If you can provide binaries that run on vanilla Windows XP or Knoppix and are capable of reading from stdin and writing to stdout, then as far as I can tell, that would be fine.
International Conference on Functional Program
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ICFP Contest Underway
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· Score: 1
The programming contest is part of icfp (they usually announce the winner at the conference).
Why is it so amazing that computers beat human beings in chess?
...because no computer has been able to consistently beat the top chess players. It is amazing that computers that can evaluate millions of board positions per second can still lose to a human who can evaluate maybe tens of board positions per second. Go is even worse; the best go programs in the world are routinely defeated by mediocre go players. This means that either a) the human brain can do a lot more computation than we give it credit for or b) our current best minmax alpha-beta game-playing algorithms are horribly suboptimal.
ibm: inferior but marketable, it's better manually
emacs: eight megs and constantly swapping (old joke from when that used to be a lot), escape-meta-alt-ctrl-shift
lisp: lots of irritating superfluous paretheses
perl: pathologically ecclectic rubbish lister
I recall reading about a case a while back in which the police obtained evidence without a warrant by taking it from someone's trash, and the court ruled that as non-infringing. Some reporters retaliated by raiding the trash of some high-profile public servants associated with the area, and reporting on it. Sauce for the goose... gotta love it.
Yeah, that happened in Oregon. Here's the article.
...what's really disturbing is how much we don't know... they were storing names, addresses, credit card numbers, and the three digit security code
on the back of the card...
I think what you really want is public key digital signatures. You can get smart cards now that do 2048 bit RSA. Why trust the credit card companies to not store private information when the technology exists to authenticate your transactions without divulging any private information whatsoever?
Credit card fraud is not a technical problem. Using the old adage, we cannot apply a technical solution. All of the extra verification proposed implies an added cost that will still not solve the problem - if you require a passphrase or some secondary authentication, thieves will just steal the second factor as well.
This credit card account theft would not have occurred if we used smart cards capable of public key cryptography instead of numbers/passwords/passphrases/etc to authenticate our financial transactions. Ideally, the bank wouldn't even have to know your private key, which could be stored on a small device (such as a smart card).
Stealing a physical object (while this still may be a problem) is much harder than intercepting transactions on a trojaned server, where credit card numbers can be harvested millions at a time from companies that have little incentive to keep private data private.
Ramen doesn't cost the same everywhere -- in London, Where Decent Food Costs A Lot, a packet of ramen can be 65p (I'm talking about cheap good third world instant ramen, not the silly Japanese stuff that actually tastes like ramen). In NY that same ramen is only 45 cents and in Japan its about 50yen, the price driven down by the local's bizarre preference for real (ie silly) ramen.
If ramen is only 10 cents in Indonesia, then Indonesia is a good place to buy ramen!
Do you mean the ramen in the plastic bag, or do you mean the more expensive instant kind in the styrofoam cup (called "pop mie" in Indonesia, and unlike American instant ramen typically comes with an unfolding plastic fork)? If the former, I'm surprised. Usually you can get Maruchan or Nissan or Top Ramen for 10 cents a package or so from Winco or Fred Meyer or wherever in Oregon (though I haven't bought any for awhile, so maybe the price fluctuated and I didn't notice). Maybe I should start trucking it across to the east coast...
In other news antibiotic abuse is widespread and extremely bad for the environment and the people who live in it.
Yeah, I've had clostridium difficile (presumably from taking antibiotics), it's no fun. I'm glad to live in a country where people don't have such frequent cause to use antibiotics.
I've been to Indonesia briefly. If I remember correctly, one dollar translates to about 10,000 Rupies, which will buy you a pretty good meal just about anywhere, or an unreliable CD containing mp3s of every Bob Marley song ever recorded, or 10 packs of ramen (ramen costs the same everywhere in the world), or about 5 or 10 angkot rides, or more biskuat than you can eat in one sitting. I stayed a few days in a hotel in Batu Karas for about about $4-$5 a night for a room shared with a couple friends. You can buy antibiotics for about a dollar or so I believe.
I didn't see many computers there, so I don't know if Linux is very well established, but no one cares about piracy over there. The percieved cost of windows is about the same as the percieved cost of Linux: whatever it costs to get a burned copy from a street vendor. "Joe sixpack" is unlikely to own a computer (though TVs are very common), but if he does, he'll probably use whatever everyone else is using, which is probably Windows.
I didn't mind the graphics of the world (which looked very good in most places), but I didn't care for some of the character designs.
I didn't identify well with the main character. He was too young, he didn't handle a sword well, and his head was too spherical. I just couldn't picture him as a hero. I'm accustomed to imagining Link as early-teenage, not as a third grader.
The game world was too sparse. Even with warping, it took too long to get anywhere. The levels were good but there weren't very many of them.
I wouldn't say it was a bad game, just not quite as good as it could have been. I'm looking forward to the new Zelda, hoping it's as good as Ocarina of Time.
1 And I saw a new heaven and a new earth: for the first heaven and the first earth were passed away; and there was no more sea.
2 And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down from God out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.
3 And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God.
4 And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away.
Theologians are unsure of the release schedule of this new earth, and what it's exact feature set and space requirements will be. Detractors of the new earth claim it is merely vaporware, or a superficial modification of the old earth, to which it's supporters accuse its detractors of spreading FUD. Jesus, lead developer of the new earth, has in prior interviews (Luke 13:31-32) stated that the release schedule is a closely guarded secret, unknown even to him. Those upset at griefers for explointing bugs in the current system cry "How long, O Lord?" (Rev 6:10)
I would include megatokyo, but it has on average been more serious and less funny lately (though I still enjoy it, and you can browse the archives for older, funnier content).
Here is a link to the documentation. The first section is a tutorial, the second is a reference for all of the povray features.
The language is very simple, yet includes programming language constructs like loops, variable assignment, and procedures (which can be recursive). Modelling by typing into a text file works suprising well for most things. I have two pieces of advice: 1) use graph paper for initial planning and 2) if you use the same number more than once, declare it as a variable rather than hardcoding it (it makes it easier to tweak the shape of complicated objects later).
Povray takes much longer than 24 hours to learn to use well, but you should be able to learn to program simple scenes with a camera, a light, and some geometry in a few hours.
Since IP addresses are allocated out of a common worldwide pool, everybody will run out more-or-less at the same time.
Those who grabbed the most addresses when they were available suffer the least when the crunch comes - they just reallocate them more efficiently, and use NAT more aggressively. Countries with a very small IPv4 address per person ratio, on the other hand, will switch to IPv6.
Hopefully once all the addresses are allocated they will be privatized so that ISPs can trade address blocks, leading to a more efficient allocation.
...and uglier routing tables. Why bother allocating IPs efficiently when they don't have to be a scarce resource in the first place?
But when the numbers start to run out, they'll be clamoring for it.
One problem is that the united states has a lot more IPs per population than most of the rest of the world (does anyone have exact numbers for this?), so we'll be one of the last to run out, and therefore one of the last to adopt ipv6, which puts us in a very bad position.
A similar problem on a smaller scale is that those who own a lot of IPv4 addresses now have a competetive advantage over those who don't, and these are exactly the people (large ISPs, telco companies) who need to adopt IPv6 in order for it to take off. Their control of a scarce resource gives them a relative advantage against those who don't, so why would they ever want to cooperate to make that resource become non-scarce? It just isn't in their best interests.
Re:reason for, reason not for
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Blank Keyboard
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· Score: 1
Every so often I marvel at the adaptivity of the human nervous system, the way that I can just think a word and it appears on the screen without my having to pay attention to where my individual fingers go. It's the next best thing to mental telepathy.
What's even weirder is that after using dvorak for awhile, I could switch between qwerty and dvorak without conscious thought. I suppose it's not unlike being fluent in multiple languages (but since I'm not, I can only speculate).
Hardly. Have you ever gotten a merchant account? They are not easy to come by. The costs of setting it up would easily outweigh how much you can steal before they shut you down. And if you try to operate it semi-legitimately, be aware that chargebacks are shouldered by the merchant, not by the CC company.
That may be true but it's beside the point. They could have used public key crytography to make fraud as close to impossible as we know how to make it without physically stealing the card, but they didn't. Instead, they (as far as I can tell - I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this point -) designed a card that digitally signs and rebroadcasts any transaction anyone can transmit wirelessly to it, and they're trusting their ability to catch merchants that act fraudulently, and their trusting their users not to buy things then claim the transactions were fraudulent.
Using your merchant account fraudulantly would not only get your account revoked, but would most likely result in legal charges from the CC company.
So, in the end we still have to trust the merchant not to act fraudulently because they probably wouldn't get away with it. Sounds like the banks have lost a good chance to implement real security, and they decided to go with a useless feature instead.
Note that we're talking of a range of a few centimeters at most.
Wireless devices always work over longer distances than advertised. Unless the card is transmitting a random nonce that has to be repeated in the reply within a fraction of a nanosecond, I'm not going to believe that it won't work over significantly greater distances.
How does the card know that it's owner approves of a particular transaction? From the card's perspective, there's not much difference from running it past a walmart scanner and getting pickpocketted by a card reader with a high gain antenna from a hundred feet away. With a magnetic strip card (horribly insecure, but in different ways), running the card through a reader implies the user's consent, but if that's no longer required, there needs to be some other way to validate the owner's intent to conduct a transaction.
The only way I could see this being secure is if the card itself had a display with the dollar amount and recipient, and a yes/no button. Perhaps they have this, does anybody know?
So, some government agencies use unsecured wireless networks, and some people might even be leeching off of them for internet access. That might or might not be a real security issue, depending on if they're using their wireless network for sensitive applications and if those applications aren't using end-to-end encryption for their applications and if their wireless networks aren't firewalled away from the rest of their network. Perhaps the actual report describes the vulnerabilities in greater detail than this article, but I don't see how the mere presence of an unsecured wireless network is necessarily something to get worked up about.
Freenet may be good at anonymous information posting and retrieval, but it's pretty easy to tell when someone is running a freenet node. It may not be safe to draw attention to yourself by running freenet, even if the authorities can't tell what you're using it for.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can provide binaries that run on vanilla Windows XP or Knoppix and are capable of reading from stdin and writing to stdout, then as far as I can tell, that would be fine.
The programming contest is part of icfp (they usually announce the winner at the conference).
ibm: inferior but marketable, it's better manually
emacs: eight megs and constantly swapping (old joke from when that used to be a lot), escape-meta-alt-ctrl-shift
lisp: lots of irritating superfluous paretheses
perl: pathologically ecclectic rubbish lister
I used to think conservatives were the ones who stood for fiscal responsibility and small government with limited powers.
link (realaudio, wmp)
I think what you really want is public key digital signatures. You can get smart cards now that do 2048 bit RSA. Why trust the credit card companies to not store private information when the technology exists to authenticate your transactions without divulging any private information whatsoever?
This credit card account theft would not have occurred if we used smart cards capable of public key cryptography instead of numbers/passwords/passphrases/etc to authenticate our financial transactions. Ideally, the bank wouldn't even have to know your private key, which could be stored on a small device (such as a smart card).
Stealing a physical object (while this still may be a problem) is much harder than intercepting transactions on a trojaned server, where credit card numbers can be harvested millions at a time from companies that have little incentive to keep private data private.
Here's the whole list, if anyone is interested.
Yeah, I've had clostridium difficile (presumably from taking antibiotics), it's no fun. I'm glad to live in a country where people don't have such frequent cause to use antibiotics.
I've been to Indonesia briefly. If I remember correctly, one dollar translates to about 10,000 Rupies, which will buy you a pretty good meal just about anywhere, or an unreliable CD containing mp3s of every Bob Marley song ever recorded, or 10 packs of ramen (ramen costs the same everywhere in the world), or about 5 or 10 angkot rides, or more biskuat than you can eat in one sitting. I stayed a few days in a hotel in Batu Karas for about about $4-$5 a night for a room shared with a couple friends. You can buy antibiotics for about a dollar or so I believe.
I didn't see many computers there, so I don't know if Linux is very well established, but no one cares about piracy over there. The percieved cost of windows is about the same as the percieved cost of Linux: whatever it costs to get a burned copy from a street vendor. "Joe sixpack" is unlikely to own a computer (though TVs are very common), but if he does, he'll probably use whatever everyone else is using, which is probably Windows.
I didn't mind the graphics of the world (which looked very good in most places), but I didn't care for some of the character designs.
I didn't identify well with the main character. He was too young, he didn't handle a sword well, and his head was too spherical. I just couldn't picture him as a hero. I'm accustomed to imagining Link as early-teenage, not as a third grader.
The game world was too sparse. Even with warping, it took too long to get anywhere. The levels were good but there weren't very many of them.
I wouldn't say it was a bad game, just not quite as good as it could have been. I'm looking forward to the new Zelda, hoping it's as good as Ocarina of Time.
Theologians are unsure of the release schedule of this new earth, and what it's exact feature set and space requirements will be. Detractors of the new earth claim it is merely vaporware, or a superficial modification of the old earth, to which it's supporters accuse its detractors of spreading FUD. Jesus, lead developer of the new earth, has in prior interviews (Luke 13:31-32) stated that the release schedule is a closely guarded secret, unknown even to him. Those upset at griefers for explointing bugs in the current system cry "How long, O Lord?" (Rev 6:10)
- Real life
- Phd (perhaps not as funny to non grad students)
- Applegeeks
I would include megatokyo, but it has on average been more serious and less funny lately (though I still enjoy it, and you can browse the archives for older, funnier content).Here is a link to the documentation. The first section is a tutorial, the second is a reference for all of the povray features.
The language is very simple, yet includes programming language constructs like loops, variable assignment, and procedures (which can be recursive). Modelling by typing into a text file works suprising well for most things. I have two pieces of advice: 1) use graph paper for initial planning and 2) if you use the same number more than once, declare it as a variable rather than hardcoding it (it makes it easier to tweak the shape of complicated objects later).
Povray takes much longer than 24 hours to learn to use well, but you should be able to learn to program simple scenes with a camera, a light, and some geometry in a few hours.
Ah, but they have - but they're asking for IPv6 addresses, not IPv4 addresses.
Those who grabbed the most addresses when they were available suffer the least when the crunch comes - they just reallocate them more efficiently, and use NAT more aggressively. Countries with a very small IPv4 address per person ratio, on the other hand, will switch to IPv6.
One problem is that the united states has a lot more IPs per population than most of the rest of the world (does anyone have exact numbers for this?), so we'll be one of the last to run out, and therefore one of the last to adopt ipv6, which puts us in a very bad position.
A similar problem on a smaller scale is that those who own a lot of IPv4 addresses now have a competetive advantage over those who don't, and these are exactly the people (large ISPs, telco companies) who need to adopt IPv6 in order for it to take off. Their control of a scarce resource gives them a relative advantage against those who don't, so why would they ever want to cooperate to make that resource become non-scarce? It just isn't in their best interests.
The only way I could see this being secure is if the card itself had a display with the dollar amount and recipient, and a yes/no button. Perhaps they have this, does anybody know?
So, some government agencies use unsecured wireless networks, and some people might even be leeching off of them for internet access. That might or might not be a real security issue, depending on if they're using their wireless network for sensitive applications and if those applications aren't using end-to-end encryption for their applications and if their wireless networks aren't firewalled away from the rest of their network. Perhaps the actual report describes the vulnerabilities in greater detail than this article, but I don't see how the mere presence of an unsecured wireless network is necessarily something to get worked up about.
Freenet may be good at anonymous information posting and retrieval, but it's pretty easy to tell when someone is running a freenet node. It may not be safe to draw attention to yourself by running freenet, even if the authorities can't tell what you're using it for.