As of now, there are two websites (Stormfront and NSDAP/AO) that are being filtered at several smaller ISPs in North Rhine-Westphalia. What you might heard of is that there is a controversial law that allows the German federal police to add alleged child pornography websites to a secret mandatory filtering list. However, this law has never been applied and will be repealed soon. In other news, most of Germany's states seem to push for web filtering of illegal gambling, but I doubt that this is going to happen in the end.
This article is so lopsided that given the long time free software licenses have been around, one must assert malicious intent instead of plain incompetence. Yeah, Canonical and even the FSF require copyright assignments that allow them to release the code under non-free licenses. And yes, even the FSF may turn rogue one day and work against the interests of the community (some claim the invariant sections of the GFDL are already a step in this direction). But why should I really care about this? I can always take the last release that was published under an acceptable license and fork it. The ability to fork is the only thing that really protects software freedom. Anything else is just secondary.
If you read our paper you will see that for an incorrect password you will still be in a vicinity of the correct initial condition. The Lyapunov exponents will get this difference multiplied, but the picture for the final evolution will still be very similar nomatter whether the password is correct or not correct.
Sorry, but I still don't understand why your approach is different from a key stretching function. I suppose the result of the time evolution should be quite different as one will reveal the CAPTCHA text and one will not. But as I said, there will be signatures of the presence of the text in the correlations functions, from which you can deduce that you guessed the correct password.
There are plenty of other key stretching techniques so not sure why this is any better tho.
You can only see the CAPTCHA text when you enter the correct password, a wrong password will just lead to random noise. Their claim is now that the presence of the CAPTCHA text cannot be detected by algorithms because to an algorithm, the picture will basically look the same in both cases.
I don't buy this. They study a system close to a continuous phase transition, meaning that it is self-similar, and there is no singular length-scale that shows up in any correlation function. By introducing the CAPTCHA text, however, they explicitly introduce such a scale, namely the size of the letters. This scale will result in a detectable feature in correlation functions, and of course only appears when the correct password has been entered. So, contrary to the authors' claim, it should be rather easy to spot when the correct password has been guessed.
all those Americans need to decide what exactly they want to replace them with.
Something better?
To begin with, it would certainly help to reduce the overall energy consumption. The US currently consumes about twice as much energy per capita as the EU member states.
You know, maybe the problem isn't that there's something unsafe about nuclear power, but rather there's something unsafe about letting private industry run nuclear power.
I doubt that governmental lack of responsibility is fundamentally better than corporate greed. Chernobyl is only one extreme example of that. I'd rather suggest to mandate the nuclear industry to install an insurance fund that covers the cost of disaster recovery and waste disposal. Once that is in place, I strongly doubt that nuclear is still a cost-efficient form of energy
Re:Any random numbers would produce the same resul
on
What Pi Sounds Like
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· Score: 2
Any random notes from a clearly defined scale (e.g. C major) paired with triadic chords from the same scale will sound vaguely pleasant. Thus, this is not "what PI" sounds like as much as it's what C major sounds like.
In a similar spirit, I once wrote musical representations of quantum algorithms. I played around with various scales, and it turned out that the best sounding scale actually depended on the algorithm. But then of course the underlying data was not nearly as random as pi.
-Apps/games installed on DOS 5 still work in Windows 7 unmodified after all the OS upgrade iterations.
Yeah, but this is not very surprising since DOS has a very limited API and there exist several independent implementation with the same amout of backwards compatibility (e.g., DOSBox). It would be much more interesting to know if you can run, say, old versions of Microsoft Office on recent Windows versions.
Not really. What was tested here was some exotic extension to the concepts usually called string theory. If I take these concepts and add some hypothetic omgon particle that lets the universe disappear by tomorrow, then I have constructed a theory that a) makes a testable prediction and b) is probably wrong. But if we turn out to be still alive and well, then this observation doesn't tell us anything about the essentials of string theory itself, such as the presence of extra dimensions or the existence of supersymmetric particles.
If I were Amazon I would not want to burn my fingers on hosting something as controversial as Wikileaks. Amazon is a company after all, and they can miss trouble like toothache.
On the other hand, this whole affair puts severe doubts on Amazon as a cloud computing provider. If my company runs important stuff on AWS, they will happily pull the plug because someone asserts "pressure" on them? Kind of means I have to expect them to fold if my competitor comes up with some patent/copyright/whatever lawsuit as it is way too common these days.
So I think Amazon just flushed its future in enterprise cloud computing down the drain.
What do you want Obama to do about it? It's up to the people to not vote for politicians that pull those stunts.
Yes, but how should people know about this when even the political opponents do not talk about it? Why should the media cover the Republican obstructonism when even the Democrats seem to have no problem with it?
Even though your 90+% is a tad exaggerated, would you say the same thing if 90+% of the population were smoking pot or meth?
In a democracy, when something is done by the majority of people, I would expect this behavior to be perfectly legal unless interfering with constitutional rights of others.
The first link reads like an elementary school primer, while the second link reads like a PHD dissertation. Is it not possible to explain quantum mechanics at a normal adult level?
Lemme try:
Quantum mechanics tells us that there are only discrete energy levels allowed within any physical system. For example, if you put a single particle into a box, the allowed energy levels a given by plane (matter) waves. Now, you don't have only a single particle, but say a million of them. Since they are the same atoms, they are indistinguishable. So, you cannot say that atom A is in level X and atom B is in level Y, but only that 2 atoms are in level X and 5 atoms are in level Y and so on. Since we are dealing with bosons, we may just put all atoms into the same energy level to find the configuration with minimum energy for the entire system. For our plane waves, this energy level would correspond to a simple half-cycle of a cosine, if we set the boundaries of the box to be at x=(+/-)pi/2.
Okay, so now we now what the minimum energy configuration is. But such a state would only be reached at absolute zero temperature, which is impossible to achieve. So what happens at finite temperatures? On first thought one would think that thermal fluctuations would lead to a population of the other energy levels, with temperature roughly indicating how far up in energy we will go. Since there a gazillion of energy levels in a macroscopic system, one would expect that the probability to find the system actually in the minimum energy level to be essentially zero.
But this is not true for very low temperatures. One can show that such a configuration can only accompany a finite number of bosons. If we put more bosons than this number into our box, they will happily pile up in the level of minimum energy and its probability will shoot through the roof. This is when we have created a Bose-Einstein condensate.
TFP mentions that the laser is operated at an average power of 425 mW. So I'd rather not be the guy standing round the corner getting hit in the eye with such a beam.
"We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is obsolete"
"LINUX is obsolete" is indeed a completely novel statement that no one has made ever before.
Re:Windows Questions?!
on
2010 Geek IQ Test
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· Score: 4, Insightful
- A geek knows Windows inside and out.
That might be true up to 95 or so, and only if said geek is old enough to have experienced these times. Later, GNU/Linux became so ubiquitous in geekdom that knowing the answers for this test is actually a hint that you are not a real geek. Personally, I find the old Geek Quiz much more entertaining.
Ah no it is a IE6 and potentially a IE7 problem if you do not have DEP turned on. It is on by default on IE8, but not in 7 and doesn't exist in 6. Really has nothing to do with the UAC controls in place on Vista or Windows 7 since DEP is the front line defense against these attacks and works to stop the attacks before any registry altering is even possible.
DEP has been broken by return-oriented programming. The fact that most exploits don't use it just means that they catch enough victims simply by using the old techniques.
Legalize file sharing by legalizing noncommercial copyright infringement. It's the only way.
This is utter nonsense. A viable alternative to the current situation would be to create new business models around truly free licenses (such as CC-BY-SA). But by essentially demanding a mandatory CC-NC licensing you stifling such business models and are just cementing the status quo, which is dominance of the distributors over the artists. Do you really want that?
If the lack of wholly GPL software on iOS bothers enough customers, there are other smartphone platforms that are known for not having such a tightly controlled app ecosystem.
And that is precisely the point of the article, to educate people about the problems with Apple's app store and that you will not have access to thousands of GPLed apps when buying an Apple device.
Slashdot Mirror
As of now, there are two websites (Stormfront and NSDAP/AO) that are being filtered at several smaller ISPs in North Rhine-Westphalia. What you might heard of is that there is a controversial law that allows the German federal police to add alleged child pornography websites to a secret mandatory filtering list. However, this law has never been applied and will be repealed soon. In other news, most of Germany's states seem to push for web filtering of illegal gambling, but I doubt that this is going to happen in the end.
This article is so lopsided that given the long time free software licenses have been around, one must assert malicious intent instead of plain incompetence. Yeah, Canonical and even the FSF require copyright assignments that allow them to release the code under non-free licenses. And yes, even the FSF may turn rogue one day and work against the interests of the community (some claim the invariant sections of the GFDL are already a step in this direction). But why should I really care about this? I can always take the last release that was published under an acceptable license and fork it. The ability to fork is the only thing that really protects software freedom. Anything else is just secondary.
If you read our paper you will see that for an incorrect password you will still be in a vicinity of the correct initial condition. The Lyapunov exponents will get this difference multiplied, but the picture for the final evolution will still be very similar nomatter whether the password is correct or not correct.
Sorry, but I still don't understand why your approach is different from a key stretching function. I suppose the result of the time evolution should be quite different as one will reveal the CAPTCHA text and one will not. But as I said, there will be signatures of the presence of the text in the correlations functions, from which you can deduce that you guessed the correct password.
There are plenty of other key stretching techniques so not sure why this is any better tho.
You can only see the CAPTCHA text when you enter the correct password, a wrong password will just lead to random noise. Their claim is now that the presence of the CAPTCHA text cannot be detected by algorithms because to an algorithm, the picture will basically look the same in both cases.
I don't buy this. They study a system close to a continuous phase transition, meaning that it is self-similar, and there is no singular length-scale that shows up in any correlation function. By introducing the CAPTCHA text, however, they explicitly introduce such a scale, namely the size of the letters. This scale will result in a detectable feature in correlation functions, and of course only appears when the correct password has been entered. So, contrary to the authors' claim, it should be rather easy to spot when the correct password has been guessed.
theoretical physics have already reached the point of being untestable unless one can launch a spacecraft into close proximity to a black hole...
Ahem, not all of theoretical physics is like that.
Something better?
To begin with, it would certainly help to reduce the overall energy consumption. The US currently consumes about twice as much energy per capita as the EU member states.
You know, maybe the problem isn't that there's something unsafe about nuclear power, but rather there's something unsafe about letting private industry run nuclear power.
I doubt that governmental lack of responsibility is fundamentally better than corporate greed. Chernobyl is only one extreme example of that. I'd rather suggest to mandate the nuclear industry to install an insurance fund that covers the cost of disaster recovery and waste disposal. Once that is in place, I strongly doubt that nuclear is still a cost-efficient form of energy
Any random notes from a clearly defined scale (e.g. C major) paired with triadic chords from the same scale will sound vaguely pleasant. Thus, this is not "what PI" sounds like as much as it's what C major sounds like.
In a similar spirit, I once wrote musical representations of quantum algorithms. I played around with various scales, and it turned out that the best sounding scale actually depended on the algorithm. But then of course the underlying data was not nearly as random as pi.
-Apps/games installed on DOS 5 still work in Windows 7 unmodified after all the OS upgrade iterations.
Yeah, but this is not very surprising since DOS has a very limited API and there exist several independent implementation with the same amout of backwards compatibility (e.g., DOSBox). It would be much more interesting to know if you can run, say, old versions of Microsoft Office on recent Windows versions.
This has nothing to do with Apple, rather with VLC.
Not sure why people are hating on Apple for this.
We feel free to hate Apple for setting up terms for their app store which are incompatible with the GPL.
timothy, you're an asshole.
Hardly. He even resisted to make this a prefetch link.
It shows string theory is testable after all.
Not really. What was tested here was some exotic extension to the concepts usually called string theory. If I take these concepts and add some hypothetic omgon particle that lets the universe disappear by tomorrow, then I have constructed a theory that a) makes a testable prediction and b) is probably wrong. But if we turn out to be still alive and well, then this observation doesn't tell us anything about the essentials of string theory itself, such as the presence of extra dimensions or the existence of supersymmetric particles.
I know I never have, and I use KDE quite a lot. I don't know anyone that has. It's usually OpenOffice.org that's being use.
It wasn't even a KDE project. Probably the authors just decided that it was time to switch directions of the project since it was not going anywhere.
If I were Amazon I would not want to burn my fingers on hosting something as controversial as Wikileaks. Amazon is a company after all, and they can miss trouble like toothache.
On the other hand, this whole affair puts severe doubts on Amazon as a cloud computing provider. If my company runs important stuff on AWS, they will happily pull the plug because someone asserts "pressure" on them? Kind of means I have to expect them to fold if my competitor comes up with some patent/copyright/whatever lawsuit as it is way too common these days.
So I think Amazon just flushed its future in enterprise cloud computing down the drain.
What do you want Obama to do about it? It's up to the people to not vote for politicians that pull those stunts.
Yes, but how should people know about this when even the political opponents do not talk about it? Why should the media cover the Republican obstructonism when even the Democrats seem to have no problem with it?
Even though your 90+% is a tad exaggerated, would you say the same thing if 90+% of the population were smoking pot or meth?
In a democracy, when something is done by the majority of people, I would expect this behavior to be perfectly legal unless interfering with constitutional rights of others.
The first link reads like an elementary school primer, while the second link reads like a PHD dissertation. Is it not possible to explain quantum mechanics at a normal adult level?
Lemme try:
Quantum mechanics tells us that there are only discrete energy levels allowed within any physical system. For example, if you put a single particle into a box, the allowed energy levels a given by plane (matter) waves. Now, you don't have only a single particle, but say a million of them. Since they are the same atoms, they are indistinguishable. So, you cannot say that atom A is in level X and atom B is in level Y, but only that 2 atoms are in level X and 5 atoms are in level Y and so on. Since we are dealing with bosons, we may just put all atoms into the same energy level to find the configuration with minimum energy for the entire system. For our plane waves, this energy level would correspond to a simple half-cycle of a cosine, if we set the boundaries of the box to be at x=(+/-)pi/2.
Okay, so now we now what the minimum energy configuration is. But such a state would only be reached at absolute zero temperature, which is impossible to achieve. So what happens at finite temperatures? On first thought one would think that thermal fluctuations would lead to a population of the other energy levels, with temperature roughly indicating how far up in energy we will go. Since there a gazillion of energy levels in a macroscopic system, one would expect that the probability to find the system actually in the minimum energy level to be essentially zero.
But this is not true for very low temperatures. One can show that such a configuration can only accompany a finite number of bosons. If we put more bosons than this number into our box, they will happily pile up in the level of minimum energy and its probability will shoot through the roof. This is when we have created a Bose-Einstein condensate.
TFP mentions that the laser is operated at an average power of 425 mW. So I'd rather not be the guy standing round the corner getting hit in the eye with such a beam.
Correlation. Not Causation. You know, there's a difference.
"We must bear in mind that Linux is not a Russian OS and, moreover, is obsolete"
"LINUX is obsolete" is indeed a completely novel statement that no one has made ever before.
- A geek knows Windows inside and out.
That might be true up to 95 or so, and only if said geek is old enough to have experienced these times. Later, GNU/Linux became so ubiquitous in geekdom that knowing the answers for this test is actually a hint that you are not a real geek. Personally, I find the old Geek Quiz much more entertaining.
Ah no it is a IE6 and potentially a IE7 problem if you do not have DEP turned on. It is on by default on IE8, but not in 7 and doesn't exist in 6. Really has nothing to do with the UAC controls in place on Vista or Windows 7 since DEP is the front line defense against these attacks and works to stop the attacks before any registry altering is even possible.
DEP has been broken by return-oriented programming. The fact that most exploits don't use it just means that they catch enough victims simply by using the old techniques.
Legalize file sharing by legalizing noncommercial copyright infringement. It's the only way.
This is utter nonsense. A viable alternative to the current situation would be to create new business models around truly free licenses (such as CC-BY-SA). But by essentially demanding a mandatory CC-NC licensing you stifling such business models and are just cementing the status quo, which is dominance of the distributors over the artists. Do you really want that?
When you're half way to mars, a malfunctioning toilet would be a shitty way to die.
Oblig Race into Space quote: "FOOD AND WASTE PROBLEM, CONTAINMENT BACKFLOW, QUITE MESSY. MISSION IS SCRUBBED."
If the lack of wholly GPL software on iOS bothers enough customers, there are other smartphone platforms that are known for not having such a tightly controlled app ecosystem.
And that is precisely the point of the article, to educate people about the problems with Apple's app store and that you will not have access to thousands of GPLed apps when buying an Apple device.
The whole story is bullshit too, as AsusTek has denied Microsoft asking for royalties [focustaiwan.tw].
Which might also just mean that they do not want to get caught when illegally distributing the Linux kernel.