Methods like md5, sha1, etc are one way algorithms that cannot be reversed* in a realistic amount of time.
Nitpick: they can't be reversed in any amount of time, because for any given hash, there are propably an infinite amount of strings which hash to that hash.
You don't want a stack where, you want a queue. If you have a stack where a car is returned to the top and the next customer also gets a car from the top, the cars experience very uneven wear, since the cars at the bottom are never taken (assuming the system has sufficient capacity). You want a system where a returned car is put at the bottom of the pile and the next customer gets a car form the top (or the other way around).
And aliens would have the same psychology as we do?
Actually, in all likelyhood... yes.
Any advanced alien race must be a pack-forming species. The reason is simple: a race of loners would never manage to get culture going, since that requires communication between individuals. It would never reach the stars; in fact it would never even reach metal-working.
Living in a pack puts certain demands on psychology. Pack members can't just pursuse their own interests, but must take each other into account, if the pack is to function. In other words, pack-forming animals have an evolutive pressure towards morality. This pressure is made ever stronger the higher technology rises, because any misbehavior is likely to result in far direr consequences when the misbehaving person has access to bombs than if he only had access to stone clubs. That is the real reason why the current society is nicer than, say, the Roman Empire: we aren't nicer people, we simply don't have a choice.
People always go on about how aliens can be totally incomprehensible to us, but that is just plain untrue. They operate on the same reality, under the same laws of physics and logic, as we do. If they are succesfull enough to reach the stars, then their psychology must conform to those laws; and that makes it similar to ours. Self-preservation, reproduction, social interaction: those are the things any succesfull intelligent species must base their psyche on. There may be more, of course, but these are the absolute minimum concepts all alien minds must have.
So, is it sensible to spend money looking for creatures which if we find them, we should ignore? Better to spend the money figuring out how to hide!
Earth has had broadcast radio for a century now, acting as a beacon to anyone listening. It is much too late to hide.
If you're really worried about alien overlords, start investing in space flight, so that any would-be conquerers are greeted by a fleet of Star Destroyers.
Compare that to a school. What's the value of those kid's lives? Why not have any guards for those? Why not let each school get together with their district and decide whether or not it is appropriate?
Because we're waiting on the government to do it, of course.
Actually, no. The real answer is: because the people have considered and decided that a few kids getting killed every now and then is not worth the cost of hiring guards at every school, especially enough guards (2 per room) to actually guarantee security against a preplanned suicide shooting.
The value of those kid's lives is less than the value of the extra tax needed, at least for those who would need to pay that tax. Cold but true.
M.A.D. It worked for your superpowers. Now let's make it work for you.
Mutually Assured Destruction prevented said destruction because all the participants wished to live. It doesn't help any when one of the participants is intending to blow his own brains out at the end. Suicidal lunatics aren't stopped by death threats.
Umm, I think the survivors of a particular genocide can call it whatever the fuck they want and we should respect the name they choose.
From Wikipedia article on Silet Holocaust: "Advocates of "racial purity" doctrines, most notably certain Jewish communal and religious leaders, use this term when they describe the assimilation and intermarriage of Jews with gentiles."
It doesn't really seem particular respectful for me to liken interracial marriage and resulting loss of blood purity to mass murder. For a particularly nasty irony, consider that one of the reasons Nazi wanted to get rid of the Jews in the first place was to keep their Aryan blood pure.
Given this level of disrespect from the kin of the survivors, I really don't think that asking on Slashdot if a particular genocide needs a specific name really compares.
I think it might seem like a well-kept secret, but it's probably that the people that examined it decided that it's not actually as big if a deal as it would seem like if taken out of context, and it's obscure enough that sensationalist media outlets prone to taking things out of context wouldn't come across this information.
German-Finland cooperation during WW2 is taught in grade school history classes which are mandatory to attend, actually. It isn't obscure by any stretch of imagination.
In this case if everyone follows his example by killing 8 people each and then themself that would add up to 6*9 people each out of 100 or 54%. So then we get a world with the rest 46% of which 3*100/46 = 6.5% are very stupid people and the rest 93.5% are mediocre people!
If everyone kills themselves then we get a world with no average or any other kind of people left;).
Box cutter? You best have a flamethrower next time, because me and everyone in business class are going to beat you to death with our laptops as soon as you start trying to wave that piddly crap in our faces. Akbar Macbook, Bitch!
Something to consider: If the laptops in question have lithium-ion batteries, and are subjected to mecanical stress likely to crack them - for example from being hit repeatedly against someone's skull - they will become flamethrowers. In other words, you may wish to use either your fists or some inert instrument of brutal violence, rather than the one which will turn into a firebomb when damaged.
Of course a creative terrorist could use this to bring the plane down in the first place. "Nobody move, I have a Lithium-Ion battery !"
Yes. Furthermore, they ignore a much simpler explanation: safety.
A monkey which has eaten a red M&M has proof that red is not deadly poisonous: the monkey is still alive. It has no such prove that the blue M&M is not deadly. Given the choice between a known safe food and an unkown one, a monkey which prefers the known safe one has a clear evolutionary advantage by the virtue of having a lower chance of dying of food poisoning.
Eating a known safe food and only changing when it is not available is the default strategy and needs to deep psychological explanation with neurotic self-deceiving monkeys. Deviations from the default strategy require explanation.
Besides, just look at human children: getting them to try new foods can be a fight. If fact I prefer food I know I like over unknown stuff. So why does all this get ignored when talking about monkeys ?
Such actions by the government will only undermine people's faith in it. As Princess Leia once said, "the more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."
Fear will keep them in line. Fear of communists, drug dealers, pedophiles and terrorists.
Besides, Tarkin's response was to blow up Alderaan. US government has nuclear bombs. Draw your own conclusions.
Typically speaking, I thought Windows typically had better framerates because the graphics drivers are in the kernel, and probably better tunned for most vendors. Or wine/Linux could just be faster...
Linux graphics drivers are in the kernel too. That's one of the reasons why it's such a huge hassle when they're closed source.
If we suppose that some super-science could allow them to split regular atoms for energy, maybe reverse the charges of the subatomic particles and create antimatter, there's still only so much matter left to annihilate. At the end, all will be nothing.
If we assume superscience, we can get energy from the expansion of space itself.
The expansion of space means that any two objects occupying a different location will be pushed apart since the space between them is expanding. They experience a force identical to gravitational acceleration. If you could somehow connect a particle far away into a generator, you could extract energy from the acceleration it experiences; not unlike tying a rope to a rock and letting it fall and pull the rope, turning a wheel and through that a generator as it does. Actually, exactly like that, except in implementation details.
Of course, if you do this, the expansion will slow, and you might end up collapsing the whole thing. But that's why we have environmental regulations:).
Everything is non-renewable given a long enough time frame. Entropy is a bitch.
Actually, wrong. In the long run, entropy is your friend. This is because the maximum amount of entropy any given volume of space can contain is determined by the size of said area (to be exact, it is determined by the surface area of the event horizon of a black hole filling said volume). As long as entropy is less than this amount, it keeps growing, driving all kinds of interesting systems - such as yourself - as it goes.
If the universe was static, entropy would eventually reach its maximum, leading to heat death of the universe and the cessation of all interesting events. But the universe is not static, it is expanding. Consequently, the maximum amount of entropy the universe as a whole can contain is also increasing. If the expansion goes on forever, so does the growth of entropy and all that it drives.
In other words, in an expanding universe there will always be useful energy sources, by the virtue of it expanding.
It seems they could both radically improve javascript and add in support for additional scripting languages. It would come at the price of increasing the size of the browsers, but that seems a small price to pay for the increased flexibility for developers.
Oh good. I get to buy even more RAM so that the developers, who have trouble using even current features correctly, get even more ways to screw things up. On top of that I Firefox gets more vulnerability vectors and potential memory leak / CPU hog points.
Sorry, but I hate all those sites which just have to use Javascript to open a new browser window when I click on a link, or just plain waste CPU cycles which Firefox already consumes too much of on its own on some inane counter. Javascript has caused enough trouble, please don't add any additional ways of screwing things over. Developers may love flexibility, but I, the user, love fast & lean surfing experience. Not that I'd get that in Firefox as is, but having several scripting systems isn't going to help any.
How is the grinding compared to WoW? That's the only other MMORPG I've played and, although I played it for a pretty long time, eventually the ceaseless repetitive grinding for every-damn-thing is what drove me away.
Every MMORPG is always going to have grinding. It's like the labyrinths in old adventure games: there to make the game longer.
Take a typical JRPG game, one which takes around 100 hours to play through if you aren't in any particular hurry. Play two hours a day, and it takes 50 days, or two months with occasional day out, to exhaust the content. Now, how long did the game take to make ? I'd imagine it took more than two months.
So what does that have to do with MMORPG's ? Well, it means that content takes time to make. In order to have people stick around while you're making the next expansion, you need to give them something to play; and since the new content is not finished yet, the only thing available is the old content. Thus the players are made to play the same quests through again and again, in other words, grind; not because of either malice or stupidity of gaming companies, but simply because it is impossible to create new quests at the same rate as the average player can play through the old ones.
For this reason grinding will likely always be an important part of MMORPG genre. The other possibility is a simulation type environment where new situations are created by the gameworld mechanics and player interaction, but that also gives the game makers less control, and is therefore risky.
It's not that he is really lucky or unlucky- he is just the 1/14000 who happened to pick every random roll correctly. For a pool of 14000 people, 1 wins all the time, 1 loses all the time, and the rest distribute out in a nice bell curve. If intelligence really does make a difference, the curve will be skewed.
Not neccessarily. Intelligence could simply decide which position you occupy on the curve: ahead of all less intelligent people, and behind all the smarter ones. The overall shape doesn't change, then; if you sell buy just before the share price rises, then someone else sold just before the price raised; and if you sell just before the price drops, then someone else bought just before the price fell.
If you profit more than average, then someone else profits less than average. Bell curve is maintained, only your and some other persons position on it are altered.
Or...... you cater to your audience. I don't see the problem with any of this. I STILL haven't coded my website to be compliant with Konqueror or Safari. That's not to say they don't work in either, I just don't care because the ratio of Windows and IE+Firefox to Safari+Konqueror+every_other_OS_specific_browser_ever is something like 100:1.
All websites and webapps I've ever created get debugged until they pass the W3C validator, both HTML and CSS, with no errors or warnings, on any input (for webapps). Amateur pride, I know; if I ever started developing them as a job, I'm sure I couldn't afford the time to do a good job and would start pulling statistics out of my ass to justify that. However, I hope I still wouldn't actually brag in public for doing a crappy job.
Oh well, at least you're posting as Anonymous Coward, so I guess you still feel some shame...
I've always thought something like this could be awesome for all sorts of geeky pastimes. Need an army for Warhammer 40k? Need a horde of orcs for D&D? Missing a piece to your favorite board game? You can print out an army, toss them back, then print out a new one the next day.
Yes, and you can print Magic the Gathering cards with current 2D printers. Can you actually use them to play against other people, thought ?
Anyway, what would be really awesome would be to use a mapping software to make a castle, landscape or a dungeon, then print it out in full 3D detail.
So like a machine loosing feedback, eventually their systems of control break down, as the ever increasing extremes become untenable for most people to suffer.
The Taliban and the Nazis have demonstrated this.
Both Taliban and Nazis stayed firmly in control until crushed from outside. Nazi Germany, in particular, fought until Berlin was captured, despite the situation becoming hopeless long before that, with no sign of popular revolt.
In fact the only totalitarian system I can think of which fell from the inside was Soviet Russia, and that was mostly because they got a leader who actually believed in the lies the people were fed, and lifted oppression to the point where resistance became possible. And from recent events it seems that Russia is heading back to a totalitarian system, to the thunderous applause of the population.
So no, totalitarian regimes don't fall because they become unbearable to their subjects. They fall because an outside force crushes them, or because the leaders inner circle betrays him, or rarely because a leader actually scales back oppression to the point where control is lost.
So somebody abusing his government office by creating the appearance of a government sanction for a particular religion is a good thing because it lets people know that they're not going to get a fair shake?
No, I think that it is good that a government official makes his religious views known, since that way people who's cases could be affected by any bias created by said views are able to get another judge who has no biases affecting this particular case.
Why you call such dutiful execution of judge's duty to inform the people concerned of any particular bias concerning the case at hand to ensure impartial trial "abuse" is beyond me.
Did you seriously miss the point by that wide of a margin, or are you just throwing up a straw man to score some rhetorical points? In case you really missed it, here's what the GPP meant: The people who think it's just fine and dandy for the government to endorse religion usually mean that it's good for the government to endorse their religion and often go completely nuts when the government endorses somebody else's religion
I'm sure they do. However, that doesn't change the fact that the only things the US Constitution forbids is for the Congress to pass laws doing so, or for religious tests to be demanded of public officials. It does not prohibit any government official from decorating his office with religious symbols. Nor does it prohibit any such official from declaring his undying allegiance to any god, prophet or madman he might choose.
If law doesn't forbid putting islamic, christian, or any other kind of religious symbols, phrases, or other paraphernalia into courtroom, then it is allowed. Since US Constitution doesn't forbid it, the matter is up to the individual state laws, which may or may not forbid it. However, demanding that government officials do not show any kind of religious feeling is not only stupid, since the feeling doesn't go away just because you're not allowed to show it and may still affect impartiality of said official's judgement, but may well be illegal too; after all, surely demanding lack of religion falls under the religious test part of the Constitution ?
I don't know that the Constitution is a strict on the separation of church and state as many (and I) would like it to be, but I do know that it's a matter of smart governance and fair policy to err on the side of neutrality when faced with the possibility of favoritism, and there's plenty of evidence that a number of the founders understood that.
I quite agree, history shows clearly that giving religion or religious leaders any earthly power is a recipe for disaster. That doesn't change that the Constitution states what it states, not what you'd want it to state. If that bothers you, try to get it changed. Don't start on the "this is what they meant" road because, as you noted, then what's stopping those who disagree with you from doing such creative reinterpretations too ?
Slashdot Mirror
Nitpick: they can't be reversed in any amount of time, because for any given hash, there are propably an infinite amount of strings which hash to that hash.
It's an old Chinese invention. Wikipedia has an article of it.
You don't want a stack where, you want a queue. If you have a stack where a car is returned to the top and the next customer also gets a car from the top, the cars experience very uneven wear, since the cars at the bottom are never taken (assuming the system has sufficient capacity). You want a system where a returned car is put at the bottom of the pile and the next customer gets a car form the top (or the other way around).
Actually, in all likelyhood... yes.
Any advanced alien race must be a pack-forming species. The reason is simple: a race of loners would never manage to get culture going, since that requires communication between individuals. It would never reach the stars; in fact it would never even reach metal-working.
Living in a pack puts certain demands on psychology. Pack members can't just pursuse their own interests, but must take each other into account, if the pack is to function. In other words, pack-forming animals have an evolutive pressure towards morality. This pressure is made ever stronger the higher technology rises, because any misbehavior is likely to result in far direr consequences when the misbehaving person has access to bombs than if he only had access to stone clubs. That is the real reason why the current society is nicer than, say, the Roman Empire: we aren't nicer people, we simply don't have a choice.
People always go on about how aliens can be totally incomprehensible to us, but that is just plain untrue. They operate on the same reality, under the same laws of physics and logic, as we do. If they are succesfull enough to reach the stars, then their psychology must conform to those laws; and that makes it similar to ours. Self-preservation, reproduction, social interaction: those are the things any succesfull intelligent species must base their psyche on. There may be more, of course, but these are the absolute minimum concepts all alien minds must have.
Earth has had broadcast radio for a century now, acting as a beacon to anyone listening. It is much too late to hide.
If you're really worried about alien overlords, start investing in space flight, so that any would-be conquerers are greeted by a fleet of Star Destroyers.
Actually, no. The real answer is: because the people have considered and decided that a few kids getting killed every now and then is not worth the cost of hiring guards at every school, especially enough guards (2 per room) to actually guarantee security against a preplanned suicide shooting.
The value of those kid's lives is less than the value of the extra tax needed, at least for those who would need to pay that tax. Cold but true.
Mutually Assured Destruction prevented said destruction because all the participants wished to live. It doesn't help any when one of the participants is intending to blow his own brains out at the end. Suicidal lunatics aren't stopped by death threats.
From Wikipedia article on Silet Holocaust: "Advocates of "racial purity" doctrines, most notably certain Jewish communal and religious leaders, use this term when they describe the assimilation and intermarriage of Jews with gentiles."
It doesn't really seem particular respectful for me to liken interracial marriage and resulting loss of blood purity to mass murder. For a particularly nasty irony, consider that one of the reasons Nazi wanted to get rid of the Jews in the first place was to keep their Aryan blood pure.
Given this level of disrespect from the kin of the survivors, I really don't think that asking on Slashdot if a particular genocide needs a specific name really compares.
German-Finland cooperation during WW2 is taught in grade school history classes which are mandatory to attend, actually. It isn't obscure by any stretch of imagination.
If everyone kills themselves then we get a world with no average or any other kind of people left ;).
Something to consider: If the laptops in question have lithium-ion batteries, and are subjected to mecanical stress likely to crack them - for example from being hit repeatedly against someone's skull - they will become flamethrowers. In other words, you may wish to use either your fists or some inert instrument of brutal violence, rather than the one which will turn into a firebomb when damaged.
Of course a creative terrorist could use this to bring the plane down in the first place. "Nobody move, I have a Lithium-Ion battery !"
Yes. Furthermore, they ignore a much simpler explanation: safety.
A monkey which has eaten a red M&M has proof that red is not deadly poisonous: the monkey is still alive. It has no such prove that the blue M&M is not deadly. Given the choice between a known safe food and an unkown one, a monkey which prefers the known safe one has a clear evolutionary advantage by the virtue of having a lower chance of dying of food poisoning.
Eating a known safe food and only changing when it is not available is the default strategy and needs to deep psychological explanation with neurotic self-deceiving monkeys. Deviations from the default strategy require explanation.
Besides, just look at human children: getting them to try new foods can be a fight. If fact I prefer food I know I like over unknown stuff. So why does all this get ignored when talking about monkeys ?
Fear will keep them in line. Fear of communists, drug dealers, pedophiles and terrorists.
Besides, Tarkin's response was to blow up Alderaan. US government has nuclear bombs. Draw your own conclusions.
Just because the KGB knows you're there doesn't mean they'd tell US law enforcement.
Linux graphics drivers are in the kernel too. That's one of the reasons why it's such a huge hassle when they're closed source.
If we assume superscience, we can get energy from the expansion of space itself.
The expansion of space means that any two objects occupying a different location will be pushed apart since the space between them is expanding. They experience a force identical to gravitational acceleration. If you could somehow connect a particle far away into a generator, you could extract energy from the acceleration it experiences; not unlike tying a rope to a rock and letting it fall and pull the rope, turning a wheel and through that a generator as it does. Actually, exactly like that, except in implementation details.
Of course, if you do this, the expansion will slow, and you might end up collapsing the whole thing. But that's why we have environmental regulations :).
Actually, wrong. In the long run, entropy is your friend. This is because the maximum amount of entropy any given volume of space can contain is determined by the size of said area (to be exact, it is determined by the surface area of the event horizon of a black hole filling said volume). As long as entropy is less than this amount, it keeps growing, driving all kinds of interesting systems - such as yourself - as it goes.
If the universe was static, entropy would eventually reach its maximum, leading to heat death of the universe and the cessation of all interesting events. But the universe is not static, it is expanding. Consequently, the maximum amount of entropy the universe as a whole can contain is also increasing. If the expansion goes on forever, so does the growth of entropy and all that it drives.
In other words, in an expanding universe there will always be useful energy sources, by the virtue of it expanding.
Oh good. I get to buy even more RAM so that the developers, who have trouble using even current features correctly, get even more ways to screw things up. On top of that I Firefox gets more vulnerability vectors and potential memory leak / CPU hog points.
Sorry, but I hate all those sites which just have to use Javascript to open a new browser window when I click on a link, or just plain waste CPU cycles which Firefox already consumes too much of on its own on some inane counter. Javascript has caused enough trouble, please don't add any additional ways of screwing things over. Developers may love flexibility, but I, the user, love fast & lean surfing experience. Not that I'd get that in Firefox as is, but having several scripting systems isn't going to help any.
Every MMORPG is always going to have grinding. It's like the labyrinths in old adventure games: there to make the game longer.
Take a typical JRPG game, one which takes around 100 hours to play through if you aren't in any particular hurry. Play two hours a day, and it takes 50 days, or two months with occasional day out, to exhaust the content. Now, how long did the game take to make ? I'd imagine it took more than two months.
So what does that have to do with MMORPG's ? Well, it means that content takes time to make. In order to have people stick around while you're making the next expansion, you need to give them something to play; and since the new content is not finished yet, the only thing available is the old content. Thus the players are made to play the same quests through again and again, in other words, grind; not because of either malice or stupidity of gaming companies, but simply because it is impossible to create new quests at the same rate as the average player can play through the old ones.
For this reason grinding will likely always be an important part of MMORPG genre. The other possibility is a simulation type environment where new situations are created by the gameworld mechanics and player interaction, but that also gives the game makers less control, and is therefore risky.
Not neccessarily. Intelligence could simply decide which position you occupy on the curve: ahead of all less intelligent people, and behind all the smarter ones. The overall shape doesn't change, then; if you sell buy just before the share price rises, then someone else sold just before the price raised; and if you sell just before the price drops, then someone else bought just before the price fell.
If you profit more than average, then someone else profits less than average. Bell curve is maintained, only your and some other persons position on it are altered.
All websites and webapps I've ever created get debugged until they pass the W3C validator, both HTML and CSS, with no errors or warnings, on any input (for webapps). Amateur pride, I know; if I ever started developing them as a job, I'm sure I couldn't afford the time to do a good job and would start pulling statistics out of my ass to justify that. However, I hope I still wouldn't actually brag in public for doing a crappy job.
Oh well, at least you're posting as Anonymous Coward, so I guess you still feel some shame...
Yes, and you can print Magic the Gathering cards with current 2D printers. Can you actually use them to play against other people, thought ?
Anyway, what would be really awesome would be to use a mapping software to make a castle, landscape or a dungeon, then print it out in full 3D detail.
Both Taliban and Nazis stayed firmly in control until crushed from outside. Nazi Germany, in particular, fought until Berlin was captured, despite the situation becoming hopeless long before that, with no sign of popular revolt.
In fact the only totalitarian system I can think of which fell from the inside was Soviet Russia, and that was mostly because they got a leader who actually believed in the lies the people were fed, and lifted oppression to the point where resistance became possible. And from recent events it seems that Russia is heading back to a totalitarian system, to the thunderous applause of the population.
So no, totalitarian regimes don't fall because they become unbearable to their subjects. They fall because an outside force crushes them, or because the leaders inner circle betrays him, or rarely because a leader actually scales back oppression to the point where control is lost.
Ups ! I mistook the "In office" time as lifetime. So fine: ex-senator likely to die any day now on the account of being 85.
No, I think that it is good that a government official makes his religious views known, since that way people who's cases could be affected by any bias created by said views are able to get another judge who has no biases affecting this particular case.
Why you call such dutiful execution of judge's duty to inform the people concerned of any particular bias concerning the case at hand to ensure impartial trial "abuse" is beyond me.
I'm sure they do. However, that doesn't change the fact that the only things the US Constitution forbids is for the Congress to pass laws doing so, or for religious tests to be demanded of public officials. It does not prohibit any government official from decorating his office with religious symbols. Nor does it prohibit any such official from declaring his undying allegiance to any god, prophet or madman he might choose.
If law doesn't forbid putting islamic, christian, or any other kind of religious symbols, phrases, or other paraphernalia into courtroom, then it is allowed. Since US Constitution doesn't forbid it, the matter is up to the individual state laws, which may or may not forbid it. However, demanding that government officials do not show any kind of religious feeling is not only stupid, since the feeling doesn't go away just because you're not allowed to show it and may still affect impartiality of said official's judgement, but may well be illegal too; after all, surely demanding lack of religion falls under the religious test part of the Constitution ?
I quite agree, history shows clearly that giving religion or religious leaders any earthly power is a recipe for disaster. That doesn't change that the Constitution states what it states, not what you'd want it to state. If that bothers you, try to get it changed. Don't start on the "this is what they meant" road because, as you noted, then what's stopping those who disagree with you from doing such creative reinterpretations too ?