But the exact "value" of c, in relation to other transfinite cardinals was not determined. In particular, its relationship to Aleph1 (which I believe is the cardinality of the power set of Aleph0) is formally undecidable.
You're pretty close there. But not quite. The cardinality of the power set of Aleph0 is C (the cardinality of the set of all real numbers). Put simply, Aleph 1 is the cardinal that comes right after Aleph0. C looked like a pretty good candidate for some time. C is a cardinal, and it comes after Aleph0. The question was, does it come right after Aleph0, or is there another cardinal in between Aleph0 and C? If my memory serves me right, an American named Cohen proved that you cannot answer 'yes' or 'no' to this question within an axiomatic system like ZFC (Zermelo-Frenkel plus the axiom of choice.)
Now, in my role as a legal historian concerned with the secular (that is, very long term) development of legal thought, I claim that legal regimes based on sharp but unpredictable distinctions among similar objects are radically unstable.
If you don't have the time to look it up, here is a brief definition for you:
axiologyThe study of the nature of values and value judgments.
Most of this thread can be divided up into two categories neatly:
MySQL rocks.
MySQL sucks.
What some people neglect to do before posting their comments is ask themselves two questions: It rocks for whom/what? It sucks for whom/what?
To begin with, Ben Adida never claimed that MySQL sucked for everyone/everything. His point was, they were getting tired of being asked the same question over and over again: Why does ACS not use MySQL, when everybody else and his sister seem to be using it? His answer to that is very simple. For the kind of stuff that OpenACS and ArsDigita do, MySQL is an alternative to Oracle like Photoshop is an alternative to PostgreSQL.
Ben never said MySQL wouldn't work for YOU.
To repeat, Ben is not trying to convince you that you shouldn't be using MySQL for your project, because he doesn't know what your project is. All he is saying, he has darn good reasons not to use MySQL for his project. Why do people feel they have to take issue with that, if they don't even know what OpenACS is trying to accomplish. Why don't they shut down their computer and take a break to read a few books on axiology for a change?
I am still afraid that I come into a Makefile someday that holds the line:
install: rm -rf/
Is this not a virus?
No, this not a virus. It is nothing more than a malicious program/script. A virus is a self-reproducing piece of code. It doesn't have to be hostile. But it does have to be able to self-propagate. Otherwise it is not a virus.
I don't know about you but I frequently find myself wanting to be able to track my steps back to the moment just before I screwed something up, so I can figure out exactly what it was that I did wrong. Sometimes, it's the other way around. I do something right by accident, and I want to have a way of backtracking my steps.
To elaborate, have you ever used a feature-rich program like Emacs? Have you ever had the experience of hitting Ctrl-X-Ctrl-B by accident and going, "Wow, how did I do that?"
I am sure that as a highly creative individual that you may be, you could come up with at least three other examples where the backtracking capability would be nothing short of a blessing, now couldn't you?
That's a nice idea and has been suggested by other people in the top thread, except I am not bent on fucking up DoubleClick's database. All I care about is that my personal profile is fubar.
There are countless other banner ad companies besides DoubleClick, and you can't fight them all the way you propose. That would take too much effort. On the other hand, it would be relatively easy to add a fuck-'em-up option to the IDcide software that would do it for you automatically along the lines I speculated in the parent post without your having to lift a finger.
Sure, most people would be too lazy and/or clueless to use such an option but then again, I am not on a crusade to dismantle DoubleClick or the likes of it.
Why not go one step further? If companies like DoubleClick want to collect information on you through cookies, let them.
One thing I imagine you could is actively contaminate the personal information that they are managing to collect on you. How would you do that? You could set up a shared cookie repository somewhere on the web. Everytime a banner network plants a cookie on your machine, you could submit it to the repository. Everytime you are about to send a cookie back to the same banner network, you would get grab someone else's cookie from the repository and send it to the unsuspecting banner ad server.
To reiterate, if you were to send your Aunt Susie's cookie to DoubleClick everytime their banner ad displays on your page, you would contaminate Aunt Susie's personal profile in the DoubleClick database.
If a lot of people were to cooperate in this way, they could render their personal profiles totally useless to advertisers, because the signal to noise ratio would be very low.
Your email contact address for your DNS details should *not* be in the same domain as your site. If you wish to change your DNS details the email request **must** come from the address registered for that domain. If your domain is down and the registered email contact is in that domain then you can find yourself in the situation of neither being able to access your site nor being able to move it!
Not nessecarily true. Last time I checked (circa 1997), InterNIC used to provide several levels of authentication. The simplest is to rely on the return address. If a request to change domain registration info comes from an address other than the one listed for the domain admin, then the request is ignored. That's the simplest scenario. However, you can choose password based authentication. This way it doesn't matter from which email address your request comes. As long as you provide the right password, you can change your domain registration info.
Make a site and browser plugin software that manages users bookmarks accross the web. I have 4 browsers each with their own bookmarks. The user logs into your "Portal" sees ads ($$$) and gets his/her bookmarks centrally located. As extra $$$, (and a privacy taboo) data mine the users bookmarks and sell the info for demographic moolah.
Damn, I've been meaning to take this idea commercial for quite some time now. There are actually a couple of sites out there that do that already but the implementation sucks. Another twist that I wanted to add is collaborative filtering. You know, if your bookmarks are mostly like mine, then you'd probably be interested to look at some of my bookmarks that you don't have yet. Also you could set things up such that your users can earn karma points, and those with a lot of karma will have their bookmarks propagate faster through collaborative filtering. Karma points may be based on how technically savvy a user is. If you provide a number of increasingly complex features, then those users who utilize all the complex features on your site to their fullest potential are obviously more experienced. Therefore, their bookmarks are probably worth looking at, and should trickle down the collaborative filters faster than an average Joe's pathetic bookmarks.
I'm not sure a browser plugin is such a great idea though. Why would you want to discriminate against users with non-MSIE or non-Netscape browsers?
The speed of light through any medium is less than the speed of light in a vacuum. Sometimes light can be made to travel through a medium faster than it's natural rate. This results in a nifty "light shockwave" which I believe is called cherenkov radiation.
Light cannot be made travel through a medium faster than its natural rate. A subatomic particle can be made travel faster than the speed of the light in that medium. When that happens, you get the Cherenkov effect.
To quote from another piece of writing by Nikolai Bezroukov,
one can think about Richard Stallman as Karl Marx, Linux Torvalds as Lenin and Eric Raymond as Trotsky:-)
The smiley is in the original.
In one of the earlier posts, someone asked about Mr. Bezroukov's credentials. I think the questioon would be best answered by pointing to the site http://www.softpanorama.org/
I wonder what would happen if next time one of these elite haxxor dudes hacks into a website, they tried to impersonate JP? Like, you know, they would put VP's "fingerprints" all over the place. Things like web design and graphics style are extremely easy to imitate. Admittedly, JP's sloppy pseudo-educated English is a bit harder to mimic, but that shouldn't be too difficult either.
Yeah, and don't forget to put all those award banners his site earned at the bottom of the hacked page!
I've seen a lot of criticism posted here. Things are not as bad as many posters would like you to imagine. The proggy is quite usable. Just make sure to encrypt all your HardEncrypt'ed messages with PGP and you will be OK. So, it has to be a two-step process:
Use HardEncrypt to encrypt your message.
Re-encrypt the message obtained at Step 1 with PGP.
I challenge anyone demostrate that this modified scheme is insecure. There are two main reasons why you can safely eliminate Step 1. Number one, many of the previous posts have successfully demonstrated, beyond any reasonable doubt, the author of HardEncrypt to lack necessary crypto expertise. Number two, even if he'd had that expertise, OTP schemes are not practical anyway. To elaborate, consider the following points:
Audio files are not random. Good one-time pads are generated using machines based on nuclear radioactive decay. This process is believed - but not known! - to be truly random (whatever that means) or, at least, unpredictable. Audio files don't even come close.
Key management is a bitch. It always it. With HardEncrypt, it is a bitch of epic proportions, all clueless comments to the contrary notwithstanding.
C'mon guys, get real! Are we engaged in a theoretical discourse here, or are we discussing a practical matter? The theoretical aspect of this discussion was closed long time ago. The verdict? Truly random one-time pads provide for unbreakable encryption. Note that all comments made Roblimo about NP-hardness, NP-completeness, or undecidability of the problem are irrelevant, as one of AC's rigthly pointed out. So much for the theoretical foundation.
As a practical matter, who do you think is going to try decrypt your piddly emails? For any organization but NSA and its international counterparts, as well as some major corporations, the task of cryptanalysing your PGP-encrypted mail is well beyond its budget. Now, try to think in terms cost-benefit analysis. For all intents and purposes, if any powerful institution were ever to get really curious about the contents of your emails, it would be much cheaper for them to ask you nicely to surrender the key. I mean, real nicely.
The bottom line is, use PGP and get a copy of Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier, if you haven't already done so.
Slashdot Mirror
You're pretty close there. But not quite. The cardinality of the power set of Aleph0 is C (the cardinality of the set of all real numbers). Put simply, Aleph 1 is the cardinal that comes right after Aleph0. C looked like a pretty good candidate for some time. C is a cardinal, and it comes after Aleph0. The question was, does it come right after Aleph0, or is there another cardinal in between Aleph0 and C? If my memory serves me right, an American named Cohen proved that you cannot answer 'yes' or 'no' to this question within an axiomatic system like ZFC (Zermelo-Frenkel plus the axiom of choice.)
To lift a quote from Anarchism Triumphant by Eben Moglen,
If you don't have the time to look it up, here is a brief definition for you:
Most of this thread can be divided up into two categories neatly:
What some people neglect to do before posting their comments is ask themselves two questions: It rocks for whom/what? It sucks for whom/what?
To begin with, Ben Adida never claimed that MySQL sucked for everyone/everything. His point was, they were getting tired of being asked the same question over and over again: Why does ACS not use MySQL, when everybody else and his sister seem to be using it? His answer to that is very simple. For the kind of stuff that OpenACS and ArsDigita do, MySQL is an alternative to Oracle like Photoshop is an alternative to PostgreSQL.
Ben never said MySQL wouldn't work for YOU.
To repeat, Ben is not trying to convince you that you shouldn't be using MySQL for your project, because he doesn't know what your project is. All he is saying, he has darn good reasons not to use MySQL for his project. Why do people feel they have to take issue with that, if they don't even know what OpenACS is trying to accomplish. Why don't they shut down their computer and take a break to read a few books on axiology for a change?
No, this not a virus. It is nothing more than a malicious program/script. A virus is a self-reproducing piece of code. It doesn't have to be hostile. But it does have to be able to self-propagate. Otherwise it is not a virus.
I don't know about you but I frequently find myself wanting to be able to track my steps back to the moment just before I screwed something up, so I can figure out exactly what it was that I did wrong. Sometimes, it's the other way around. I do something right by accident, and I want to have a way of backtracking my steps.
To elaborate, have you ever used a feature-rich program like Emacs? Have you ever had the experience of hitting Ctrl-X-Ctrl-B by accident and going, "Wow, how did I do that?"
I am sure that as a highly creative individual that you may be, you could come up with at least three other examples where the backtracking capability would be nothing short of a blessing, now couldn't you?
That's a nice idea and has been suggested by other people in the top thread, except I am not bent on fucking up DoubleClick's database. All I care about is that my personal profile is fubar.
There are countless other banner ad companies besides DoubleClick, and you can't fight them all the way you propose. That would take too much effort. On the other hand, it would be relatively easy to add a fuck-'em-up option to the IDcide software that would do it for you automatically along the lines I speculated in the parent post without your having to lift a finger.
Sure, most people would be too lazy and/or clueless to use such an option but then again, I am not on a crusade to dismantle DoubleClick or the likes of it.
Why not go one step further? If companies like DoubleClick want to collect information on you through cookies, let them.
One thing I imagine you could is actively contaminate the personal information that they are managing to collect on you. How would you do that? You could set up a shared cookie repository somewhere on the web. Everytime a banner network plants a cookie on your machine, you could submit it to the repository. Everytime you are about to send a cookie back to the same banner network, you would get grab someone else's cookie from the repository and send it to the unsuspecting banner ad server.
To reiterate, if you were to send your Aunt Susie's cookie to DoubleClick everytime their banner ad displays on your page, you would contaminate Aunt Susie's personal profile in the DoubleClick database.
If a lot of people were to cooperate in this way, they could render their personal profiles totally useless to advertisers, because the signal to noise ratio would be very low.
Not nessecarily true. Last time I checked (circa 1997), InterNIC used to provide several levels of authentication. The simplest is to rely on the return address. If a request to change domain registration info comes from an address other than the one listed for the domain admin, then the request is ignored. That's the simplest scenario. However, you can choose password based authentication. This way it doesn't matter from which email address your request comes. As long as you provide the right password, you can change your domain registration info.
Damn, I've been meaning to take this idea commercial for quite some time now. There are actually a couple of sites out there that do that already but the implementation sucks. Another twist that I wanted to add is collaborative filtering. You know, if your bookmarks are mostly like mine, then you'd probably be interested to look at some of my bookmarks that you don't have yet. Also you could set things up such that your users can earn karma points, and those with a lot of karma will have their bookmarks propagate faster through collaborative filtering. Karma points may be based on how technically savvy a user is. If you provide a number of increasingly complex features, then those users who utilize all the complex features on your site to their fullest potential are obviously more experienced. Therefore, their bookmarks are probably worth looking at, and should trickle down the collaborative filters faster than an average Joe's pathetic bookmarks.
I'm not sure a browser plugin is such a great idea though. Why would you want to discriminate against users with non-MSIE or non-Netscape browsers?
Light cannot be made travel through a medium faster than its natural rate. A subatomic particle can be made travel faster than the speed of the light in that medium. When that happens, you get the Cherenkov effect.
The smiley is in the original.
In one of the earlier posts, someone asked about Mr. Bezroukov's credentials. I think the questioon would be best answered by pointing to the site http://www.softpanorama.org/
I wonder what would happen if next time one of these elite haxxor dudes hacks into a website, they tried to impersonate JP? Like, you know, they would put VP's "fingerprints" all over the place. Things like web design and graphics style are extremely easy to imitate. Admittedly, JP's sloppy pseudo-educated English is a bit harder to mimic, but that shouldn't be too difficult either.
Yeah, and don't forget to put all those award banners his site earned at the bottom of the hacked page!
What do you guys think?
I challenge anyone demostrate that this modified scheme is insecure.
There are two main reasons why you can safely eliminate Step 1. Number one, many of the previous posts have successfully demonstrated, beyond any reasonable doubt, the author of HardEncrypt to lack necessary crypto expertise. Number two, even if he'd had that expertise, OTP schemes are not practical anyway. To elaborate, consider the following points:
Are we engaged in a theoretical discourse here, or are we discussing a practical matter? The theoretical aspect of this discussion was closed long time ago. The verdict? Truly random one-time pads provide for unbreakable encryption. Note that all comments made Roblimo about NP-hardness, NP-completeness, or undecidability of the problem are irrelevant, as one of AC's rigthly pointed out. So much for the theoretical foundation.
As a practical matter, who do you think is going to try decrypt your piddly emails? For any organization but NSA and its international counterparts, as well as some major corporations, the task of cryptanalysing your PGP-encrypted mail is well beyond its budget. Now, try to think in terms cost-benefit analysis. For all intents and purposes, if any powerful institution were ever to get really curious about the contents of your emails, it would be much cheaper for them to ask you nicely to surrender the key. I mean, real nicely.
The bottom line is, use PGP and get a copy of Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier, if you haven't already done so.