Sure he's a blowhard and a dirty bastard but compared to a shit stain like Hillary he looks pretty damn good.
There are thousands of things that don't look as bad as a shit stain—if you can see them at all—that will harm you far worse than a shit stain. An insecure, xenophobe blowhard in a post-nuclear world might very well be one of those things.
On the playground, being a shit stain is pretty much the ground zero of social comparison. In real life, the Mines of Moria couldn't contain everything scarier and deadlier than a shit stain. Definitely, Trump will do well among the playground electorate who show up to vote using their trusty shit-stain barometer.
The rest of the electorate will stop to ponder world problems that can't be resolved with a box of Tide.
Table 1 excludes a row for the United States, but includes asterisks for whether each value for "Significantly different (p <.05) from United States". (If there was a Level 6 it would be this: ability to glean primary information from texts where conflicting information fills all the tables.)
Not once is the question of language addressed. Here is what I presume: "Subjects are tested in their official language of choice." How hard was that to blurt out? And what about subjects whose preschool home environment was "none of the above"?
This is all gussied up to mobilise action as a future employment catastrophe, yet it's not at all clear that future America has any desire to employ the bottom 20% of its millennial generation. Their contribution to America's employment landscape might be effectively zilch.
By now I'm firmly of the opinion that these numbers have been sifted, folded, and mutilated to sell something. What might that be? Then I look up and see this URL has the domain name ets.org. Bingo!
Still, it's hard to believe how much of the millennial generation in Canada falls below level 3. 40% in the 2012 survey. (I trust this number more because we don't have the Spanish problem—not yet an official language in America, so probably not tested).
Then I look at the requirements for level 3 and see that this is well above merely "getting the news". Level 2 is more than sufficient for reading the first two paragraphs of what generally qualifies as journalism these days. Level 3 requires elementary synthesis from two or more sources at the same time. Ah yes, I can see how the mayfly generation might struggle with this.
You can tell from any election cycle that half the population can't successfully meld two quantitative ideas (e.g. spend more here, spend less there). I recall a recent John Oliver-esque clip where Americans on the street professed to want "smaller government" but then you go through a list of entitlement programs and one by one the answer is "don't you dare cut that one!" Many of these people appear adequately employed. Small government. Mmmmm, donut! Program cuts. Ugh, no donut!
Sorry, rationality, Americans are just not that into you.
Here's the requirements for level 5:
At this level, tasks may require the respondent to search for and integrate information across multiple, dense texts; construct syntheses of similar and contrasting ideas or points of view; or evaluate evidence based arguments. Application and evaluation of logical and conceptual models of ideas may be required to accomplish tasks. Evaluating reliability of evidentiary sources and selecting key information is frequently a requirement. Tasks often require respondents to be aware of subtle, rhetorical cues and to make high-level inferences or use specialized background knowledge.
Did spotting ets.org in the source text URL immediately set off a blinking radiation hazard light. Full marks.
Still no mention of the language question. Time to pull out the big guns. Use the FAQ Luke. (After all, why on earth would language status be up-front information in a survey on reading proficiency?)
That means the remaining 1000 miles of range are going to come from fossil fuels.
We're at least twenty years into this debate, and you still haven't figured out that "where energy comes from" depends on the production mix, not the consumption mix.
Hardly impressive.
There's perhaps 20% at stake where the efficiency term on power delivery in which the consumption mix can usefully tilt the landscape (e.g. by enabling fewer wasteful interconversions).
Plus there are other possible advantages. The 190-mile range is more than sufficient to shift emissions out of most urban areas.
Supposing this thing has a tank trailer (somehow I think it must), it could drop off the tank trailer entering Toronto, and pick another one up leaving Toronto. For comparison, the entire conurbation corridor from Buffalo to Bowmanville (the far edge of Oshawa) is about 150 miles. Even if it's not the eastern seaboard, it's not hickville, either.
Personally, I wouldn't blame the thing for not including cold fusion. I'd look for incremental gains worth having. Then I'd multiply by some very conservative number that this all pans out as advertised, without major flies in the ointment cancelling out all the paper advantages during a long and unpleasant teething cycle.
Microsoft makes fundamental improvements to their OS quite often
Matched by equal and opposite dis-improvements to the EULA, which becomes ever more intrusive, as well as much obnoxious behaviour you have to guard against with the vigilance of Sleepless in Sparta. So far I haven't figured out how to get just the good bits. Daring forecast: it ain't never gonna happen.
My wife's iMac is early 2008 and appears not be supported. Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz, 4 GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT with 128MB of GDDR3 memory. It even has an external SSD on Firewire 800 and a 22" secondary display in portrait mode, all of which works just fine.
It hardly seems insufficient for anything my wife needs to do, though some application mixes (Chromium + iMovie is a particularly bad idea) balk at having only 4 GB of system RAM.
Nevertheless, I warned her to budget for a replacement 18 months ago, sensing the e-waste event horizon coming to perfectly serviceable hardware near you.
Damn! I was wondering why the Feds were being Samsung's bitch. Now I see the light. I'm getting slow in my old age, I should have seen that right off the bat.
Because—as old crusty coot knows to the very marrow of his fragile bones—the most cynical available view is never wrong. My diagnosis is that old age is still penetrating your hard tissues. But take heart. The process is automatic. You won't even have to work for it.
Hitchen's Author of America contains a super depressing page on Thomas Jefferson descending into coot-hood.
"I regret that I am not to die in the belief, that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776, to acquire self-government and happiness to their country, is to be thrown away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons, and that my only consolation is to be, that I live not to weep over it."
Vintage Passion of the Withering Lawn.
"Are our slaves to be presented with freedom and a dagger?" he demanded to know in a letter to Adams. If Congress could override the state on the question of slavery... where would it all end? "All the whites south of the Potomac and Ohio must evacuate their states; and most fortunate those who can do it first."
Anyone running a business in a rented office should assume that the building owner sees everything that is happening in the office.
And people decry slippery slope arguments.
Human paranoia: massless pulley pomade and frictionless rope tallow repackaged in a rusty 1970s aerosol spray can as Universal Slope Lube (earth-destroying propellant undisclosed).
Step 1: assume adversaries reside in frictionless hyperspace
Step 2: notice what they can do
Step 3: apply Murphy's law
Step 4: adorn self with tin foil
Step 5: worry about whisker growth causing pin holes
That doesn't even begin to discuss such questions as why MS feels the need to sell the keyboard cover as an *option* for over $100 on a computer this expensive?
Because sticker shock has discrete spectral lines. Nobody ever said humans were rational, although Greenspan put on quite the show concerning where that assumption would take you (the financing model was also innovative: no money down, no giant one-time trillion-dollar payment until your children can legally drink in public).
Gawker's entire defense, as I understand it, was that posting the sex tape was in the public interest because the subject was no average Joe.
When the AI revolution hits full swing, we're going to here the elite AI dissing everything old school with the comment as the vapid mutterings of some stupid regex. Even the computers will soon know how little comprehension goes into this kind of knee jerk retort.
Plus, no one is even going to watch the "average Joe" sex tape unless "average" Joe has a ginormous schlong (in truth, porn is fueled in equal measure by lust and envy, when it's not just about leering disgrace).
In summary, if your grandmother had wings, she'd be an airplane.
I don't think they've shuffled Ken or his progeny into the Google graveyard just yet. There was a close call a long time ago, but it crawled onto the shore and sprouted lungs (since renamed "types") just in time.
During 1971 and 1972 B evolved into "New B" (NB) and then C.
Personally, I don't think he wrote his classic paper about the behaviour of the malicious; he wrote it about the behaviour of the naive, which at the time was an exceptionally wide net encompassing all things digital.
I've got better things to do with my life than fight with Android's broken permission system.
Need my phone state? Fuck off.
Need my address book? Fuck off.
Need my location and you're not showing a map? Fuck off.
There, I just told 90% of the reason to own a smart phone to kindly fuck off.
Welcome to my new dumb phone with the touch screen that constantly ass dials, because there's no proper switch on the dumb thing to lock this out.
You'd think that was enough, but then I realized the audio quality is less than half as good as my old land line (1/4 as good when both ends are skanky connections).
"But what crazy person uses these stupid things to communicate carefully?" I can hear you say. You're quite right. Recently I read Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age by Sherry Turkle. I was actually disappointed in this book. There are good bits where she focusses on her primary research, but too much of the book is not like this.
One of the best things I read in there was the abject terror that many who are just now becoming adults express about having face to face conversations. Over and over it was "God grant me the ability to converse in person, but not yet." She interviewed these sorry young adults by the dozen.
That goes a long way toward explaining why the device works the way it does, but it doesn't explain why we still call these things "phones". As a phone for actually talking to people, it's pretty shitty. My brother is on the road a lot, and he often calls me when he's driving. We seem to spend half the call navigating half-duplex. Next time he calls I might recommend we try old-timey radio protocol.
ten four over come again
This doesn't even get into the likelihood that my device has an open back door for CSIS or the NSA to listen in whenever they feel like it, for example to capture the audio of me keyboarding my passwords, soon to own me in every dimension. Help yourself guys. After you waste enough taxpayer money, you'll discover that my peccadilloes are painfully vanilla. In fact, I'm so boring, I don't even know why I bother to resent this. Yet I do.
Cars used to represent independence / freedom from parental supervision. You'd complain that if your parents didn't give you enough access to the car you'd be ruined socially for life. It seems to me that nothing else could explain the Android security model. Give away your privacy to every app developer on the planet, but so long as my parents are excluded, I'll buy a new one every year until I turn thirty (the last five years on pure momentum).
I admit that sometimes Swype is kind of cool, in a crippled kind of way: it lets me input text at about 1/4 the speed that I can type on a regular keyboard. I used Runkeeper with my Pebble watch for one summer, and it was okay. Then this happened:
My wife and I lean toward environmentalism, so we make it a point to own only one one vehicle, and sometimes we have to juggle our joint transportation. We often exchange text messages to make this work. That task is now 90% of the "smart phone" use case I've got left, and valuable enough that I haven't thrown my smart phone into the trash can. I'd suffer a fair amount of inconvenience not to carry this lump of disappointment around with me all day long, but not so much as to require a second vehicle. Planet comes first, the voluntary hair shirt of disgust comes a distant second.
My smart phone is the most disappointing impressive thing I've ever owned.
It is a factual statement that Hillary is under investigation by the FBI.
Equally,
It is a fat ass statement that Hillary is under investigation by the FBI.
By the miracle of modern politics, sometimes factual == fat ass.
I just picked up a copy of It's Even Worse Than It Looks this morning. You, sir, are the Elephant Man in the mirror, minus the redeeming character of your pachydermous patriarch.
The simplest solution is to avoid doing business with anyone in the state of Indiana.
Either Indiana meant nothing to you in first place—all you get for your troubles is another annoying entry on your ever-lengthening "don't do" list, now with seventeen different flavours of unwanted ice cream—or you're in the business of selling performance car parts and it's ten minutes of internet background search every time the phone rings and a fair amount of rejecting business. This surely won't affect your Zagat rating, where of course the "simplest" solution is to sit back and let your online reputation go to hell—then continue to iterate "simplicity" until you find yourself—paying your bills was long ago an excluded complication—gracefully allowing your cell mate make use of your body however and whenever he wishes to.
Simple is just another word for... nothing left to lose.
La la la, la la la la, la la la, la la la la La la la, la la la la, la la la, la la la la
"Shut the fuck up, bitch, I ain't done with you yet."
A human looking at your password might suspect or recognize the formula, but a program won't.
You're delusional.
As soon as two or three of these related passwords are cracked and associated together, they can be easily identified as a password set having short edit distances (this takes a program of next to no complexity), and then any other accounts they suspect are related to this group can be fuzzed around the base phrase.
Then, if the automatic fuzz doesn't work, it can still brought to the attention of a human, who will probably detect patterns not just in your foolish password cluster, but patterns that tend to work over the entire space of foolish password clusters.
This is an arms race you're guaranteed to lose just as soon as the black hats obtain multiple associated password cracks.
I keep all my passwords in a password manager. The passwords individually are constructed to have about 50 bits of entropy on reasonable assumptions about attack order. Many of my passwords are 11 to 12 characters long, with maybe five symbol group transitions, seeded with a randomly generated password, then hand-tweaked until it looks like something I can read at a single glance and remember for half an hour or so. It takes me about three minutes per password at time of creation to create fifty briefly memorable bits.
It's still on the weak side. If five or more of my passwords became associated in plain, I estimate an attacker could reduce his attack space to something on the 30 to 40 bits per password range, after discerning my general tendencies.
Obtaining multiple seed cracks isn't likely from brute-force cracking of encrypted passwords, because this method rarely persist to 50 true bits of entropy (electricity cost is a thing if you use your own kit, opportunity cost is a thing if you use a botnet). And this can only be done if the password hash is lousy in the first place, rather than bcrypt or scrypt where 30 true bits of entropy is a daunting search.
There's still keyclick sniffing from any available microphone, keyboard loggers, BIOS trojans, etc. where password entropy is gathered in plain. This can then provide the seed template for your related-password group even if your one-off entropy is way beyond GPU cracking of bad password hash files.
The iron law of security is that algorithms only improve. Perhaps there should also be an iron law of networks that datasets aggregate. As bcrypt/scrypt become more widely adopted, the clever cracker will turn his attention to exploiting shared password entropy. Within two years the algorithm of choice for this work will be deep learning. Just how much of a challenge do you think { sCorrectHorseBattery, rCorrectHorseBattery } will pose for the algorithm that recently defeated Lee Se-dol? With thousands or millions of similar cases already in hand to seed the learning process?
I predict it will fuzz your silly template before breakfast.
In all likelihood, there will soon be a pretty good algorithm for guessing that a password belongs to a silly template on just one example. Algorithm: "That sure looks like three English words with a weak per-site fuzz, let's hammer on some related accounts and see what falls off the bottom branch."
If you look at this from the perspective of multi-drug resistant pathogens, it's almost like we're collectively determined to create the perfect training gradient for these deep learning algorithms, with many examples to gather at each level of difficulty, so as to better induce the next thing.
At least my artisanal password family looks like I completed the prescribed antibiotic regimen. Your proposed template looks like you took three pills out of twenty one, then forgot all about taking the rest after the first time you pissed with a dreamy smile.
It's a bloody long article, but here's what caught my eye.
Referring to a slide from the training program that seemed to indicate federal statutes and presidential Executive Orders (EOs) carry equal legal weight, Snowden wrote, "this does not seem correct, as it seems to imply Executive Orders have the same precedence as law. My understanding is that EOs may be superseded by federal statute, but EOs may not override statute."
About 20 minutes after Snowden sent the email, an OGC office manager forwarded it to the Signals Intelligence Oversight and Compliance training group — the people who had designed the test.
If the OGC lawyer had added "I'm not sure within the context of the training program whether the training slide attests to such a serious misrepresentation, but if it does, you need to suspend teaching this slide immediately" we might all now be in a different place.
The NSA culture in effect seemed to regard providing timely and correct training materials concerning the chain of agency authority as a "best effort" (warranting an administrative follow up) rather than "mission critical" (warranting an internal bow-shot cease and desist).
Hayden's book Playing to the Edge contains tedious chapter upon chapter about endless compliance politics played at the top level, all lawyered up six ways from Sunday, but did the organization deeply communicate the resulting values internally, as forcefully as described by John Kotter in his book Leading Change?
Most companies under communicate their visions for change by at least a factor of 10. A single memo announcing a big new change is never enough, nor is even a series of speeches by the CEO and the executive team.
If the OGC lawyer had the required ten reminders from on high spilling out of her inbox, she might have gone down the cease and desist track instead, giving Snowden immediate reason to believe that someone on the other side actually gave a shit.
Robert Litt, general counsel of the ODNI:
"To the extent Snowden was saying he raised his concerns internally within NSA, no rational person could read this as being anything other than a question about an unclear single page of training."
I would argue here that the other side of "playing close to the edge" is that a single page of unclear training material, if it's the wrong page, is no laughing matter.
"To the extent Snowden was saying he raised his concerns internally within NSA, no rational person could read this as being anything other than a question about an unclear single page of training which, given the content of the page in question, should have been flagged as a matter of immediate and utmost concern."
Narrow sidelines poorly communicated. What could possibly go wrong?
After only the thousandth trip down the rubber hose, $5 wrench, and single-ended extension cord & lavage basin aisle (special today-only if purchased together) I finally figured out that the core of this joke is actually narcissism.
***
Two agents dressed in black are confronted with a hapless chump, yanked out of bed at 04:00, now seated securely in front of them in a creaky wooden chair (missing most of its seat bottom) in his Dr No. vs Dr Evil footie pyjamas, refusing to give up his password at least until they serve him a fair-trade, organic, single origin Ethiopian peaberry so he can properly recover his wits.
Behind the observation screen.
"Does he want if flown in fresh from Africa this very morning?"
"I know some guys who could arrange to scramble a jet for a mere $12 large under the table."
"Risky. I don't think he's gonna sit there quietly for four hours. Once he notices the damage we've done to this footie pyjamas, he's gonna Hulk-up and destroy the entire facility. Have we got a faster, less expensive option?"
"For $240 we could scramble a hover-drone from Slacker's Choice. They've got one now that dangles a drogue-straw, completely hands-free."
"Innovative. That can't just be for our benefit. There's got to be some cover."
"Think I've got it figured. Like—here's a scenario—your dom gets a text message, then during the message storm—a natural dom always has to get the last word—leaves the room to get some munchies—"
"—shitty dom who won't even stay in character when the phone rings—"
"—no!—from his twisted point of view, it is in characterthe sub has to suffer through all the crunching and spooning sounds while being ignored for some stupid text barrage—but, and here's the thing, the sub has this figured before hand, and there's this iPhone app and the sub merely mumbles, or groans, or croaks the word "drogue" and the whole transaction is automatic, right down to geolocation of the right floor and window."
"We can't even do that."
"Which part? Bound-and-gagged speech recognition, or cell-based geolocation to a single window?"
"Only a muffled 'yerrrg!' comes though one of my gags, and it always means the same thing. The window bit."
"Yes, but we're just a single agency—a large, well funded agency with all the best toys—but even so, we can only stay a step ahead of the consumer flood up to a point."
"Yeah, I know what you mean. They've got the two of us detailed to extract just one password from one chump in his footie pyjamas. That's got to be hard to scale. You can get yourself a $5 wrench just about anywhere, but they don't hand out these retinal-projection aviator glasses without a year of hard-core indoctrination."
"Don't forget the three-hour semi-annual flutter."
"Or peeing into a bottle after every stat."
"Come to think of it, that can't be cheap, either."
"Equip that $240 drogue with a parabolic antenna, we could soon be out of a job."
"Ssssssh. Wipe that from your day log. Right now. If HQ clues into the economics of all this at scale, the glory days of hardware store expense accounts are over and done with."
MIB #2 sets his neuralyzer to 15 s. There's a bright flash. In perfect synchrony, both pairs of aviator glasses negate, dump, and eschew 15 s of recorded history—and the workings of the astrobuck underworld are spared from economic insight, yet again.
"So, what happened to the sub?"
"Well, the dom comes back into the room and the sub is sipping fair-trade, organic, single origin Ethiopian peaberry from a hovering straw."
"What about the gag?"
"Trivial, my dear Watson. The drogue contains a flexible plastic liner which is threaded into one nostril, through the sinus, right onto the taste buds."
The former is a bucket of shit and the latter makes Skype and Whatsapp look like they were coded by 2 year olds after their first learn to code class.
I wouldn't be too hard on the WhatsApp engineers. They weren't allowed an afternoon nap after achieving 140 million concurrent connections before taking their first learn-to-code class.
Kids these days. All they want is time off for good behaviour.
Turning our heads 180 degrees, if you wanted to look like you'd taken your first learn to type properly class, you'd be writing "WhatsApp" instead of "Whatsapp" and "two-year-olds" instead of "two year olds". But no, you're from the school where noticing pre-existing paint on the road is considered optional.
Nice post. Profane, hyperbolic, vaguely illiterate, extolling a competence inversion in simple language that could have come straight from the mouth of Donald Trump if his followers were down on the meme that programming requires skill.
It's that last one that's going to keep you out of politics. Your methods are there, but you've got to go way down market to reach your intended audience. It's a lot harder than it looks. Down there, you don't have many sticks to rub together.
In one short, Lucy points out to him the woefully inadequate range of a toy piano; an angry Schroeder yanks it out from under her, causing her to conk her head on the floor. This became a frequent running gag in the strip's later years. Lucy once "accidentally" washed his piano and threw it in the dryer, thus having the piano shrink, leaving Schroeder horrified.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.
My problem lies primarily with the content. Most of the world prefers noisy cartoons. In this economic climate, a modern Kubrick casts three buddies from drama school instead of one Peter Sellars.
Like the people in computer science who care more about computers than computation, there's a large crowd of content consumers out there who love themselves some smart TV.
Those judges will think different once they realize that they're "disclosing" all their DNA-laden dead skin cells to their Asian laundry service—they argue in some tonal language that DNA sequencing abets selection of the optimal detergent enzymes—and "disclosing" their DNA-laden saliva at the local Mexican diner—they argue in Spanish that DNA sequencing abets selection of the optimal flavour molecules—and all those other white-privilege leaks that Donald's silly wall won't fix.
It's a competitive world. Business necessities ever expand.
The time has come, I think, to award a new Ignoble Prize for year's most brainless "parse job", in which a precious, literal reading of a formal text isn't compatible with five minutes worth of broad observation of the real world.
Am I have a bad morning? This thread is making me want to scream. "Moore's law", "5 years?" Anyone else want to pile in with a tired fatuity? Surf's up, apparently, for a tiny value of "surf".
The following video (from January 2016) contains just about everything worth knowing at this point about Intel's forthcoming phantom memory. Don't even try reading anything else unless you got a bone for chalcogenide chemistry.
Executive summary: Charge-storage memory is at the end of its rope. There's no longer enough electrons per cell to make the cells reliable. According to Coulson (he passed my bullshit detector with nary a glitch), the typical 3D SSD is correcting about 50 bit-errors per read using advanced error correction, or the devices would not work at all. DRAM scaling is possibly worse.
Resistive memory does not depend upon charge storage, and has completely different physical scaling. Even resistive memories must stack almost out of the starting gate to achieve the scaling velocity that conventional fatuity demands. But the physics and economics of lithography are such that each additional layer suffers from diminishing returns. In fact, the cost of lithography scales as the total amount of surface area patterned, with stacked patterns being ever more expensive the higher you go. There's a sweet spot where the reduction in wafer cost through the use of less wafer pays back the more expensive lithographic process in stacking layers.
It wouldn't surprise me that we're already past that point at 32 layers in SSD, and that what pays off for going even this far are the advantages in density and integration of the surrounding products. (Hence the chips cost more than they could have, but the end product costs less, or justifies a higher per-GB selling price due to some rack-density jizz premium.)
Hard drives have traditionally had the huge advantage of not being a patterned media, hence you get a lot more surface area at a far lower cost. This, too, will change in the transition to bit-patterned media. But this media involves an extremely regular pattern with no fancy layers.
When we finally invent copolymer directed assembly of chalcogenide matrices, then perhaps we can finally dance on the grave of spinning rust.
It pretty much has to be Facebook and Twitter making people so stupid these days. People get so dialed into the present moment where the only acceptable latency is none at all as to completely forget that the past is a large object. Just look at the archival data generated by gene sequencing, EOS, deep sky surveys, CERN, and gravity-wave telescopes and then ask yourself whether an 8 ms cold latency over raw data is too big for you.
With ZFS, 1500 TB is around the present practical limit for one pool (200 drives at 8 TB each, per the Oracle Cloud guy, early 2016) and it's still just 8 ms sector latency (depending on what else you're standing behind). How about you sit there and watch while some lithographic robot patterns out 1500 TB of charge storage cells? Ring me when it's done. I've got more pressing things to do.
He is saying that it shouldn't be capitalized, regardless of what Wikipedia thinks, but that it was anyway and the best reason anyone can come up with for that may be simply that it was a new term.
Then he goes and uses "Phonograph" as a comparable, showing off how little he understands about the ubiquitous bound forms featuring the word "the" as the first element, and why that might give off an edible smell to the proper noun olfactory gland, even though it's just some chemical in a test tube with a dubious history.
In other words, Microsoft won't treat your local data with any more privacy than it treats your data on its servers and may upload your local data to its servers arbitrarily—unless you stop Microsoft from doing so.
First there is the hit to your TCO to have to read and digest this. Then there's the hit to your TCO to research defense against the dark arts (which usually proves to be a moving target). Then there's the hit to your TCO when someone tells you that Microsoft subsequently softened this language, but you're doubtful they softened it all that much, only it's too painful to contemplate having to check it out again so you wallow in rational ignorance until the end of time, a mononucleosis of self-determination.
Let's not even get into the fact that most wikipedia articles are biased towards a pan-European, North American, and Australian viewpoint, in spite of claiming that they have strict "NPOV" rules, or the fact that administrators will simply delete a wikipedia page that covers a notable subject whose very existence they disagree with.
Yes, and the Catholic church has strict rules about altar boys, but it's hard to see how this organization outcome could have been averted once the crucial decision was made to merge ascetic monasticism with moral authority.
This bugs me so much I sit around posting mindless screeds on Slashdot about how a billion people should flip off the Pope, never getting around to what all these people might then do with themselves in my purportedly pristine post-Pope society.
Catholic church: humanity's oldest cultural institution.
Wikipedia: humanity's youngest cultural institution.
Slashdot Mirror
There are thousands of things that don't look as bad as a shit stain—if you can see them at all—that will harm you far worse than a shit stain. An insecure, xenophobe blowhard in a post-nuclear world might very well be one of those things.
On the playground, being a shit stain is pretty much the ground zero of social comparison. In real life, the Mines of Moria couldn't contain everything scarier and deadlier than a shit stain. Definitely, Trump will do well among the playground electorate who show up to vote using their trusty shit-stain barometer.
The rest of the electorate will stop to ponder world problems that can't be resolved with a box of Tide.
Suds for Drugs
I tried to digest the PIACC data. What a hot mess. Here's one page that initially seemed promising:
Overall Results — Millennials
This covers 2012. I had to look elsewhere for descriptive text around the performance levels (Description of PIAAC literacy discrete achievement levels).
Table 1 excludes a row for the United States, but includes asterisks for whether each value for "Significantly different (p < .05) from United States". (If there was a Level 6 it would be this: ability to glean primary information from texts where conflicting information fills all the tables.)
Not once is the question of language addressed. Here is what I presume: "Subjects are tested in their official language of choice." How hard was that to blurt out? And what about subjects whose preschool home environment was "none of the above"?
This is all gussied up to mobilise action as a future employment catastrophe, yet it's not at all clear that future America has any desire to employ the bottom 20% of its millennial generation. Their contribution to America's employment landscape might be effectively zilch.
By now I'm firmly of the opinion that these numbers have been sifted, folded, and mutilated to sell something. What might that be? Then I look up and see this URL has the domain name ets.org. Bingo!
Still, it's hard to believe how much of the millennial generation in Canada falls below level 3. 40% in the 2012 survey. (I trust this number more because we don't have the Spanish problem—not yet an official language in America, so probably not tested).
Then I look at the requirements for level 3 and see that this is well above merely "getting the news". Level 2 is more than sufficient for reading the first two paragraphs of what generally qualifies as journalism these days. Level 3 requires elementary synthesis from two or more sources at the same time. Ah yes, I can see how the mayfly generation might struggle with this.
You can tell from any election cycle that half the population can't successfully meld two quantitative ideas (e.g. spend more here, spend less there). I recall a recent John Oliver-esque clip where Americans on the street professed to want "smaller government" but then you go through a list of entitlement programs and one by one the answer is "don't you dare cut that one!" Many of these people appear adequately employed. Small government. Mmmmm, donut! Program cuts. Ugh, no donut!
Sorry, rationality, Americans are just not that into you.
Here's the requirements for level 5:
Did spotting ets.org in the source text URL immediately set off a blinking radiation hazard light. Full marks.
Still no mention of the language question. Time to pull out the big guns. Use the FAQ Luke. (After all, why on earth would language status be up-front information in a survey on reading proficiency?)
Frequently Asked Questions
We're at least twenty years into this debate, and you still haven't figured out that "where energy comes from" depends on the production mix, not the consumption mix.
Hardly impressive.
There's perhaps 20% at stake where the efficiency term on power delivery in which the consumption mix can usefully tilt the landscape (e.g. by enabling fewer wasteful interconversions).
Plus there are other possible advantages. The 190-mile range is more than sufficient to shift emissions out of most urban areas.
Supposing this thing has a tank trailer (somehow I think it must), it could drop off the tank trailer entering Toronto, and pick another one up leaving Toronto. For comparison, the entire conurbation corridor from Buffalo to Bowmanville (the far edge of Oshawa) is about 150 miles. Even if it's not the eastern seaboard, it's not hickville, either.
Personally, I wouldn't blame the thing for not including cold fusion. I'd look for incremental gains worth having. Then I'd multiply by some very conservative number that this all pans out as advertised, without major flies in the ointment cancelling out all the paper advantages during a long and unpleasant teething cycle.
Matched by equal and opposite dis-improvements to the EULA, which becomes ever more intrusive, as well as much obnoxious behaviour you have to guard against with the vigilance of Sleepless in Sparta. So far I haven't figured out how to get just the good bits. Daring forecast: it ain't never gonna happen.
My wife's iMac is early 2008 and appears not be supported. Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz, 4 GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT with 128MB of GDDR3 memory. It even has an external SSD on Firewire 800 and a 22" secondary display in portrait mode, all of which works just fine.
It hardly seems insufficient for anything my wife needs to do, though some application mixes (Chromium + iMovie is a particularly bad idea) balk at having only 4 GB of system RAM.
Nevertheless, I warned her to budget for a replacement 18 months ago, sensing the e-waste event horizon coming to perfectly serviceable hardware near you.
Because—as old crusty coot knows to the very marrow of his fragile bones—the most cynical available view is never wrong. My diagnosis is that old age is still penetrating your hard tissues. But take heart. The process is automatic. You won't even have to work for it.
Hitchen's Author of America contains a super depressing page on Thomas Jefferson descending into coot-hood.
Vintage Passion of the Withering Lawn.
Good grief, doubting Thomas, settle down.
C$20,000 invested before the fact would have procured a fairly substantial ZFS storage pool.
Snapshots don't cost much in marginal storage unless the dataset churns vigorously.
Human paranoia: massless pulley pomade and frictionless rope tallow repackaged in a rusty 1970s aerosol spray can as Universal Slope Lube (earth-destroying propellant undisclosed).
Step 1: assume adversaries reside in frictionless hyperspace
Step 2: notice what they can do
Step 3: apply Murphy's law
Step 4: adorn self with tin foil
Step 5: worry about whisker growth causing pin holes
Because sticker shock has discrete spectral lines. Nobody ever said humans were rational, although Greenspan put on quite the show concerning where that assumption would take you (the financing model was also innovative: no money down, no giant one-time trillion-dollar payment until your children can legally drink in public).
s/here/hear
I guess I deserved it.
Gawker's entire defense, as I understand it, was that posting the sex tape was in the public interest because the subject was no average Joe.
When the AI revolution hits full swing, we're going to here the elite AI dissing everything old school with the comment as the vapid mutterings of some stupid regex. Even the computers will soon know how little comprehension goes into this kind of knee jerk retort.
Plus, no one is even going to watch the "average Joe" sex tape unless "average" Joe has a ginormous schlong (in truth, porn is fueled in equal measure by lust and envy, when it's not just about leering disgrace).
In summary, if your grandmother had wings, she'd be an airplane.
I don't think they've shuffled Ken or his progeny into the Google graveyard just yet. There was a close call a long time ago, but it crawled onto the shore and sprouted lungs (since renamed "types") just in time.
Personally, I don't think he wrote his classic paper about the behaviour of the malicious; he wrote it about the behaviour of the naive, which at the time was an exceptionally wide net encompassing all things digital.
I've got better things to do with my life than fight with Android's broken permission system.
Need my phone state? Fuck off.
Need my address book? Fuck off.
Need my location and you're not showing a map? Fuck off.
There, I just told 90% of the reason to own a smart phone to kindly fuck off.
Welcome to my new dumb phone with the touch screen that constantly ass dials, because there's no proper switch on the dumb thing to lock this out.
You'd think that was enough, but then I realized the audio quality is less than half as good as my old land line (1/4 as good when both ends are skanky connections).
"But what crazy person uses these stupid things to communicate carefully?" I can hear you say. You're quite right. Recently I read Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age by Sherry Turkle. I was actually disappointed in this book. There are good bits where she focusses on her primary research, but too much of the book is not like this.
One of the best things I read in there was the abject terror that many who are just now becoming adults express about having face to face conversations. Over and over it was "God grant me the ability to converse in person, but not yet." She interviewed these sorry young adults by the dozen.
That goes a long way toward explaining why the device works the way it does, but it doesn't explain why we still call these things "phones". As a phone for actually talking to people, it's pretty shitty. My brother is on the road a lot, and he often calls me when he's driving. We seem to spend half the call navigating half-duplex. Next time he calls I might recommend we try old-timey radio protocol.
ten four
over
come again
This doesn't even get into the likelihood that my device has an open back door for CSIS or the NSA to listen in whenever they feel like it, for example to capture the audio of me keyboarding my passwords, soon to own me in every dimension. Help yourself guys. After you waste enough taxpayer money, you'll discover that my peccadilloes are painfully vanilla. In fact, I'm so boring, I don't even know why I bother to resent this. Yet I do.
Cars used to represent independence / freedom from parental supervision. You'd complain that if your parents didn't give you enough access to the car you'd be ruined socially for life. It seems to me that nothing else could explain the Android security model. Give away your privacy to every app developer on the planet, but so long as my parents are excluded, I'll buy a new one every year until I turn thirty (the last five years on pure momentum).
I admit that sometimes Swype is kind of cool, in a crippled kind of way: it lets me input text at about 1/4 the speed that I can type on a regular keyboard. I used Runkeeper with my Pebble watch for one summer, and it was okay. Then this happened:
Fitness App Runkeeper Secretly Tracks Users At All Times, Sends Data to Advertisers
Now FitnessKeeper is on my "fuck off" list, too.
My wife and I lean toward environmentalism, so we make it a point to own only one one vehicle, and sometimes we have to juggle our joint transportation. We often exchange text messages to make this work. That task is now 90% of the "smart phone" use case I've got left, and valuable enough that I haven't thrown my smart phone into the trash can. I'd suffer a fair amount of inconvenience not to carry this lump of disappointment around with me all day long, but not so much as to require a second vehicle. Planet comes first, the voluntary hair shirt of disgust comes a distant second.
My smart phone is the most disappointing impressive thing I've ever owned.
Equally,
By the miracle of modern politics, sometimes factual == fat ass.
I just picked up a copy of It's Even Worse Than It Looks this morning. You, sir, are the Elephant Man in the mirror, minus the redeeming character of your pachydermous patriarch.
Either Indiana meant nothing to you in first place—all you get for your troubles is another annoying entry on your ever-lengthening "don't do" list, now with seventeen different flavours of unwanted ice cream—or you're in the business of selling performance car parts and it's ten minutes of internet background search every time the phone rings and a fair amount of rejecting business. This surely won't affect your Zagat rating, where of course the "simplest" solution is to sit back and let your online reputation go to hell—then continue to iterate "simplicity" until you find yourself—paying your bills was long ago an excluded complication—gracefully allowing your cell mate make use of your body however and whenever he wishes to.
Simple is just another word for ... nothing left to lose.
La la la, la la la la, la la la, la la la la
La la la, la la la la, la la la, la la la la
"Shut the fuck up, bitch, I ain't done with you yet."
You're delusional.
As soon as two or three of these related passwords are cracked and associated together, they can be easily identified as a password set having short edit distances (this takes a program of next to no complexity), and then any other accounts they suspect are related to this group can be fuzzed around the base phrase.
Then, if the automatic fuzz doesn't work, it can still brought to the attention of a human, who will probably detect patterns not just in your foolish password cluster, but patterns that tend to work over the entire space of foolish password clusters.
This is an arms race you're guaranteed to lose just as soon as the black hats obtain multiple associated password cracks.
I keep all my passwords in a password manager. The passwords individually are constructed to have about 50 bits of entropy on reasonable assumptions about attack order. Many of my passwords are 11 to 12 characters long, with maybe five symbol group transitions, seeded with a randomly generated password, then hand-tweaked until it looks like something I can read at a single glance and remember for half an hour or so. It takes me about three minutes per password at time of creation to create fifty briefly memorable bits.
It's still on the weak side. If five or more of my passwords became associated in plain, I estimate an attacker could reduce his attack space to something on the 30 to 40 bits per password range, after discerning my general tendencies.
Obtaining multiple seed cracks isn't likely from brute-force cracking of encrypted passwords, because this method rarely persist to 50 true bits of entropy (electricity cost is a thing if you use your own kit, opportunity cost is a thing if you use a botnet). And this can only be done if the password hash is lousy in the first place, rather than bcrypt or scrypt where 30 true bits of entropy is a daunting search.
There's still keyclick sniffing from any available microphone, keyboard loggers, BIOS trojans, etc. where password entropy is gathered in plain. This can then provide the seed template for your related-password group even if your one-off entropy is way beyond GPU cracking of bad password hash files.
The iron law of security is that algorithms only improve. Perhaps there should also be an iron law of networks that datasets aggregate. As bcrypt/scrypt become more widely adopted, the clever cracker will turn his attention to exploiting shared password entropy. Within two years the algorithm of choice for this work will be deep learning. Just how much of a challenge do you think { sCorrectHorseBattery, rCorrectHorseBattery } will pose for the algorithm that recently defeated Lee Se-dol? With thousands or millions of similar cases already in hand to seed the learning process?
I predict it will fuzz your silly template before breakfast.
In all likelihood, there will soon be a pretty good algorithm for guessing that a password belongs to a silly template on just one example. Algorithm: "That sure looks like three English words with a weak per-site fuzz, let's hammer on some related accounts and see what falls off the bottom branch."
If you look at this from the perspective of multi-drug resistant pathogens, it's almost like we're collectively determined to create the perfect training gradient for these deep learning algorithms, with many examples to gather at each level of difficulty, so as to better induce the next thing.
At least my artisanal password family looks like I completed the prescribed antibiotic regimen. Your proposed template looks like you took three pills out of twenty one, then forgot all about taking the rest after the first time you pissed with a dreamy smile.
It's a bloody long article, but here's what caught my eye.
If the OGC lawyer had added "I'm not sure within the context of the training program whether the training slide attests to such a serious misrepresentation, but if it does, you need to suspend teaching this slide immediately" we might all now be in a different place.
The NSA culture in effect seemed to regard providing timely and correct training materials concerning the chain of agency authority as a "best effort" (warranting an administrative follow up) rather than "mission critical" (warranting an internal bow-shot cease and desist).
Hayden's book Playing to the Edge contains tedious chapter upon chapter about endless compliance politics played at the top level, all lawyered up six ways from Sunday, but did the organization deeply communicate the resulting values internally, as forcefully as described by John Kotter in his book Leading Change?
Think You're Communicating Enough? Think Again
If the OGC lawyer had the required ten reminders from on high spilling out of her inbox, she might have gone down the cease and desist track instead, giving Snowden immediate reason to believe that someone on the other side actually gave a shit.
Robert Litt, general counsel of the ODNI:
I would argue here that the other side of "playing close to the edge" is that a single page of unclear training material, if it's the wrong page, is no laughing matter.
Narrow sidelines poorly communicated. What could possibly go wrong?
After only the thousandth trip down the rubber hose, $5 wrench, and single-ended extension cord & lavage basin aisle (special today-only if purchased together) I finally figured out that the core of this joke is actually narcissism.
***
Two agents dressed in black are confronted with a hapless chump, yanked out of bed at 04:00, now seated securely in front of them in a creaky wooden chair (missing most of its seat bottom) in his Dr No. vs Dr Evil footie pyjamas, refusing to give up his password at least until they serve him a fair-trade, organic, single origin Ethiopian peaberry so he can properly recover his wits.
Behind the observation screen.
"Does he want if flown in fresh from Africa this very morning?"
"I know some guys who could arrange to scramble a jet for a mere $12 large under the table."
"Risky. I don't think he's gonna sit there quietly for four hours. Once he notices the damage we've done to this footie pyjamas, he's gonna Hulk-up and destroy the entire facility. Have we got a faster, less expensive option?"
"For $240 we could scramble a hover-drone from Slacker's Choice. They've got one now that dangles a drogue-straw, completely hands-free."
"Innovative. That can't just be for our benefit. There's got to be some cover."
"Think I've got it figured. Like—here's a scenario—your dom gets a text message, then during the message storm—a natural dom always has to get the last word—leaves the room to get some munchies—"
"—shitty dom who won't even stay in character when the phone rings—"
"—no!—from his twisted point of view, it is in characterthe sub has to suffer through all the crunching and spooning sounds while being ignored for some stupid text barrage—but, and here's the thing, the sub has this figured before hand, and there's this iPhone app and the sub merely mumbles, or groans, or croaks the word "drogue" and the whole transaction is automatic, right down to geolocation of the right floor and window."
"We can't even do that."
"Which part? Bound-and-gagged speech recognition, or cell-based geolocation to a single window?"
"Only a muffled 'yerrrg!' comes though one of my gags, and it always means the same thing. The window bit."
"Yes, but we're just a single agency—a large, well funded agency with all the best toys—but even so, we can only stay a step ahead of the consumer flood up to a point."
"Yeah, I know what you mean. They've got the two of us detailed to extract just one password from one chump in his footie pyjamas. That's got to be hard to scale. You can get yourself a $5 wrench just about anywhere, but they don't hand out these retinal-projection aviator glasses without a year of hard-core indoctrination."
"Don't forget the three-hour semi-annual flutter."
"Or peeing into a bottle after every stat."
"Come to think of it, that can't be cheap, either."
"Equip that $240 drogue with a parabolic antenna, we could soon be out of a job."
"Ssssssh. Wipe that from your day log. Right now. If HQ clues into the economics of all this at scale, the glory days of hardware store expense accounts are over and done with."
MIB #2 sets his neuralyzer to 15 s. There's a bright flash. In perfect synchrony, both pairs of aviator glasses negate, dump, and eschew 15 s of recorded history—and the workings of the astrobuck underworld are spared from economic insight, yet again.
"So, what happened to the sub?"
"Well, the dom comes back into the room and the sub is sipping fair-trade, organic, single origin Ethiopian peaberry from a hovering straw."
"What about the gag?"
"Trivial, my dear Watson. The drogue contains a flexible plastic liner which is threaded into one nostril, through the sinus, right onto the taste buds."
"Without sneezing?"
"High-tech plastic, with a special c
I wouldn't be too hard on the WhatsApp engineers. They weren't allowed an afternoon nap after achieving 140 million concurrent connections before taking their first learn-to-code class.
Rick Reed: Half a billion unsuspecting FreeBSD users
Kids these days. All they want is time off for good behaviour.
Turning our heads 180 degrees, if you wanted to look like you'd taken your first learn to type properly class, you'd be writing "WhatsApp" instead of "Whatsapp" and "two-year-olds" instead of "two year olds". But no, you're from the school where noticing pre-existing paint on the road is considered optional.
Nice post. Profane, hyperbolic, vaguely illiterate, extolling a competence inversion in simple language that could have come straight from the mouth of Donald Trump if his followers were down on the meme that programming requires skill.
It's that last one that's going to keep you out of politics. Your methods are there, but you've got to go way down market to reach your intended audience. It's a lot harder than it looks. Down there, you don't have many sticks to rub together.
My problem lies primarily with the content. Most of the world prefers noisy cartoons. In this economic climate, a modern Kubrick casts three buddies from drama school instead of one Peter Sellars.
Like the people in computer science who care more about computers than computation, there's a large crowd of content consumers out there who love themselves some smart TV.
Those judges will think different once they realize that they're "disclosing" all their DNA-laden dead skin cells to their Asian laundry service—they argue in some tonal language that DNA sequencing abets selection of the optimal detergent enzymes—and "disclosing" their DNA-laden saliva at the local Mexican diner—they argue in Spanish that DNA sequencing abets selection of the optimal flavour molecules—and all those other white-privilege leaks that Donald's silly wall won't fix.
It's a competitive world. Business necessities ever expand.
The time has come, I think, to award a new Ignoble Prize for year's most brainless "parse job", in which a precious, literal reading of a formal text isn't compatible with five minutes worth of broad observation of the real world.
Am I have a bad morning? This thread is making me want to scream. "Moore's law", "5 years?" Anyone else want to pile in with a tired fatuity? Surf's up, apparently, for a tiny value of "surf".
The following video (from January 2016) contains just about everything worth knowing at this point about Intel's forthcoming phantom memory. Don't even try reading anything else unless you got a bone for chalcogenide chemistry.
Rick Coulson of Intel on 3D XPoint and NVMe
Executive summary: Charge-storage memory is at the end of its rope. There's no longer enough electrons per cell to make the cells reliable. According to Coulson (he passed my bullshit detector with nary a glitch), the typical 3D SSD is correcting about 50 bit-errors per read using advanced error correction, or the devices would not work at all. DRAM scaling is possibly worse.
Resistive memory does not depend upon charge storage, and has completely different physical scaling. Even resistive memories must stack almost out of the starting gate to achieve the scaling velocity that conventional fatuity demands. But the physics and economics of lithography are such that each additional layer suffers from diminishing returns. In fact, the cost of lithography scales as the total amount of surface area patterned, with stacked patterns being ever more expensive the higher you go. There's a sweet spot where the reduction in wafer cost through the use of less wafer pays back the more expensive lithographic process in stacking layers.
It wouldn't surprise me that we're already past that point at 32 layers in SSD, and that what pays off for going even this far are the advantages in density and integration of the surrounding products. (Hence the chips cost more than they could have, but the end product costs less, or justifies a higher per-GB selling price due to some rack-density jizz premium.)
Hard drives have traditionally had the huge advantage of not being a patterned media, hence you get a lot more surface area at a far lower cost. This, too, will change in the transition to bit-patterned media. But this media involves an extremely regular pattern with no fancy layers.
Magnetic Bit Patterned Media Fabrication Using Block Copolymer Directed Assembly
When we finally invent copolymer directed assembly of chalcogenide matrices, then perhaps we can finally dance on the grave of spinning rust.
It pretty much has to be Facebook and Twitter making people so stupid these days. People get so dialed into the present moment where the only acceptable latency is none at all as to completely forget that the past is a large object. Just look at the archival data generated by gene sequencing, EOS, deep sky surveys, CERN, and gravity-wave telescopes and then ask yourself whether an 8 ms cold latency over raw data is too big for you.
With ZFS, 1500 TB is around the present practical limit for one pool (200 drives at 8 TB each, per the Oracle Cloud guy, early 2016) and it's still just 8 ms sector latency (depending on what else you're standing behind). How about you sit there and watch while some lithographic robot patterns out 1500 TB of charge storage cells? Ring me when it's done. I've got more pressing things to do.
Likewise, there is no theoretical reason a sumo wrestler needs to be plus sized, if he's short and explosive.
Then he goes and uses "Phonograph" as a comparable, showing off how little he understands about the ubiquitous bound forms featuring the word "the" as the first element, and why that might give off an edible smell to the proper noun olfactory gland, even though it's just some chemical in a test tube with a dubious history.
"the Internet"
"the Donald"
Half of America sees little distinction.
Door #1: perfectly fine Windows 7 + somewhat tolerable EULA
Door #2: barely improved Windows 10 + "improved" EULA
Microsoft's Windows 10 is a privacy nightmare
First there is the hit to your TCO to have to read and digest this. Then there's the hit to your TCO to research defense against the dark arts (which usually proves to be a moving target). Then there's the hit to your TCO when someone tells you that Microsoft subsequently softened this language, but you're doubtful they softened it all that much, only it's too painful to contemplate having to check it out again so you wallow in rational ignorance until the end of time, a mononucleosis of self-determination.
Don't go there. You deserve better.
Yes, and the Catholic church has strict rules about altar boys, but it's hard to see how this organization outcome could have been averted once the crucial decision was made to merge ascetic monasticism with moral authority.
This bugs me so much I sit around posting mindless screeds on Slashdot about how a billion people should flip off the Pope, never getting around to what all these people might then do with themselves in my purportedly pristine post-Pope society.
Catholic church: humanity's oldest cultural institution.
Wikipedia: humanity's youngest cultural institution.
They both have problems. Imagine that.