Passing high school math and science courses would be more than enough in this case. Since I assume you are already out of high school and/or your school is/was incompetent and fails to teach the basics, I would recommend a book called 'How to lie with statistics.'
We have a paleoclimate record covering roughly half a billion years. There are several known cycles that account for it partially, as an example the glacial-interglacial cycle (when it's active!) takes ~100k years. And anyone with the slightest understanding of statistics knows that you cannot take a 500 year non-random sample out of a 500m year data set and expect this miniscule slice to accurately reflect the whole.
It's GIGO, the rest of the math can be absolutely perfect and the results are still garbage, because that math assumes proper sampling which was not done.
"If you leave your sandwich near me and come back to find a bite taken out of it, would you accept the argument, "You cannot ascertain the intake of past consumption with enough precision to absolutely blame me for eating your sandwich", or would you say I'm full of shit?"
That depends. Did I leave it in front of you with no one else nearby, and return quickly? Or did I leave it 'near' you and a few hundred thousand other people, and for a long enough period of time that any one of them could have taken it?
Eh that's arguable, there are some approaches to paleo-climate that work fairly well, as long as their limitations are understood.
But 500 years? Are you freaking kidding me?
Nowhere near long enough to hold the weight attached. If this were science rather than religion their reviewers would have ripped them apart. But these days it seems like as long as you mouth the orthodox AGW litany no further questions are permitted.
Go tools-options-advanced (by fonts and colors.) Find 'allow sites to choose' and make sure that evil box is NOT checked. Then for each category of font make sure that the one selected is clean and easy to read. If not, change it. Hit ok, done.
Actually according to TFA they tried this, but for some reason the staff failed to complete the job. It was pretty vague about why, and it's pretty hard for me to think of an excuse I would accept if I were that judge.
How would I know why I am being modded down? I appear to have some fans who come through periodically and give me a bunch of overrated mods, that might be it.
Font? That would be idiotic since I do not control the font on your screen, not even indirectly. For the benefit of anyone who does not understand, the user agent (web browser) has the final decision as to what font to use in displaying a webpage (if the concept of 'font' actually has meaning in the environment it runs in, which is not a given.) The web page (in this case, Slashdot) can give your browser suggestions, and often it has a long list of such suggestions which your browser can and often should be told to ignore.
I am three levels back, behind the web page. I am allowed to give it hints as well, but only by picking from a very short list. Every option on it sucks, the one I am using now sucks the least as default because it mucks with my text the least. If you do not like the font you are seeing on your screen then LEARN how to use your web browser and activate an over-ride. This is the web not television FFS.
Except that this has nothing to do with luck. It has to do with independent observers having less pressure on them to, consciously or subconsciously, produce rhetoric ostensibly concerning foreign policy but whose content is determined by domestic political needs.
Maybe, of course we cannot just believe them after seeing them repeatedly lying to Congress, but it strikes me likely in this particular case they are telling the truth. This bug, unless I am misunderstanding, essentially lets you read from a small contiguous pseudo-random block of memory. That's obviously not acceptable from a defender point of view - it could potentially expose any and all information so it's a severe flaw - but from an attackers point of view it seems less impressive.
You could probably try this thousands of times without actually obtaining any information of value. Sure, you might luck out and get the keys to the kingdom, but it seems like a crapshoot. From an attackers point of view, this might be better than nothing, but unless they have pretty near nothing to start from, it does not seem exciting.
And we know they have a lot more than nothing to start from. With Total Surveillance in effect on the net, with rootkits and zero-day exploits to deliver them, it's just really hard to see how this would add anything substantial to their toolkit.
No, I suspect this is exactly what it appears to be - a critical bug resulting from too much emphasis on fast and not enough on good. That's hardly unique to OpenSSL, it's a chronic problem across the industry as a whole.
"I've trained quite a few people in their 50's to code, but here's the thing: Lots of them type ~10-20WPM"
You should be requiring a pass on a touch-typing test as a prerequisite for any computer courses, and offer a remedial typing course for those who fail.
Trying to teach computing to someone that cannot hold say 45wpm at absolute minimum is very much like trying to train someone who struggles to walk for a marathon. Wastes your time and the students as well.
"Sorry, but who is going to fund this? And what is their motivator? I'm missing something here."
Consumers. To protect ourselves. Obviously.
"I'm not sure if you're arrogant or ignorant here, but the general population does not have the education or sometimes the intelligence to make sensible choices that require knowledge and information they don't posses"
I'm not sure if you are ignorant or arrogant here, but what you are referring to is not an inherent state of an inherently lesser sort of people, but rather a product of environment. The nanny state creates this helplessness, it does not alleviate it.
"I also believe that as a whole, humans are becoming more and more stupid"
Good. You have noticed. Now go figure out why that is happening. I will give you two very blatant hints. Fichte. Horace Mann.
"but that doesn't mean our government should allow large corporations take advantage of these people in situations like this. "
Quit worrying about what governments *allow* and start thinking about what they *enable*.
"You mention your tax dollars being spent to educate the ignorant, would you prefer that your tax dollars be spent saving the lives of those who believed the pedallers and now may need significantly more expensive treatment due to not treating their issue properly initially?"
I would prefer to stop it a stage earlier - at the stage where my tax dollars are used to train helplessness and ignorance in the first place. Why not just keep our tax dollars and do something useful with them instead?
"That sounds like opinion and speculation - sure there are cases both ways, but 'tends' may be a bit strong."
"Bizarre as this might sound, this isn't specifically about you."
Which is not an answer or a justification of any kind. At best it's a hand-wave.
"If you're suggesting that the industry should run its own standards body I'm afraid you're blind to a huge conflict of interest. There's nothing effective and efficient about having the fox guard the hen house."
I am suggesting nothing of the kind, you appear to be blind to the fact that this is exactly what you get whenever you have a monopolistic regulatory agency 'running the industry.' What I want is a free market and that means NO ONE 'running the industry.'
Of course it adds a level of stress, but as long as it ceases when I clock out for the day, and there is a legitimate need, I just figure it's one of the reasons I am getting paid. That's why we call it work, not play, you take on stress and you get paid.
If I were a cop, you know, frankly I think I would probably be in favor of making certain that I and every coworker was being recorded every minute we were on shift. To protect myself as much as to protect the public.
"They are likely using a specialty alloy run through a one-of-a-kind manufacturing line to produce these things. They're not going to be cheap like tire rims."
Not until the Chinese clone it. You can bet their projectiles will be orders of magnitude less expensive, and just slightly less effective.
This project in particular seems to have some odd implications as well. I believe it's poor policy, contrary to our national interest, but nonetheless Washington is committed to encircling China with the Navy, and clearly this tech is intended to help with that. But I have to project the Chinese copying the tech rapidly. And this sort of weapon is going to be easier and cheaper to implement (not to mention much more accurate!) if you mount it on land instead of on a ship.
I suspect by the time the US Navy has a number of these weapons in operational use, the Chinese will counter with much larger number of similar, if less sophisticated, versions in fixed emplacements along their coast, and their position will be better, not worse as a result.
That is to say, it appears to be tech that swings the balance of power toward defense. Not necessarily a bad thing that, but if the governments purpose in developing this technology was defensive, they would not have gone to all the trouble to specifically implement this as a ship-portable weapon.
It's very neat tech, and I can understand some enthusiasm on a purely technical level, but on the level of 'good use of taxpayers money' I am afraid it is pure fail.
"How would you like to have your every move and word recorded and transmitted by your employer every second of every working day?"
Well consider that's exactly what happens for me and many others every day at work, it's obviously something people can cope with.
"I don't condone police abuse but this level of intrusion seems extreme to me."
You seem a bit out of touch. LOTS of people have every word recorded while they are working. LOTS of people that have far less opportunity to abuse their position than a policeman does.
"To me this is absolutely forward thinking (more information is usually a good thing)."
I see a few problems with this.
First off, you're taxing my pay to pay someone else to tell me something I already know. That's perverse and inefficient at best. (Exaggerated slightly to make the point - I dont actually currently pay taxes in Oz but I have in the past and the point holds for any current resident.)
Secondly, having a state funded 'consumer watchdog' inevitably discourages the creation of private consumer watchdogs (plural) which would be more effective and efficient.
Third, a state funded consumer watchdog agency luls consumers into unwarranted complacency. If the assumption is that anything for sale must be safe and effective (because that is why we pay the overhead of all these rules and regulations, after all?) then there is perceived to be less or no need to weigh your choices carefully, to research before buying, etc. Ironically a measure supposedly to benefit consumers tends to actually work against their interests.
"There are about 10,000 complementary medicine products sold in Australia but most consumers are unaware they are not evaluated by the domestic medicines safety watchdog before they are allowed on the market."
This is absolutely backwards thinking. The assumption is that no product should possibly be 'allowed' in the market without costly and time-consuming 'evaluation' and 'approval' by a 'watchdog.' That's just a recipe for guaranteeing the profits of existing market leaders at the expense of the consumer.
People are selling nonsense? Don't buy it. Easy-peazy as they say in Oz.
It appears you are confused. The Israelis also have agents that supposedly have special abilities in reading body-language as well, so that part of the description could apply to both places, however the mention of not "singling out someone by their heritage" makes it clear we are referring to Iran not Israel. The Israelis single people out according to heritage as explicit policy, as many US Citizen of Palestinian heritage have been made painfully aware.
OK, this is an NSA article and I just agreed with you.
Is that really you? Someone hijack your account?
Our government is spending borrowed money like there is no tomorrow backed only by their promise to work us and our descendents forever to pay the interest. It cannot end well.
Slashdot Mirror
Passing high school math and science courses would be more than enough in this case. Since I assume you are already out of high school and/or your school is/was incompetent and fails to teach the basics, I would recommend a book called 'How to lie with statistics.'
We have a paleoclimate record covering roughly half a billion years. There are several known cycles that account for it partially, as an example the glacial-interglacial cycle (when it's active!) takes ~100k years. And anyone with the slightest understanding of statistics knows that you cannot take a 500 year non-random sample out of a 500m year data set and expect this miniscule slice to accurately reflect the whole.
It's GIGO, the rest of the math can be absolutely perfect and the results are still garbage, because that math assumes proper sampling which was not done.
"If you leave your sandwich near me and come back to find a bite taken out of it, would you accept the argument, "You cannot ascertain the intake of past consumption with enough precision to absolutely blame me for eating your sandwich", or would you say I'm full of shit?"
That depends. Did I leave it in front of you with no one else nearby, and return quickly? Or did I leave it 'near' you and a few hundred thousand other people, and for a long enough period of time that any one of them could have taken it?
Eh that's arguable, there are some approaches to paleo-climate that work fairly well, as long as their limitations are understood.
But 500 years? Are you freaking kidding me?
Nowhere near long enough to hold the weight attached. If this were science rather than religion their reviewers would have ripped them apart. But these days it seems like as long as you mouth the orthodox AGW litany no further questions are permitted.
It's much easier than that actually.
Go tools-options-advanced (by fonts and colors.) Find 'allow sites to choose' and make sure that evil box is NOT checked. Then for each category of font make sure that the one selected is clean and easy to read. If not, change it. Hit ok, done.
Actually according to TFA they tried this, but for some reason the staff failed to complete the job. It was pretty vague about why, and it's pretty hard for me to think of an excuse I would accept if I were that judge.
"That font is hideous and unreadable"
Then perhaps you should uninstall it?
"I shouldn't need to go digging in any settings to fix the mess you created."
Are you really such a technological illiterate you think I control which fonts are installed and used on your computer?
How would I know why I am being modded down? I appear to have some fans who come through periodically and give me a bunch of overrated mods, that might be it.
Font? That would be idiotic since I do not control the font on your screen, not even indirectly. For the benefit of anyone who does not understand, the user agent (web browser) has the final decision as to what font to use in displaying a webpage (if the concept of 'font' actually has meaning in the environment it runs in, which is not a given.) The web page (in this case, Slashdot) can give your browser suggestions, and often it has a long list of such suggestions which your browser can and often should be told to ignore.
I am three levels back, behind the web page. I am allowed to give it hints as well, but only by picking from a very short list. Every option on it sucks, the one I am using now sucks the least as default because it mucks with my text the least. If you do not like the font you are seeing on your screen then LEARN how to use your web browser and activate an over-ride. This is the web not television FFS.
"What is this even supposed to mean?!? The "run" situation?"
He's trying to write 'the run position.'
Except that this has nothing to do with luck. It has to do with independent observers having less pressure on them to, consciously or subconsciously, produce rhetoric ostensibly concerning foreign policy but whose content is determined by domestic political needs.
Maybe, of course we cannot just believe them after seeing them repeatedly lying to Congress, but it strikes me likely in this particular case they are telling the truth. This bug, unless I am misunderstanding, essentially lets you read from a small contiguous pseudo-random block of memory. That's obviously not acceptable from a defender point of view - it could potentially expose any and all information so it's a severe flaw - but from an attackers point of view it seems less impressive.
You could probably try this thousands of times without actually obtaining any information of value. Sure, you might luck out and get the keys to the kingdom, but it seems like a crapshoot. From an attackers point of view, this might be better than nothing, but unless they have pretty near nothing to start from, it does not seem exciting.
And we know they have a lot more than nothing to start from. With Total Surveillance in effect on the net, with rootkits and zero-day exploits to deliver them, it's just really hard to see how this would add anything substantial to their toolkit.
No, I suspect this is exactly what it appears to be - a critical bug resulting from too much emphasis on fast and not enough on good. That's hardly unique to OpenSSL, it's a chronic problem across the industry as a whole.
It's easy to write code.
It's very hard to write good code.
Sad truth - the market for good code is pretty incredibly tiny. Generally, the buyer does not care.
"I've trained quite a few people in their 50's to code, but here's the thing: Lots of them type ~10-20WPM"
You should be requiring a pass on a touch-typing test as a prerequisite for any computer courses, and offer a remedial typing course for those who fail.
Trying to teach computing to someone that cannot hold say 45wpm at absolute minimum is very much like trying to train someone who struggles to walk for a marathon. Wastes your time and the students as well.
"If the reward were equally spread amongst boys and girls, girls would simply continue to fall behind in such areas."
So essentially you believe a) girls (statistically) do not have the necessary talent for coding and/or b) they do not have the desire to code?
See, I do not believe a) is correct, but in my experience b) is (statistically) pretty accurate.
If people have equality of opportunity, and you just dislike their choices, that is your personal problem.
"Sorry, but who is going to fund this? And what is their motivator? I'm missing something here."
Consumers. To protect ourselves. Obviously.
"I'm not sure if you're arrogant or ignorant here, but the general population does not have the education or sometimes the intelligence to make sensible choices that require knowledge and information they don't posses"
I'm not sure if you are ignorant or arrogant here, but what you are referring to is not an inherent state of an inherently lesser sort of people, but rather a product of environment. The nanny state creates this helplessness, it does not alleviate it.
"I also believe that as a whole, humans are becoming more and more stupid"
Good. You have noticed. Now go figure out why that is happening. I will give you two very blatant hints. Fichte. Horace Mann.
"but that doesn't mean our government should allow large corporations take advantage of these people in situations like this. "
Quit worrying about what governments *allow* and start thinking about what they *enable*.
"You mention your tax dollars being spent to educate the ignorant, would you prefer that your tax dollars be spent saving the lives of those who believed the pedallers and now may need significantly more expensive treatment due to not treating their issue properly initially?"
I would prefer to stop it a stage earlier - at the stage where my tax dollars are used to train helplessness and ignorance in the first place. Why not just keep our tax dollars and do something useful with them instead?
"That sounds like opinion and speculation - sure there are cases both ways, but 'tends' may be a bit strong."
If anything it is too weak.
In some cases.
Often, however, the 'real medicine' comes with side effects severe enough one must question if it's worth it.
A harmless placebo may not be as good as a good doctor, but in many situations it is preferable to a bad doctor.
"Bizarre as this might sound, this isn't specifically about you."
Which is not an answer or a justification of any kind. At best it's a hand-wave.
"If you're suggesting that the industry should run its own standards body I'm afraid you're blind to a huge conflict of interest. There's nothing effective and efficient about having the fox guard the hen house."
I am suggesting nothing of the kind, you appear to be blind to the fact that this is exactly what you get whenever you have a monopolistic regulatory agency 'running the industry.' What I want is a free market and that means NO ONE 'running the industry.'
Of course it adds a level of stress, but as long as it ceases when I clock out for the day, and there is a legitimate need, I just figure it's one of the reasons I am getting paid. That's why we call it work, not play, you take on stress and you get paid.
If I were a cop, you know, frankly I think I would probably be in favor of making certain that I and every coworker was being recorded every minute we were on shift. To protect myself as much as to protect the public.
"They are likely using a specialty alloy run through a one-of-a-kind manufacturing line to produce these things. They're not going to be cheap like tire rims."
Not until the Chinese clone it. You can bet their projectiles will be orders of magnitude less expensive, and just slightly less effective.
That's true of the broader scene.
This project in particular seems to have some odd implications as well. I believe it's poor policy, contrary to our national interest, but nonetheless Washington is committed to encircling China with the Navy, and clearly this tech is intended to help with that. But I have to project the Chinese copying the tech rapidly. And this sort of weapon is going to be easier and cheaper to implement (not to mention much more accurate!) if you mount it on land instead of on a ship.
I suspect by the time the US Navy has a number of these weapons in operational use, the Chinese will counter with much larger number of similar, if less sophisticated, versions in fixed emplacements along their coast, and their position will be better, not worse as a result.
That is to say, it appears to be tech that swings the balance of power toward defense. Not necessarily a bad thing that, but if the governments purpose in developing this technology was defensive, they would not have gone to all the trouble to specifically implement this as a ship-portable weapon.
It's very neat tech, and I can understand some enthusiasm on a purely technical level, but on the level of 'good use of taxpayers money' I am afraid it is pure fail.
"How would you like to have your every move and word recorded and transmitted by your employer every second of every working day?"
Well consider that's exactly what happens for me and many others every day at work, it's obviously something people can cope with.
"I don't condone police abuse but this level of intrusion seems extreme to me."
You seem a bit out of touch. LOTS of people have every word recorded while they are working. LOTS of people that have far less opportunity to abuse their position than a policeman does.
Eh that may be the broader issue at play in the story but it is not really relevant to the quote I was addressing.
"To me this is absolutely forward thinking (more information is usually a good thing)."
I see a few problems with this.
First off, you're taxing my pay to pay someone else to tell me something I already know. That's perverse and inefficient at best. (Exaggerated slightly to make the point - I dont actually currently pay taxes in Oz but I have in the past and the point holds for any current resident.)
Secondly, having a state funded 'consumer watchdog' inevitably discourages the creation of private consumer watchdogs (plural) which would be more effective and efficient.
Third, a state funded consumer watchdog agency luls consumers into unwarranted complacency. If the assumption is that anything for sale must be safe and effective (because that is why we pay the overhead of all these rules and regulations, after all?) then there is perceived to be less or no need to weigh your choices carefully, to research before buying, etc. Ironically a measure supposedly to benefit consumers tends to actually work against their interests.
"There are about 10,000 complementary medicine products sold in Australia but most consumers are unaware they are not evaluated by the domestic medicines safety watchdog before they are allowed on the market."
This is absolutely backwards thinking. The assumption is that no product should possibly be 'allowed' in the market without costly and time-consuming 'evaluation' and 'approval' by a 'watchdog.' That's just a recipe for guaranteeing the profits of existing market leaders at the expense of the consumer.
People are selling nonsense? Don't buy it. Easy-peazy as they say in Oz.
Huh?
It appears you are confused. The Israelis also have agents that supposedly have special abilities in reading body-language as well, so that part of the description could apply to both places, however the mention of not "singling out someone by their heritage" makes it clear we are referring to Iran not Israel. The Israelis single people out according to heritage as explicit policy, as many US Citizen of Palestinian heritage have been made painfully aware.
OK, this is an NSA article and I just agreed with you.
Is that really you? Someone hijack your account?
Our government is spending borrowed money like there is no tomorrow backed only by their promise to work us and our descendents forever to pay the interest. It cannot end well.