I agree completely. I run a company that markets bargain items through email, and I don't see why I'd bother paying to use this "trusted" email thing to reach potential customers. We can just buy email lists and send for free, so why bother?
I can imagine it's probably easy to think of a bug as some kind of syntax mistake or typo in the program where, were you to look at the offending line, it would be obvious. That may be true in some rare cases, but with complex programs like FireFox a bug or security hole can be caused by an unusual reaction or side-effect that happens only when two components interact under some specific, unusual (often unexpected) circumstance. There may not be one single line with a mistake - it may encompass various libraries or even the architecture of the application. When a program grows beyond a certain size, the possible interactions grow exponentially and it isn't realistic to simply test every situation by hand.
I understand this, but I don't think it changes my point. That kind of complexity can be solved with asking "what are all possible inputs" and "what are all possible outputs"?
Something I've really wondered about, and would really like an answer to: Why the hell is it so hard not to include bugs and exploits? I used to think it was just poor management, but now you have open source projects with thousands of eyes looking at every line of code. How is it that you can't write code that prevents these exploits? It's nice that you can patch it after the fact, but from what I remember in taking computer science, if you follow some simple procedures, the code is robust. What's the problem? I am dying to know.
I'm glad someone finally mentioned men and women. That seems to be the most important part of this study -- about emotional and cognitional areas of the brain changing. It seems to me that the average (or median) 16-year-old male is more emotionally mature than the average (or median) 30-year-old female because they can better set aside emotion and think rationally.
Showering with my girlfriend actually makes it take longer (than two combined showers) because I have to come in her, THEN we have to both do normal shower procedures.
Those are good points -- seriously. But remember, what makes (made?) Google great was the quality of resutls they could generate *without* making "human" decisions about individual sites, i.e., that their AI handled it all. By starting to single out individual sites, they're showing the weakness of their algorithm. What would be really impressive would be to write an algorithm to detect this kind of gaming -- an AI that "learns" the tricks people start using.
But really, do you expect to get anything meaningful out of a search on single semi-random words on Google?
I don't, but surprisingly, there's someone who does. In that article, a two-bit writer complains that, because you have to type in "apples" rather than "apple" to get the fruit (because of the computer), there's something fundamentally wrong with Google. It's good for a laugh, but not much else.
Yeah, and someone needs to remind them that people have been studying crack propagation for years. The summary doesn't explain how their approach differs, or what it tells us that we didn't already know. ~~~~
His tone is off. Don't gripe to us about how we're like flatearthers for using the current (empirically consistent) model. If you've got a better model show us your predictions and let us test it. Jeez, he sounds like an IDer. (ID=intelligent design)
They forget the flip side, which is that Google could also use this separate internet as a refuge from the "tiered internet" asshattery we've been hearing about.
Good point. Reminds me of a quote from some lame TV Drama:
"Why are you judging me? I pay you to agree with me!" "You pay me to represent you. What I think... isn't up for sale."
Anyway, this case seems to be in sharp contrast to a certain Stephan Kinsella of Applied Optoelectronics. (I'll let y'all google him and his firm.) He works as an IP attorney, sometimes arguing for patents, etc., but is a fierce opponent of all IP (except where it would constitute fraud). And his employer knows this.
The Ubuntu project has already made good progress in terms of usability and so forth;
LOL!!!!!! No, sorry. Just recently I tried to install the latest version to a partition I created. I followed the install instructions to the letter. Then, because of some problem with GRUB, I got locked out of both Windows AND Ubuntu. Real nice. Real nice. Sorry, but any OS that locks you out of all OS's for installing it does not have high "usability" and so forth. The folks on ubuntuforums.org weren't so helpful either. (Look for posts by user: UbuntuDupe) My verdict: find a distro that doesn't punish you for trying it out.
since machine translation is moving along quite well,
No, it's not. Or if it is, people aren't presenting any hard evidence that their methods word. It's always "Oh, we've got a killer one coming out, just you wait and see." Okay, I'll wait. But I won't hold my breath.
Some of us decide not just on economics, but also on morality (and think it's immorral to proffit off major problems like peak oil).
You wouldn't just be profiting off of it, you would be bidding up the price of oil and redirecting investment into finding more of it or in finding alternative energy sources. Moreover, assuming nothing but your own dismal worldview, there are people who have no qualms about profiting from this kind of thing and have billions to invest. When their own money -- and a damn lot of it -- is put on the line, they tend to reject the peak oil theory. They see the same evidence you do. They can afford to research this kind of stuff. And it's just not the kind of thing they put their money into.
It's kind of funny watching people like you. Like watching psychics explain why they don't want Randi's million dollars. If you know the future of oil availability better than all investors, that's as good as a million dollars.
What? Windows has historically been secure. Last year's Windows security budget at Microsoft was over $40 million. When you think about all the people who use Windows, it's amazing what its resilience is. If you don't open suspicious email attachments, have a firewall, and scan for viruses, you'll be fine.
The only reason hackers haven't done to Linux what they've done to Windows is because there are far fewer people using it, and the ones that do have extra security measures up. But make no mistake: once Linux cracks, say, 10%, they will find a jagged shard of glass in the Linux kernel and they will fuck you with it. I guarantee it.
You generally want women in science for the same reason you would want diversity in any field. It brings new perspectives and ideas to science because women usually lead lives that are a bit different from that of men.
That would explain why you want intellectual diversity. That's a completely separate issue from whether or not you have a dick.
The airlines... receive major subsidies from the government (in the form of airports and air traffic control, just to name two)
You're going to have to do better than those two. ATC is funded out of air travel taxes (not necessarily one for one, but canceled out so that it's in no way a "major subsidy", esp. when you debit the airlines the regulations they have to obey not justified by safety or tort prevention). Airports are locally funded, which, sure, is a government too, but irrelevant because you were justifying why they had to obey federal rules.
If you want to talk about the 9/11 bailout, okay, I can see that, but I think you're trying to make your point independent of that.
So what are these "major subsidies" from the federal government the airlines get?
That's fucking bullshit! you're telling me that Google, with it's (apparently worthless) motto of "don't Be Evil" and armies of PhD's could not spend the time and money to get their search results crammed through the Great Firewall via some technical breakthrough?
No, they couldn't. No matter what they did to break through, once the Chinese government knew how they did it, they'd block every method (website, protocol, whatever) that was part of the circumention process, even if it meant shutting off the outside internet entirely and kicking all Google representatives out. Google can't just merrily fuck with a foreign government -- that knows it's fucking with them -- and expect to be able to immunize themselvs from the consequences through the use of their wits.
You seem to have this belief that whererever one does business, one must first overthrow the existing system and establish pure democracy, modeled off of the US Constitution. But if everyone followed that, the people of China would have even *less* improvement over their current state of affairs. The very people you probably think you're basing your position on actually added a footnote you seem to ignore:
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
That doesn't mean "put up with it". I means, don't make the perfect be the enemy of the good. Make sure the good you intend to do is justified by the risk you're taking.
Bob spends 100 years in cryogenic hibernation and then is thawed out. His first conversation goes like this:
Bob: Just before I say anything else, I want to remind you that languages can change a lot in a hundred years, but I'm just going to talk like I did back then, so please don't take offense at anything, because I probably won't mean it that way. Them: [acknowledges comment and assures Bob they understand his position] Bob: So, the niggers still causin' all the problems?
Whoever keeps modding me down, please, just fucking stop it. It's really immature. I know a lot of you don't like me, but following me around so that you can spill whatever mod points you get on me is really, really lame. And people are noticing now. There is no reason to mod this post down. If you want to critique the underlying idea than do so.
But hey, at least you can squeeze in a few easy "off-topics" now, right? Well, let me see if I can avoid that.
A lot of you are complaining that this guy is going to intimidate and press for laws based on this information. But it seems to me that's a little "pre-crime"-ish. There's nothing wrong with raising awareness of what a controversial professor claims. Any and all intellectually honest professors should welcome that (assuming that belief is part of what he chooses to teach, which seems to be the case here). If and when this guy starts to engage in the *other*, not-cool stuff, then it's fair game to call him fascist. If on the other hand, one of his goals is to get people to say "hey, this professor actually is an idiot", that's what free speech is all about.
Slashdot Mirror
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/02/07/13 19209
I agree completely. I run a company that markets bargain items through email, and I don't see why I'd bother paying to use this "trusted" email thing to reach potential customers. We can just buy email lists and send for free, so why bother?
I can imagine it's probably easy to think of a bug as some kind of syntax mistake or typo in the program where, were you to look at the offending line, it would be obvious. That may be true in some rare cases, but with complex programs like FireFox a bug or security hole can be caused by an unusual reaction or side-effect that happens only when two components interact under some specific, unusual (often unexpected) circumstance. There may not be one single line with a mistake - it may encompass various libraries or even the architecture of the application. When a program grows beyond a certain size, the possible interactions grow exponentially and it isn't realistic to simply test every situation by hand.
I understand this, but I don't think it changes my point. That kind of complexity can be solved with asking "what are all possible inputs" and "what are all possible outputs"?
Something I've really wondered about, and would really like an answer to: Why the hell is it so hard not to include bugs and exploits? I used to think it was just poor management, but now you have open source projects with thousands of eyes looking at every line of code. How is it that you can't write code that prevents these exploits? It's nice that you can patch it after the fact, but from what I remember in taking computer science, if you follow some simple procedures, the code is robust. What's the problem? I am dying to know.
I'm glad someone finally mentioned men and women. That seems to be the most important part of this study -- about emotional and cognitional areas of the brain changing. It seems to me that the average (or median) 16-year-old male is more emotionally mature than the average (or median) 30-year-old female because they can better set aside emotion and think rationally.
Showering with my girlfriend actually makes it take longer (than two combined showers) because I have to come in her, THEN we have to both do normal shower procedures.
Those are good points -- seriously. But remember, what makes (made?) Google great was the quality of resutls they could generate *without* making "human" decisions about individual sites, i.e., that their AI handled it all. By starting to single out individual sites, they're showing the weakness of their algorithm. What would be really impressive would be to write an algorithm to detect this kind of gaming -- an AI that "learns" the tricks people start using.
I don't, but surprisingly, there's someone who does. In that article, a two-bit writer complains that, because you have to type in "apples" rather than "apple" to get the fruit (because of the computer), there's something fundamentally wrong with Google. It's good for a laugh, but not much else.
Yeah, and someone needs to remind them that people have been studying crack propagation for years. The summary doesn't explain how their approach differs, or what it tells us that we didn't already know. ~~~~
His tone is off. Don't gripe to us about how we're like flatearthers for using the current (empirically consistent) model. If you've got a better model show us your predictions and let us test it. Jeez, he sounds like an IDer. (ID=intelligent design)
They forget the flip side, which is that Google could also use this separate internet as a refuge from the "tiered internet" asshattery we've been hearing about.
I wasn't modded down for this one, I just have terrible karma, which is due to this, this, and a bunch of other downmods far less justified.
Good point. Reminds me of a quote from some lame TV Drama:
... isn't up for sale."
"Why are you judging me? I pay you to agree with me!"
"You pay me to represent you. What I think
Anyway, this case seems to be in sharp contrast to a certain Stephan Kinsella of Applied Optoelectronics. (I'll let y'all google him and his firm.) He works as an IP attorney, sometimes arguing for patents, etc., but is a fierce opponent of all IP (except where it would constitute fraud). And his employer knows this.
The Ubuntu project has already made good progress in terms of usability and so forth;
LOL!!!!!! No, sorry. Just recently I tried to install the latest version to a partition I created. I followed the install instructions to the letter. Then, because of some problem with GRUB, I got locked out of both Windows AND Ubuntu. Real nice. Real nice. Sorry, but any OS that locks you out of all OS's for installing it does not have high "usability" and so forth. The folks on ubuntuforums.org weren't so helpful either. (Look for posts by user: UbuntuDupe) My verdict: find a distro that doesn't punish you for trying it out.
since machine translation is moving along quite well,
No, it's not. Or if it is, people aren't presenting any hard evidence that their methods word. It's always "Oh, we've got a killer one coming out, just you wait and see." Okay, I'll wait. But I won't hold my breath.
Some of us decide not just on economics, but also on morality (and think it's immorral to proffit off major problems like peak oil).
You wouldn't just be profiting off of it, you would be bidding up the price of oil and redirecting investment into finding more of it or in finding alternative energy sources. Moreover, assuming nothing but your own dismal worldview, there are people who have no qualms about profiting from this kind of thing and have billions to invest. When their own money -- and a damn lot of it -- is put on the line, they tend to reject the peak oil theory. They see the same evidence you do. They can afford to research this kind of stuff. And it's just not the kind of thing they put their money into.
It's kind of funny watching people like you. Like watching psychics explain why they don't want Randi's million dollars. If you know the future of oil availability better than all investors, that's as good as a million dollars.
Oh look honey, another person who believes in "peak oil" but hasn't bought oil futures.
That's nice, dear.
Well, servers are hard to hack regardless. Who tries to get ads to display in a server's GUI? You know?
What? Windows has historically been secure. Last year's Windows security budget at Microsoft was over $40 million. When you think about all the people who use Windows, it's amazing what its resilience is. If you don't open suspicious email attachments, have a firewall, and scan for viruses, you'll be fine.
The only reason hackers haven't done to Linux what they've done to Windows is because there are far fewer people using it, and the ones that do have extra security measures up. But make no mistake: once Linux cracks, say, 10%, they will find a jagged shard of glass in the Linux kernel and they will fuck you with it. I guarantee it.
Yeah, but, like, the cars would get 500 mpg city and sell for $50 ... or something.
How does that one go again?
You generally want women in science for the same reason you would want diversity in any field. It brings new perspectives and ideas to science because women usually lead lives that are a bit different from that of men.
That would explain why you want intellectual diversity. That's a completely separate issue from whether or not you have a dick.
The airlines ... receive major subsidies from the government (in the form of airports and air traffic control, just to name two)
You're going to have to do better than those two. ATC is funded out of air travel taxes (not necessarily one for one, but canceled out so that it's in no way a "major subsidy", esp. when you debit the airlines the regulations they have to obey not justified by safety or tort prevention). Airports are locally funded, which, sure, is a government too, but irrelevant because you were justifying why they had to obey federal rules.
If you want to talk about the 9/11 bailout, okay, I can see that, but I think you're trying to make your point independent of that.
So what are these "major subsidies" from the federal government the airlines get?
That's fucking bullshit! you're telling me that Google, with it's (apparently worthless) motto of "don't Be Evil" and armies of PhD's could not spend the time and money to get their search results crammed through the Great Firewall via some technical breakthrough?
No, they couldn't. No matter what they did to break through, once the Chinese government knew how they did it, they'd block every method (website, protocol, whatever) that was part of the circumention process, even if it meant shutting off the outside internet entirely and kicking all Google representatives out. Google can't just merrily fuck with a foreign government -- that knows it's fucking with them -- and expect to be able to immunize themselvs from the consequences through the use of their wits.
You seem to have this belief that whererever one does business, one must first overthrow the existing system and establish pure democracy, modeled off of the US Constitution. But if everyone followed that, the people of China would have even *less* improvement over their current state of affairs. The very people you probably think you're basing your position on actually added a footnote you seem to ignore:
"Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
That doesn't mean "put up with it". I means, don't make the perfect be the enemy of the good. Make sure the good you intend to do is justified by the risk you're taking.
Bob spends 100 years in cryogenic hibernation and then is thawed out. His first conversation goes like this:
Bob: Just before I say anything else, I want to remind you that languages can change a lot in a hundred years, but I'm just going to talk like I did back then, so please don't take offense at anything, because I probably won't mean it that way.
Them: [acknowledges comment and assures Bob they understand his position]
Bob: So, the niggers still causin' all the problems?
Whoever keeps modding me down, please, just fucking stop it. It's really immature. I know a lot of you don't like me, but following me around so that you can spill whatever mod points you get on me is really, really lame. And people are noticing now. There is no reason to mod this post down. If you want to critique the underlying idea than do so.
But hey, at least you can squeeze in a few easy "off-topics" now, right? Well, let me see if I can avoid that.
A lot of you are complaining that this guy is going to intimidate and press for laws based on this information. But it seems to me that's a little "pre-crime"-ish. There's nothing wrong with raising awareness of what a controversial professor claims. Any and all intellectually honest professors should welcome that (assuming that belief is part of what he chooses to teach, which seems to be the case here). If and when this guy starts to engage in the *other*, not-cool stuff, then it's fair game to call him fascist. If on the other hand, one of his goals is to get people to say "hey, this professor actually is an idiot", that's what free speech is all about.