It's worth remembering that all the humanist values that you hold dear... the rights of man, civil liberty, universal suffrage, the civil rights movement... were first nurtured in churches, at a time when these views were very unpopular.
They were also roundly denounced in churches, at times when those views were unpopular - just like homosexuality in the modern era. It's almost like the people giving sermons in church are people with varying opinions, and not particularly special in any way!
Uhhhm... after you guess the wrong password five times, the account is locked out and a system administrator needs to unlock it. If the sysadmin is unlocking the account ten times a day and the user swears that he's not entering in wrong passwords, then the sysadmin knows that there's something wrong.
If you've got the password hash and you're trying to brute force it, you've already won - you've got the password hash. How the hell did you get that without really high level access to the server you're trying to get in to?
Now, if we're talking about something like a drive that was encrypted with a passphrase and has been shipped across the country, then a long and complex password (transmitted out of band, obviously) would be a good idea. Of course, you could just encrypt it with the recipient's public key and sign it with your private key, but that would be too smart.
Look: as long as it takes more than (let's say) a hundred attempts to guess your password, you're safe. All those retarded BDSM password rules are just bullshit management insists on so they feel secure.
So? Just because they were paid laborers doesn't mean the worker attrition rate wasn't horrific. People are willing to endure a whole lot of shit for their daily bread. Further, just because they were paid doesn't mean they weren't effectively slaves - after all, if you're not going to work on the Pyramid, what else are you going to do? None of the rice paddies need unskilled labor, the Pharoah is pre-empting all other construction projects for his great endeavor, and where else are you going to get health insurance if you don't work for him?
Wait sorry I was channeling modern day America for a moment there. Anyway, even though you may be paid, you're still a slave if your only choices are "take this job" or "starve and die".
Seriously, screwing the motherboard into place on the chassis, putting the PSU where it's supposed to be without destroying something and mounting the heatsink without blowing away one of those delicate motherboard capacitors that designers are fond of putting right next to where the huge heavy sharp heatsink goes are the three most challenging parts of assembling a computer. The rest is all plug 'n play a monkey could do, and I bet a monkey wouldn't drop the goddamn ram.
Actually, I would expect the futureman to respect my beliefs and not try to force his modern culture on me (and hence not shoot me, and if I do die not revive me); however, I would extend that same respect to the futureman: I would not try to block legislation that would, for instance, move psyche-donors to the top of the mental apparatus transplant lists because I believe such things to be against my ancient New Reformed Spaghettheology beliefs. I wouldn't try to change the education standards of the era to only teach my cherished but now known to be wrong Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, instead of their shiny new Grand Unified Theory. I wouldn't try to deny people the right to genetically screen their potential children, in order to avoid the pain and hardship of raising children with gross physical and mental deformities.
Unfortunately, we have our own transplants from a thousand years ago who are right now trying to accomplish the equivalent of these very things.
Yes, he did. He wanted to destroy religion in the Soviet Union and build an Atheist society. Nitpicking about the cause when you're quite happy to ignore historical context for religious abuses of power suggests a double standard on your part.
Funny. Then why was Stalin declared "the divinely anointed leader of [Russia's] armed and cultural forces leading us to victory over the barbarian invasion" by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1942? You'd think that if his goal really was to destroy religion in the Soviet Union and build an atheistic society, he wouldn't have negotiated with the church like that.
Or maybe Stalin just wanted power and control, regardless of its source?
There are at least two documentaries "out there" somewhere, in which today's modern engineering big shots have voiced opinions that they couldn't build a pyramid in the time frame in which the various pyramids were built.
You know why? Because we don't have slaves any more. What they mean is "with modern safety standards, we couldn't build the pyramids". If you told them "Okay, here's two thousand people, you're allowed to kill ten men for every 20 meters in height", they'd be all "so where do I sign on?"
Yeah, I don't understand this. Their religion comes from a time when cutting-edge surgery involved a dull axe, some grain alcohol (to get the surgeon's courage up) and maybe some hot tar if you were lucky. How can they possibly justify applying a book written by a bunch of shepherds and nomads to something as modern as organ transplantation?
And if they think that God intended for His holy book to say something about organ transplants, wouldn't it be right there where it's obvious (like say in the ten commandments), and not hidden away in some obscure little passage?
It's because journalists frequently major in journalism, so all they know how to do is write articles; they don't necessarily know how to do anything but bang on a keyboard.
The point of the Turing test is that if it passes, we can't tell the difference.
Unfortunately that's a really low bar to clear nowadays. It's kind of sad, but judging from MySpace and Facebook the majority of teenagers could profitably be replaced with a small shell script.
I don't think openness of the standard is a benefit in this specific instance. Flash has to be optimized once per platform (so, 3 times).
But Flash has been optimized zero times per platform. It is under the sole control of Adobe, so unless you have some mystical way of improving their legendarily shitty code, Flash is simply not going to get any better ever. Adobe has exactly zero reason to make Flash work any better, because they have zero competition in the market (Silverlight? Don't make me laugh, at this point everyone knows what happens when you take up a Microsoft standard). Because Adobe has no competition, Flash just keeps on getting worse and worse and taking up more and more CPU, which is totally unsupportable in theoretical future low-power web devices. Apple refused to include Flash support in the iPhone and the iPad for a very good reason; it absolutely kills performance, even on a full-blown computer.
On the other hand, if we put control over the implementation of this sort of thing into the hands of the browser companies, we'll see drastic improvements. Apple really wants a speedy, energy efficient yet full-featured browser for its mobile devices; Google wants a browser that can do more than modern ones for its web apps; the Mozilla foundation wants something like HTML 5 because it would fit in with their ideology far better than the current closed browser plugin; Opera wants it because their main market nowadays is mobile web, so their requirements are basically the same as Apple's. All of these companies have very good reasons for implementing something like HTML 5, and they all want you to use their browser - so we're going to see a lot of competition in terms of efficient HTML 5 implementations, just like we've been seeing a lot of competition in terms of efficient Javascript implementations.
Honestly, not the greatest - you'll definitely need to recharge it once you get back home. I tend to spend the day listening to music over a Bluetooth headset, and it handles that well, though the battery is nearly drained when I get home.
Of course, if you're just that hardcore, an extra battery is like $30 and totally user-replaceable:)
Yeah, I can't actually find any microSD cards that are have more than 16 GB right now, and even the 16 GB ones are like $50. As long as it's hardware compatible, I'm sure the N900 will be able to use it - the OS is, after all, based on Debian.
These people do not live in a reality based world. They like John Calvin because they think he was the grandfather of Protestantism, not because he actually was. Also because he was full of fire and brimstone, which is always good for bashing kids in the head with.
It's a new category of computing device just like the toaster was a new category of cooking implement. Sure, it's convenient when you're in a rush or when all you need is toast, but it's far more limited than a stove; if you don't want toast, there's only a few other things you can do with it - but they're all almost impossible to mess up except on purpose. It's totally fine to hand a toaster over to someone you wouldn't trust to boil water, but a person who actually wants to make good food needs a better tool.
It fits in your pocket, and has a physical keyboard.
Seriously, I recently bought an N900, and this thing seems like where the iPad hopes to be in a decade. It does everything I expect out of the box, and everything I want with a bit of effort (I mean shit, I've been playing mobile Chrono Trigger and Freeciv on this thing for the last couple of days without any problems). Not only that, but it comes with 32 GB of internal storage, supports up to 16 GB of removable storage, has 3G built-in, and costs ~$530 (about the price of the base iPad). And it comes with a X-Terminal app. By default. This thing was made for me, I think.
Yeah, it's only got a 600 MHz CPU - but it's also got a 430 MHz DSP, so it can handle a surprising number of things very smoothly. It also doesn't have multi-touch, but that's not really something I need. It doesn't have 802.11n, but I'm okay with that for the next five or ten years - at that point I'll upgrade to something else.
No, the Taliban only want to blow up a couple of buildings and kill a few thousand people, to a total economic loss of a few hundred million, if that. The American Christian fundamentalists, on the other hand, want to fuck up our nation's educational system with their Iron Age mythologies, which will screw us economically in the worst way possible - a generation of children who believe that God created the Earth at some point in the past will have untold consequences on our ability to compete economically with countries that have been putting their children through reality-based curricula.
And that's not even counting the personal, emotional harm that they cause. Do you really think that teaching God Almighty loves you and also hey, he loved Job and killed all of Job's children and family and then gave him better ones doesn't leave emotional scars? Do you really think teaching children that the Rapture is coming any day now and only the most pious will be taken up into Heaven won't cause some neuroses? Seriously, find the accounts some ex-Jehova's Witnesses have of their religion; those people live in the fucking stone age, in terms of their view of reality.
So? They also removed the emphasis on "Enlightenment" from the requirement, and added Aquinas and Calvin. Without the emphasis on Enlightenment philosophy and with the addition of those two horribly out of place philosophers, it's just a grab-bag of names - it doesn't require that the students be taught the principles of the Enlightenment, which were the foundation of modern scientific efforts. Instead, you'll probably see textbooks that take a "fair and balanced" view of Enlightenment vs pre-Enlightenment thought, or something like that.
Basically, there is nothing right about that statement; the Amish do get vaccinated, and they do get autism. It seriously takes less than five minutes of looking to find an Amish autism clinic that cares for autistic children and adults.
Hey here's something the "lazy democrats" tried to pass, but failed:
12:28 - Board member Mavis Knight offers the following amendment: "examine the reasons the Founding Fathers protected religious freedom in America by barring government from promoting or disfavoring any particular religion over all others." Knight points out that students should understand that the Founders believed religious freedom was so important that they insisted on separation of church and state.
12:32 - Board member Cynthia Dunbar argues that the Founders didn't intend for separation of church and state in America. And she's off on a long lecture about why the Founders intended to promote religion. She calls this amendment "not historically accurate."
12:35 - Knight's amendment fails on a straight party-line vote, 5-10. Republicans vote no, Democrats vote yes.
12:38 - Let the word go out here: The Texas State Board of Education today refused to require that students learn that the Constitution prevents the U.S. government from promoting one religion over all others. They voted to lie to students by omission.
FYI, they removed the requirement that students study the impact of ideas from the Enlightenment and Thomas Jefferson's role as an Enlightenment scholar. Instead, they added Saint Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, and removed the specific reference to the Enlightenment.
The original requirement was that students be able to:
"explain the impact of Enlightenment ideas from John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson on political revolutions from 1750 to the present."
It is now:
"explain the impact of the writings of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Charles de Montesquieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin and Sir William Blackstone."
This is, quite frankly, a travesty. The first list had an actual thrust to it (you know, Enlightenment scholars in 1750+). This one is closer to just a list of philosophers that a council of morons thought sounded good - after all, Thomas Aquinas totally proved God exists! And John Calvin came up with Protestantism! Totally what every schoolchild in Texas (and by extension, a large part of the rest of the country) needs to know!
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They were also roundly denounced in churches, at times when those views were unpopular - just like homosexuality in the modern era. It's almost like the people giving sermons in church are people with varying opinions, and not particularly special in any way!
Uhhhm... after you guess the wrong password five times, the account is locked out and a system administrator needs to unlock it. If the sysadmin is unlocking the account ten times a day and the user swears that he's not entering in wrong passwords, then the sysadmin knows that there's something wrong.
If you've got the password hash and you're trying to brute force it, you've already won - you've got the password hash. How the hell did you get that without really high level access to the server you're trying to get in to?
Now, if we're talking about something like a drive that was encrypted with a passphrase and has been shipped across the country, then a long and complex password (transmitted out of band, obviously) would be a good idea. Of course, you could just encrypt it with the recipient's public key and sign it with your private key, but that would be too smart.
Look: as long as it takes more than (let's say) a hundred attempts to guess your password, you're safe. All those retarded BDSM password rules are just bullshit management insists on so they feel secure.
So? Just because they were paid laborers doesn't mean the worker attrition rate wasn't horrific. People are willing to endure a whole lot of shit for their daily bread. Further, just because they were paid doesn't mean they weren't effectively slaves - after all, if you're not going to work on the Pyramid, what else are you going to do? None of the rice paddies need unskilled labor, the Pharoah is pre-empting all other construction projects for his great endeavor, and where else are you going to get health insurance if you don't work for him?
Wait sorry I was channeling modern day America for a moment there. Anyway, even though you may be paid, you're still a slave if your only choices are "take this job" or "starve and die".
Seriously, screwing the motherboard into place on the chassis, putting the PSU where it's supposed to be without destroying something and mounting the heatsink without blowing away one of those delicate motherboard capacitors that designers are fond of putting right next to where the huge heavy sharp heatsink goes are the three most challenging parts of assembling a computer. The rest is all plug 'n play a monkey could do, and I bet a monkey wouldn't drop the goddamn ram.
Actually, I would expect the futureman to respect my beliefs and not try to force his modern culture on me (and hence not shoot me, and if I do die not revive me); however, I would extend that same respect to the futureman: I would not try to block legislation that would, for instance, move psyche-donors to the top of the mental apparatus transplant lists because I believe such things to be against my ancient New Reformed Spaghettheology beliefs. I wouldn't try to change the education standards of the era to only teach my cherished but now known to be wrong Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, instead of their shiny new Grand Unified Theory. I wouldn't try to deny people the right to genetically screen their potential children, in order to avoid the pain and hardship of raising children with gross physical and mental deformities.
Unfortunately, we have our own transplants from a thousand years ago who are right now trying to accomplish the equivalent of these very things.
Apparently not all Jews define death as "when the heart stops beating"; it seems to be only a small yet oddly vocal minority.
Funny. Then why was Stalin declared "the divinely anointed leader of [Russia's] armed and cultural forces leading us to victory over the barbarian invasion" by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1942? You'd think that if his goal really was to destroy religion in the Soviet Union and build an atheistic society, he wouldn't have negotiated with the church like that.
Or maybe Stalin just wanted power and control, regardless of its source?
You know why? Because we don't have slaves any more. What they mean is "with modern safety standards, we couldn't build the pyramids". If you told them "Okay, here's two thousand people, you're allowed to kill ten men for every 20 meters in height", they'd be all "so where do I sign on?"
Yeah, I don't understand this. Their religion comes from a time when cutting-edge surgery involved a dull axe, some grain alcohol (to get the surgeon's courage up) and maybe some hot tar if you were lucky. How can they possibly justify applying a book written by a bunch of shepherds and nomads to something as modern as organ transplantation?
And if they think that God intended for His holy book to say something about organ transplants, wouldn't it be right there where it's obvious (like say in the ten commandments), and not hidden away in some obscure little passage?
It's because journalists frequently major in journalism, so all they know how to do is write articles; they don't necessarily know how to do anything but bang on a keyboard.
The point of the Turing test is that if it passes, we can't tell the difference.
Unfortunately that's a really low bar to clear nowadays. It's kind of sad, but judging from MySpace and Facebook the majority of teenagers could profitably be replaced with a small shell script.
The first ones in 15 billion years, over the entirety of the universe? Not bloody likely.
But Flash has been optimized zero times per platform. It is under the sole control of Adobe, so unless you have some mystical way of improving their legendarily shitty code, Flash is simply not going to get any better ever. Adobe has exactly zero reason to make Flash work any better, because they have zero competition in the market (Silverlight? Don't make me laugh, at this point everyone knows what happens when you take up a Microsoft standard). Because Adobe has no competition, Flash just keeps on getting worse and worse and taking up more and more CPU, which is totally unsupportable in theoretical future low-power web devices. Apple refused to include Flash support in the iPhone and the iPad for a very good reason; it absolutely kills performance, even on a full-blown computer.
On the other hand, if we put control over the implementation of this sort of thing into the hands of the browser companies, we'll see drastic improvements. Apple really wants a speedy, energy efficient yet full-featured browser for its mobile devices; Google wants a browser that can do more than modern ones for its web apps; the Mozilla foundation wants something like HTML 5 because it would fit in with their ideology far better than the current closed browser plugin; Opera wants it because their main market nowadays is mobile web, so their requirements are basically the same as Apple's. All of these companies have very good reasons for implementing something like HTML 5, and they all want you to use their browser - so we're going to see a lot of competition in terms of efficient HTML 5 implementations, just like we've been seeing a lot of competition in terms of efficient Javascript implementations.
Honestly, not the greatest - you'll definitely need to recharge it once you get back home. I tend to spend the day listening to music over a Bluetooth headset, and it handles that well, though the battery is nearly drained when I get home.
Of course, if you're just that hardcore, an extra battery is like $30 and totally user-replaceable :)
But we can't let a bureaucrat get between patients and their health care needs! Not even if that bureaucrat is a doctor!
Spoken like a true disciple of Bob.
Yeah, I can't actually find any microSD cards that are have more than 16 GB right now, and even the 16 GB ones are like $50. As long as it's hardware compatible, I'm sure the N900 will be able to use it - the OS is, after all, based on Debian.
These people do not live in a reality based world. They like John Calvin because they think he was the grandfather of Protestantism, not because he actually was. Also because he was full of fire and brimstone, which is always good for bashing kids in the head with.
It's a new category of computing device just like the toaster was a new category of cooking implement. Sure, it's convenient when you're in a rush or when all you need is toast, but it's far more limited than a stove; if you don't want toast, there's only a few other things you can do with it - but they're all almost impossible to mess up except on purpose. It's totally fine to hand a toaster over to someone you wouldn't trust to boil water, but a person who actually wants to make good food needs a better tool.
(I skipped dinner, can you tell?)
It fits in your pocket, and has a physical keyboard.
Seriously, I recently bought an N900, and this thing seems like where the iPad hopes to be in a decade. It does everything I expect out of the box, and everything I want with a bit of effort (I mean shit, I've been playing mobile Chrono Trigger and Freeciv on this thing for the last couple of days without any problems). Not only that, but it comes with 32 GB of internal storage, supports up to 16 GB of removable storage, has 3G built-in, and costs ~$530 (about the price of the base iPad). And it comes with a X-Terminal app. By default. This thing was made for me, I think.
Yeah, it's only got a 600 MHz CPU - but it's also got a 430 MHz DSP, so it can handle a surprising number of things very smoothly. It also doesn't have multi-touch, but that's not really something I need. It doesn't have 802.11n, but I'm okay with that for the next five or ten years - at that point I'll upgrade to something else.
No, the Taliban only want to blow up a couple of buildings and kill a few thousand people, to a total economic loss of a few hundred million, if that. The American Christian fundamentalists, on the other hand, want to fuck up our nation's educational system with their Iron Age mythologies, which will screw us economically in the worst way possible - a generation of children who believe that God created the Earth at some point in the past will have untold consequences on our ability to compete economically with countries that have been putting their children through reality-based curricula.
And that's not even counting the personal, emotional harm that they cause. Do you really think that teaching God Almighty loves you and also hey, he loved Job and killed all of Job's children and family and then gave him better ones doesn't leave emotional scars? Do you really think teaching children that the Rapture is coming any day now and only the most pious will be taken up into Heaven won't cause some neuroses? Seriously, find the accounts some ex-Jehova's Witnesses have of their religion; those people live in the fucking stone age, in terms of their view of reality.
So? They also removed the emphasis on "Enlightenment" from the requirement, and added Aquinas and Calvin. Without the emphasis on Enlightenment philosophy and with the addition of those two horribly out of place philosophers, it's just a grab-bag of names - it doesn't require that the students be taught the principles of the Enlightenment, which were the foundation of modern scientific efforts. Instead, you'll probably see textbooks that take a "fair and balanced" view of Enlightenment vs pre-Enlightenment thought, or something like that.
Basically, there is nothing right about that statement; the Amish do get vaccinated, and they do get autism. It seriously takes less than five minutes of looking to find an Amish autism clinic that cares for autistic children and adults.
Hey here's something the "lazy democrats" tried to pass, but failed:
FYI, they removed the requirement that students study the impact of ideas from the Enlightenment and Thomas Jefferson's role as an Enlightenment scholar. Instead, they added Saint Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin, and removed the specific reference to the Enlightenment.
The original requirement was that students be able to:
It is now:
This is, quite frankly, a travesty. The first list had an actual thrust to it (you know, Enlightenment scholars in 1750+). This one is closer to just a list of philosophers that a council of morons thought sounded good - after all, Thomas Aquinas totally proved God exists! And John Calvin came up with Protestantism! Totally what every schoolchild in Texas (and by extension, a large part of the rest of the country) needs to know!