Logical? Holy shit. There are people who think al Qaeda are logical.
Well I can at least parse a sentence. They are the logical response in that an attack produces a counter-attack. Would the meaning be clearer to you if I had said they are the natural response to US support for the Saudi regime? If a country invades another, or in this case supports a totalitarian regime, it is logical to expect a resistance movement. Al Quaeda are that resistance movement. But since you have interpreted it in a different sense, yes - within the bounds of their own priorities, Al Quaeda are indeed logical. They are striking back at what they perceive to be their enemy. Logical enough, I would say.
Would you want me to get "logical" in the good ol' Qaeda style on your sorry ass?
I think you getting logical in any sense would be a good start. But if you really want to threaten me, here I am. So go ahead. I'm waiting...:p
the logical response to a long history of US support for the nasty regime of Israel
There, fixed that for ya.
Without entirely disagreeing with your post, if I had meant to type Israel, I would have. I was responding specifically to a comment about Al Quaeda which was predominantly a response to the US presence Saudi Arabia and support of the deeply unpleasant regime that controls it. It's an actual monarchy! Not in the stupid soak up your taxes and do nothing but inbreed English way, but an actual monarchy! Have no doubt that it is right to want a representative government there. And whilst Israel colours everything in the Middle East, and is an ever-present factor in creating the tolerance or sympathy that lets Al Quaeda hide and recruit, the actual original demand of Osama bin Laden was for the US to get out of Saudi Arabia and let them sort out issues with their government their own way. If we're going to look at the initial drive behind Al Quaeda, then we first have to look at Saudi Arabia. That is not to say that the effect of Israel on muslim and non-muslim relations outweighs Saudi in general terms. This is a country that demands a particular religion for immigration. Not even Iran asks that!
You said part of what I was going to say in reply already. The viable alternative in the Euro is extremely important. The only thing I would have added to the reply is that when the GP and you both comment that the size of the debt isn't important... Well I've heard it described as the Wile E. Coyote Effect. It is the economic principle whereby you can keep going even after you run off a cliff, so long as you don't look down. Only when you realise that there's nothing beneath you, do you plummet earthwards. In this analogy, the size of the debt is the height of the cliff. You're right in some ways to say that the debt doesn't matter so long as you keep running. But when the readjustment happens (say the Euro becomes the currency of choice), it becomes very significant indeed. You only have to look at some third world countries that were buried under debt to see how much difference it makes to a country's ability to climb back up. I'm not disagreeing with your concise summary of one of the biggest issues. I'm just saying that the size of the debt is still a big worry. The issue of where it's been borrowed from is a factor too. I don't necessarily mean China, but from the USA's own institutions such as Social Security. They've borrowed against the future and that's bad.
The US and the rest of the world are fighting enemies that don't have submarines, or any navy at all. Al-Queda doesn't have a navy. These are small, dedicated groups of people who remain hidden. You can't fight people like that with a tank, much less a submarine.
Al Quaeda are not a threat to the the United States. Not in the way that an actual army is. Al Quaeda are just the logical response to a long history of US support for the nasty regime of Saudi Arabia. Unchecked, they will cause deaths, but the only real threat they pose to the US itself, is one of respect which harms the government and its foreign bad-ass image. But not a threat to the American way of life or culture (those have come solely in the government's response). The two reasons that Al Quaeda are played up by the US government and media are (a) as a part of a campaign of confusing issues to justify an occupation of Iraq and (b) to excuse the diversion of vast funds into the military sector. A dubious reason to increase government surveillance and power is also a pleasant (for the authorities) bonus.
Of course this isn't to disagree with your main arguments. Trying to restart the Cold War is massively misguided and the US can't afford to do it anyway. I'm just observing that Al Queada is a reactionary force to US policy, not an independent force. They fight primarily off US territority and could not pursue a war on US territority. All the US needs to do to stop the resistance is to stop pushing. But the powers that be in the US can't countenance such an idea because they have so much riding on being the big tough guy, both before the US people's (Slashdotter's excepted) drilled in faith in their country's superiority and on the international stage where they have pushed other countries around for a long time (mostly with a complete lack of awareness of the situation on the part of the population who I've usually found to be very friendly).
The swollen armed forces of the US have been unnecessary for quite some time. I'm surprised people haven't cottoned on a long time before now.
And that's assuming that it ever came to war. I don't want to be blasé about the risk of conflict, but keep in mind that US debt isn't quite critical but has become very, very large. A good portion of that debt is to China (another big chunk is borrowed against the public via social security, et al). The US government has essentially mortgaged the country. There doesn't have to be a war before a US citizen finds she's working for a Chinese company and renting from a Chinese landlord.
Now the US has an enormous military (there had to be something to show for all that borrowing and it certainly wasn't in education and health care, yes?). You could say that the US could tell the rest of the World to go and fuck itself and renege on the debt. But that's extremely unlikely because (a) the richest people of the US who have the greatest influence to bring about such a thing are those who would lose the most in any sort of international isolation or chaos, (b) the whole economic structure of the US would go into freefall and (c) it would be hard to fund the US military in an economic crisis anyway, at least for any sustained period.
Besides, it's not in the USA's creditor's interests for the US to default on debt or go bankrupt or turn into a military dictatorship. The percentage is in keeping it just sufficiently under the economic thumb that it can be milked in perpetuity and nudged into selling off its institutions and resources group by group. That's one of the nice things about a heavily privatised society. It makes it convenient for the country to be sold without non-radical means of preventing it.
This is going to sound really daft, no doubt, but I've just read through all of the above and I'm now curious as to what "progressive" means in the USA? At least I'm assuming this is another US instance of innocent words being co-opted to represent political factions like Liberal. Often bearing no intuitive relation to their meaning in the rest of the world.
There is a reason american phones often lack the java capability that exists on the same model in the rest of the world, java opens up the phone.
Out of curiousity, and because someone here will know, what the presence of Java on mobiles in the US and how does it compare to the rest of the world? Is Java standard in most countries on modern phones but not the US, or is it much patchier?
Heh! Mine now has debian on it. I'd like to say it was a direct result of the Novell-Microsoft deal, which was the major factor, but SuSE's hideous application launcher "start" menu was also a contributor.;)
Of course there's another option, which is simply that the government of Nigeria decided that Mandriva Linux was the better option regardless of "incentives." Maybe they saw the Microsoft deal for what it was - cheap now, pay later. Or possibly they don't trust an operating system where there's strong reason to believe that there are backdoors for the US government. In any case, let's not forget that there are solid reasons for choosing Mandriva and kick backs might not be the biggest factor for once.
At the risk of "you must be new here" comments, I think you have underestimated the intelligence of the/. crowd. I think most of us can recognize that stupid patents are a threat to us all. Microsoft-haters might take some satisfaction in seeing Microsoft cut itself on its own weapons, but most will draw the line at saying the patent action is a good thing, because we don't know who might get hit by it next.
I'm seeing more and more actual patent actions recently. I've read that one of the reasons a patent war hasn't kicked off is because everything was on hold while everyone was trying to get the Europeans to enact the same patent laws and approve the queue of US patents over here, thus increasing the size of the prize to be divvied up. Looks like that might not happen now, though, so it could be that things are heating up partly because of that? That and Microsoft looking at more desparate ways of putting down Linux.
You create a file of sufficient size to meet your expected requirements in advance, or else you encrypt an entire partition. In either case, the size of the file or partition says nothing about the amount of data stored within it. But I'm glad to see other people talking about TrueCrypt. It really is a fantastic program and user-friendly enough for people at the lowish-end of technical expertise, too.
Customer C sees that an ISP is advertising x MB/s connections for y dollars, says "great, I'll be able to download z really fast!", and signs up. Then he finds out that he can't download z as fast as he thought, because BitTorrent/sftp/whatever is blocked or throttled.
You've just caused another issue to occur to me which I hadn't really thought about until now. Currently, I can assess the likely speeds from ISPs based on the deal I sign with them (Comcast out and out lies not withstanding). If ISPs are also charging the people whose sites I visit for different speed rates, that's another factor which I have to take into account and possibly don't even have the needed information to judge it on anyway. Example:
ISP A offers cheap 8Mbps connection to public. ISP B offers 2Mbps at not much saving. Public goes yay and signs up with ISP A.
However, ISP A makes up its costs compared to ISP B by sur-charging the website hosts for decent bandwidth, whilst ISP B does not.
The result of this is that I actually get worse performance with ISP A than with ISP B because they have hidden the real costs by slapping them on the hosting companies in the form of performance surcharges. How would I, the customer, ever be able to get a real handle on which ISP would be best for me?
Now this is why I read/. - in amongst all the bemoaning, I come across the odd interesting idea that had never occurred to me. Banning the government from appealing (not that they're very appealing anyway;). Would need to think it over, but that could be a good thing and I fully agree with the comments about government not being a single entity. People forget that.
I think this is exactly the reason why democracy just can not exist as a stable state;
But this isn't a given. (Please note that I'm only disagreeing with your conclusion, not your argument.) The degree to which the people care is heavily influenced by factors of general education levels, wealth distribution and culture. The republic of Rome, whilst a republic having the subtle distinction of being a republic rather than a democracy and lacking universal suffrage, is still a valid example of a democracy lasting over four-hundred years. There is no intrinsic reason why a democracy must fail sooner than any other form of government. The apathy of people in the US regarding politics is, I think, largely a result of both poor education in history and world events, and of the prevalent meme that nothing can be done. Both are fostered, deliberately or not, by the highly controlled media in the country. Although affluence may well be a large factor in the apathy also, in some ways. This last is most certainly going to change!
Education levels and cultural attitudes can be changed and historically have been. It's not a rule that must inevitably be followed. And the desire and hope for a perfect democracy, even if thwarted, can also raise us up to a more representative society than we would have if never tried. Hang in there!:)
All correct, but there's an interesting corollary - the more people who are convicted of crimes, the less effect this threat has. It doesn't even need to be conviction as simply the experience of being arrested and thinking that you may be sentenced is enough to open your eyes and disabuse people of the Us vs. Them stereotyping of criminals. When you or your friend or brother or your partner has a criminal record, the mark on a job candidate's history becomes much less of a instant trigger for dismissing them. Instead, you start to do what you should do all along which is assess it on the merits of the actual case - was it breaching a silence order from the government or was it murdering little old ladies? I personally have recommended that someone with a criminal record be hired. They appeared to be the best candidate.
The other effect of arresting someone, is that the ability to frighten them with arrest is often somewhat diminished thereafter. A senior British police officer here remarked in interview, that laws were for keeping the law-abiding law-abiding. I.e. people are afraid of being caught. Once you have been caught and your record marked, you usually care less about further marks. I might even go so far as to say that going out and getting yourself arrested (preferably for something minor and non prison-worthy) is quite a liberating experience.
Finally, is the very wrong law in the US that disenfranchises convicted felons from voting. As more and more people are convicted (and very predominantly from poor demographics), the US democracy becomes less and less representative. And we all know where that leads.
Thank you. Waited a few days to reply to avoid cluttering up the thread until there were fewer people still reading. And it's not often I get called "concise.";)
Well you see, every time we point out something else that can be used for territory, that's another bill that has to go through congress to mandate registration of it. We're hoping that we can get the US government to simply busy itself to death.
Bribery then, is the act of using incentives to influence the decision through either providing personal gain (the traditional "baksheesh" bribe) or change of bias (see http://www.gatesfoundation.org./ [www.gatesfoundation.org]
The second part of your definition is grey, imo - but yes, you are correct. But I would say that the presence of bribery implies the necessity for bribery (because you don't pay if you don't have to). And the necessity for bribery implies the decision is inferior because otherwise the bribery wouldn't be necessary. Hence my explanation as to why bribery is not just "a cost of doing business in some cultures." Of course you can find complications and exceptions in that chain, the most notable being where the other parties are also attempting bribery and the decision making process is merely a bidding war. That case still falls within the realm of 'reasons why bribery is bad,' mind you.
So I don't disagree with you and it may be useful to have put a stricter definition on my comments, by all means.:) But the conclusion I drew originally is merely changed under the stricter definition from "an inferior decision is made" to "the consequence of the decision becomes less important." In either case it is a negative that businesses in our countries should not be a party to (I'm in the UK where the British government recently intervened to halt an investigation into bribery in the arms business on the part of BAE - how blatant is that?).
I've not worked with neural networks (the non-organic kind). I imagine that a neural network can be preserved as a representation of its state, so could be stored in a database. But for security purposes this is equivalent to storing the password. I understand that a neural network could be trained to recognize the drawing (though I think a much simpler representation must be possible), but it wouldn't be possible to store a hash of this network as a means of recognizing passwords without storing them. A hash of some generalised representation such as the previous poster's XML suggestion could be stored, but there might be an issue with narrowing the password space. I just wondered if it was anything that anyone has thought about. Not storing people's passwords is a standard security precaution as well as extending useful privacy to the users.
But on the subject of security, how would these passwords be stored? One nice thing with plaintext is that you never have to store anyone's actual password, only the hash of it. I suppose you could still create a hash of "1. stroke 47degrees 3%, 2, stroke 270degrees 22%" or whatever the password device spits out, but it seems to me that as this system requires a more sophisticated way of interpreting fuzzily matched movements, there might be problems with this approach or it could introduce weaknesses.
You could use some algorithm to simplify the users drawing, rounding angles (I punned!:D ), adjusting lengths, perhaps. But this would probably have the effect of narrowing the password space making it easier to crack the passwords. I'm not an expert in this area, I'd be interested to know if they've thought about this or if anyone else knows a bit more about it.
On one side you have people who are just trying to maintain the purity of the standard definition of the word giga. On the other side you have anarchists who believe that they can use any word they want to mean anything they want. Sure, the SI prefixes were here first but who cares about that?
The SI prefixes weren't here first in this context. KB, MB, GB have an established meaning that goes way back and was never originally tied to the SI prefixes. You can say that using 1KB = 1024B is changing the SI meaning in this specific context, but saying 1KB - 1000B is changing the meaning of widely established words and that matters more. Neither you nor anyone else has a chance of suddenly stopping people using the actual terms GB, KB, MB, etc. They are the standard terminology. If the meaning of those terms were to change, then you would have a unit that is less useful than the existing one. For a number of reasons, power of 2 numbers are more appropriate in this context. I certainly don't want to be buying a 1.073741824GB stick of of RAM, but that's what the nature of computer addressing leads us to. I also want to be able to convert to and from network speeds (bits) easily. There are other issues. The point is that to be a useful and concise unit, it needs to be a power of 2, and that we have established terms that aren't going to go away.
If somebody needs a decimal version, then it is the decimal version that requires a newly invented term, because whether it fits with another system or not, the GBs et al, are already there and their meaning was chosen for solid, practical reasons.
The majority of computer purchasers don't particularly care what the standard is, so long as they know it is a standard. Those fewer computer users that do care, are certainly capable of understanding that a kilobyte means 1024 bytes and are sometimes greatly inconvenienced when someone fucks with the definitions as Seagate just has.
Slashdot Mirror
Well I can at least parse a sentence. They are the logical response in that an attack produces a counter-attack. Would the meaning be clearer to you if I had said they are the natural response to US support for the Saudi regime? If a country invades another, or in this case supports a totalitarian regime, it is logical to expect a resistance movement. Al Quaeda are that resistance movement. But since you have interpreted it in a different sense, yes - within the bounds of their own priorities, Al Quaeda are indeed logical. They are striking back at what they perceive to be their enemy. Logical enough, I would say.
I think you getting logical in any sense would be a good start. But if you really want to threaten me, here I am. So go ahead. I'm waiting...
Without entirely disagreeing with your post, if I had meant to type Israel, I would have. I was responding specifically to a comment about Al Quaeda which was predominantly a response to the US presence Saudi Arabia and support of the deeply unpleasant regime that controls it. It's an actual monarchy! Not in the stupid soak up your taxes and do nothing but inbreed English way, but an actual monarchy! Have no doubt that it is right to want a representative government there. And whilst Israel colours everything in the Middle East, and is an ever-present factor in creating the tolerance or sympathy that lets Al Quaeda hide and recruit, the actual original demand of Osama bin Laden was for the US to get out of Saudi Arabia and let them sort out issues with their government their own way. If we're going to look at the initial drive behind Al Quaeda, then we first have to look at Saudi Arabia. That is not to say that the effect of Israel on muslim and non-muslim relations outweighs Saudi in general terms. This is a country that demands a particular religion for immigration. Not even Iran asks that!
You said part of what I was going to say in reply already. The viable alternative in the Euro is extremely important. The only thing I would have added to the reply is that when the GP and you both comment that the size of the debt isn't important... Well I've heard it described as the Wile E. Coyote Effect. It is the economic principle whereby you can keep going even after you run off a cliff, so long as you don't look down. Only when you realise that there's nothing beneath you, do you plummet earthwards. In this analogy, the size of the debt is the height of the cliff. You're right in some ways to say that the debt doesn't matter so long as you keep running. But when the readjustment happens (say the Euro becomes the currency of choice), it becomes very significant indeed. You only have to look at some third world countries that were buried under debt to see how much difference it makes to a country's ability to climb back up. I'm not disagreeing with your concise summary of one of the biggest issues. I'm just saying that the size of the debt is still a big worry. The issue of where it's been borrowed from is a factor too. I don't necessarily mean China, but from the USA's own institutions such as Social Security. They've borrowed against the future and that's bad.
Yes. See middle paragraph.
Al Quaeda are not a threat to the the United States. Not in the way that an actual army is. Al Quaeda are just the logical response to a long history of US support for the nasty regime of Saudi Arabia. Unchecked, they will cause deaths, but the only real threat they pose to the US itself, is one of respect which harms the government and its foreign bad-ass image. But not a threat to the American way of life or culture (those have come solely in the government's response). The two reasons that Al Quaeda are played up by the US government and media are (a) as a part of a campaign of confusing issues to justify an occupation of Iraq and (b) to excuse the diversion of vast funds into the military sector. A dubious reason to increase government surveillance and power is also a pleasant (for the authorities) bonus.
Of course this isn't to disagree with your main arguments. Trying to restart the Cold War is massively misguided and the US can't afford to do it anyway. I'm just observing that Al Queada is a reactionary force to US policy, not an independent force. They fight primarily off US territority and could not pursue a war on US territority. All the US needs to do to stop the resistance is to stop pushing. But the powers that be in the US can't countenance such an idea because they have so much riding on being the big tough guy, both before the US people's (Slashdotter's excepted) drilled in faith in their country's superiority and on the international stage where they have pushed other countries around for a long time (mostly with a complete lack of awareness of the situation on the part of the population who I've usually found to be very friendly).
The swollen armed forces of the US have been unnecessary for quite some time. I'm surprised people haven't cottoned on a long time before now.
And that's assuming that it ever came to war. I don't want to be blasé about the risk of conflict, but keep in mind that US debt isn't quite critical but has become very, very large. A good portion of that debt is to China (another big chunk is borrowed against the public via social security, et al). The US government has essentially mortgaged the country. There doesn't have to be a war before a US citizen finds she's working for a Chinese company and renting from a Chinese landlord.
Now the US has an enormous military (there had to be something to show for all that borrowing and it certainly wasn't in education and health care, yes?). You could say that the US could tell the rest of the World to go and fuck itself and renege on the debt. But that's extremely unlikely because (a) the richest people of the US who have the greatest influence to bring about such a thing are those who would lose the most in any sort of international isolation or chaos, (b) the whole economic structure of the US would go into freefall and (c) it would be hard to fund the US military in an economic crisis anyway, at least for any sustained period.
Besides, it's not in the USA's creditor's interests for the US to default on debt or go bankrupt or turn into a military dictatorship. The percentage is in keeping it just sufficiently under the economic thumb that it can be milked in perpetuity and nudged into selling off its institutions and resources group by group. That's one of the nice things about a heavily privatised society. It makes it convenient for the country to be sold without non-radical means of preventing it.
This is going to sound really daft, no doubt, but I've just read through all of the above and I'm now curious as to what "progressive" means in the USA? At least I'm assuming this is another US instance of innocent words being co-opted to represent political factions like Liberal. Often bearing no intuitive relation to their meaning in the rest of the world.
Genuine question.
But on Slashdot, they aren't the same lies...
Out of curiousity, and because someone here will know, what the presence of Java on mobiles in the US and how does it compare to the rest of the world? Is Java standard in most countries on modern phones but not the US, or is it much patchier?
Heh! Mine now has debian on it. I'd like to say it was a direct result of the Novell-Microsoft deal, which was the major factor, but SuSE's hideous application launcher "start" menu was also a contributor.
Of course there's another option, which is simply that the government of Nigeria decided that Mandriva Linux was the better option regardless of "incentives." Maybe they saw the Microsoft deal for what it was - cheap now, pay later. Or possibly they don't trust an operating system where there's strong reason to believe that there are backdoors for the US government. In any case, let's not forget that there are solid reasons for choosing Mandriva and kick backs might not be the biggest factor for once.
At the risk of "you must be new here" comments, I think you have underestimated the intelligence of the
I'm seeing more and more actual patent actions recently. I've read that one of the reasons a patent war hasn't kicked off is because everything was on hold while everyone was trying to get the Europeans to enact the same patent laws and approve the queue of US patents over here, thus increasing the size of the prize to be divvied up. Looks like that might not happen now, though, so it could be that things are heating up partly because of that? That and Microsoft looking at more desparate ways of putting down Linux.
You create a file of sufficient size to meet your expected requirements in advance, or else you encrypt an entire partition. In either case, the size of the file or partition says nothing about the amount of data stored within it. But I'm glad to see other people talking about TrueCrypt. It really is a fantastic program and user-friendly enough for people at the lowish-end of technical expertise, too.
No, he meant plat - he plats his eyebrow.
You've just caused another issue to occur to me which I hadn't really thought about until now. Currently, I can assess the likely speeds from ISPs based on the deal I sign with them (Comcast out and out lies not withstanding). If ISPs are also charging the people whose sites I visit for different speed rates, that's another factor which I have to take into account and possibly don't even have the needed information to judge it on anyway. Example:
ISP A offers cheap 8Mbps connection to public. ISP B offers 2Mbps at not much saving. Public goes yay and signs up with ISP A.
However, ISP A makes up its costs compared to ISP B by sur-charging the website hosts for decent bandwidth, whilst ISP B does not.
The result of this is that I actually get worse performance with ISP A than with ISP B because they have hidden the real costs by slapping them on the hosting companies in the form of performance surcharges. How would I, the customer, ever be able to get a real handle on which ISP would be best for me?
Now this is why I read
But this isn't a given. (Please note that I'm only disagreeing with your conclusion, not your argument.) The degree to which the people care is heavily influenced by factors of general education levels, wealth distribution and culture. The republic of Rome, whilst a republic having the subtle distinction of being a republic rather than a democracy and lacking universal suffrage, is still a valid example of a democracy lasting over four-hundred years. There is no intrinsic reason why a democracy must fail sooner than any other form of government. The apathy of people in the US regarding politics is, I think, largely a result of both poor education in history and world events, and of the prevalent meme that nothing can be done. Both are fostered, deliberately or not, by the highly controlled media in the country. Although affluence may well be a large factor in the apathy also, in some ways. This last is most certainly going to change!
Education levels and cultural attitudes can be changed and historically have been. It's not a rule that must inevitably be followed. And the desire and hope for a perfect democracy, even if thwarted, can also raise us up to a more representative society than we would have if never tried. Hang in there!
All correct, but there's an interesting corollary - the more people who are convicted of crimes, the less effect this threat has. It doesn't even need to be conviction as simply the experience of being arrested and thinking that you may be sentenced is enough to open your eyes and disabuse people of the Us vs. Them stereotyping of criminals. When you or your friend or brother or your partner has a criminal record, the mark on a job candidate's history becomes much less of a instant trigger for dismissing them. Instead, you start to do what you should do all along which is assess it on the merits of the actual case - was it breaching a silence order from the government or was it murdering little old ladies? I personally have recommended that someone with a criminal record be hired. They appeared to be the best candidate.
The other effect of arresting someone, is that the ability to frighten them with arrest is often somewhat diminished thereafter. A senior British police officer here remarked in interview, that laws were for keeping the law-abiding law-abiding. I.e. people are afraid of being caught. Once you have been caught and your record marked, you usually care less about further marks. I might even go so far as to say that going out and getting yourself arrested (preferably for something minor and non prison-worthy) is quite a liberating experience.
Finally, is the very wrong law in the US that disenfranchises convicted felons from voting. As more and more people are convicted (and very predominantly from poor demographics), the US democracy becomes less and less representative. And we all know where that leads.
Thank you. Waited a few days to reply to avoid cluttering up the thread until there were fewer people still reading. And it's not often I get called "concise."
Regards,
-H.
Well you see, every time we point out something else that can be used for territory, that's another bill that has to go through congress to mandate registration of it. We're hoping that we can get the US government to simply busy itself to death.
The second part of your definition is grey, imo - but yes, you are correct. But I would say that the presence of bribery implies the necessity for bribery (because you don't pay if you don't have to). And the necessity for bribery implies the decision is inferior because otherwise the bribery wouldn't be necessary. Hence my explanation as to why bribery is not just "a cost of doing business in some cultures." Of course you can find complications and exceptions in that chain, the most notable being where the other parties are also attempting bribery and the decision making process is merely a bidding war. That case still falls within the realm of 'reasons why bribery is bad,' mind you.
So I don't disagree with you and it may be useful to have put a stricter definition on my comments, by all means.
Anyway, thanks for the comments.
Regards,
-H.
I believe the relevant quote starts something like "He who fights monsters..."
I've not worked with neural networks (the non-organic kind). I imagine that a neural network can be preserved as a representation of its state, so could be stored in a database. But for security purposes this is equivalent to storing the password. I understand that a neural network could be trained to recognize the drawing (though I think a much simpler representation must be possible), but it wouldn't be possible to store a hash of this network as a means of recognizing passwords without storing them. A hash of some generalised representation such as the previous poster's XML suggestion could be stored, but there might be an issue with narrowing the password space. I just wondered if it was anything that anyone has thought about. Not storing people's passwords is a standard security precaution as well as extending useful privacy to the users.
But on the subject of security, how would these passwords be stored? One nice thing with plaintext is that you never have to store anyone's actual password, only the hash of it. I suppose you could still create a hash of "1. stroke 47degrees 3%, 2, stroke 270degrees 22%" or whatever the password device spits out, but it seems to me that as this system requires a more sophisticated way of interpreting fuzzily matched movements, there might be problems with this approach or it could introduce weaknesses.
:D ), adjusting lengths, perhaps. But this would probably have the effect of narrowing the password space making it easier to crack the passwords. I'm not an expert in this area, I'd be interested to know if they've thought about this or if anyone else knows a bit more about it.
You could use some algorithm to simplify the users drawing, rounding angles (I punned!
The SI prefixes weren't here first in this context. KB, MB, GB have an established meaning that goes way back and was never originally tied to the SI prefixes. You can say that using 1KB = 1024B is changing the SI meaning in this specific context, but saying 1KB - 1000B is changing the meaning of widely established words and that matters more. Neither you nor anyone else has a chance of suddenly stopping people using the actual terms GB, KB, MB, etc. They are the standard terminology. If the meaning of those terms were to change, then you would have a unit that is less useful than the existing one. For a number of reasons, power of 2 numbers are more appropriate in this context. I certainly don't want to be buying a 1.073741824GB stick of of RAM, but that's what the nature of computer addressing leads us to. I also want to be able to convert to and from network speeds (bits) easily. There are other issues. The point is that to be a useful and concise unit, it needs to be a power of 2, and that we have established terms that aren't going to go away.
If somebody needs a decimal version, then it is the decimal version that requires a newly invented term, because whether it fits with another system or not, the GBs et al, are already there and their meaning was chosen for solid, practical reasons.
The majority of computer purchasers don't particularly care what the standard is, so long as they know it is a standard. Those fewer computer users that do care, are certainly capable of understanding that a kilobyte means 1024 bytes and are sometimes greatly inconvenienced when someone fucks with the definitions as Seagate just has.