"Under real world conditions, Osama Bin Laden himself could easily evade a face recognition system."
Apparently the ACLU thinks that camera detection systems should give OBL preferential treatment. Either that, or they think he's one distinctively ugly mofo.:-)
If it becomes a law for one, it's law for another.
Not really.
It's really not that difficult to imagine a law that was written such that those who licensed their IP (code) under certain criteria (zero cost, freely redistributable, modifiable, whatever. Think open source criteria) would be exempt. And in particular, any well-drafted law would have this property.
Whether one can expect that from the fine congress you folks have elected is another matter entirely.:-)
Re:Sun invented patterns?
on
Bitter Java
·
· Score: 1
The structure itself is devoted to uncovering antipatterns , a term Tate uses because it plays off the way that Sun offered Java patterns to help programmers use the new tools efficiently. Most of the chapters show the wrong way to build something and then show how to correct it.
And Al Gore invented the internet. Or was that Bill G again?
Uhh..where in the quote does it say that they invented them?
If I offer you a wheel, does that mean I invented the wheel?
It's not at all hard for me to imagine. It is *entirely* conceivable to me that that is a reasonable trade-off. I would probably make it - my personal details are widely available. I don't mind aggregated user-study, I don't mind targetted advertising. I just don't like spam, and if that's what it's going to get me it's not worth it.
The scope of my point was a lot bigger, though. It's not just one issue that's the problem, it's many many issues. Many important issues. That's what we can't handle.
Admittedly, though, I don't have a particularly well-thought-out solution that I think is better. However, I believe that the internet has significant ability to "enable" meritocracy-based-discussion (something like slashdot, but with a bit of a different intent - slashdot's system is a reactive, defensive system against noise, where I'm thinking of a proactive system that lets you find people who have done the research that you can trust.) that would let me look quickly over what a few people had figured out on, say, shoe companies, and have a sense of how trustworthy it is. *shrug* Solving that problem would get you a nobel prize, probably.:-)
You're right, of course. This is exactly how the free market is supposed to work. And it may be the best general solution to this sort of problem. But it probably isn't ideal.
It's one of the underlying assumptions of capitalism that we are all rational agents. In particular, we have the quality to make a rational decision about every system that we take part in, and more importantly every dollar that we spend.
I am human. I am not a rational agent. While some of my decisions are irrational, more often I don't even realize I'm making a decision. Because the world is not transparent (and it would be impossible to make it so) I can't make the rational decision to support the shoe company that creates the best working conditions, and the fast food company that has the most efficient packaging (through the entire process, mind you, not just what I get handed.), and the beef company that treats its animals best, or the government that has the least corruption.
Now, it's important to note that on any particular issue (environment, corruption, labour standards, animal treatment, etc.) you can probably do enough digging to make the decision. However, there is not (yet?) a system that "lubricates" the effective decision making capacity of the citizens of a capitalist democracy.
Thus, while this is indeed working exactly as it is "supposed" to, it is still not optimal.
(It's no wonder I have a hard time placing myself on a political spectrum. They're *both* wrong.:-) )
"One answer is that it's time to unionize. IT workers are not valued for their intelligence or problem solving ability. They're valued as "human resources" much as a company's mineral or financial resources -- to be used when necessary and discarded when useless."
This is so much overpampered bullshit it makes me cringe. For three years, IT workers were the most overvalued segment of employees. Most of them didn't deserve it. I'm a CS major, and I don't think I deserve what I earn compared to say my sister doing her PhD in nutrition. Her work has significantly more impact on human quality of life.
You need to take your head out of your ass and realize that just because there was a period of time when IT was hugely overvalued doesn't mean it still should be.
Now, sometimes work environments suck. Sometimes bosses suck. Sometimes you should get paid more because you contribute more to your organization than people who get paid the same as you. Or maybe they should just get paid less. But your quote above is indicative of an "I deserve it because I'm in IT" attitude that I despise.
That's silly. And I can't believe non of the replies to your post (yet) point out why that's silly. The stable distribution is just that -- very stable. Nothing's gonna change in it for a long time. You can target it, and you know what you're targetting. It's not *only* about software stability (correct execution and stability) but about platform stability - what version of things to target. All software has bugs, and at least if you know what version you're targetting if that bug affects you, you work around it. Thus, stable is stable of the long term, and the best thing to target for someone like Corel that releases commercial software for linux (or used to..). This is also ideal for an admin that's setting up computers as an IT department for a corporation - you want everything to be homogenous and as unchanging as possible. It would also be good if I was setting up something for my parents. That way I'd know that if I set up an "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade" cronjob, they wouldn't come back one day and have things broken.
What you, as an end-user that wants spiffynew features, want to run is testing. That's what woody's been for a while now, and it's great. Recent versions of everything. A more dynamic platform. You can handle things breaking after an upgrade and fix them. You can handle diddling a little bit to get commercial software to work (99% of the time it would work anyway...). You'll get your KDE3.0 in a fairly timely fashion, and you'll get your X 4.2 in a timely fashion (unless there aren't enough volunteers, but that's hardly debian's fault.)
Don't forget that the current machines do have *some* resale value. A 400mhz PC should still go for $150 or something, which narrows the cost savings even more.
Not everything is a trend. This is not a trend. An instance does not a trend make. Copyright extension, that's a trend. Lawsuits against aquatic plants enthusiasts? Not a trend.
Trend, n: 1. The general direction in which something tends to move. (dictionary.com)
Of course it's/mathematically/ possible, a simple guessing algorithm will terminate and output the plaintext and the pad.
Uhh..I don't know where you learned your crypto, but a truly random one time pad is truly, mathematically, provably, unambiguously, categorically, information theoretically totally secure, given only the cyphertext. This is because every possible plaintext is an equally valid possibility for being the correct plaintext, and there is no way to tell that you have the correct plaintext.
Once the first card reader is compromised, or even if someone just reverse-engineers the chip, the whole system is compromised. blah blah
Perhaps there are people better than you at designing these systems, just maybe, could it be?
It is certainly possible to make it *extremely* difficult if not impossible to get a private key out of a smart-card. The NSA did it with Skipjack in the early nineties.
If the card reader also has a private key, and it must submit to the card a certificate that said key has been signed (some sort of challenge/response), and then the data is streamed over some strong cypher (AES, say...with..oh...256 bits, maybe?), and all this is done correctly, it is most certainly possible to make the card readers utterly impossible to compromise and reverse engineer.
Now, whether you trust the person behind the card reader is another matter. And whether you trust the people making the cards to truly dispose of the private keys generated and such is also another question. But from a pure hardware/software system, it is certainly possible to do this securely.
Except that you're reading this for free on Slashdot, run on open source software used for free, on a browser you didn't pay for (unless you use opera),...
Minimum wage here is like $7 or something. Your take home would be a higher percentage than that - only a very small amount of tax-like-deductions would be removed. You're right, $200 is hard to find, but $300 isn't. I cut my hair about every 8 months (Which leads to this funny thing in pictures - everytime someone I don't see very often has a picture of me, my hair is notably different.:-) ).
I guess I was making an implicit assumption that I wouldn't stay at minimum long, too, though -- I've had several bosses in several kinds of jobs (dishwashing, bussing tables, fairly cushy retail stockroom type work, and then some tech jobs) and best as I can tell they all thought I was excellent.
The best point that you make is the house-of-cards, hard-to-recover-if-something-goes-wrong bit. Again, health coverage makes a big difference here.
As for your peer in the ethics class, the appropriate response is "There's no reason that anyone in the world should be starving - a supersized mcchicken meal is only $6!". 'course, he probably wouldn't get the point.:-)
(If you happen to feel like it, I'd prefer taking this to email. web-board UIs suck universally. you can reach me at my username@my-website's-domain, believe it or not. (Good thing spambots aren't that clever.:-) )
In the strict sense, I meet the "rich kid" definition - my parents will pay for whatever I can argue that I "need" and can't afford. I don't take them up on it very often, though, on principal. I believe that I could survive on a 9 to 5 minimum wage job and be reasonably happen. Granted, I couldn't support a family (or even a pet, for that matter) on that, but I could do it. That's why people complaining that they can't get their standard of living high enough bother me.
I would never live in a place that charted (tolled) me to move around. I avoid cover charges at bars. I don't eat out. I *do* cook 95% of my own food. And I'm not talking TV dinners, I'm talking proper from-scratch type things. If I can do it, you can do it...The location thing is significant, though. Canada's better for that.:-)
Yeah, I'll buy that. The point that I make is still valid, though...I mean yeah, stuff's not perfect. The economy in the US is hurting pretty bad (moreso than here, it seems), and things in the US (and probably particularly in NYC) are fairly cutthroat for that sort of thing. (For example, severance pay is all-but-expected in Canada, and from what I understand to many 'mericans it's a foreign concept.) Still, though, you've sacrificed a lot of comfort to live somewhere where you can expand your horizons - which I think is valid and I agree with, in general. The cost is some satisfaction in the work life, I guess. If it's worth paying, keep doing it. If it's not, then stop.
As a side-note, I'm not sure if you're being condescending or not, but at the end of HS I was told I could not grasp the difference between HS and Univ. And I could, and I did. And so when I get told that the "Real World" is unfathomable to me, I have some healthy scepticism.:-)
There's no reason I can't stay living in off-campus housing after university. There's no reason I can't keep living with random people like I have been. There's no reason I can't keep living within walking distance of laundry and groceries. I'm in Canada, so health insurance is mostly a moot point for me, but admittedly a valid one for you.
I'm not sure why you say that I shouldn't DARE suggest that you mvoe somewhere else. I mean, if your absolute priority is to live where you are, then you are sort of stuck taking what comes with it. I guess that's not to say that you shouldn't complain, but rather that you can "cry me a river.":-)
...where "poverty" is hardly poverty at all, of course. The North American definition of poverty is laughable. I'll have food on my plate, some disposable income for a social life and other fun, a net connection, a phone line, etc. But I won't have a car. I won't eat out more than once a weak, and when I do it'll be Subway, not Red Lobster. All of this is not to say that there aren't people in poverty in NA, but that many people who are considered impoverished aren't.
Last time I checked, cars were not a necessity. Don't whine about wanting a certain (high!) standard of living and then complain that your job is demanding too much of you. You have a choice: Follow what you really want to do, and deal with the fact that it probably doesn't pay well, or follow what pays well and deal with the fact that it will probably be far from what you really want to do.
I'm still "only" a university student. I'm bracing for several years of poverty, 'cause I really want to do a law degree after my current CS degree. I'm not sure I want to be a lawyer. But I know that following the law degree will make me happier. I'll take on some debt, and I sure as hell won't have a car, but you won't hear me whining about not being happy. 'cause if I wasn't, I'd change what I was doing until I was happy.
As long as mp3 trading services are around, it only takes one person to rip a CD and stay up on gnutella or whatever for it to get around.
So the real question is, right now, what % of CDs are first-generation rips? Since we all know that any CD like this can be ripped (even if with a loss of quality from going the DAC/ADC in the sound card), they will be ripped. And then they'll be traded. So who cares?
The other interesting question is whether something like cdparanoia (which, from what I've heard, rips these CDs) can be considered a circumvention device even though it existed independently of (and before) the copy-protection being circumvented. I presume this would guarantee that it had "substantial non-infringing use" or whatever the standard is that they measure it by, but I dunno.
(Yeah, slashdot doesn't have to be consistent, they don't have to obey the open standards they promote, but you'd think at least the OSDN navbar would be correct.)
Slashdot Mirror
From that link:
11 Ben-Hur 1959 $70.00 $512.64
12 101 Dalmatians* 1961 $152.60 $500.87
I don't recall my economics prof mentioning 100% inflation between 1959 and 1961. What's with that?
If only they were using Open Source Software in the aviation industry
:-)
Post all your "WTF is that supposed to mean" comments here!
"Under real world conditions, Osama Bin Laden himself could easily evade a face recognition system."
:-)
Apparently the ACLU thinks that camera detection systems should give OBL preferential treatment. Either that, or they think he's one distinctively ugly mofo.
If it becomes a law for one, it's law for another.
:-)
Not really.
It's really not that difficult to imagine a law that was written such that those who licensed their IP (code) under certain criteria (zero cost, freely redistributable, modifiable, whatever. Think open source criteria) would be exempt. And in particular, any well-drafted law would have this property.
Whether one can expect that from the fine congress you folks have elected is another matter entirely.
The structure itself is devoted to uncovering antipatterns , a term Tate uses because it plays off the way that Sun offered Java patterns to help programmers use the new tools efficiently. Most of the chapters show the wrong way to build something and then show how to correct it.
And Al Gore invented the internet. Or was that Bill G again?
Uhh..where in the quote does it say that they invented them?
If I offer you a wheel, does that mean I invented the wheel?
It's not at all hard for me to imagine. It is *entirely* conceivable to me that that is a reasonable trade-off. I would probably make it - my personal details are widely available. I don't mind aggregated user-study, I don't mind targetted advertising. I just don't like spam, and if that's what it's going to get me it's not worth it.
:-)
The scope of my point was a lot bigger, though. It's not just one issue that's the problem, it's many many issues. Many important issues. That's what we can't handle.
Admittedly, though, I don't have a particularly well-thought-out solution that I think is better. However, I believe that the internet has significant ability to "enable" meritocracy-based-discussion (something like slashdot, but with a bit of a different intent - slashdot's system is a reactive, defensive system against noise, where I'm thinking of a proactive system that lets you find people who have done the research that you can trust.) that would let me look quickly over what a few people had figured out on, say, shoe companies, and have a sense of how trustworthy it is. *shrug* Solving that problem would get you a nobel prize, probably.
You're right, of course. This is exactly how the free market is supposed to work. And it may be the best general solution to this sort of problem. But it probably isn't ideal.
:-) )
It's one of the underlying assumptions of capitalism that we are all rational agents. In particular, we have the quality to make a rational decision about every system that we take part in, and more importantly every dollar that we spend.
I am human. I am not a rational agent. While some of my decisions are irrational, more often I don't even realize I'm making a decision. Because the world is not transparent (and it would be impossible to make it so) I can't make the rational decision to support the shoe company that creates the best working conditions, and the fast food company that has the most efficient packaging (through the entire process, mind you, not just what I get handed.), and the beef company that treats its animals best, or the government that has the least corruption.
Now, it's important to note that on any particular issue (environment, corruption, labour standards, animal treatment, etc.) you can probably do enough digging to make the decision. However, there is not (yet?) a system that "lubricates" the effective decision making capacity of the citizens of a capitalist democracy.
Thus, while this is indeed working exactly as it is "supposed" to, it is still not optimal.
(It's no wonder I have a hard time placing myself on a political spectrum. They're *both* wrong.
"One answer is that it's time to unionize. IT workers are not valued for their intelligence or problem solving ability. They're valued as "human resources" much as a company's mineral or financial resources -- to be used when necessary and discarded when useless."
This is so much overpampered bullshit it makes me cringe. For three years, IT workers were the most overvalued segment of employees. Most of them didn't deserve it. I'm a CS major, and I don't think I deserve what I earn compared to say my sister doing her PhD in nutrition. Her work has significantly more impact on human quality of life.
You need to take your head out of your ass and realize that just because there was a period of time when IT was hugely overvalued doesn't mean it still should be.
Now, sometimes work environments suck. Sometimes bosses suck. Sometimes you should get paid more because you contribute more to your organization than people who get paid the same as you. Or maybe they should just get paid less. But your quote above is indicative of an "I deserve it because I'm in IT" attitude that I despise.
That's silly. And I can't believe non of the replies to your post (yet) point out why that's silly. The stable distribution is just that -- very stable. Nothing's gonna change in it for a long time. You can target it, and you know what you're targetting. It's not *only* about software stability (correct execution and stability) but about platform stability - what version of things to target. All software has bugs, and at least if you know what version you're targetting if that bug affects you, you work around it. Thus, stable is stable of the long term, and the best thing to target for someone like Corel that releases commercial software for linux (or used to..). This is also ideal for an admin that's setting up computers as an IT department for a corporation - you want everything to be homogenous and as unchanging as possible. It would also be good if I was setting up something for my parents. That way I'd know that if I set up an "apt-get update; apt-get upgrade" cronjob, they wouldn't come back one day and have things broken.
What you, as an end-user that wants spiffynew features, want to run is testing. That's what woody's been for a while now, and it's great. Recent versions of everything. A more dynamic platform. You can handle things breaking after an upgrade and fix them. You can handle diddling a little bit to get commercial software to work (99% of the time it would work anyway...). You'll get your KDE3.0 in a fairly timely fashion, and you'll get your X 4.2 in a timely fashion (unless there aren't enough volunteers, but that's hardly debian's fault.)
Don't forget that the current machines do have *some* resale value. A 400mhz PC should still go for $150 or something, which narrows the cost savings even more.
I find the trend disturbing
Not everything is a trend. This is not a trend. An instance does not a trend make. Copyright extension, that's a trend. Lawsuits against aquatic plants enthusiasts? Not a trend.
Trend, n: 1. The general direction in which something tends to move. (dictionary.com)
Of course it's /mathematically/ possible, a simple guessing algorithm will terminate and output the plaintext and the pad.
Uhh..I don't know where you learned your crypto, but a truly random one time pad is truly, mathematically, provably, unambiguously, categorically, information theoretically totally secure, given only the cyphertext.
This is because every possible plaintext is an equally valid possibility for being the correct plaintext, and there is no way to tell that you have the correct plaintext.
Once the first card reader is compromised, or even if someone just reverse-engineers the chip, the whole system is compromised. blah blah
Perhaps there are people better than you at designing these systems, just maybe, could it be?
It is certainly possible to make it *extremely* difficult if not impossible to get a private key out of a smart-card. The NSA did it with Skipjack in the early nineties.
If the card reader also has a private key, and it must submit to the card a certificate that said key has been signed (some sort of challenge/response), and then the data is streamed over some strong cypher (AES, say...with..oh...256 bits, maybe?), and all this is done correctly, it is most certainly possible to make the card readers utterly impossible to compromise and reverse engineer.
Now, whether you trust the person behind the card reader is another matter. And whether you trust the people making the cards to truly dispose of the private keys generated and such is also another question. But from a pure hardware/software system, it is certainly possible to do this securely.
I'm sorry, I couldn't read your post...
:-)
It was far too low on whitespace.
You get what you pay for. Especially online.
...
Unless you get less than what you pay for.
Almost never do you get more than you pay for.
Except that you're reading this for free on Slashdot, run on open source software used for free, on a browser you didn't pay for (unless you use opera),
Just to challenge some of your assumptions:
:-) ).
:-)
:-) )
Minimum wage here is like $7 or something. Your take home would be a higher percentage than that - only a very small amount of tax-like-deductions would be removed. You're right, $200 is hard to find, but $300 isn't. I cut my hair about every 8 months (Which leads to this funny thing in pictures - everytime someone I don't see very often has a picture of me, my hair is notably different.
I guess I was making an implicit assumption that I wouldn't stay at minimum long, too, though -- I've had several bosses in several kinds of jobs (dishwashing, bussing tables, fairly cushy retail stockroom type work, and then some tech jobs) and best as I can tell they all thought I was excellent.
The best point that you make is the house-of-cards, hard-to-recover-if-something-goes-wrong bit. Again, health coverage makes a big difference here.
As for your peer in the ethics class, the appropriate response is "There's no reason that anyone in the world should be starving - a supersized mcchicken meal is only $6!". 'course, he probably wouldn't get the point.
(If you happen to feel like it, I'd prefer taking this to email. web-board UIs suck universally. you can reach me at my username@my-website's-domain, believe it or not. (Good thing spambots aren't that clever.
Dude, move to Canada. :-)
:-)
In the strict sense, I meet the "rich kid" definition - my parents will pay for whatever I can argue that I "need" and can't afford. I don't take them up on it very often, though, on principal. I believe that I could survive on a 9 to 5 minimum wage job and be reasonably happen. Granted, I couldn't support a family (or even a pet, for that matter) on that, but I could do it. That's why people complaining that they can't get their standard of living high enough bother me.
I would never live in a place that charted (tolled) me to move around. I avoid cover charges at bars. I don't eat out. I *do* cook 95% of my own food. And I'm not talking TV dinners, I'm talking proper from-scratch type things. If I can do it, you can do it...The location thing is significant, though. Canada's better for that.
-Rob
Yeah, I'll buy that. The point that I make is still valid, though...I mean yeah, stuff's not perfect. The economy in the US is hurting pretty bad (moreso than here, it seems), and things in the US (and probably particularly in NYC) are fairly cutthroat for that sort of thing. (For example, severance pay is all-but-expected in Canada, and from what I understand to many 'mericans it's a foreign concept.) Still, though, you've sacrificed a lot of comfort to live somewhere where you can expand your horizons - which I think is valid and I agree with, in general. The cost is some satisfaction in the work life, I guess. If it's worth paying, keep doing it. If it's not, then stop.
:-)
As a side-note, I'm not sure if you're being condescending or not, but at the end of HS I was told I could not grasp the difference between HS and Univ. And I could, and I did. And so when I get told that the "Real World" is unfathomable to me, I have some healthy scepticism.
Cheers...
-Rob
There's no reason I can't stay living in off-campus housing after university. There's no reason I can't keep living with random people like I have been. There's no reason I can't keep living within walking distance of laundry and groceries. I'm in Canada, so health insurance is mostly a moot point for me, but admittedly a valid one for you.
:-)
I'm not sure why you say that I shouldn't DARE suggest that you mvoe somewhere else. I mean, if your absolute priority is to live where you are, then you are sort of stuck taking what comes with it. I guess that's not to say that you shouldn't complain, but rather that you can "cry me a river."
I'm bracing for several years of poverty
...where "poverty" is hardly poverty at all, of course. The North American definition of poverty is laughable. I'll have food on my plate, some disposable income for a social life and other fun, a net connection, a phone line, etc. But I won't have a car. I won't eat out more than once a weak, and when I do it'll be Subway, not Red Lobster. All of this is not to say that there aren't people in poverty in NA, but that many people who are considered impoverished aren't.
But I have to pay rent and car insurance.
Last time I checked, cars were not a necessity. Don't whine about wanting a certain (high!) standard of living and then complain that your job is demanding too much of you. You have a choice: Follow what you really want to do, and deal with the fact that it probably doesn't pay well, or follow what pays well and deal with the fact that it will probably be far from what you really want to do.
I'm still "only" a university student. I'm bracing for several years of poverty, 'cause I really want to do a law degree after my current CS degree. I'm not sure I want to be a lawyer. But I know that following the law degree will make me happier. I'll take on some debt, and I sure as hell won't have a car, but you won't hear me whining about not being happy. 'cause if I wasn't, I'd change what I was doing until I was happy.
Thanks you for your post. It was ***VERY INFORMATIVE***.
As a return gesture, I'd like to teach you that html has a bold tag - simply put <b> before and </b> after.
;-)
As long as mp3 trading services are around, it only takes one person to rip a CD and stay up on gnutella or whatever for it to get around.
So the real question is, right now, what % of CDs are first-generation rips? Since we all know that any CD like this can be ripped (even if with a loss of quality from going the DAC/ADC in the sound card), they will be ripped. And then they'll be traded. So who cares?
The other interesting question is whether something like cdparanoia (which, from what I've heard, rips these CDs) can be considered a circumvention device even though it existed independently of (and before) the copy-protection being circumvented. I presume this would guarantee that it had "substantial non-infringing use" or whatever the standard is that they measure it by, but I dunno.
> who doesn't know what a "Turing Test" is?
I'm sorry, I don't what you mean by "Turing Test". Perhaps we can talk about something else for a while.
:-)
..bwahahahah.
Check out the results of the w3c validator
(Yeah, slashdot doesn't have to be consistent, they don't have to obey the open standards they promote, but you'd think at least the OSDN navbar would be correct.)
yeesh.