Researchers at CalTech have discovered how bees fly, putting one more nail in the coffin of Intelligent Design.
Unfortunately, this coffin is infinitely long. I've tried to argue with ID-ists and there's no hope. Why is it infinitely long? Because there is an infinite wealth of knowledge out there and we can never know all of it. As long as there is something we do not know, there will be room for a god or a designer.
To quote someone I admire:
"I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." ~Isaac Newton (1642-1727)
In Brewster, Memoirs of Newton (1855), vol II, Ch. 27
Excuse me, think back to that guy, standing in the path of the line of tanks, and stopping them. Even if it accomplished nothing locally, that has to be one of THE most touching images of the last century, that has inspired thousands to get up stand up for their rights.
You're excused.
But certainly you can think of more moving moments than that. What about the buddhist monk who set himself on fire in public to protest Vietnam?
I'm not saying anyone should go to that length. I'm just saying if he only inspired thousands (like you said), then he certainly fell short as China has a population near one billion.
Unless one's thesis is on the Wikipedia, anyone depending oslely on Wikipedia for research needs a reality slap.
I don't think it's really fair for you to say something like this unless you live in China and get along fine with the suppression of websites.
Afterall, I've found very helpful things on Wikipedia. I just wrote a Hidden Markov Model using the Viterbi Algorithm and did it from scratch in Java using WordNet and this page. Am I saying I could write a paper off of Wikipedia? No, but when that's all you have to work with, it may be more important than you think.
I guess we wait for another Tiananmen Square to happen again. It kind of makes one wonder what exactly was accomplished in 1989 when 100,000 protesters marched in Beijing. Appearantly not much.
While the U.S. is concerned with this, maybe we should instead be concerned with that?
What are people supposed to do if they cannot free themselves from a suppressive government? It's not worth violence to be able to read wikipedia but it's clear that non-violent protests in the past did very little.
I recently reread Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond. In it, he describes the extinction of many large species that grew up on remote islands.
We're all familiar with the dodo bird which was a fairly large species but there were also appearant extinctions of other large animals in the Polynesian Islands.
The reason for their extinction is that they grew up without modern man on their islands. Now, animals that live in Africa like the giraffe, wildebeest, hippo, etc were exposed to the evolution of man. Our initial stone weapons didn't kill all the targets but gave them time to adjust genetically and grow wary and eventually instinctively fear humans.
Those that didn't were killed.
Once the remote island mega fauna became exposed to humans and their advanced iron or steel weapons, they did not have the time to adjust to fear us. And our weapons rarely didn't kill them... in most cases, not even leaving a generation to try to adapt to our presence. For this reason, they were quickly killed without fearing us.
A supposed Kong would invariably never fear humans unless their were a race of Kongs and we adapted our 1920's technology to be able to kill them more efficiently.
-- You are asserting an opinion that one language, Java, is better than almost all others.
Where did I say this? I never said this. I said that it was well planned and well designed. I wasn't saying it was better than C, I would never say that. They both have their applications.
What I was trying to convey (as neutrally as possible) is that I appreciate Java because I feel that the extent to which it's been used reveals that the planning that went into it was well done.
Appearantly I was painting a bullseye on my back.
- You are upset that I called you a troll (which was nicer than just saying, "Shut it, Corky.").
Yeah, it is nicer than just saying "Shut it, Corky." But you could have pointed out what was wrong with my post instead of being an ass. Now, normally I just ignore asses but your post got modded up so at least a few other members of the community agree with you. I'm not pissed, I just realized something. And that something is to no longer offer my comments to slashdot. I think I'll move to anandtech.
If slashdot users want a community full of people who snort and laugh everytime they read someone's opinion, than I don't want to be here. I'll look for a place where people only try to add more information to the discussion and spend more time constructing arguments than insults.
Well, to let you know, I got to log on for about five minutes. I'm at my parent's house in the middle of nowhere working on a phone line connection (of which the ISP is 7 miles away as the crow flies).
I'm tying up the phone line as I type and I had about as much time to write the humble note about Java.
I said it was a "humble" note because I'm no expert on computer languages and I never claimed to be.
I started downloading firefox on this POS celeron and it looks like it's going to be around 45 minutes... which is out the question considering the phone line it will tie up.
Further more, the high score on your post causes me to realize what crap this site can be. Don't worry, I won't be posting on slashdot for quite some time... if ever.
I also use LISP. But let's keep in mind that I said "practical computing." I probably should have included "object oriented" with practical.
Duly noted though, Paul Graham and company did a fine job on that language. I still enjoy using it in my AI classes in grad school. A very clean language but the topic at hand was Java, not LISP and I'm only 23 years old... I think that makes Java a little more accessible to me than LISP.
Java is one of the first languages that was well planned and well designed with a theoretical basis in mind.
I can't think of many languages where this is true and that's why I think I'll always appreciate Java. It was a case where a practical computing technology was built after the theoretical studies were done.
It was a language done right and the first in this manner I could appreciate.
You know, I noticed that between me and my friends the most painful experience when dealing with computers
is losing a hard drive.
Yes, I know it's a nerd thing to say but it's almost as bad as losing a
pet.
Now, because of the brands of said failed drives, I have developed a quality ranking
apart from my friends. And it's the pain of that lost data that backs me up.
I had a death star (IBM deskstar)
tear itself apart on me and even though it was one of those old Ukrainian IBM/Hitachi ones, I still shy
away from Western Digital who now makes them also. I've also had a Seagate fail me but (to be fair) I had
bought it thoroughly used.
Now, when ever I go out and buy a drive, I'm leaning towards Maxtor
simply because I have a lot of them and one hasn't failed me with crucial data on it. I'm a lot better
prepared to deal with that now as I'm older and wiser so maybe I won't ever feel that level of pain again.
Many of my friends swear by Seagate and also claim they're the quietest thing out there.
These new drives made by the merged company should be quite good, perhaps they're able to combine
technologies, patents, manufacturing methods and resources to form a very reliable and quiet drive.
What I'd like to ask slashdot readers is for a good way to measure drive quality other than
throwing down chicken bones and looking at them or reading tea leaves?
I guess the only thing
I've found so far is reviews on-line (sometimes Neweggs have the best sampling), any other suggestions?
Is there some kind of hard-drive-consumer-report thingy out there?
Ok, I looked at this keyboard and (aside from moving the keys to an abcd format) it seems to
use more of shift-like functionality. Each key I see has 5 labelings and I hope to god that
the ones I can't make out in white are the numbers because I can't seem to find them anywhere
else on this freak of nature.
I just counted on my own traditional 101-key keyboard
146 or so different values I could want to send to the computer. So let's use that number
in a brief analysis of methods we could use to design a keyboard.
On one hand, you could have a physical key for each and every character/signal you want to send.
Yes, even upper case letters would be a key different from lower case.
On the other
hand, you could say that combinations of keys count for sending signals. This assumes the
user can depressed keys instantly but this means that for each key, we've doubled the amount
of signals we can send. So, the smallest power of 2 above 146 is 256 or 2^8. And this is
fine because we have 10 fingers which is more then enough to hit 8, if required.
However, we don't want a keyboard with a key for every signal and we don't want
to have to memorize combinations and press down on keys instantly to obtain the desired signal.
What we do want is a happy medium.
Both the 101 and 53 key methods provide
that medium, I guess it's just a case of who came first (similar to the problem with
Dvorak simplified keyboard
Which many people have contended is better than QWERTY yet has not taken off like it should have.
Unless this new keyboard poses some amazing qualities that set it far and above the
old design, it's probably not going to take...
... and I'm not seeing these innovative
designs, just a need for me to memorize a new key pattern.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the almighty spaghetti monster
for all that He has done for me.
Not only has He used divine intervention in Dover but He has shown me the way! I await
his presence in pirate heaven with the stripper factory and beer volcano.
... at how many times a developer has been instructed to use a certain security measure and he/she went about implementing it without giving it a second thought.
This is also very dangerous when security implementations are very simple to implement because it may provide a false sense of security without ever having to know the nitty gritty details of what's going on.
Why on earth don't Ebay GPG sign their messages? Even if most users wouldn't check the signature, at least their own fraud team could tell what was genuine Ebay correspondence and what wasn't...
I think this is simply a case example of one security measure being sufficient up to this point and so there is no reason to go through all the trouble of implementing a possibly better method.
Another thing to add to your list of security DO's, always keep your eye open for a better (even if it's different) solution to your security needs. If security is so important to the big wigs, make your case and ask for money to research/test other possibilities.
I would suggest reading up on the security measures you currently use.
Maybe you use HTTPS and should read up about the security
zones you can make using HTTPS.
If you can verify that your trusted sites really are trusted, then you should feel safer.
I think a lot of companies fall victim to using a security method X with out investigating security methods
W, Y & Z. After minimal investigation, it might be clear that X has had problems in the past and there is
a lot of buzz about possible future problems (like the book in the article might point out).
I don't know a ton about security but I would suggest you simply make yourself a subject matter expert
and look out for possible problems with your particular security method.
In the context of the article this is doubly nonsense because IE for Mac is discontinued and vulnerabilities for it will never be fixed.
In a wider context, its still nonsense. If you're concerned about security, you use the browser with the more secure architecture - not the one with the least users.
Ok, so you're right. There, that's not something you see on a slashdot post very often, is it?
I guess our argument comes down to whether an architecture really is safe. Maybe IE's architecture is just unsafe because the current lines of attack are developed to target its architecture? As a programmer, I'm fairly bias when I say this but hackers are very resourceful. I do not doubt their abilities to target different applications when it suits them.
In case you noticed, the linked article
read like a bad translation from Chinese to English. Probably because it was.
If you'd like a better article regarding this, try out this
article which is easier and it also contains a relevant quote:
"It is recommended that Macintosh users migrate to more recent web browsing technologies such as Apple's Safari," Microsoft said.
Instead of having to put up with awkward sentences like the following from The People's Daily article:
IE will not be a problem for Apple users because most of them have applied different browsers on their computers.
I hope everyone has "applied" firefox by now.
I'm not going to say anything about this remark:
And with this change, every mac on the internet will become even more secure than their Windows based counterparts.
Other than this is an arguable statement. It's possible that whatever browser has the highest usage rating will have the most
virii written for it. If Firefox becomes the dominant browser, it might even be safer to have IE installed on
your computer to avoid the latest virus. Yes, a Firefox virus is fixed faster than an IE virus, but it's still
a liability.
One of the most important caveats of today's progress in quantum computing is Shor's Algorith.
Why hasn't quantum computing gone further? Well, first you need to know that it requires your qubit to be tied to nearby qubits. When done with electrons, this is difficult because decoherence sets in very quickly.
In the end, they can "compute" with this string of qubits by bathing it in a certain frequency wavelength. What comes back are the multiple waves with the frequencies of all the prime factorizations of the initial frequency. The initial frequency cannot be greater than 2^(# of qubits).
As a citizen of the U.S., you are funding this project so you have paid for and are entitled to read about their discoveries and I encourage you to do so if you have the time.
The reason for all this research?
"Many public key cryptosystems, such as RSA, will become obsolete if Shor's algorithm is ever implemented in a practical quantum computer."
I used to take an advanced literature course in college. I loved to read but I knew that the placement for jobs meant I had remain a computer science major.
My professor told me that maybe I should save up money writing code and then apply for a professor position at a college or get a teaching degree.
Maybe it's conducive for one who programs computers to have a yearning for a different job and once they have enough financial backing, they take the plunge?
I haven't yet discounted teaching as a future profession... but I'm only 23...
Slashdot Mirror
To quote someone I admire:
Possessed Demon: I will now debunk the moonwalk. Toe, slide, toe, slide...easy...
Earl: God made upside-down margaritas, and keg headstands too.
Frat boy: Thank you God!
Ahhhh, UCB, how I miss thee.
A man burns and a band capitalizes off of it. Further more, you joke about it. I guess death isn't as serious as it used to be.
But certainly you can think of more moving moments than that. What about the buddhist monk who set himself on fire in public to protest Vietnam?
I'm not saying anyone should go to that length. I'm just saying if he only inspired thousands (like you said), then he certainly fell short as China has a population near one billion.
I don't think it's really fair for you to say something like this unless you live in China and get along fine with the suppression of websites.
Afterall, I've found very helpful things on Wikipedia. I just wrote a Hidden Markov Model using the Viterbi Algorithm and did it from scratch in Java using WordNet and this page. Am I saying I could write a paper off of Wikipedia? No, but when that's all you have to work with, it may be more important than you think.
I guess we wait for another Tiananmen Square to happen again. It kind of makes one wonder what exactly was accomplished in 1989 when 100,000 protesters marched in Beijing. Appearantly not much.
While the U.S. is concerned with this, maybe we should instead be concerned with that?
Either way, if you're interested in what the U.S. is concerned about, maybe you should read documents made available by the Freedom of Information Act.
What are people supposed to do if they cannot free themselves from a suppressive government? It's not worth violence to be able to read wikipedia but it's clear that non-violent protests in the past did very little.
Movies made from video games are timeless... just look at Mario Brothers, Doom, Final Fanatasy, Tomb Raider, and Resident Evil!
I recently reread Guns, Germs & Steel by Jared Diamond. In it, he describes the extinction of many large species that grew up on remote islands.
... in most cases, not even leaving a generation to try to adapt to our presence. For this reason, they were quickly killed without fearing us.
We're all familiar with the dodo bird which was a fairly large species but there were also appearant extinctions of other large animals in the Polynesian Islands.
The reason for their extinction is that they grew up without modern man on their islands. Now, animals that live in Africa like the giraffe, wildebeest, hippo, etc were exposed to the evolution of man. Our initial stone weapons didn't kill all the targets but gave them time to adjust genetically and grow wary and eventually instinctively fear humans.
Those that didn't were killed.
Once the remote island mega fauna became exposed to humans and their advanced iron or steel weapons, they did not have the time to adjust to fear us. And our weapons rarely didn't kill them
A supposed Kong would invariably never fear humans unless their were a race of Kongs and we adapted our 1920's technology to be able to kill them more efficiently.
If you haven't read that book, do so.
What I was trying to convey (as neutrally as possible) is that I appreciate Java because I feel that the extent to which it's been used reveals that the planning that went into it was well done.
Appearantly I was painting a bullseye on my back.
Yeah, it is nicer than just saying "Shut it, Corky." But you could have pointed out what was wrong with my post instead of being an ass. Now, normally I just ignore asses but your post got modded up so at least a few other members of the community agree with you. I'm not pissed, I just realized something. And that something is to no longer offer my comments to slashdot. I think I'll move to anandtech.
If slashdot users want a community full of people who snort and laugh everytime they read someone's opinion, than I don't want to be here. I'll look for a place where people only try to add more information to the discussion and spend more time constructing arguments than insults.
Happy solstice.
"Slashdot troll," that's good.
... which is out the question considering the phone line it will tie up.
... if ever.
Well, to let you know, I got to log on for about five minutes. I'm at my parent's house in the middle of nowhere working on a phone line connection (of which the ISP is 7 miles away as the crow flies).
I'm tying up the phone line as I type and I had about as much time to write the humble note about Java.
I said it was a "humble" note because I'm no expert on computer languages and I never claimed to be.
I started downloading firefox on this POS celeron and it looks like it's going to be around 45 minutes
Further more, the high score on your post causes me to realize what crap this site can be. Don't worry, I won't be posting on slashdot for quite some time
Thank you for showing me the light, good day.
I also use LISP. But let's keep in mind that I said "practical computing." I probably should have included "object oriented" with practical.
... I think that makes Java a little more accessible to me than LISP.
Duly noted though, Paul Graham and company did a fine job on that language. I still enjoy using it in my AI classes in grad school. A very clean language but the topic at hand was Java, not LISP and I'm only 23 years old
Java is one of the first languages that was well planned and well designed with a theoretical basis in mind.
I can't think of many languages where this is true and that's why I think I'll always appreciate Java. It was a case where a practical computing technology was built after the theoretical studies were done.
It was a language done right and the first in this manner I could appreciate.
You know, I noticed that between me and my friends the most painful experience when dealing with computers is losing a hard drive.
Yes, I know it's a nerd thing to say but it's almost as bad as losing a pet.
Now, because of the brands of said failed drives, I have developed a quality ranking apart from my friends. And it's the pain of that lost data that backs me up.
I had a death star (IBM deskstar) tear itself apart on me and even though it was one of those old Ukrainian IBM/Hitachi ones, I still shy away from Western Digital who now makes them also. I've also had a Seagate fail me but (to be fair) I had bought it thoroughly used.
Now, when ever I go out and buy a drive, I'm leaning towards Maxtor simply because I have a lot of them and one hasn't failed me with crucial data on it. I'm a lot better prepared to deal with that now as I'm older and wiser so maybe I won't ever feel that level of pain again.
Many of my friends swear by Seagate and also claim they're the quietest thing out there.
These new drives made by the merged company should be quite good, perhaps they're able to combine technologies, patents, manufacturing methods and resources to form a very reliable and quiet drive.
What I'd like to ask slashdot readers is for a good way to measure drive quality other than throwing down chicken bones and looking at them or reading tea leaves?
I guess the only thing I've found so far is reviews on-line (sometimes Neweggs have the best sampling), any other suggestions? Is there some kind of hard-drive-consumer-report thingy out there?
Ok, I looked at this keyboard and (aside from moving the keys to an abcd format) it seems to use more of shift-like functionality. Each key I see has 5 labelings and I hope to god that the ones I can't make out in white are the numbers because I can't seem to find them anywhere else on this freak of nature.
...
... and I'm not seeing these innovative
designs, just a need for me to memorize a new key pattern.
I just counted on my own traditional 101-key keyboard 146 or so different values I could want to send to the computer. So let's use that number in a brief analysis of methods we could use to design a keyboard.
On one hand, you could have a physical key for each and every character/signal you want to send. Yes, even upper case letters would be a key different from lower case.
On the other hand, you could say that combinations of keys count for sending signals. This assumes the user can depressed keys instantly but this means that for each key, we've doubled the amount of signals we can send. So, the smallest power of 2 above 146 is 256 or 2^8. And this is fine because we have 10 fingers which is more then enough to hit 8, if required.
However, we don't want a keyboard with a key for every signal and we don't want to have to memorize combinations and press down on keys instantly to obtain the desired signal.
What we do want is a happy medium.
Both the 101 and 53 key methods provide that medium, I guess it's just a case of who came first (similar to the problem with Dvorak simplified keyboard Which many people have contended is better than QWERTY yet has not taken off like it should have.
Unless this new keyboard poses some amazing qualities that set it far and above the old design, it's probably not going to take
Space. It seems to go on and on forever. But then you get to the end and a gorilla starts throwing barrels at you ...
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the almighty spaghetti monster for all that He has done for me.
Not only has He used divine intervention in Dover but He has shown me the way! I await his presence in pirate heaven with the stripper factory and beer volcano.
Believe.
... at how many times a developer has been instructed to use a certain security measure and he/she went about implementing it without giving it a second thought.
This is also very dangerous when security implementations are very simple to implement because it may provide a false sense of security without ever having to know the nitty gritty details of what's going on.
I think this is simply a case example of one security measure being sufficient up to this point and so there is no reason to go through all the trouble of implementing a possibly better method.
Another thing to add to your list of security DO's, always keep your eye open for a better (even if it's different) solution to your security needs. If security is so important to the big wigs, make your case and ask for money to research/test other possibilities.
I would suggest reading up on the security measures you currently use. Maybe you use HTTPS and should read up about the security zones you can make using HTTPS.
If you can verify that your trusted sites really are trusted, then you should feel safer.
I think a lot of companies fall victim to using a security method X with out investigating security methods W, Y & Z. After minimal investigation, it might be clear that X has had problems in the past and there is a lot of buzz about possible future problems (like the book in the article might point out).
I don't know a ton about security but I would suggest you simply make yourself a subject matter expert and look out for possible problems with your particular security method.
But don't some users want this X and VB functionality?
Ok, so you're right. There, that's not something you see on a slashdot post very often, is it?
I guess our argument comes down to whether an architecture really is safe. Maybe IE's architecture is just unsafe because the current lines of attack are developed to target its architecture? As a programmer, I'm fairly bias when I say this but hackers are very resourceful. I do not doubt their abilities to target different applications when it suits them.
If you'd like a better article regarding this, try out this article which is easier and it also contains a relevant quote: Instead of having to put up with awkward sentences like the following from The People's Daily article:
I hope everyone has "applied" firefox by now.
I'm not going to say anything about this remark: Other than this is an arguable statement. It's possible that whatever browser has the highest usage rating will have the most virii written for it. If Firefox becomes the dominant browser, it might even be safer to have IE installed on your computer to avoid the latest virus. Yes, a Firefox virus is fixed faster than an IE virus, but it's still a liability.
Why hasn't quantum computing gone further? Well, first you need to know that it requires your qubit to be tied to nearby qubits. When done with electrons, this is difficult because decoherence sets in very quickly.
In the end, they can "compute" with this string of qubits by bathing it in a certain frequency wavelength. What comes back are the multiple waves with the frequencies of all the prime factorizations of the initial frequency. The initial frequency cannot be greater than 2^(# of qubits).
The information I am relaying to you is from George Johnson's book, A Shortcut Through Time. Which is quite good.
I would also like to point out that the United States Government Lab in Los Alamos has done considerable research regarding this.
As a citizen of the U.S., you are funding this project so you have paid for and are entitled to read about their discoveries and I encourage you to do so if you have the time.
The reason for all this research? ~ From the Wiki Talk on Shor's Algorithm
Being rich isn't the end goal for all of us, you know. There's this thing called "self satisfaction."
I used to take an advanced literature course in college. I loved to read but I knew that the placement for jobs meant I had remain a computer science major.
... but I'm only 23 ...
My professor told me that maybe I should save up money writing code and then apply for a professor position at a college or get a teaching degree.
Maybe it's conducive for one who programs computers to have a yearning for a different job and once they have enough financial backing, they take the plunge?
I haven't yet discounted teaching as a future profession