Firstly, a lot of software out there still has password length limits, sometimes silently discarding additional characters. You will still need ordinary passwords now and then.
Secondly, no normal human will type a five, six or more words passphrase every time they want to unlock their screen. They will do it for three days while they're hyped on how secure they are now, and then it'll become something they hate, and then they'll change it back to "123".
Thirdly, this is a bit more tricky, the real world security of almost every password scheme I've come across in 15 years of IT security experience is several orders of magnitude lower than the mathematical assumption. Because we consistently forget to take the human factor into account. Maybe some extreme nerds will actually follow this guideline, more normal people will discard words they can't remember for words they can, change things "a little" for convenience, and generally sabotage the whole system without even realizing it. It's the same as with passwords, all over again. Yes, on paper, a password has on the order of 10^16 possible combinations. But in reality, taking into account how people actually choose passwords (even ignoring the whole "password" and "123456" problem!) the actual diversity is more on the order of 10^9. Same here. You think using dice removes the human factor. omg do you underestimate humans!
This is right, but depends a lot on your threat scenario. For many applications where security really matters, both online and offline cracking are by far not the biggest risks.
In fact, they're ridiculous. I've given a couple presentations on password strength, and password meters are to password strength what the TSA is for air travel security - a better-than-nothing baseline approach that is mostly for show.
The problem is that we have nothing better to offer at this time, even though most security experts agree that passwords are a solution whose time is over.
For example when faced with the decision to crash into a pedestrian or another vehicle carrying a family, it would be a challenge for a self-driving car to follow the same moral reasoning a human would in the situation
Or maybe it would follow better moral reasoning. Ours is not perfect, it's just whatever evolution came up with that gave us the best species survival rates. That doesn't mean it's really the most ethical solution. For example, in a post-feminist society, let's assume for arguments sake that gender discrimination has been overcome, wouldn't we also do away with "women and children first" - which is a suitable survival approach in a species fighting for survival in the african prairie, but hardly for the dominant species that already is overpopulated.
There is no right to create a hostile working environment for women.
You are right. There's no reason to make boob-grabbing a sport at work, or install under-table cameras and post the up-skirt shots in the Intranet. There's no reason to announce publicly the menstruation periods of every girl in the office, or enforce a dresscode that ignores female anatomy. Definitely sex should not be a condition for promotion, and meetings should not start with blowjob requests, made in order of beauty to the attending women. Likewise, putting a single toilet for women into the basement while having men toilets everywhere.
Oh wait, you were talking about a software joke project on some random Internet site that nobody is forced to visit or even know about? Yeah, that definitely is the dictionary case for "hostile working environment".
the entire back office being papered over with pinups
That's absolutely the same as a random Internet site that nobody... why am I wasting my time here, a monkey would see the difference.
Half the world doesn't understand why blowing people to pieces is afternoon TV, but showing kids the same nipple that they sucked on a few years before is a national scandal.
Let's live in a perfectly politically correct world where our jokes, every sentence we speak and every message we write is controlled by the thought police.
And I say that as someone who was bullied at school. But here's the point: There's harassment, which has a victim and there's jokes about a class the size of half the worlds population and either you are incredibly insecure or unbelievably egomaniac to consider yourself the individual target.
Every real woman I've met in my life laughs about jokes that ridicule women in general the same way that I laugh about jokes where guys in general are the target. These jokes are funny exactly because they contain a piece of truth.
Everything, taken to extremes, is evil. That includes feminism, no-harassment policies and political correctness. No, wait. That last one is evil from the start.
Firstly, the general feeling that Postgres is engineered and designed and not cobbled together.
Secondly, support for non-trivial SQL is just a lot better. For a forum or simple application, MySQL is fine by language, but if you get into the more tricky SQL, it will fail you much sooner.
Thirdly, schemas, views, stored procedures the whole environment around the tables is so much more refined and powerful. Not that it's easy to say "MySQL cannot do this" - there's usually some hack or roundabout way in which it can do it, but in Postgres you don't need the hacks.
And it seems to me that it's so much clearer and better to do serials and foreign keys and all that. In MySQL it always felt to me like everything that's not trivial was added on, by someone else than the last feature. Postgres is just much more consistent in its approach.
Oh yes, and it does GIS. And blobs (properly). And UTF (properly). I just feel a lot more comfortable throwing everything at it and not thinking "will it handle it?" all the time.
I've used MySQL for almost 20 years for different projects of mine. In my professional life, I've also used ADABAS, Oracle and this and that other.
I was interested in Postgres some years ago but never went beyond reading one book. Then two years ago I decided to start a new project with Postgres from the start, because I wanted PostGIS.
I'm not looking back. Every future project I do will always use Postgres. Aside from the technical and functional and other rational arguments, the feeling you get is like graduating from BASIC to a real programming language.
the benefits of increased productivity per worker haven't been shared by the workers for 40 years.
This. In the 60s and 70s there was this shared vision of what creative and scientific progress mankind could make when freed from most of the boring busywork that many jobs are.
Then a non-conspiracy(*) decided "what if we just pocket all that profit instead and instead of being just very rich become super-filthy mega rich?"
(*) most cases where people see conspiracies actually are not, they are just cases where the interests of people or groups of people align so nicely that they don't even need to make a conspiracy to act as if they had.
How many lines of code does it take to reliably and safely detect the lane markings of a road?
As you are from this area, I'm sure you already know what I'm about to say, but maybe you have an answer:
The goal is not 100% detection rate. The goal is a detection rate that is equal to or better than that of most human drivers. I've driven roads where the line markings were so difficult to see (maybe just in the particular conditions of that day) that it was more a matter of guessing than actual detection.
So what is the detection rate of human drivers? Probably much lower than intuition would make us think, because we are very good and fast and automated in using other cues as well, and in many cases don't actually look for the lane markings, we "know" from other input where they are supposed to be and basically just check now and then if they really are or something is wrong.
Yes, it's a hard problem, and the more we do in the field of computer vision the more we understand just how amazing human vision is, but it is also full of bugs and problems, so the target is not perfection.
The same thing that happened to the ice cutters, coffee bean sorters, switch board operators and hundreds of other obsolete jobs.
I've never met a taxi driver who would qualify to go to engineering school or become a programmer or some such.
There are lots of jobs for people without higher education. When we reach the development level where everything that unqualified people can do is being done by robots, we can also give everyone a home and food and other shit for free.
So in your world where the sharing economy reigns supreme,
And I thought I just called the CEO of one of those "sharing economy" companies a greedy liar. I'm not a fan of this new buzzword, and frankly speaking half of it is scams. But if we're talking about cars, Lyft and Uber are not the future and I'm surprised people pump billions into them when their business will be obsolete in ten years. They really expect an ROI so quickly?
Because if a cabbie can't keep their taxi clean, what makes you think the average person will too?
Maybe that's a thing in your area? With a single exception, all the car-sharing cars I've used for the past few years have been fine and on the level of taxis except for a little more dirt on the floor (and only the floor).
more commodity like cars
Thanks to the used car market, the price of buying a car is not the problem. The cost and hassle of maintaining one is. If you don't need a car every day, it's simply not worth it.
The ones I use have agreements with the city that they can park on any public parking spot for free, even if you need to pay with your private car there. I don't know if they pay a yearly flat sum to the city or if the city sees it as a quid-pro-quo deal because of the reduced space usage and traffic.
Yeah, I just don't get that attitude. Well, when you own a Lambo or a vintage car or something that's special, yes I get that. But "this Honda Civic is mine, it's so special from the other 20 mio. that came off the same production line" - sorry, I don't get that.
Agreed, sometimes you get a car just before they take it for cleaning and washing and it's a little dirty. But in several years of doing this, I had one car that was actually so dirty I would've taken the next one if I hadn't been in a rush. Most of the time, they're more clean than most private cars I know.
And this thinking that there are all the ghosts of everyone who has ever been in the car is too irrational for me. People who sit in a car do not leave behind a magical aura that affects you three days later.
That's because you consider it an additional room in your house. I know people who do that, but I never did even when I had a car there was almost nothing in it. Note that I didn't say self-driving car-sharing will replace all private car ownership, that would be stupid. But it will replace taxis and ride-sharing.
And those cars don't get stolen?
They're equipped with GPS, you sign up with your drivers license to these services and unlock the car with an RFID card. So basically they know who you are and that it was you who took the car.
Kids can use it (for instance when you don't want to have to pick up your kids at their soccer training)
That's a really great thought. Better yet: You can program the car to allow only a set of destinations, so the kids can hop in and get home, but not get lost somewhere else.
There's a lot telling that in a long post you zeroed in on the one word that triggered you.
You live in the center of the city, don't you? How do your kids like the schools there? Just curious.
So much subtle aggression. Go outside, the weather is beautiful today.
Yes, I live in the city - Lyft and Uber don't exactly serve the countryside, do they? The rest is not your business and is irrelevant to the topic at hand.
I'll tell you what the future is, and the CEOs of Lyft, Uber, etc. know it as well:
Self-driving car-sharing vehicles.
I'm a huge fan of the new car-sharing services that have popped up in recent years. The ones where you simply pick up a car wherever you find it (your iPhone App will show you the nearest ones if you are looking), drive to where you want, and leave it there for the next person to take.
You have a car when you need it, don't need to bother with it when you don't, you don't need to worry about fuel, inspections, washing it - nothing. And you can take the car you need for today. Good weather? Cabrio. Need to transport something? Bigger trunk. etc.
Main disadvantage? Sometimes there's no car nearby, and of course the usual parking space hunt in the city.
Solution: Self-driving cars. Tap a button on your smartphone, the nearest car comes and picks you up. Just exit it at destination and it'll go away by itself, either finding a parking space or going to the next person who called one. If it's an electric car, it can also go and find a charging station if it wants.
Who needs taxis? Who needs Lyft?
They know this, of course, and they know it's coming.
By trying to censor, you only strengthen their resolve.
Ignoring them doesn't work so well, either. You miss the point where your "ANYTHING" includes nothing - if you do nothing, they will make something up. Heck, look how the right-wing christians in USA speak of being prosecuted.
You realize that almost always the reason there's only one cable company is because of regulation, don't you?
Welcome to the real world, I see you have arrived very recently. Please take care of the cars - we have excellent collision detection but things actually hurt here. Also notice that you will have to breathe, sleep and piss in this world. Everything is more complex here, including ethics and politics. You will find that your simplified 1-2-3 answers do not apply to the real world very often, and you will need to use more of your brain than you are used to.
But aside from some difficulties, it's pretty cute and the sex and food are real. You should try them.
It is sort of unfair to nail MS too much for IE. The big problem was javascript and really javascript is still a big problem.
Nonsense. The big problem was the "not invented here" syndrome. I started writing HTML in about 1998 or so, maybe earlier, and IE has always been a PITA because it always had its quirks and wanted to be treated special. Everyone else was at least trying to implement the standard, MS attitude was basically to fuck it from both sides and approaching the Internet with a "you will write this stuff the way we want" attitude.
Microsoft wants to distance itself with the negative connotations Internet Explorer has acquired through the years. They still haven't decided on an official name for Project Spartan, but it will probably have the company name in it.
So, which one of these two conflicting goals do they actually wish to achieve?
Changing it to a percent of wealth or income would encourage more rich people to hide their assets overseas.
Other than taxation, the system doesn't require a perfectly accurate assessment. The point is not to give Joe Rich the $134,942.50 fine he deserves, but to give him a fine he actually notices instead of the $50 flat fine that he'll light his cigar with, laughing "I'll do that every day from now on, it's fun".
So yeah, he goes and hides half his wealth and we only fine him $60k - he'll still notice that and laugh a lot less.
On the Internet they are able -- with the cooperation of the web page designer -- to have you seeing as many advertisements that can be fit on the screen.
There's advertisement on the Internet? You poor fool must be surfing without an ad blocker, who inflicted such cruel and unusual punishment on you?
Slashdot Mirror
This is total bullshit, and dangerous at that.
Firstly, a lot of software out there still has password length limits, sometimes silently discarding additional characters. You will still need ordinary passwords now and then.
Secondly, no normal human will type a five, six or more words passphrase every time they want to unlock their screen. They will do it for three days while they're hyped on how secure they are now, and then it'll become something they hate, and then they'll change it back to "123".
Thirdly, this is a bit more tricky, the real world security of almost every password scheme I've come across in 15 years of IT security experience is several orders of magnitude lower than the mathematical assumption. Because we consistently forget to take the human factor into account. Maybe some extreme nerds will actually follow this guideline, more normal people will discard words they can't remember for words they can, change things "a little" for convenience, and generally sabotage the whole system without even realizing it. It's the same as with passwords, all over again. Yes, on paper, a password has on the order of 10^16 possible combinations. But in reality, taking into account how people actually choose passwords (even ignoring the whole "password" and "123456" problem!) the actual diversity is more on the order of 10^9. Same here. You think using dice removes the human factor. omg do you underestimate humans!
This is right, but depends a lot on your threat scenario. For many applications where security really matters, both online and offline cracking are by far not the biggest risks.
In fact, they're ridiculous. I've given a couple presentations on password strength, and password meters are to password strength what the TSA is for air travel security - a better-than-nothing baseline approach that is mostly for show.
The problem is that we have nothing better to offer at this time, even though most security experts agree that passwords are a solution whose time is over.
For example when faced with the decision to crash into a pedestrian or another vehicle carrying a family, it would be a challenge for a self-driving car to follow the same moral reasoning a human would in the situation
Or maybe it would follow better moral reasoning. Ours is not perfect, it's just whatever evolution came up with that gave us the best species survival rates. That doesn't mean it's really the most ethical solution.
For example, in a post-feminist society, let's assume for arguments sake that gender discrimination has been overcome, wouldn't we also do away with "women and children first" - which is a suitable survival approach in a species fighting for survival in the african prairie, but hardly for the dominant species that already is overpopulated.
There is no right to create a hostile working environment for women.
You are right. There's no reason to make boob-grabbing a sport at work, or install under-table cameras and post the up-skirt shots in the Intranet. There's no reason to announce publicly the menstruation periods of every girl in the office, or enforce a dresscode that ignores female anatomy. Definitely sex should not be a condition for promotion, and meetings should not start with blowjob requests, made in order of beauty to the attending women. Likewise, putting a single toilet for women into the basement while having men toilets everywhere.
Oh wait, you were talking about a software joke project on some random Internet site that nobody is forced to visit or even know about? Yeah, that definitely is the dictionary case for "hostile working environment".
the entire back office being papered over with pinups
That's absolutely the same as a random Internet site that nobody... why am I wasting my time here, a monkey would see the difference.
This.
Half the world doesn't understand why blowing people to pieces is afternoon TV, but showing kids the same nipple that they sucked on a few years before is a national scandal.
Let's live in a perfectly politically correct world where our jokes, every sentence we speak and every message we write is controlled by the thought police.
And I say that as someone who was bullied at school. But here's the point: There's harassment, which has a victim and there's jokes about a class the size of half the worlds population and either you are incredibly insecure or unbelievably egomaniac to consider yourself the individual target.
Every real woman I've met in my life laughs about jokes that ridicule women in general the same way that I laugh about jokes where guys in general are the target. These jokes are funny exactly because they contain a piece of truth.
Everything, taken to extremes, is evil. That includes feminism, no-harassment policies and political correctness. No, wait. That last one is evil from the start.
Firstly, the general feeling that Postgres is engineered and designed and not cobbled together.
Secondly, support for non-trivial SQL is just a lot better. For a forum or simple application, MySQL is fine by language, but if you get into the more tricky SQL, it will fail you much sooner.
Thirdly, schemas, views, stored procedures the whole environment around the tables is so much more refined and powerful. Not that it's easy to say "MySQL cannot do this" - there's usually some hack or roundabout way in which it can do it, but in Postgres you don't need the hacks.
And it seems to me that it's so much clearer and better to do serials and foreign keys and all that. In MySQL it always felt to me like everything that's not trivial was added on, by someone else than the last feature. Postgres is just much more consistent in its approach.
Oh yes, and it does GIS. And blobs (properly). And UTF (properly). I just feel a lot more comfortable throwing everything at it and not thinking "will it handle it?" all the time.
I've used MySQL for almost 20 years for different projects of mine. In my professional life, I've also used ADABAS, Oracle and this and that other.
I was interested in Postgres some years ago but never went beyond reading one book. Then two years ago I decided to start a new project with Postgres from the start, because I wanted PostGIS.
I'm not looking back. Every future project I do will always use Postgres. Aside from the technical and functional and other rational arguments, the feeling you get is like graduating from BASIC to a real programming language.
the benefits of increased productivity per worker haven't been shared by the workers for 40 years.
This. In the 60s and 70s there was this shared vision of what creative and scientific progress mankind could make when freed from most of the boring busywork that many jobs are.
Then a non-conspiracy(*) decided "what if we just pocket all that profit instead and instead of being just very rich become super-filthy mega rich?"
(*) most cases where people see conspiracies actually are not, they are just cases where the interests of people or groups of people align so nicely that they don't even need to make a conspiracy to act as if they had.
How many lines of code does it take to reliably and safely detect the lane markings of a road?
As you are from this area, I'm sure you already know what I'm about to say, but maybe you have an answer:
The goal is not 100% detection rate. The goal is a detection rate that is equal to or better than that of most human drivers. I've driven roads where the line markings were so difficult to see (maybe just in the particular conditions of that day) that it was more a matter of guessing than actual detection.
So what is the detection rate of human drivers? Probably much lower than intuition would make us think, because we are very good and fast and automated in using other cues as well, and in many cases don't actually look for the lane markings, we "know" from other input where they are supposed to be and basically just check now and then if they really are or something is wrong.
Yes, it's a hard problem, and the more we do in the field of computer vision the more we understand just how amazing human vision is, but it is also full of bugs and problems, so the target is not perfection.
what happens to the taxi drivers
The same thing that happened to the ice cutters, coffee bean sorters, switch board operators and hundreds of other obsolete jobs.
I've never met a taxi driver who would qualify to go to engineering school or become a programmer or some such.
There are lots of jobs for people without higher education. When we reach the development level where everything that unqualified people can do is being done by robots, we can also give everyone a home and food and other shit for free.
So in your world where the sharing economy reigns supreme,
And I thought I just called the CEO of one of those "sharing economy" companies a greedy liar. I'm not a fan of this new buzzword, and frankly speaking half of it is scams. But if we're talking about cars, Lyft and Uber are not the future and I'm surprised people pump billions into them when their business will be obsolete in ten years. They really expect an ROI so quickly?
Because if a cabbie can't keep their taxi clean, what makes you think the average person will too?
Maybe that's a thing in your area? With a single exception, all the car-sharing cars I've used for the past few years have been fine and on the level of taxis except for a little more dirt on the floor (and only the floor).
more commodity like cars
Thanks to the used car market, the price of buying a car is not the problem. The cost and hassle of maintaining one is. If you don't need a car every day, it's simply not worth it.
How does the car sharing service pay for parking?
The ones I use have agreements with the city that they can park on any public parking spot for free, even if you need to pay with your private car there. I don't know if they pay a yearly flat sum to the city or if the city sees it as a quid-pro-quo deal because of the reduced space usage and traffic.
Yeah, I just don't get that attitude. Well, when you own a Lambo or a vintage car or something that's special, yes I get that. But "this Honda Civic is mine, it's so special from the other 20 mio. that came off the same production line" - sorry, I don't get that.
Agreed, sometimes you get a car just before they take it for cleaning and washing and it's a little dirty. But in several years of doing this, I had one car that was actually so dirty I would've taken the next one if I hadn't been in a rush. Most of the time, they're more clean than most private cars I know.
And this thinking that there are all the ghosts of everyone who has ever been in the car is too irrational for me. People who sit in a car do not leave behind a magical aura that affects you three days later.
I would never share my car with strangers.
That's because you consider it an additional room in your house. I know people who do that, but I never did even when I had a car there was almost nothing in it. Note that I didn't say self-driving car-sharing will replace all private car ownership, that would be stupid. But it will replace taxis and ride-sharing.
And those cars don't get stolen?
They're equipped with GPS, you sign up with your drivers license to these services and unlock the car with an RFID card. So basically they know who you are and that it was you who took the car.
Kids can use it (for instance when you don't want to have to pick up your kids at their soccer training)
That's a really great thought. Better yet: You can program the car to allow only a set of destinations, so the kids can hop in and get home, but not get lost somewhere else.
I love the lack of self-awareness in this.
There's a lot telling that in a long post you zeroed in on the one word that triggered you.
You live in the center of the city, don't you? How do your kids like the schools there? Just curious.
So much subtle aggression. Go outside, the weather is beautiful today.
Yes, I live in the city - Lyft and Uber don't exactly serve the countryside, do they? The rest is not your business and is irrelevant to the topic at hand.
I'll tell you what the future is, and the CEOs of Lyft, Uber, etc. know it as well:
Self-driving car-sharing vehicles.
I'm a huge fan of the new car-sharing services that have popped up in recent years. The ones where you simply pick up a car wherever you find it (your iPhone App will show you the nearest ones if you are looking), drive to where you want, and leave it there for the next person to take.
You have a car when you need it, don't need to bother with it when you don't, you don't need to worry about fuel, inspections, washing it - nothing. And you can take the car you need for today. Good weather? Cabrio. Need to transport something? Bigger trunk. etc.
Main disadvantage? Sometimes there's no car nearby, and of course the usual parking space hunt in the city.
Solution: Self-driving cars. Tap a button on your smartphone, the nearest car comes and picks you up. Just exit it at destination and it'll go away by itself, either finding a parking space or going to the next person who called one. If it's an electric car, it can also go and find a charging station if it wants.
Who needs taxis? Who needs Lyft?
They know this, of course, and they know it's coming.
By trying to censor, you only strengthen their resolve.
Ignoring them doesn't work so well, either. You miss the point where your "ANYTHING" includes nothing - if you do nothing, they will make something up. Heck, look how the right-wing christians in USA speak of being prosecuted.
You realize that almost always the reason there's only one cable company is because of regulation, don't you?
Welcome to the real world, I see you have arrived very recently. Please take care of the cars - we have excellent collision detection but things actually hurt here. Also notice that you will have to breathe, sleep and piss in this world. Everything is more complex here, including ethics and politics. You will find that your simplified 1-2-3 answers do not apply to the real world very often, and you will need to use more of your brain than you are used to.
But aside from some difficulties, it's pretty cute and the sex and food are real. You should try them.
It is sort of unfair to nail MS too much for IE. The big problem was javascript and really javascript is still a big problem.
Nonsense. The big problem was the "not invented here" syndrome. I started writing HTML in about 1998 or so, maybe earlier, and IE has always been a PITA because it always had its quirks and wanted to be treated special. Everyone else was at least trying to implement the standard, MS attitude was basically to fuck it from both sides and approaching the Internet with a "you will write this stuff the way we want" attitude.
Microsoft wants to distance itself with the negative connotations Internet Explorer has acquired through the years. They still haven't decided on an official name for Project Spartan, but it will probably have the company name in it.
So, which one of these two conflicting goals do they actually wish to achieve?
Changing it to a percent of wealth or income would encourage more rich people to hide their assets overseas.
Other than taxation, the system doesn't require a perfectly accurate assessment. The point is not to give Joe Rich the $134,942.50 fine he deserves, but to give him a fine he actually notices instead of the $50 flat fine that he'll light his cigar with, laughing "I'll do that every day from now on, it's fun".
So yeah, he goes and hides half his wealth and we only fine him $60k - he'll still notice that and laugh a lot less.
On the Internet they are able -- with the cooperation of the web page designer -- to have you seeing as many advertisements that can be fit on the screen.
There's advertisement on the Internet? You poor fool must be surfing without an ad blocker, who inflicted such cruel and unusual punishment on you?