Won't *noticeably* moisten the things they contact, you mean.

I don't need this abuse from you. Why don't you go work for the snake-oil company if they're so cutting edge that water isn't wet.

It just seems so, so stupid to me that in the search for real encryption, we have to rely on pseudo-randomness, so then the entire point of contention comes down to a matter of how much "pseudo" we're willing to accept. My theory is that as science goes deeper into math and logic, we're going to result in consecutively more "reliable" PRNG but those will always be dismissed by later science, and will always raise the point of contention. It's not worth getting worked up over, and it's certainly never worth placing so much investment in that that same and inevitable contention is going to seem dearly costly in retrospect. People are, by and large, stupid. If we want truly random results, we should utilize something like a photon interference field which is more or less considered to be completely random. Or the emission of particles from certain stable isotopes which are known to closely adhere to certain probabilities over time but are also known to be truly random. Then we would be forced to develop methods of encryption based on true randomness, which is only an impossibility as long as we continue to believe (within our limited paradigm) that it is so.

Gee. You other nerds on Slashdot, you're all so THMART.

Except when you're arguing with somebody who's actually aced a college level course in Anthropology.

"The larynx, or voice box, sits lower in the throat in humans than in chimps, one of several features that enable human speech. Human ancestors evolved a descended larynx roughly 350,000 years ago. We also possess a descended hyoid bone -- this horseshoe-shaped bone below the tongue, unique in that it is not attached to any other bones in the body, allows us to articulate words when speaking. "

http://www.livescience.com/15689-evolution-human-special-species.html [livescience.com]

btw -- FYFY (fixed you for you)

BTW, NONE of the shit you or the other guy said knocked down what I was saying about chimps -- they're not going to be human. Get over it. God, I can't get some of you geeks. Next time try somebody in your own high school.

I can't help but imagine you protested my remarks out of some desire to live out some fantasy related to your formative-years viewing of a "planet of the apes" sequel.

Gee. You other nerds on Slashdot, you're all so THMART.

Except when you're arguing with somebody who's actually aced a college level course in Anthropology.

"The larynx, or voice box, sits lower in the throat in humans than in chimps, one of several features that enable human speech. Human ancestors evolved a descended larynx roughly 350,000 years ago. We also possess a descended hyoid bone â" this horseshoe-shaped bone below the tongue, unique in that it is not attached to any other bones in the body, allows us to articulate words when speaking. "

http://www.livescience.com/15689-evolution-human-special-species.html

btw -- FYFY (fixed you for you)

BTW, NONE of the shit you or the other guy said knocked down what I was saying about chimps -- they're not going to be human. Get over it. God, I can't get some of you geeks. Next time try somebody in your own high school.

The fact that I got the wrong canister item (whipPED cream) aside -- totally moot considering thousands of other products WERE using CFC's back in the day -- the ozone holes didn't disappear. There's still an ozone hole, today, and scientists are largely puzzled about it.

What do you do, just sit in a basement and read whatever Time magazine tells you?

It could be the "fuzzy logic" they've used in "solving" the "problems":

... let's call a recess and re-convene when that statement makes sense, shall we?

Because I'm pretty sure that "shining lasers -- OR just some plain old light -- onto a cloud of WATER VAPOR" is basically where we've been since 1970. My parents were well-familiar with it enough to laugh about how pointless the technology of doing exactly that was, back in 1986.

Let me digress: my parents laughed at the attempts to "bring back 3D" (in cinema) back in the same time period. They thought it was atrocious that ANOTHER attempt was made in the 90's. They would be furious today that it's a recurring theme. My parents had no patience for social amnesia, and I guess I kind of don't, either.

I kind of hate these stupid stories we keep getting fed to us as "news". "We'll shine lashers at the water cloudsh, kidsh!" Okay, old man! You've been doing that same trick for 40 fucking years! You can quit! Snake oil has actually been regulated against by the government!

We'll get there eventually but shit like this (indulge me in quoting it one ... more ... time, it's such a precious artefact of our modern lack of common sense and how gullible 21st century humanity really has become):

'nuff said. Put me in the cryo-time-machine, wake me up when we have pills to get rid of TMAO-producing gut flora and when we reinvent the burger not to destroy the ecosphere.

There was this one time, when like, I thought this one thing was a bug, but when I got closer it was a pebble.

Did I ever tell you about this one time when I thought I seriously fucked my toe up, but I only stubbed it?

I remember once when I walked a long time, like it felt like tons of hours and miles, but it was only an hour and it was only like three miles. I dunno I guess I was tired.

Would be nice. But I've been consultant to my family on computer issues since I was 14 years old, over two decades of service. They never figure it out. Some people just never do. Especially when you're dealing with family, the issue of who is treating who as a child typically goes in the direction of older to younger, not the other way around.

yeah but how long until Apple forces obsolescence of their Mac or iPad?

It is almost inevitable that I will have to provide them with a Windows machine. The *nix alternative is too weird and too much could go wrong in their hands.

(1) I would lock them out of any significant changes. They would not be capable of getting escalated permission (to install or uninstall software, to use administrative tools, etc.) without a special* password.

(2) * I would come up with some means of rewriting the admin password using PRNG and a given sequence. Each time Admin permission is given for installation of some program or another, it would advance the sequence and re-write the Admin password. I would keep track of how many times this has been done and always know which bunch of pseudo-random characters it is currently. I would probably be on the phone with them for awhile because in some cases you have to escalate two or three times to get something installed or changed.

(3) A sub-Admin account would exist but with severely curtailed privileges. Where "Adminstrator group" permissions are given for services or privileges, I would remove "Administrator group" and replace it with the name of the fully-powered Admin account, and only add the name of the sub-Admin account where it's needed. They would regularly use this sub-Admin account instead of a regular user account. This way they could plug-and-play printers, change windows services (SOME of them) and so on without needing to call me up for the mystery password.

(4) All remote access services would be shut down. They would be entirely on their own, no remote desktop or remote help. If they somehow heard about remote desktop or remote help and wanted to do that, I would tell them too bad, that if they don't want a secure computer we can do a fresh re-install and they can have the complete out of the box experience and damn the torpedoes, but that I would no longer consult with them on that computer. That would change things, if not right away, then certainly when they are swamped with viruses and getting hijacked down the road.

(5) I would demand no outside consultancy, just like I do with any windows box I "secure". If somebody I've helped comes back to me complaining that they went to somebody else and now everything I did was undone again, I cut them loose. There are too many people posing as "computer geeks" who seem to enjoy installing anti-malware that's pure slowdown and kicks and screams to stay on the system, "speed up" and "doctor" apps that are known to be shady, and other massively market-hyped crap. Since insisting on no outside consultancy, I've significantly decreased my stress and workload by ridding myself of chronically repeat clients. In fact, I don't do street computer work any more, at all. It's not worth it. I would be doing my "parents" a serious favor at the cost of a lot of stress and hassle in my life.

(6) I have never been satisfied with the auto-update experience of most applications. I would have to choose software for them that I feel is secure enough not to need updating, and to leave it at that. Windows Update is bad enough, and they are already going to be screaming at me over the phone on those days when there's a serious patch and it's in the news and Microsoft's update service is running slow or haltingly for several days.

Alternately:

I would just install something like SUSE and a virtual machine running their precious Windows. I would get my "parents" a really expensive laptop, two sets of wi fi keyboards and mice, two wi fi monitors, and set them up with SUSE giving them two simultaneous but separate experiences inside their Windows virtual machines. It would take me for fucking ever and would be complicated as shit, and would be really expensive. Then since they would want persistent Windows experiences, Windows itself is still there to be a total complete headache nightmare. So why go the convoluted "matrix reality" style virtual machines in a linux box when they can still screw up their persistent albeit virtual Windows experience? Yes there'd be this nice safe layer of protection between what some hacker thinks they've broken into and what's really going on, but the "parents" would still be calling me up screaming because they screwed up. So I would *STILL* have to do everything I described above, and would *ALSO* have to do everything that entails running these two virtual machines from this SUSE laptop, securely, and feeding the output two separate ways to two separate wi-fi "dumb terminals". If I went the native Windows way, their computers would still be relatively fool-proof and tamper-proof, and the hardware would be much cheaper.

I would prefer the first choice, where I buy them two cheap laptops and install Windows 8.1 on them, and create a system with limited privilege admins and as few open ways for them or for others to hijack the machine as possible.

I like how you're saying that homo sapiens isn't ready for lower primates. That's pretty clever, I like how you did that.

You don't think it has something to do with more fundamental problems, do you? Like how we're the only living thing with a voice box capable of producing speech? That, might not be a big issue in your model of the Amazing Human World of the Future?

Remember how we went through the process of removing CFCs from production and usage (by and large) because of the ozone holes?

It didn't stop the greenhouse effect overall, though, did it? Because sufficient impetus wasn't given to citizens or to governments to avoid expelling greenhouse gases. Especially when it's an issue of what's coming out of your whip cream canister, it gives you little reason to put thought behind that next cut of steak you're going to put that whip cream onto.

Here's just another gas to distract the masses from the greenhouse gases they expel in normal, everyday life. We'll be all focused on this gas and it gives us an excuse to ignore 7,000 other greenhouse effect contributors.

No, of course not!

We just wanna sue the monkeys!

We're not crazy or anything!

That boy needs therapy. Psychosomatic. That boy needs therapy. Purely psychosomatic. That boy needs therapy. Lie down on the couch! What does that mean? You're a nut! You're crazy in the coconut!
What does that mean? That boy needs therapy.

I'm gonna kill you.

Thanks for clearing that up.

So this is, in other words, "projection" as in the projection of one line onto another line, or the projection of a straight line onto the surface of a sphere (it generates an arc) etc.

I am looking forward to the day when we've genuinely proven that the universe is a complete and total simulation, though.

I think the mistake of this article was to use the term "hologram". A convincingly three dimensional laser hologram could be projected onto a cloud of reflective material from stereoscopic images. Our universe might be something similar from a higher number of dimensions. But "hologram" is too close in popular fiction to a "simulation", and most people get at least some of their scientific enthusiasm (and familiar terminology) from science fiction.

The article could have said "turns out the universe isn't a ball, it's a plane that a ball is projecting onto" but people would have missed the point.