A really smart person will get the same grade as a reasonably smart person, because tests are made so a reasonably smart person can get the top mark; any better than that is simply trimmed off; you can maybe get an A+ or A++, but at some point they just stop adding plusses and any smarts (or effort/talent/etc) beyond that is ignored.
This is true about grades, but I found that it's not true for standardized tests (SAT, GRE, etc.). If you're smart, you try to put down the correct answer. If you're really smart, you try to figure out what the author of the question thinks the right answer is. You also know that wrong answers aren't weighed as heavily as the correct ones, so if you don't have time to finish, you just quickly skim the remaining questions and guess. It worked for me. Every time I took one of these tests I got sent to the counselor to figure out why I scored so highly on these tests, but had crappy grades. I told them the truth: I didn't care about grades, but it was fun gaming the tests.
The trend in computing (and outside as well, but that's offtopic) is to give increased control to the manufacturers and vendors, and less control to the owner. If things continue the way they're going now, in 20 years (if that) I foresee a future where computers (as known by the average person) are black boxes, never to be taken apart for any reason.... There will come a day when hobbyist computing and true hacking (as opposed to the popular definition of "illegal shit") will only be possible with "retro" computers. It might be a few years off, but it will happen if things continue on the current course.
I think the future is phones and tablets for the home/average user market within five years. (Sure, tablets will have an optional keyboard for the vestigially literate.) Which means people who want a real computer will essentially have to leech off the business pipeline. However, that avenue might very well be closed off also, with computers assembled in large batches in a country far, far away. I suppose that people who want to build their own computer badly enough will still be able to do so, but it will be hard to get parts, they will be costly, and the selection will be very limited. But then we may all be going back to the abacus anyhow, given the general trends.
That seems surely reasonable. My problem with the OP was that he seemed to say that you could tell it was a one-time pad by merely looking at it. Also, SOE by no means used good cryptographic techniques consistently (the infamous "poem code" comes to mind). But this may not have been SOE, of course.
Given that the original message looks supiciously like it was encoded with a one time pad, it's really not at all surprising that they can't crack it without the relevant pad. Which was probably destroyed a long time ago.
I'm curious: how do you tell by the looks of a cyphertext that it was encrypted with a one-time pad? Yeah, it's written in groups of five characters, and makes no (obvious) sense...but that is no clue as to the method used to encrypt the text. Breaking up words into equal groups is done (obviously) to obfuscate word boundaries, it's not a practice restricted to one-time pads.
For all we know 4 or 5 pigeons were released, each with only every 4th or 5th letter of the text, all encoded differently.
With that kind of packet loss even three letter agencies would be at a loss
Actually, I'm pretty sure there were two copies of the message sent. I deduce this because of the arabic numeral "2" entered on the form field titled "Number of copies sent". Also, there's the identifier codes for two pigeons on the message. Or didn't you look at the pretty picture in TFA?
Maybe sheer quantity will take care of providing a "Rosetta Stone" for the future. If only a single product label survives, then our descendants will have a record of about a dozen major languages instantiated in texts with identical meaning, and a fairly clear understanding of our major obsessions and legal system in the bargain.
Report Hints At Privacy Problem of Drones That Can Recognize Faces
Yeah, those drones can be touchy about their privacy. Have you ever seen one with a facebook page? Personally, I would respect their privacy, because having a drone unhappy at you could have lethal consequences.
if i yell fire in a crowded theatre, people may trample and kill others motivated out of self-preservation. so me, the one shouted fire, i'm the one culpable
if i call mohammed a nasty word, and people start rioting and killing, they are motivated by religious extremism. do you believe a religious zealot who will kill because of his religion is a defensible position, like self-preservation? hell no! so where does the buck stop? with the religious zealot
if i insult your mother and you kill someone, who is culpable for the dead person? you? or me because i insulted my mother? do you see how crazy this gets?
at some point you have to learn to put proper blame where it is properly due
I agree, but I'm just a little reluctant to think it's quite that simple. Bear with me a moment, please.
Let's suppose that the person who made the video acted with malice aforethought. Now, this is just a hypothetical, a fairy tale, if you will. For of course whoever made it was only expressing his opinions, sort of shouting into the wind, and quite astonished anyone heard him, I guess. But let's pretend that the guy knew exactly what would happen after he released his little piece of "art". As part of this ridiculous hypothetical, let's say that we find evidence that he was acting as an agent for a foreign intelligence service, who also—of course—knew what would happen when the "trailers" hit the web. Do you still think this man is innocent as a lamb? That he did nothing wrong, and broke no laws?
My little story is a horror story, of course. In it, people are being cynically manipulated by an intelligence service (or perhaps a terrorist cabal) to produce a certain result. The Moslems are jumping around burning up stuff and killing Americans, just as directed. The Americans are outraged and are sending in the Marines (and would, in their hearts, really like to nuke Mecca, but won't say so), exactly according to the script. Oh, and lest we forget, there is an election coming up in the USA, and which candidate suddenly looks indecisive and weak? So, my hypothetical Evil Genius has quite a score to tally up; she's done really well.
I am so glad that the stuff in the foregoing paragraph isn't true because I know I made it all up, and will now go back to contentedly oiling my rifle, and fantasizing about nuking Mecca.
"The Cloud" is only good as secondary backup if you don't care that it becomes public.
Encrypt it all you want. Access to your data is the hardest hurdle and by using the could you give it away.
I'm thinking that people who want to "be in the cloud" don't think about stuff like encrypting. "What, me--worry? I'm using the cloud!" En/Decrypting is work, and the whole idea of the cloud is to avoid work. If any crypto is being done, it's probably a service operated by your friendly (non-local) cloud provider, which means it provides no real security at all.
This willingness of businesses to surrender their family jewels—their data—to complete strangers has puzzled me since this type of service came into vogue. But then, I'm also mystified by people's willingness to put their true names and their personal lives on the web and make them accessible to everyone. There is an acute shortage of paranoia among the sheep these days.
Why would you want it to look like Win7? Win7's interface sucked almost as much as Win8.
...I disagree that the kernel is all that matters - it certainly does matter, but so does the UI, as there's only so much you can do, and unless you want to implement it yourself, you're also reliant on the third-party software actually existing.... A good file manager is pretty important to have.
I guess I don't understand the full dimensions of the problem you have with the Windows GUI. I fixed mine so it looks like Windows 2K, and that's the end of it. It was a lot easier than figuring out how to change the GUI on my Ubuntu machine, when I had one. As far as I'm concerned, the GUI should be a very thin, lightweight set of options that can be easily changed at the whim of the user—not a bunch of stuff that has to be downloaded from software repositories and installed (and then maybe even work).
What is a file manager? I make a shortcut to my Windows desktop for all the disks on my machine, double click on the icons, and...well...manage my files. I can search for them, delete them, open them...what else do I want to do? I'm serious, I have just never said to myself, "gosh, I wish I had a file manager for my PC".
... right now the most powerful army on earth and it's leaders is immune to prosecution from the international court we set up to prosecute war crimes. They actually claim the right to deliver accused war criminals to that court for judgement but refuse to recognize it for their own actions - and nobody has the political, economic or military clout to force them to do so.
The only time anybody gets punished for war crimes by the USA is when a soldier with a conscience leaks the video and they are forced to hold court-martials for P.R. reasons. Why do you think that this would NOT happen with the kind of consensus based military predicted here ?
You mean they prosecute the poor fellow who leaked the news, right? Because that's what they are doing.
There is a taint of hypocrisy about any "war crimes" trials, even if they are held by a supposedly neutral court based in an allegedly neutral jurisdiction. (As the Nürnberg travesty was not.) You can only be prosecuted for war crimes if you have lost the war, or if your government is so weak as to be unable to protect you from those who come to make the arrest.
States seldom make any serious attempt to prosecute crimes committed by their own soldiers against enemy soldiers or civilians during a war. This is because war by its very nature entails an extraordinary set of circumstances—and a concomittant psychology—that are so far outside the experience of normal human beings living normal human lives as to make judgment of the actions of soldiers innately hypocritical. The soldier has been placed in an insane position, and is then asked to account for his actions before a jury of people who were never there. You might say that war itself is a giant atrocity, composed of many little crimes. Under circumstances like this, "I was following orders" is—and always has been—a perfectly acceptable excuse.
You say, correctly, that the United States will not deliver up its soldiers for ware crimes trial by the Hague Tribunal. But what European powers have done so? For example, why was the commander of the Dutch brigade (the 32nd Hosenscheisser, as I recall) that failed to fire a single shot in defense of the civilians in the designated UN "safe area" at Srebrenica not prosecuted? Did he not have a duty to protect the people there? Sure, he was probably out-gunned, but if he had aggressively disposed his troops and made it clear that the area would be defended, I doubt that the Serb irregulars would have been ordered to attack UN troops. Or perhaps the U.N. official who declared the "safe area" in the first place should be tried for promising safety he could not provide. But as always, prosecution is selective.
Inevitably, we can imagine that if groups like these actually existed, one would eventually engage in a war crime of some sort. When that happens, who would be punished? The ones perpetrating it? The people who voted in support of the crime? Those who were aware of it? The entire group?
The precedent is quite clear: whoever loses gets punished.
Multinational corporations and governments are already arming themselves for cyber warfare.
That doesn't bother me half as much as when they hire actual armed thugs (a.k.a. "mercenaries"). Of course our (USA) government has already done that, because they can't seem to get enough gullible American kids to enlist in the official Army. Thus history repeats itself.
Which is more dangerous: For citizens to be armed, or for oligarchs to go unchecked? Reading the Declaration of Independence may give you some insight into the conclusion reached by what became the most powerful nation-state in history.
Er, that question has nothing to do with the novel (New Model Army). The NMAs are radically democratic mercenary armies that make decision based on voting via an allegedly uncrackable network. (In NMA, network security is achieved by some handwaving and talk about AI "worms" that protect the system. Yeah. Sure.) In other words, an NMA is something that—were it to show up in my neighborhood—would be shot down like the dogs they are by our local militia, and have its weapons confiscated for future use. So I do agree with you in principle, it's just that your question doesn't address the concept of the New Model Army as expressed in the novel.
Or until we have REAL 3D breakthrough where your can walk around a solid appearing image to see it from different perspectives, without glasses.
No pragmatic person will ask for such technology today. There is nothing wrong with researching, but it will take many years before we see any feasible technology for that.
Let me ask a more fundamental question: what would be the point of such a technology? I doubt whether this even qualifies as an item that should go on our wish list of "stuff I wish they would invent". Let's consider some of the possible uses for such a technology.
I don't want to watch a drama in a fish tank. Think of Hamlet in your living room. (Let's just pretend we have a living room that would permit life-sized characters; a miniaturized Ophelia or King Claudius in a fish tank sized "screen" are too ridiculous on the face of it.) I suppose you could walk around and see the eponymous protagonist agonize from all angles. Maybe you could even walk between Hamlet and his father's ghost during that scene. Observe the theatrical fencing techniques in the fight scene from different angles. How much fun is that really going to be? After the first time. I suppose plays could be written that allow you to participate in them, but this has been done before (with real actors), and it's not much fun after the first time, either.
What's true for plays is just as true for any dramatic entertainment—I don't understand how a movie would be better if it were shot in REAL 3D (in the OP's sense) as opposed to shown on a flat screen. It seems to me that seeing the action in a "fish tank" (no matter if it's a huge fish tank) would actually interfere with my ability to immerse myself in the action. (As, in fact, today's feeble 3D prevents immersion, at least in my case.)
OK, how about games? There's more latitude here. Maybe a first-person shooter in a 3D environment would be cool. You and your friends could meet in each other's living rooms, with appropriate armor and armament superimposed by the software...hmm...this could be hard on the furniture as you throw yourself around to avoid incoming fire. Maybe you could play in special venues set up for this kind of thing. But wait, don't we have something like that already? It's called "Lasertag", I think. And if you have to travel to a special arena, how does the 3D thing help much? Hmm. There must be something I'm missing.
It seems like the technology to project realistic 3D images anywhere you want to is bound to be useful. Literally hundreds of science fiction books tell us so. But caution should rule here—remember that before we all got cell phones, science fiction heroes were always rushing to the nearest "videophone booth" to make the call that would save the world. OK, if you look like Princess Leia, you could better use your feminine wiles to plead for the help of Obi Wan Kenobi if you could make a REAL 3D call. But other than that...do you really want to turn on your REAL 3D scanner so that you and your friend can appear to be mutually sitting in each other's living rooms having a conversation? When a simple phone call would do?
I'm not saying there wouldn't be a use for REAL 3D, but it's not making movies or phone calls. Maybe it would be nice for games, maybe a kind of game that hasn't been invented yet. But my imagination is not exactly coming up with lots of money making reasons for anyone to work on this technology. Of course, that's not the same as saying that there aren't any.
The 2.25 million people that died in the Korean War, and the ~ 2 million people that died in the Vietnam War would beg to differ.
Too true.
But compared to 73 million in eight years (averaging over nine million per year for about half a generation) some people believe that's a substantial improvement.
Yes, I get the impression that most of the commentators on this topic don't have a sense of proportion about the scale of destructiveness of the two world wars (which can reasonably be argued to be a single war with a 20 year time-out—so you should really add in the casualties of World War I). They also don't seem to understand that the destructiveness of war with conventional weapons has increased geometrically (if that's the right word) as the industrialized nation-states of the world grew in power. In the future, historians will look back at the first half of the 20th Century and shudder.
We are both too far from that time of war, and too close to it. The younger generations are ignorant of what happened because they don't much care about history. If they think about them at all, the young think that the World Wars are indeed "ancient history", and do not concern themselves with just how disastrous the scale of destruction was. (I'm willing to bet that many people, when pressed about how many people were killed in World War II, will say "Uh...6 million?".) On the other hand, those of us who do take an interest in history have not yet had time to see the full impact of the wars, and measure them dispassionately. I happen to believe that the World Wars put an end to what has sometimes been called "Western Civilization", or what might be called the European-model nation-states. This is very clear in Europe now: borders are dissolving, nationalism has evaporated, and national currencies abandoned. These aren't necessarily all bad changes, but they are very significant indeed. I do not see the ultimate outcome, but I don't think it's going to be all good either. As usual, the U.S. lags a few decades behind Europe in catching up with developments.
These views aren't original to me, any more than the view of nuclear weapons as an anti-war measure are unique to Kenneth Waltz. I first encountered both views—that nuclear weapons tend to prevent wars between states that do possess them, and that the nation-state model has become obsolete—in the writings of the Israeli historian Martin van Creveld. Take a look at his paper Through A Glass Darkly" for a quick summary of van Creveld's views. His book, Nuclear Proliferation and the Future of Conflict addresses the issue under discussion in a more comprehensive way.
I would have thought that the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons on aggression is fairly obvious. After three wars in a few decades, India and Pakistan have not had a single war ever since both sides came into possession of nuclear weapons. How many nuclear powers has the United States attacked? Indeed, it looks as though the U.S. attack on Iraq taught the Iranians much about the importance of nuclear weapons. (A lesson that Israel was quick to grasp, and grasped much sooner.)
I think that nuclear weapons don't deter war because they are so very destructive, but because they are so obviously and so quickly destructive. Both world wars were the result of miscalculation. Had the opposing sides known the true cost of these wars, they would have done anything they could to avoid them. This was especially true of World War I. It was supposed to be "over by Christmas"; the old in-and-out of traditional European wars that is ended by some border readjustments and modest reparation payments. Instead, the European powers experienced destruction and economic ruin on an unpr
..and I'm going to ignore you and do what I wanted to do anyway. If my current tool doesn't allow it, I'll switch to one that does.
But insults aside, I think the way in which you said "you shouldn't be doing that" without even bothering to explain why, is part of the problem. You're basically saying that you know better than me, so much so that you shouldn't even have to persuade me, that I should just accept your superior knowledge. That approach never works, and it's pretty insulting to be on the receiving end of it.
If you want to advocate a better way or explain why "continue 2" is bad, you can certainly do that, but just trying to force your position upon everyone isn't the answer. If you try, someone else (in this case, php) will come along and give the people what they want...
I'm sorry that you felt insulted by my comments; that was not my intent. I suppose that, by repeating the criticism, I was acting along the lines of "If one man calls you an ass, ignore him; if three men call you an ass, get thyself a saddle". Or, I would say, maybe you should check if you've been fed too much hay. I have better things to do than to wait around for chances to insult fools; there are other ways of wasting time that I enjoy much more. The fact that I am willing to risk insulting you means that I think you are not a fool.
Second, I am by no means a Guru, but I got into the programming game very early, and I took the advice of people who got into it even earlier, and who are far better programmers than I will ever be. Truly, I am not fit to even polish their sandals. Sometimes, the advice was couched in terms that were not very flattering ("Hey, that's dumb. Do it this way.) Because I respected the experience of these elders, I would try out their way, and try to understand why it might be better than mine. Sometimes it wasn't. Of course you don't know me, and have no reason to give me the slightest degree of respect. However, the fact that you are hearing so much criticism of PHP ought to make you at least look at this criticism closely. There's plenty of stuff out on the Web about this issue, so reasearch might be indicated.
I don't even know PHP, and have no long-standing animosity to it. My web programming has been done in Perl CGI. I don't think that Perl is the One True Way. Python is not a bad choice either; I don't like Python (for what seem to others like arbitrary reasons), but I respect the language. I'm tired, it's late, etc. but I did a quick search for this break 2 statement you were talking about. I found the following code snippet at this site (I'm sorry about the munged indents; I don't recall how format code in HTML right now):
$i = 0;
while (++$i) {
switch ($i) {
case 5:
echo "At 5\n";
break 1;/* Exit only the switch. */
case 10:
echo "At 10; quitting \n";
break 2;/* Exit the switch and the while. */
default:
break;
}
}
OK, this grates on me, but it's not hard to understand what it does. It doesn't seem obviously evil. But further down that same page, there is the following comment:
If the numerical argument is higher than the number of things which can be broken out of, it seems to me like the execution of the entire program is stopped.
My program had 8 nested loops. Didn't bother counting them, but wrote: break 10. - Result: Code following the loops was not processed.
Say what??? "break 2 seemed innocuous, if kludgy; but I didn't understand that you could use just any index after the break. And apparently the PHP interpreter or compiler or whatever does no checking on the index. So you could have break 10 or maybe 250. Maybe this would work as you intended when you first wrote it, but can you really not see h
Realistically: the guy refusing the sale is Iranian-American.
And, as such, especially vulnerable to the displeasure of our beloved government's "homeland security" apparatus. I imagine this just scared the crap out of him. Maybe he was being tested by Homeland Security to see if he was a Patriotic American. Or maybe the girl's cousin would sell the iPad, and it would get found on somebody killed by a Predator in Pakistan. Either way, he's in for a long session of inhaling water and being asked why he was supplying our enemies with advanced terrorist technology. Wake up, people. It's not easy being a patriotic American these days. You have to be so very, very careful.
I am one of those "stupid" PHP users. It's not the first language I learned, nor is it the last. I'm well aware of Python as an alternative for developing web apps, and I've tried it, but I really do prefer PHP.
One reason is flexibility in flow control. PHP has do... while loops. Also, I can do "continue 2" or "break 2" if there is a loop within a loop, to continue or break at the outer loop. I'm honestly puzzled that Python still hasn't added these obvious and useful things.
I've asked Python types about this, and gotten reasons like "you shouldn't be doing that in the first place," which pisses me off and makes me want to stick with PHP even more.
I'm going to tell you what you don't want to hear, and I'm going to tell you because it's true: you shouldn't be doing that. The reasons why you shouldn't be doing that have nothing to do with any one programming language, they are general to all programming languages. They are the same as the reasons why you shouldn't have GOTO statements, and these things were learned near the very beginnings of the study of programming as a discipline.
There are far too many people who equate the invention of new programming language with "progress". It ain't so. That being said, it's probably possible for a good programmer to write good code in any language. (I say "probably" because I don't know all the languages, including PHP.) However, not all programmers are equally good, so it might be wise to stick to languages that won't let you commit atrocities.
This truly belongs in the category of questions that if you have to ask, then you're not going to understand the answers...Mostly because they will be of the same caliber as the question.
That's great and everything. But what kind of capacitance can they get out of these?
As little as possible, one hopes, though I've never heard of parasitic capacitance as a major consideration in battery design. But when they get down to spray painting them on surfaces, who knows? Certainly the designers of any non-trivial circuit that is sprayed onto a surface will have to deal with this phenomenon.
...On a typical manual mill, for example, turning the traverse handwheel a complete revolution moves the table by an integer number of thousandths of an inch (usually 100 or 200, which are 2.54 and 5.08 mm). To operate the mill in metric units requires either that the operator remember that a revolution is 2540 micrometers (awkward) or rebuild a significant precision part of the machine (the leadscrews and leadscrew nuts). You might think that this wouldn't be a problem with CNC mills, but many use stepper motors to turn the leadscrews. Those stepper motors might have only 200 or 400 steps per revolution (giving a resolution of 1 to 0.25 mils, or 0.0254 mm to 0.00635 mm) which can make it inconvenient to use metric units...
Someone is probably going to reply that these issues don't apply to modern CNC tools. I'm not familiar with those, but the point is that there are a significant number inexpensive and serviceable tools in the US that can only work with metric units in a very awkward way (or at great expense).
You raise some excellent points. One tends to think of switching from English to Metric units as simply converting to a different way of thinking, but—as you cogently point out—there are more concrete reasons for resisting the move to metric. I wonder: does the reliance on English units tangibly reduce the competitiveness of US manufacturing vis a vis the rest of the world? If such a monetary disadvantage existed, then we might have a counter-argument, one that would tend to justify investment in new metric machinery. Given that such equipment is very expensive, I imagine that the disadvantages of the English system would have to be shown to be quite massive to justify the switch.
Also, I wonder if radically new manufacturing techniques might not displace the old machinery soon, thus vitiating the question of whether to replace our machining tools. If we start using 3-D printers to make everything, I do hope they won't have gears that will only move in increments of English units!
I suggest that this is how we managed to put a very expensive and blurry space telescope into orbit.
Not in this case; there was an extra washer installed on one side of the arm mount for the mirror grinder, meaning that the arm was skewed. I agree with your general sentiment of reducing areas of potential confusion, though.
You appear to be correct; I can't find anything about the Hubble error being due to metric/English unit confusion. I don't know where I got this idea. Thanks for the correction.
I prefer a "thou"; less ambiguous than "mil", which could be confused for "millimeter" (granted, one should not be shortening millimeter to mil).
I can attest to that confusion. Having been born in a country that uses the metric system, I kept thinking that "mil" must be some kind of slang for "millimeter". (Needless to say, I am not a hardware engineer.) One day, I was touring a chip manufacturing plant, and the "engineer" giving the tour kept referring to "mils". It soon became apparent to me that the unit in question must be much smaller than a millimeter. So I finally burst out with my question, "What's a mil?". He just stared at me blankly, presumably struck speechless by my ignorance. I suggest that this is how we managed to put a very expensive and blurry space telescope into orbit.
I've gotten used to the common usages of the English system; at this point, I'd be inconvenienced by a sudden switch to kilometers (and experience shows that the US public won't accept the change). However, you'd think that U.S. and British engineers could nerve themselves to overcome a switch to metric.
Not that I'm entirely sure how I feel about Google using drones to improve Google Earth. If I have a privacy fence up... well, it's to protect my privacy. Taking pictures from a low flying drone isn't much different than leaning a ladder against the fence and climbing up to peer over....
Ah but think of the new sport that is now going to catch on: drone skeet shooting! Yehaaa!
IMPORTANT SAFETY WARNING from the Drone Skeet Shooting Association of America: Participants should not engage U.S. government drones. A predator missile can seriously mess up your back yard. Remember, identify your target before opening fire. Also, drones are counted in your favor only if the wreckage lands on your property. If it falls on your neighbor's property, he gets the points. Happy drone skeeting!
Slashdot Mirror
A really smart person will get the same grade as a reasonably smart person, because tests are made so a reasonably smart person can get the top mark; any better than that is simply trimmed off; you can maybe get an A+ or A++, but at some point they just stop adding plusses and any smarts (or effort/talent/etc) beyond that is ignored.
This is true about grades, but I found that it's not true for standardized tests (SAT, GRE, etc.). If you're smart, you try to put down the correct answer. If you're really smart, you try to figure out what the author of the question thinks the right answer is. You also know that wrong answers aren't weighed as heavily as the correct ones, so if you don't have time to finish, you just quickly skim the remaining questions and guess. It worked for me. Every time I took one of these tests I got sent to the counselor to figure out why I scored so highly on these tests, but had crappy grades. I told them the truth: I didn't care about grades, but it was fun gaming the tests.
The trend in computing (and outside as well, but that's offtopic) is to give increased control to the manufacturers and vendors, and less control to the owner. If things continue the way they're going now, in 20 years (if that) I foresee a future where computers (as known by the average person) are black boxes, never to be taken apart for any reason. ... There will come a day when hobbyist computing and true hacking (as opposed to the popular definition of "illegal shit") will only be possible with "retro" computers. It might be a few years off, but it will happen if things continue on the current course.
I think the future is phones and tablets for the home/average user market within five years. (Sure, tablets will have an optional keyboard for the vestigially literate.) Which means people who want a real computer will essentially have to leech off the business pipeline. However, that avenue might very well be closed off also, with computers assembled in large batches in a country far, far away. I suppose that people who want to build their own computer badly enough will still be able to do so, but it will be hard to get parts, they will be costly, and the selection will be very limited. But then we may all be going back to the abacus anyhow, given the general trends.
That seems surely reasonable. My problem with the OP was that he seemed to say that you could tell it was a one-time pad by merely looking at it. Also, SOE by no means used good cryptographic techniques consistently (the infamous "poem code" comes to mind). But this may not have been SOE, of course.
Given that the original message looks supiciously like it was encoded with a one time pad, it's really not at all surprising that they can't crack it without the relevant pad. Which was probably destroyed a long time ago.
I'm curious: how do you tell by the looks of a cyphertext that it was encrypted with a one-time pad? Yeah, it's written in groups of five characters, and makes no (obvious) sense...but that is no clue as to the method used to encrypt the text. Breaking up words into equal groups is done (obviously) to obfuscate word boundaries, it's not a practice restricted to one-time pads.
For all we know 4 or 5 pigeons were released, each with only every 4th or 5th letter of the text, all encoded differently. With that kind of packet loss even three letter agencies would be at a loss
Actually, I'm pretty sure there were two copies of the message sent. I deduce this because of the arabic numeral "2" entered on the form field titled "Number of copies sent". Also, there's the identifier codes for two pigeons on the message. Or didn't you look at the pretty picture in TFA?
Maybe sheer quantity will take care of providing a "Rosetta Stone" for the future. If only a single product label survives, then our descendants will have a record of about a dozen major languages instantiated in texts with identical meaning, and a fairly clear understanding of our major obsessions and legal system in the bargain.
Report Hints At Privacy Problem of Drones That Can Recognize Faces
Yeah, those drones can be touchy about their privacy. Have you ever seen one with a facebook page? Personally, I would respect their privacy, because having a drone unhappy at you could have lethal consequences.
if i yell fire in a crowded theatre, people may trample and kill others motivated out of self-preservation. so me, the one shouted fire, i'm the one culpable
if i call mohammed a nasty word, and people start rioting and killing, they are motivated by religious extremism. do you believe a religious zealot who will kill because of his religion is a defensible position, like self-preservation? hell no! so where does the buck stop? with the religious zealot
if i insult your mother and you kill someone, who is culpable for the dead person? you? or me because i insulted my mother? do you see how crazy this gets?
at some point you have to learn to put proper blame where it is properly due
I agree, but I'm just a little reluctant to think it's quite that simple. Bear with me a moment, please.
Let's suppose that the person who made the video acted with malice aforethought. Now, this is just a hypothetical, a fairy tale, if you will. For of course whoever made it was only expressing his opinions, sort of shouting into the wind, and quite astonished anyone heard him, I guess. But let's pretend that the guy knew exactly what would happen after he released his little piece of "art". As part of this ridiculous hypothetical, let's say that we find evidence that he was acting as an agent for a foreign intelligence service, who also—of course—knew what would happen when the "trailers" hit the web. Do you still think this man is innocent as a lamb? That he did nothing wrong, and broke no laws?
My little story is a horror story, of course. In it, people are being cynically manipulated by an intelligence service (or perhaps a terrorist cabal) to produce a certain result. The Moslems are jumping around burning up stuff and killing Americans, just as directed. The Americans are outraged and are sending in the Marines (and would, in their hearts, really like to nuke Mecca, but won't say so), exactly according to the script. Oh, and lest we forget, there is an election coming up in the USA, and which candidate suddenly looks indecisive and weak? So, my hypothetical Evil Genius has quite a score to tally up; she's done really well.
I am so glad that the stuff in the foregoing paragraph isn't true because I know I made it all up, and will now go back to contentedly oiling my rifle, and fantasizing about nuking Mecca.
"The Cloud" is only good as secondary backup if you don't care that it becomes public.
Encrypt it all you want. Access to your data is the hardest hurdle and by using the could you give it away.
I'm thinking that people who want to "be in the cloud" don't think about stuff like encrypting. "What, me--worry? I'm using the cloud!" En/Decrypting is work, and the whole idea of the cloud is to avoid work. If any crypto is being done, it's probably a service operated by your friendly (non-local) cloud provider, which means it provides no real security at all.
This willingness of businesses to surrender their family jewels—their data—to complete strangers has puzzled me since this type of service came into vogue. But then, I'm also mystified by people's willingness to put their true names and their personal lives on the web and make them accessible to everyone. There is an acute shortage of paranoia among the sheep these days.
Why would you want it to look like Win7? Win7's interface sucked almost as much as Win8.
...I disagree that the kernel is all that matters - it certainly does matter, but so does the UI, as there's only so much you can do, and unless you want to implement it yourself, you're also reliant on the third-party software actually existing.... A good file manager is pretty important to have.
I guess I don't understand the full dimensions of the problem you have with the Windows GUI. I fixed mine so it looks like Windows 2K, and that's the end of it. It was a lot easier than figuring out how to change the GUI on my Ubuntu machine, when I had one. As far as I'm concerned, the GUI should be a very thin, lightweight set of options that can be easily changed at the whim of the user—not a bunch of stuff that has to be downloaded from software repositories and installed (and then maybe even work).
What is a file manager? I make a shortcut to my Windows desktop for all the disks on my machine, double click on the icons, and...well...manage my files. I can search for them, delete them, open them...what else do I want to do? I'm serious, I have just never said to myself, "gosh, I wish I had a file manager for my PC".
You mean they prosecute the poor fellow who leaked the news, right? Because that's what they are doing.
There is a taint of hypocrisy about any "war crimes" trials, even if they are held by a supposedly neutral court based in an allegedly neutral jurisdiction. (As the Nürnberg travesty was not.) You can only be prosecuted for war crimes if you have lost the war, or if your government is so weak as to be unable to protect you from those who come to make the arrest.
States seldom make any serious attempt to prosecute crimes committed by their own soldiers against enemy soldiers or civilians during a war. This is because war by its very nature entails an extraordinary set of circumstances—and a concomittant psychology—that are so far outside the experience of normal human beings living normal human lives as to make judgment of the actions of soldiers innately hypocritical. The soldier has been placed in an insane position, and is then asked to account for his actions before a jury of people who were never there. You might say that war itself is a giant atrocity, composed of many little crimes. Under circumstances like this, "I was following orders" is—and always has been—a perfectly acceptable excuse.
You say, correctly, that the United States will not deliver up its soldiers for ware crimes trial by the Hague Tribunal. But what European powers have done so? For example, why was the commander of the Dutch brigade (the 32nd Hosenscheisser, as I recall) that failed to fire a single shot in defense of the civilians in the designated UN "safe area" at Srebrenica not prosecuted? Did he not have a duty to protect the people there? Sure, he was probably out-gunned, but if he had aggressively disposed his troops and made it clear that the area would be defended, I doubt that the Serb irregulars would have been ordered to attack UN troops. Or perhaps the U.N. official who declared the "safe area" in the first place should be tried for promising safety he could not provide. But as always, prosecution is selective.
Inevitably, we can imagine that if groups like these actually existed, one would eventually engage in a war crime of some sort. When that happens, who would be punished? The ones perpetrating it? The people who voted in support of the crime? Those who were aware of it? The entire group?
The precedent is quite clear: whoever loses gets punished.
Multinational corporations and governments are already arming themselves for cyber warfare.
That doesn't bother me half as much as when they hire actual armed thugs (a.k.a. "mercenaries"). Of course our (USA) government has already done that, because they can't seem to get enough gullible American kids to enlist in the official Army. Thus history repeats itself.
Which is more dangerous: For citizens to be armed, or for oligarchs to go unchecked? Reading the Declaration of Independence may give you some insight into the conclusion reached by what became the most powerful nation-state in history.
Er, that question has nothing to do with the novel (New Model Army). The NMAs are radically democratic mercenary armies that make decision based on voting via an allegedly uncrackable network. (In NMA, network security is achieved by some handwaving and talk about AI "worms" that protect the system. Yeah. Sure.) In other words, an NMA is something that—were it to show up in my neighborhood—would be shot down like the dogs they are by our local militia, and have its weapons confiscated for future use. So I do agree with you in principle, it's just that your question doesn't address the concept of the New Model Army as expressed in the novel.
No pragmatic person will ask for such technology today. There is nothing wrong with researching, but it will take many years before we see any feasible technology for that.
Let me ask a more fundamental question: what would be the point of such a technology? I doubt whether this even qualifies as an item that should go on our wish list of "stuff I wish they would invent". Let's consider some of the possible uses for such a technology.
I don't want to watch a drama in a fish tank. Think of Hamlet in your living room. (Let's just pretend we have a living room that would permit life-sized characters; a miniaturized Ophelia or King Claudius in a fish tank sized "screen" are too ridiculous on the face of it.) I suppose you could walk around and see the eponymous protagonist agonize from all angles. Maybe you could even walk between Hamlet and his father's ghost during that scene. Observe the theatrical fencing techniques in the fight scene from different angles. How much fun is that really going to be? After the first time. I suppose plays could be written that allow you to participate in them, but this has been done before (with real actors), and it's not much fun after the first time, either.
What's true for plays is just as true for any dramatic entertainment—I don't understand how a movie would be better if it were shot in REAL 3D (in the OP's sense) as opposed to shown on a flat screen. It seems to me that seeing the action in a "fish tank" (no matter if it's a huge fish tank) would actually interfere with my ability to immerse myself in the action. (As, in fact, today's feeble 3D prevents immersion, at least in my case.)
OK, how about games? There's more latitude here. Maybe a first-person shooter in a 3D environment would be cool. You and your friends could meet in each other's living rooms, with appropriate armor and armament superimposed by the software...hmm...this could be hard on the furniture as you throw yourself around to avoid incoming fire. Maybe you could play in special venues set up for this kind of thing. But wait, don't we have something like that already? It's called "Lasertag", I think. And if you have to travel to a special arena, how does the 3D thing help much? Hmm. There must be something I'm missing.
It seems like the technology to project realistic 3D images anywhere you want to is bound to be useful. Literally hundreds of science fiction books tell us so. But caution should rule here—remember that before we all got cell phones, science fiction heroes were always rushing to the nearest "videophone booth" to make the call that would save the world. OK, if you look like Princess Leia, you could better use your feminine wiles to plead for the help of Obi Wan Kenobi if you could make a REAL 3D call. But other than that...do you really want to turn on your REAL 3D scanner so that you and your friend can appear to be mutually sitting in each other's living rooms having a conversation? When a simple phone call would do?
I'm not saying there wouldn't be a use for REAL 3D, but it's not making movies or phone calls. Maybe it would be nice for games, maybe a kind of game that hasn't been invented yet. But my imagination is not exactly coming up with lots of money making reasons for anyone to work on this technology. Of course, that's not the same as saying that there aren't any.
The 2.25 million people that died in the Korean War, and the ~ 2 million people that died in the Vietnam War would beg to differ.
Too true.
But compared to 73 million in eight years (averaging over nine million per year for about half a generation) some people believe that's a substantial improvement.
Yes, I get the impression that most of the commentators on this topic don't have a sense of proportion about the scale of destructiveness of the two world wars (which can reasonably be argued to be a single war with a 20 year time-out—so you should really add in the casualties of World War I). They also don't seem to understand that the destructiveness of war with conventional weapons has increased geometrically (if that's the right word) as the industrialized nation-states of the world grew in power. In the future, historians will look back at the first half of the 20th Century and shudder.
We are both too far from that time of war, and too close to it. The younger generations are ignorant of what happened because they don't much care about history. If they think about them at all, the young think that the World Wars are indeed "ancient history", and do not concern themselves with just how disastrous the scale of destruction was. (I'm willing to bet that many people, when pressed about how many people were killed in World War II, will say "Uh...6 million?".) On the other hand, those of us who do take an interest in history have not yet had time to see the full impact of the wars, and measure them dispassionately. I happen to believe that the World Wars put an end to what has sometimes been called "Western Civilization", or what might be called the European-model nation-states. This is very clear in Europe now: borders are dissolving, nationalism has evaporated, and national currencies abandoned. These aren't necessarily all bad changes, but they are very significant indeed. I do not see the ultimate outcome, but I don't think it's going to be all good either. As usual, the U.S. lags a few decades behind Europe in catching up with developments.
These views aren't original to me, any more than the view of nuclear weapons as an anti-war measure are unique to Kenneth Waltz. I first encountered both views—that nuclear weapons tend to prevent wars between states that do possess them, and that the nation-state model has become obsolete—in the writings of the Israeli historian Martin van Creveld. Take a look at his paper Through A Glass Darkly" for a quick summary of van Creveld's views. His book, Nuclear Proliferation and the Future of Conflict addresses the issue under discussion in a more comprehensive way.
I would have thought that the deterrent effect of nuclear weapons on aggression is fairly obvious. After three wars in a few decades, India and Pakistan have not had a single war ever since both sides came into possession of nuclear weapons. How many nuclear powers has the United States attacked? Indeed, it looks as though the U.S. attack on Iraq taught the Iranians much about the importance of nuclear weapons. (A lesson that Israel was quick to grasp, and grasped much sooner.)
I think that nuclear weapons don't deter war because they are so very destructive, but because they are so obviously and so quickly destructive. Both world wars were the result of miscalculation. Had the opposing sides known the true cost of these wars, they would have done anything they could to avoid them. This was especially true of World War I. It was supposed to be "over by Christmas"; the old in-and-out of traditional European wars that is ended by some border readjustments and modest reparation payments. Instead, the European powers experienced destruction and economic ruin on an unpr
..and I'm going to ignore you and do what I wanted to do anyway. If my current tool doesn't allow it, I'll switch to one that does.
But insults aside, I think the way in which you said "you shouldn't be doing that" without even bothering to explain why, is part of the problem. You're basically saying that you know better than me, so much so that you shouldn't even have to persuade me, that I should just accept your superior knowledge. That approach never works, and it's pretty insulting to be on the receiving end of it.
If you want to advocate a better way or explain why "continue 2" is bad, you can certainly do that, but just trying to force your position upon everyone isn't the answer. If you try, someone else (in this case, php) will come along and give the people what they want...
I'm sorry that you felt insulted by my comments; that was not my intent. I suppose that, by repeating the criticism, I was acting along the lines of "If one man calls you an ass, ignore him; if three men call you an ass, get thyself a saddle". Or, I would say, maybe you should check if you've been fed too much hay. I have better things to do than to wait around for chances to insult fools; there are other ways of wasting time that I enjoy much more. The fact that I am willing to risk insulting you means that I think you are not a fool.
Second, I am by no means a Guru, but I got into the programming game very early, and I took the advice of people who got into it even earlier, and who are far better programmers than I will ever be. Truly, I am not fit to even polish their sandals. Sometimes, the advice was couched in terms that were not very flattering ("Hey, that's dumb. Do it this way.) Because I respected the experience of these elders, I would try out their way, and try to understand why it might be better than mine. Sometimes it wasn't. Of course you don't know me, and have no reason to give me the slightest degree of respect. However, the fact that you are hearing so much criticism of PHP ought to make you at least look at this criticism closely. There's plenty of stuff out on the Web about this issue, so reasearch might be indicated.
I don't even know PHP, and have no long-standing animosity to it. My web programming has been done in Perl CGI. I don't think that Perl is the One True Way. Python is not a bad choice either; I don't like Python (for what seem to others like arbitrary reasons), but I respect the language. I'm tired, it's late, etc. but I did a quick search for this break 2 statement you were talking about. I found the following code snippet at this site (I'm sorry about the munged indents; I don't recall how format code in HTML right now):
$i = 0; /* Exit only the switch. */ /* Exit the switch and the while. */
while (++$i) {
switch ($i) {
case 5:
echo "At 5\n";
break 1;
case 10:
echo "At 10; quitting
\n";
break 2;
default:
break;
}
}
OK, this grates on me, but it's not hard to understand what it does. It doesn't seem obviously evil. But further down that same page, there is the following comment:
If the numerical argument is higher than the number of things which can be broken out of, it seems to me like the execution of the entire program is stopped. My program had 8 nested loops. Didn't bother counting them, but wrote: break 10. - Result: Code following the loops was not processed.
Say what??? "break 2 seemed innocuous, if kludgy; but I didn't understand that you could use just any index after the break. And apparently the PHP interpreter or compiler or whatever does no checking on the index. So you could have break 10 or maybe 250. Maybe this would work as you intended when you first wrote it, but can you really not see h
Realistically: the guy refusing the sale is Iranian-American.
And, as such, especially vulnerable to the displeasure of our beloved government's "homeland security" apparatus. I imagine this just scared the crap out of him. Maybe he was being tested by Homeland Security to see if he was a Patriotic American. Or maybe the girl's cousin would sell the iPad, and it would get found on somebody killed by a Predator in Pakistan. Either way, he's in for a long session of inhaling water and being asked why he was supplying our enemies with advanced terrorist technology. Wake up, people. It's not easy being a patriotic American these days. You have to be so very, very careful.
I am one of those "stupid" PHP users. It's not the first language I learned, nor is it the last. I'm well aware of Python as an alternative for developing web apps, and I've tried it, but I really do prefer PHP.
One reason is flexibility in flow control. PHP has do ... while loops. Also, I can do "continue 2" or "break 2" if there is a loop within a loop, to continue or break at the outer loop. I'm honestly puzzled that Python still hasn't added these obvious and useful things.
I've asked Python types about this, and gotten reasons like "you shouldn't be doing that in the first place," which pisses me off and makes me want to stick with PHP even more.
I'm going to tell you what you don't want to hear, and I'm going to tell you because it's true: you shouldn't be doing that. The reasons why you shouldn't be doing that have nothing to do with any one programming language, they are general to all programming languages. They are the same as the reasons why you shouldn't have GOTO statements, and these things were learned near the very beginnings of the study of programming as a discipline.
There are far too many people who equate the invention of new programming language with "progress". It ain't so. That being said, it's probably possible for a good programmer to write good code in any language. (I say "probably" because I don't know all the languages, including PHP.) However, not all programmers are equally good, so it might be wise to stick to languages that won't let you commit atrocities.
This truly belongs in the category of questions that if you have to ask, then you're not going to understand the answers...Mostly because they will be of the same caliber as the question.
There are two very important questions that should have been answered:
1) How much power are the getting from the Beer Stein in the picture.
2) What beer is in the stein.
3) Are they also working on a spray-paintable Peltier cooler so that we can keep our beer cold and our hands warm at the same time?
That's great and everything. But what kind of capacitance can they get out of these?
As little as possible, one hopes, though I've never heard of parasitic capacitance as a major consideration in battery design. But when they get down to spray painting them on surfaces, who knows? Certainly the designers of any non-trivial circuit that is sprayed onto a surface will have to deal with this phenomenon.
...On a typical manual mill, for example, turning the traverse handwheel a complete revolution moves the table by an integer number of thousandths of an inch (usually 100 or 200, which are 2.54 and 5.08 mm). To operate the mill in metric units requires either that the operator remember that a revolution is 2540 micrometers (awkward) or rebuild a significant precision part of the machine (the leadscrews and leadscrew nuts). You might think that this wouldn't be a problem with CNC mills, but many use stepper motors to turn the leadscrews. Those stepper motors might have only 200 or 400 steps per revolution (giving a resolution of 1 to 0.25 mils, or 0.0254 mm to 0.00635 mm) which can make it inconvenient to use metric units...
Someone is probably going to reply that these issues don't apply to modern CNC tools. I'm not familiar with those, but the point is that there are a significant number inexpensive and serviceable tools in the US that can only work with metric units in a very awkward way (or at great expense).
You raise some excellent points. One tends to think of switching from English to Metric units as simply converting to a different way of thinking, but—as you cogently point out—there are more concrete reasons for resisting the move to metric. I wonder: does the reliance on English units tangibly reduce the competitiveness of US manufacturing vis a vis the rest of the world? If such a monetary disadvantage existed, then we might have a counter-argument, one that would tend to justify investment in new metric machinery. Given that such equipment is very expensive, I imagine that the disadvantages of the English system would have to be shown to be quite massive to justify the switch.
Also, I wonder if radically new manufacturing techniques might not displace the old machinery soon, thus vitiating the question of whether to replace our machining tools. If we start using 3-D printers to make everything, I do hope they won't have gears that will only move in increments of English units!
I suggest that this is how we managed to put a very expensive and blurry space telescope into orbit.
Not in this case; there was an extra washer installed on one side of the arm mount for the mirror grinder, meaning that the arm was skewed. I agree with your general sentiment of reducing areas of potential confusion, though.
You appear to be correct; I can't find anything about the Hubble error being due to metric/English unit confusion. I don't know where I got this idea. Thanks for the correction.
I prefer a "thou"; less ambiguous than "mil", which could be confused for "millimeter" (granted, one should not be shortening millimeter to mil).
I can attest to that confusion. Having been born in a country that uses the metric system, I kept thinking that "mil" must be some kind of slang for "millimeter". (Needless to say, I am not a hardware engineer.) One day, I was touring a chip manufacturing plant, and the "engineer" giving the tour kept referring to "mils". It soon became apparent to me that the unit in question must be much smaller than a millimeter. So I finally burst out with my question, "What's a mil?". He just stared at me blankly, presumably struck speechless by my ignorance. I suggest that this is how we managed to put a very expensive and blurry space telescope into orbit.
I've gotten used to the common usages of the English system; at this point, I'd be inconvenienced by a sudden switch to kilometers (and experience shows that the US public won't accept the change). However, you'd think that U.S. and British engineers could nerve themselves to overcome a switch to metric.
...
Not that I'm entirely sure how I feel about Google using drones to improve Google Earth. If I have a privacy fence up... well, it's to protect my privacy. Taking pictures from a low flying drone isn't much different than leaning a ladder against the fence and climbing up to peer over....
Ah but think of the new sport that is now going to catch on: drone skeet shooting! Yehaaa!
IMPORTANT SAFETY WARNING from the Drone Skeet Shooting Association of America: Participants should not engage U.S. government drones. A predator missile can seriously mess up your back yard. Remember, identify your target before opening fire. Also, drones are counted in your favor only if the wreckage lands on your property. If it falls on your neighbor's property, he gets the points. Happy drone skeeting!