I'm an Idiot? Really, that's how you start your argument... wow. I don't even know why I bothered reading the reset of your comment. When you start a response with "You're an Idiot" it just makes you sound stupid.

Firstly, I don't really care how "controlled" a factory is. I didn't say that the factories used inedible or poisonous ingredients. I'm sure everything they use is approved and won't make you sick. Just like Neapolitan ice cream from the grocery store is perfectly fine to eat.

Secondly, I don't care what you think "everybody in the industry" knows. Appeal to authority doesn't help your argument.

Thirdly, I never said anything about organic ingredients so I'm not sure why you brought it up. When I said high quality ingredients I meant things like real vanilla bean in a vanilla cup cake instead of "artificial vanilla flavour" or saffron in a saffron cup cake. Or orange zest in a orange cupcake instead of "artificial flavours and colours". I suspect you would know this if you ever left your mom's basement.

Fourthly, they are not ALL lard. Almost all specialty shops use real butter. Just Google "specialty cupcake ingredients". It's not that hard. You live in a really vacuous world if you think you can't get a real butter cupcake.

I am guessing that you don't travel much and haven't experience things and people out of your comfort zone. You probably don't feel welcome in new environments and around new people. Probably because you flippantly call people "idiots" and then go on to say the stupidest things. I suggest you try being a bit more buttery to people perhaps little sweeter and more sugary and then, perhaps, you will make something called a "friend" or even multiple "friends". And maybe, just maybe, one of these "friends" might even buy you a cupcake, with real butter.

Exactly this. Except the $0.89 cup cake at my local grocer is made with mostly lard and sugar with waxy poor quality chocolate and lard icing and comes in maybe 3 different flavours and is sold in very high volumes at a low price.

Whereas the specialty cup cake is made with real butter high quality chocolate and other ingredients and is available in 20 different flavours and is sold in low volumes at a high price.

Basically think of Neapolitan ice cream from some big manufacturer vs Baskin Robins or some such. You can argue that they are overpriced for what they are but you can't say that the products are exactly the same.

One last point I'd like to make is that in some other countries in world, like France for example, specialty bakeries making high end pastries and cakes are the *only* types of bakeries. People are so willing to pay for higher quality food that there are no cheap grocery store alternatives. So maybe it's not a fad.

ISPs could move to that model too. But they don't want to. They prefer to charge flat rates and then throttle people who use it more.

They tried to do that in Canada and everybody went apeshit crazy. The federal government got involved and there were protests in the street (really) and ultimately the isps were ordered to abandon it. To be fair the the ISPs wanted to charge a monthly fee with a low cap plus something stupid like $2.50 /GB for overages.

http://www.google.ca/search?q=canada+usage+based+billing&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Actually, 52 bits of entropy is 4 times harder to crack by brute force (and therefore would take 4 times longer). Not bad. However, Ym=2f4tjaramadillo would have 63 bits of entropy and therefore be 2048 times more difficult to crack and take 2048 times as long.

The easiest thing to do is to memorize a random good password and periodically tag on a random word or two for use on different sites for relatively insecure stuff.

something like: d49dfjsf as the base password
and then for slashdot maybe: d49djsfsnailstar (then for slashdot you'd only have to remember 'snail star')
and for facebook maybe d49djsfspuddlegrass) etc etc

tonnes of entropy -- relatively easy to remember and much better than using the same exact password in multiple places...

Yes I know 2048 is low-- I picked it because it's nice power of 2. And yes, most people won't pick completely random words but that's missing the point. *most* people also don't pick random alphanumeric passwords either.

However, my guess is that a nonrandom selection of 4 words is stronger than a nonrandom selection of 8 letters which I think is the point that the xkcd comic is making. In both cases the password is nonrandom.

Sorry for the poor formatting-- here it is better:

You are misinterpretting the idea. The password is not stronger simply because it's longer. It's stronger because there are many more common words than there are letters in the alphabet.

Think of each word in the password as a single letter. However, instead of the alphabet being 26 letters (or 62 if you include upper and lowercase and numbers) the alphabet is 2048 letters long. Then picking a 4 "letter" password gives you 2^44 bits of entropy. A completely random 8 letter alphanumeric password would give ~47 bits.

If someone sees a couple of letters from a four word password and can somehow deduce from that an entire word (for arguments sake) you still have 2^33 bits of entropy. If somebody sees two characters from your 8 character randomly generated password you have only ~2^31 bits of entropy left.

If you really must have random passwords it's really not a bad idea to at least tack on a single word to the end of your password just for the fun of it.
Jg9D2js7 = 47 bits of entropy
Jg9D2js7cricket = 58 bits of entropy and in the real word probably much harder to guess than four dictionary words because it doesn't follow one scheme or the other- it's a mix of the two.

You are misinterpretting the idea. The password is not stronger simply because it's longer. It's stronger because there are many more common words than there are letters in the alphabet. Think of each word in the password as a single letter. However, instead of the alphabet being 26 letters (or 62 if you include upper and lowercase and numbers) the alphabet is 2048 letters long. Then picking a 4 "letter" password gives you 2^44 bits of entropy. A completely random 8 letter alphanumeric password would give ~47 bits. If someone sees a couple of letters from a four word password and can somehow deduce from that an entire word (for arguments sake) you still have 2^33 bits of entropy. If somebody sees two characters from your 8 character randomly generated password you have only ~2^31 bits of entropy left. If you really must have random passwords it's really not a bad idea to at least tack on a single word to the end of your password just for the fun of it. Jg9D2js7 = 47 bits of entropy Jg9D2js7cricket = 58 bits of entropy and in the real word probably much harder to guess than four dictionary words because it doesn't follow one scheme or the other- it's a mix of the two.

That's very similar to the way we interview at my company. On interview day my co-interviewer basically tosses out some new interesting problem solving questions and I give them a go. If I can't solve them relatively easily then we don't ask them. We generally pick questions that have multiple solutions some better than others and if the candidate gives the O(n^2) answer we hint towards the O(n) answer. All the programming questions are done in pseudo code and we ask the candidate walk us through their code and explain it.

The basic idea is to see how they think, how well they can learn, and how well they can explain themselves and the code they write and how good that code is. Nobody is going to get the O(n) answer to some of the questions in the given time (unless they have seen it before) but their attitude and ability to figure it out given enough hints in really telling. With some candidates a few hints are enough; with others I can pratically tell them the answer and they still don't clue in. That is really telling.

Yahoo Postmaster has a pretty useful help page. If you do everything listed here you should be in good shape: http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/mail/postmaster/basics/postmaster-15.html

How to double your profits selling arms: sell to both sides of the conflict.

Or, if you can keep the balance of power relatively even then you can way more than double your profits. A war where side trounces the other in a couple of days is far less profitable than one which lasts years.

If turnit in can strike balance in which students realistically have to use check paper or whatever it's called in order to avoid being falsely labeled a plagiarist then they can way more than double their profits...

I'm not sure how they setup there networks but it would be easy, if they had a properly segmented network, to require dhcp or a properly authenticated ip for you to connect. It's pretty trivial. It's not 1996 anymore. For example: Lets say your cable modem is connected to port 13839- the switch, router, or transparent firewall or whatever equipment they choose to use could simple not forward your traffic if the destination ip or source ip doesn't match the ip that was assigned to your specific port. Period. Short of finding a flaw in the device there is no getting around that.

There must be something I don't understand about this system...

The whole idea is to compare a certificate served by a website to a client with one received from the same destination by a notary. If the client is surfing from a compromised network and gets served a fake certificate, it won't match with the one from the notary, triggering an alert.

How does it prevent a man in the middle attack from simply forging the certificate and all of the notary responses?

Because in my little corner of the planet (Victoria BC) there is a 10 person deep line up for a latte at every single one of the hundreds of espresso shops every morning. That's why.

Justified or not people buy lattes.

Read carefully: "Pretty accurately" all that implies is that "subset" is a pretty large share of "set". Very good- move along now.

I am also Canadian, and I vividly remember my grade 8 Spanish teacher (of Argentinian origin) giving us a 15 minute lecture about the term "American" being used incorrectly to describe USians. As far as she was concerned she was American and was visibly upset about it. So yes it does bother some people.