The web is a powerful platform for deployment of information precisely because there are a very limited number of standard formats for contents, and a single standard environment for viewing them. It pisses me off to no end when I see a PDF file without an HTML version alongside it. The last thing I want to do is deal with a whole different environment to view content---whether it's Acrobat or a viewer plug-in makes no difference. Ditto for Word, OOo, etc. (As I always say, "Repeat after me: 'HTML is for Viewing, PDF is for Printing'.")
Unfortunately, in the real world people often want to both view and print documents. Anyone posting a static document online that is likely going to be printed by a large fraction of the people who view it, needs to consider PDF rather than HTML as an option.
Also, I have run into problems with websites and software that will appear to accept a long password when you are creating it, but internally truncate it to some number of characters (usually eight). When you go to log in, some such sites/programs will only accept the truncated password. Entering the full original password produces a failed login.
I really, really wish this stupid historical 8 character limit on passwords would go away. There is absolutely no reason ever to prevent someone from making a password longer than eight characters. You need some upper limit of course, but why not 20 or 30?
Yes, but the number of such combinations greatly exceeds the number of combinations consisting of only lowercase letters. Given that most naive users will, in the absence of a constraint, choose a password of only lowercase letters, this increases security overall. You're trading a small decrease in security for the people who would use all lower case with one punctuation mark regardless of constraints, in exchange for a larger increase in security for the much larger pool of people who would use all lowercase if they could.
Your argument would be true, except that in the absence of constraints, a semi-intelligent cracking program is going to try all-lowercase passwords first, since that is what most users will use if nothing forces them to do otherwise. If it doesn't crack the account, the next thing to try would be strings consisting of 7 or so lowercase letters followed by a number. I agree with you that the cracking program doesn't "know" the password is all lowercase, but the cracker is free to "guess" that all-lowercase passwords are more likely given human nature. Forcing mixed cases, etc. makes the users who would use those features anyway slightly less secure for the reasons you noted, but increases overall security by removing an obvious first-guess pattern.
There's a lesson for you here: it's usually a bad idea to use a preexisting personal account (email, IM, cell phone, whatever) for work, especially if your employer ends up paying for the account. It leads to all kinds of problems later.
What are you talking about? Many other countries have already 'generally' adopted nuclear power. Nuclear provides about 17% of the world's energy, and there are some countries that get more than half of their power from nuclear. Even some 'developing' nations have nuclear power plants (e.g. Brazil, India, Mexico and Pakistan). Just because the U.S. has allowed itself to stagnate technologically in this area, don't assume that the rest of the world has done the same.
It depends how and where you plan to use the computer. In a home office the fan may be fine, but if you plan to include the computer in your home entertainment system it may become annoying when listening to quiet dialog in movies, or quiet passages in classical music.
Of course, if the Faraday cage isn't grounded Gauss' Law says that its outer surface is an equipotential, but it doesn't guarantee that the potential of this surface is zero. One reason why Faraday cages are usually grounded is to ensure that they do not accidentally become charged, especially when they contain equipment that is running on an external power supply.
There are other, more subtle issues. The usual textbook explanation of how a Faraday cage works assumes a static equilibrium. Fluctuating electric or electromagnetic fields will pass through the cage to some degree, depending on the frequency of the field and the construction of the cage. Grounding sometimes makes a difference in how well a cage blocks external high-frequency waves. It's not just a matter of whether the cage is grounded, but also where and how it's grounded.
In case anyone else reading this is unclear on why a Faraday cage is not a perfect barrier for non-static fields: loosely speaking, the usual analysis assumes the electrons on the surface of the metal have had time to adjust their positions so as to "cancel out" the external electric field everywhere inside the cage. If the external electric or electromagnetic fields fluctuate fast enough, the electrons will not move fast enough to completely cancel the field at all times and the signal leaks through the cage.
You're probably right, though, that an ungrounded Faraday cage would be fine for shielding a passport. I have no idea whether tinfoil would be sufficient for blocking RF though.
Seriously, the whole point of the firefox extensions system is to prevent the situation where everybody's pet feature gets added to the core browser. That way leads inevitably to horrible bloated software. Extensions are dead easy to install. If the feature you want were available as an extension (and maybe it is already), you could simply install it on your mum's computer.
Not to mention that if the browser displayed a warning (even a subtle one) every time it encountered a noncompliant page, it would rapidly discourage people from using it.
I was hoping to see some good answers to this question, but it seems most people are more interested in whether his Christmas card distro is a good idea. I wanted to know for myself: I wouldn't mind trying Linux but have been too lazy to bother, and don't really feel any strong need to switch away from Windows.
So, which live CD is the best, if I define "the best" as "most likely to boot up and work with absolutely no tinkering, and provides the ability to do something useful once it is booted up?" Not messing up my Windows setup would be a high priority too.
Voting for judges is a bad idea. The last thing you want is for judges to have to pander to public opinion in order to secure reelection. It's not good for keeping the judiciary unbiased and focused on the law.
(Yes, I know many jurisdictions in the U.S. elect judges. It's a bad idea there too.)
But only if you find the new job before you get fired from the old one. The rules changed a few years back. If you're on an H1-b and you lose your job, it's game over.
Warren and Marshal's discovery that gastric ulcers, which previously had been thought to be caused by stress and diet, were actually a simple bacterial infection that can be cured with antibiotics.
In both cases, these researchers' claims were completely rejected by the scientific community, but they were able to accumulate sufficient evidence to get their ideas accepted in the end.
No, not one's own beliefs and preconceived ideas. New ideas are evaluated in the context of the overall picture of how things work, that is shared by the scientific community as a whole (or at least by everyone in one field). Yes, this is using preconceptions to filter which ideas are worth exploring further and which are not. This process is absolutely vital to science. Our existing understanding of the world (based on previous experiments to verify and disprove theories) shapes our view of which of the vast supply of hypotheses are worth investigating. Without this filter, we would waste huge amounts of time exploring worthless ideas, and science would never get anywhere.
One of the problems with the whole paranormal field is that it is pretty hard to set up a good, unbiased experimental program. Most of the research that has been done in this field is useless due to subtle or not so subtle experiment design problems. The proponents tend to just keep using the data and making unsupportable claims anyway. That kind of behaviour pretty much puts a field outside the bounds of what can be explored scientificly. If the the scientific community cannot come to agreement on what constitutes a valid experiment, then there is no way to collect evidence to support or disprove a theory. If you want to "search for evidence", you have to have some agreement on how to determine what evidence is valid.
What you have said is generally correct, but I think you have managed to completely miss the point. Of course it is the genes that evolve, not the organisms or species. Of course evolution doesn't "know" anything. One can still step back and observe the overall effect however: evolution over time optimizes species for survival and reproduction, within whatever ecological niche is available. Complex results arise from a simple "feedback" type mechanism--natural selection.
Admittedly, the way some supporters of the Gaia hypothesis have written about it damages their credibility. People tend to make this out to be some sort of mystical thing, when it really isn't. It's not that the Earth or Evolution is intelligent, it's just that it exhibits complex behavior arising from simpler processes.
Any scientist worth anything would at least look for some evidence for or against rather than dismissing out of hand like the lot of you.
Actually, that is not how science works. If scientists accepted and looked for evidence for or against every hypothesis, we would never make any progress. You have to have some way of filtering the small number of ideas that are likely to be fruitful from the much larger pool of ideas that aren't going to get you anywhere. The way we do this is through a paradigm--an overall understanding of "how things work". Ideas that don't fit the current paradigm are rejected. We may of course miss some valid ideas that way, but the vast majority of ideas that are rejected are worthless. The valid ideas we miss will get picked up later, in some future paradigm shift.
Actually while this author appears to be full of shit, the stuff about negative energy is not completely bogus. I didn't read the PDF, but it sounds like he has culled stuff from the famous Alcubiere warp drive paper. This was a real, published, physics paper showing a theoretical solution of General Relativity allowing faster than light travel via a clever distortion of space-time without the need to resort to creating a wormhole. The author dubbed it a "warp drive" in homage to Star Trek. There's only one slight catch: the solution requires a huge quantity of "negative energy matter". We don't have any good reason to think that such matter exists. I don't think anybody believes this particular GR solution is physical, but the theory is not bogus.
This is not entirely true. There is actually a scientific theory that the Earth's ecosystem (the interaction between all the organisms and the environment) undergoes a sort of collective natural selection. As a simple example, the food "chain" contains loops like wolf eats deer which eats plants which grow on organic material produced by bacteria digesting dead wolves (among other things). Natural selection optimizes those loops as well as it optimizes each individual species. The whole web of life co-evolves not just for optimum survival of each species but also for optimum survival of all life. Some people get all mystical about this, but fundamentally there is nothing mysterious about it.
Where the grandparent goes wrong is in assuming that that optimum necessarily works in our best interests. Extinctions are part of the process. If we mess up the environment badly enough, we may find ourselves extinct. Life on Earth will recover and go on without us.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, in the real world people often want to both view and print documents. Anyone posting a static document online that is likely going to be printed by a large fraction of the people who view it, needs to consider PDF rather than HTML as an option.
I really, really wish this stupid historical 8 character limit on passwords would go away. There is absolutely no reason ever to prevent someone from making a password longer than eight characters. You need some upper limit of course, but why not 20 or 30?
Yes, but the number of such combinations greatly exceeds the number of combinations consisting of only lowercase letters. Given that most naive users will, in the absence of a constraint, choose a password of only lowercase letters, this increases security overall. You're trading a small decrease in security for the people who would use all lower case with one punctuation mark regardless of constraints, in exchange for a larger increase in security for the much larger pool of people who would use all lowercase if they could.
Your argument would be true, except that in the absence of constraints, a semi-intelligent cracking program is going to try all-lowercase passwords first, since that is what most users will use if nothing forces them to do otherwise. If it doesn't crack the account, the next thing to try would be strings consisting of 7 or so lowercase letters followed by a number. I agree with you that the cracking program doesn't "know" the password is all lowercase, but the cracker is free to "guess" that all-lowercase passwords are more likely given human nature. Forcing mixed cases, etc. makes the users who would use those features anyway slightly less secure for the reasons you noted, but increases overall security by removing an obvious first-guess pattern.
There's a lesson for you here: it's usually a bad idea to use a preexisting personal account (email, IM, cell phone, whatever) for work, especially if your employer ends up paying for the account. It leads to all kinds of problems later.
What are you talking about? Many other countries have already 'generally' adopted nuclear power. Nuclear provides about 17% of the world's energy, and there are some countries that get more than half of their power from nuclear. Even some 'developing' nations have nuclear power plants (e.g. Brazil, India, Mexico and Pakistan). Just because the U.S. has allowed itself to stagnate technologically in this area, don't assume that the rest of the world has done the same.
Who is more likely to shoot themself in the face?
Put a well raised kid in a room alone with a gun, and then put a teased, abused, mentally damaged child alone in a room with a gun....
Who is likely to blow their brains out?
Actually, you might be surprised...
Probably not true of the average reader here, actually.
It depends how and where you plan to use the computer. In a home office the fan may be fine, but if you plan to include the computer in your home entertainment system it may become annoying when listening to quiet dialog in movies, or quiet passages in classical music.
Telecomm equipment is designed to be pretty robust. Passing the qualification standards is a PITA.
There are other, more subtle issues. The usual textbook explanation of how a Faraday cage works assumes a static equilibrium. Fluctuating electric or electromagnetic fields will pass through the cage to some degree, depending on the frequency of the field and the construction of the cage. Grounding sometimes makes a difference in how well a cage blocks external high-frequency waves. It's not just a matter of whether the cage is grounded, but also where and how it's grounded.
In case anyone else reading this is unclear on why a Faraday cage is not a perfect barrier for non-static fields: loosely speaking, the usual analysis assumes the electrons on the surface of the metal have had time to adjust their positions so as to "cancel out" the external electric field everywhere inside the cage. If the external electric or electromagnetic fields fluctuate fast enough, the electrons will not move fast enough to completely cancel the field at all times and the signal leaks through the cage.
You're probably right, though, that an ungrounded Faraday cage would be fine for shielding a passport. I have no idea whether tinfoil would be sufficient for blocking RF though.
Seriously, the whole point of the firefox extensions system is to prevent the situation where everybody's pet feature gets added to the core browser. That way leads inevitably to horrible bloated software. Extensions are dead easy to install. If the feature you want were available as an extension (and maybe it is already), you could simply install it on your mum's computer.
Not to mention that if the browser displayed a warning (even a subtle one) every time it encountered a noncompliant page, it would rapidly discourage people from using it.
Sounds like an Extension.
So, which live CD is the best, if I define "the best" as "most likely to boot up and work with absolutely no tinkering, and provides the ability to do something useful once it is booted up?" Not messing up my Windows setup would be a high priority too.
Voting for judges is a bad idea. The last thing you want is for judges to have to pander to public opinion in order to secure reelection. It's not good for keeping the judiciary unbiased and focused on the law. (Yes, I know many jurisdictions in the U.S. elect judges. It's a bad idea there too.)
But only if you find the new job before you get fired from the old one. The rules changed a few years back. If you're on an H1-b and you lose your job, it's game over.
There is.
Before anybody mods that funny, an artist did receive a copyright infringement claim over a completely silent track on his album. Slashdot has discussed this before.
- Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift
- Warren and Marshal's discovery that gastric ulcers, which previously had been thought to be caused by stress and diet, were actually a simple bacterial infection that can be cured with antibiotics.
In both cases, these researchers' claims were completely rejected by the scientific community, but they were able to accumulate sufficient evidence to get their ideas accepted in the end.One of the problems with the whole paranormal field is that it is pretty hard to set up a good, unbiased experimental program. Most of the research that has been done in this field is useless due to subtle or not so subtle experiment design problems. The proponents tend to just keep using the data and making unsupportable claims anyway. That kind of behaviour pretty much puts a field outside the bounds of what can be explored scientificly. If the the scientific community cannot come to agreement on what constitutes a valid experiment, then there is no way to collect evidence to support or disprove a theory. If you want to "search for evidence", you have to have some agreement on how to determine what evidence is valid.
Admittedly, the way some supporters of the Gaia hypothesis have written about it damages their credibility. People tend to make this out to be some sort of mystical thing, when it really isn't. It's not that the Earth or Evolution is intelligent, it's just that it exhibits complex behavior arising from simpler processes.
Actually, that is not how science works. If scientists accepted and looked for evidence for or against every hypothesis, we would never make any progress. You have to have some way of filtering the small number of ideas that are likely to be fruitful from the much larger pool of ideas that aren't going to get you anywhere. The way we do this is through a paradigm--an overall understanding of "how things work". Ideas that don't fit the current paradigm are rejected. We may of course miss some valid ideas that way, but the vast majority of ideas that are rejected are worthless. The valid ideas we miss will get picked up later, in some future paradigm shift.
Perhaps it's related to the fact that his web address is "biomindsuperpowers.com".
Actually while this author appears to be full of shit, the stuff about negative energy is not completely bogus. I didn't read the PDF, but it sounds like he has culled stuff from the famous Alcubiere warp drive paper. This was a real, published, physics paper showing a theoretical solution of General Relativity allowing faster than light travel via a clever distortion of space-time without the need to resort to creating a wormhole. The author dubbed it a "warp drive" in homage to Star Trek. There's only one slight catch: the solution requires a huge quantity of "negative energy matter". We don't have any good reason to think that such matter exists. I don't think anybody believes this particular GR solution is physical, but the theory is not bogus.
Where the grandparent goes wrong is in assuming that that optimum necessarily works in our best interests. Extinctions are part of the process. If we mess up the environment badly enough, we may find ourselves extinct. Life on Earth will recover and go on without us.