"Hi, US Army tech support, how can I help?" "Ummm, the grenade holder on the front of my computer seems to be broken." "..." ----------- "Hi, US Army tech support, how can I help?" "Hi, our computer system doesn't seem to be working." "Can you first check that it's plugged in properly" "Sorry, they bombed our generator and the lights are off" "..." ----------- "Hi, US Army tech support, how can I help?" "Hi, some of the keys on this computer aren't working" "Sounds like you've got sand in the keyboard. Take the keyboard, hold it at 90 degrees to the table and rap it sharply to displace the dust." "OK" ***clong***clong***whirr***thud***WHOOSH*** "Um, I think I just bombed Baghdad..." "...what kind of computer is this?" "It's the control panel for our missile battery" "..."
I predict a massive increase in the Iraq war casualty rate due to techs going postal.
Yeah, the phrasing was a bit dodgy. On the other hand, it's equally dodgy to say that the number p1*p2*...*pn + 1 is the product of other primes since our assumption is that there are no other primes. Your proof and my proof are effectively equivalent, given that the contradiction kicks in before we have to decide what our "new primes" will be.
If a complete list of existing primes is specified and a number is not divisible by any of these then whether we say that it is prime or has unknown prime factors is completely irrelevant as the contradiction has already been broached.
My mum's experience is probably reasonably representative. She's pretty tech-savvy generally, but she found AOL very reliable, stable and easy to use. For some reason, she didn't think the fact that it conflicted with Ethereal was a big enough problem to merit a switch...
She recently moved away because she wanted to set up a domain name/webhosting thingy via a third party and AOL was being annoying about outgoing mail servers.
Since then, she's had major problems with email (mails coming in many hours after they were sent, apparently completely at random). BT (the new ISP at the time) have mucked her about quite a bit. She's finally got broadband and the problems are (apparently) gone, but it can't have been a fun experience.
Those members of society who don't use the more complex features of the 'net are unlikely to ever have a major problem with AOL. This cannot be said about most other ISPs.
An example of the maths humour genre from my Director of Studies (who was pissed at the time):
An astronomer, a physicist and a mathematician (it is said) were holidaying in Scotland. Glancing from a train window, they observed a black sheep in the middle of a field.
"How interesting," observed the astronomer, "all scottish sheep are black!"
To which the physicist responded, "No, no! Some Scottish sheep are black!"
The mathematician gazed heavenward in supplication, and then intoned, "In Scotland there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black."
Upon which the others chorused "Shut up you ****ing pedant!" and hurled him out the train window....it seemed funnier at the time. Specially after the Zorb's Lemon joke.
Good summary from a waveform perspective.
There are definitely an infinitely large number of primes. Proof: assume a finite number of primes p1,p2,...,pn (counting from smallest to largest). Then p1*p2*...*pn + 1 is divisible by none of these (hence is prime) and is larger than pn. This is a contradiction of the original assumption, which must therefore be wrong. Hence there are an infinite number of primes.
"Games don't make you do anything. But if you're going to snap and kill people, then it might influence the way you do it. If you're borderline crazy already, and you play a lot of GTA, then when you go over the edge you might act that out. Same with the postal thing - if you're crazy already, then hearing 24/7 coverage of someone shooting a post office will likely influence you when you snap."
On the bright side, that at least stops people doing anything *really* innovative. Car crime and violent behaviour are pretty scary on an individual level, but I won't start to get worried about this til I see a computer game where the aim is to design high-yield explosive devices.
My counterargument would be that the violence in question is a part of our psyches anyway. Computer games just give an outlet that is relatively harmless.
I'm just coming to the end of a 48-hour undergrad work session, and if I can't find something to take my frustrations out on then my chance of going postal can be expected to dramatically increase.
An aside: anyone able to enlighten me as to where the phrase "going postal" comes from?
Well, if you assume that a world in which I don't beat my sister round the head with heavy objects is healthier...
Computer games have saved me on two occasions when I was literally seeing red. It doesn't happen much but, when it does, shooting the proverbial out of a terrorist bot is about the best therapy I've come across. For comparison, the time I didn't manage to get to a computer resulted in a big hole in the plasterboard, which was certainly not healthy for my fist.
I have a very irritating sister. Thanks to computer games, this state of affairs continues.
I think mostly people are bothered cos it tends to be geeks and/or social outcasts - the sort of people who frequent slashdot - who get caught in the crossfire. Read Voices from the Hellmouth from the Slashdot Hall of Fame for a classic example.
Damn right we're bothered by this issue.
An acquaintance of mine is convinced that excessive playing of Quake saved his life. The story goes that, one morning after a protracted gameage session, he was nearly mown down whilst cycling to school. The hairtrigger state of his nervous system resulted in him swerving out of the errant van's path before his tired brain had even grasped what the fuss was about.
The legend is silent on whether he subsequently rocket-jumped onto the van and shoved a grenade through the windscreen...
I could be wrong, but I thought that the issues being covered here are examples of IP infringement not IP theft. The concept of IP theft surely only applies when the rights themselves are being stolen (theft of certification of some kind) rather than when they are simply being breached.
And that kind of theft is almost exclusively the preserve of Big Business ("no, you can't use tab to switch between hyperlinks, we 'invented' it first!") so unless the US plans to go after major corporations...
That wouldn't be such a bad idea but it's never going to happen:(
What *is* the difference? In your view, I mean? I'm still a student; I'm guessing that this is the sort of thing that's useful to know before going out into the big bad world.
My dad was a PhD student for Dr Fleischmann (at a point separate from the cold fusion saga). I have little personal knowledge of the situation, but the received wisdom is that the main mistake the good doctors made was to go into too much detail. They declared precisely what they thought was going on, and this pissed off a lot of physicists who thought that electrochemists should stick to their own subject.
I can't guarantee the truth or falsity of this, but it sounds plausible. And it's worrying to think that the anger of the specialist scientific community may have held back cheap power for a long period of time.
I think of science as a body of knowledge that is replicable and open and thus doesn't rely on trusting any one person or group to be telling the truth. FOSS works on the same principle - I know there's no trojans in it cos there are enough people looking over the source code that any malicious program would get noticed very quickly.
Research which relies on accepting someone else's word isn't scientific, let alone trustworthy. I wish the reporters who gamely swallow these dodgy stats would get wise to this:(
Exactly. There is a gap between what is illegal and what some people see as immoral/a firing offence/worthy of a lynch mob. Whilst that gap exists, the potential for privacy violations by said people will still leave room for vigilanteism.
For example, I don't want a Christian boss finding out that I just checked "The Book of Law" by A. Crowley out of the local library.
Your assumption here is that no-one will want to use this info unless you're doing something bad, right? That's kinda wrong. Think stalkers, think terrorists ("lets see how many casualties we can acheive by monitoring who goes into that building"), think the petty-minded official who you annoyed once and now he's out to make your life hell.
Even as far as breaking the law goes... to quote Terry Pratchett, probably the only way to avoid breaking a law is to spend all your time locked in a dark cellar with your hands on the table in front of you. And even then you'd probably be guilty of loitering.
I'm in a society called the Assassins' Guild, which plays games based around a kind of controlled, mutually-consensual stalking. It is truly horrifying how easy it is to track any given person down. This is why I value privacy - the games we play are harmless, but there are more than enough crazies out there who are perfectly willing to use this information maliciously. And any system that relies on respecting thy neighbour is, in my opinion, in deep trouble.
I would say that to state that censorship can only be done by the government is overbroad. The only real difference between a company and a government is that the latter tends to be geographically oriented. Think campuses. Think third world countries where multinationals run the show.
Imagine you're working and living on a Microsoft campus. You find that access to anti-microsoft sites is blocked. This is as much censorship as anything the government does, as I can't see a definition of censorship that incorporates one without the other and doesn't explicitly state that it has to be a government doing it.
I hope they don't have plans to move onto other forms of biometrics. The jokes are too obvious - "All your face are..."
Seriously, I am very disturbed by things like this. They're treating their customers as criminals. It's kinda true in my case, but that's besides the point. The fact that they can ignore their customers' feelings in this way indicates that there is some kind of monopoly problem here. Apologies if I'm wrong, but I can't think of a single non-monopoly group that a) played fast and loose with customers and b) stayed in business.
Most people don't realise how far and fast their personal info spreads, and how dangerous this is. But just think "solial engineering". Think "identity theft". Consider what happens when the system for storing everyone's details (for confirmation purposes obviously) is hacked and all those lovely biometrics, which were supposed to also be used for passports, appear on the black market. There will be a way that this can be abused.
I personally am willing to do whatever is necessary to avoid this sort of situation. In particular, I'm not going to trust some random company with any more info than strictly necessary. I use Linux to avert the possibility of trojan code in the OS, and I intend to find some way of detecting RFID tags so I can boycott shops that use them. Masochistic but, if many people behave like this, then the companies peddling this crap may get the message. We can only hope.
"Troll" is used to refer to those who add no value to, and especially those who lower the value of, a community. It is not just those who disagree with the moderators - most mods are smart enough to spot a good argument regardless of who it is aimed at.
I trust the mods enough to browse at +3.
On the other hand, there are quite a few examples of companies refusing to fix something til it was made public (remember the ASN1 thing?). A piece of code that isn't designed to fly is possibly the best way to get people off their butts. We're in Dilbertville now folks - no intelligent lifeforms.
Slashdot Mirror
"Hi, US Army tech support, how can I help?"
"Ummm, the grenade holder on the front of my computer seems to be broken."
"..."
-----------
"Hi, US Army tech support, how can I help?"
"Hi, our computer system doesn't seem to be working."
"Can you first check that it's plugged in properly"
"Sorry, they bombed our generator and the lights are off"
"..."
-----------
"Hi, US Army tech support, how can I help?"
"Hi, some of the keys on this computer aren't working"
"Sounds like you've got sand in the keyboard. Take the keyboard, hold it at 90 degrees to the table and rap it sharply to displace the dust."
"OK" ***clong***clong***whirr***thud***WHOOSH*** "Um, I think I just bombed Baghdad..."
"...what kind of computer is this?"
"It's the control panel for our missile battery"
"..."
I predict a massive increase in the Iraq war casualty rate due to techs going postal.
Yeah, the phrasing was a bit dodgy. On the other hand, it's equally dodgy to say that the number p1*p2*...*pn + 1 is the product of other primes since our assumption is that there are no other primes. Your proof and my proof are effectively equivalent, given that the contradiction kicks in before we have to decide what our "new primes" will be.
If a complete list of existing primes is specified and a number is not divisible by any of these then whether we say that it is prime or has unknown prime factors is completely irrelevant as the contradiction has already been broached.
My mum's experience is probably reasonably representative. She's pretty tech-savvy generally, but she found AOL very reliable, stable and easy to use. For some reason, she didn't think the fact that it conflicted with Ethereal was a big enough problem to merit a switch...
She recently moved away because she wanted to set up a domain name/webhosting thingy via a third party and AOL was being annoying about outgoing mail servers.
Since then, she's had major problems with email (mails coming in many hours after they were sent, apparently completely at random). BT (the new ISP at the time) have mucked her about quite a bit. She's finally got broadband and the problems are (apparently) gone, but it can't have been a fun experience.
Those members of society who don't use the more complex features of the 'net are unlikely to ever have a major problem with AOL. This cannot be said about most other ISPs.
Engineers think that equations imitate reality
Physicists think that reality imitates equations
Mathematicians can't make the connection
An example of the maths humour genre from my Director of Studies (who was pissed at the time):
...it seemed funnier at the time. Specially after the Zorb's Lemon joke.
An astronomer, a physicist and a mathematician (it is said) were holidaying in Scotland. Glancing from a train window, they observed a black sheep in the middle of a field.
"How interesting," observed the astronomer, "all scottish sheep are black!"
To which the physicist responded, "No, no! Some Scottish sheep are black!"
The mathematician gazed heavenward in supplication, and then intoned, "In Scotland there exists at least one field, containing at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black."
Upon which the others chorused "Shut up you ****ing pedant!" and hurled him out the train window.
Good summary from a waveform perspective.
There are definitely an infinitely large number of primes. Proof: assume a finite number of primes p1,p2,...,pn (counting from smallest to largest). Then p1*p2*...*pn + 1 is divisible by none of these (hence is prime) and is larger than pn. This is a contradiction of the original assumption, which must therefore be wrong. Hence there are an infinite number of primes.
"Games don't make you do anything. But if you're going to snap and kill people, then it might influence the way you do it. If you're borderline crazy already, and you play a lot of GTA, then when you go over the edge you might act that out. Same with the postal thing - if you're crazy already, then hearing 24/7 coverage of someone shooting a post office will likely influence you when you snap."
On the bright side, that at least stops people doing anything *really* innovative. Car crime and violent behaviour are pretty scary on an individual level, but I won't start to get worried about this til I see a computer game where the aim is to design high-yield explosive devices.
My counterargument would be that the violence in question is a part of our psyches anyway. Computer games just give an outlet that is relatively harmless.
I'm just coming to the end of a 48-hour undergrad work session, and if I can't find something to take my frustrations out on then my chance of going postal can be expected to dramatically increase.
An aside: anyone able to enlighten me as to where the phrase "going postal" comes from?
Well, if you assume that a world in which I don't beat my sister round the head with heavy objects is healthier...
Computer games have saved me on two occasions when I was literally seeing red. It doesn't happen much but, when it does, shooting the proverbial out of a terrorist bot is about the best therapy I've come across. For comparison, the time I didn't manage to get to a computer resulted in a big hole in the plasterboard, which was certainly not healthy for my fist.
I have a very irritating sister. Thanks to computer games, this state of affairs continues.
I think mostly people are bothered cos it tends to be geeks and/or social outcasts - the sort of people who frequent slashdot - who get caught in the crossfire. Read Voices from the Hellmouth from the Slashdot Hall of Fame for a classic example.
Damn right we're bothered by this issue.
An acquaintance of mine is convinced that excessive playing of Quake saved his life. The story goes that, one morning after a protracted gameage session, he was nearly mown down whilst cycling to school. The hairtrigger state of his nervous system resulted in him swerving out of the errant van's path before his tired brain had even grasped what the fuss was about.
The legend is silent on whether he subsequently rocket-jumped onto the van and shoved a grenade through the windscreen...
And then they go and give all our details to the US...
What's the use of rules that a government treats as being made to be broken?
I could be wrong, but I thought that the issues being covered here are examples of IP infringement not IP theft. The concept of IP theft surely only applies when the rights themselves are being stolen (theft of certification of some kind) rather than when they are simply being breached.
:(
And that kind of theft is almost exclusively the preserve of Big Business ("no, you can't use tab to switch between hyperlinks, we 'invented' it first!") so unless the US plans to go after major corporations...
That wouldn't be such a bad idea but it's never going to happen
Well, where do you think I've been dumping all my old MS install disks? I shoulda guessed that the volcano wouldn't like them either...
What *is* the difference? In your view, I mean? I'm still a student; I'm guessing that this is the sort of thing that's useful to know before going out into the big bad world.
My dad was a PhD student for Dr Fleischmann (at a point separate from the cold fusion saga). I have little personal knowledge of the situation, but the received wisdom is that the main mistake the good doctors made was to go into too much detail. They declared precisely what they thought was going on, and this pissed off a lot of physicists who thought that electrochemists should stick to their own subject. I can't guarantee the truth or falsity of this, but it sounds plausible. And it's worrying to think that the anger of the specialist scientific community may have held back cheap power for a long period of time.
I think of science as a body of knowledge that is replicable and open and thus doesn't rely on trusting any one person or group to be telling the truth. FOSS works on the same principle - I know there's no trojans in it cos there are enough people looking over the source code that any malicious program would get noticed very quickly.
:(
Research which relies on accepting someone else's word isn't scientific, let alone trustworthy. I wish the reporters who gamely swallow these dodgy stats would get wise to this
Exactly. There is a gap between what is illegal and what some people see as immoral/a firing offence/worthy of a lynch mob. Whilst that gap exists, the potential for privacy violations by said people will still leave room for vigilanteism.
For example, I don't want a Christian boss finding out that I just checked "The Book of Law" by A. Crowley out of the local library.
Your assumption here is that no-one will want to use this info unless you're doing something bad, right? That's kinda wrong. Think stalkers, think terrorists ("lets see how many casualties we can acheive by monitoring who goes into that building"), think the petty-minded official who you annoyed once and now he's out to make your life hell.
Even as far as breaking the law goes... to quote Terry Pratchett, probably the only way to avoid breaking a law is to spend all your time locked in a dark cellar with your hands on the table in front of you. And even then you'd probably be guilty of loitering.
I'm in a society called the Assassins' Guild, which plays games based around a kind of controlled, mutually-consensual stalking. It is truly horrifying how easy it is to track any given person down. This is why I value privacy - the games we play are harmless, but there are more than enough crazies out there who are perfectly willing to use this information maliciously. And any system that relies on respecting thy neighbour is, in my opinion, in deep trouble.
I would say that to state that censorship can only be done by the government is overbroad. The only real difference between a company and a government is that the latter tends to be geographically oriented. Think campuses. Think third world countries where multinationals run the show. Imagine you're working and living on a Microsoft campus. You find that access to anti-microsoft sites is blocked. This is as much censorship as anything the government does, as I can't see a definition of censorship that incorporates one without the other and doesn't explicitly state that it has to be a government doing it.
I hope they don't have plans to move onto other forms of biometrics. The jokes are too obvious - "All your face are..." Seriously, I am very disturbed by things like this. They're treating their customers as criminals. It's kinda true in my case, but that's besides the point. The fact that they can ignore their customers' feelings in this way indicates that there is some kind of monopoly problem here. Apologies if I'm wrong, but I can't think of a single non-monopoly group that a) played fast and loose with customers and b) stayed in business. Most people don't realise how far and fast their personal info spreads, and how dangerous this is. But just think "solial engineering". Think "identity theft". Consider what happens when the system for storing everyone's details (for confirmation purposes obviously) is hacked and all those lovely biometrics, which were supposed to also be used for passports, appear on the black market. There will be a way that this can be abused. I personally am willing to do whatever is necessary to avoid this sort of situation. In particular, I'm not going to trust some random company with any more info than strictly necessary. I use Linux to avert the possibility of trojan code in the OS, and I intend to find some way of detecting RFID tags so I can boycott shops that use them. Masochistic but, if many people behave like this, then the companies peddling this crap may get the message. We can only hope.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those things
"Troll" is used to refer to those who add no value to, and especially those who lower the value of, a community. It is not just those who disagree with the moderators - most mods are smart enough to spot a good argument regardless of who it is aimed at.
I trust the mods enough to browse at +3.
On the other hand, there are quite a few examples of companies refusing to fix something til it was made public (remember the ASN1 thing?). A piece of code that isn't designed to fly is possibly the best way to get people off their butts. We're in Dilbertville now folks - no intelligent lifeforms.