I fail to see the relevance. Yes, Microsoft has played fast and loose with various standards, including some critical ones in email. And the surrounding the handling of text/plain as text/each-long-line-is-a-paragraph plus the failure to support format=flowed is arguably the email standards violation with far and away the most impact.

But this doesn't mean Google doesn't also have a lot to answer for. Gmail IMAP compliance in particular is pretty bad, and SMTP handling of error conditions pushes things right to the limits if not past them.

Shame on Google for using a weak key, but also shame on this article for being more than a little hyperbolic.

If you, you know, actually read the standard, or even the Wikipedia page, you'll see that DKIM is not intended to be used as a signature mechanism in the same way as S/MIME or PGP. Rather, it's a means to assert responsibility for sending the message, it's done at the domain rather than user level, and verification results are intended to be used for message filtering, not for asserting that so-and-so actually signed the message.

Sure, the underlying technology is based on hashes, signatures, signature verification, and so on but that's because there's no other way to do it. The fact that DKIM allows for the application of relaxed interpretation of both message header and body data kinda tells you it's not intended to be used to provide an absolute assurance that what you got is authentic in every way.

DKIM is also not intended to be the ultimate source of information for filtering. Rather, DKIM results are supposed to be combined with other metrics to form an overall assessment of message validity. And that's a very good thing, since I get all sorts of spammy stuff that makes it through Google, including getting a legitimate DKIN signature attached. Other filtering mechanisms are needed to block such crap.

All that said, it's very disappointing to see yet another case where Google has seen fit to play fast and loose with standards. This is happening much too often.

I've been using Seamonkey for many years. I started when I needed a quickie HTML editor for something, tried it, liked the overall browser and stuck with it.

Every so often I try the various other browsers. So far I've seen no reason to change and lots of reasons not to.

But I thought this was very unusual. Seems it isn't.

According to the abstract, their model "explains more than 85% of observed variation". So yes, it may be useful narrowing things down in an investigation, but this is a long way from being a tracking tool, let alone qualifying as an admissible forensic result. And judging from the cites It also looks like a lot of the interest in this has more to do with tracking movements of animals, not people, which is a lot more reasonable.

FWIW, I used to do a lot of laser spectroscopy work, so this is not entirely familiar territory.

I RFTA, and I didn't see the citations to the peer-reviewed studies demonstrating the reliability of this technique. I also didn't see any cites to case law where these results have been found to be admissible in court.

Of course it depends to some extent on how the results are being used. If they are being used for purposes of exclusion of suspects, or as a means of narrowing a search, reliability or admissibility may have yet to be tested. But sooner or later they will be. I just hope it happens before this gets widely accepted and someone gets hurt.

On a personal note, I drink bottled water almost exclusively for health reasons (immune suppressed and bottled water has, on average, lower bacterial counts than tap). But I buy what's cheapest and available, which means I switch brands all the time. Assuming water does account for the majority of the isotopes these tests check, the stuff I'm drinking right now comes from two different sources, one 600+ miles north, the other 200+ miles northeast of here. Since this is in California, that's not exactly narrowing things down.

"“In the name of Annah the Almaziful the Everliving, the Bringer of Plurabilities, haloed be her eve, her singtime sung, her till be run, unhemmed as it is uneven. " - Finnegan's Wake

I liked Finnegan's Wake enough to read it a couple of times. Then again, "de gustibus non est disputandum" is kind of the point here.

Crap. I now see someone beat me to it. Oh well.

"I'm sure we all agree that we ought to love one another and I know there are people in the world that do not love their fellow human beings and I hate people like that." - Tom Lehrer

Because what I did in college was write software which among other things was used to model digestive processes. As I recall, the medium sized model was a fairly non-sparse system of more than 200 differential equations, mostly linear but with a few key highly nonlinear terms. And in case it isn't obvious, 200+ equations translates into a hell of a lot more chemicals involved than you could reasonably memorize.

Difficulties of solving the thing aside (the system turns out to stiffer than you'd expect), the fun part for the chemists was getting all the coupling coefficients right, because they come from lots of different sources and are expressed in lots of different units. I built dimensional analysis into the software, but they decided not to use it because it would take to long. That was a bad call, because after publication a mistake turned up (an add that should have been a multiply) that dimensional analysis would have caught. The good news is they reran the model and the mistake didn't change the results significantly, so they were able to issue a simple correction.

I couldn't name even one enzyme involved then or now, but back then I knew quite a bit about how digestion actually worked.

Darn! Forgot to log out and go AC. Sigh.

Writing a post without that symbol in it is difficult, but if you work at it... Voila!


- Gadsby

First of all, your initial assertion that university professors don't get training in teaching is incorrect in many cases. In many places the overlap between the "college of eduction" sorts and the other departments is considerable, with the education professors teaching lots of courses, usually the entry level ones.

And guess what? It's entirely possible for them to be the ones who suck at teaching. That was certainly the case in the department where I taught: Consistently lower student ratings and student performance for that subgroup.

Oh, and as for the non-English speaking graduate students, in a lot of places they are handling entire classes with little or no supervision. Maybe that's still a TA, but when they are the only person teaching the class and doing all the grading, it's pretty much a moot point. And it's a HUGE problem: My calculus classroom used to be SRO because poor guy teaching another section one room over spoke great Russian but almost no English at all. (I say "poor guy" because it is not his fault he was given a job he couldn't possibly do well.)

I'd actually go a bit further, and say that defining slope in the obvious geometric fashion is the better way to do it. It's not like we have a shortage of terms for the change in a car's position or whatever, e.g., "speed" or "velocity". And the more general concept is better referred to as "rate of change".

I used to teach calculus, and even at the college level the grasp students have over the relationship between what that car is doing on the road and those lines on the chalkboard is often fairly tenuous. So a good teacher spends time explaining how the things connect. When you're doing that it helps to have different words for what's on the board and whatever it is in the physical world you're talking about. And it helps if the terms you use connect naturally to the domain where they are being applied.

And as long as I'm nattering on about this, another thing I picked up on pretty quickly is what sort of explanation works best varies from one student to another. For some students geometric arguments work best. For others that's completely opaque, and they get more out of an abstract symbolic approach. There are even some that just naturally get trigonometric arguments. So when I'd do a problem talking about, say a ladder sliding down a wall, I'd typically work at least two ways and sometimes three.

Anyway, it strikes me as more than a little ironic that someone who is supposedly trying to rework curriculum to better suit student needs is so pedantic about terminology. In my experience excessive pedantry is completely at odds with effective teaching.

He's (arguably) transcribing the questions as they are asked and noting his own responses. He is not transcribing anything from a recording. This restriction is clearly intended to prevent a person who prepares a transcript from the recording at a later date from being able to reveal anything. Which is entirely reasonable, although I suspect that in most cases it's more a matter of someone comparing the transcript made at the time with what was on the tape. (At least that's how it worked when I have given testimony. And FWIW, it's been my experience that in relatively relaxed settings like depositions stenographers appreciate it when you spell any unusual technical terms you're using.)

Also look at the subsequent section regarding secrecy, where the person giving the testimony is conspicuous by their absence.

The article in question says, "The most sophisticated and powerful cyberweapon uncovered to date was written in the LUA computer language. Except that it wasn't. The Kaspersky FAQ says:

The effective Lua code part is rather small compared to the overall code. Our estimation of development ‘cost’ in Lua is over 3000 lines of code, which for an average developer should take about a month to create and debug.

Flame is 20Mb total, and a lot of that is almost certainly written in C/C++ (Lua VM, sqlite3, zlib, libbz2).

The article then says, "[Flame] was built with gamer code". Also incorrect. Lua is a general-purpose scripting language in no way specific to gaming. And I've heard nothing that says code directly related to any sort of game is part of it.

That's the last time the article mentions Lua or gaming, but no further mentions are necessary. A false connection has been made, and by hyping up the danger of Flame, e.g., the UN views it is a "significant threat", they're effectively blaming game developers through guilt by association.

The article also says, "Flame came to light when the U.N. International Telecommunications Union (which oversees cyberactivities for the body) received reports of unusual activity." The implication is Flame was responsible for the activity. Again according to Kaspersky, that's not the case. They were attempting to track down something called "Codename Wiper" that was responsible for actually deleting data when they stumbled across Flame by accident.

In contrast, the MSNBC article makes it quite clear that only part of Flame was written in Lua. It then engages in a fairly coherent discussion of why Lua might have been chosen to implement part of Flame, quoting various sources with various different takes on it. And the headline is rather obviously intended to be facetious.

So, on one hand we have a fairly coherent piece that actually tries to get into software design philosophy. And on the other, we have your typical pile of crap from Fox News.