ckoepp

You are not the only one criticizing IQ tests. Even Theodor Adorno had his problems with those tests. Some even claim that the whole IQ research is not very scientific at all. An IQ test for example is considered good if there is a Gaussian distribution present in the results it produces when applied to a large set of people. However, we still don't know if human intelligence is actually Gaussian distributed. The only proof you can find are such IQ tests, which actually are designed with this very pattern in mind. It's like asking a question with the answer already in mind.

I guess with the creation of phrases like "emotional IQ" and "cognitive IQ" even the research expressed its doubt that those tests can truly hold their promises. Freerk Huisken might be right in the end. He argued that it's a logical problem when one is trying to measure intelligence in artificial test as they can not retrieve the true capabilities of a human. Intelligence is a damn complicated subject and although we humans love to measure and categorize everything, we should consider that IQ tests are far from being comparable. Truth is, we still do not understand what intelligence actually is :)

This is actually a nice topic to discuss with philosophers.

I also read some of his books. He does make a great introduction to the topic of media philosophy.

If you're interested in his topic, you might want to read some books of Vilem Flusser. "Post-History" and "Does Writing Have a Future" are great texts which I think are highly relevant to computer scientists like me. Sadly, Flusser is almost unknown to people not taking classes in philosophy. I would never have read any text of him without taking philosophy as my minor subject ^^

I agree even though I'm not sure the problem is on the "using passwords" side. There are more fundamental problems with fail2ban & Co.

Using regular expressions on logs and triggering such massive actions like IP-based bans isn't a wise thing to do. Logs are not the trivial lines of text they were 10 years before. In reality you'd have to deal with chaotic stuff often even including user-entered data - this is why there are so many classical Big-Data programs and algorithms are joining the party here. It's very hard to write solid regular expressions on those without overseeing a tiny DoS possibility because of injection. There are numerous examples in the CVE database for exactly this when you look at fail2ban and other programs using the same scheme...

If you really need to keep your logs clean and there is no way in detecting "unusual behaviour" by filtering out all those background noise you see on SSH usually, why not use iptables with it's extensions instead? You can easily count the attempts to connect to defined ports and block any IP address reaching a threshold for a limited amount of time. This is a way more solid implementation of the same thing as IP packages are well-defined structures and there is simply no way in injecting something in the IP source field of them.

About the hardware consumption by SSH login attempts: you guys aren't honestly arguing that a cronjob-like grep of log-files and performing regular expressions on hundreds of lines is a way better to do the same, right? This is actually highly inefficient too...

For me, even plain iptables filtering isn't a nice thing. I use port-knocking to get access to my SSH services. Every server has it's unique sequence of packages to tell it to open access to SSH for a IP transmitting the right packages with the right flags and payload in the correct ordering.

I'm not saying "get rid of fail2ban", but people should know what they are doing and what problems come with those programs. The convenience has it's price...

I mean, how many jobs require significant international communication with people who don't speak English? Not many.

Well, there is more to a language than just words and grammar, right? Learning a language is also a crash course in terms of cultural studies. If you happen to be in contact with other cultures this might be quite helpful to deal with colleagues and/or customers.

We're living in a world where a majority of people communicate. Cultural understanding is more important than ever and even though English seems to be the global language, everyone should be willing to learn at least one foreign languages and basic concepts of other cultures with it.

There's also a small test about this: if you happen to be in a foreign country just try to learn the local phrases for "Hello" and "Thank you". Use it when checking in at the hotel, eating in restaurants and dealing with local people - you'll be amazed what those simple words can archive. It's a sign of respect and that you made an effort to learn about their culture.

To sum it up: cultural understanding is getting more important as the whole world (regardless of national borders) communicates. Learning a language comes with learning about a different culture and reflecting your own. This is an essential thing when dealing with foreign people and everybody should have basic knowledge about it.

Given also that sending signals into deep space is extremely expensive and energy will always be finite, communication with new worlds is sought only rarely.

I totally agree to this statement. Even though I guess there is no need to actively sent too many information out in space as we do already have a kind of "frequency pollution" broadcasting TV channels, TCP packets etc. There are many signals travelling from earth to space all the time - communication with satellites doesn't end on them, remember: it's radio we use for communication!

You can easily imagine what it must be outta there when aiming at the earth with some kind of antenna: just imagine a world on which air isn't throttling voice-signals (aka shouting/talking). Those signals would keep floating around until they are reflected by some kind of object. Well, in space there aren't that many objects so our little earth is already looking like a big frequency mess and a kind of big light bulb for other guys out there. We just have to wait until all our civilization-generated signals are arriving at other parts of the galaxy.'

You can argue whether this is a wise thing to do this so naively but it's already too late to stop this from happening and to be honest: we can only do assumptions based on things we do know, so we simply have to speculate when it comes to aliens. The only thing which makes me a kind of sad is, that we humans seem to had a quite clear pattern when it comes to "exploration" of new geographical areas by external people (Northern/Southern American Natives, Africans, Australian Natives the list goes on and on). In this sense it's quite good that space-travels are that hard to do over a fast distance.

Just my 2 cents :)

Well, 1&1/United Internet has a reputation for such bad behavior [1,2].

Actually it's quite easy to just enter some address and order some useless premium services "in behalf" of other people - this actually happened to a member of my family. According to consumer protection organizations this seems to be their business model [3,4].

Note that those links are in German: [1] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web.de#Kritik [2] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmx.de#Kritik [3] http://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/digital/Glueckwunsch-Abz... [4] http://www.verbraucherzentrale-niedersachsen.de/link1811119A...

>> "LateX is slow, inconsistent and needs to be ran multiple times to give a correct result" It is not slow, it runs in under a second on most documents I have authored.

Slow? I don't know about that, but compared to what? Even in word it does need some time to reach the "Save as PDF" menu, right?

> "Inconsistent" I'm not sure what tinco meant by this, but it does in fact return the same results for the same file across multiple runs.

Well, there is some truth about this. There is an odd naming scheme if you look at stuff like "enumerate", "itemize" and "description" - beginners get confused by this as they assume it would be called "describe". The same goes for most of the packages. This is somehow historical, but I think it also makes it unnecessary hard to figure out LaTex for beginners, right?

Also the reason why LaTex needs several runs to finally create the full document. Nowadays you would do this differently I guess as there is simply no need to start the program twice if the application would be smart enough to call sub-programs (like biblatex) by itself on the fly. It would still run the same routine several times, but users wouldn't see it and it would be one command for them to build the document. That's another point beginners tend to go crazy about :)

Having said that, I should add that I'm using LaTex (and XeLaTex, etc.) daily and there isn't a single program matching the power and beauty of it - I even design covers for my publications with it. But I'm able to use vim and emacs, right? 90% of the people are bloody beginners and it would be a shame to hide the beauty of a LaTex document from them.

> "It's syntax is ugly."

Yeah, well...ugly is a bad term to discuss about. I like it and I think the syntax is way cleaner than reStructured text :D

So the protection from Northern Korea is also wrong as the name of the whole system was? Your homework wasn't done properly either, don't you think? :D

Well, I'm European and you can't expect me to know details about every military protection plan from the US administration (which are surely a lot), can you?

Googeling it wouldn't have returned useful information with two wrong facts I guess ;)

...and by the way: your link said nothing about the Ukraine! :D :D So again, look at google maps!

Patriot missiles in Ukraine to protect the US and EU from North Korea and Iran?!

Well, get back to your geography homework and have a look where the Ukraine is located...

Another side of the medal is, that this very government was elected freely and a lot of Ukrainian people are still supporting it, especially in the East of the country.

Don't get me wrong, the government is far from being a good one and there surly are reasons to demonstrate. But it's elected and the OSCE said it was a fair election overall [1].

Well, in the end I must agree to Aoyagi: this is one side of a complex situation and although it is undoubtedly touching, it's not the whole truth behind the current situation.

[1] http://www.osce.org/odihr/elections/110818

Well, some airlines [1] already offering such services...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones_on_aircraft#Statu...

Well, for a fun project a GUI is quite enough and I bet it took him more than just a single day to do it. The title of this submission surly is a bit too enthusiastic...

But don't complain - it's still a funny thing to look at, right? :)

Of course you have sources for this statement, right?

By the way - this is exactly the argumentation neo-Nazi parties parties proclaim all the time [1]. You must be in lack of any information about what is going on in European and German politics to state stuff like this...

[1] http://npd-fraktion-sachsen.de/index.php?s=111&aid=6373

It is, but still it quite open what happens if you'd deny a normal growth. Animals are no machines where you simply disable a gene and it works like you expect it to work.

We're not even sure what a huge amount of the DNA really does (and what it doesn't). So playing around with such stuff is trial-and-error as you see on virtually any such experiments (Orange trees, potatoes, cloned sheeps, etc.).

The problem currently is that we actually don't know how the brain works. I know a lot of people claiming that they've found out - but if you dig deeper you'll find most experiments only work in certain cultures and are far from being THE theory which explains everything. I mean nobody today can actually be sure that the power at which a synapse is firing has a meaning. We simply have no idea - it may have significant influence but we're far from proving it (can't find the paper describing this, as I'm not able to connect to the university network currently).

This is bad news - especially for the AI-robotics guys, as they need this knowledge to implement the next generation of smart robots. They hope to get some "self reprogrammable robots" as this is what your brain seems to do all the time.

So what do we technicians do? We're trying to build a machine to simulate a brain (and hope we're right in our assumption how the brain works). There is a huge project like this going on in the EU too [1]. This is the bottom-up approach and it's far from all the press releases as there are too many assumptions in it - even if those guys hate to hear it. There is a nice documentary film with Jospeh Weizenbaum (former professor at MIT and close friend of Chromsky) about this very issue and its ethical aspects [2].

The up-down approach is researched by system biologists (and other related sciences). They aim at the bio-chemical and physical layers to figure out how a brain works and it seems like this is complicated as hell. We're some kind of programmable - even if nobody can tell how far this actually goes. Just being raised in different cultures can have significant influence in how a brain reacts in situations. Even siblings with the same DNA and are being raised within the very same family you can find differences in how their brain reacts...

So don't get too excited about all this - we're far away from being "downloadable". Which is maybe not the worst thing if you're thinking about it for a while. What would life mean if it's endless? And by the way: even if you were downloadable, what tells you that you're still alive if a copy of your brain is stored within an robot? There are hard philosophical questions behind such issues...

[1] https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_%26_Pray