His was a sort of Deism common to many physicists. It was an idea of God and universe being one in the same and also very impersonal and alien.
Then I think we're actually on the same page, more or less. I think what I mainly object to is the lumping of philosophies like this with strong atheism. On the one hand, they do not differ in the testable predictions that they make, but on the other I think that the way in which we frame ideas is itself important.
Seriously, this gnostic-atheist vs. theist shitstorm is getting out of hand. Me, I'm more of a Theological noncognitivist or ignostic myself -- though even these labels are restrictive, since sometimes I play with panpsychist/pantheist/hylozoist ideas (albeit not seriously, since they make no testable predictions). Whatever, this post isn't supposed to be about me; the point is just that we're not stuck with a binary choice here.
To call anyone who does not believe in a personal god an atheist is to ignore a whole ton of different kinds of philosophies...
Re:Misconception about crypto in article
on
R.I.P. FTP
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· Score: 1
Yeah, I'd agree with that. I'd missed that he was talking about a compromised client rather than server.
Re:Misconception about crypto in article
on
R.I.P. FTP
·
· Score: 1
TFA is talking about the *client* software which saves the password for you so you don't have to enter it every time.
Whoops, my bad. I'd thought he was talking about a compromised server.
Bzzzt! Fail.
However, that's just obnoxious.
Misconception about crypto in article
on
R.I.P. FTP
·
· Score: 1
From TFA:
And if an attacker managed to do that, then I assumed that the risk of passwords being stolen by spyware was about the same whether I used FTP or SFTP -- because either way, the spyware could just steal my password by reading it out of a configuration file where the password was stored. (Even though FTP and SFTP programs both store passwords in an encrypted format, the programs have to be able to decrypt the passwords in order to use them whenever the user wants to open a connection. So the spyware could just mimic whatever steps the client programs use to decrypt the stored passwords, in order to steal one of my passwords stored in a file.) So, I assumed it made no difference whether I used FTP or SFTP
This is incorrect. A decently-written program will not store your password anywhere, either encrypted or as plaintext. What it will store is a one-way hash of your password. When someone connects, it will compute a hash of the password they entered and compare it to the stored hash. Nowhere in this process is the actual password decrypted.
Rainbow tables allow one to attack these kinds of schemes, but adding salt to passwords basically makes even this impossible.
This may seem to contradict the "DRM is impossible" principle but it does not because the problems are different. For passwords, you only need to prove to me that you know the secret; you don't need to tell me what the secret is. For DRM, the music or movie is the secret, so it has to be revealed: You wouldn't pay iTunes for proof that they know what a certain song sounds like; what you want is the actual song!
The problem is that we use the words "client" and "server" to refer both to the programs and to the machines they run on. Usually server machines run server programs, but not always (and consider true P2P stuff where programs are both clients and servers). Maybe we need to throw out all the words and replace them with alternatives like "listener" and "caller" for the programs and... "big machine" and "little machine" for the computers?:-)
Hmm... yeah; that's the kind of stuff I was trying to think of (and I think it'd be cool if devices did this). But really you'd only need one X server for this, and there wouldn't even be much reason for it to be run by the user whose X client was connecting to it; that's all the sort of stuff that's already handled by xauth.
Hmm... What that lacks is the ability to interact with the plots (zoom in, etc), which I like sometimes... but on the plus side, as you said the overhead is lower, and also 'screen' will work (whereas the equivalent for X clients, 'xmove,' doesn't play nice with xauth, and anyway is rarely installed on servers to begin with).
A third method that a friend of mine uses (for very big jobs) is to have the MATLAB script generate emails; he just runs it with nohup and logs out.
What makes this even more confusing is the role of SSH (when it is used), so that servers and clients are actually connected via other proxy servers and clients running locally...
The "X server" runs on the machine with the keyboard, mouse, and display. An "X client" is a program (e.g., xterm) that connects to an "X server" to which it sends drawing commands and from which it receives mouse and keyboard events. In the "writing network software sense," these names make sense, because it is the "X server" that sits and listens on a port, and the "X clients" that connect to it. What makes this confusing is that in practice an "X server" will usually run on a user's machine (which you would normally call a 'client') and an "X client" will run on a big machine elsewhere (which you would normally call a 'server'). The problem comes from using the words "client" and "server" to describe both programs and machines; basically, our jargon sucks.
I am a bit confused by the submitter's comment about remote X servers. I understand the appeal of remote X clients: I can, e.g., log into a big fast machine and run MATLAB (the X client) there while interacting with the window on my less-powerful laptop (which runs the X server). But what's the point of a remote X server? Why would anyone want to run an X server (software sense of 'server') on a server (hardware sense of 'server')?
Ouch. So if it's not a huge discovery in an entirely new research area, it's worthless? Would you be willing to apply this criterion to your own accomplishments?
Am I the only one bothered by the fact that this guy assumes that (1) men don't like/use satnav, and (2) the reason they don't is that it sounds like a woman? We're not all a bunch of insecure sexists (ok, I'm insecure about plenty of things, but gender isn't one of them). Maybe Joe has a bad marriage, or had an overbearing mother... He can always change the voice to Dr. Doom like a friend of mine did if that'll make him feel better. "[deep]You approach a right turn.[/deep]." He finds it reassuring, like owning a particularly scary breed of dog...
Clearly OP has a collection of movies in multipart RAR archives because that is how warez types distribute them. Without the ability to play back multipart RAR archives, he has three options, none of them particularly nice:
1 - Extract the videos and delete the original archives. Upside: Videos are instantly accessible; no disk space is wasted. Downside: Can't seed the torrent of the archive any more.
2 - Extract the videos only temporarily before viewing. Upside: Can continue seeding the torrent of the archive, and essentially no disk space is wasted. Downside: There's a minute or two of delay whenever you want to watch a video.
3 - Extract the videos as soon as the download finishes, and keep both them and the original archives on disk. Upside: Videos are instantly accessible and he can still seed. Downside: Twice the disk space is used, for no good reason.
If VLC could play back multipart RAR archives, he would have all the advantages of #2 without the (significant) disadvantage of delay.
Question: Is there a video player that handles multipart RAR archives?
Really? I think the better solution would have been to simply accept that italics would represent quotes in old posts and use the newer quotation style only in newer posts. I think that'd be preferable to having a tag that means "interpret as italics in some contexts and quotes in others."
This is a bug in the Slashcode, I think. Try this: Make an HTML post in which you use italics. Then view that same post in your profile. The italics will have been replaced by quotes. Hopefully this high-visibility example will cause this to be fixed.
You can't extend IT to be representative of the whole world. Just because IT has some ingrained hatred for anyone with college experience doesn't mean college is worthless.
Yeah, it tells you that college is useless for IT work. You don't need to know computing theory to do it any more than you need to study electrical engineering to be an electrician. That doesn't make it any less valuable; I mean, it's useful and it pays decently. It's just not the sort of thing that benefits from academic training. If I want someone to design a circuit, on the other hand, or control a rocket, or build a highway overpass, I'd want some academic training, as those disciplines require a great deal more theoretical background.
Okamoto, N. (2005). A Secondary Symbiosis in Progress? Science, 310 (5746), 287-287 DOI: 10.1126/science.1116125
OKAMOTO, N., & INOUYE, I. (2006). Hatena arenicola gen. et sp. nov., a Katablepharid Undergoing Probable Plastid Acquisition Protist, 157 (4), 401-419 DOI: 10.1016/j.protis.2006.05.011
Also, whereas blogs are freely-available, you need a subscription to read the journal article -- so I think that the way this was done is the best way.
I read Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition on similar advice. I disliked both, but probably for very different reasons. (I also read his collaboration with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, and though I won't say I disliked it, I also wasn't impressed by it; I simply didn't feel strongly about it either way.)
My problem with William Gibson is an impression I get from him: That he is a popular-press reporter, trying desperately to be "hip" and "relevant," and writing about subjects about which he knows rather little. As I read his work, I feel assaulted by cultural references which do nothing to advance the plot or set to mood; it's all just so much 'name-dropping' on Gibson's part.
Basically, they read to me like they're intended neither to enlighten nor to entertain, but only to make a name for William Gibson as a guy who "gets it."
You may be surprised to hear this in the next sentence, but I love a lot of Neal Stephenson's work -- particularly Cryptonomicon and The Diamond Age. Now, that man's ego definitely fills his writing. But he knows what he's talking about, and you get the feeling that he's writing the story that he wants to write and not the story that he thinks will use the right buzzwords to generate attention.
(I cannot stand his Baroque Cycle though. I'm thinking he jumped the shark with Quicksilver.)
I don't know if this has been the most coherent post. I find it hard to articulate the feeling I get when I read Gibson's stuff that turns me off to him. But it's there, and every time I forget that I don't like Gibson's writing and I pick up one of his books on someone's advice, I am annoyed and disappointed.
The "correct" method would be to model the network, and fine her the difference between the number of songs shared by the network without her presence and that number with her involvement. For an analogy, it would be the drop of current in a resistor network caused by the removal of a particular resistor. This would represent that actual harm that she did. Since this depends greatly on the topology of the network, this is of course not feasible without some assumptions. The theory of random graphs (see e.g. work by Bollobas) might be helpful here. Not that I'm really advocating such a mathematical approach to law.
The upshot of this is that, assuming a relatively highly-connected graph (high Fiedler number), her impact is probably very, very small. For an extreme example, consider the difference in effective resistance between 100 1-ohm resistors in parallel and 99; it's tiny.
Juries do not like it when clearly guilty defendants tell a shifting tale of several badly told obvious lies, and that tends to push damages up.
...to $1.92 million. Assuming a household income of $50,233.00 (the median), and moreover assuming that the defendant will cease eating, receiving medial treatment, or paying for rent, water, or electricity from now on, it will take over 38 years to pay that off.
The jury might as well have just ordered the woman executed.
Slashdot Mirror
His was a sort of Deism common to many physicists. It was an idea of God and universe being one in the same and also very impersonal and alien.
Then I think we're actually on the same page, more or less. I think what I mainly object to is the lumping of philosophies like this with strong atheism. On the one hand, they do not differ in the testable predictions that they make, but on the other I think that the way in which we frame ideas is itself important.
You're atheist OR religious.
...or something else. :-)
Seriously, this gnostic-atheist vs. theist shitstorm is getting out of hand. Me, I'm more of a Theological noncognitivist or ignostic myself -- though even these labels are restrictive, since sometimes I play with panpsychist/pantheist/hylozoist ideas (albeit not seriously, since they make no testable predictions). Whatever, this post isn't supposed to be about me; the point is just that we're not stuck with a binary choice here.
To call anyone who does not believe in a personal god an atheist is to ignore a whole ton of different kinds of philosophies...
Yeah, I'd agree with that. I'd missed that he was talking about a compromised client rather than server.
TFA is talking about the *client* software which saves the password for you so you don't have to enter it every time.
Whoops, my bad. I'd thought he was talking about a compromised server.
Bzzzt! Fail.
However, that's just obnoxious.
From TFA:
And if an attacker managed to do that, then I assumed that the risk of passwords being stolen by spyware was about the same whether I used FTP or SFTP -- because either way, the spyware could just steal my password by reading it out of a configuration file where the password was stored. (Even though FTP and SFTP programs both store passwords in an encrypted format, the programs have to be able to decrypt the passwords in order to use them whenever the user wants to open a connection. So the spyware could just mimic whatever steps the client programs use to decrypt the stored passwords, in order to steal one of my passwords stored in a file.) So, I assumed it made no difference whether I used FTP or SFTP
This is incorrect. A decently-written program will not store your password anywhere, either encrypted or as plaintext. What it will store is a one-way hash of your password. When someone connects, it will compute a hash of the password they entered and compare it to the stored hash. Nowhere in this process is the actual password decrypted.
Rainbow tables allow one to attack these kinds of schemes, but adding salt to passwords basically makes even this impossible.
This may seem to contradict the "DRM is impossible" principle but it does not because the problems are different. For passwords, you only need to prove to me that you know the secret; you don't need to tell me what the secret is. For DRM, the music or movie is the secret, so it has to be revealed: You wouldn't pay iTunes for proof that they know what a certain song sounds like; what you want is the actual song!
The problem is that we use the words "client" and "server" to refer both to the programs and to the machines they run on. Usually server machines run server programs, but not always (and consider true P2P stuff where programs are both clients and servers). Maybe we need to throw out all the words and replace them with alternatives like "listener" and "caller" for the programs and... "big machine" and "little machine" for the computers? :-)
Hmm... yeah; that's the kind of stuff I was trying to think of (and I think it'd be cool if devices did this). But really you'd only need one X server for this, and there wouldn't even be much reason for it to be run by the user whose X client was connecting to it; that's all the sort of stuff that's already handled by xauth.
Hmm... What that lacks is the ability to interact with the plots (zoom in, etc), which I like sometimes... but on the plus side, as you said the overhead is lower, and also 'screen' will work (whereas the equivalent for X clients, 'xmove,' doesn't play nice with xauth, and anyway is rarely installed on servers to begin with).
A third method that a friend of mine uses (for very big jobs) is to have the MATLAB script generate emails; he just runs it with nohup and logs out.
What makes this even more confusing is the role of SSH (when it is used), so that servers and clients are actually connected via other proxy servers and clients running locally...
The "X server" runs on the machine with the keyboard, mouse, and display. An "X client" is a program (e.g., xterm) that connects to an "X server" to which it sends drawing commands and from which it receives mouse and keyboard events. In the "writing network software sense," these names make sense, because it is the "X server" that sits and listens on a port, and the "X clients" that connect to it. What makes this confusing is that in practice an "X server" will usually run on a user's machine (which you would normally call a 'client') and an "X client" will run on a big machine elsewhere (which you would normally call a 'server'). The problem comes from using the words "client" and "server" to describe both programs and machines; basically, our jargon sucks.
You don't need X for Matlab. The interface isn't that good.
It's for plots that having X is useful.
I am a bit confused by the submitter's comment about remote X servers. I understand the appeal of remote X clients: I can, e.g., log into a big fast machine and run MATLAB (the X client) there while interacting with the window on my less-powerful laptop (which runs the X server). But what's the point of a remote X server? Why would anyone want to run an X server (software sense of 'server') on a server (hardware sense of 'server')?
Even better, they only require ONE image.
In other words, it's not the same problem.
This guy has wasted his life.
Ouch. So if it's not a huge discovery in an entirely new research area, it's worthless? Would you be willing to apply this criterion to your own accomplishments?
Am I the only one bothered by the fact that this guy assumes that (1) men don't like/use satnav, and (2) the reason they don't is that it sounds like a woman? We're not all a bunch of insecure sexists (ok, I'm insecure about plenty of things, but gender isn't one of them). Maybe Joe has a bad marriage, or had an overbearing mother... He can always change the voice to Dr. Doom like a friend of mine did if that'll make him feel better. "[deep]You approach a right turn.[/deep]." He finds it reassuring, like owning a particularly scary breed of dog...
Clearly OP has a collection of movies in multipart RAR archives because that is how warez types distribute them. Without the ability to play back multipart RAR archives, he has three options, none of them particularly nice:
1 - Extract the videos and delete the original archives. Upside: Videos are instantly accessible; no disk space is wasted. Downside: Can't seed the torrent of the archive any more.
2 - Extract the videos only temporarily before viewing. Upside: Can continue seeding the torrent of the archive, and essentially no disk space is wasted. Downside: There's a minute or two of delay whenever you want to watch a video.
3 - Extract the videos as soon as the download finishes, and keep both them and the original archives on disk. Upside: Videos are instantly accessible and he can still seed. Downside: Twice the disk space is used, for no good reason.
If VLC could play back multipart RAR archives, he would have all the advantages of #2 without the (significant) disadvantage of delay.
Question: Is there a video player that handles multipart RAR archives?
I think it'd be better if they'd simply left italics as italics.
I think we're in agreement. :-)
Really? I think the better solution would have been to simply accept that italics would represent quotes in old posts and use the newer quotation style only in newer posts. I think that'd be preferable to having a tag that means "interpret as italics in some contexts and quotes in others."
This is a bug in the Slashcode, I think. Try this: Make an HTML post in which you use italics. Then view that same post in your profile. The italics will have been replaced by quotes. Hopefully this high-visibility example will cause this to be fixed.
You can't extend IT to be representative of the whole world. Just because IT has some ingrained hatred for anyone with college experience doesn't mean college is worthless.
Yeah, it tells you that college is useless for IT work. You don't need to know computing theory to do it any more than you need to study electrical engineering to be an electrician. That doesn't make it any less valuable; I mean, it's useful and it pays decently. It's just not the sort of thing that benefits from academic training. If I want someone to design a circuit, on the other hand, or control a rocket, or build a highway overpass, I'd want some academic training, as those disciplines require a great deal more theoretical background.
Okamoto, N. (2005). A Secondary Symbiosis in Progress? Science, 310 (5746), 287-287 DOI: 10.1126/science.1116125 OKAMOTO, N., & INOUYE, I. (2006). Hatena arenicola gen. et sp. nov., a Katablepharid Undergoing Probable Plastid Acquisition Protist, 157 (4), 401-419 DOI: 10.1016/j.protis.2006.05.011
Also, whereas blogs are freely-available, you need a subscription to read the journal article -- so I think that the way this was done is the best way.
I read Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition on similar advice. I disliked both, but probably for very different reasons. (I also read his collaboration with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, and though I won't say I disliked it, I also wasn't impressed by it; I simply didn't feel strongly about it either way.)
My problem with William Gibson is an impression I get from him: That he is a popular-press reporter, trying desperately to be "hip" and "relevant," and writing about subjects about which he knows rather little. As I read his work, I feel assaulted by cultural references which do nothing to advance the plot or set to mood; it's all just so much 'name-dropping' on Gibson's part.
Basically, they read to me like they're intended neither to enlighten nor to entertain, but only to make a name for William Gibson as a guy who "gets it."
You may be surprised to hear this in the next sentence, but I love a lot of Neal Stephenson's work -- particularly Cryptonomicon and The Diamond Age. Now, that man's ego definitely fills his writing. But he knows what he's talking about, and you get the feeling that he's writing the story that he wants to write and not the story that he thinks will use the right buzzwords to generate attention.
(I cannot stand his Baroque Cycle though. I'm thinking he jumped the shark with Quicksilver.)
I don't know if this has been the most coherent post. I find it hard to articulate the feeling I get when I read Gibson's stuff that turns me off to him. But it's there, and every time I forget that I don't like Gibson's writing and I pick up one of his books on someone's advice, I am annoyed and disappointed.
The "correct" method would be to model the network, and fine her the difference between the number of songs shared by the network without her presence and that number with her involvement. For an analogy, it would be the drop of current in a resistor network caused by the removal of a particular resistor. This would represent that actual harm that she did. Since this depends greatly on the topology of the network, this is of course not feasible without some assumptions. The theory of random graphs (see e.g. work by Bollobas) might be helpful here. Not that I'm really advocating such a mathematical approach to law.
The upshot of this is that, assuming a relatively highly-connected graph (high Fiedler number), her impact is probably very, very small. For an extreme example, consider the difference in effective resistance between 100 1-ohm resistors in parallel and 99; it's tiny.
Juries do not like it when clearly guilty defendants tell a shifting tale of several badly told obvious lies, and that tends to push damages up.
The jury might as well have just ordered the woman executed.
Gives new meaning to the phrase "piece of flair," doesn't it?