>"You recommended to 'Prefer symmetric cryptography over public-key cryptography.' Can you elaborate on why?" > It is more likely that the NSA has some fundamental mathematical advance in breaking public-key algorithms than symmetric algorithms.
I think his reasoning is that the NSA is more likely to have a clever hack for elliptic curve crypto which is why they've been pushing it - the ideal situation for the NSA is that everyone uses crypto that the NSA but nobody else can break.
I'm can't tell if this is a dumb idea or a brilliant one. What about training yourself to type phone numbers with your left hand? It might be just enough to segregate out the muscle memory. It would be moderately annoying while you're training yourself, but if you're re-wiring calculators and remapping keyboards it can't be much more troublesome.
Unfortunately I don't use either kind of numpad much myself so I can't try it - I would just to see if it works.
I had a lot of trouble recently with VS2010 hammering my dev workstation. It was pretty complicated actually - when running VS I was getting way too much disk IO which was making my system almost unusable - even when just having a few editor tabs open in VS.
The problem seems to be that I had only 2GB of RAM in the box (blame someone else, I didn't provision it), and while VS wasn't really using much itself, it was spawning a whole lot of threads which were processing in the background (IntelliSense and so forth), modifying lots of memory, and because my RAM was semi-full the changed memory was getting written out to the swap file constantly. And then of course the virus scanner was going nuts looking at all the disk IO. The disk IO became the system bottleneck and brought the system to its knees when it wasn't even doing any useful work.
Adding a gig of RAM completely fixed it. Even though my system wasn't exactly running out of RAM, the extra head room stopped it from thrashing the disk all the time for trivial writes. FYI, the system resources page was showing 1GB 'in use' and the other GB full of 'cached, just in case you want it again' when I was having the trouble to start with, which initially made me think that RAM wasn't the problem.
... which would be a great way to hint to an evil master server that all of your disparate web identities you just checked up on are in fact the same person;)
From interest I looked up a list of big earthquakes when the Japan one hit: USGS list - it was the fourth largest in the world since 1900. At a rough guess the chance of such a large quake hitting the area of the reactors would be lower than 1/1000, although the pacific rim is a very active area anyway. Right ballpark though.
Just chipping in because I happen to have looked this up already.
IIRC (it's on my home computer) f.lux changes the colour profile of your desktop towards red, which is like sunset/firelight/sleeping time, and away from blue which is like bright daylight. It's usually set based on its calculated dawn/dusk times from the time on your computer and the location you enter in the settings. I'm sure you can either override the location or just lie to it - you'd want the 'night' colour while you're meant to be getting sleepy.
Anyway, it's a free tiny download so just give it a go and see what you think. I like it.
I'm pretty sure it's based on how engaged your brain is. Reading is probably using your imagination and all the bits of your brain associated with understanding real-world situation, whereas if you're playing some kind of clickfest like bejewelled or diablo (or, dare I say it, WoW) most of your brain can get on with shutting down for the night.
On the flipside, if I'm trying to get over jet lag or need to stay awake for some other reason nothing beats a good game of Civ - that'll keep my brain spinning for 48 hours straight given the chance.
IANAPoet, but I bet he spent a long time trying to shoehorn clever speeches into blank verse format. Maybe he really wished he could call a rose whatever the hell he wanted?
I really don't see how that's a defensible position. I suppose you're trying to argue something about non-intersecting light cones being effectively different universes? Once the light cone produced by Betelgeuse_explodes reaches us it's in our causal domain and we can reason back to the time before the light cones intersected just like for any other event. Everything initially happens in a different light cone from you, it's just that on non-astronomical scales the time is negligible.
For example, we can reason geometrically about when the light from Betelgeuse exploding will reach Andromeda, and the how long it would take our neighbours at Andromeda to send us a message saying "Holy shit! Did you see that?".
Do you expect other artists to produce more than one interesting work before you accept that they're good rather than just lucky? Do your arty friends give you blank looks when you say "but how do we know?" You may be applying the scientific method without realising it.
Your questions are interesting, sensible questions with interesting answers. Careers were made by the people who answered them the first time.
Identity is an axiom of mathematics. You have to accept it to be doing maths as we understand it, but you're free to examine mathematical systems where a != a and work with the consequences.
Sure, so basically I agree with you. 1/3 is a ratio, and 0.333... is an inconvenient decimal representation of the same. The whole infinity and limits business annoys me when the equivalence between 1/3 and 0.33... is practically speaking a definition and 3*0.33... = 1 is an exercise in misdirection. Since when did real number multiplication involve expanding infinite series? Oh sorry, it has dots on the end. My mistake.
My beef is with the shoehorning of rational numbers into the real space; that... operator is something you put after a real number to say "only joking! it's not a real number at all, sucker".
Sorry to double reply, but there's another way of looking at it I'd like to mention. I might be slightly off on the mathematics (hopefully a kind mathematician will correct me if I mess up) but it might give you another clue about how 0.99... is a special case.
Consider that for any two real numbers x and y, there are an infinite number of other real numbers z where z is between x and y. For a less algebraic example, between 0.1 and 0.2 you have 0.11, 0.12, 0.13, but also 0.111, 0.1111 and so on - an infinite number.
However, between 0.99... and 1.0 there are no more numbers. There's no way to sneak an extra digit on to the back of 0.99... to get another number between it and 1. This is obviously a very special case and for various reasons involving infinity and limits 0.99... and 1.0 are treated/defined as being the same. This might not convince you that they are the same, but hopefully it's easier to see that there's something funky going on with 0.99... even apart from saying that it's the same thing as 1.0.
Although I am a heretic in this matter and shouldn't really weigh in; the... operator is a mean trick which breaks the laws of arithmetic. That's why you're stumped. It's a shorthand for 'continue to infinity', and as soon as you have an infinity in your equation all bets are off.
The real kicker is that if you're not watching for that sneaky infinity it looks just like a simple equation a five year old can do.
Sorry to reply in an overdone subthread, but I think I have a different objection from the usual.
I'm a programmer, like many here, and I spend a lot of time working with strings, numbers and sequences. I see 0.999... as an infinite sequence which must be partially evaluated when it's used as a number. This has several consequences, but the relevant one is that when comparing numbers the obvious algorithm is to sort them by the greatest non-equal digit - so 0.999... is greater than 0.989..., and must be partially evaluated to determine that 0.9999999... is greater than 0.9999998... This understanding of 0.999... as representing an infinite sequence which can be reasoned about has worked for me in all the situations I've come across (admittedly, not many).
Of course using this reasoning also clearly tells me that trivially 0.999... < 1.
And, before someone asks, I evaluate (1/3) == 0.333... as either true based on no detectable difference, true based on a type conversion from 1/3 being identical to 0.333..., or the heat death of the universe while still looking for an answer.
Now, hopefully something interesting after another "I dun't understand math lol" post.
Obviously the 'correct' interpretation of 0.999... == 1 versus my 0.999... < 1 is based a difference between 'real' mathematics and the bastardised computer mathematics where we don't actually have infinite sequences and have to make do, but still I can usefully define 0.999... as the largest number which is less than 1 and reason about it on that basis.
So why does 'real' mathematics use a definition based on limits rather than the shortcutty but apparently workable definition I imagine a computer using? Is there some kind of difference based on consistency of the model, or usefulness for some kinds of calculation, or just tradition or what?
P.S., sorry if slashcode ate my less than signs, I think I got them all with <
No, seriously, censorship is when you say something other than your natural inclination due to the expected response from another party.
When Rockstar takes Hot Coffee out of GTA San Andreas because Wal Mart won't carry it with an 18 rating it's censorship.
When you tell your boss "I'm worried that we don't have enough time available to complete the project" instead of "you cockface, we're working 80 hour weeks because you can't project manage for shit and your enormous ego won't let you change the timeline" you're censoring yourself.
Government censorship is merely censorship imposed by the government. There are a million other kinds.
Slashdot Mirror
He elaborated (slightly) in a blog comment
>"You recommended to 'Prefer symmetric cryptography over public-key cryptography.' Can you elaborate on why?"
> It is more likely that the NSA has some fundamental mathematical advance in breaking public-key algorithms than symmetric algorithms.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/09/the_nsa_is_brea.html#comments
I think his reasoning is that the NSA is more likely to have a clever hack for elliptic curve crypto which is why they've been pushing it - the ideal situation for the NSA is that everyone uses crypto that the NSA but nobody else can break.
A tag should meaningfully distinguish a subset of the content.
"You break it, you bought it"
Sometimes work is outsourced, particularly in small companies, because for this project they need 8 programmers but only employ four.
I'm can't tell if this is a dumb idea or a brilliant one. What about training yourself to type phone numbers with your left hand? It might be just enough to segregate out the muscle memory. It would be moderately annoying while you're training yourself, but if you're re-wiring calculators and remapping keyboards it can't be much more troublesome.
Unfortunately I don't use either kind of numpad much myself so I can't try it - I would just to see if it works.
And the NZ Dollar! Me too! Me too! Go, you good thing!
http://www.x-rates.com/d/USD/NZD/graph120.html
Next they should invent a sarcasm detector, that would be really useful.
I had a lot of trouble recently with VS2010 hammering my dev workstation. It was pretty complicated actually - when running VS I was getting way too much disk IO which was making my system almost unusable - even when just having a few editor tabs open in VS.
The problem seems to be that I had only 2GB of RAM in the box (blame someone else, I didn't provision it), and while VS wasn't really using much itself, it was spawning a whole lot of threads which were processing in the background (IntelliSense and so forth), modifying lots of memory, and because my RAM was semi-full the changed memory was getting written out to the swap file constantly. And then of course the virus scanner was going nuts looking at all the disk IO. The disk IO became the system bottleneck and brought the system to its knees when it wasn't even doing any useful work.
Adding a gig of RAM completely fixed it. Even though my system wasn't exactly running out of RAM, the extra head room stopped it from thrashing the disk all the time for trivial writes. FYI, the system resources page was showing 1GB 'in use' and the other GB full of 'cached, just in case you want it again' when I was having the trouble to start with, which initially made me think that RAM wasn't the problem.
... which would be a great way to hint to an evil master server that all of your disparate web identities you just checked up on are in fact the same person ;)
From interest I looked up a list of big earthquakes when the Japan one hit: USGS list - it was the fourth largest in the world since 1900. At a rough guess the chance of such a large quake hitting the area of the reactors would be lower than 1/1000, although the pacific rim is a very active area anyway. Right ballpark though.
Just chipping in because I happen to have looked this up already.
IIRC (it's on my home computer) f.lux changes the colour profile of your desktop towards red, which is like sunset/firelight/sleeping time, and away from blue which is like bright daylight. It's usually set based on its calculated dawn/dusk times from the time on your computer and the location you enter in the settings. I'm sure you can either override the location or just lie to it - you'd want the 'night' colour while you're meant to be getting sleepy.
Anyway, it's a free tiny download so just give it a go and see what you think. I like it.
I'm pretty sure it's based on how engaged your brain is. Reading is probably using your imagination and all the bits of your brain associated with understanding real-world situation, whereas if you're playing some kind of clickfest like bejewelled or diablo (or, dare I say it, WoW) most of your brain can get on with shutting down for the night.
On the flipside, if I'm trying to get over jet lag or need to stay awake for some other reason nothing beats a good game of Civ - that'll keep my brain spinning for 48 hours straight given the chance.
IANAPoet, but I bet he spent a long time trying to shoehorn clever speeches into blank verse format. Maybe he really wished he could call a rose whatever the hell he wanted?
So after t+8 minutes when the earth goes flying away from where the sun isn't any more, will we say:
"Oh shit, the sun just vanished!"
or
"Oh shit, the sun vanished 8 minutes ago and we just felt the effects!"
I really don't see how that's a defensible position. I suppose you're trying to argue something about non-intersecting light cones being effectively different universes? Once the light cone produced by Betelgeuse_explodes reaches us it's in our causal domain and we can reason back to the time before the light cones intersected just like for any other event. Everything initially happens in a different light cone from you, it's just that on non-astronomical scales the time is negligible.
For example, we can reason geometrically about when the light from Betelgeuse exploding will reach Andromeda, and the how long it would take our neighbours at Andromeda to send us a message saying "Holy shit! Did you see that?".
Haha, you might have picked the wrong specialty ;)
Do you expect other artists to produce more than one interesting work before you accept that they're good rather than just lucky? Do your arty friends give you blank looks when you say "but how do we know?" You may be applying the scientific method without realising it.
Your questions are interesting, sensible questions with interesting answers. Careers were made by the people who answered them the first time.
Bugger! Catastrophic set hierarchy failure!
Thanks, I'll consider that in the morning and see if I still make any sense.
Remember kids, one little liberal arts paper might seem harmless enough but EVEN ONE can ruin your life.
Identity is an axiom of mathematics. You have to accept it to be doing maths as we understand it, but you're free to examine mathematical systems where a != a and work with the consequences.
Sure, so basically I agree with you. 1/3 is a ratio, and 0.333... is an inconvenient decimal representation of the same. The whole infinity and limits business annoys me when the equivalence between 1/3 and 0.33... is practically speaking a definition and 3*0.33... = 1 is an exercise in misdirection. Since when did real number multiplication involve expanding infinite series? Oh sorry, it has dots on the end. My mistake.
My beef is with the shoehorning of rational numbers into the real space; that ... operator is something you put after a real number to say "only joking! it's not a real number at all, sucker".
</rant>
Sorry to double reply, but there's another way of looking at it I'd like to mention. I might be slightly off on the mathematics (hopefully a kind mathematician will correct me if I mess up) but it might give you another clue about how 0.99... is a special case.
Consider that for any two real numbers x and y, there are an infinite number of other real numbers z where z is between x and y. For a less algebraic example, between 0.1 and 0.2 you have 0.11, 0.12, 0.13, but also 0.111, 0.1111 and so on - an infinite number.
However, between 0.99... and 1.0 there are no more numbers. There's no way to sneak an extra digit on to the back of 0.99... to get another number between it and 1. This is obviously a very special case and for various reasons involving infinity and limits 0.99... and 1.0 are treated/defined as being the same. This might not convince you that they are the same, but hopefully it's easier to see that there's something funky going on with 0.99... even apart from saying that it's the same thing as 1.0.
Well, in base 3, 0.22... == 1.
Briefly, the trick is in the ... operator, it doesn't really work like you'd expect.
(Did I miss something? The parent didn't seem particularly tied to base 10)
An infinitesmial ;)
I think it depends who you ask (I'm not a mathematician, most of my knowledge about this comes from history/philosophy of science).
Although I am a heretic in this matter and shouldn't really weigh in; the ... operator is a mean trick which breaks the laws of arithmetic. That's why you're stumped. It's a shorthand for 'continue to infinity', and as soon as you have an infinity in your equation all bets are off.
The real kicker is that if you're not watching for that sneaky infinity it looks just like a simple equation a five year old can do.
Sorry to reply in an overdone subthread, but I think I have a different objection from the usual.
I'm a programmer, like many here, and I spend a lot of time working with strings, numbers and sequences. I see 0.999... as an infinite sequence which must be partially evaluated when it's used as a number. This has several consequences, but the relevant one is that when comparing numbers the obvious algorithm is to sort them by the greatest non-equal digit - so 0.999... is greater than 0.989..., and must be partially evaluated to determine that 0.9999999... is greater than 0.9999998... This understanding of 0.999... as representing an infinite sequence which can be reasoned about has worked for me in all the situations I've come across (admittedly, not many).
Of course using this reasoning also clearly tells me that trivially 0.999... < 1.
And, before someone asks, I evaluate (1/3) == 0.333... as either true based on no detectable difference, true based on a type conversion from 1/3 being identical to 0.333..., or the heat death of the universe while still looking for an answer.
Now, hopefully something interesting after another "I dun't understand math lol" post.
Obviously the 'correct' interpretation of 0.999... == 1 versus my 0.999...
< 1 is based a difference between 'real' mathematics and the bastardised computer mathematics where we don't actually have infinite sequences and have to make do, but still I can usefully define 0.999... as the largest number which is less than 1 and reason about it on that basis.
So why does 'real' mathematics use a definition based on limits rather than the shortcutty but apparently workable definition I imagine a computer using? Is there some kind of difference based on consistency of the model, or usefulness for some kinds of calculation, or just tradition or what?
P.S., sorry if slashcode ate my less than signs, I think I got them all with <
No, seriously, censorship is when you say something other than your natural inclination due to the expected response from another party.
When Rockstar takes Hot Coffee out of GTA San Andreas because Wal Mart won't carry it with an 18 rating it's censorship.
When you tell your boss "I'm worried that we don't have enough time available to complete the project" instead of "you cockface, we're working 80 hour weeks because you can't project manage for shit and your enormous ego won't let you change the timeline" you're censoring yourself.
Government censorship is merely censorship imposed by the government. There are a million other kinds.