I agree that the designers construct these worlds for the purpose of treadmill running,
I find myself imagining a massively "multiplayer" treadmill where you see the people you're running with in orc/elf/dwarf skins running around a virtual world as you run on a read treadmill. It could be the next great fitness craze for geeks:)
Passwords are good, long passwords aren't better
on
Password Security Panned
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The point of the article is that passwords are good but that long passwords aren't better. The idea is that your security system should be logging each attempt to authenticate (ie: don't provide public access to the encrypted string). Any brute force attack immediately triggers an alert against that account.
It's not that passwords are bad, but rather that relying on ever-longer passwords instead of having any intrusion/irregular behaviour detection. Theres a diminished return to strong passwords - if brute force gets too hard, determined attackers will get passwords another way: social engineering, phishing or trojens. Once password complexity is "good enough" (a 4-digit pin number for banks), security resources are better spent reacting to odd events.
We sysadmin types see the world in terms of root, where "monitoring" all possible events is neigh impossible. But for most of the world, passwords are for updating databases where transactions are logged and reversable (eg: slashdot spamming with a hacked accout).
The ratings are so bad, I doubt even the script kiddies are watching it. Trek never really recovered from Shatner's "Get a Life" joke.
Yeah, there was awful writing at times (something Trek has recovered from before), few places left to boldly go in the Trekverse and geekdom's entertainment habbits were moving away from the tv forcing the networks to flail around in search of a new audience, but the "Get a Life" meme was a stigma that eroded all that was good and fun about the fandom.
Have they taken the next step and hypothesized that such an event could account for major climate changes? Like the event that killed off the dinosaurs?
Well... asteroids don't give off a lot of light:)
Is there any reason why dark matter has to be exotic? My layman's instinct would be that for every star we see in the sky, there must be a large number of jupiter-sized balls of gas and debris that never managed to accumulate enough mass to ignite. Would we even be able to detect these or get an estimate on how common they would be in the universe by looking for eclipses of distant stars?
We're not going to end up with a super-intelligent mouse who could speak if it only had the proper vocal chords. Think about the space a mouse has in its skull, and how much room we have, and this will start to make more sense.
So... what if someone now decides to create an elephant with a human brain?
It worries me that the envelope is being pushed primarily to do an end-run around human experimentation: they are creating an entity which is biologically human for purposes of research yet won't be human under the law. That motivation worries me, even if I understand the goals and the public good. But after all we have a bazillion mouse lines out there with human genes implanted in them for research - does the fact that its a chimera with some "pure human" cells really suddenly make it any different?
(am I allowed to say "I'm undecided" on slashdot?)
I'm not sure I understand what you mean? I would consider a natural human-human chimera to be just a special case of a more general definition of a chimera: "two or more genetically distinct cell lines within individual".
To me, the interesting question is what will this do to the concept of equality under the law? What percentage of human does an entity have to be for us to declare it human under the law? Does a person with a rabbit-celled mole cease to be human? Does a rabbit with a human-celled mole have human rights? Or will there be a "sentience test" for any new organism to determine its status? Or will the concept of legal "equal rights" collapse for all of us under the weight of these questions?
I guess it's all academic until a reaches adulthood and demands clarification of the law.
( aside: there are more bacteria cells than human cells in the average human body so we're already chimeras of a sort:)
The last time I lost my journal, it was accompanied by a loud popping sound and the smell of ozone coming from the power supply of the linux box in the corner of my living room.
As much as I like having an easy interface to the online writings of all my friends, I miss the days of having my own pet web server, of being able to do something myself other than twiddle my thumbs and wait when something breaks.
(sorry... I know... random meanderings... I feel this sudden urge to post a few memes, links to personality tests and a few "what happened at work today!" comments).
The story is a funny little urban anecdote, but that's it. Burglers get scared off by a lot of things - and they usually don't rob houses while there are people in them so any sign of life can often scare them off.
If this is news then I'm now waiting for a sensationalist story about a startled burgler or even a policeman on a routine call hearing the audio of some game character making a threat or seeing a high resolution gun pointed at him on a big screen and returning fire, hitting a kid.
According to the 1898 H.G. Wells original story (of which the infamous radio play was just a dramatization, not the original source material), the Martians were eating earth foodstuffs and water and it was basically food poisoning that did them in.
To wit:
But there are no bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work their overthrow.
And from the epilog:
At any rate, in all the bodies of the Martians that were examined after the war, no bacteria except those already known as terrestrial species were found.
( I would like to thank The Literature Network
and google for their assistance in the preparation of this post. No martians were harmed in the research. )
( oh, and I wouldn't lose much sleep over Martian bugs - there are plenty of diseases in strange corners of our own world against which we have no defenses - I's rate this whole article "-1 : FUD" )
The Grandparent poster had an interesting point, in that Darwinism could be used as a basis for a society.
To apply the idea in the parent post: the theory of Darwinian evolution has as much to do with Eugenics as the theory of gravity had to do with the 9/11 plot.
Interestingly, if the nazis (or one of the less militant Eugenics movements) had won and built their utopian race, they'd be living in the biological equivalent of a Windows world, constantly being overrun with fast-spreading plagues.
An analogy I've found is helpful to use on people who have trouble with this concept:
Saying that we should not aid those who are weak because it opposes the theory of evolution is like saying we should not build support beams in bridges because it opposes the theory of gravity.
Evolution, like gravity, is a description of nature, not a philosophy of how to build a civilization.
Re:Top Five reasons why the space program should b
on
Apollo 12 at 35
·
· Score: 1
5. The world population doubles every 40 years. Eventually, we will have to either expand across other planets or enforce population control.
I would point out that since the doubling of population growth is exponential and a sphere centered on earth expands only geometrically, to avoid population control we not only have to expand outwards, but outwards at an ever-accelerating pace.
Eventually even a shockwave of humanity expanding outwards filling space at the speed of light will not be able to keep up with a doubling population. Thus, the density colonized space will have to increase, also at an accelerating rate until eventually we attain critical mass and collapse the universe into a black hole from the weight of our existence.
You can't outrun population control, only delay it a little.
D&D really was one of those rare cases of something "new". Before the net was popular, it was a great tool for social networking for geeks. Every tech job I've ever had came not from my experience or my education, but from contacts made over the years around gaming tables.
Alas, it's a also a good example of how success is measured differently between sellers and consumers. D&D never really went into decline around here, but once you own the main rule books and some dice, you don't _need_ anything else and so game stores moved more heavily into card games where the profits were.
The d20 licensing scheme is very, very cool, although I have to admit that I still don't quite trust TSR/Wizards/Hasbro (their first reaction to the net was similar to the RIAA but then after an initial fan-relations-disaster they changed their tune and actually made an effort to reach out to the fans and address legitimate need to be able to share).
It's interesting watching a second generation of gamers start to grow up (and yes, there is a large and healthy population of them). They don't have to be saddled with as much of the "it's evil!" baggage (it's still out there, but weakened as the geek have inherited the earth)
Actually, if the universe turns out to be a giant fractal, you would potentially be allowed to model the entire thing with arbitrary precision within a small amount of time and space right down to the simulation of the simulation.
(of course, based a layman's understanding of the uncertainty principle, we might have some difficulty taking any measurements of such a simulation - but if I had an answer to that, I wouldn't be just tossing it out in a slashdot post:)
If I were to add a film to this list, it would likely be "Contact". The opening shot is the best explanation of "space is big" I've ever seen, it deals with the big science-vs-religion flamewar in a way that seems respectful to both sides and it says an amazingly large number of things about science. I didn't like the movie at first, but it's really grown on me the more I've thought back to it.
(although I do think it should have ended at the limo - that's when it had made its point and that's when it was done).
It's not about suppressing speech it's about paying people for their creative talent.
And here in a nutshell is where the fault line is between you and I. Are you suggesting you created something that wasn't there to begin with? My view is that images of public events should be public as well.
(if you're speaking about images taken outside public events, I do consider those different, although I feel strongly that an aspiring politician should treat all photo-ops as public events)
I think I need to call my job "Career Property" so that I can lobby to outlaw any technology or action which would eliminate the need to keep me.
This strikes me as another case of the [Christian] church re-explaining history to put themselves at the center - after all, isn't chess originally from India?
Obtopic: Isn't religion an act of faith? If a developer adds a plotline or algorithm to a game to "models" a religion, it's not really religion any more because by definition it's been made mechanistic.
Personally, I feel there's not enough Darwinian evolution in games - why don't orc shamons evolve a more dangerous AI?
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that the designers construct these worlds for the purpose of treadmill running,
I find myself imagining a massively "multiplayer" treadmill where you see the people you're running with in orc/elf/dwarf skins running around a virtual world as you run on a read treadmill. It could be the next great fitness craze for geeks :)
The point of the article is that passwords are good but that long passwords aren't better. The idea is that your security system should be logging each attempt to authenticate (ie: don't provide public access to the encrypted string). Any brute force attack immediately triggers an alert against that account.
It's not that passwords are bad, but rather that relying on ever-longer passwords instead of having any intrusion/irregular behaviour detection. Theres a diminished return to strong passwords - if brute force gets too hard, determined attackers will get passwords another way: social engineering, phishing or trojens. Once password complexity is "good enough" (a 4-digit pin number for banks), security resources are better spent reacting to odd events.
We sysadmin types see the world in terms of root, where "monitoring" all possible events is neigh impossible. But for most of the world, passwords are for updating databases where transactions are logged and reversable (eg: slashdot spamming with a hacked accout).
Distributed Disintrest Of Startrek?
The ratings are so bad, I doubt even the script kiddies are watching it. Trek never really recovered from Shatner's "Get a Life" joke.
Yeah, there was awful writing at times (something Trek has recovered from before), few places left to boldly go in the Trekverse and geekdom's entertainment habbits were moving away from the tv forcing the networks to flail around in search of a new audience, but the "Get a Life" meme was a stigma that eroded all that was good and fun about the fandom.
Have they taken the next step and hypothesized that such an event could account for major climate changes? Like the event that killed off the dinosaurs?
Well ... asteroids don't give off a lot of light :)
Is there any reason why dark matter has to be exotic? My layman's instinct would be that for every star we see in the sky, there must be a large number of jupiter-sized balls of gas and debris that never managed to accumulate enough mass to ignite. Would we even be able to detect these or get an estimate on how common they would be in the universe by looking for eclipses of distant stars?
We're not going to end up with a super-intelligent mouse who could speak if it only had the proper vocal chords. Think about the space a mouse has in its skull, and how much room we have, and this will start to make more sense.
So ... what if someone now decides to create an elephant with a human brain?
It worries me that the envelope is being pushed primarily to do an end-run around human experimentation: they are creating an entity which is biologically human for purposes of research yet won't be human under the law. That motivation worries me, even if I understand the goals and the public good. But after all we have a bazillion mouse lines out there with human genes implanted in them for research - does the fact that its a chimera with some "pure human" cells really suddenly make it any different?(am I allowed to say "I'm undecided" on slashdot?)
I'm not sure I understand what you mean? I would consider a natural human-human chimera to be just a special case of a more general definition of a chimera: "two or more genetically distinct cell lines within individual".
To me, the interesting question is what will this do to the concept of equality under the law? What percentage of human does an entity have to be for us to declare it human under the law? Does a person with a rabbit-celled mole cease to be human? Does a rabbit with a human-celled mole have human rights? Or will there be a "sentience test" for any new organism to determine its status? Or will the concept of legal "equal rights" collapse for all of us under the weight of these questions?
I guess it's all academic until a reaches adulthood and demands clarification of the law.
( aside: there are more bacteria cells than human cells in the average human body so we're already chimeras of a sort :)
So you're saying it should be called "she-dot"?
The last time I lost my journal, it was accompanied by a loud popping sound and the smell of ozone coming from the power supply of the linux box in the corner of my living room.
As much as I like having an easy interface to the online writings of all my friends, I miss the days of having my own pet web server, of being able to do something myself other than twiddle my thumbs and wait when something breaks.
(sorry ... I know ... random meanderings ... I feel this sudden urge to post a few memes, links to personality tests and a few "what happened at work today!" comments).
The story is a funny little urban anecdote, but that's it. Burglers get scared off by a lot of things - and they usually don't rob houses while there are people in them so any sign of life can often scare them off.
If this is news then I'm now waiting for a sensationalist story about a startled burgler or even a policeman on a routine call hearing the audio of some game character making a threat or seeing a high resolution gun pointed at him on a big screen and returning fire, hitting a kid.
According to the 1898 H.G. Wells original story (of which the infamous radio play was just a dramatization, not the original source material), the Martians were eating earth foodstuffs and water and it was basically food poisoning that did them in.
To wit:
And from the epilog:
( I would like to thank The Literature Network and google for their assistance in the preparation of this post. No martians were harmed in the research. )
( oh, and I wouldn't lose much sleep over Martian bugs - there are plenty of diseases in strange corners of our own world against which we have no defenses - I's rate this whole article "-1 : FUD" )
The Grandparent poster had an interesting point, in that Darwinism could be used as a basis for a society.
To apply the idea in the parent post: the theory of Darwinian evolution has as much to do with Eugenics as the theory of gravity had to do with the 9/11 plot.
Interestingly, if the nazis (or one of the less militant Eugenics movements) had won and built their utopian race, they'd be living in the biological equivalent of a Windows world, constantly being overrun with fast-spreading plagues.
An analogy I've found is helpful to use on people who have trouble with this concept:
Saying that we should not aid those who are weak because it opposes the theory of evolution is like saying we should not build support beams in bridges because it opposes the theory of gravity.
Evolution, like gravity, is a description of nature, not a philosophy of how to build a civilization.
5. The world population doubles every 40 years. Eventually, we will have to either expand across other planets or enforce population control.
I would point out that since the doubling of population growth is exponential and a sphere centered on earth expands only geometrically, to avoid population control we not only have to expand outwards, but outwards at an ever-accelerating pace.
Eventually even a shockwave of humanity expanding outwards filling space at the speed of light will not be able to keep up with a doubling population. Thus, the density colonized space will have to increase, also at an accelerating rate until eventually we attain critical mass and collapse the universe into a black hole from the weight of our existence.
You can't outrun population control, only delay it a little.
I fear that they might try to "clean" up the movie.
So you're worrying the ads might pitch Marvin as "your plastic pal who's fun to play with?"
Yeah, they'll be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Am I the only one who is getting tired of the whole "the fans are the real problem!" whining?
As amazing and fun as the animation and humour were, I was never able shake off the creepy elitism underneath it all as I was watching it.
hey, news flash, you're not going to find the meaning of life encoded in the articles of slashdot ...
*ponders mios's uid*
7+1+5*7+3-4 = 42
I for one am tired of being cheep foreign labour.
I want to be expensive foreign labour.
D&D really was one of those rare cases of something "new". Before the net was popular, it was a great tool for social networking for geeks. Every tech job I've ever had came not from my experience or my education, but from contacts made over the years around gaming tables.
Alas, it's a also a good example of how success is measured differently between sellers and consumers. D&D never really went into decline around here, but once you own the main rule books and some dice, you don't _need_ anything else and so game stores moved more heavily into card games where the profits were.
The d20 licensing scheme is very, very cool, although I have to admit that I still don't quite trust TSR/Wizards/Hasbro (their first reaction to the net was similar to the RIAA but then after an initial fan-relations-disaster they changed their tune and actually made an effort to reach out to the fans and address legitimate need to be able to share).
It's interesting watching a second generation of gamers start to grow up (and yes, there is a large and healthy population of them). They don't have to be saddled with as much of the "it's evil!" baggage (it's still out there, but weakened as the geek have inherited the earth)
I prefer to think of math as "the language of patterns" (with a lot of regional dialects).
Our ideas are the same up to an isomorphism.
This is a total non-story posed in a dishonestly sensationalistic fashion. That's right! People should get their news from Fox.
Actually, if the universe turns out to be a giant fractal, you would potentially be allowed to model the entire thing with arbitrary precision within a small amount of time and space right down to the simulation of the simulation.
(of course, based a layman's understanding of the uncertainty principle, we might have some difficulty taking any measurements of such a simulation - but if I had an answer to that, I wouldn't be just tossing it out in a slashdot post :)
"First Post"
If I were to add a film to this list, it would likely be "Contact". The opening shot is the best explanation of "space is big" I've ever seen, it deals with the big science-vs-religion flamewar in a way that seems respectful to both sides and it says an amazingly large number of things about science. I didn't like the movie at first, but it's really grown on me the more I've thought back to it.
(although I do think it should have ended at the limo - that's when it had made its point and that's when it was done).
It's not about suppressing speech it's about paying people for their creative talent. And here in a nutshell is where the fault line is between you and I. Are you suggesting you created something that wasn't there to begin with? My view is that images of public events should be public as well. (if you're speaking about images taken outside public events, I do consider those different, although I feel strongly that an aspiring politician should treat all photo-ops as public events) I think I need to call my job "Career Property" so that I can lobby to outlaw any technology or action which would eliminate the need to keep me.
This strikes me as another case of the [Christian] church re-explaining history to put themselves at the center - after all, isn't chess originally from India?
Obtopic: Isn't religion an act of faith? If a developer adds a plotline or algorithm to a game to "models" a religion, it's not really religion any more because by definition it's been made mechanistic.
Personally, I feel there's not enough Darwinian evolution in games - why don't orc shamons evolve a more dangerous AI?