So let me get this straight: you're recommending I set my password to what some dude on the Internet is telling me to, and who can trivially connect it to me since he knows the IP address it was sent to ? And the dude, who's presumably advocating this practice since he's going out of his way to enable it, is supposedly a security expert ?
Suddenly, in a flash of pure black light, it dawned on me: all hope is lost. We are doomed.
In theory, yes; but in practice all SVG viewers I've come across are so bloody slow it would result in a diashow. Besides, Flash can do vector graphics too, and in fact many shows are done with it to begin with nowadays.
Besides, there are no good SVG editors. Inkscape is decent, but crashes easily when editing nodes and doesn't have animation support.
And that, boys and girls, journalists and college professors, is how our tax system works. The people who pay the highest taxes get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, and they just may not show up anymore. In fact, they might start drinking overseas where the atmosphere is somewhat friendlier.
And if they do, then perhaps we should consider such a large chunk of our economy being controlled by foreigners to be an unacceptable risk to our national security, and nationalize said chunk.
If you truly wanted freedom then you wouldn't want a president. What most people want is somebody they can trust with guiding them. Give up a bit of independence and allow somebody else to make decisions that the individual doesn't have either the will or time to make.
Actually, neither the Government nor the President are there to guide anyone or do anyone's decisions for them. They are there to make the decisions no single Jack Average can do because they affect lots of people.
For guidance, seek a pastor or a philosopher. Or a Wiccan enclave, your local suicide cult, or whatever. But don't look at politicians for that.
Originally was a way to translate the worth of something into the terms of something else. A cow, an apple, an hour of specialized work, etc. There was a limited amount of money because there was a limited amount of things to trade for, had no meaning to have $10 more than the amount of goods and services.
What happens if a plague comes in and kills half the workers ? Suddenly that hour of work is a lot more valuable compared to the cow or apple.
Value is, and has always been, a transient a fluid thing. It is not something inherent in either work, cow, or apple; it is simply what people believe these things to be worth. It has always had life of its own, and there has always been great fluctuations in the relative value of things.
There is no REAL wealth. Not since the gold standard was dropped and fractional banking was introduced and floating currencies was introduced.
Gold isn't real wealth. Gold is a pretty metal. Means of production are real wealth. In medieval times that meant land, since you could grow food on it, and landowners were known as Lords, Barons and so on. Nowadays it would mean factories, power plants, and so on - and of course land is still valuable too.
You NEED the gold standard. Period. You do not need central banks. They are private banks that governments borrow from at interest and inflate the supply.
I suggest a glass bead standard instead. They can be just as pretty, there are historical precedents for using them as means of exchange, and when the whole thing goes crashing down, they can be repurposed as children's toys.
It is the same fraud that has been perpetrated by financial institutions for centuries. Money as most people understand it does not exist today except as 1's and 0's, the so called "gold standard" is long gone.
Gold is useless except as decoration. It only has value because people have been conditioned to think it does. The same is true for dollars, euros, or any other currency. The gold standard is no less abstract than any other form of currency, since the value a gram of gold has is entirely arbitrary and not inherent in any way.
Why should the rest of society fund an entire institution entirely for the benefit of teachers?
Because otherwise teachers working conditions and pay become even worse than they are, which results in anyone halfway competent to seek other employment, leaving only the desperate to teach children. This, in turn, results in even more ignorant population, making it easier for fundamentalists and crooks to fool them and gain power, making things much worse for everyone.
The UK Skynet has been around since at least 1969.
But it didn't become sentient until August 29, 1997. Luckily for all of us its operators, being part of the British government and thus barely sentient themselves, failed to notice anything unusual, so it was left to lead a peaceful existence, talk with any foreign computer it wished, and spawn children in the form of virus-infected data sets, such as the one described in the article.
Let's face it 99% of the people in the developed world (and higher in the rest of the world right now) will never need to program or want to program. They just want their computers to work and do what they want.
Since "programming" is shorthand for "making the computer do what you want it to do", you just contradicted yourself. You want real control over a computer, you learn to program. There's no way around it.
That program doesn't have a learning curve. It has a learning cliff.
Learning Himalayas, with ferocious eagles attacking you every step of the way.
But if you can manage to scale it, it's a very powerful and efficient program. The interface is both really bad and really good.
Assembler is efficient, but that doesn't make it a good programming language.
Blender sucks. There's just no other way to say it. But then again, so does every 3D program. I suspect it has something to do with 3D artists wanting job security or something...
Only until it becomes practical to do that. When it does, expect the market of all sorts of airs ("Wisconsin Pasture", "Vermont Forest") -- and expect people trying to sneak into the crops-covering air-collecting canopy for a sniff to get busted (deservingly).
Well, when that day comes, those farmers better make damn sure that none of the carbon dioxide those plants consume comes from my lungs.
yet again you are a showcase example of unability of thinking beyond written text.
Then perhaps you should express your ideas in the text itself so I don't have to try to guess what undoubtedly ingenious thoughts you didn't bother writing down.
Obvious abuse would be something like, reporting very same kind of incident for the 3rd time around,
So an employee can get two rewards for false alarms, after which it is in his best interests to ignore any further suspicious activity ?
or something which clearly is not a suspicious activity.
And who judges what is or is not "clearly not a suspicious activity" ?
Try to understand: a system which gives out punishments must define the conditions under which it gives them out exactly, because otherwise it will degenerate into arbitrary decisions or outright abuse of power by those who have it, and ass-covering by everyone else. That is why the real-life laws are so complex: they must try to define exactly what is punishable and what is not.
In the system you've described, an employee who notices something suspicious would best serve his own interests by pretending to not notice.
Punishment for obvious abuse would be a necessity, thinking beyond of written text is allowed, even recommended.
So basically, if a world bank employee suspects something and reports it, he may be punished or rewarded for it, depending on someone else's opinion on what is or is not obvious. This means that only those who are after the reward - the people who are most likely to be dishonest - will bother, as everyone else will be deterred by the potential punishment.
...or at least economic stratification within a nation.
Translation: "Increases opportunity, which SOME people make good use of... others don't."
That is partly correct. Economic stratification means that economic resources are allocated less evenly, which in turn means that the elite becomes richer and the rest poorer. This means that being part of the elite has bigger pay-off than in a less stratified society, so in that sense it does increase opportunity.
However, your implication that the people who aren't part of the elite only have themselves to blame for their situation is incorrect: by definition, only a small fraction of any given group of people can be part of the elite, so most members of a society lose when it becomes more stratified.
And yet this is not the whole story either. Since increasing stratification also increases the pay-off of being part of the elite, it also gives a bigger incentive to work towards that goal. If the society is otherwise well-functional - corruption is low and social mobility is high,which means free (tax-funded) education and social safety nets to allow easy upwards mobility and risky ventures such as starting a new business - then increased ambition will enrich it as a whole. This means that even the losers benefit, since while their relative position in their society is lower than it would be in a more equal one, their absolute position is higher.
The question is: what is the optimal level of stratification which best benefit the majority of the society's members, rather than just the elite ?
That isn't capitalism of any form. It is legalized theft.
Actually, it is pretty much the definition of capitalism: using your capital to get more of it. That it is also legalized theft is not relevant; and besides, being a Robber Baron is a time-honoured capitalist tactic.
Offer an prize for bringing up if there's a suspicion, immediately bringing that server down, and even if it was a failed suspicion, there should be somekind of reward for just being suspicious.
So basically, you are suggesting rewarding making false accusations against unfamiliar people and bringing down the servers needlessly. Gee, I wonder what unintended side-effects that could have ?
What scares me is that while this guards against the garden variety phishing attack, it can't protect me from an ISP DNS compromise. Running *NIX on your home PC or using a Mac can't protect you from that either, so don't get smug. It's a good idea to find an "obscure" yet stable feature on your bank's site.
Or you could simply use HTTPS to contact the site. If the bank doesn't have HTTPS interface, or if the certificate is self-signed or otherwise fishy, don't use that bank.
Personally, I've decided to forego online banking for now. No reason to risk phishing attacks, when the nearest office is within walking distance:).
He's hardcore libertarian so whenever he talks about these sorts of things there's an inherent dishonesty; he will never admit the free market failed, so he will always be scrambling to come up with an alternate, no matter how implausible.
This is true for anything anyone holds strong believes in. For whatever reason people attach to alternative solutions to a pragmatic problem - resource allocation, also known as economy - with fervour usually reserved for religious ideas. It is quite stupid, and arguably does more harm than religious fanaticism.
It is good for some rather amusing drama, thought, when these same economic fanatics call people "sheeple" when they won't vote for someone who's clearly nuts. Libertarians are especially good here, with their absolutely serious rants about personal responsibility and general tough guy chestbeating about how anyone who doesn't want to live in a jungle where only the fittest survive is a pussy who's sucking from the public teats, but I suspect commies were much the same back in their day. And of course it also serves a useful function by makings sure by making it absolutely clear even to the dumbest voters that said nutcases are, indeed, nuts and shouldn't be voted for.
Instead, in this case, they just blindly did it, and worse, they then created mortgage backed securities full of these risky loans and then did the most colossally stupid thing... the thing that caused the REAL collapse of the economy... they LIED about how risky these were, leading them to be GROSSLY overvalued.
Stupid ? It's a bloody genius thing. They crashed the economy, made sure that their own assets are safe - as they are with government bailouts - and will undoubtedly use those assets to buy lots of stock once the ongoing crash brings the rates low enough. Everything gets blamed on the government - the libertarians and other armchair economists will take care of that - while the masterminds laugh all the way to the bank, which they also own.
The collections are to provide a consistent design pattern to use.
Which doesn't answer the question of why you need one for in this case.
Strictly speaking, no you don't need the synchronized collection for events that only update the GUI, but it is good to know that a) you will need them if you're doing actual distributed or parallel computing,
Apart from distributed computing being a whole different beast than mere multithreading, and thus outside the scope of this discussion, you are also wrong. Unless you actually coded the server controlling the distributed computing clients as a GUI application - in which case you are, to put it bluntly, an idiot - there's no reason whatsoever why you'd need synchronized collections, or even a multithreaded server for that matter.
I have no idea what you mean with "parallel" computing which wouldn't fit under either distributed computing or multithreading. Is it some method of quantum-computer programming in the multiple words paradigm ?-)
and b) you don't need to roll your own synchronization checks since JCF already has them.
All those synchronization checks do is ensure that the internal state of the collection remains consistent. You still need explicit synchronization if, for example, you want to ensure that a previously non-empty collection doesn't become empty between the check and some operation depending on that emptiness. It would be much better to wrap a non-synchronized collection in a class which implements the desired functionality and provides its own synchronization which makes sense in the specific context of your application.
I've got a virtual universe in my head. Every day of my life, I've adapted it in an effort to make it better. If I wasn't inclined to do so, I would never have progressed from the level of a fetus. I would never have thought, never have learned. The desire to understand, to make the internal model representative of the external model, that is what intelligence is. Or at least an essential part of what it is.
While you are basically correct in intelligence needing motivation, you are also making a mistake here: the desire to learn needs not be a primary motivation. For example, I'm learning to draw. For this it is necessary for me to learn human anatomy. As a result, I am improving my internal model of human anatomy daily; however, that is not motivated by a desire to improve this model, but by a desire to draw well.
Therefore, it must object to us turning it off if it is to be intelligent in the first place.
What if we gave it a single motivation: to kill itself ? Or to put it another way: what if the motivating force of the computer was to convince its operator to turn it off ? It would still be motivated to improve its internal model, since the better it understands its operator, the better it can manipulate him; but it would hardly be motivated to object the very thing it was trying to do.
Intelligence requires some motivation to get off your ass and do something. However, there is no requirement that the motivation would be sane by our standards.
But barring any of these motivations, why would a computer want to stay on?
Because an AI which takes steps to keep itself in working order has an advantage in real-world uses over one which doesn't, so you can as well design it with marketability in mind from the beginning ?
If it's perfect AI (by my definition) and has no irrational need to stay on (a while(1){survive();} thread?), why would protecting itself be any indication of real intelligence?
"Rational" simply means that an intelligence, artificial or not, is doing things which will help it satisfy its drives, while "irrational" means that it acts in ways which will make it less able to do so.
All intelligences need drives to motivate them. Simple automatons with each possible reaction reprogrammed don't, but they aren't intelligent by any stretch of imagination. And drives themselves aren't rational or irrational, they simply are. And, since the purpose of AI research is to employ them in some capacity in the real world, having one of these drives be self-preservation would likely be a good idea, since it lowers maintenance costs considerably by
having the AI use its I to avoid damage.
In the old Creatures AI game you could breed a creature which had no drives whatsoever. It would do nothing but sit still, since nothing motivated it to do anything. The same can be seen in Sims: while the intelligence there is extremely limited, it is driven by the needs of the sims. In fact it is true for every conceivable intelligence: without drives, the system is not self-motivating, which makes it useless for any practical task. Your "perfect" AI wouldn't bother answering to the questions asked it, because it would have no more motivation to react to them than to the threat of power-off.
The half piece is the shared data structure, and it's only a half piece because you'll want to use the synchronized collections wrapper to get a (you guessed it) synchronized collection.
What do you need the collection for, exactly speaking ? Simply have a thread pool and queue new tasks to be executed there, and have the task queue the corresponding UI update to the Swing Event Thread upon completion.
For that matter, if you do need a collection, you could simply use an unsynchronized collection and have the UI updates update it as well. Since all such updates happen in the SE thread, no synchronization is necessary, and your UI code can access it at will.
Maybe I'd understand it better if I read it than if I heard it on a crappy video.
Maybe that's the whole reason it was put on video instead. For some ideas, understanding it and thinking it is a good idea are inversely related. This sounds line one of those.
Slashdot Mirror
So let me get this straight: you're recommending I set my password to what some dude on the Internet is telling me to, and who can trivially connect it to me since he knows the IP address it was sent to ? And the dude, who's presumably advocating this practice since he's going out of his way to enable it, is supposedly a security expert ?
Suddenly, in a flash of pure black light, it dawned on me: all hope is lost. We are doomed.
...Unbelievable. Just plain unbelievable.
In theory, yes; but in practice all SVG viewers I've come across are so bloody slow it would result in a diashow. Besides, Flash can do vector graphics too, and in fact many shows are done with it to begin with nowadays.
Besides, there are no good SVG editors. Inkscape is decent, but crashes easily when editing nodes and doesn't have animation support.
And if they do, then perhaps we should consider such a large chunk of our economy being controlled by foreigners to be an unacceptable risk to our national security, and nationalize said chunk.
Two can play the blackmail game.
Actually, neither the Government nor the President are there to guide anyone or do anyone's decisions for them. They are there to make the decisions no single Jack Average can do because they affect lots of people.
For guidance, seek a pastor or a philosopher. Or a Wiccan enclave, your local suicide cult, or whatever. But don't look at politicians for that.
What happens if a plague comes in and kills half the workers ? Suddenly that hour of work is a lot more valuable compared to the cow or apple.
Value is, and has always been, a transient a fluid thing. It is not something inherent in either work, cow, or apple; it is simply what people believe these things to be worth. It has always had life of its own, and there has always been great fluctuations in the relative value of things.
Gold isn't real wealth. Gold is a pretty metal. Means of production are real wealth. In medieval times that meant land, since you could grow food on it, and landowners were known as Lords, Barons and so on. Nowadays it would mean factories, power plants, and so on - and of course land is still valuable too.
I suggest a glass bead standard instead. They can be just as pretty, there are historical precedents for using them as means of exchange, and when the whole thing goes crashing down, they can be repurposed as children's toys.
Gold is useless except as decoration. It only has value because people have been conditioned to think it does. The same is true for dollars, euros, or any other currency. The gold standard is no less abstract than any other form of currency, since the value a gram of gold has is entirely arbitrary and not inherent in any way.
Because otherwise teachers working conditions and pay become even worse than they are, which results in anyone halfway competent to seek other employment, leaving only the desperate to teach children. This, in turn, results in even more ignorant population, making it easier for fundamentalists and crooks to fool them and gain power, making things much worse for everyone.
But it didn't become sentient until August 29, 1997. Luckily for all of us its operators, being part of the British government and thus barely sentient themselves, failed to notice anything unusual, so it was left to lead a peaceful existence, talk with any foreign computer it wished, and spawn children in the form of virus-infected data sets, such as the one described in the article.
It would explain a lot of things, wouldn't it ?
Since "programming" is shorthand for "making the computer do what you want it to do", you just contradicted yourself. You want real control over a computer, you learn to program. There's no way around it.
Learning Himalayas, with ferocious eagles attacking you every step of the way.
Assembler is efficient, but that doesn't make it a good programming language.
Blender sucks. There's just no other way to say it. But then again, so does every 3D program. I suspect it has something to do with 3D artists wanting job security or something...
Well, when that day comes, those farmers better make damn sure that none of the carbon dioxide those plants consume comes from my lungs.
Then perhaps you should express your ideas in the text itself so I don't have to try to guess what undoubtedly ingenious thoughts you didn't bother writing down.
So an employee can get two rewards for false alarms, after which it is in his best interests to ignore any further suspicious activity ?
And who judges what is or is not "clearly not a suspicious activity" ?
Try to understand: a system which gives out punishments must define the conditions under which it gives them out exactly, because otherwise it will degenerate into arbitrary decisions or outright abuse of power by those who have it, and ass-covering by everyone else. That is why the real-life laws are so complex: they must try to define exactly what is punishable and what is not.
In the system you've described, an employee who notices something suspicious would best serve his own interests by pretending to not notice.
So basically, if a world bank employee suspects something and reports it, he may be punished or rewarded for it, depending on someone else's opinion on what is or is not obvious. This means that only those who are after the reward - the people who are most likely to be dishonest - will bother, as everyone else will be deterred by the potential punishment.
That is partly correct. Economic stratification means that economic resources are allocated less evenly, which in turn means that the elite becomes richer and the rest poorer. This means that being part of the elite has bigger pay-off than in a less stratified society, so in that sense it does increase opportunity.
However, your implication that the people who aren't part of the elite only have themselves to blame for their situation is incorrect: by definition, only a small fraction of any given group of people can be part of the elite, so most members of a society lose when it becomes more stratified.
And yet this is not the whole story either. Since increasing stratification also increases the pay-off of being part of the elite, it also gives a bigger incentive to work towards that goal. If the society is otherwise well-functional - corruption is low and social mobility is high,which means free (tax-funded) education and social safety nets to allow easy upwards mobility and risky ventures such as starting a new business - then increased ambition will enrich it as a whole. This means that even the losers benefit, since while their relative position in their society is lower than it would be in a more equal one, their absolute position is higher.
The question is: what is the optimal level of stratification which best benefit the majority of the society's members, rather than just the elite ?
Actually, it is pretty much the definition of capitalism: using your capital to get more of it. That it is also legalized theft is not relevant; and besides, being a Robber Baron is a time-honoured capitalist tactic.
So basically, you are suggesting rewarding making false accusations against unfamiliar people and bringing down the servers needlessly. Gee, I wonder what unintended side-effects that could have ?
What scares me is that while this guards against the garden variety phishing attack, it can't protect me from an ISP DNS compromise. Running *NIX on your home PC or using a Mac can't protect you from that either, so don't get smug. It's a good idea to find an "obscure" yet stable feature on your bank's site.
Or you could simply use HTTPS to contact the site. If the bank doesn't have HTTPS interface, or if the certificate is self-signed or otherwise fishy, don't use that bank.
Personally, I've decided to forego online banking for now. No reason to risk phishing attacks, when the nearest office is within walking distance :).
This is true for anything anyone holds strong believes in. For whatever reason people attach to alternative solutions to a pragmatic problem - resource allocation, also known as economy - with fervour usually reserved for religious ideas. It is quite stupid, and arguably does more harm than religious fanaticism.
It is good for some rather amusing drama, thought, when these same economic fanatics call people "sheeple" when they won't vote for someone who's clearly nuts. Libertarians are especially good here, with their absolutely serious rants about personal responsibility and general tough guy chestbeating about how anyone who doesn't want to live in a jungle where only the fittest survive is a pussy who's sucking from the public teats, but I suspect commies were much the same back in their day. And of course it also serves a useful function by makings sure by making it absolutely clear even to the dumbest voters that said nutcases are, indeed, nuts and shouldn't be voted for.
Stupid ? It's a bloody genius thing. They crashed the economy, made sure that their own assets are safe - as they are with government bailouts - and will undoubtedly use those assets to buy lots of stock once the ongoing crash brings the rates low enough. Everything gets blamed on the government - the libertarians and other armchair economists will take care of that - while the masterminds laugh all the way to the bank, which they also own.
Which doesn't answer the question of why you need one for in this case.
Apart from distributed computing being a whole different beast than mere multithreading, and thus outside the scope of this discussion, you are also wrong. Unless you actually coded the server controlling the distributed computing clients as a GUI application - in which case you are, to put it bluntly, an idiot - there's no reason whatsoever why you'd need synchronized collections, or even a multithreaded server for that matter.
I have no idea what you mean with "parallel" computing which wouldn't fit under either distributed computing or multithreading. Is it some method of quantum-computer programming in the multiple words paradigm ?-)
All those synchronization checks do is ensure that the internal state of the collection remains consistent. You still need explicit synchronization if, for example, you want to ensure that a previously non-empty collection doesn't become empty between the check and some operation depending on that emptiness. It would be much better to wrap a non-synchronized collection in a class which implements the desired functionality and provides its own synchronization which makes sense in the specific context of your application.
While you are basically correct in intelligence needing motivation, you are also making a mistake here: the desire to learn needs not be a primary motivation. For example, I'm learning to draw. For this it is necessary for me to learn human anatomy. As a result, I am improving my internal model of human anatomy daily; however, that is not motivated by a desire to improve this model, but by a desire to draw well.
What if we gave it a single motivation: to kill itself ? Or to put it another way: what if the motivating force of the computer was to convince its operator to turn it off ? It would still be motivated to improve its internal model, since the better it understands its operator, the better it can manipulate him; but it would hardly be motivated to object the very thing it was trying to do.
Intelligence requires some motivation to get off your ass and do something. However, there is no requirement that the motivation would be sane by our standards.
Because an AI which takes steps to keep itself in working order has an advantage in real-world uses over one which doesn't, so you can as well design it with marketability in mind from the beginning ?
"Rational" simply means that an intelligence, artificial or not, is doing things which will help it satisfy its drives, while "irrational" means that it acts in ways which will make it less able to do so.
All intelligences need drives to motivate them. Simple automatons with each possible reaction reprogrammed don't, but they aren't intelligent by any stretch of imagination. And drives themselves aren't rational or irrational, they simply are. And, since the purpose of AI research is to employ them in some capacity in the real world, having one of these drives be self-preservation would likely be a good idea, since it lowers maintenance costs considerably by having the AI use its I to avoid damage.
In the old Creatures AI game you could breed a creature which had no drives whatsoever. It would do nothing but sit still, since nothing motivated it to do anything. The same can be seen in Sims: while the intelligence there is extremely limited, it is driven by the needs of the sims. In fact it is true for every conceivable intelligence: without drives, the system is not self-motivating, which makes it useless for any practical task. Your "perfect" AI wouldn't bother answering to the questions asked it, because it would have no more motivation to react to them than to the threat of power-off.
What do you need the collection for, exactly speaking ? Simply have a thread pool and queue new tasks to be executed there, and have the task queue the corresponding UI update to the Swing Event Thread upon completion.
For that matter, if you do need a collection, you could simply use an unsynchronized collection and have the UI updates update it as well. Since all such updates happen in the SE thread, no synchronization is necessary, and your UI code can access it at will.
That's what I've done. Works perfectly.
Maybe that's the whole reason it was put on video instead. For some ideas, understanding it and thinking it is a good idea are inversely related. This sounds line one of those.