(1) The "google yourself" effect: what you read is going to be logged by the site you are reading. That's a nice gold star on files of special interest in the logs of the site you are reading.
(2) The version of the documents being spread could potentially have been maliciously altered. Just because you have a corporate licence for a piece of software doesn't mean it's a good idea to grab a copy from warez.
(1) The search for life beyond earth is going to rely a lot on looking for planets with suitable chemistry, but we don't really know what the range of viable environments is. Phospherous is one of the key elements required to make the chemistry of all known life work. Arsenic is chemically similar to phosperous so they took a bacteria that could survive in an arsonic-rich environment and starved it of phosphorus and found that it could still survive. This expands the range of environments in which life-as-we-know it can theoretically exist.
(2) We also don't know how often life arises in ideal chemistry - despite all the apparently variety in life on earth, all life is so similar at a chemical level there's no strong evidence that it *didn't* all come from a single fluke proto-bacteria. So we don't know for certain if you took an identical primordial earth whether life would be likely to arise. What some of the early news reports were speculating is that the researchers had found a bacteria with a chemistry so different that it was evidence of a seperate origin. That would be gigantic news but is *not* the case here - it's a bacteria with ordinary chemistry most of the time that has simply adapted to a more extreme environment than most other life can tolerate.
So whether or not this is exciting really boils down to "how much of the core chemistry of the cell (which is almost identical across all living things) is really functioning on arsenic instead of phosphorus" in these phosphorous-starved bacteria. This where I'm still a little fuzzy about what has actually been proven.
This smells of an article that got a little over-excited on speculation. If its just using arsonic as part of its respiration, that's not earth-shaking news - it's already known some bacteria do this.
Does diplomacy still need to be played out as a game of princes?
What the leaks have shown so far is that there is no compelling reason to keep analysis and meeting minutes secret in the first place. Most of it already makes the evening news in one form or another and the veil of secrecy only serves to leave a void of suspicion and paranoia that chattering voices can fill with nonsense. In a democracy, the ultimate judges of policy are the voting public - so should not the rule be "talk to our leaders, talk to all of us"? Is stability and democracy of the world really served in the long run by allowing friendly leaders to say one thing to "us" and another thing to their own people? Isn't that the root problem of a lot of the instability in the first place?
I'm not expecting change, but the leak feels like is a rare opportunity to debate if there might be a better way to build the very foundations of diplomacy.
Wikileaks appears to have mastered the art of tapping into the 24-hour news cycle - a buildup of anticipation that allows many, many fact-light/speculation-and-angst-heavy stories. A DoS perfectly feeds that "there's something exciting here" narrative without really being of any consequence (I would actually be a little more surprised if they weren't being a little slashdotted today - they are after all, the lead story on just about every news service in the world right now)
What I'm curious to see is whether this forces more diplomacy out of the back rooms and into the light of day - in the end, is there really much gained in world stability by a veil of secrecy and wheeling-and-dealing if it just serves to maintain a disconnect between what is publically and privately stated? Of course, I'm in a country that already obsesses over "What does the US think of us? Do they like us?", so the more candid any critique, the more the leak probably helps US interests in shaping our behaviour.
Facebook, you shall not cross this line! No this line. Not this line. Wait... ok, now don't cross this line.
Sorry, but I have a hard time seeing complaints about facebook as credible any more - surely by this point they've already driven away everyone who really cares about these sorts of things.
I have come to suspect that Intuition is the peacock's tail of humanity, that it is an elemental part of our biology to constantly test a potential mate's intellect/attentiveness with a random guessing game with sufficiently cryptic clues. Asking for direction is essentially admitting failure - the solution is not to avoid the game, but to ritualize it in a way that feels satisfying to both parties.
*realizes too late that I misread the parent thread*
Trading 1,000,000:1 rather than 1:1,000,000 never occurred to me. But I guess to avoid being a hypocrite, I have to apply my logic equally in reverse. I could never believe that the fate of a million lives would ever rest on my life or death, no matter which way the sacrifice went (*shudder*).
If I am ever offered the opportunity to trade my life for a million lives, I will look at the situation logically and conclude the highest probablity is that I misunderstood the offer.
For every hero who sacrifices themselves for the greater good, there's a fool who forgot to carry the two.
The problem is not whether 0.999... equals 1, it's whether 0.999... is actually a well-defined.
All of calculus is built upon examining the importance of the *rate* at which lim x->0 1-x is creating 0.999...
When I look at lim (dy->0,dx->0) dy/dx , even though 1-dx and 1-dy are both 0.999... if calculated individually, the relative rate at which these two dimensions are going there still has meaning, leading us to the concepts of derivatives and integrals.
110010111001001010100100111010011 may or may not mean anything now, but hopefully by the time he leaves office we'll have wormed cryptic references to them into every nook and cranny of the country:)
Stewart always walks a fine line because he is both a comedian and someone with deep, sincere beliefs. He is a great court jester, able to poke the absurdity of people around him. At the same time, he is fully willing to sucker punch people who think him only a fool - see his Crossfire-killing interview or his utter dismantling of Jim Cramer. When he does go serious, there's always this hint of frustration with the rest of the world to his voice - a sort of "why do I have to be the one to do this? Why has nobody else stepped up and done this?" tone.
It's interesting how he has taken what started as an anti-Beck meme and is trying to mold it into something non-partisan. I think he fears that his own fans are at risk of becoming part of the radicalization problem. So although the rally may be a jab at the Glen Becks of the world, it's also a subtle tug at his own audience to urge them not to become just a mirror of Beck - to try to find the common ground rather than just an opposing hilltop.
The problem with clever tricks like pings that is that the mere fact that 1s and 0s are moving between computer A and computer B creates a link. I would assume that the first pass at stenography detection is just create a big facebook-friends style map of who's communicating bits. All the talk of randomness and entropy really only applies if you first assume that some meandering channel of communication exists from A to B that isn't, in itself, unusual or unexpected.
It is my understanding that if you start with a random one-time pad of 1s and 0s, it should be impossible to determine whether or not you have XORed a file of any entropy against it. If any background communication has surplus bits that are random 1s and 0s, that is your ideal stenography sub-channel. So any a test for encrypted data is really a test for a channel of random bits being transmitted.
The other half of the question is whether a test for random data is sufficient to detect a stenography channel? The smallest encrypted message that can be sent is a single bit - basically just a flare going up. And from a single bit, you can grow over time that channel to any arbitrary length. So that means your algorithm would be required to detect the existence of any pattern of random (unexplained) bits in a file or communication channel that the receiver could be flagging to read as a string of bits.
That's as far as I get... I think that it probably reduces to being able to put a statistical upper bound on the size of a file that could be hidden given the number of random/unexplained bits in a data stream, but I don't think you could "prove" stenography wasn't happening.
I would have thought that the groupthink and manipulation of public opinion leading to that little trillion dollar "weapons of mass destruction" boo-boo in Iraq would have taught Americans a lesson about the value of the presumption of innocence.
I just can't shake the image from my imagination that Beck is doing the same thing as Colbert, just taking it to an even greater extreme where he is doing his parody from inside the political movement he's parodying and playing it so straight that nobody gets it, seeing just how far he can push the gag before people catch on.
Until we can point an exact and computable equation for the entire past, present and future of existence, there will always be unexplored parts of the map. You can fill that void with any assumption you want - from dragons to flying spaghetti monsters, a big fat zero to $God. If you assume that this placeholder is omnipotent and mysterious, that removes all the messy frustration about why it's hiding out in the ignorance section.
Where you run into problems is that these seemingly harmless placeholders become memes. As you add lore around your placeholder of choice, there is competition between memes. Some survive. Some die. Some mutate. Evolution now kicks in. The placeholders become resistant to being replaced with other placeholders. As people start filling in the map, knowledge itself becomes a threat to the meme and it begins to complete for mindspace in which to live.
Now this harmless placeholder is, for all practical purposes, a real living thing scratching at your mind from the void beyond knowledge like some quantum virtual particle leaping out of a black hole.
It probably regularly happened. A new strain of disease comes along, old traditions and rituals don't work and societies get thrown into turmoil - most dramatically, look at what happened to some of the big civilizations of the New World when European diseases swept through.
I tend not to think of programming at all any more when I think of "IT". To me, IT is more about assembling networks, clients and servers, databases/storage and firewalls. I'd teach the ecology of an OS rather than how to write one.
I would make algorithms should be part of a math class - to me the natural place is to teach it is alongside algebra and logic (where teach the difference between a=b the statement, a==b the question and a:=b the action).
I smell a conspiracy to attempt to bring the US media's favorite vacuous ratings-boosting political flamewar to slashdot by dressing it up in a thin veil of tech.
Slashdot Mirror
(1) The "google yourself" effect: what you read is going to be logged by the site you are reading. That's a nice gold star on files of special interest in the logs of the site you are reading.
(2) The version of the documents being spread could potentially have been maliciously altered. Just because you have a corporate licence for a piece of software doesn't mean it's a good idea to grab a copy from warez.
My take on it ...
(1) The search for life beyond earth is going to rely a lot on looking for planets with suitable chemistry, but we don't really know what the range of viable environments is. Phospherous is one of the key elements required to make the chemistry of all known life work. Arsenic is chemically similar to phosperous so they took a bacteria that could survive in an arsonic-rich environment and starved it of phosphorus and found that it could still survive. This expands the range of environments in which life-as-we-know it can theoretically exist.
(2) We also don't know how often life arises in ideal chemistry - despite all the apparently variety in life on earth, all life is so similar at a chemical level there's no strong evidence that it *didn't* all come from a single fluke proto-bacteria. So we don't know for certain if you took an identical primordial earth whether life would be likely to arise. What some of the early news reports were speculating is that the researchers had found a bacteria with a chemistry so different that it was evidence of a seperate origin. That would be gigantic news but is *not* the case here - it's a bacteria with ordinary chemistry most of the time that has simply adapted to a more extreme environment than most other life can tolerate.
So whether or not this is exciting really boils down to "how much of the core chemistry of the cell (which is almost identical across all living things) is really functioning on arsenic instead of phosphorus" in these phosphorous-starved bacteria. This where I'm still a little fuzzy about what has actually been proven.
(I hope that helps)
This smells of an article that got a little over-excited on speculation. If its just using arsonic as part of its respiration, that's not earth-shaking news - it's already known some bacteria do this.
Does diplomacy still need to be played out as a game of princes?
What the leaks have shown so far is that there is no compelling reason to keep analysis and meeting minutes secret in the first place. Most of it already makes the evening news in one form or another and the veil of secrecy only serves to leave a void of suspicion and paranoia that chattering voices can fill with nonsense. In a democracy, the ultimate judges of policy are the voting public - so should not the rule be "talk to our leaders, talk to all of us"? Is stability and democracy of the world really served in the long run by allowing friendly leaders to say one thing to "us" and another thing to their own people? Isn't that the root problem of a lot of the instability in the first place?
I'm not expecting change, but the leak feels like is a rare opportunity to debate if there might be a better way to build the very foundations of diplomacy.
Wikileaks appears to have mastered the art of tapping into the 24-hour news cycle - a buildup of anticipation that allows many, many fact-light/speculation-and-angst-heavy stories. A DoS perfectly feeds that "there's something exciting here" narrative without really being of any consequence (I would actually be a little more surprised if they weren't being a little slashdotted today - they are after all, the lead story on just about every news service in the world right now)
What I'm curious to see is whether this forces more diplomacy out of the back rooms and into the light of day - in the end, is there really much gained in world stability by a veil of secrecy and wheeling-and-dealing if it just serves to maintain a disconnect between what is publically and privately stated? Of course, I'm in a country that already obsesses over "What does the US think of us? Do they like us?", so the more candid any critique, the more the leak probably helps US interests in shaping our behaviour.
Facebook, you shall not cross this line! No this line. Not this line. Wait ... ok, now don't cross this line.
Sorry, but I have a hard time seeing complaints about facebook as credible any more - surely by this point they've already driven away everyone who really cares about these sorts of things.
Total information awareness?
I have come to suspect that Intuition is the peacock's tail of humanity, that it is an elemental part of our biology to constantly test a potential mate's intellect/attentiveness with a random guessing game with sufficiently cryptic clues. Asking for direction is essentially admitting failure - the solution is not to avoid the game, but to ritualize it in a way that feels satisfying to both parties.
Next up: "When Cantor Sets collide"
*realizes too late that I misread the parent thread*
Trading 1,000,000:1 rather than 1:1,000,000 never occurred to me. But I guess to avoid being a hypocrite, I have to apply my logic equally in reverse. I could never believe that the fate of a million lives would ever rest on my life or death, no matter which way the sacrifice went (*shudder*).
If I am ever offered the opportunity to trade my life for a million lives, I will look at the situation logically and conclude the highest probablity is that I misunderstood the offer.
For every hero who sacrifices themselves for the greater good, there's a fool who forgot to carry the two.
The boundaries of his life were filled with many twists and turns.
The problem is not whether 0.999... equals 1, it's whether 0.999... is actually a well-defined.
All of calculus is built upon examining the importance of the *rate* at which lim x->0 1-x is creating 0.999...
When I look at lim (dy->0,dx->0) dy/dx , even though 1-dx and 1-dy are both 0.999... if calculated individually, the relative rate at which these two dimensions are going there still has meaning, leading us to the concepts of derivatives and integrals.
110010111001001010100100111010011 may or may not mean anything now, but hopefully by the time he leaves office we'll have wormed cryptic references to them into every nook and cranny of the country :)
Stewart always walks a fine line because he is both a comedian and someone with deep, sincere beliefs. He is a great court jester, able to poke the absurdity of people around him. At the same time, he is fully willing to sucker punch people who think him only a fool - see his Crossfire-killing interview or his utter dismantling of Jim Cramer. When he does go serious, there's always this hint of frustration with the rest of the world to his voice - a sort of "why do I have to be the one to do this? Why has nobody else stepped up and done this?" tone.
It's interesting how he has taken what started as an anti-Beck meme and is trying to mold it into something non-partisan. I think he fears that his own fans are at risk of becoming part of the radicalization problem. So although the rally may be a jab at the Glen Becks of the world, it's also a subtle tug at his own audience to urge them not to become just a mirror of Beck - to try to find the common ground rather than just an opposing hilltop.
The problem with clever tricks like pings that is that the mere fact that 1s and 0s are moving between computer A and computer B creates a link. I would assume that the first pass at stenography detection is just create a big facebook-friends style map of who's communicating bits. All the talk of randomness and entropy really only applies if you first assume that some meandering channel of communication exists from A to B that isn't, in itself, unusual or unexpected.
It is my understanding that if you start with a random one-time pad of 1s and 0s, it should be impossible to determine whether or not you have XORed a file of any entropy against it. If any background communication has surplus bits that are random 1s and 0s, that is your ideal stenography sub-channel. So any a test for encrypted data is really a test for a channel of random bits being transmitted.
The other half of the question is whether a test for random data is sufficient to detect a stenography channel? The smallest encrypted message that can be sent is a single bit - basically just a flare going up. And from a single bit, you can grow over time that channel to any arbitrary length. So that means your algorithm would be required to detect the existence of any pattern of random (unexplained) bits in a file or communication channel that the receiver could be flagging to read as a string of bits.
That's as far as I get ... I think that it probably reduces to being able to put a statistical upper bound on the size of a file that could be hidden given the number of random/unexplained bits in a data stream, but I don't think you could "prove" stenography wasn't happening.
( standard disclaimer: I am not a $profession )
There's an old proverb: "you don't tug on Superman's cape".
I would have thought that the groupthink and manipulation of public opinion leading to that little trillion dollar "weapons of mass destruction" boo-boo in Iraq would have taught Americans a lesson about the value of the presumption of innocence.
I just can't shake the image from my imagination that Beck is doing the same thing as Colbert, just taking it to an even greater extreme where he is doing his parody from inside the political movement he's parodying and playing it so straight that nobody gets it, seeing just how far he can push the gag before people catch on.
Until we can point an exact and computable equation for the entire past, present and future of existence, there will always be unexplored parts of the map. You can fill that void with any assumption you want - from dragons to flying spaghetti monsters, a big fat zero to $God. If you assume that this placeholder is omnipotent and mysterious, that removes all the messy frustration about why it's hiding out in the ignorance section.
Where you run into problems is that these seemingly harmless placeholders become memes. As you add lore around your placeholder of choice, there is competition between memes. Some survive. Some die. Some mutate. Evolution now kicks in. The placeholders become resistant to being replaced with other placeholders. As people start filling in the map, knowledge itself becomes a threat to the meme and it begins to complete for mindspace in which to live.
Now this harmless placeholder is, for all practical purposes, a real living thing scratching at your mind from the void beyond knowledge like some quantum virtual particle leaping out of a black hole.
It probably regularly happened. A new strain of disease comes along, old traditions and rituals don't work and societies get thrown into turmoil - most dramatically, look at what happened to some of the big civilizations of the New World when European diseases swept through.
The judge proclaimed "[citation needed]"
I tend not to think of programming at all any more when I think of "IT". To me, IT is more about assembling networks, clients and servers, databases/storage and firewalls. I'd teach the ecology of an OS rather than how to write one.
I would make algorithms should be part of a math class - to me the natural place is to teach it is alongside algebra and logic (where teach the difference between a=b the statement, a==b the question and a:=b the action).
I smell a conspiracy to attempt to bring the US media's favorite vacuous ratings-boosting political flamewar to slashdot by dressing it up in a thin veil of tech.