Really the only time you have to handle assembly in a PC application is when you're implementing a just in time compiler, and it's becoming the fashion to let LLVM do that for you.
That's an interesting combination of overstating and understating the case.
For one thing, your favourite C/C++ compiler likely contains a hand optimized memcpy() routine, down to assembly if it exposes a worthwhile gain, or coded in C with or without intrinsics if it doesn't. Many C/C++ compilers contain hand-optimized floating point routines, even more so in the embedded world. Plus there are many performance libraries out there to handle the heavy lifting in multimedia, mathematics, and encryption, some of which are vendor tuned to the n'th degree. It's been a while since I've used an Intel library, but this is likely one of the breed:
As for LLVM, I'd say it's more than fashion. The differences in performance characteristics from one micro-architecture to another are nightmares to cope with at the assembly language level. The average tablet computer these days could probably play Kasparov to a draw, and there are still macho programmers out there who think they can do register assignment and live range analysis better than your compiler? Dude, if you've got that much talent, roll up your sleeves and fix the freaking compiler. Hopefully LLVM will solve that old problem of first having to swallow the gcc ast syntax enzyme.
Tautology #1: I can beat my computer at chess => your chess computer sucks (or it's running on your wristwatch).
Tautology #2: I can beat my compiler at coding a non-trivial loop => your compiler sucks.
Unless your goal in life is to win rigged competitions, LLVM is a lot more than a fashion statement.
Microsoft wants IE6 to go away as much as, if not more than, anyone else.
Do you mean that Microsoft now wants to rid the world of IE 6 as badly as they once wanted their corporate customers to permanently indenture themselves by writing IE 6 specific in-house web applications? Or twice as badly?
When you sell your soul for a fixed price, no matter how much you get up front, eventually you begin to think "maybe I could have gotten a bit more". Seller's remorse.
Some doctors, for instance, were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands; they felt that their social status as gentlemen was inconsistent with the idea that their hands could be unclean.
Did they want to cure their patients or were they more concerned with their own dignity and status? One or the other. I don't recall the verse in the Hipocratic Oath about "doing no harm in so far as it's consistent with my social status". Doesn't strike me the vow leaves much scope for weighing one against the other.
Microsoft built this thing knowing what it was from the outset, in fact, so far as I can tell, wanting it to be exactly what it was. I suppose we all wish to shed the lies of our past in favour of the shinier lies of the present.
I never got a five times speedup over Microsoft, but we consistently got 30% reduction in code size, which on a 640KB machine is not to be sneezed at. A big part of that was the excellent register calling conventions and pragma support.
The reality is that Watcom C++ was crushed by Microsoft Visual C++ which had a slick interface lashed onto appalling C++ language support. This was an era when anything slapped in a box was saleable software.
People forget that before eyeballs displaced profit, fatuousness displaced quality. It didn't matter very much if the feature worked as advertised. Software users, like deluded sports fans, believed that hope springs eternal. Maybe it would work in the next version? Sadly, programmers fell for the hype just as often as the end consumers. RIP Watcom.
The day Watcom packed it in—effectively about a version before their last release—I knew that quality had lost the race for many years to come. I didn't have it in me for a career in jello stacking, so I went off for a while to do my own thing. These days, quality is back on the table, for jobs that no longer exist. But if they did, it would be good times again.
Bill Watterson really knew what he was doing when he drew all those snowmen in the first half of the 1990s.
Amazing how rusty the pipeline-stall instruction group becomes after twenty years of disuse. CWD is a little outside the nucleus of RISC instructions screaming to break free. Not the inner circle of hell, but one of the antechambers. More worth forgetting than recollecting.
The true lesson of our x86 heritage: discretion is the greater part of valour. There's a *lot* of aging x86 instructions that belong to the HCF group for all practical purposes.
My GF's great-grandmother passed away in November. She was very close.
Weepy GF gets onto the web site of a regional Canadian carrier that prides itself on its customer service, selects her flight, and begins to fill out the VISA information. After filling out most of the information she clicks "continue" and *bam* up comes VISA's activation during shopping page (ADS) with a giant "I agree" button under inscrutable masses of legal fine print. She is in a fine state of mind for clicking her life away.
This happens right in the middle of the transaction, with no advance warning. Not on the page before she began filling out the details: to complete this transaction with your VISA card, you will be obligated to click "I agree" to the ADS terms of service, which shifts VISA's liability onto your shoulders and plays havoc with established web security practices and altogether makes the world a shittier place.
All of this under the commercial maxim that instant gratification == learned helplessness. Your average user will blindly click anything during gratification interruptus.
As it happens, my red-eyed GF muttered out loud "WTF is this?". It took me about 30s to get past "HF those sleezy MFs". Then I told her to slam down the virtual circuit on her half-completed web page transaction and start the transaction over again using an aging circuit-switched technology far less suited to rights erosion, and also more expensive for the airline to provide. Real human at the other end. What a PITA.
Redacted portions of an online TOS from a large Canadian bank which has since gone 404.
You agree not to: modify, adapt, sub-license, translate, sell, reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble any portion of the Verified by Visa Website or service or the software used in connection with Verified by Visa.
You agree to immediately notify us by contacting us, as we require in our cardholder agreement with you for a lost or stolen card of any unauthorized use of your password or other verification information, or any other breach of security. You will be liable for any unauthorized activity involving use of your password or Activation Data, until we receive such notice.
Answer me this, Batman:
How is one supposed to notify the bank that you've lost control over the password, when you lose control to a phishing widget embedded in a concealed iFrame?
I wrote that riddle back in November, and I'm no closer now to coming up with the solution. FWIW, this agreement is probably less egregious than the one that came up under ADS, from a different major Canadian bank. Bonus marks for completing this task without first discovering how the service works which violates your TOS.
And on the other side, among our kids, there's a growing copyright abolitionism, a generation that rejects the very notion of what copyright is supposed to do, rejects copyright and believes that the law is nothing more than an ass to be ignored and to be fought at every opportunity possible. The extremism on one side begets extremism on the other, a fact we should have learned many, many times over, and both extremes in this debate are just wrong.
For the good of society, the law ought not to be an ass, and the VISA company ought to not be pushing the matter like a used car salesman at the helm of an invincible glass castle.
If this goes ahead, and the knowledge and experience is lost, it will take years to recover from.
Why is it harder for America to copy its own success by starting over from not scratch, when most of Asia finds it easy enough to copy America, starting from almost nothing?
Ironic, given how much commentators liked to compare him to JFK back in the campaign. Kennedy had foresight.
In my books, foresight is returning to space after we solve the fusion energy problem. Has anyone calculated how many trillion bronto-burger ton-years it takes to achieve a successful moon shot?
If you concerning is living to witness the glory of space, get yourself a PhD in enzyme telomerase. Plenty of fish to fry at sea level. Now that we've sequenced the human genome, maybe it's time to lean a little less hard on the glory of "because we can".
The point of this is not to "win" the war on spam, but to force the spammers to convolute their message with sufficient ingenuity that the messages become unintelligible to the morons who purchase the products or buy the penny stocks or launder stolen funds. The point is to convolute the spam until the only option left to the spammer is to render an ice cube in ASCII art containing a subliminal giant wiener.
It's not an arms race against the spammers, who are plenty smart, it's an arms race against their customers, who for the most part are as dumb as a bag of glass hammers.
And it is my task, on behalf of the rest of the world, to convey a thank to the U.S. taxpayers, for Demographic Health Survey. Many are not aware of -- no this is not a joke. This is very serious. It is due to USA's continuous sponsoring during 25 years of the very good methodology for measuring child mortality that we have a grasp of what's happening in the world. And it is U.S. government at its best, without advocacy, providing facts, that it's useful for the society. And providing data free of charge, on the internet, for the world to use. Thank you very much.
Quite in the opposite of the World Bank [who rock] it's just that we would like to upgrade our international agencies to deal with the world in a modern way, as we do. And when it comes to free data and transparency, United States of America is one of the best. And that doesn't come easy from the mouth of a Swedish public health professor.
technically an all lowercase password is just as secure as any other password
You must have missed the bulletin which explains that security consists of becoming a less inviting target than the guy beside you. If the sheep tend to use all lower-case passwords (baaaaaa), then you're best off wearing a different cloak.
it is probably also better to start all of your passwords with a 'z' since they tend to check in alphabetical order [citation needed]
I thought script kiddies were all playing on the streets of the Facebook favela these days, and that unemployed Russian PhDs were out there flexing their combinatorics.
From that training set, it would be pretty easy to code up a Markov letter bigram or trigram model and enumerate from least entropy on up (a near approximation to this is plenty good enough). My guess is that that nine letter all-lowercase passwords would be on roughly the same tier as six letter passwords with multiple punctuation marks.
This study was a bit stupid in reporting password strength. A nine letter password from two symbol sets will be close in strength to an eight letter password from three symbol sets, as long as the nine letter password doesn't build upon trivial substrings.
I think this is why the recommendation demands three symbol sets: it gives users less scope to squander entropy that a longer, ordinary character password ought to have.
One time, as a joke, a very long time ago, a devious coworker put a keystroke logger on a paranoid coworker and the password revealed was 6uldv8. Apparently there's more than one reason to keep your passwords secret.
I generate all my own passwords starting from suggestions offered by OpenBSD's apg utility. For crap sites, I try to achieve an estimated entropy in the vicinity of 30 bits and scale up to about 60 bits at the paranoid end: 5*6 (a brief burst of line noise), 6*5, 7*4, 8*4, 9*3, 10*3 (baby talk).
For longer passwords, you can pair two words from a large dictionary (about 13 bits entropy each) and then add another four bits with a single symbol corruption. Routinely sticking an ! in between two obscure dictionary words is not a good idea if you're concerned about cross entropy, where the attacker already knows some of your passwords by other means. I avoid consistent corruption templates, because I don't want to lower the cross-entropy on a set of partially exposed passwords too severely.
For most purposes, even 20 bits of entropy is a good start, if the attack involves knocking on the front door. Not so good if the hashed password file is compromised behind the scenes. Even 30 bits is pathetic in the latter case, but this reasonably well mitigated by never sharing a password across multiple sites.
At 40 bits, the attacker begins to ask whether there's any money involved. A high-end video card, properly coded, would sneeze at 40 bits. However, properly coded still isn't free,
By the time you get to 50 bits, it's time to start asking whether you've seriously pissed off the wrong person. Quite doable, with a modicum of enmity, but not worth the bother if the game is shooting fish in a barrel at least expense. Armour piercing rounds are deployed sparingly.
I wouldn't be the least bit surprised that the NSA has accumulated a dictionary of the trillion most common passwords, sorted by descending order of frequency, covering all languages and source lexicons of the world (pets, pet names, Klingon, Thalassian, Qenya) permuted into all manner of imposed password template schema. I'd be shocked if they hadn't. For that matter, Google could build a good approximation to that dictionary just using their lexigram index, on roughly the terascale.
Shedding about 10 bits of protection per decade, we'll soon need to return to Beowulf era culture where reciting your ancestors back to the garden of Eden was the gold standard for accurate recall.
24 hour cable tv as much as the internet have reduced the demand for print news because they make print news out of date before it arrives on the doorstep.
Why is it that so many people can't get past the skim milk reflex long enough to arrive at the aged cheddar nirvana? I used to subscribe to the Economist precisely *because* they had to age the news longer than 90s.
It strikes me that many people attend the news more to not feel left out than to gain insight or comprehension. It all people want is to feel included, quality is going to be a tough sell.
This might not be a popular observation in some circles, but there is a certain brand of religious sentiment rooted in separation disorder and potential collapse of the boundaries of self. In this tent, god functions as an auxiliary shoring pole. Somehow, despite insuperable odds against this, some of us manage to function without one.
Without us constantly ignoring that all we know... defined through its relativity, is [not] in any way related to any "truth", we would go completely and utterly crazy...
Hang onto that pole, buddy, it's all you've got.
I'm deferring my personal rapture of completely and utterly for the debut screening of the Total Perspective Vortex, arriving in theatres near you not long after the Kurzweilian singularity cures humanity of our misguided detour into sexual reproduction—that whole Adam and Eve and apple thing.
Seriously, this absolutist depiction of truth is highly overrated, best suited for the bully pulpit or some taffy-stretched argument about the interlocking nature of determinism and free will. Truth does not amount to moral certainty. It's not a slice of lembas bread wrapped in the silver leaves of the fruitless Mallorn tree (sparing the elves forbidden knowledge, but also leaving them a mite hazy on the inner workings of general relativity).
The smallest apparatus I've yet discovered to explore the relationship between truth and certitude is Ackermann's VTOL exhaust-fume reburner. Fits nicely on a napkin in your driveway, until you light the match.
You might wish to save your efforts to compute A(10,10) for the infinite afterlife, should you believe in one. By a little known corollary, the computed value of A(10,10) is exceeded in magnitude only by the number of unanswered emails in your eternal inbox when you triumphantly roll down your timeless sleeves. Not even a sonic boom as this functions punches effortlessly through the Googleplex.
Doesn't require much skill to compute on eternal parchment, but you will need a large stack of reliable bookmarks and a tendency not to daydream. It could even be done with a large system of jars and marbles, if you're not afraid of heights. I'm told the TPV is stunning to behold from above, but I don't think standing up there on a ladder at the rim of the marble jar I could let go of both rails long enough to plink marble. I think I'd have to use my mouth and not swallow too many on the long ascent. A belly full of marbles would make the climb severely unpleasant. On the trip back down, you can measure Plink's constant.
Really, people who stand on truth eternal haven't given a mayfly's wet dream to the highly intractable application of truth, which is not a small matter, intractability having been baked by god into the integers themselves. As Babbage amended Descartes: I count, therefore the greater portion of certitude lies forever beyond my ken.
Finally, here's one that most people don't know. What did Maxwell say when the apple fell?
The main purpose of robots.txt is to keep web spiders (aka "robots") from getting stuck in a tarpit of script-generated pages
You mean provocating cause at point of consensus. Once something becomes ensconced as a facility of the commons, it's purpose takes on a life of its own, as practiced in the large.
Robots.txt also serves as a sentinel for which parties on the net are playing ball, but obeying robots.txt, and who is operating outside the bounds of conformity, DoSing whatever they please.
Good luck getting a job with children when that accusation is revealed to a potential employer.
Sometimes when the world conspires to enact injustice, it's the prison wardens of small minds in the general population who need to be taken to task. Likewise with your credit record. A merchant can make an unfounded allegation about payment failure, and the blotch is hard to remove. Soon people begin to fear the malingering blotch and behave in frightened, risk averse ways, which the worst of the merchants soon begin to exploit.
Personally, I think the solution is to add teeth to the liability laws, to the point that when a person suffers an social injury (such as denial of employment and credit), there is someone useful to sue for having allowed the unsubstantiated information to flow around the loop in the first place.
Comments that quickly get you sued if you mention them in public can be erected as monuments if you commit them to permanent electronic storage, equally without basis, and then dress up the reports with an agency masthead. It doesn't even matter if the agency can tell their torus from a hole in the ground.
Every time his family is detained by airport security for extra Vaseline, it's an offence against their reputation and dignity in the court of small minds who witness the spectacle.
Kind of makes a guy want to set up a credit reporting agency on relationship fidelity. A solid marketing tie-in to a couple of dating agencies, you could do pretty good, $20 for a quick peak at the morning-after decorum score would find many takers. Or just a quick $5 for the post-coital returns-your-call score.
Of course, 100% of your data would be scurrilous, but a solidly designed masthead on the official-looking fidelity report seems to take care of this. Something like "by appointment of the queen" if your headquarters reside in the BVI. Don't touch that one if you reside in the U.K. The queen has rights under British law.
I just don't get why credit reporting agencies and the police enjoy this giant loophole on damaging reputations with unfounded data, when liability laws are in other regards extremely strict on this matter.
How about one that would appeal to my exogenous backbone, my poker cue of moral outrage? How about a public CYA cowardice index, which details the many small cowardly decisions people make in life, such as not to interview a person because you've discovered an unsubstantiated allegation as part of a background check, knowing full well that the agency in question does not vouch that there is any reality behind the aspersion, but you then decide to cover your own by screening the person out from further consideration nevertheless, on the grounds that your peers will prove equally mired in cowardice in the judgement of your actions.
Those are the many tiny moral transactions by which our faulty instruments of government ascend into the shadowy penumbra of totalinariasm.
The reason there is so much blame in this world against government is that secretly wish government to function well enough to protect us from our own cowardice, which it rarely fails to achieve.
We could start by demanding a reversal in this effective debasement of our liability laws.
proportional fonts can be read 14% faster than fixed-width fonts
Sounds good, until brain engages, 14% later. can be always flags +10 in my wetware instance of CrapAssassin, unless BeerGoggles is displacing cycles.
I think, with maybe 60,000 hours of reading time under my lengthening belt, I'd have noticed this effect by now, if it applied carte blanch to all modes of reading. The other night I skimmed the 130,000 words supplied in response to the Edge 2010 question "How is the Internet changing the way YOU think?" This was not the cream of their efforts, but there were some interesting topical centers.
My reading speed through this exercise varied by an order of magnitude, depending on signal density. The weird thing is, for some of the longer responses, my subconscious sends notice "nothing to see here" at a skimming speed where I have no clue what words are actually flying past. Every so often, I drop out of warp speed to double check, and sure enough, not very much to see here, by whatever criteria turns my crank, which itself is sometimes elusive to my conscious mind.
I took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.
— Woody Allen
I once attended a school where in some dark closet they kept copies of "Duck and Cover" films, as well as a CRM114-vintage machine designed to stretch your saccade, by forcing you to read words in a revealed window with a progressive speed ratchet.
I never did especially well compared to the best of my classmates on the quiz that followed. Had they slowed that stupid thing down to about half the speed they were forcing us to read, followed by an essay question to expound upon conceptual error, distortion, slant, exaggeration, and damn lies, I would have run out of foolscap before completing my task. In critical response, I was an autobahn surrounded by country lanes, yet many of my classmates could read for uncritical comprehension faster than I could. Dangerous skill. (I'm sure for some of my old classmates, whatever dirt path once existed has returned to nature in their adult years, with ample fertilizer from mainstream media, but that's another matter.)
It's no different with source code. You can read for comprehension, or you can read for all possible error, a state of mind where the eyes consume only a tiny fraction of total brain glucose. Critical thought in the candy factory is hard enough when the conveyor flows along at a consistent speed. Neither can I properly type a long sequence of i and l characters worth a damn in a proportional font. My eyes fail to sync with my fingers, and half the letters fall down my shirt.
Nothing impairs reading speed like a tightly written algorithm where every symbol is exactly right. Nothing inflates the volume of symbols violently gouged onto the retina as a chunk of code where no symbol means precisely what it seems to mean.
Personally, I'm not lining up for smaller gouges in greater number.
Google is a publicly owned company, and if they stick around long enough, it's a statistical certainty that their leadership roles will eventually be filled by someone less competent and/or less ethical than the current incumbents.
But according to Raymond Kurzweil it's an exponential certainty that we'll long have forgotten about Google by then, in favour of the next big thing. Conquest ain't what it used to be.
Jenny, I got your number I'm gonna make you mine Jenny, I got your number 86.75.30.9
You, too? Last visible hop 10.226.70-86.rev.gaoland.net gaoland.net seems to be slashdotted already.
One ring to find them all, one ring to bind them. I wish had the graphics talent to rework that scene where the Nazgûl rider is sniffing the tree roots for sneaky hobbits, and his phone goes off with some super goofy ring tone. We could redo Orthanc as a wifi repeater and that eyeball as a Pringles can.
I'd rather have call display that worked reliably.
Addition to previous post. I didn't make an idea quite as clear as I meant to here on the un-wiki.
On the "make it right" pass it took 15s to update the screen after pressing the page down key, and this from assembly language.
What I was trying to express here is that in this era, performance was a hardcore narcotic, it was pure heroine to a code junkie trying to get a 5MHz processor to update half a million green pixels faster than Google now returns a results page indexing the entire internet. Knuth's mantra, more honoured in the breach, was a secret handshake of the local AA chapter, where everyone got together to show off our needle tracks. These days, performance as an addictive drug hardly rivals a can of Jolt cola.
That's the main reason why I want to shoot people who write "clever" code on the first pass.
Over the years, I've grown to hate this meme. Not because it isn't right, but because it stops ten floors below the penthouse of human potential.
First of all, it's an incredible instance of cultural drift. In the mid 1980s, when this meme was halfway current, I worked on adding support for Asian characters to an Asian-made PC. On the "make it right" pass it took 15s to update the screen after pressing the page down key, and this from assembly language. Slower than YouTube over 300 baud. It was doing a lot of pixel swizzling it shouldn't have been, because the fonts were supplied in a format better suited to printing. This was an order of magnitude below an invitation to whiffle-ball training camp. This was Lance Armstrong during his chemotherapy years towing a baby trailer. Today you get 60fps with a 100 thousand or a 100 million polygons, I've sort of lost track.
Let's not shunt performance onto the side track of irrelevancy. While there's no good excuse, ever, for writing faulty code, an enlightened balance between starting out with an approach you can live with, and exploiting necessary cleverness *within your ability* goes a long way.
How about we update Knuth's arthritic maxim? Don't tweak what you don't grok. If you grok, use your judgement. Exploit your human potential. Live a little.
The books I've been reading lately about the evolution of skills in the work place suggest that painstaking reductive work processes are on their way to India. Job security in home world is greatly enhanced if you can navigate multiple agendas in tandem, exploiting more of that judgement thing.
One of the reasons Carmack became so successful is that he didn't waste his effort looking for excuses to deprive his co-workers of their oxygen bits. Instead he conducted shrewd excursions along the edge of the envelope in pursuit of the sweet spot between cleverness too oppressive to live with, and no performance at all.
In my day of deprecating my elders, I always knew where the pea was hidden under the mattress. These days, there are so many squishy mattresses stacked one upon the other, I have to plan my work day with a step ladder. Which I think is what this unwatchable cult-encoded video is on about: the ankle level view most of us never see any more.
Here's another thing. I've you're going to be clever about how you code something, also be clever about how you do it. In other words, be equally clever all levels of the solution process simultaneously: algorithm selection, implementation, commenting, software engineering, documentation, and unit test. Knuth got away with TeX, barely, for precisely this reason. Because of his cleverness, the extension to handle Asian languages was far from elegant. Because of his cleverness (in making everything else run extremely well), people actually wanted to extend TeX to handle Asian languages. So who's to say he was wrong? Despite his cleverness, he managed to keep his booboo score in single or low double digits. His bug tracking database fit nicely on an index card.
In the modern era, people quote the old "make it right before you make it faster" as the cure for the halitosis of ineptitude: you're feeble and irritating, so practice your social graces. Don't make me come over there and choke off your oxygen bit. It's a long ways from saying "you have a lot of human potential, and not much experience, so let me help you confront the challenges in a meaningful way". These sayings leak a lot of sentiment about social engagement.
Every so often I have to pull up a chair beside a junior resource and go "Dude, you're jousting at windmills here, let's roll that change back and try again. I know you can do better." Five minutes of war stories about how to shoot yourself in the foot six ways from Sunday is usually enough to rebalance the flywheel of self preservation.
Please demonstrate how these nine words: "Human males evolve at a faster pace than females", involves the notion of "improvement".
Did you read carefully? On my reading, the test was divergence between human males and some other primate male. It struck me as possible that all the churn detected was in the other primate lineage, since they suggested that sperm competition is more common on the hairy side of the primate tree. Hetropaternity, ugh. And some people don't like to share toilet seats. Well, if the human penis is accessorized to function as a foreign sperm removal scoop, no doubt there's a good evolutionary motive.
I'll take my solutions in half measure, thank you very much. A half-measure here, a half-measure there, pretty soon I'm better off than the chump beside me.
The absolute win with NoScript is that no scripts run on a site you didn't mean to visit. Maybe the mouse slipped, or you clicked something dubious in a late night haze, or a google search result looked good in précis but you land with a giant OMG! thump. With NoScript you can bail, and you still know where you've been.
Most sites work with just scripts from the base URL. I'm on a lot of sites with half a dozen or more scripts blocked, and it works fine.
For places that look a bit dubious, I use temporary mode.
I'm sure there's some monkey business going on with the base scripts I'm permitting on many sites, but a lot less than shacking a rugby team in a convent. I say it's a pretty good first measure if they have to sneak across the quad.
All in all, it sounds very much like a half-assed illusion of a solution.
Quoting the forefathers of gender-segregation are we?
Not only that the guy sounds like a bit of a douchebag, why would you EVER use mathematics for human relationships?
I didn't know there was a douchebag continuum. As for mathematics, it beats dropping a pebble in the jar every time you turn the trick. But who's counting?
Personally, I chose to read the article as a fabulous send up of the Drake equation. Only he doesn't get his math quite right, because attraction tends to be reciprocal, plus attraction is open to subtle distortions and shouldn't be modelled as a constant term.
Turns out, god made ugly people so the rest of us could hook up.
Responding to my own post with another nugget I had lying around.
From [http://www.wired.com/print/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2008/01/securitymatters_0124 What Our Top Spy Doesn't Get: Security and Privacy Aren't Opposites]
It should be no surprise that people choose security over privacy: 51 to 29 percent in a recent poll. Even if you don't subscribe to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's obvious that security is more important. Security is vital to survival, not just of people but of every living thing. Privacy is unique to humans, but it's a social need. It's vital to personal dignity, to family life, to society -- to what makes us uniquely human -- but not to survival.
So there you have it, privacy is pretty low on the pecking order. If you're sporting a whale tail or any other form of beltline inversion, you probably got over that long ago.
In the case of the second link, I don't think it's relevant whether it's true or not. A little hint of what the world looks like with blabbing on steroids.
Social norms aren't like the 1950s any more. Change is hardly new. Hope Zuckerberg comprehends the risk he faces if his social network degenerates in the world's largest permanent-ink bathroom wall. Fortunately, many young people can consult their hippie grandparents on divorcing their youthful indiscretions.
What I do agree with is the shift of attitude regarding the people who put nothing out there at all. A blank slate is not a clean slate. Most likely, it's a control freak. There are, of course, many good career options for the blank slates in our midst within the agencies of denial, some of which have (or will soon have) employees within their HR department to construct on your behalf an online social life of least suspicion.
I see the world becoming divided into the masks and the kimonos, fresh new ideological poles for a brave new world.
As for Monsanto, they sell seeds. Dont want 'em? Don't buy 'em. Sheesh, how evil.
Didn't your mother teach you about path integrals? What to put in your mouth, depends on where it's been? You also seemed to have missed the lesson on how genes move from one organism to the next, sometimes even to places where they aren't desired. And what about the "genie out of the bottle" lesson? That's also an important landmark in proper upbringing. Sheesh, your mother.
Slashdot Mirror
Really the only time you have to handle assembly in a PC application is when you're implementing a just in time compiler, and it's becoming the fashion to let LLVM do that for you.
That's an interesting combination of overstating and understating the case.
For one thing, your favourite C/C++ compiler likely contains a hand optimized memcpy() routine, down to assembly if it exposes a worthwhile gain, or coded in C with or without intrinsics if it doesn't. Many C/C++ compilers contain hand-optimized floating point routines, even more so in the embedded world. Plus there are many performance libraries out there to handle the heavy lifting in multimedia, mathematics, and encryption, some of which are vendor tuned to the n'th degree. It's been a while since I've used an Intel library, but this is likely one of the breed:
Intel MKL
As for LLVM, I'd say it's more than fashion. The differences in performance characteristics from one micro-architecture to another are nightmares to cope with at the assembly language level. The average tablet computer these days could probably play Kasparov to a draw, and there are still macho programmers out there who think they can do register assignment and live range analysis better than your compiler? Dude, if you've got that much talent, roll up your sleeves and fix the freaking compiler. Hopefully LLVM will solve that old problem of first having to swallow the gcc ast syntax enzyme.
Tautology #1: I can beat my computer at chess => your chess computer sucks (or it's running on your wristwatch).
Tautology #2: I can beat my compiler at coding a non-trivial loop => your compiler sucks.
Unless your goal in life is to win rigged competitions, LLVM is a lot more than a fashion statement.
Do you mean that Microsoft now wants to rid the world of IE 6 as badly as they once wanted their corporate customers to permanently indenture themselves by writing IE 6 specific in-house web applications? Or twice as badly?
When you sell your soul for a fixed price, no matter how much you get up front, eventually you begin to think "maybe I could have gotten a bit more". Seller's remorse.
Ignaz Semmelweis
Did they want to cure their patients or were they more concerned with their own dignity and status? One or the other. I don't recall the verse in the Hipocratic Oath about "doing no harm in so far as it's consistent with my social status". Doesn't strike me the vow leaves much scope for weighing one against the other.
Microsoft built this thing knowing what it was from the outset, in fact, so far as I can tell, wanting it to be exactly what it was. I suppose we all wish to shed the lies of our past in favour of the shinier lies of the present.
I never got a five times speedup over Microsoft, but we consistently got 30% reduction in code size, which on a 640KB machine is not to be sneezed at. A big part of that was the excellent register calling conventions and pragma support.
The reality is that Watcom C++ was crushed by Microsoft Visual C++ which had a slick interface lashed onto appalling C++ language support. This was an era when anything slapped in a box was saleable software.
People forget that before eyeballs displaced profit, fatuousness displaced quality. It didn't matter very much if the feature worked as advertised. Software users, like deluded sports fans, believed that hope springs eternal. Maybe it would work in the next version? Sadly, programmers fell for the hype just as often as the end consumers. RIP Watcom.
The day Watcom packed it in—effectively about a version before their last release—I knew that quality had lost the race for many years to come. I didn't have it in me for a career in jello stacking, so I went off for a while to do my own thing. These days, quality is back on the table, for jobs that no longer exist. But if they did, it would be good times again.
Bill Watterson really knew what he was doing when he drew all those snowmen in the first half of the 1990s.
Amazing how rusty the pipeline-stall instruction group becomes after twenty years of disuse. CWD is a little outside the nucleus of RISC instructions screaming to break free. Not the inner circle of hell, but one of the antechambers. More worth forgetting than recollecting.
The true lesson of our x86 heritage: discretion is the greater part of valour. There's a *lot* of aging x86 instructions that belong to the HCF group for all practical purposes.
My GF's great-grandmother passed away in November. She was very close.
Weepy GF gets onto the web site of a regional Canadian carrier that prides itself on its customer service, selects her flight, and begins to fill out the VISA information. After filling out most of the information she clicks "continue" and *bam* up comes VISA's activation during shopping page (ADS) with a giant "I agree" button under inscrutable masses of legal fine print. She is in a fine state of mind for clicking her life away.
This happens right in the middle of the transaction, with no advance warning. Not on the page before she began filling out the details: to complete this transaction with your VISA card, you will be obligated to click "I agree" to the ADS terms of service, which shifts VISA's liability onto your shoulders and plays havoc with established web security practices and altogether makes the world a shittier place.
All of this under the commercial maxim that instant gratification == learned helplessness. Your average user will blindly click anything during gratification interruptus.
As it happens, my red-eyed GF muttered out loud "WTF is this?". It took me about 30s to get past "HF those sleezy MFs". Then I told her to slam down the virtual circuit on her half-completed web page transaction and start the transaction over again using an aging circuit-switched technology far less suited to rights erosion, and also more expensive for the airline to provide. Real human at the other end. What a PITA.
Brilliant lose-lose for everyone involved.
Two of the links I recorded checked this out:
Links More Banking Stupidity: Phished by Visa
Verified by Visa: British banks phish their own customers - Boing Boing
Redacted portions of an online TOS from a large Canadian bank which has since gone 404.
You agree not to: modify, adapt, sub-license, translate, sell, reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble any portion of the Verified by Visa Website or service or the software used in connection with Verified by Visa.
You agree to immediately notify us by contacting us, as we require in our cardholder agreement with you for a lost or stolen card of any unauthorized use of your password or other verification information, or any other breach of security. You will be liable for any unauthorized activity involving use of your password or Activation Data, until we receive such notice.
Answer me this, Batman:
How is one supposed to notify the bank that you've lost control over the password, when you lose control to a phishing widget embedded in a concealed iFrame?
I wrote that riddle back in November, and I'm no closer now to coming up with the solution. FWIW, this agreement is probably less egregious than the one that came up under ADS, from a different major Canadian bank. Bonus marks for completing this task without first discovering how the service works which violates your TOS.
This whole thing makes me seriously limbic.
Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity
And on the other side, among our kids, there's a growing copyright abolitionism, a generation that rejects the very notion of what copyright is supposed to do, rejects copyright and believes that the law is nothing more than an ass to be ignored and to be fought at every opportunity possible. The extremism on one side begets extremism on the other, a fact we should have learned many, many times over, and both extremes in this debate are just wrong.
For the good of society, the law ought not to be an ass, and the VISA company ought to not be pushing the matter like a used car salesman at the helm of an invincible glass castle.
Why is it harder for America to copy its own success by starting over from not scratch, when most of Asia finds it easy enough to copy America, starting from almost nothing?
In my books, foresight is returning to space after we solve the fusion energy problem. Has anyone calculated how many trillion bronto-burger ton-years it takes to achieve a successful moon shot?
If you concerning is living to witness the glory of space, get yourself a PhD in enzyme telomerase. Plenty of fish to fry at sea level. Now that we've sequenced the human genome, maybe it's time to lean a little less hard on the glory of "because we can".
The point of this is not to "win" the war on spam, but to force the spammers to convolute their message with sufficient ingenuity that the messages become unintelligible to the morons who purchase the products or buy the penny stocks or launder stolen funds. The point is to convolute the spam until the only option left to the spammer is to render an ice cube in ASCII art containing a subliminal giant wiener.
It's not an arms race against the spammers, who are plenty smart, it's an arms race against their customers, who for the most part are as dumb as a bag of glass hammers.
Hey baby, how's your baby? Fair exchange, in my books.
From Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset
And it is my task, on behalf of the rest of the world, to convey a thank to the U.S. taxpayers, for Demographic Health Survey. Many are not aware of -- no this is not a joke. This is very serious. It is due to USA's continuous sponsoring during 25 years of the very good methodology for measuring child mortality that we have a grasp of what's happening in the world. And it is U.S. government at its best, without advocacy, providing facts, that it's useful for the society. And providing data free of charge, on the internet, for the world to use. Thank you very much.
Quite in the opposite of the World Bank [who rock] it's just that we would like to upgrade our international agencies to deal with the world in a modern way, as we do. And when it comes to free data and transparency, United States of America is one of the best. And that doesn't come easy from the mouth of a Swedish public health professor.
You must have missed the bulletin which explains that security consists of becoming a less inviting target than the guy beside you. If the sheep tend to use all lower-case passwords (baaaaaa), then you're best off wearing a different cloak.
I thought script kiddies were all playing on the streets of the Facebook favela these days, and that unemployed Russian PhDs were out there flexing their combinatorics.
From that training set, it would be pretty easy to code up a Markov letter bigram or trigram model and enumerate from least entropy on up (a near approximation to this is plenty good enough). My guess is that that nine letter all-lowercase passwords would be on roughly the same tier as six letter passwords with multiple punctuation marks.
This study was a bit stupid in reporting password strength. A nine letter password from two symbol sets will be close in strength to an eight letter password from three symbol sets, as long as the nine letter password doesn't build upon trivial substrings.
I think this is why the recommendation demands three symbol sets: it gives users less scope to squander entropy that a longer, ordinary character password ought to have.
One time, as a joke, a very long time ago, a devious coworker put a keystroke logger on a paranoid coworker and the password revealed was 6uldv8. Apparently there's more than one reason to keep your passwords secret.
I generate all my own passwords starting from suggestions offered by OpenBSD's apg utility. For crap sites, I try to achieve an estimated entropy in the vicinity of 30 bits and scale up to about 60 bits at the paranoid end: 5*6 (a brief burst of line noise), 6*5, 7*4, 8*4, 9*3, 10*3 (baby talk).
For longer passwords, you can pair two words from a large dictionary (about 13 bits entropy each) and then add another four bits with a single symbol corruption. Routinely sticking an ! in between two obscure dictionary words is not a good idea if you're concerned about cross entropy, where the attacker already knows some of your passwords by other means. I avoid consistent corruption templates, because I don't want to lower the cross-entropy on a set of partially exposed passwords too severely.
For most purposes, even 20 bits of entropy is a good start, if the attack involves knocking on the front door. Not so good if the hashed password file is compromised behind the scenes. Even 30 bits is pathetic in the latter case, but this reasonably well mitigated by never sharing a password across multiple sites.
At 40 bits, the attacker begins to ask whether there's any money involved. A high-end video card, properly coded, would sneeze at 40 bits. However, properly coded still isn't free,
By the time you get to 50 bits, it's time to start asking whether you've seriously pissed off the wrong person. Quite doable, with a modicum of enmity, but not worth the bother if the game is shooting fish in a barrel at least expense. Armour piercing rounds are deployed sparingly.
I wouldn't be the least bit surprised that the NSA has accumulated a dictionary of the trillion most common passwords, sorted by descending order of frequency, covering all languages and source lexicons of the world (pets, pet names, Klingon, Thalassian, Qenya) permuted into all manner of imposed password template schema. I'd be shocked if they hadn't. For that matter, Google could build a good approximation to that dictionary just using their lexigram index, on roughly the terascale.
Shedding about 10 bits of protection per decade, we'll soon need to return to Beowulf era culture where reciting your ancestors back to the garden of Eden was the gold standard for accurate recall.
I wish every login box on every site had a
Why is it that so many people can't get past the skim milk reflex long enough to arrive at the aged cheddar nirvana? I used to subscribe to the Economist precisely *because* they had to age the news longer than 90s.
It strikes me that many people attend the news more to not feel left out than to gain insight or comprehension. It all people want is to feel included, quality is going to be a tough sell.
This might not be a popular observation in some circles, but there is a certain brand of religious sentiment rooted in separation disorder and potential collapse of the boundaries of self. In this tent, god functions as an auxiliary shoring pole. Somehow, despite insuperable odds against this, some of us manage to function without one.
Hang onto that pole, buddy, it's all you've got.
I'm deferring my personal rapture of completely and utterly for the debut screening of the Total Perspective Vortex, arriving in theatres near you not long after the Kurzweilian singularity cures humanity of our misguided detour into sexual reproduction—that whole Adam and Eve and apple thing.
Seriously, this absolutist depiction of truth is highly overrated, best suited for the bully pulpit or some taffy-stretched argument about the interlocking nature of determinism and free will. Truth does not amount to moral certainty. It's not a slice of lembas bread wrapped in the silver leaves of the fruitless Mallorn tree (sparing the elves forbidden knowledge, but also leaving them a mite hazy on the inner workings of general relativity).
The smallest apparatus I've yet discovered to explore the relationship between truth and certitude is Ackermann's VTOL exhaust-fume reburner. Fits nicely on a napkin in your driveway, until you light the match.
Ackermann function
You might wish to save your efforts to compute A(10,10) for the infinite afterlife, should you believe in one. By a little known corollary, the computed value of A(10,10) is exceeded in magnitude only by the number of unanswered emails in your eternal inbox when you triumphantly roll down your timeless sleeves. Not even a sonic boom as this functions punches effortlessly through the Googleplex.
Doesn't require much skill to compute on eternal parchment, but you will need a large stack of reliable bookmarks and a tendency not to daydream. It could even be done with a large system of jars and marbles, if you're not afraid of heights. I'm told the TPV is stunning to behold from above, but I don't think standing up there on a ladder at the rim of the marble jar I could let go of both rails long enough to plink marble. I think I'd have to use my mouth and not swallow too many on the long ascent. A belly full of marbles would make the climb severely unpleasant. On the trip back down, you can measure Plink's constant.
Really, people who stand on truth eternal haven't given a mayfly's wet dream to the highly intractable application of truth, which is not a small matter, intractability having been baked by god into the integers themselves. As Babbage amended Descartes: I count, therefore the greater portion of certitude lies forever beyond my ken.
Finally, here's one that most people don't know. What did Maxwell say when the apple fell?
"Missed me by that much."
You mean provocating cause at point of consensus. Once something becomes ensconced as a facility of the commons, it's purpose takes on a life of its own, as practiced in the large.
Off-label use
Robots.txt also serves as a sentinel for which parties on the net are playing ball, but obeying robots.txt, and who is operating outside the bounds of conformity, DoSing whatever they please.
Sometimes when the world conspires to enact injustice, it's the prison wardens of small minds in the general population who need to be taken to task. Likewise with your credit record. A merchant can make an unfounded allegation about payment failure, and the blotch is hard to remove. Soon people begin to fear the malingering blotch and behave in frightened, risk averse ways, which the worst of the merchants soon begin to exploit.
Personally, I think the solution is to add teeth to the liability laws, to the point that when a person suffers an social injury (such as denial of employment and credit), there is someone useful to sue for having allowed the unsubstantiated information to flow around the loop in the first place.
Comments that quickly get you sued if you mention them in public can be erected as monuments if you commit them to permanent electronic storage, equally without basis, and then dress up the reports with an agency masthead. It doesn't even matter if the agency can tell their torus from a hole in the ground.
Michael Hicks
Every time his family is detained by airport security for extra Vaseline, it's an offence against their reputation and dignity in the court of small minds who witness the spectacle.
Kind of makes a guy want to set up a credit reporting agency on relationship fidelity. A solid marketing tie-in to a couple of dating agencies, you could do pretty good, $20 for a quick peak at the morning-after decorum score would find many takers. Or just a quick $5 for the post-coital returns-your-call score.
Of course, 100% of your data would be scurrilous, but a solidly designed masthead on the official-looking fidelity report seems to take care of this. Something like "by appointment of the queen" if your headquarters reside in the BVI. Don't touch that one if you reside in the U.K. The queen has rights under British law.
I just don't get why credit reporting agencies and the police enjoy this giant loophole on damaging reputations with unfounded data, when liability laws are in other regards extremely strict on this matter.
How about one that would appeal to my exogenous backbone, my poker cue of moral outrage? How about a public CYA cowardice index, which details the many small cowardly decisions people make in life, such as not to interview a person because you've discovered an unsubstantiated allegation as part of a background check, knowing full well that the agency in question does not vouch that there is any reality behind the aspersion, but you then decide to cover your own by screening the person out from further consideration nevertheless, on the grounds that your peers will prove equally mired in cowardice in the judgement of your actions.
Those are the many tiny moral transactions by which our faulty instruments of government ascend into the shadowy penumbra of totalinariasm.
The reason there is so much blame in this world against government is that secretly wish government to function well enough to protect us from our own cowardice, which it rarely fails to achieve.
We could start by demanding a reversal in this effective debasement of our liability laws.
proportional fonts can be read 14% faster than fixed-width fonts
Sounds good, until brain engages, 14% later. can be always flags +10 in my wetware instance of CrapAssassin, unless BeerGoggles is displacing cycles.
I think, with maybe 60,000 hours of reading time under my lengthening belt, I'd have noticed this effect by now, if it applied carte blanch to all modes of reading. The other night I skimmed the 130,000 words supplied in response to the Edge 2010 question "How is the Internet changing the way YOU think?" This was not the cream of their efforts, but there were some interesting topical centers.
My reading speed through this exercise varied by an order of magnitude, depending on signal density. The weird thing is, for some of the longer responses, my subconscious sends notice "nothing to see here" at a skimming speed where I have no clue what words are actually flying past. Every so often, I drop out of warp speed to double check, and sure enough, not very much to see here, by whatever criteria turns my crank, which itself is sometimes elusive to my conscious mind.
I took a speed reading course and read 'War and Peace' in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.
— Woody Allen
I once attended a school where in some dark closet they kept copies of "Duck and Cover" films, as well as a CRM114-vintage machine designed to stretch your saccade, by forcing you to read words in a revealed window with a progressive speed ratchet.
I never did especially well compared to the best of my classmates on the quiz that followed. Had they slowed that stupid thing down to about half the speed they were forcing us to read, followed by an essay question to expound upon conceptual error, distortion, slant, exaggeration, and damn lies, I would have run out of foolscap before completing my task. In critical response, I was an autobahn surrounded by country lanes, yet many of my classmates could read for uncritical comprehension faster than I could. Dangerous skill. (I'm sure for some of my old classmates, whatever dirt path once existed has returned to nature in their adult years, with ample fertilizer from mainstream media, but that's another matter.)
It's no different with source code. You can read for comprehension, or you can read for all possible error, a state of mind where the eyes consume only a tiny fraction of total brain glucose. Critical thought in the candy factory is hard enough when the conveyor flows along at a consistent speed. Neither can I properly type a long sequence of i and l characters worth a damn in a proportional font. My eyes fail to sync with my fingers, and half the letters fall down my shirt.
Nothing impairs reading speed like a tightly written algorithm where every symbol is exactly right. Nothing inflates the volume of symbols violently gouged onto the retina as a chunk of code where no symbol means precisely what it seems to mean.
Personally, I'm not lining up for smaller gouges in greater number.
But according to Raymond Kurzweil it's an exponential certainty that we'll long have forgotten about Google by then, in favour of the next big thing. Conquest ain't what it used to be.
You, too? Last visible hop 10.226.70-86.rev.gaoland.net gaoland.net seems to be slashdotted already.
One ring to find them all, one ring to bind them. I wish had the graphics talent to rework that scene where the Nazgûl rider is sniffing the tree roots for sneaky hobbits, and his phone goes off with some super goofy ring tone. We could redo Orthanc as a wifi repeater and that eyeball as a Pringles can.
I'd rather have call display that worked reliably.
Addition to previous post. I didn't make an idea quite as clear as I meant to here on the un-wiki.
What I was trying to express here is that in this era, performance was a hardcore narcotic, it was pure heroine to a code junkie trying to get a 5MHz processor to update half a million green pixels faster than Google now returns a results page indexing the entire internet. Knuth's mantra, more honoured in the breach, was a secret handshake of the local AA chapter, where everyone got together to show off our needle tracks. These days, performance as an addictive drug hardly rivals a can of Jolt cola.
Over the years, I've grown to hate this meme. Not because it isn't right, but because it stops ten floors below the penthouse of human potential.
First of all, it's an incredible instance of cultural drift. In the mid 1980s, when this meme was halfway current, I worked on adding support for Asian characters to an Asian-made PC. On the "make it right" pass it took 15s to update the screen after pressing the page down key, and this from assembly language. Slower than YouTube over 300 baud. It was doing a lot of pixel swizzling it shouldn't have been, because the fonts were supplied in a format better suited to printing. This was an order of magnitude below an invitation to whiffle-ball training camp. This was Lance Armstrong during his chemotherapy years towing a baby trailer. Today you get 60fps with a 100 thousand or a 100 million polygons, I've sort of lost track.
Let's not shunt performance onto the side track of irrelevancy. While there's no good excuse, ever, for writing faulty code, an enlightened balance between starting out with an approach you can live with, and exploiting necessary cleverness *within your ability* goes a long way.
How about we update Knuth's arthritic maxim? Don't tweak what you don't grok. If you grok, use your judgement. Exploit your human potential. Live a little.
The books I've been reading lately about the evolution of skills in the work place suggest that painstaking reductive work processes are on their way to India. Job security in home world is greatly enhanced if you can navigate multiple agendas in tandem, exploiting more of that judgement thing.
One of the reasons Carmack became so successful is that he didn't waste his effort looking for excuses to deprive his co-workers of their oxygen bits. Instead he conducted shrewd excursions along the edge of the envelope in pursuit of the sweet spot between cleverness too oppressive to live with, and no performance at all.
In my day of deprecating my elders, I always knew where the pea was hidden under the mattress. These days, there are so many squishy mattresses stacked one upon the other, I have to plan my work day with a step ladder. Which I think is what this unwatchable cult-encoded video is on about: the ankle level view most of us never see any more.
Here's another thing. I've you're going to be clever about how you code something, also be clever about how you do it. In other words, be equally clever all levels of the solution process simultaneously: algorithm selection, implementation, commenting, software engineering, documentation, and unit test. Knuth got away with TeX, barely, for precisely this reason. Because of his cleverness, the extension to handle Asian languages was far from elegant. Because of his cleverness (in making everything else run extremely well), people actually wanted to extend TeX to handle Asian languages. So who's to say he was wrong? Despite his cleverness, he managed to keep his booboo score in single or low double digits. His bug tracking database fit nicely on an index card.
In the modern era, people quote the old "make it right before you make it faster" as the cure for the halitosis of ineptitude: you're feeble and irritating, so practice your social graces. Don't make me come over there and choke off your oxygen bit. It's a long ways from saying "you have a lot of human potential, and not much experience, so let me help you confront the challenges in a meaningful way". These sayings leak a lot of sentiment about social engagement.
Every so often I have to pull up a chair beside a junior resource and go "Dude, you're jousting at windmills here, let's roll that change back and try again. I know you can do better." Five minutes of war stories about how to shoot yourself in the foot six ways from Sunday is usually enough to rebalance the flywheel of self preservation.
Did you read carefully? On my reading, the test was divergence between human males and some other primate male. It struck me as possible that all the churn detected was in the other primate lineage, since they suggested that sperm competition is more common on the hairy side of the primate tree. Hetropaternity, ugh. And some people don't like to share toilet seats. Well, if the human penis is accessorized to function as a foreign sperm removal scoop, no doubt there's a good evolutionary motive.
I'll take my solutions in half measure, thank you very much. A half-measure here, a half-measure there, pretty soon I'm better off than the chump beside me.
The absolute win with NoScript is that no scripts run on a site you didn't mean to visit. Maybe the mouse slipped, or you clicked something dubious in a late night haze, or a google search result looked good in précis but you land with a giant OMG! thump. With NoScript you can bail, and you still know where you've been.
Most sites work with just scripts from the base URL. I'm on a lot of sites with half a dozen or more scripts blocked, and it works fine.
For places that look a bit dubious, I use temporary mode.
I'm sure there's some monkey business going on with the base scripts I'm permitting on many sites, but a lot less than shacking a rugby team in a convent. I say it's a pretty good first measure if they have to sneak across the quad.
Quoting the forefathers of gender-segregation are we?
I didn't know there was a douchebag continuum. As for mathematics, it beats dropping a pebble in the jar every time you turn the trick. But who's counting?
Personally, I chose to read the article as a fabulous send up of the Drake equation. Only he doesn't get his math quite right, because attraction tends to be reciprocal, plus attraction is open to subtle distortions and shouldn't be modelled as a constant term.
Turns out, god made ugly people so the rest of us could hook up.
Dan Ariely asks, Are we in control of our own decisions?
Whoops, wrong metastasic syntax in the URL above. Oh, well.
Responding to my own post with another nugget I had lying around.
From [http://www.wired.com/print/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2008/01/securitymatters_0124 What Our Top Spy Doesn't Get: Security and Privacy Aren't Opposites]
It should be no surprise that people choose security over privacy: 51 to 29 percent in a recent poll. Even if you don't subscribe to Maslow's hierarchy of needs, it's obvious that security is more important. Security is vital to survival, not just of people but of every living thing. Privacy is unique to humans, but it's a social need. It's vital to personal dignity, to family life, to society -- to what makes us uniquely human -- but not to survival.
So there you have it, privacy is pretty low on the pecking order. If you're sporting a whale tail or any other form of beltline inversion, you probably got over that long ago.
Sun on Privacy: 'Get Over It'
Revenge, Facebook Style: Brother 1, Sister 0
In the case of the second link, I don't think it's relevant whether it's true or not. A little hint of what the world looks like with blabbing on steroids.
Social norms aren't like the 1950s any more. Change is hardly new. Hope Zuckerberg comprehends the risk he faces if his social network degenerates in the world's largest permanent-ink bathroom wall. Fortunately, many young people can consult their hippie grandparents on divorcing their youthful indiscretions.
What I do agree with is the shift of attitude regarding the people who put nothing out there at all. A blank slate is not a clean slate. Most likely, it's a control freak. There are, of course, many good career options for the blank slates in our midst within the agencies of denial, some of which have (or will soon have) employees within their HR department to construct on your behalf an online social life of least suspicion.
I see the world becoming divided into the masks and the kimonos, fresh new ideological poles for a brave new world.
Didn't your mother teach you about path integrals? What to put in your mouth, depends on where it's been? You also seemed to have missed the lesson on how genes move from one organism to the next, sometimes even to places where they aren't desired. And what about the "genie out of the bottle" lesson? That's also an important landmark in proper upbringing. Sheesh, your mother.