A call for violence or discrimination against a people based on their race, gender, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, parental status, or marital status (and perhaps more, but that covers the major bases) is hate speech. Perhaps it lacks rigor, but that is my own internal definition.

Of course it is censorship, I don't think anyone can credibly deny that, but that doesn't mean that a slippery slope applies to it. Look at some of the hate speech laws around the world for more details. There are good and bad ways to do it, but it can be done right.

If we want to make America better then we need to do something to combat the irrational and damaging hatred that spreads like as much kudzu through a forest, choking the ecosystem litterally from the roots up. Perhaps hate speech laws aren't the right tool, but they are a tool to consider to combat a very real problem.

The best way to stop any want or need for hate speech laws is to be intolerant of intolerance, but many people would never question their grandmother's racism, or an in-laws calls to cast all Muslims out of the nation. This low level of negativity and subtle hatred feeds the whole food chain, culminating in some rather terrible things across every spectrum of society.

How can you change that? What can be done? How do you raise the morality level of an entire society? How to do all this without robbing society of other rights? I don't know, but it is worth talking about.

I understand the fear of hate speech laws. Our government can sometimes use tools made for good purpose to accomplish evil ends, but let's speak as rational people about it instead of becoming polarized so much against the means itself that the original of it intent is lost. Most of us really want to make the world better.

That isn't exactly how rainbow tables work. In fact colliding chains is undesireable for rainbow tables. While it is true that you might end up on another "chain" the odds of that are exceedingly low with even 128bits of hash space and any decent salt.

The reason for itterating a password hash it to slow it down, to try and thwart brute force, however it doesn't work that well against GPUs since they have so many cores to work with and VERY efficient implementations of the algorithms. Some password hashing algorithms (I believe bcrypt is of this sort) can be tuned to take more memory and, this, keep GPUs from working much if any faster than a normal CPU. This, really, needs more research but the principals are simple: make memory access patterns impossible to predict so you can't stream in cache lines and make the space required "large" (lare isn't HUGE, I think a few megs is large enough. You won't find this in a normal cryptographic hash as they are *designed* to be fast, and that is a good thing for every use aside from this)

Rainbow tables work in chains, as you said, but what they do is they generate a hash from a "seed" for each chain THEN they "map" that hash back into the password space, and then hash that, map, hash, map, hash, da da da. Once you do this for a good long ways you store the final hash and the seed for this chain. You have MANY chains.
To find a password from the hash you pick up right in the middle of that. Lets go step by step:
You have a hash to reverse
1) check the hash against your "end of chain" hashes
2) If the hash has no match you do the same "mapping" that you did while creating the rainbow table into the password space
3) repeat until you find an "end hash" and therefore the chain, or you find that this password isn't in your table by mapping-hashing more times than you used for the chains
4) assuming you found the end hash you then take the "seed" for that chain and start hashing and mapping it over and over until you find your original hash
5) the password that you hashed to get there will be the correct one

So, yeah. Lots going on and many subtle problems that can creep in, but the chances of a collision due to itterated hashing aren't large. Smaller than anything you'll ever need to worry about. Like I said, too, itterated hashing doesn't help much against GPUs

I write in Java, most days, so I depend on compilers to do a lot of work for me. I don't depend on them [compilers] to pick the correct algorithm for me.

Simple problems get library functions. Simple streams of instuctions get optiomized futher by the processor. It still requires an awareness of how to optimize the problem to get good results.

Can't sort a linear list like you sort a random access list, an't sort a directed cylic graph at all (lest you peer inside and find a wayto break the loops) at all, and you can't provide consistency, patition tollerence, and availability at the same time. Some things *are* written in stone, but not as many as I let on, but CERTAINLY more than I'd like!

Laziness need not apply.

That is because of knowledge of processor details, memory details, comple operations, and, well, they [compilers] are better than us. Except that the ability to optimise depends on pure logic, of some form. As the state gets large optimization gets more complex.

Just like quicksort(3) is far faster than bubblesort so too is a highly threadable code faster than non-threadble code. Languages do not, contrary to belief, express intent, the provide a strict set of instructions that the computer MUST respect. In the end a good algorithm with no compiler help will beat optimized "dumb" code in all cases larger than "toy" (say, a few dozen "n" in Big-O notation)

Good thought about opimizing compilers, but it doesn't bear out.

It is possible to prove a multi-threaded program correct.

First you might start at the memory model, and all the guarantees that one can make based on that (and, by association, all the guarantees in terms of the memory model that locking / atomic calls make), then one can move on to he library structures and routines (objects and methods to put it in another paradigm).

Once you have hard guarantees using primitives and low level constructs it might be easy to construct a state-based proof. One example is Cliff Click's lock free hashtable (don't know ifhe has a formal proof, but nearly so if not)

Correctness in multithreaded environments takes a different form than in a single thread, but it is nothing that cannot be managed. Generally there are only a few "tough locks" to crack and the majority of the speedup can be had. Some problems are harder than others, and some problems don't have great parallelism, but that is just a generalization of programming, really. "Some things are harder than others, but nothing doable is impossible"

I wrote up a very long comment that ranted and raved and didn't come close to this comment right here. Some threading problems are hard, really hard. They aren't that common.

Man up and learn. I like it.

What about XFCE stifles your productivity? I rarely hear a remark against it so I'm interested to know.

IANAA but I can tell you that they have automated those tasks. The things that astronomers do these days is more programing and math heavy. They are taking the absoloute raw data and turning it into useful figures, new theories, proving old theories or debunking them and coming up with new ones, and every so often making a pretty picture that we can enjoy.

The amount of data collected is VAST, and there are so many telescopes and more projects viing for telescope time. The amount of prep work and post work pales in comparison to the actual observations.

So you are right in that sense: Automate!... but many things still require a solid chunk of grey matter, in the end.

I came here to say this. Instead I'll second.

Add nautilus back in to get my prefered file manager back (1 apt-get), change the keybinds so I've got my 4 virtual destops on my normal keybind (I like CTRL+ALT+(left|up|down|right) for desktops 1,2,3,4 and + shift to move with window, but that is just my preference. I use the virtual desktops a LOT), and... really that is it. Install my dev suite (same old same old, do it anywhere, Xubuntu to debian) and... happy me! Got my productivity back. I like it even better than compiz (though it DOEs have compositiing!). I've even heard of some folk running compiz on top of it, but I grew tired of that.

XFCE all the way.

Which country would that be?

Completely honest question, what bits does the Oracle version include that Hotspot does not?

G1GC, some very nice optimizations across the board, and some (I think) rather efficient native segments where needed (I/O and the like) are all a part of Hotspot.

I'll guess that the Oracle binary bits are to serve Oracle, but it would be interesting to see some improvements to aspire towards in Hotspot that are already in Oracle Java.
Let me know.

Bananatree3 likely wasn't being ignorant, but rather stating the situation simply. The economics are driven by... economics. Just because they know where more is and are getting at it faster does not mean that it is the cheap stuff that used to spring out of the ground and soak the plains of Texas and Texans alike. This oil is deeper, dirtier, and more spread out.

We are really good at getting at oil, because we need it for every piece of modern life, or at least it is the only feasible way to do it. So we get the oil, however we can.

It would have been more accurate to say, "the CHEAP shit is running out". Other than that I think it is a fine comment.

Albedo actually, but that is one HELL of an amusing mixup! I think that if we could calculate libido accurately via simple observation we'd be able to put dating websites out of business ;)

Yes. The atmosphere gets thin out at the edges, but there is no hard line where the soft vaccum of space starts and atmosphere ends.

Even once you are outside any influence from a planet's atmosphere you have the stellar wind. Beyond that there is still interstellar gas. Beyond that there is the intergalactic medium. You can check out the desnities cited on wikipedia for each but none of them are zero.

There is simply no getting a good hard vaccuum in this universe and, hence, anything moving in the universe has to deal with the fact that it is going to smack into some amount of matter in its journeys. Being near to a big puffy ball of matter just exacerbates that.

So... yeah. Orbit involves atmosphere no matter how you slice it. Just a question of how much

There is an extravagant claim.

But that isn't really even the worst part. It might be true, it might come to pass. Fine, fine. Don't gush about it for half the article, or if they insist on gushing then at least lay out the chllenges and technical details needed to get there.

Sorry I seemed as though I don't appreciate their work. I do. I just want more than a friggin advertisment for an article.