Infact, christians were not put to death in the Roman colosseum - at least not unless they also happened to be gladiators, criminals or beggars.
They *were*, however, systematically put to death in the circus maximus down the road, amongst other places.
There is a large cross in the colosseum to honour cristian martyrs, and I belive that a pope has declared it sacred ground, based on the same misunderstanding.
Your assertion that religion had a lot to do with renaissance science does not paint the full picture. Infact early reanaissance men such as Brunelleschi and Leonardo were a lot more influenced by ancient greek humanist philosophers & mathematicians than by the church - at least as far as their breakthroughs in science, art and architecture goes.
Of course, the church wielded considerable money and influence, and so were able to support many early renaissance triumphs. Just look at Florence cathedral - 1436 - the largest dome built since roman times. It would not have been possible without the "rediscovery" of Euclidian geometry, trigenometry and mathematics.
Even hundreds of years later, astronomers were unable to openly argue the humanist view that the earth revolved around the sun because of the very real fear of disfavour from the church.
So here we have a fairly common picture - the church provides the money, but the renaissance men take their influences from humanists. It is the combination that proved fertile ground for rapid technological advance.
Yes, I'll agree to that. Anyway, part of the development methodology of a professional coder is a "peer review". This means others examine your code for this kind of thing.
Anyone who is a professional coder and does not write module test code *AND* participate in peer review is cheating both themselves and their employer.
This becomes more and more critical as the scale and complexity of the software increases. - Oh yes - I mean all languages, not just C
You may have a good point about where the money is going,b ut by this logic, I should be able to go into my local BMW dealer and help myself to a Z3 convertible, 'cause although I want it, I'm not going to buy one.
You are missing the point that if anything is being stolen at all, it is information. You are not within your rights to demand a BMW from the dealer, but you are within your rights to look at it really closely in a dealership, and then try to make one in your backyard. And furthermore, if you succeed in making one, you can tell your friends how you did it.
There is a grain of truth in your argument that profitable artists subsidise non-profitable ones, but the insisputable fact is that record companies are in it for themselves.
Yes, they screw the artists because it's more profitable to do it than not to, and they are effectively a cartel.
Everyone should read what Courtney Love has to say about it from her personal experience:
Traditionally the big traditional telco manufacturers - AT&T, Nortel, Ericsson, Alcatel,... - manufactured their own hardware and wrote their own software to run the stuff. This includes proprietary real time OS's and hardware drivers. Newer players in the router market, eg Cisco, Xedia, etc. do as well.
These days the old manufacturers are integrating commodity hardware with their proprietry hardware.
There are some very low end PABX applications running on commodity PCs, but the main game in big back-end switching and routing is still commodity, and probably will always be so, because you just can't switch or route calls or packets fast enough on a general purpose computer, in all but trivial cases.
I would assume that subtelty is a prerequisite for an attempt to affect the result of an election in a country with a strong rule of law.
The more people that Evil Overlord (tm) tries to illegally coerce, the more chances there are that the story might make the front page of the newspaper. And hence the courts might just force a rerun of the ballot.
Of course, this did not happen in Zimbabwe recently, despite independent observers saying that coercion was widespread. It seems that in practice the courts in that country are not independent of the government in any meaningful way. Or perhaps noone challenged the result.
Nothing is stopping you in principle for weilding your Nerf Supermaxx, but you won't be able to do it enough times to affect the result of the ballot in a stastically significant way.
As others have already said, the risk with computer based voting is that if you can write nerf_supermaxx.java , to frig with the database, you can affect many more people than you can in person.
The body who governs the election could even digitally sign the source code, the compiler & environment to be used (in advance,) and then anyone can re-make the voting software and verify that their binary matches the one being used via checksum.
Yes, this is correct because in a standard simple for loop like this example, we throw away the result of the pre or post increment.
ie. what i++ is really saying is
tmp = i; i = i + 1; return tmp;
(and then throw away the return value)
Similarly, what ++i is really saying is
i = i + 1; return &i
(and then thow away the return value)
So, for simple types, ++i and i++ are the same, if we ignore the returned value.
This is also the reason that ++i is preferred over i++ (for almost all uses) because postfix increment boils down to an assignment operator, a copy constructor and an increment, whereas the prefix version just boils down to an increment.
Good job our superuser didn't run it on his account 'just to see what it did' Ours Did!!! Ha Ha Ha. All the engineers are killing themselves laughing....
Did anyone notice that the smaller, broken cypher was encoded using alphabetic substitution, but each word was reversed.
"....Another clue was taken from Tyler's correspondence to Poe in which he discussed the difficulty of deciphering text that was written backwards ("eht", rather than "the"), and spaces and punctuation are omitted."
We should not rule this out when/if attempting a brute force dictionary attack.
Secondly, all symbols in use seem to be in one of 8 alphabets:
* upper/lower case * small/normal size * right/upside down
What about reading off the characters in each of the alphabets, (ignoring spaces & other alphabets), to create a stream of "normalised" characters. ie. start reading all upper/small/right, then upper/small/upsidedown, etc. From there, attack the concatenated stream as an alphabetic substitution cypher, allowing reversed words.
Of course, we don't know which order to do the alphabets in.
Hmmm. in the best Bletchley Park tradition, we could run all arrangements of 8 character streams in parallel.
The enigma machine was cracked by the British working in Bletchley Park (sp?) outside London. To be precise, the variant of the machine with 3 rotating tumblers and a patch board was cracked. There were other variants which were not cracked.
This is approximately how it was done:
1. The French obtained through espoinage in the early days of the war an instruction book of how to use the machine. After the French and British were not able to find anything in it to significantly assist their attacks on the enigma, the book eventually found its way to a Polish team of scientists.
2. One Polish guy had an insight on a weakness which had eluded others studying it. This weakness was a combination of the enigma design and the German standard operating procedure. The team passed the work on to the British because (a) they couldn't continue in Poland, and (b) the weakness still required a lot of brute-force checking - ie. automation was required. The British had Turing et. al. working for them. (c) the German codes changed every day, so this attack had to be run on the first interceptions of the day, every day, to be able to read the rest of the day's messages.
3. UNKNOWN TO THE ENGINEERS/MATHEMATICIANS, some code books for particular months were captured. The "management" decided to keep this info from the engineers, and to persist with the daily automated cracking as a defence against the majority of the time when they didn't have the books of keys.
So in summary, the cracking of the enigma machine was the result of a clever mathematical insight, and operational predictability to do with the initial alignment of the tumblers. This made possible a brute force attack, which was automated with banks of electro-mechanical "computers".
Most Australian notes already have holograms on them, and also little plastic windows, with part of the design printed on one side of the window, and the other part printer on the other side.
This means that the allignment error of the printing on both sides of each note must be say 0.1 mm.
This is an extra headache for the would be counterfeiter.
Can I please ask you a question (I am asking this without sarcasm; it is just a simple request for a considered answer)
Do you think that the Jewish nation dwell on the past too much? I agree that it is good to undestand the history of your people, but isn't there also a time to just get on with life and look to the future?
Does suffering in previous generations ever justify actions in the present? I could also ask this of a citizen of the Balkans.
The thrust of the article was really an argument in favour of component based software architectures rather than GPL'd software.
[by "component model", I mean a software architecture which would allow the user to build or buy components which would plug in to an application.]
You don't want MS Bob in your word processor? fine - dont buy the plug in. You want a grammar checker which understands Finnish? Fine buy it and plug it in, or write it yourself.
Binary distributions will protect property while R&D expenditure is recouped.
It is, however, a good point in the article that customers are given no opportunity to fix y2k bugs without buying the latest complete product. This is resolved either by just upgrading the date related plug ins, or (better) if the source is available, simply fixing this.
The alternate argument is that the nanobot designers are going to design 'bots which can run on fuel found where they are likely to be deployed. This almost surely means either (a) inside the human body or (b) in some domestic household scene.
Hence they _must_ be designed to run (and replicate) on 'fuel' which is availalbe in those environments. This hardly qualifies as exotic fuel, bringing us back to the grey goo nightmare scenario.
I agree that replication on a truly massive scale should be easily detectable. But it might be too late by then.
Watching the interview, I certainly got the impression that Bill was mostly just talking up the industry. Much time was spent on how wonderful the information age is, how the use of MS products have liberated people and ideas, because it has lowered the cost of entry to publishing.
Most of this is true to an extent. (flameproof suit is on)
My point is that MS is in such a commanding position that Bill doesn't have to promote MS. He just has to promote the industry, and he will automatically get 90% of the benefit.
This is an important concept which dominant companies in many industries use in their advertising campaigns. For example, the Budweiser beer company in the US has such a dominant market position that they spend advertising dollars talking up the beer industry. Sometimes they don't even mention their product name. They know that an increase in the amount of beer sold in the US will benefit them more than their competition.
So how MS came to be in their dominant position is only really of academic interest. What will really hurt them is when others eat into their dominant position - hence this type of pseudo-advertising doesn't work anymore. Then they have to start competing on features per $.
Jeremy had an opening to make this point, but missed it.
Slashdot Mirror
Use a hand held GPS - there are models which have london maps built in.
Ok history meister.
Infact, christians were not put to death in the Roman colosseum - at least not unless they also happened to be gladiators, criminals or beggars.
They *were*, however, systematically put to death in the circus maximus down the road, amongst other places.
There is a large cross in the colosseum to honour cristian martyrs, and I belive that a pope has declared it sacred ground, based on the same misunderstanding.
Your assertion that religion had a lot to do with renaissance science does not paint the full picture. Infact early reanaissance men such as Brunelleschi and Leonardo were a lot more influenced by ancient greek humanist philosophers & mathematicians than by the church - at least as far as their breakthroughs in science, art and architecture goes.
Of course, the church wielded considerable money and influence, and so were able to support many early renaissance triumphs. Just look at Florence cathedral - 1436 - the largest dome built since roman times. It would not have been possible without the "rediscovery" of Euclidian geometry, trigenometry and mathematics.
Even hundreds of years later, astronomers were unable to openly argue the humanist view that the earth revolved around the sun because of the very real fear of disfavour from the church.
So here we have a fairly common picture - the church provides the money, but the renaissance men take their influences from humanists. It is the combination that proved fertile ground for rapid technological advance.
That's nothing. I used a:
* cardboard box
* no screen
* Rubber band for power, using a trained mouse on a cartwheel
* storage was limited to the memory of the mouse.
Oh wait - that was my sister's pet cage, not my computer.
Yes, I'll agree to that. Anyway, part of the development methodology of a professional coder is a "peer review". This means others examine your code for this kind of thing.
Anyone who is a professional coder and does not write module test code *AND* participate in peer review is cheating both themselves and their employer.
This becomes more and more critical as the scale and complexity of the software increases. - Oh yes - I mean all languages, not just C
You are missing the point that if anything is being stolen at all, it is information. You are not within your rights to demand a BMW from the dealer, but you are within your rights to look at it really closely in a dealership, and then try to make one in your backyard. And furthermore, if you succeed in making one, you can tell your friends how you did it.
I agree: I have been using helix-GNOME for about a month, and it is solid as a rock. And it is real eye candy.
Well, they were talking about both the web ( URLs, documents, etc ) and the internet ( routers, interfaces )
There are 3rd party tools which will allow you to configure many routers and many types of routers with from one GUI.
ie. the translation of the user's command (via the GUI) to the actual Cisco/Bay/Xedia/etc. commands is automatically done by driver software.
This makes rolling out an access list update trivial.
There is a grain of truth in your argument that profitable artists subsidise non-profitable ones, but the insisputable fact is that record companies are in it for themselves.
Yes, they screw the artists because it's more profitable to do it than not to, and they are effectively a cartel.
Everyone should read what Courtney Love has to say about it from her personal experience:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/14/love/ index.html
Bzzzt. Wrong.
... - manufactured their own hardware and wrote their own software to run the stuff. This includes proprietary real time OS's and hardware drivers. Newer players in the router market, eg Cisco, Xedia, etc. do as well.
Traditionally the big traditional telco manufacturers - AT&T, Nortel, Ericsson, Alcatel,
These days the old manufacturers are integrating commodity hardware with their proprietry hardware.
There are some very low end PABX applications running on commodity PCs, but the main game in big back-end switching and routing is still commodity, and probably will always be so, because you just can't switch or route calls or packets fast enough on a general purpose computer, in all but trivial cases.
Or perhaps even better would be to omit the comma completely;
I nearly went blind finishing the story.
I would assume that subtelty is a prerequisite for an attempt to affect the result of an election in a country with a strong rule of law.
The more people that Evil Overlord (tm) tries to illegally coerce, the more chances there are that the story might make the front page of the newspaper. And hence the courts might just force a rerun of the ballot.
Of course, this did not happen in Zimbabwe recently, despite independent observers saying that coercion was widespread. It seems that in practice the courts in that country are not independent of the government in any meaningful way. Or perhaps noone challenged the result.
Nothing is stopping you in principle for weilding your Nerf Supermaxx, but you won't be able to do it enough times to affect the result of the ballot in a stastically significant way.
As others have already said, the risk with computer based voting is that if you can write nerf_supermaxx.java , to frig with the database, you can affect many more people than you can in person.
So open source the voting software. Sheesh.
The body who governs the election could even digitally sign the source code, the compiler & environment to be used (in advance,) and then anyone can re-make the voting software and verify that their binary matches the one being used via checksum.
Yes, this is correct because in a standard simple for loop like this example, we throw away the result of the pre or post increment.
ie. what i++ is really saying is
tmp = i;
i = i + 1;
return tmp;
(and then throw away the return value)
Similarly, what ++i is really saying is
i = i + 1;
return &i
(and then thow away the return value)
So, for simple types, ++i and i++ are the same, if we ignore the returned value.
This is also the reason that ++i is preferred over i++ (for almost all uses) because postfix increment boils down to an assignment operator, a copy constructor and an increment, whereas the prefix version just boils down to an increment.
Good job our superuser didn't run it on his account 'just to see what it did' Ours Did!!! Ha Ha Ha. All the engineers are killing themselves laughing....
Did anyone notice that the smaller, broken cypher was encoded using alphabetic substitution, but each word was reversed.
"....Another clue was taken from Tyler's correspondence to Poe in which he discussed the difficulty of deciphering text that was written backwards ("eht", rather than "the"), and spaces and punctuation are omitted."
We should not rule this out when/if attempting a brute force dictionary attack.
Secondly, all symbols in use seem to be in one of 8 alphabets:
* upper/lower case
* small/normal size
* right/upside down
What about reading off the characters in each of the alphabets, (ignoring spaces & other alphabets), to create a stream of "normalised" characters. ie. start reading all upper/small/right, then upper/small/upsidedown, etc. From there, attack the concatenated stream as an alphabetic substitution cypher, allowing reversed words.
Of course, we don't know which order to do the alphabets in.
Hmmm. in the best Bletchley Park tradition, we could run all arrangements of 8 character streams in parallel.
The enigma machine was cracked by the British working in Bletchley Park (sp?) outside London. To be precise, the variant of the machine with 3 rotating tumblers and a patch board was cracked. There were other variants which were not cracked.
This is approximately how it was done:
1. The French obtained through espoinage in the early days of the war an instruction book of how to use the machine. After the French and British were not able to find anything in it to significantly assist their attacks on the enigma, the book eventually found its way to a Polish team of scientists.
2. One Polish guy had an insight on a weakness which had eluded others studying it. This weakness was a combination of the enigma design and the German standard operating procedure. The team passed the work on to the British because (a) they couldn't continue in Poland, and (b) the weakness still required a lot of brute-force checking - ie. automation was required. The British had Turing et. al. working for them. (c) the German codes changed every day, so this attack had to be run on the first interceptions of the day, every day, to be able to read the rest of the day's messages.
3. UNKNOWN TO THE ENGINEERS/MATHEMATICIANS, some code books for particular months were captured. The "management" decided to keep this info from the engineers, and to persist with the daily automated cracking as a defence against the majority of the time when they didn't have the books of keys.
So in summary, the cracking of the enigma machine was the result of a clever mathematical insight, and operational predictability to do with the initial alignment of the tumblers. This made possible a brute force attack, which was automated with banks of electro-mechanical "computers".
Most Australian notes already have holograms on them, and also little plastic windows, with part of the design printed on one side of the window, and the other part printer on the other side.
This means that the allignment error of the printing on both sides of each note must be say 0.1 mm.
This is an extra headache for the would be counterfeiter.
Can I please ask you a question (I am asking this without sarcasm; it is just a simple request for a considered answer)
Do you think that the Jewish nation dwell on the past too much? I agree that it is good to undestand the history of your people, but isn't there also a time to just get on with life and look to the future?
Does suffering in previous generations ever justify actions in the present? I could also ask this of a citizen of the Balkans.
The thrust of the article was really an argument in favour of component based software architectures rather than GPL'd software.
[by "component model", I mean a software architecture which would allow the user to build or buy components which would plug in to an application.]
You don't want MS Bob in your word processor? fine - dont buy the plug in. You want a grammar checker which understands Finnish? Fine buy it and plug it in, or write it yourself.
Binary distributions will protect property while R&D expenditure is recouped.
It is, however, a good point in the article that customers are given no opportunity to fix y2k bugs without buying the latest complete product. This is resolved either by just upgrading the date related plug ins, or (better) if the source is available, simply fixing this.
The alternate argument is that the nanobot designers are going to design 'bots which can run on fuel found where they are likely to be deployed. This almost surely means either (a) inside the human body or (b) in some domestic household scene.
Hence they _must_ be designed to run (and replicate) on 'fuel' which is availalbe in those environments. This hardly qualifies as exotic fuel, bringing us back to the grey goo nightmare scenario.
I agree that replication on a truly massive scale should be easily detectable. But it might be too late by then.
"...oh look, the horse has bolted..."
Watching the interview, I certainly got the impression that Bill was mostly just talking up the industry. Much time was spent on how wonderful the information age is, how the use of MS products have liberated people and ideas, because it has lowered the cost of entry to publishing.
Most of this is true to an extent. (flameproof suit is on)
My point is that MS is in such a commanding position that Bill doesn't have to promote MS. He just has to promote the industry, and he will automatically get 90% of the benefit.
This is an important concept which dominant companies in many industries use in their advertising campaigns. For example, the Budweiser beer company in the US has such a dominant market position that they spend advertising dollars talking up the beer industry. Sometimes they don't even mention their product name. They know that an increase in the amount of beer sold in the US will benefit them more than their competition.
So how MS came to be in their dominant position is only really of academic interest. What will really hurt them is when others eat into their dominant position - hence this type of pseudo-advertising doesn't work anymore. Then they have to start competing on features per $.
Jeremy had an opening to make this point, but missed it.
or is that Barrapunted?