You know, I can go and buy a microwave oven and plug it safely into a standardized outlet and not electrocute myself or blow up my house. I can even buy a propane tank and fire up my grill without risking my life too much. I can buy a modern automobile and feel confident that if I drive it into a tree at 30 MPH or roll it over, I still have a reasonable chance of surviving. Most things have built-in standardized safety features and/or safe failure modes (within reason).
These things I can buy are all tools, some with licensing or age restrictions attached, but all more-or-less idiot-proofed. The razor blades I bought recently to scrape paint off my windows even warned me that they were "razor sharp". Well duh.
But the most sophisticated, most powerful, most versatile, general purpose tool we humans have yet invented, the networked personal computer, has been sold to and is used by millions of people without any training whatsoever and without any warnings outside of what one might pick up from the "Dangers in Cyberspace" fluff segment on the local news.
People are using computers more and more to organize all of their critical financial information. A single security breach can have catastrophic, real consequences, if for example your identity is stolen and your credit is ruined after your bank accounts are drained overnight.
All you have to do is click on one really bad link. Sometimes, not even that.
This is just another example of how technology is changing human society in completely unpredictable ways. Back in the 80's, you might have worried about a virus wiping out your word processing file. Today, typing your username and password on an untrusted machine, even just once, can compromise your entire life, and ruin your future.
Of course there's a big hole somewhere in the universe of observable spacetime.
The universe is fractal, it's congruent across all scales and infinite in all dimensions.
The galaxies are just like young solar systems on a much grander scale. Every star is like an atom, and every atom is a like a star. Me, I'm a up quark. And root canals are quite tolerable with sufficient nitrous oxide followed by liberal doses of prescription opiates.
Here in the U.S., customers can choose whether they want to get screwed by Sprint, Verizon, Cingular, T-Mobile, AT&T, or Comcast. Isn't unregulated capitalism great?!
I said usually, not always. Are you suggesting there wasn't a better outcome that could have been negotiated without having a war? There's no way to tell if the world would have come out better or worse had the colonies not declared independence. The world would probably be completely unrecognizable and it's absurd to try to consider the possibilities of what would have happened had the American Revolution not taken place.
Of course the world might have turned out "better" (whatever that means), if Western Civilization simply exterminated Communism in a nuclear conflagration shortly after WWII ended. Of course the world in 2050 might be "better" (at leasr for us) if we simply kill all the Muslims and take over their oil.
I'm advocating the construction of a future in which we don't slaughter each other anymore. We are human beings, not lions or baboons. We're able to exchange knowledge to better ourselves and thereby avoid conflict through negotiation and compromise.
Maybe I'm an idealist, but I think we're just doing it wrong.
The U.N. Security Council, along with pretty much everyone with half a brain living in most of the civilized world, used their own mental heuristics to correctly predict the outcome of the disaster in Iraq. The neo-conservatives in the U.S. and, inexplicably, Great Britain, were the only ones talking about a "cakewalk".
As the Cypherpunk Tim May used to say, these people need killing. While I don't advocate such extreme measures myself, all these people do need to be replaced on November 10, 2008. If the ballot box is not effective (if the election is stolen again) there's always the ammo box.
People strive for some kind of lasting mark on society or evidence they existed and their lives mattered. The fact is that most evidence of any of us will eventually fade just the way it has for generations before us. Old fil got brittle, cracked, or was water damaged and stuck together. Old prints suffer similar fates. It's just by luck a that a lot of the old images have lasted.
For lots of people, the only record they ever existed is either a headstone, or more commonly, just their skeletons. Might as well get used to the idea.
Indeed the only people who came before us about whom we care at all, have made creative cultural contributions (literature, art) or intellectual contributions (to politics, philosophy, history, etc.) Most people are far more interested in what Shakespeare wrote than what their great-great-great grandfather looked like as a kid. All the candid snapshots we take will mean increasingly little to the people who are further outside the moving window of interest that consists of those living in the present and the decades that surround today.
When it comes down to it, we're all just ephemeral patterns of information instantiated in matter, patterns that happen to be able to reproduce themselves imperfectly with energy input. Even the ideas we might painstakingly chisel into stone may not outlast the genetic information we pass on to our descendents (if we successfully reproduce).
But human civilization has become the substrate upon which memetic evolution is now acting as the primary driving force of progress in the universe (or at least our local region). The universe around here is just waking up, realizing its own existence, and deciding what to do with itself.
What really matters is the ideas we pass on to our progeny, which we have some control over. We currently have no real control over the genes we propagate; they need only be nominally good enough for survival.
In the meantime, it really doesn't matter if you preserve your grandparents' wedding photos for your grandchildren to see. They won't be interested.
Only six? With lossy compression, you could do significantly better, as long as you don't mind all your offspring being funny-but-similar-looking lactose-intolerant non-deterministic sociopathic freaks.
You're worried about martial law, while American society is deteriorating, rotting from the inside out!? Our only hope lies with people who wield ideas, not guns.
All of these anti-phishing tools are a waste of time. The real problem is educating users about safe computing practices.
People simply need to learn that you just don't click on a link in an unsolicited email supposedly from your bank, any more than you would deposit your paycheck into a newly opened bank branch in the nasty part of town, with shoddily painted signage and shifty-looking tellers.
98% of people can learn principles of safe computing. The remaining 2% are a lost cause. Instead of coddling people's ignorance, we should focus on education. Crooks are always going to be out there trying to take advantage of people. This problem is not going to go away or be solved by technological safeguards. It is counterproductive to devise and improve ways for people to continue ignorant, careless behaviour, "La la la, click on whatever links I see," download and run this, that and the next thing, rather than teaching them how to be careful about what code they run and where they type their password.
Ah, nostalgia. When I was a kid, my little sister used to break the
heads off of my Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker action figures. I
chewed on their retractable lightsabers too, I think, but I grew out
of that phase.
My friends and I got even by playing badminton with the severed heads
of her Barbie dolls (which aerodynamically resemble shuttlecocks).
If they would distribute it via a legit torrent, I'd download it, watch it, seed it, and promote it to other people. Even if it had advertisements. I'd even watch the ads and consider consuming the advertised products. All of these things represent value to HBO.
But I will not subscribe to HBO, because I don't have cable. I don't even have a color TV. I don't plan to buy one either.
If there isn't a legit way to get it, I'll just download it for free. If that becomes too risky, I'll be fine watching the interesting clips that wind up on youtube or any of a hundred video blogs. Worst case, I don't get to watch it at all. I'll live.
But for every one like me, there are 1000 who will watch whatever garbage shows up on their idiot box that day, who will buy whatever products and ideas are advertised therein.
What pisses me off is that I can't buy brand-name soap or oatmeal or cars or computing devices without helping to pay the advertising bill for Procter & Gamble and Quaker and Toyota and Dell. I suppose I can grow my own tomatoes and buy generic soap, but if I buy a Honda or a Gateway PC, some of what I pay goes to the advertising industry and some even goes to the RIAA (those pop songs in the commercials aren't free).
It's almost impossible to escape being a good consumer (tm), no matter how hard you try.
Which is why we should all just go read a book. Or write one yourself. It doesn't cost anything to publish your own work anymore. Putting down what you have to say on paper, or electrons, is of more value to our culture than consuming the latest corporate cultural spam. I'll much rather read your replies to this messange, than go out to see the latest Spiderman 3 or Shrek 3.
Think about that. Shrek 3. Spiderman 3. Star Wars 6. Windows Vista. Budweiser. Paris Hilton. Pizza Hut. MacDonalds. Ford. Comcast. Verizon. Wal*Mart.
We can only hope we are witnessing the death throes of state-sponsored protection of the antiquated intellectual property regime that has been built up over the past several hundred years.
You can't "own" an idea anymore. It's absurd to even try in a world with instantaneous global communication networks. We got a little taste of this two nights ago with the digg 09:f9 revolt. We see memes getting remixed all the time over on 4chan/b/.
Welcome to the future. Your contributions to the culture of humanity will be mercilessly dissected, reshuffled, caricatured, parodied, paraded, criticized, subclassed and recycled.
It confirms our understanding of light and matter and how they interact. You would think that shining light (energy) on something would warm it up. If it cools it down, something strange is going on.
In a broader sense, it means that we can manipulate matter and energy in ways nobody imagined 100 years ago (well, except for Einstein).
Just how are they dating these samples? Is there an assumption that each layer is a year? Are they assuming there has been no meltbacks removing several years records?
I am not a paleo-climatologist, but I think we can safely assume that the scientists who are analyzing ice cores are taking these sorts of things into account. Much like a sysadmin reading a log file or processing tcpdump output looking for evidence of hacking, you can safely assume that yeah, the experts did think of that.
When you have expertise in a particular field you tend to become better at perceiving patterns in the data sets you have. The open source 'many eyes' rule of thumb comes into play here, too.
Thus I think we can assume the PhDs in this field would notice an anomaly indicating that their data set may be corrupted, just like I could analyze a suspicious HTTP traffic log file, profile the activity from a specific IP address, correlate it with other sources of information, and make reasonable hypotheses as to what actually was going on, whether the activity was a bot or a human, etc. Or even whether the activity was a human trying to disguise itself as a bot (or vice-versa). And I don't even have a PhD, I just have a decade or so of experience.
Zestfully clean, you're not fully clean unless you're Zest-fully clean.
These things run through my consciousness without my permission. They've invaded my brain via the commercial mass-media during my childhood and adolescence. They are inescapable and pernicious. I'd like to buy the world a Coke.
Go ahead, tell me you've been raised in America and you don't have a corporate media advertising slogan running through the back of your mind now and then. Ancient Chinese secret, huh?
As long as you don't mind him "grooming" your wife and daughters when you're not around.
Seriously, why don't we humans just try to grow up and respect other [near-]sentient life forms more, in general, when possible. We could start with not blowing each other up with suicide bombs and JDAMs. Maybe move on to not killing elephants just to saw off their teeth to make jewelery. Work on not killing the other primates for meat and dolphins for sport too.
Our species has a loooong way to go on morality. If we don't sort these things out, we're not going to make it.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I can go and buy a microwave oven and plug it safely into a standardized outlet and not electrocute myself or blow up my house. I can even buy a propane tank and fire up my grill without risking my life too much. I can buy a modern automobile and feel confident that if I drive it into a tree at 30 MPH or roll it over, I still have a reasonable chance of surviving. Most things have built-in standardized safety features and/or safe failure modes (within reason).
These things I can buy are all tools, some with licensing or age restrictions attached, but all more-or-less idiot-proofed. The razor blades I bought recently to scrape paint off my windows even warned me that they were "razor sharp". Well duh.
But the most sophisticated, most powerful, most versatile, general purpose tool we humans have yet invented, the networked personal computer, has been sold to and is used by millions of people without any training whatsoever and without any warnings outside of what one might pick up from the "Dangers in Cyberspace" fluff segment on the local news.
People are using computers more and more to organize all of their critical financial information. A single security breach can have catastrophic, real consequences, if for example your identity is stolen and your credit is ruined after your bank accounts are drained overnight.
All you have to do is click on one really bad link. Sometimes, not even that.
This is just another example of how technology is changing human society in completely unpredictable ways. Back in the 80's, you might have worried about a virus wiping out your word processing file. Today, typing your username and password on an untrusted machine, even just once, can compromise your entire life, and ruin your future.
Of course there's a big hole somewhere in the universe of observable spacetime.
The universe is fractal, it's congruent across all scales and infinite in all dimensions.
The galaxies are just like young solar systems on a much grander scale. Every star is like an atom, and every atom is a like a star. Me, I'm a up quark. And root canals are quite tolerable with sufficient nitrous oxide followed by liberal doses of prescription opiates.
G'night.
He must know what he's talking about, he's listed in Who's Who Among UK-Based Software Developers .
Here in the U.S., customers can choose whether they want to get screwed by Sprint, Verizon, Cingular, T-Mobile, AT&T, or Comcast. Isn't unregulated capitalism great?!
I said usually, not always. Are you suggesting there wasn't a better outcome that could have been negotiated without having a war? There's no way to tell if the world would have come out better or worse had the colonies not declared independence. The world would probably be completely unrecognizable and it's absurd to try to consider the possibilities of what would have happened had the American Revolution not taken place.
Of course the world might have turned out "better" (whatever that means), if Western Civilization simply exterminated Communism in a nuclear conflagration shortly after WWII ended. Of course the world in 2050 might be "better" (at leasr for us) if we simply kill all the Muslims and take over their oil.
I'm advocating the construction of a future in which we don't slaughter each other anymore. We are human beings, not lions or baboons. We're able to exchange knowledge to better ourselves and thereby avoid conflict through negotiation and compromise.
Maybe I'm an idealist, but I think we're just doing it wrong.
The U.N. Security Council, along with pretty much everyone with half a brain living in most of the civilized world, used their own mental heuristics to correctly predict the outcome of the disaster in Iraq. The neo-conservatives in the U.S. and, inexplicably, Great Britain, were the only ones talking about a "cakewalk".
Is that lots of people are going to suffer and die, and lots of money will be spent, usually with detrimental results to all parties involved.
Oh yeah, and the companies that make bombs and guns will get richer.
As the Cypherpunk Tim May used to say, these people need killing . While I don't advocate such extreme measures myself, all these people do need to be replaced on November 10, 2008. If the ballot box is not effective (if the election is stolen again) there's always the ammo box.
For now, let's put the soap box to good use.
Indeed the only people who came before us about whom we care at all, have made creative cultural contributions (literature, art) or intellectual contributions (to politics, philosophy, history, etc.) Most people are far more interested in what Shakespeare wrote than what their great-great-great grandfather looked like as a kid. All the candid snapshots we take will mean increasingly little to the people who are further outside the moving window of interest that consists of those living in the present and the decades that surround today.
When it comes down to it, we're all just ephemeral patterns of information instantiated in matter, patterns that happen to be able to reproduce themselves imperfectly with energy input. Even the ideas we might painstakingly chisel into stone may not outlast the genetic information we pass on to our descendents (if we successfully reproduce).
But human civilization has become the substrate upon which memetic evolution is now acting as the primary driving force of progress in the universe (or at least our local region). The universe around here is just waking up, realizing its own existence, and deciding what to do with itself.
What really matters is the ideas we pass on to our progeny, which we have some control over. We currently have no real control over the genes we propagate; they need only be nominally good enough for survival.
In the meantime, it really doesn't matter if you preserve your grandparents' wedding photos for your grandchildren to see. They won't be interested.
so you could fit almost 6 full humans on a DVD.
Only six? With lossy compression, you could do significantly better, as long as you don't mind all your offspring being funny-but-similar-looking lactose-intolerant non-deterministic sociopathic freaks.
You're worried about martial law, while American society is deteriorating, rotting from the inside out!? Our only hope lies with people who wield ideas, not guns.
If guns are our only weapons, we're screwed.
All of these anti-phishing tools are a waste of time. The real problem is educating users about safe computing practices.
People simply need to learn that you just don't click on a link in an unsolicited email supposedly from your bank, any more than you would deposit your paycheck into a newly opened bank branch in the nasty part of town, with shoddily painted signage and shifty-looking tellers.
98% of people can learn principles of safe computing. The remaining 2% are a lost cause. Instead of coddling people's ignorance, we should focus on education. Crooks are always going to be out there trying to take advantage of people. This problem is not going to go away or be solved by technological safeguards. It is counterproductive to devise and improve ways for people to continue ignorant, careless behaviour, "La la la, click on whatever links I see," download and run this, that and the next thing, rather than teaching them how to be careful about what code they run and where they type their password.
Ah, nostalgia. When I was a kid, my little sister used to break the heads off of my Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker action figures. I chewed on their retractable lightsabers too, I think, but I grew out of that phase.
My friends and I got even by playing badminton with the severed heads of her Barbie dolls (which aerodynamically resemble shuttlecocks).
Now I feel OLD.
If they would distribute it via a legit torrent, I'd download it, watch it, seed it, and promote it to other people. Even if it had advertisements. I'd even watch the ads and consider consuming the advertised products. All of these things represent value to HBO.
But I will not subscribe to HBO, because I don't have cable. I don't even have a color TV. I don't plan to buy one either.
If there isn't a legit way to get it, I'll just download it for free. If that becomes too risky, I'll be fine watching the interesting clips that wind up on youtube or any of a hundred video blogs. Worst case, I don't get to watch it at all. I'll live.
But for every one like me, there are 1000 who will watch whatever garbage shows up on their idiot box that day, who will buy whatever products and ideas are advertised therein.
What pisses me off is that I can't buy brand-name soap or oatmeal or cars or computing devices without helping to pay the advertising bill for Procter & Gamble and Quaker and Toyota and Dell. I suppose I can grow my own tomatoes and buy generic soap, but if I buy a Honda or a Gateway PC, some of what I pay goes to the advertising industry and some even goes to the RIAA (those pop songs in the commercials aren't free).
It's almost impossible to escape being a good consumer (tm), no matter how hard you try.
Which is why we should all just go read a book. Or write one yourself. It doesn't cost anything to publish your own work anymore. Putting down what you have to say on paper, or electrons, is of more value to our culture than consuming the latest corporate cultural spam. I'll much rather read your replies to this messange, than go out to see the latest Spiderman 3 or Shrek 3.
Think about that. Shrek 3. Spiderman 3. Star Wars 6. Windows Vista. Budweiser. Paris Hilton. Pizza Hut. MacDonalds. Ford. Comcast. Verizon. Wal*Mart.
Fuck all that shit.
We can only hope we are witnessing the death throes of state-sponsored protection of the antiquated intellectual property regime that has been built up over the past several hundred years.
You can't "own" an idea anymore. It's absurd to even try in a world with instantaneous global communication networks. We got a little taste of this two nights ago with the digg 09:f9 revolt. We see memes getting remixed all the time over on 4chan /b/.
Welcome to the future. Your contributions to the culture of humanity will be mercilessly dissected, reshuffled, caricatured, parodied, paraded, criticized, subclassed and recycled.
This is progress.
41
A bit torrent would look more like 10011000010001111010111110101011011010100100110011 11111101011001
That's where the bees have gone. They've flown to Saturn and are constructing a gigantic honeycomb.
It confirms our understanding of light and matter and how they interact. You would think that shining light (energy) on something would warm it up. If it cools it down, something strange is going on.
In a broader sense, it means that we can manipulate matter and energy in ways nobody imagined 100 years ago (well, except for Einstein).
There are no super hackers out there.
Disregard that, I suck cocks.
Just how are they dating these samples? Is there an assumption that each layer is a year? Are they assuming there has been no meltbacks removing several years records?
I am not a paleo-climatologist, but I think we can safely assume that the scientists who are analyzing ice cores are taking these sorts of things into account. Much like a sysadmin reading a log file or processing tcpdump output looking for evidence of hacking, you can safely assume that yeah, the experts did think of that.
When you have expertise in a particular field you tend to become better at perceiving patterns in the data sets you have. The open source 'many eyes' rule of thumb comes into play here, too.
Thus I think we can assume the PhDs in this field would notice an anomaly indicating that their data set may be corrupted, just like I could analyze a suspicious HTTP traffic log file, profile the activity from a specific IP address, correlate it with other sources of information, and make reasonable hypotheses as to what actually was going on, whether the activity was a bot or a human, etc. Or even whether the activity was a human trying to disguise itself as a bot (or vice-versa). And I don't even have a PhD, I just have a decade or so of experience.
Zestfully clean, you're not fully clean unless you're Zest-fully clean.
These things run through my consciousness without my permission. They've invaded my brain via the commercial mass-media during my childhood and adolescence. They are inescapable and pernicious. I'd like to buy the world a Coke.
Go ahead, tell me you've been raised in America and you don't have a corporate media advertising slogan running through the back of your mind now and then. Ancient Chinese secret, huh?
Woo hoo hoo
Let them sign up all the new customers they want, as long as they reveal how I can expunge that damned jingle from my brain.
Boy do I feel bad now for the poor schmuck who lives at 123 First St., Schenectady, NY 12345
I've been signing them up for junk mail, spam, credit card offers, everything for years now.
Holy shit, Google Maps says that that address actually exists.
Sorry, dude.
As long as you don't mind him "grooming" your wife and daughters when you're not around.
Seriously, why don't we humans just try to grow up and respect other [near-]sentient life forms more, in general, when possible. We could start with not blowing each other up with suicide bombs and JDAMs. Maybe move on to not killing elephants just to saw off their teeth to make jewelery. Work on not killing the other primates for meat and dolphins for sport too.
Our species has a loooong way to go on morality. If we don't sort these things out, we're not going to make it.