Excellent post, but one thing bothers me.

Isn't that begging the question? I'm not a physicist, but my understanding is that the question of determinism is a matter of interpretation. (Quantum mechanics can be understood to be deterministic.) Isn't that the question they are poking at here?

Typical programmers.
FTFY.

Besides, if you think that's bad, you should see what happens when they actually do do something. <grin/>

Why would they have any goal to be working toward at all? We take it for granted that an intelligent entity would necessarily value self-preservation. But it doesn't have to be so, that's a product of natural selection. Why would a machine intelligence "care" if it survived? Why would it care about anything, for that matter? If anything, it'll be selected to have goals to serve us.

If intelligent machines ever pose a threat to humans, it will be because of another group of humans giving them that goal.

Hey, you said it, not me. ;)

Absolutely. The fact that we (application developers) are dealing with passwords at all is the root of the problem here. The first time I wrote an app that did this (in 1997) I felt a little queasy about it. Yes you should use a three-tier design if at all possible. Ad-hoc queries cause many more issues than just this anyway; stored procedures should be the only allowed access from the middle tier. The password should be hashed a zillion times before being stored or compared.

But really, that's all just band-aids. We should not have to re-implement this for every application, and the user should not be subjected to the absolute train wreck of having to register and make up credentials for every fucking site. I would have thought something better would be here by now.

No amount of bitching at users or developers is going to help. This whole way of doing things needs to be tossed, and we need to figure out which one of these we want. Or something else if none of those are really sufficient. But something.

Point taken -- thanks for the clarification. There are a few comments in this thread that seem to be saying that you can't trust that something hasn't been altered, even when the hash matches, but it's hard to tell what they're saying.

Minor nit-pick: A hash is not a hash. I'm sure you are aware, but just for clarity -- Cryptographic hashes are intended to make it very hard to modify the binary stream without changing the hash. Not all hashes have that property. If you know what the cryptographic hash is supposed to be (you trust the hash) then you can be confident the stream has not been modified if the hashes match (ignoring known weaknesses, e.g. in MD5.)

No, you've got it all wrong -- Chinese with its simplified verbs is much more relaxing to speak. How can you be yourself when speaking any language that is two-tense, or even more?

:-P

... and I get schnockered again. How about gakkô, or even gakkou, then -- surely slashcode won't eat a regular old ASCII rendering?

Note: "school" in Japanese should have been rendered as gakk, not just gakk. Even better, it should be rendered with a macron (overbar) on the "o" instead, to indicate a long "o". For those interested about what long vowels are in Japanese, see the Wikipedia article on the "mora" in linguistics.

Japanese is Subject-(wa)-object-(predicate), with verb terminator. You have wo and ga following direct and indirect objects; vocalized punctuation from ka and ne; and context-implied elements ("Run!" instead of "You run!" because no shit I mean you).

Japanese particles have no strong correlation to anything much in English. They are grammatically important words, vaguely similar in function to English prepositions. Sometimes particles might be like conjunctions (to is kinda like "and"), sometimes they might be like punctuation (ka on the end is a verbal question mark), sometimes they have no good translation (wa marks topic, or contrastive subject).

FWIW, wa is more often considered a topic marker than a subject marker. Samples:

The particle ga is closer to a subject marker in function. For instance, Watashi ga unagi desu could only be interpreted to mean "I am an eel." Meanwhile, ni is vaguely like indirect object.

And, as you note, Japanese is incredibly more context-dependent than English. Oftentimes, anything that can be omitted from a sentence will be omitted, particularly anything that is clear from context, that has been previously established in the text or conversation or what-have-you. This makes Japanese into English interpretation a real bitch -- your example of "no shit I mean XXX" can get really tricky. If you miss the first part of what someone says, and you've lost the thread, you're absolutely hosed. English grammatically demands a lot more context-providing words, even when we think we're omitting detail. He's going to the store could be rendered in Japanese as just Ikimasu (go/goes/going/will go), if the context allows -- we don't even have the gender of the subject here in Japanese, making it much harder to try to guess.

More on topic to the greater thread, I've studied both Mandarin and Japanese, and I found Mandarin *much* easier to wrap my head around. Mandarin is a kind of language called an analytic language -- words are pretty broken down, even more than English, with no inflectional endings like "-ing" or "-s" or "-ed" etc. for tense, and no differences in a single word for singular or plural, that kind of thing. It's very streamlined in some ways. The Mandarin word mi can mean "buy", or "bought", or "will buy", without the need for different tenses -- tense is supplied by context, such as adding in the word for "today" or "tomorrow".

Japanese, meanwhile, is a very synthetic language -- words are glommed together with other elements to express different things like active/passive and adjectives, or even basics like tense or social context. One fun example is highly infected verb-based forms in Japanese, like saserareyasukattanda, which means "it's the case that he/she/it/they was/were easily made to do [something]".

Social context in Japanese is very important, kinda like Spanish tú vs. usted or French tu vs. vous, only on steroids and totally whacked out. Just looking at tense and social context in Japanese, the English terms "go" or "will go" can be variously expressed by the Japanese iku ("go" when talking to friends or familiars; present and future tense in Japanese are generally the same), ikimasu ("go" when talking in less-familiar social contexts), mairimasu ("go" when talking to someone else about oneself in a formal context), irasshaimasu ("go' when talking about someone else in a formal context). Then there are different permutations of each of these for negatives (ikanai, ikimasen, mairimasen, irasshaimasen), past affirmatives (itta, ikimashita, mairimashita, irasshaimashita), past negatives (ikanakatta, ikimasen deshita, mairimasen deshita, irasshaimasen deshita). And depending on grammatical construction, the formal forms might instead be mairu, irassharu; mairanai, irassharanai; maitta, irasshatta; mairanakatta, irassharanakatta. And that's not getting into the fact that mairu and related forms can instead mean "come", and irassharu can mean "come" or even just "be".

Just using this "go" example, Mandarin is much easier: that whole grammatical construct in Mandarin can collapse down to just [bù] qù ([not] go).

As far as I'm concerned, Mandarin is the easier language.

Regarding your sig: your wife thinks the best way to solve 10% of problems is to start a fire? Nice.

Yep. This is really more a function of the (guest) OS than anything else. As long as the guest is OK booting under either hardware (physical and virtual) dynamically, it should work fine. It's been a long time since mainstream OSs couldn't do that. It can be a little tricky to set up the VM to use a physical partition, though. That's the part that bootcamp does for you, which is nice, but it's definitely not the only way to make this work.

My experience was that the installer never got past the loading icon in VirtualBox...

They can talk to me about animal cruelty when they no longer hold the record for most animals killed in a shelter.