then half the time you ask "at least one boy" and half the time you ask "at least one girl".
If you choose that way, and happen to draw a father with the "at least one boy" question, then the probability the other child of his is a boy is 50%. (That is, given 100 fathers, the three cases are 2 girls: 25; 2 boys 25; 1 each 50; you split the 1 each case between the 2 questions, so you have 50 cases where you ask "at least one girl"--25 of those are they have 2 girls, 25 of those they have one of each; and 50 cases where you ask "at least one boy" with the same odds.)
Thus a complete analysis of all the cases under a more plausible situation for where you might be asking this question returns to the naive solution: the other child will be a boy 50% of the time.
So, as other people have said it depends on context. If the context is that it's a mathematician posing the question once about a hypothetical non-real situation, and the mathematician is sexist or otherwise favors mentioning boys, then maybe it's 1/3rd. But if he's not--if he chose the question randomly based on the gender choices available to him--then it's 50%.
Moreover, even if you choose a sexist bias for how you split the middle cases, if you measure over asking ALL questions, both "at least one boy" and "at least one girl", no matter how you split up the cases, the average odds that the other c
Digital signatures rely on jacking up the odds. It makes a lot more sense to just jack up the odds on the already essentially working system then to go to all those lengths.
Unfortunately that requires a protocol change, which is a hard social problem. Adding 16 bits of source port randomization didn't require a protocol change, and they thought it was good enough. But maybe it wasn't (this particular demonstration is a little too laboratory-science for me; the flood of wrong responses would probably turn into a visible DoS attack in the real world). If it wasn't, though, no, it's not hard to fix on a technological front.
To a rough approximation, DNS is about trusting the servers the DNS system is configured to talk to. Other servers are only "trusted" about the data they're known to be responsible for. There is no fatal flaw to that design, as long as the DNS servers can't be spoofed. As long as a given DNS server always initiates "conversations" with the trusted servers, and uses a sufficiently large random transaction ID, and that conversation is private, the data it gets back is perfectly reliable. (DNSSEC attempts to tackle the problem from a different direction, by making sure all reports from the trusted servers can be verified as really being from them, which allows you to give up all three of those requirements.)
This isn't really necessary. You may not find what I'm about to say satisfactory to your desires, but it flatly contradicts this repeated claim.
You can run ReadyNAS in RAID-1. (I have four drives in two RAID-1 pairs.) The ReadyNAS filesystem is ext3, so if the machine fails (or if the machine and one drive fails), you can still access your data. (Theoretically you can do this for any supported RAID setting, but RAID-1 has the advantage of only needing to mount one drive to access the data, so you can probably drop it in an existing linux box, and access is easy; others will be more work, and I've never tried.)
One-click was always trivially obvious to anyone and everyone who'd had anything to do with anything even remotely like thinking about the problem.
Received wisdom was that one-click was a bad idea, because (a) people would misclick and buy something they didn't want, and (b) people would be scared off from the site they were scared of misclicking. But this was received wisdom; everybody before Amazon thought one-click was a bad idea--but that means everyone knew about one click already.
Maybe Amazon gets points for figuring out how to make it work pyschologically for people (if they even have--I have one-click disabled), but that's not the part that's being patented, and is surely not the part that people are talking about being obvious. Of course the ideal of clicking once was obvious--that's how the vast majority of actions on the computer worked, e.g. following hyperlinks! Or submitting a form! How could the action 'buy' not be obvious as one click as well? How could you possibly think that? And the implementation is trivial (the site just needs to know who you are, which it does if you're you logged in, whether with cookies or just earlier in the session and you have a session ID in the url).
There's a GUI rule of thumb that everything should be undoable, and anything you can't make undoable should have a confirmation dialog? That's the exact same principle that underlies both the common wisdom against 1-click (require confirmation) and Amazon's specific solution (allow undoing the order).
If you think this wasn't obvious, you can choke on a turkey.
I'm not denying there is asymmetry in the sense of some people have faster connects and some have slower connections. I'm not denying there are asymmetrical DSL connections. But none of this is relevant at all, and I really can't tell what you think you're replying to, or what the relevance of a strawman 'everyone has maximum connectivity to everyone else' is for.
Moreover, the post I was replying to seemed to think that bandwidth was somehow magically created and the cost the ISPs magically. In practice the total amount of bandwidth available at any given moment (which, as you say, is shared across everyone) IS fixed. If some of that bandwidth isn't being used, it really IS free, available bandwidth that can be leveraged by things like P2P. The whole model that "using more bandwidth costs somebody money" is the part that doesn't actually fit the reality!
I'd argue that using more bandwidth is free until it starts choking the circuits somewhere, and then "everybody"'s bandwidth drops, and eventually costs rise as somebody somewhere has to start physically adding more bandwidth to the system--but surely that takes time and represents largely fixed costs for deployment, not continuous costs over time (some maintainence cost, and power cost, but how high can those be?).
Enter P2P, and now there's a lot of data being transferred between the users, with noone paying for it. ... we're all on flat rate, so noone pays. Every 1 MB I download is 1 MB that Blizzard didn't pay for.
But somebody somewhere is uploading that data that's being downloaded. It's not magically coming from nowhere. If the trick is that the cost of bandwidth is supposed to be shouldered by the uploaders, then it's shouldered by the uploaders, and it doesn't matter if it's being downloaded by p2pers or anything.
Which you vaguely get at later in your reply, but this sort of comment is nonsense: "Legal" BitTorrent transfers tend to fall in that category. Someone thought he's smart if he, basically, cheats the ISPs of the bandwidth price. Instead of putting the file on a site and paying for the bandwidth, now he leaves it to a bunch of users that the ISP can't figure out how to bill for it. Nobody posting legal files thinks anything like they're "cheating"! Even if your theory is true, nobody out there knows it, so how could they think they're cheating? They think they're 'spreading the load' somehow. They're using 'available bandwidth' that's not being used for anything.
Then you say:
2. To make things work, paying for the receiving end too was based on oversell and... well, a self-throttling sharing scheme.
Ok then. If all download bandwidth requires corresponding upload bandwidth, and p2p uses "average users'" upload bandwidth, and upload bandwidth for "average users" was oversold... then that means your argument ends up being "broadband vendors oversold bandwidth"! (Just that it's upload bandwidth, not download bandwidth like everyone thinks.)
But this all hinges on a rather bizarre claim about how bandwidth is sold (by upload bandwidth only) that does things like ignore people in the middle... it may be true but your presentation is so sloppy that it doesn't seem trustworthy at all.
You can take it as an example of a problem their own massive oversell created, if it makes you feel any better.
Yeah, gee, I think I'll do that, since that's what your argument boils down to.
No, the "no original research" rule was instituted to deal with physics crackpots. This is documented on wikipedia itself if you actually delve into the pages about the rule.
There is no good way for wikipedia to differentiate between the personal experiences or knowledge of a 73-year-old rocket scientist wunderkind, a crackpot writing stuff in his garage, or a published scientist dabbling poorly outside his actual area of expertise. So wikipedia just disallows that sort of thing entirely, and draws instead on the difficulty in those people publishing their work in peer-reviewed journals or mainstream publications by setting threshholds in that direction.
And it's not wikipedia's fault if the knowledge of a 73-year-old-Jim-Yardley knower isn't preserved. Anecodes and anything else from him can be written down on any web page and preserved for posterity that way. (And if they get media attention because they're not crackpottery, they may make it into wikipedia someday.)
The goal of preserving absolutely everything known by every human, but only the good stuff, is unsatisifiable, and wikipedia aims on the extremely conservative side of the problem. It may not seem like that with all the pop culture crap to be found there, but wikipedia isn't a single coherent entity, it's a teeming mass of random people following the rules to varying degrees of accuracy and with no consistency at all. Somehow people care more about following the rules when it comes to rocket science than when it comes to character summaries of last year's big TV show. And isn't that awesome?
Here is what is quite possibly a definitive story on ASCAP & BMI.
When does calling something an addiction become an addiction?
I have to love it, because it was almost 10 years ago I noticed a problem with an algorithm recommended in the HTML specification and went to w3c.org and couldn't figure out any way to tell them about the problem. And, sure enough, browsers still use that algorithm today.
Somehow I missed when this happened, but it should mean patent litigiation is going to totally rebalance issues of obviousness vs. prior art.
You do not get a patent on a problem or an idea. You get a patent on a solution to a problem, an implementation of an idea.
"Location-based search" is an idea. "A machine that can trap/kill mice" is an idea. "A sturdy container made from cardboard" is an idea. "Heating water to create steam to power the motion of a vehicle" is an idea shading towards an implementation. The intention of patents was not to patent the idea. Yes, ideas are often clever, creative, novel, or "innovative": "nobody ever thought of doing that before". But that means very little; somebody has to think of it the first time. In the grand scheme of thing, ideas are cheap, and not what patents are supposed to protect (in the interests of encouraging).
You are supposed to patent an implementation of an idea: a detailed, specific approach to solving the problem. The solution is not supposed to be "obvious to a skilled practitioner", but there is no enforcement of this in the patent system, which is where many valid grumbles about patents arise.
I don't know anything about cardboard box patents, but there are some obvious constraints on the problem. You'd probably like to be able to tile the plane with the unfolded shape, so you can cut them out of a larger run of the material. You'd like to be able to fold the thing up into something along the lines of a box (a rectangular parallelpiped)--boxes pack well for shipping. You need overlapping flaps to allow sealing it.
Given those constraints, there are probably only a few basic plausible methods for a design for making a cardboard box that's efficient and effective. Given so few plausible designs, somebody who invents one and patents it is not significantly helping or advancing science (because the constrained solution space is so small, any skilled practioner could invent one of the few possible solutions). Actual advances are what patents are intended to encourage, but (at least as I've characterized the problem) I doubt anything like that happened in the basic design of cardboard boxes. (I also know nothing about what, if anything, got patented. This is just trying to offer an analogy.)
This happens constantly in software; most of the time the idea is the only novelty, and the patent is either interpreted as covering all possible solutions to the idea (making alternative implementations irrelevant), or it patents the obviously best solution (if you're going to draw a cursor in a manner that's reversible, XOR is the most effective algorithm; there were apple ][ / Atari 800 games that drew sprites the same way--but the patent only covered uses of the algorithm for drawing cursors on windowed workstations). Someone long ago patented the idea of a networked game with sound and was semi-recently extorting game companies with it; the patent was old enough that the most viable candidate for prior art fell through, because although people used a port on the old Commodore Pet computer to create a networked game, and used the same port to drive a simple sound output, nobody ever did both at the same time (I guess it only had the one port); and without prior art, nobody involved in the patent system accepts that the idea that combining the two is obvious, or at least that the two or three obvious ways of implementing game-sound-in-networked-game are, indeed, obvious. Or (more accurately, I expect) they've abandoned all pretense of 'obviousness' as meaning anything other than 'prior art'.