I wasn't actually thinking of objects large enough to have a significant influence on one and/or another, but it's very intresting to see gravity, a purely attractive force, keeping objects apart.
L1 is unstable. By "unstable", it doesn't mean "unstable to something hitting it", it means "unstable to anything"
Now there's a concept with some intresting consequences... if more than one body shares the same orbit, that too is "unstable to anything" in the sense that the lightest touch imaginable means they'll eventually collide... and Lagrange points are probably good places to go looking for exotic particles with negative mass...
Take two bodies A & B and put them in some kind of orbit about each other. Now take a third much smaller body C and put it at L1 - the Lagrange point between A & B. The positions of the three bodies should be entirely predictable for all eternity. Now have C struck by Deep Impact, or a butterflys wing, or something. Now C is destined to hit either A or B, the question is which? There's no way of knowing, because it's like a pendulum swinging between two magnets, which is one of the canonical examples of a chaotic system.
Please forget I said that... flawed in some embrassingly obvious ways too... like I meant "orbit" not "hit", and it being nothing like a pendulum swinging between two magnets. Oops.
That's a very good argument for the solar system being a chaotic system - thanks.
Here's the kind of thing I had in mind when I wondered if a system could go from predictable to chaotic: (I now think this is flawed, but that just makes posting it here all the more fun)
Take two bodies A & B and put them in some kind of orbit about each other. Now take a third much smaller body C and put it at L1 - the Lagrange point between A & B. The positions of the three bodies should be entirely predictable for all eternity. Now have C struck by Deep Impact, or a butterflys wing, or something. Now C is destined to hit either A or B, the question is which? There's no way of knowing, because it's like a pendulum swinging between two magnets, which is one of the canonical examples of a chaotic system.
I've sometimes wondered if you could trigger some kind of butterfly-effect by interfering with a (solar) system that might look anarchic, but has actually had several billion years to settle down into some kind of inscrutable relative-equilibrum... but I have to say I don't think it's very likely.
A thieving opportunist has stolen a van of my latest publication hot off the press!
But that SPANKED-up idiot has left the rear doors open and now my, artistically violent, tastefully desctructive video game is being dropped all over the Internet.
Persue that trail of illegal copies diligently and aggressively collecting evidence as you go.
When you've followed the trail to that thieving SPANK-head, waste him.
Country harbors spammers, cut them off from the US internet. Spammers AND the companies that hire them BOTH held equally liable. If it's a criminal act to spam, it's a criminal act to hire someone to spam.
Don't forget to criminalise the act of responding to spam by buying stuff off of spammers, while you're at it.
OK, I agree the structured approach has serious virtues too... I still think it would be a mistake to rely upon it exclusively, though.
What most OSS hackers don't realize is that in commercial software companies...
What a lot of OSS hackers do have is day-jobs in commercial software companies. i.e. I think they realise exactly what goes on in these places
Commercial software generally has a very proactive approach
Nah, who cares as long as sales aren't affected? - and maybe they wont be as long as you can be seen to be re-acting. Certainly in the past it's been possible to make money off of applications with sieve-like security
while OSS has a very reactive approach to problems
Depends on why they cared enough to write the software in the first place. The reasons are many and varied so I would hesitate to make such a generalisation myself.
but he does not believe those eyeballs are looking for security problems in a structured way.
...I reckon you've got to think outside the box to find security problems anyway... or are all those potential crackers out there going to be looking for 'sploits in a structured way? yeah, right.
I'm an FPS guy so I don't know what has been going on in the RPG/RTS world.
And I feel like I don't know what is going on in the Open Source gaming world. Is it me, or does it get very little coverage on Slashdot? - not that I'm critising Slashdot as it has plenty of other things to cover, but does anyone have any suggestions on where to look. When I've Googled, I've generally turned up the pages for individual projects, rather than news sources.
Easier when you know what you're brute-forcing is an e-mail address. I don't know how big the DNS system is, but I'd hazard there are only 4 bytes of entrophy in it (domain's are not the same as IP addresses, but that's what I'm basing my estimate on).
For example, if you count everything from the @ sign in your e-mail address as being only 4 bytes, there are only 11 bytes total, so it is NOT impossible that, say, a 16 byte MD5 hash of your e-mail address could be reversed (still very hard, though)
Just getting the output-channel, from brain to computer, would reduce the incidence of nerve problems in people's arms, such as carpal-tunnel syndrome or strain on the ulnar nerve (which I am bothered with right now).
The more alternative output-channels the better, but I dread to think what mental injuries we might be able to do ourselves in the future by thinking in an unnatural fashion repetitively.
I'd much rather see sign-language recognition myself.
the difference between Linux and Microsoft
on
Joe Trippi Interviewed
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
and made the campaign a lot stronger. Just like how open-source works in running software -- it's the difference between Linux and Microsoft
Come to think of it, basically everything I ever do with my computer involves a certain amount of learning and creativity.
What depresses me is that every creative idea I have for stuff to do with my computer, seems to require vast amounts of toil, scouring through documentation, and learning how to jump through some very arbitary-seeming hoops, to get to where I want to go. That's the reason why I spend very little time being creative at my computer.
But even worse than this, PayPal forces you to be a customer.
Yep, I've been there too. I don't like it because I live within the EU data protection umbrella, but had to give PayPal permission to store my data on their US servers, so that my data is now vunerable to random subpoenas and goodness knows what else.
Still, my credit card was due to expire within a few weeks, so I didn't lose much sleep over it:-)
grandparent: You don't speak dates like this: "Meet me 17 April 2004." It's not natural. You might say "Meet me on April 17th 2004."
parent: Not in English it isn't, but in most European languages it is:
French, Dutch, Spanish, German,... (those are just the ones I know.. surely there are more)
English is a European language, and we're far more likely to say "Meet me on the 17th of April" over here.
The end result is that you only spend time teaching the theory, and grade the practice along the way, in the end forcing them to apply everything in a meaningful fashion, proving they know what they were doing. I gained a lot from every class, no matter how much I hated the material, and it has payed off in a very real fashion in my work.
Then it sounds like you've had a good, well-rounded education. Excellant. (mine was OK too, btw, but that's irrelevant as I didn't study cs)
Spoken like someone who has never studied computer science theory.
hehe, true enough. We'll see who is first up against the wall when the revolution comes;-)
Of course, as a pragmatist I would be foolish to discount the utility of cs theory entirely... but it would be an even worse folly to rely entirely upon theory. And besides, lots of talented individuals have bottled their knowledge inside of API's and stuff that I can use (let's hear it for Open Source!), so most of the time, I don't need to know how it works, anyway.
Take the hint from the majority of good Universities who teach computer science, where you are simply expected to pick up a language in your spare time, because that aspect is secondary to the theory, and the easier of the two.
The difference between theory and practice is very small in theory, but rather large in practice.
That's true, but it still kinda sticks out like a sore thumb.
It does indeed, very true - but then what I wrote above was a parlour-game which was meant to be spotted, and it's meaning figured out - and not proper steganography where the intention is the converse.
In my opinion it is not a good day to be a software development shop.
On the other hand, it's probably a wonderful time to be offering consultancy on systems integration and how to best tailor particular open source programs to a clients needs.
Slashdot Mirror
I wasn't actually thinking of objects large enough to have a significant influence on one and/or another, but it's very intresting to see gravity, a purely attractive force, keeping objects apart.
Now there's a concept with some intresting consequences... if more than one body shares the same orbit, that too is "unstable to anything" in the sense that the lightest touch imaginable means they'll eventually collide... and Lagrange points are probably good places to go looking for exotic particles with negative mass...
Take two bodies A & B and put them in some kind of orbit about each other. Now take a third much smaller body C and put it at L1 - the Lagrange point between A & B. The positions of the three bodies should be entirely predictable for all eternity. Now have C struck by Deep Impact, or a butterflys wing, or something. Now C is destined to hit either A or B, the question is which? There's no way of knowing, because it's like a pendulum swinging between two magnets, which is one of the canonical examples of a chaotic system.
Please forget I said that... flawed in some embrassingly obvious ways too... like I meant "orbit" not "hit", and it being nothing like a pendulum swinging between two magnets. Oops.
That's a very good argument for the solar system being a chaotic system - thanks.
Here's the kind of thing I had in mind when I wondered if a system could go from predictable to chaotic: (I now think this is flawed, but that just makes posting it here all the more fun)
Take two bodies A & B and put them in some kind of orbit about each other. Now take a third much smaller body C and put it at L1 - the Lagrange point between A & B. The positions of the three bodies should be entirely predictable for all eternity. Now have C struck by Deep Impact, or a butterflys wing, or something. Now C is destined to hit either A or B, the question is which? There's no way of knowing, because it's like a pendulum swinging between two magnets, which is one of the canonical examples of a chaotic system.
I've sometimes wondered if you could trigger some kind of butterfly-effect by interfering with a (solar) system that might look anarchic, but has actually had several billion years to settle down into some kind of inscrutable relative-equilibrum... but I have to say I don't think it's very likely.
A thieving opportunist has stolen a van of my latest publication hot off the press! But that SPANKED-up idiot has left the rear doors open and now my, artistically violent, tastefully desctructive video game is being dropped all over the Internet. Persue that trail of illegal copies diligently and aggressively collecting evidence as you go. When you've followed the trail to that thieving SPANK-head, waste him.
Don't forget to criminalise the act of responding to spam by buying stuff off of spammers, while you're at it.
OK, I agree the structured approach has serious virtues too... I still think it would be a mistake to rely upon it exclusively, though.
What most OSS hackers don't realize is that in commercial software companies...
What a lot of OSS hackers do have is day-jobs in commercial software companies. i.e. I think they realise exactly what goes on in these places
Commercial software generally has a very proactive approach
Nah, who cares as long as sales aren't affected? - and maybe they wont be as long as you can be seen to be re-acting. Certainly in the past it's been possible to make money off of applications with sieve-like security
while OSS has a very reactive approach to problems
Depends on why they cared enough to write the software in the first place. The reasons are many and varied so I would hesitate to make such a generalisation myself.
but he does not believe those eyeballs are looking for security problems in a structured way.
And I feel like I don't know what is going on in the Open Source gaming world. Is it me, or does it get very little coverage on Slashdot? - not that I'm critising Slashdot as it has plenty of other things to cover, but does anyone have any suggestions on where to look. When I've Googled, I've generally turned up the pages for individual projects, rather than news sources.
For example, if you count everything from the @ sign in your e-mail address as being only 4 bytes, there are only 11 bytes total, so it is NOT impossible that, say, a 16 byte MD5 hash of your e-mail address could be reversed (still very hard, though)
Yes, but it would be kind of nice if all those spam-zombies out there got white-knighted and fell quiet, all the same.
The more alternative output-channels the better, but I dread to think what mental injuries we might be able to do ourselves in the future by thinking in an unnatural fashion repetitively.
I'd much rather see sign-language recognition myself.
Last I checked, Linux has yet to win the OS wars.
What depresses me is that every creative idea I have for stuff to do with my computer, seems to require vast amounts of toil, scouring through documentation, and learning how to jump through some very arbitary-seeming hoops, to get to where I want to go. That's the reason why I spend very little time being creative at my computer.
Yep, I've been there too. I don't like it because I live within the EU data protection umbrella, but had to give PayPal permission to store my data on their US servers, so that my data is now vunerable to random subpoenas and goodness knows what else.
Still, my credit card was due to expire within a few weeks, so I didn't lose much sleep over it :-)
Ah-ha, trust the compiler do you? No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code.
OK, yes, I admit it ;-)
You don't speak dates like this: "Meet me 17 April 2004." It's not natural. You might say "Meet me on April 17th 2004."
parent: ... (those are just the ones I know.. surely there are more)
Not in English it isn't, but in most European languages it is: French, Dutch, Spanish, German,
English is a European language, and we're far more likely to say "Meet me on the 17th of April" over here.
Then it sounds like you've had a good, well-rounded education. Excellant. (mine was OK too, btw, but that's irrelevant as I didn't study cs)
hehe, true enough. We'll see who is first up against the wall when the revolution comes ;-)
Of course, as a pragmatist I would be foolish to discount the utility of cs theory entirely... but it would be an even worse folly to rely entirely upon theory. And besides, lots of talented individuals have bottled their knowledge inside of API's and stuff that I can use (let's hear it for Open Source!), so most of the time, I don't need to know how it works, anyway.
The difference between theory and practice is very small in theory, but rather large in practice.
It does indeed, very true - but then what I wrote above was a parlour-game which was meant to be spotted, and it's meaning figured out - and not proper steganography where the intention is the converse.
"Even if you encode the text somehow, its presence would still stick out like a much larger sore thumb than, say, a message hidden in a JPG file."
But XML does give you plenty of potential hiding places for data (e.g. white-space)
On the other hand, it's probably a wonderful time to be offering consultancy on systems integration and how to best tailor particular open source programs to a clients needs.