I try to keep Slashdot as close to the original as possible. I keep Javascript disabled, and when the admins tried to reenable it for me, I disabled it again.
At what point did I argue that any information should be unavailable to people who are interested in it? Quite the opposite, I think that given the Internet, people should be able to access any information they want, and they should be able to do so at little to no cost. There is no excuse for barriers to information in the 21st century, especially not in a developed nation like the United States.
It is also worth keep in mind that anyone who lives near a university can probably gain access to its libraries. At my current institution, anyone can walk into the libraries, and as long as they do not create a disturbance, they can read any of the books on the shelves; the only think they cannot do is remove books from the library. There are even publicly accessible computers that do not require a login. Even at institutions that require permission to enter the libraries, I have not yet seen a case where there was no way for a non-student to get such permission (not that I have a very large sample size; most of the places I have seen do not require special permission just to enter the library).
Given all of that, though, I would be surprised if non-prodigies were able to grasp the deeper material and insights from certain fields. There is a lot of high quality information on cryptography available, and high quality information on various fields of math needed to understand cryptography, but the truth is that modern cryptography is a very difficult field. Even with a great teacher, it is very hard to understand cryptography; lacking such a teacher would leave a student at a serious disadvantage. Sure, anyone could memorize protocols and algorithms, but that is not the same as understanding why those systems are (possibly) secure, and gaining such an understanding is difficult, especially when you go beyond the basics, and it becomes extremely hard when you have no guidance whatsoever.
It depends on whether there's enough information about it and if you're intelligent enough to grasp it on your own. Otherwise, self teaching in that subjects obviously isn't a good idea.
(Emphasis mine.) Yes, if you are intelligent enough to grasp the material on your own. This becomes increasingly rare as the material becomes increasingly advanced; there is a point at which only an extreme minority of people are capable of understanding the material on their own, without a teacher's help (even further is the point at which only an extreme minority are capable of understanding the material even with a teacher's help).
Some people merely aren't capable of teaching themselves and may require help.
At a sufficiently advanced level, I would say that statement covers just about everyone, with the only exceptions being prodigies like Ramanujan (who are outliers even among very intelligent people). I know quite a number of people who are "taught themselves" how to program, and like I said, they are generally capable of writing programs, even highly complex programs. Where they tend to fall short are places where subtle insights are critical; for example, they may understand the basic idea behind RSA, but rarely do they understand Blum-Blum-Shub or its security proof, even after reading a lot about it.
I will admit that there is a possible alternative explanation, which is that these same people may have difficulty getting access to material that is readily available to a university student, particularly journal access. This is particularly problematic for older papers that were published before the Internet, and those papers may offer a lot of the very insights I referred to above. However, I am less confident in this explanation, mainly because a lot of the advanced material necessary just to understand a journal article often requires the same sort of subtle insights that people who did not have a good teacher often lack.
Actually, you can teach yourself about any subject that has a vast amount of information written about it, provided you're 'capable' of teaching yourself at all.
I disagree with this one. Some fields are sufficiently difficult that being "self taught" would either require someone with an exceptional intellect, or an unreasonable amount of time. I would say this is particularly true of abstract math e.g. topology, abstract algebra, etc. Anyone could pick up the basics in those subjects, assuming they had sufficient mathematical background to begin with, but I would be surprised if all but an extreme minority of people could really understand what they are doing in those fields without some sort of formal education.
No seriously. The amount of things I have learnt from researching on the internet...
...probably seems like a lot, but does not actually go into as much depth as you might think. I know plenty of people who are "self taught" and can do a fine job of hacking together certain types of programs, but they generally do not have deeper insights into the theory behind what they are doing. That might be OK for developing certain classes of applications, but it is usually a disaster for a field like cryptography, and I would not trust someone who was "self taught" to develop safety critical software (think Therac-25).
If you just want to learn how to hack out some code, sure, you can teach yourself. I would not recommend this approach for theoretical topics in CS, except for the most basic concepts; at more advanced levels, you are really studying abstract math, and it really does help to have a teacher.
if you go posting these (still considered classified) documents all over your friends' walls, what does that say about your ability to handle classified information?
Nothing at all, actually:
Graduate students are not under orders to keep government secrets secret.
The information was already released by someone else, there is no secret to keep.
How is suggesting they don't expose themself to certain things which might have an impact on a future career move, threatening their "free speech rights"?
The suggestion was that they not post links to the cables, because if they do, their eligibility for government jobs will be called into question. How is that not threatening their free speech rights?
When the state department is threatening graduate students' free speech rights, yeah, it is time to bash America. We bash China for doing that sort of thing to its citizens, so why is America exempt?
Uhm, I am a grad student, and I will say it right now: I have sent links to articles about the cables, and even to Wikileaks' statement on the cables, to plenty of people. If sending a link to data that is already available to the world is cause to bar me from government work, then I guess I won't be working for the US government.
The language still is, and that is what really matters. No Turing machine can actually use its entire tape; the infinite nature of the tape only means that the machine can use an unbounded, but still finite, amount of memory.
So, let's say your Javascript program needs 1000TB of memory to complete some computation. That will not work on my laptop, since my laptop does not have that much physical memory available. You might construct a computer with that much memory, though (perhaps a very big computer, but that is irrelevant) and then the same program will run.
Unless, of course, the compiler/interpreter does not place any bounds on memory, and relies instead on the OS to enforce those sorts of restrictions (i.e. by terminating your program when you try to allocate more memory than is available). A language being Turing complete is purely a theoretical concept; it has nothing to do with what sort of machine the language is actually used on.
That depends on what sort of attack you want to perform.
It has a sandbox that it plays in. If JS code breaks out of that, its a bug
Suppose you have a perfect sandbox, no bugs whatsoever. You can still perform the attack described in TFA, because Javascript is supposed to be able to do exactly what TFA describes. You could still have problems with XSS attacks (this is external to bugs in the Javascript interpreter). The API allows these things to happen, and a bug-free Javascript interpreter would still have to conform to the API.
The advertisers have pretty well demonstrated that they aren't competent to be trusted to make reasonable choices so the government needed to step in and tell them what they were going to do.
Or, if people just mute their TVs during commercials, advertisers will not have any incentive to engage in the practice, and suddenly the problem is solved without a committee deciding what is "too loud."
I'd like to see them do the same thing with those stupid Flash ads that cover content randomly and the ones that take up more of my bandwidth than the rest of the web page.
Or, you can do what I do: disable Javascript, do not use Flash, and stop visiting websites that consistently display advertisements that cover what you are interested in (with a written complaint explaining why you will not visit anymore). For a simpler solution, you can just use ABP or a similar program.
If I gave you some random code, did not tell you what exactly it did but asked you to run it, would you run it? That is basically what is happening when you browse with Javascript enabled -- you are allowing websites to run essentially arbitrary code on your computer.
It is more evidence to support the hypothesis that life could be made from different elements than the ones that life as we know it are made from. Your DNA, like most living organisms' DNA, is made from five elements: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus. This is evidence that DNA could be made using arsenic instead of phosphorus, which has similar chemical properties.
Personally, I think it would have been more exciting if they had discovered silicon based life, which would be a life form that uses silicon instead of carbon, but this is cool too...
He did run DDOS attacks on websites that were sympathetic to terrorists. Basically, this guy is a hard-line far-right hacktivist, and I cannot say that I am surprised that he was behind the wikileaks attack.
Slashdot Mirror
I try to keep Slashdot as close to the original as possible. I keep Javascript disabled, and when the admins tried to reenable it for me, I disabled it again.
As it turns out, the friends that matter to you will continue to stay in touch with you even if you are not on Facebook.
At what point did I argue that any information should be unavailable to people who are interested in it? Quite the opposite, I think that given the Internet, people should be able to access any information they want, and they should be able to do so at little to no cost. There is no excuse for barriers to information in the 21st century, especially not in a developed nation like the United States.
It is also worth keep in mind that anyone who lives near a university can probably gain access to its libraries. At my current institution, anyone can walk into the libraries, and as long as they do not create a disturbance, they can read any of the books on the shelves; the only think they cannot do is remove books from the library. There are even publicly accessible computers that do not require a login. Even at institutions that require permission to enter the libraries, I have not yet seen a case where there was no way for a non-student to get such permission (not that I have a very large sample size; most of the places I have seen do not require special permission just to enter the library).
Given all of that, though, I would be surprised if non-prodigies were able to grasp the deeper material and insights from certain fields. There is a lot of high quality information on cryptography available, and high quality information on various fields of math needed to understand cryptography, but the truth is that modern cryptography is a very difficult field. Even with a great teacher, it is very hard to understand cryptography; lacking such a teacher would leave a student at a serious disadvantage. Sure, anyone could memorize protocols and algorithms, but that is not the same as understanding why those systems are (possibly) secure, and gaining such an understanding is difficult, especially when you go beyond the basics, and it becomes extremely hard when you have no guidance whatsoever.
It depends on whether there's enough information about it and if you're intelligent enough to grasp it on your own. Otherwise, self teaching in that subjects obviously isn't a good idea.
(Emphasis mine.) Yes, if you are intelligent enough to grasp the material on your own. This becomes increasingly rare as the material becomes increasingly advanced; there is a point at which only an extreme minority of people are capable of understanding the material on their own, without a teacher's help (even further is the point at which only an extreme minority are capable of understanding the material even with a teacher's help).
Some people merely aren't capable of teaching themselves and may require help.
At a sufficiently advanced level, I would say that statement covers just about everyone, with the only exceptions being prodigies like Ramanujan (who are outliers even among very intelligent people). I know quite a number of people who are "taught themselves" how to program, and like I said, they are generally capable of writing programs, even highly complex programs. Where they tend to fall short are places where subtle insights are critical; for example, they may understand the basic idea behind RSA, but rarely do they understand Blum-Blum-Shub or its security proof, even after reading a lot about it.
I will admit that there is a possible alternative explanation, which is that these same people may have difficulty getting access to material that is readily available to a university student, particularly journal access. This is particularly problematic for older papers that were published before the Internet, and those papers may offer a lot of the very insights I referred to above. However, I am less confident in this explanation, mainly because a lot of the advanced material necessary just to understand a journal article often requires the same sort of subtle insights that people who did not have a good teacher often lack.
Actually, you can teach yourself about any subject that has a vast amount of information written about it, provided you're 'capable' of teaching yourself at all.
I disagree with this one. Some fields are sufficiently difficult that being "self taught" would either require someone with an exceptional intellect, or an unreasonable amount of time. I would say this is particularly true of abstract math e.g. topology, abstract algebra, etc. Anyone could pick up the basics in those subjects, assuming they had sufficient mathematical background to begin with, but I would be surprised if all but an extreme minority of people could really understand what they are doing in those fields without some sort of formal education.
No seriously. The amount of things I have learnt from researching on the internet...
If you just want to learn how to hack out some code, sure, you can teach yourself. I would not recommend this approach for theoretical topics in CS, except for the most basic concepts; at more advanced levels, you are really studying abstract math, and it really does help to have a teacher.
if you go posting these (still considered classified) documents all over your friends' walls, what does that say about your ability to handle classified information?
Nothing at all, actually:
Actually, it says not to post links to websites that disseminate them. Like, for example, this one: http://www.nytimes.com/
How is suggesting they don't expose themself to certain things which might have an impact on a future career move, threatening their "free speech rights"?
The suggestion was that they not post links to the cables, because if they do, their eligibility for government jobs will be called into question. How is that not threatening their free speech rights?
It is pretty crazy that posting links to publicly available information could threaten your employment opportunities...
When the state department is threatening graduate students' free speech rights, yeah, it is time to bash America. We bash China for doing that sort of thing to its citizens, so why is America exempt?
Uhm, I am a grad student, and I will say it right now: I have sent links to articles about the cables, and even to Wikileaks' statement on the cables, to plenty of people. If sending a link to data that is already available to the world is cause to bar me from government work, then I guess I won't be working for the US government.
I laughed a little bit at that characterization of spam.
The language still is, and that is what really matters. No Turing machine can actually use its entire tape; the infinite nature of the tape only means that the machine can use an unbounded, but still finite, amount of memory.
So, let's say your Javascript program needs 1000TB of memory to complete some computation. That will not work on my laptop, since my laptop does not have that much physical memory available. You might construct a computer with that much memory, though (perhaps a very big computer, but that is irrelevant) and then the same program will run.
Unless, of course, the compiler/interpreter does not place any bounds on memory, and relies instead on the OS to enforce those sorts of restrictions (i.e. by terminating your program when you try to allocate more memory than is available). A language being Turing complete is purely a theoretical concept; it has nothing to do with what sort of machine the language is actually used on.
It has nothing to do with Turing-completeness.
That depends on what sort of attack you want to perform.
It has a sandbox that it plays in. If JS code breaks out of that, its a bug
Suppose you have a perfect sandbox, no bugs whatsoever. You can still perform the attack described in TFA, because Javascript is supposed to be able to do exactly what TFA describes. You could still have problems with XSS attacks (this is external to bugs in the Javascript interpreter). The API allows these things to happen, and a bug-free Javascript interpreter would still have to conform to the API.
The advertisers have pretty well demonstrated that they aren't competent to be trusted to make reasonable choices so the government needed to step in and tell them what they were going to do.
Or, if people just mute their TVs during commercials, advertisers will not have any incentive to engage in the practice, and suddenly the problem is solved without a committee deciding what is "too loud."
I'd like to see them do the same thing with those stupid Flash ads that cover content randomly and the ones that take up more of my bandwidth than the rest of the web page.
Or, you can do what I do: disable Javascript, do not use Flash, and stop visiting websites that consistently display advertisements that cover what you are interested in (with a written complaint explaining why you will not visit anymore). For a simpler solution, you can just use ABP or a similar program.
My grandma had an even better solution: mute the TV during commercials.
If I gave you some random code, did not tell you what exactly it did but asked you to run it, would you run it? That is basically what is happening when you browse with Javascript enabled -- you are allowing websites to run essentially arbitrary code on your computer.
Maybe it is time to establish a network that is controlled by its users, rather than large corporations and powerful governments?
If a newspaper gets classified information through regular investigative journalism, they are now NOT allowed to print that information?
If Joe Lieberman has his way...
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/12/shield/
It is more evidence to support the hypothesis that life could be made from different elements than the ones that life as we know it are made from. Your DNA, like most living organisms' DNA, is made from five elements: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and phosphorus. This is evidence that DNA could be made using arsenic instead of phosphorus, which has similar chemical properties.
Personally, I think it would have been more exciting if they had discovered silicon based life, which would be a life form that uses silicon instead of carbon, but this is cool too...
He did run DDOS attacks on websites that were sympathetic to terrorists. Basically, this guy is a hard-line far-right hacktivist, and I cannot say that I am surprised that he was behind the wikileaks attack.