Poll workers are volunteers. Instead of inflicting that on them, take a protest sign to your polling place, wave it around and holler a bit, then go home.
Admittedly, the paper unicorn is not present in the original cut, nor the unicorn dream. Nonetheless, subsequent releases made it quite clear that Deckard is in fact a lesbian. Why are we still debating this?
Even for good programmers, it's not always clear cut. Sometimes you see slices of assembly in otherwise wholly C-based systems that are elegant and an order of magnitude more efficient than C, but drastically harder to maintain when the original author "moves on". Occasionally the local performance gain is swamped by the global performance profile, too.
For PCs that are guaranteed to remain stationary, I can see your point. For laptops, however, this kind of arrangement would be onerous. Wireless networks just aren't reliable enough in my experience.
I have the greatest sympathy for IT/CS people who dislike "politics" and try to avoid it in their jobs. This guy, though, had a job in the GOVERNMENT. How can he feign outrage that politics became involved?
This newer title also seems very stylized. I certainly wouldn't mistake it for a video and the context (sword, elfin outfit, monsters) is obvious fantasy.
This isn't a conflict between realism and anime. It's a choice of ghost in the shell anime over hello kitty.
I'm buying an iMac with OSX installed and I was wondering whether the BSD core means that transgaming will work for me as well. Has anyone had experience with Transgaming or an equivalent on OSX?
I have to disagree with those of you who believe that the US Government's H1B Visa policy creates an artificial lack of jobs for American citizens. On the contrary, if you take a broader look at the tech labor pool, the only artificial situation is an overabundance of jobs (or inflation of wages) for US citizens due to the *restrictions* imposed by the Visa process.
We can't be good little libertarians one day and protectionists the next. In India and China there is a huge and rapidly growing pool of at least marginally qualified technical workers. It is simply inevitable that Americans such as us will come into competition with those people for the limited pool of technical positions globally. It's a simple macroeconmic principle that as the pool of labor grows, the prevalent wage drops. A scale back of the H1B program will only temporarily maintain the *existing* imbalance that favors us in America.
As painful as it is (of course I have a job so maybe I have no place to talk about pain) we as tech workers have to face the facts that 1) We work in a global industry 2) Our salaries are artificially inflated for us by national borders. The diffusion of workers to the U.S. is just a matter of time, and until we just admit this and liberalize employment of overseas labor, the whole industry in the US will be hurt by paying out excessive wages.
Rather than trying to lock out our tech brothers and sisters in India and China, we should be focusing on making sure that we are the best available labor pool for the job, regardless of national origin.
Don't you feel it is relevant that a man who has impacted a very large number of young people (many of ourselves included) may have consciously or unconsciously chosen to promote paedophilia?
I am not one of those who believe that any art, including fiction, is unintentional. I would like very much to understand why Piers Anthony repeatedly choses sex with young girls as a topic for his novels and why he is overwhelmingly inclined to justify the act in his work. Keep in mind that the entire work is fictional. The fact that the fictional characters endorse the act, including the fictional young girls, tells us more about Mr. Anthony than about the world around us.
However you are right that the question is offensive and for that I apologize.
Hello Mr. Anthony. As a young adult, I devoured nearly all your novels, with my particular favorites including the Adept series, Incarnations, Bio of a *, and the first eight or ten Xanth titles. It's fair to say that a large part of my psyche and probably my vocabularly are attributable to you.
Recently I reprised On a Pale Horse with my girlfriend and I discovered to my discomfort that it dealt very explicitly with underage sex in a way that sexualized young girls in particular. Although the novel retained many charming qualities for me, I began to consider the female underage sexuality in the other books of that series, especially one of the later books (Of Eternity?) in which an underage girl uses a protracted stay in Purgatory in order to be able to have legal sex with a much older priest. Significantly, she is only 18 "by law". Physically and mentally she is 16 when she has sex with the priest. We are supposed to have any moral questiones calmed by this.
As I recalled more of your works, I noticed a recurring theme of young girls being exploited in sexual ways. The opening of Bio of a Space Tyrant describes the protagonist's shame and arousal as his young sister is raped. Later in the series, I hazily recall a wealthy character who kept pre-pubescent girls for sex, then released them for service when they matured. The character was depicted in a very sympathetic light - he was just misunderstood.
Finally, long ago I read a hardback book by you which attributed to you membership in a social organization dedicated to protecting girls against paedophilia.
As a fan an admirer, but also as someone who is disquieted by the influence you may have had upon my young sexuality, I would like to know candidly whether you are attracted to underage women. Naturally I am in no way implying that you would ever act upon such an urge, but the writing you have given us is very close to an act in itself, considering your very broad and impressionable audience.
Thanks.
Re:An even better solution...
on
DRM Helmet
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
If we take this piracy/drm/et al mess to its logical conclusion, the only foolproof solution is for the distributors to stop distributing content altogether.
That's an excellent idea. The global populace can simply pay them a daily retainer levied as a tax. In return the "content" companies will ensure that our musical and literary heritage is well protected in a vault beneath the hills of Hollywood, far from the prying ears and eyes of those who would remember this precious intellectual property and be inspired by it to create "derivative works" without a license.
After all, the functioning work in "intellectual property" is "property". And a property holder is certain within its rights to hoard its belongings.
The fact that this scenario is so ludicrous demonstrates that even if all music and literature can be the "property" of a single corporate entity or trust which I doubt then society has every right to claim access to that "property" as a central part of its culture.
Please remove your rose colored glasses and back away slowly:)
Like you, I was on the internet five years ago (and before). Unlike you, I do not recollect it so fondly.
NNTP newsgroups were not appreciably more interesting or informative than they are today. In many cases, newsgroups only become valuable once they have been around long enough to develop a kind of "lore" and archive of all the discussions that have taken place in them over the years. This, necessarily, was absent or sparse back when the groups were newer.
It may have been true that the spirit on the WWW was more collegial and the participants less concerned with personal benefit, but mainly the web was populated by dabblers who wanted to put up a scanned picture of their dorm room or girlfriend. "Valuable" sites were mainly collections of interesting links to the small number of pages that contained data of real use. And the simple fact that very few websites existed and that they were mainly the creations of students or professors in educational institutions (or porn) meant that the content of the web was limited. It was not possible in those days to perform a search for "half-hitch" and get back dozens of valuable, instructive hits about how to tie knots. The attitude of the web may have been different but the breadth was sorely lacking.
In other words, the things you remember fondly are not only still present on the net, but improved in almost all cases! In addition, we have access now to commercial sites that simply didn't exist in those days. It may be that those sites speak more loudly than your favorite nook of the web, but they are at worst hogging the limelight. They are not pushing out the original spirit. Not by any means.
"I know I'd pay a buck to overturn the DMCA, free Dimitri, outlaw spam, protest license problems, protect the GPL etc."
There's your answer right there you fucking skinflint!
The minimum donation to most anti-freedom organizations (700 club, CC, Heritage, etc) is $25 with most members giving at lest $50. You think 70,000 tightwads chucking pennies at the problem is going to make a difference?
Indeed they do still exist. Consider my place of employment, where I have worked now for just over three years. At this outfit every employee has his or her own private window office with walls to the ceilings and no cubes. Employees are treated to significant free food and drink and one probably could live for a while just migrating around the buildings snarfing up the freebie lunches and dinners for those who work hard. We play with nerf guns, water guns, yo yos, and even have little nerf turf wars going on between groups. There is a foosball table on floor #1, a pool table on floor #3, and a ping pong table in the next building. Elsewhere you can find free arcade games. And it is not uncommon to see long haired geeks clad in t-shirts and hawaiian straw hats walking barefoot through the halls.
In addition, this place where I work provides me with extreme technical challenges and difficult problems that require me to grow. We work on projects that affect thousands, tens or thousands, or even millions of people depending upon our area of focus. Because of this we have issues related to security, deployment, and scale that dwarf those faced by most tech workers. In my position I have had to go from zero to expert not only in areas such as security, XML, and networking, but also in the area of managing conflict and engaging others to work towards goals.
Finally this business provides its employees with astonishing resources and is unlikely to vanish for quite some time.
In case you haven't glanced at my email by now, this business is Microsoft.:-)
I think the best solution is more drastic: kick everyone off the big five TLDs and stick them under a country code -- where they're supposed to be -- and let them prove that they deserve an international name;
Wonderful. In that event only entities with a presence in more than one country would get.com,.org, or.net.
Well, that leaves the United Nations, the Peace Corp, and every corporation making more than $1 million a year.
Cuts us right out, tho. Is that what you had in mind?
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Against Intel's market share and marketing engine (such as the Intel Inside campaign), AMD is doing the prudent thing by forging strategic alliances, rather than waiting for the computing public to recognize them as a superior provider.
When AMD produces a superior product, they will be recognized by the market. Today they don't have that claim. You can't walk into a Circuit City these days without seeing that a plurality of the processors for off-the-shelf machines are AMD, so IMHO Intel's vaunted monopoly is a bust top hat. AMD runs in second place because it actually lags behind Intel in several key spots.
(Disclaimer: I run a.9Ghz Athlon at home and love it - I have never had better performance from a machine)
The fact is that AMD has beaten Intel only in two spaces: price/performance, and mindshare among the tech savvy. Apart from those advantages, there are still numerous failing in their product line:
1) Power consumption. They've kept themselves well out of the laptop and server farm market by eating power like a pig and blowing it in the form of heat. I have heard that AMD is reducing power in their Clawhammer chips though.
2) No non-vapor multiproc motherboards for the Athlon. Granted this is not really their fault, although I have heard that the Althon has a hard time achieving greater than 2-way SMP. Anyway, you can't enter the lucrative server market until you can at least support 2-way on a range of platforms and in reality you aren't viable until you have support for at least 8-way. Looking forward to the day when motherboard makers open their eyes to this opportunity.
3) Incompatibilities with gaming hardware. If you aren't in the server business you'd better be in the home user market and nothing uses a CPU like games. Once again this isn't exactly their fault, but at least in my case several pieces of my hardware had to have their drivers patched up before they would work with AMD and I even briefly had to crank down my AGP to 2x instead of 4x in order to prevent my games from freezing. All of these problems can be solved (enough other people have noticed them to have populated with web with helpful tips) but this is not the way to earn the trust of home users. The worst part is, it was most likely the makers of the other hardware items that failed to perform adequate QA, but fingerpointing never fixed a box.
4) Brand name. Where are the AMD ads to counterpoise the Intel blue guys? This company, despite its great product line, doesn't seem to have any message for ordinary consumers beyond "We're almost the same as Intel!" If you read through the last two problems above, you might agree with me that brand recognition is the root of both. So why don't they do something about it?
There are lots of advantages to buying AMD, but equally strong disadvantages at the present time. For certain applications AMD is the way to go. For others, regrettably the best choice is Intel.
For those of us working on closed software and not in a position to take advantage of open-sourced peer review, code reviews are a critical substitute. This backdoor illustrates what happens when dev's are "trusted" to code morally and never second-guessed. Of all the advantages of OSS, peer review is the one closed-source developers have to work hardest to replicate.
Currently I am leading my team through a series of security code reviews for a system that transacts money. We joke about finding a method called "PayTim()", but it is not entirely a joke. No matter how much we would all like to believe that our team is composed of trustworthy devs, it is important to establish the expectation that all code is reviewed. It keeps the honest honest.
Not to mention that we have found and fixed many hidden security and reliability flaws along the way, thus improving the quality of our product.
For those of us working on closed software and not in a position to take advantage of open-sourced peer review, code reviews are a critical substitute. This backdoor illustrates what happens when dev's are "trusted" to code morally and never second-guessed. Of all the advantages of OSS, peer review is the one closed-source developers have to work hardest to replicate.
Currently I am leading my team through a series of security code reviews for a system that transacts money. We joke about finding a method called "PayTim()", but it is not entirely a joke. No matter how much we would all like to believe that our team is composed of trustworthy devs, it is important to establish the expectation that all code is reviewed. Its keeps the honest honest.
Not to mention that we have found and fixed many hidden security and reliability flaws along the way, thus improving the quality of our product.
Other than as a curiosity specific to the dating or organic matter and archaelogical finds, this is irrelevant. Serious dating is performed with the Isochron method.
What is wrong with the word palimpsest? It is a perfectly valid word that I have seen used since way back when I was a kid (the Beyond Zork game let you pick up a palimpsest as part of a puzzle, IIRC). Not only that, but the author is using it perfectly correctly - the world of Dying Earth is a medium upon which many people have scribbled but which has been wiped clean due to the impending cock-up in the sun.
Using palimpsest here is accurate, economical and I daresay even elegant. It is a good choice; why are you criticising him just because you had to look it up?
Quantum scrambling of communication is cool, and indeed may provide an unbreakable code protocol, but the kind of unreserved exuberance in the article might be unwise.
The essence of public/private key crypto (which is what we use today for key exchange) is the putative difficulty of prime-factoring a very large number. Our confidence in this sort of algorithm stems from centuries of direct investigation of this problem and corresponding centuries of failure to accomplish a solution in a reasonable time order. The problems involved in solving this problem is so well understood that mathematicians have even been able to generalize this problem to a class of seemingly unrelated problems in the NP set. I won't pretend I understand NP at all, but any discipline that can draw a parallel between prime factorization and problems like the traveling salesman is obviously deeply researched and well developed.
"Quantum crypto" as the article calls it, is not based upon this sort of deep understanding. Far from it; instead, it is based upon our somewhat naiive observation that particles flip in unison "like magic" when they are quantum-associated. While certainly QM is also a complex field of study with just over a hundred years of development, I don't think anybody out there can make any kind of definitive statement or even guess about why quantum binding happens or how it works.
Given this, how can we be confident in an algorithm founded upon what is basically our collective ignorance? Surely there is some kind of fundamental law or reason behind quantum binding, and when we come to understand it (string theory?), perhaps the "magic" of QM will suddenly seem kind of prosaic and even influenceable. There really is no way of knowing because even the most skilled practictioners of the science bicker about the exact cause and mechanism.
Not to be a damper - I would love to see this system working - but we need to be honest about our ignorance and how it could hurt us in the long run.
Slashdot Mirror
Poll workers are volunteers. Instead of inflicting that on them, take a protest sign to your polling place, wave it around and holler a bit, then go home.
Admittedly, the paper unicorn is not present in the original cut, nor the unicorn dream. Nonetheless, subsequent releases made it quite clear that Deckard is in fact a lesbian. Why are we still debating this?
Even for good programmers, it's not always clear cut. Sometimes you see slices of assembly in otherwise wholly C-based systems that are elegant and an order of magnitude more efficient than C, but drastically harder to maintain when the original author "moves on". Occasionally the local performance gain is swamped by the global performance profile, too.
Legal expert with axe to grind tricks low-paid professional hatchet men at NFL into making a minor and unimportant error.
For PCs that are guaranteed to remain stationary, I can see your point. For laptops, however, this kind of arrangement would be onerous. Wireless networks just aren't reliable enough in my experience.
I have the greatest sympathy for IT/CS people who dislike "politics" and try to avoid it in their jobs. This guy, though, had a job in the GOVERNMENT. How can he feign outrage that politics became involved?
This newer title also seems very stylized. I certainly wouldn't mistake it for a video and the context (sword, elfin outfit, monsters) is obvious fantasy.
This isn't a conflict between realism and anime. It's a choice of ghost in the shell anime over hello kitty.
Thank you for this informed and balanced analysis
I'm buying an iMac with OSX installed and I was wondering whether the BSD core means that transgaming will work for me as well. Has anyone had experience with Transgaming or an equivalent on OSX?
I have to disagree with those of you who believe that the US Government's H1B Visa policy creates an artificial lack of jobs for American citizens. On the contrary, if you take a broader look at the tech labor pool, the only artificial situation is an overabundance of jobs (or inflation of wages) for US citizens due to the *restrictions* imposed by the Visa process.
We can't be good little libertarians one day and protectionists the next. In India and China there is a huge and rapidly growing pool of at least marginally qualified technical workers. It is simply inevitable that Americans such as us will come into competition with those people for the limited pool of technical positions globally. It's a simple macroeconmic principle that as the pool of labor grows, the prevalent wage drops. A scale back of the H1B program will only temporarily maintain the *existing* imbalance that favors us in America.
As painful as it is (of course I have a job so maybe I have no place to talk about pain) we as tech workers have to face the facts that 1) We work in a global industry 2) Our salaries are artificially inflated for us by national borders. The diffusion of workers to the U.S. is just a matter of time, and until we just admit this and liberalize employment of overseas labor, the whole industry in the US will be hurt by paying out excessive wages.
Rather than trying to lock out our tech brothers and sisters in India and China, we should be focusing on making sure that we are the best available labor pool for the job, regardless of national origin.
You may now flame me into obliviion.
Don't you feel it is relevant that a man who has impacted a very large number of young people (many of ourselves included) may have consciously or unconsciously chosen to promote paedophilia?
I am not one of those who believe that any art, including fiction, is unintentional. I would like very much to understand why Piers Anthony repeatedly choses sex with young girls as a topic for his novels and why he is overwhelmingly inclined to justify the act in his work. Keep in mind that the entire work is fictional. The fact that the fictional characters endorse the act, including the fictional young girls, tells us more about Mr. Anthony than about the world around us.
However you are right that the question is offensive and for that I apologize.
Hello Mr. Anthony. As a young adult, I devoured nearly all your novels, with my particular favorites including the Adept series, Incarnations, Bio of a *, and the first eight or ten Xanth titles. It's fair to say that a large part of my psyche and probably my vocabularly are attributable to you.
Recently I reprised On a Pale Horse with my girlfriend and I discovered to my discomfort that it dealt very explicitly with underage sex in a way that sexualized young girls in particular. Although the novel retained many charming qualities for me, I began to consider the female underage sexuality in the other books of that series, especially one of the later books (Of Eternity?) in which an underage girl uses a protracted stay in Purgatory in order to be able to have legal sex with a much older priest. Significantly, she is only 18 "by law". Physically and mentally she is 16 when she has sex with the priest. We are supposed to have any moral questiones calmed by this.
As I recalled more of your works, I noticed a recurring theme of young girls being exploited in sexual ways. The opening of Bio of a Space Tyrant describes the protagonist's shame and arousal as his young sister is raped. Later in the series, I hazily recall a wealthy character who kept pre-pubescent girls for sex, then released them for service when they matured. The character was depicted in a very sympathetic light - he was just misunderstood.
Finally, long ago I read a hardback book by you which attributed to you membership in a social organization dedicated to protecting girls against paedophilia.
As a fan an admirer, but also as someone who is disquieted by the influence you may have had upon my young sexuality, I would like to know candidly whether you are attracted to underage women. Naturally I am in no way implying that you would ever act upon such an urge, but the writing you have given us is very close to an act in itself, considering your very broad and impressionable audience.
Thanks.
That's an excellent idea. The global populace can simply pay them a daily retainer levied as a tax. In return the "content" companies will ensure that our musical and literary heritage is well protected in a vault beneath the hills of Hollywood, far from the prying ears and eyes of those who would remember this precious intellectual property and be inspired by it to create "derivative works" without a license.
After all, the functioning work in "intellectual property" is "property". And a property holder is certain within its rights to hoard its belongings.
The fact that this scenario is so ludicrous demonstrates that even if all music and literature can be the "property" of a single corporate entity or trust which I doubt then society has every right to claim access to that "property" as a central part of its culture.
A clear case of eminent domain!
Please remove your rose colored glasses and back away slowly :)
Like you, I was on the internet five years ago (and before). Unlike you, I do not recollect it so fondly.
NNTP newsgroups were not appreciably more interesting or informative than they are today. In many cases, newsgroups only become valuable once they have been around long enough to develop a kind of "lore" and archive of all the discussions that have taken place in them over the years. This, necessarily, was absent or sparse back when the groups were newer.
It may have been true that the spirit on the WWW was more collegial and the participants less concerned with personal benefit, but mainly the web was populated by dabblers who wanted to put up a scanned picture of their dorm room or girlfriend. "Valuable" sites were mainly collections of interesting links to the small number of pages that contained data of real use. And the simple fact that very few websites existed and that they were mainly the creations of students or professors in educational institutions (or porn) meant that the content of the web was limited. It was not possible in those days to perform a search for "half-hitch" and get back dozens of valuable, instructive hits about how to tie knots. The attitude of the web may have been different but the breadth was sorely lacking.
In other words, the things you remember fondly are not only still present on the net, but improved in almost all cases! In addition, we have access now to commercial sites that simply didn't exist in those days. It may be that those sites speak more loudly than your favorite nook of the web, but they are at worst hogging the limelight. They are not pushing out the original spirit. Not by any means.
There's your answer right there you fucking skinflint!
The minimum donation to most anti-freedom organizations (700 club, CC, Heritage, etc) is $25 with most members giving at lest $50. You think 70,000 tightwads chucking pennies at the problem is going to make a difference?
Indeed they do still exist. Consider my place of employment, where I have worked now for just over three years. At this outfit every employee has his or her own private window office with walls to the ceilings and no cubes. Employees are treated to significant free food and drink and one probably could live for a while just migrating around the buildings snarfing up the freebie lunches and dinners for those who work hard. We play with nerf guns, water guns, yo yos, and even have little nerf turf wars going on between groups. There is a foosball table on floor #1, a pool table on floor #3, and a ping pong table in the next building. Elsewhere you can find free arcade games. And it is not uncommon to see long haired geeks clad in t-shirts and hawaiian straw hats walking barefoot through the halls. In addition, this place where I work provides me with extreme technical challenges and difficult problems that require me to grow. We work on projects that affect thousands, tens or thousands, or even millions of people depending upon our area of focus. Because of this we have issues related to security, deployment, and scale that dwarf those faced by most tech workers. In my position I have had to go from zero to expert not only in areas such as security, XML, and networking, but also in the area of managing conflict and engaging others to work towards goals. Finally this business provides its employees with astonishing resources and is unlikely to vanish for quite some time. In case you haven't glanced at my email by now, this business is Microsoft. :-)
I think the best solution is more drastic: kick everyone off the big five TLDs and stick them under a country code -- where they're supposed to be -- and let them prove that they deserve an international name; Wonderful. In that event only entities with a presence in more than one country would get .com, .org, or .net.
Well, that leaves the United Nations, the Peace Corp, and every corporation making more than $1 million a year.
Cuts us right out, tho. Is that what you had in mind?
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Against Intel's market share and marketing engine (such as the Intel Inside campaign), AMD is doing the prudent thing by forging strategic alliances, rather than waiting for the computing public to recognize them as a superior provider.
.9Ghz Athlon at home and love it - I have never had better performance from a machine)
When AMD produces a superior product, they will be recognized by the market. Today they don't have that claim. You can't walk into a Circuit City these days without seeing that a plurality of the processors for off-the-shelf machines are AMD, so IMHO Intel's vaunted monopoly is a bust top hat. AMD runs in second place because it actually lags behind Intel in several key spots.
(Disclaimer: I run a
The fact is that AMD has beaten Intel only in two spaces: price/performance, and mindshare among the tech savvy. Apart from those advantages, there are still numerous failing in their product line:
1) Power consumption. They've kept themselves well out of the laptop and server farm market by eating power like a pig and blowing it in the form of heat. I have heard that AMD is reducing power in their Clawhammer chips though.
2) No non-vapor multiproc motherboards for the Athlon. Granted this is not really their fault, although I have heard that the Althon has a hard time achieving greater than 2-way SMP. Anyway, you can't enter the lucrative server market until you can at least support 2-way on a range of platforms and in reality you aren't viable until you have support for at least 8-way. Looking forward to the day when motherboard makers open their eyes to this opportunity.
3) Incompatibilities with gaming hardware. If you aren't in the server business you'd better be in the home user market and nothing uses a CPU like games. Once again this isn't exactly their fault, but at least in my case several pieces of my hardware had to have their drivers patched up before they would work with AMD and I even briefly had to crank down my AGP to 2x instead of 4x in order to prevent my games from freezing. All of these problems can be solved (enough other people have noticed them to have populated with web with helpful tips) but this is not the way to earn the trust of home users. The worst part is, it was most likely the makers of the other hardware items that failed to perform adequate QA, but fingerpointing never fixed a box.
4) Brand name. Where are the AMD ads to counterpoise the Intel blue guys? This company, despite its great product line, doesn't seem to have any message for ordinary consumers beyond "We're almost the same as Intel!" If you read through the last two problems above, you might agree with me that brand recognition is the root of both. So why don't they do something about it?
There are lots of advantages to buying AMD, but equally strong disadvantages at the present time. For certain applications AMD is the way to go. For others, regrettably the best choice is Intel.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
For those of us working on closed software and not in a position to take advantage of open-sourced peer review, code reviews are a critical substitute. This backdoor illustrates what happens when dev's are "trusted" to code morally and never second-guessed. Of all the advantages of OSS, peer review is the one closed-source developers have to work hardest to replicate.
Currently I am leading my team through a series of security code reviews for a system that transacts money. We joke about finding a method called "PayTim()", but it is not entirely a joke. No matter how much we would all like to believe that our team is composed of trustworthy devs, it is important to establish the expectation that all code is reviewed. It keeps the honest honest.
Not to mention that we have found and fixed many hidden security and reliability flaws along the way, thus improving the quality of our product.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
For those of us working on closed software and not in a position to take advantage of open-sourced peer review, code reviews are a critical substitute. This backdoor illustrates what happens when dev's are "trusted" to code morally and never second-guessed. Of all the advantages of OSS, peer review is the one closed-source developers have to work hardest to replicate.
Currently I am leading my team through a series of security code reviews for a system that transacts money. We joke about finding a method called "PayTim()", but it is not entirely a joke. No matter how much we would all like to believe that our team is composed of trustworthy devs, it is important to establish the expectation that all code is reviewed. Its keeps the honest honest.
Not to mention that we have found and fixed many hidden security and reliability flaws along the way, thus improving the quality of our product.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Other than as a curiosity specific to the dating or organic matter and archaelogical finds, this is irrelevant. Serious dating is performed with the Isochron method.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Just so you know, a minaret is a kind of tower. I am pretty sure fingers cannot weave minarets in any sense. Maybe you meant pirouettes?
Although I don't know what they would be doing weaving those either.
-your friendly grammar nazi,
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
What is wrong with the word palimpsest? It is a perfectly valid word that I have seen used since way back when I was a kid (the Beyond Zork game let you pick up a palimpsest as part of a puzzle, IIRC). Not only that, but the author is using it perfectly correctly - the world of Dying Earth is a medium upon which many people have scribbled but which has been wiped clean due to the impending cock-up in the sun.
Using palimpsest here is accurate, economical and I daresay even elegant. It is a good choice; why are you criticising him just because you had to look it up?
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Sorry, I meant to post the above comment as myself, not as AC.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Quantum scrambling of communication is cool, and indeed may provide an unbreakable code protocol, but the kind of unreserved exuberance in the article might be unwise.
The essence of public/private key crypto (which is what we use today for key exchange) is the putative difficulty of prime-factoring a very large number. Our confidence in this sort of algorithm stems from centuries of direct investigation of this problem and corresponding centuries of failure to accomplish a solution in a reasonable time order. The problems involved in solving this problem is so well understood that mathematicians have even been able to generalize this problem to a class of seemingly unrelated problems in the NP set. I won't pretend I understand NP at all, but any discipline that can draw a parallel between prime factorization and problems like the traveling salesman is obviously deeply researched and well developed.
"Quantum crypto" as the article calls it, is not based upon this sort of deep understanding. Far from it; instead, it is based upon our somewhat naiive observation that particles flip in unison "like magic" when they are quantum-associated. While certainly QM is also a complex field of study with just over a hundred years of development, I don't think anybody out there can make any kind of definitive statement or even guess about why quantum binding happens or how it works.
Given this, how can we be confident in an algorithm founded upon what is basically our collective ignorance? Surely there is some kind of fundamental law or reason behind quantum binding, and when we come to understand it (string theory?), perhaps the "magic" of QM will suddenly seem kind of prosaic and even influenceable. There really is no way of knowing because even the most skilled practictioners of the science bicker about the exact cause and mechanism.
Not to be a damper - I would love to see this system working - but we need to be honest about our ignorance and how it could hurt us in the long run.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!