[...] is that the great strength of a password is its portability. If I need someone to do something on my behalf I can tell them the password and they can do it, and it gets done. This may sound like a weakness on the surface, but the alternative non-portable method would mean all those things wouldn't otherwise have been done, and ultimately systems are designed to do things.
Aren't you extrapolating from posting the latest coolest pic you have on your Facebook account a bit too much?
If you have a job where security credentials are important and your boss finds out your giving your password so someone else can "get stuff done", you'll find yourself in a bad spot (or you should at least)! There's a reason even Facebook says usernames and passwords are personal... it's because they're meant to be, to protect you (apparently from yourself). Hell, this statement you wrote seems to me the best reason to go on and implement biometric style authentication. At least people will stop giving their passwords to others... Do you also give people access to your bank account because you need them to do something for you? And you sleep comfortable after that?
I think the regular old password is the best balance you'll ever get to authentication. Why waste energy trying to build a better mousetrap?
And since when what you think is law? World seemed to work pretty well in 1904 and yet, by 1905, a certain guy named Einstein had proved there was a speed limit (among other things). Why did he even waste energy thinking about that when we clearly cannot even go beyond the nearest rock?
Well, mass spectrometers have the (slight) disadvantage of needing a charged "particle". if it's neutral (and for whatever reason you cannot charge it), this seems like a possible solution.
Granted, it looks like it has a lot of drawbacks of its own (like the heating part).
once they have sold enough consoles to get some serious market share, they will make an update that screws us all.
Will screw us?! If you already know this is most likely going to happen and you consider it a screwing factor, why the hell do you go on and buy it on the first place?!
Well, I just had one break yesterday. BetterPrivacy doesn't work with version 11.
And I have only three extensions in total, so "my" average of broken extensions is quite high. How do they say... oh yeah, "your mileage may vary."
No, stealing isn't the only way. But then again, when you apply for a patent it should (in principle) be for something novel and non-obvious. If random Joe (whomever he is) can think of it, then maybe a patent shouldn't be granted to such a thing.
It's the same as in 11.4.
Whatever is commented out keeps the default behavior. As already mentioned in this thread, the default is allowing root logins. Your change to "No" prevents root access (provided you restarted the SSH daemon). Of course you can use "without-password" to allow ssh-key based access to root, if you still have a need for it.
My view of it is that there aren't that many basic concepts to discover in the back of your garage. Particle accelerators, high-field NMR machines, electron or AFM microscopes, huge ground-based or orbital telescopes are needed to make the next discoveries in their respective fields because the easy stuff, that could be seen with bubble chambers, low-field magnets, optical microscopes and small telescopes was already discovered. It's a matter of diminishing returns.
Scientists have been doing their jobs for hundreds of years, no one is going to discover an improved version of the laws of gravitation with a 100 dollar telescope. What may come out of observing dark matter was obtained with multi-million dollar equipment, collaborative effort and brilliant minds going over and over the same thing.
Granted, there may be things to discover that can still be attained in a garage. In hindsight everything is easy, but if no one is looking, there may still be amazing things still to observe in your kitchen lab. But expecting the cure for problems of the world to come out of a bunch of semi-amateur scientists is betting on the wrong horse... it may happen in a field or two, but it won't be the future of science.
My opinion... most likely it won't. I do think the article us (partially) crap. Food sucks up there, because the same food actually would suck down here. It's not something I'd want to eat if given a choice. And the times it actually looked like proper food, it tasted like proper food. Humidity may contribute to it not being great, but it won't make it the crap it looks, tastes and feels like most of the time. And having flown low-cost airlines where you pay for the food and it actually tastes good (because they want you to pay for it) I know it's not the addition of salt and tons of pepper or whatever that makes it edible.
In the 787 at first it may taste like good food because it being a new plane the companies will want all the publicity they can get, but after a while the dust settles and the same crap food you get on other planes you'll get on the 787. And then no humidity in the world will make a difference...
And saying they add too much salt to compensate for the lack of taste completely ignores that lots of other prepackaged and fast food options have the same problem. They do it because our brain is wired to love salt and won't care about the crap we're eating. Not because there's no humidity in the restaurant you're in!
OP says that the ten thousand taste buds (i.e. notice how there was no mention of pressure at that point) work fine as long as there is humidity. Whether at 8 thousand feet or 35 thousand feet, what the OP says is that the really low humidity inside the plane (to guarantee its structural integrity on the long run) is bad for the taste buds and thus for the taste of food.
The article may be crap, but not for the reasons you point!
Are you suggesting the 7 mirrors will be all next to one another in a long line with 58 meters of length?
If so, you might want to look here to get a better idea of how it will look like.
And you may want to go here to see it will actually have a 24.5 meter diameter, which is a lot closer to 22 than to 58.
But hey, don't let facts or the possibility of learning something get in your way... every man deserves the chance to call someone else an idiot.
I seem to recall the SR-71's leading edges were actually designed to handle deforming at said high-temperatures.
It was not only the leading edges that were designed that way, the entire plane was designed taking into account that it would expand. Here's an interesting citation from the Wikipedia page for the SR-71:
"To allow for thermal expansion at the high operational temperatures, the fuselage panels were manufactured to fit only loosely on the ground. Proper alignment was only achieved when the airframe heated due to air resistance at high speeds, causing the airframe to expand several inches. Because of this, and the lack of a fuel sealing system that could handle the thermal expansion of the airframe at extreme temperatures, the aircraft would leak JP-7 jet fuel onto the runway. The aircraft would quickly make a short sprint after takeoff to warm up the airframe before being refueled in the air, prior to departing on a mission."
Here go two links just in case you are interested in knowing more about this Navajo code talk and the men that helped "secure" communications in the Pacific.
If you have a knowledgeable user on a Mac he can run the system securely with out a need for a virus scanner. Unfortunately on Windows you do not have this option.
Now I've never ran an anti-virus on an UNIX system I own, including my Macs, but I would never run a Windows system without it.
Stop spreading FUD, please.
When I used Windows XP I didn't have an antivirus for extensive periods. When I did, I kept it off all the time. I must certainly have had periods of over between 6 months between scans. And I never found viruses, adware, spyware and so on.
I didn't install random crap I found on the internet. I used an account without privileges. I had the standard firewall on. I updated my software. That's all there is!
And before you say it was impossible to have a standard privilege account back then, I never had usability problems. It made installing software slightly harder but nothing that a knowledgeable user can't do. And that's less than 1% of a typical user's time in front of the computer anyway.
Is Windows immune to viruses? No.
Is Windows going to get destroyed with viruses no matter what you do so that you need antivirus, antispyware, antiadware and so no? Hell, no!
I know this is all anecdotal evidence, but one case should be more than enough to disprove that "awesome" theory you had there...
What you should have said is "I'm not knowledgeable enough to run a Windows without an antivirus." But that's not really a Windows problem, is it?
Disclaimer (to avoid being called a fanboi): Nowadays I use Linux all the time, I haven't had a computer with Windows (except on VMs) for several years now.
I've read quite a bit about this Uberman sleep schedule although I never tried it. One of the guys who tried it said that whenever he was doing it he felt major cravings for grape juice (which he said he never felt while on a regular sleep schedule).
He didn't know for sure the source for this but his guess was that the other sleep phases produce chemicals which you end up not getting if you use this sleeping pattern.
So, while it seems to work, it's not without its problems. And I'm not sure anyone ("anyseveral" actually) did it for long enough so that the long term effects could be judged.
Granted, someone whose brain was wired to do that would probably be completely non-functional, since we need so much power for our other activities, but it is certainly possible.
Indeed you are right at this point. I once saw a documentary about savants and this is one of the ideas you got. These people master skills like no one else could imagine. The most famous savant, Kim Peek (the inspiration for the character of Dustin Hoffman in Rainman) had memorized thousands of books. Other played instruments flawlessly even after hearing a new piece just once. Other could draw Manhattan with impressive detail after seeing only one photo. The list goes on.
The inabilities they had were quite striking as well. The above mentioned Kim Peek was totally unable to function by himself. If left alone brushing his teeth he would continue brushing the same spot.
To further support your statement they had the case of a couple of twins (based on Wikipedia I'd say Charles and George Finn, but I can't be certain) that could calculate the calendar back thousands of years. You'd ask "Which day of the week was 1st of March 330 AD?" and they'd get it right. They could also remember, for the time they had been alive, what the weather was like on a specific day "Ah, you were born in 22nd September 1973? It was a sunny day here in NY." These twins started by being totally asocial but (at least one of them, can't recall what happened to the other) but as their social skills improved their computational capacities got lost. By the end of the documentary you saw one of them failing a basic math test (he said a certain number ending in 5 was prime) but going out in NYC and buying a hot dog, which he would have been unable 20 years before.
If I give you the money, you fail to do the back flip, and after all that I still don't ask you for the money back, what's wrong with you taking the money (other than your conscience)?
These people don't have to burden of proof because morons believe them nonetheless. They have to prove nothing because there are those who are gullible to believe them without any consistent evidence that they can do what they claim.
If things were as simple as you put them, they would all be put out of business by the second week of "work". It would be clear they are doing nothing and people would move on. Science should debunk them because no one else will. It would be good if we lived in a world where these people had to prove their skills, but we don't. We live in a world where these psychics are making more money than scientists. Simple as that!
Why is it their job to prove their abilities? If there are people out there gullible enough to be willing to give their money to someone who never proved any of his supposed skills, that's their problem.
And I disagree with you, I think it's his job and science's to prove these people wrong. There are people out there who are not skilled enough or critical enough to realize these psychics are liars, thieves and con artists. Someone has to help them, just like the police is here to protect us of general criminals (or should be).
Just a clarification, I think something got lost between my original comment and yours... Elephant gestation is about 22 months. When I said after one year you have two elephants I meant the same two, not two more...
Put two fish of the same species in a proper environment and safe from predators and after one year you have 10000 of them. Put two elephants in an equivalent scenario and after one year you have two elephants. After two years you may have three. After 10 years, all things perfect, you'll have about 5 of them.
Now go back to the end of year one... kill one fish, kill one elephant. Do you see where this is going?
First, the fact that the asteroids would be going at a much slower speed than your ship going at the speed of light. Instead of the asteroids clearing your path, you would eventually hit the asteroids.
Then, let's forget this tiny detail of E=mc^2 and how that influences the mass of a speeding object. Sure it's a negligible factor at our typical speeds but apply the Lorentz Factor to a ship speeding close to the speed of light (let's say 90%) and the mass increases substantially (to 2.3 times the rest mass). Increase speed even more and mass keeps going up (to roughly 7 times, at 0.99c). Then, when you think a bit more about it, more than the 10 seconds it took you to read that forum you showed while completely missing the post of the guy that says basically what I just said, you start seeing what the problem is with keeping a constant 1G acceleration. It takes a lot of mass (read "fuel"), just to keep speeding up. Then, if you think a little bit harder, you may start understanding why they call the speed of light a "limit".
Slashdot Mirror
[...] is that the great strength of a password is its portability. If I need someone to do something on my behalf I can tell them the password and they can do it, and it gets done. This may sound like a weakness on the surface, but the alternative non-portable method would mean all those things wouldn't otherwise have been done, and ultimately systems are designed to do things.
Aren't you extrapolating from posting the latest coolest pic you have on your Facebook account a bit too much?
If you have a job where security credentials are important and your boss finds out your giving your password so someone else can "get stuff done", you'll find yourself in a bad spot (or you should at least)! There's a reason even Facebook says usernames and passwords are personal... it's because they're meant to be, to protect you (apparently from yourself). Hell, this statement you wrote seems to me the best reason to go on and implement biometric style authentication. At least people will stop giving their passwords to others... Do you also give people access to your bank account because you need them to do something for you? And you sleep comfortable after that?
I think the regular old password is the best balance you'll ever get to authentication. Why waste energy trying to build a better mousetrap?
And since when what you think is law? World seemed to work pretty well in 1904 and yet, by 1905, a certain guy named Einstein had proved there was a speed limit (among other things). Why did he even waste energy thinking about that when we clearly cannot even go beyond the nearest rock?
Well, mass spectrometers have the (slight) disadvantage of needing a charged "particle". if it's neutral (and for whatever reason you cannot charge it), this seems like a possible solution.
Granted, it looks like it has a lot of drawbacks of its own (like the heating part).
Desktop Linux is not a large enough market to have any significant bearing on the importance of Flash.
Ah but you see, next year it will be the year of the Linux Desktop and it will all change!
once they have sold enough consoles to get some serious market share, they will make an update that screws us all.
Will screw us?! If you already know this is most likely going to happen and you consider it a screwing factor, why the hell do you go on and buy it on the first place?!
Glutton for punishment, much?
Well, I just had one break yesterday. BetterPrivacy doesn't work with version 11.
And I have only three extensions in total, so "my" average of broken extensions is quite high. How do they say... oh yeah, "your mileage may vary."
No, stealing isn't the only way. But then again, when you apply for a patent it should (in principle) be for something novel and non-obvious. If random Joe (whomever he is) can think of it, then maybe a patent shouldn't be granted to such a thing.
It's the same as in 11.4.
Whatever is commented out keeps the default behavior. As already mentioned in this thread, the default is allowing root logins. Your change to "No" prevents root access (provided you restarted the SSH daemon). Of course you can use "without-password" to allow ssh-key based access to root, if you still have a need for it.
My view of it is that there aren't that many basic concepts to discover in the back of your garage. Particle accelerators, high-field NMR machines, electron or AFM microscopes, huge ground-based or orbital telescopes are needed to make the next discoveries in their respective fields because the easy stuff, that could be seen with bubble chambers, low-field magnets, optical microscopes and small telescopes was already discovered. It's a matter of diminishing returns.
Scientists have been doing their jobs for hundreds of years, no one is going to discover an improved version of the laws of gravitation with a 100 dollar telescope. What may come out of observing dark matter was obtained with multi-million dollar equipment, collaborative effort and brilliant minds going over and over the same thing.
Granted, there may be things to discover that can still be attained in a garage. In hindsight everything is easy, but if no one is looking, there may still be amazing things still to observe in your kitchen lab. But expecting the cure for problems of the world to come out of a bunch of semi-amateur scientists is betting on the wrong horse... it may happen in a field or two, but it won't be the future of science.
Maybe a bit late, but OpenSUSE as of 11.4 still had "PermitRootLogin yes" by default. Haven't checked for later versions...
My opinion... most likely it won't. I do think the article us (partially) crap. Food sucks up there, because the same food actually would suck down here. It's not something I'd want to eat if given a choice. And the times it actually looked like proper food, it tasted like proper food. Humidity may contribute to it not being great, but it won't make it the crap it looks, tastes and feels like most of the time. And having flown low-cost airlines where you pay for the food and it actually tastes good (because they want you to pay for it) I know it's not the addition of salt and tons of pepper or whatever that makes it edible.
In the 787 at first it may taste like good food because it being a new plane the companies will want all the publicity they can get, but after a while the dust settles and the same crap food you get on other planes you'll get on the 787. And then no humidity in the world will make a difference...
And saying they add too much salt to compensate for the lack of taste completely ignores that lots of other prepackaged and fast food options have the same problem. They do it because our brain is wired to love salt and won't care about the crap we're eating. Not because there's no humidity in the restaurant you're in!
OP says that the ten thousand taste buds (i.e. notice how there was no mention of pressure at that point) work fine as long as there is humidity. Whether at 8 thousand feet or 35 thousand feet, what the OP says is that the really low humidity inside the plane (to guarantee its structural integrity on the long run) is bad for the taste buds and thus for the taste of food.
The article may be crap, but not for the reasons you point!
Are you suggesting the 7 mirrors will be all next to one another in a long line with 58 meters of length?
If so, you might want to look here to get a better idea of how it will look like.
And you may want to go here to see it will actually have a 24.5 meter diameter, which is a lot closer to 22 than to 58.
But hey, don't let facts or the possibility of learning something get in your way... every man deserves the chance to call someone else an idiot.
You are right, but so is the submitter...
Decimate
I seem to recall the SR-71's leading edges were actually designed to handle deforming at said high-temperatures.
It was not only the leading edges that were designed that way, the entire plane was designed taking into account that it would expand. Here's an interesting citation from the Wikipedia page for the SR-71:
"To allow for thermal expansion at the high operational temperatures, the fuselage panels were manufactured to fit only loosely on the ground. Proper alignment was only achieved when the airframe heated due to air resistance at high speeds, causing the airframe to expand several inches. Because of this, and the lack of a fuel sealing system that could handle the thermal expansion of the airframe at extreme temperatures, the aircraft would leak JP-7 jet fuel onto the runway. The aircraft would quickly make a short sprint after takeoff to warm up the airframe before being refueled in the air, prior to departing on a mission."
Here go two links just in case you are interested in knowing more about this Navajo code talk and the men that helped "secure" communications in the Pacific.
If you have a knowledgeable user on a Mac he can run the system securely with out a need for a virus scanner. Unfortunately on Windows you do not have this option.
Now I've never ran an anti-virus on an UNIX system I own, including my Macs, but I would never run a Windows system without it.
Stop spreading FUD, please.
When I used Windows XP I didn't have an antivirus for extensive periods. When I did, I kept it off all the time. I must certainly have had periods of over between 6 months between scans. And I never found viruses, adware, spyware and so on.
I didn't install random crap I found on the internet. I used an account without privileges. I had the standard firewall on. I updated my software. That's all there is!
And before you say it was impossible to have a standard privilege account back then, I never had usability problems. It made installing software slightly harder but nothing that a knowledgeable user can't do. And that's less than 1% of a typical user's time in front of the computer anyway.
Is Windows immune to viruses? No.
Is Windows going to get destroyed with viruses no matter what you do so that you need antivirus, antispyware, antiadware and so no? Hell, no!
I know this is all anecdotal evidence, but one case should be more than enough to disprove that "awesome" theory you had there...
What you should have said is "I'm not knowledgeable enough to run a Windows without an antivirus." But that's not really a Windows problem, is it?
Disclaimer (to avoid being called a fanboi): Nowadays I use Linux all the time, I haven't had a computer with Windows (except on VMs) for several years now.
I've read quite a bit about this Uberman sleep schedule although I never tried it. One of the guys who tried it said that whenever he was doing it he felt major cravings for grape juice (which he said he never felt while on a regular sleep schedule).
He didn't know for sure the source for this but his guess was that the other sleep phases produce chemicals which you end up not getting if you use this sleeping pattern.
So, while it seems to work, it's not without its problems. And I'm not sure anyone ("anyseveral" actually) did it for long enough so that the long term effects could be judged.
Granted, someone whose brain was wired to do that would probably be completely non-functional, since we need so much power for our other activities, but it is certainly possible.
Indeed you are right at this point. I once saw a documentary about savants and this is one of the ideas you got. These people master skills like no one else could imagine. The most famous savant, Kim Peek (the inspiration for the character of Dustin Hoffman in Rainman) had memorized thousands of books. Other played instruments flawlessly even after hearing a new piece just once. Other could draw Manhattan with impressive detail after seeing only one photo. The list goes on.
The inabilities they had were quite striking as well. The above mentioned Kim Peek was totally unable to function by himself. If left alone brushing his teeth he would continue brushing the same spot.
To further support your statement they had the case of a couple of twins (based on Wikipedia I'd say Charles and George Finn, but I can't be certain) that could calculate the calendar back thousands of years. You'd ask "Which day of the week was 1st of March 330 AD?" and they'd get it right. They could also remember, for the time they had been alive, what the weather was like on a specific day "Ah, you were born in 22nd September 1973? It was a sunny day here in NY." These twins started by being totally asocial but (at least one of them, can't recall what happened to the other) but as their social skills improved their computational capacities got lost. By the end of the documentary you saw one of them failing a basic math test (he said a certain number ending in 5 was prime) but going out in NYC and buying a hot dog, which he would have been unable 20 years before.
If I give you the money, you fail to do the back flip, and after all that I still don't ask you for the money back, what's wrong with you taking the money (other than your conscience)?
These people don't have to burden of proof because morons believe them nonetheless. They have to prove nothing because there are those who are gullible to believe them without any consistent evidence that they can do what they claim.
If things were as simple as you put them, they would all be put out of business by the second week of "work". It would be clear they are doing nothing and people would move on. Science should debunk them because no one else will. It would be good if we lived in a world where these people had to prove their skills, but we don't. We live in a world where these psychics are making more money than scientists. Simple as that!
Why is it their job to prove their abilities? If there are people out there gullible enough to be willing to give their money to someone who never proved any of his supposed skills, that's their problem.
And I disagree with you, I think it's his job and science's to prove these people wrong. There are people out there who are not skilled enough or critical enough to realize these psychics are liars, thieves and con artists. Someone has to help them, just like the police is here to protect us of general criminals (or should be).
Wikipedia has a list of the oldest people in the world.. 27 of them got older than 114 (only three of them disputed) and one of them is still alive.
So... "nothing to see here, move along..."
There's this thing called relative speed... (you can imagine the rest, right?)
Just a clarification, I think something got lost between my original comment and yours...
Elephant gestation is about 22 months. When I said after one year you have two elephants I meant the same two, not two more...
Put two fish of the same species in a proper environment and safe from predators and after one year you have 10000 of them.
Put two elephants in an equivalent scenario and after one year you have two elephants. After two years you may have three. After 10 years, all things perfect, you'll have about 5 of them.
Now go back to the end of year one... kill one fish, kill one elephant. Do you see where this is going?
Gee, what could go wrong with that?
First, the fact that the asteroids would be going at a much slower speed than your ship going at the speed of light. Instead of the asteroids clearing your path, you would eventually hit the asteroids.
Then, let's forget this tiny detail of E=mc^2 and how that influences the mass of a speeding object. Sure it's a negligible factor at our typical speeds but apply the Lorentz Factor to a ship speeding close to the speed of light (let's say 90%) and the mass increases substantially (to 2.3 times the rest mass). Increase speed even more and mass keeps going up (to roughly 7 times, at 0.99c). Then, when you think a bit more about it, more than the 10 seconds it took you to read that forum you showed while completely missing the post of the guy that says basically what I just said, you start seeing what the problem is with keeping a constant 1G acceleration. It takes a lot of mass (read "fuel"), just to keep speeding up. Then, if you think a little bit harder, you may start understanding why they call the speed of light a "limit".