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Re:Oh my god, they're stealing knowledge! by bludstone · 2000-04-15 22:49 · Score: 1 · on RMS On eBooks

So open source the planet.

I know its cliche, but online open source textbooks for schools could be a godsend. The absolutly disgusting quality of textbooks in schools now, if theyve got the new ones, is one of the primary reasons i found highschool mindboggingly boring. My personal favorite is how at the beggining of every semester they re-taught everything we learned over again.. what a fucking waste of my time.

Im starting to drift, but someone could create a forum for online textbooks that proffessors and teachers all around the world could collectivly work on.

Then again, I imagine a distinct conflict of interest would arise.. would science books have to cover creationism?

Ah screw it, the education system is totally fucked and needs to be compleatly reworked anyways. Just set them loose on Everything2 and see what they find out. :)

Brute Force by Xamot · 2000-04-09 21:10 · Score: 2 · on Enigma Encryption Vs. Modern Computers?

Using the "Brute Force" method is an effective method of cryptanalysis. It just isn't a very good one. You will most likely get more than one possible solution and without some sort of crib you may not know which one is correct. This is what makes the One-Time Pad effective.

These Distributed.net contests aren't that stupid. They do show what is possible if you do have a crib. Initialy Enigma was broken by the Polish because they got a hold of the schematics and some german codebooks. They were able to find out that the first three letters were the same as the next three lettters and those were the rotator settings for the rest of the message. (the first enigma machines only had 3 wheels in use at one time) Because they knew this repetition existed they were able to create machines that could "Brute Force" those 6 letters. But they still had to look to see that they created a readable message. Turning took this information and many decrypted messages and figured out a way to decipher engima messages without this repetition because he knew the germans would eventually realize that it is a weekness. And they did! To crack these new messages Turning used cribs, guesses at what words would be where in the message. See Turing realized many messages the germans sent adhered to a strict standard format. IIRC especially some weather reports that were sent out at the same time everyday. Knowing the format of these messages and which messages (of the many messages that are sent during a war) turing was able to create a machine that could use these cribs to find the key to the message.

I haven't read Kahn's book yet, but I want to. I have read The Code Book by S. Singh.

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Brute Force by Xamot · 2000-04-09 21:10 · Score: 2 · on Enigma Encryption Vs. Modern Computers?

Using the "Brute Force" method is an effective method of cryptanalysis. It just isn't a very good one. You will most likely get more than one possible solution and without some sort of crib you may not know which one is correct. This is what makes the One-Time Pad effective.

These Distributed.net contests aren't that stupid. They do show what is possible if you do have a crib. Initialy Enigma was broken by the Polish because they got a hold of the schematics and some german codebooks. They were able to find out that the first three letters were the same as the next three lettters and those were the rotator settings for the rest of the message. (the first enigma machines only had 3 wheels in use at one time) Because they knew this repetition existed they were able to create machines that could "Brute Force" those 6 letters. But they still had to look to see that they created a readable message. Turning took this information and many decrypted messages and figured out a way to decipher engima messages without this repetition because he knew the germans would eventually realize that it is a weekness. And they did! To crack these new messages Turning used cribs, guesses at what words would be where in the message. See Turing realized many messages the germans sent adhered to a strict standard format. IIRC especially some weather reports that were sent out at the same time everyday. Knowing the format of these messages and which messages (of the many messages that are sent during a war) turing was able to create a machine that could use these cribs to find the key to the message.

I haven't read Kahn's book yet, but I want to. I have read The Code Book by S. Singh.

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Brute Force by Xamot · 2000-04-09 21:10 · Score: 2 · on Enigma Encryption Vs. Modern Computers?

Using the "Brute Force" method is an effective method of cryptanalysis. It just isn't a very good one. You will most likely get more than one possible solution and without some sort of crib you may not know which one is correct. This is what makes the One-Time Pad effective.

These Distributed.net contests aren't that stupid. They do show what is possible if you do have a crib. Initialy Enigma was broken by the Polish because they got a hold of the schematics and some german codebooks. They were able to find out that the first three letters were the same as the next three lettters and those were the rotator settings for the rest of the message. (the first enigma machines only had 3 wheels in use at one time) Because they knew this repetition existed they were able to create machines that could "Brute Force" those 6 letters. But they still had to look to see that they created a readable message. Turning took this information and many decrypted messages and figured out a way to decipher engima messages without this repetition because he knew the germans would eventually realize that it is a weekness. And they did! To crack these new messages Turning used cribs, guesses at what words would be where in the message. See Turing realized many messages the germans sent adhered to a strict standard format. IIRC especially some weather reports that were sent out at the same time everyday. Knowing the format of these messages and which messages (of the many messages that are sent during a war) turing was able to create a machine that could use these cribs to find the key to the message.

I haven't read Kahn's book yet, but I want to. I have read The Code Book by S. Singh.

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just like Everything? by sbuckhopper · 2000-04-05 00:35 · Score: 1 · on Learn About FreeNet Straight From The Source

I could be completely off base here, but from what I understand both FreeNet and Everything are both places to store stuff, as in whatever you want.

Besides the fact that Everything is centralized and FreeNet is not, are there any other fundamental differences between the two?

---
"Everybody knows the moon's made of cheese."

System-G is whacked, but there is merit. by cryptomancer · 2000-03-29 06:04 · Score: 1 · on Practical Gravity Shielding for Spacecraft?

First I'll say that yes, as many other people have pointed out, there are holes in the technical portion of this 'Gravitational Spacecraft' as big as the one at Cygnus X-1. Mind you, I'm no Fizzisyst, but to compare what I found, here's my list:

photons can 'absorb' other photons: the collision of certain high-energy photons results in a matter/anti-matter pair; reversible: the collision of a matter/anti-matter pair releases energy in the form of a pair of photons.

The proof completely lacks any reference to equations which describe physical properties. That 'eq 1.04' is written by Fran, so of course it will produce the answer that a photon has null gravitational mass. Which isn't right, because photons have relativistic mass, momentum, and inertia. Thanks to the particle/wave duality of nature, though you might not be able to talk of matter when referring to a photon, but it is still affected and effects the rest of the universe.

There's talk of nullifying gravitons. Please, gravitons are theorized and still have no evidence as to their existence. Personally, I'm starting to believe that gravity along with 'dark matter' are sub-spacial effects from the extradimensional nature of the universe. Grep this /. article and its link.

By this point, I havn't even gotten past the first paragraph. And looking at the rest of the 'proof' is similarly... lacking. But seeing the really neat rendered graphics (nevermind the AOL host site), I'm tempted to say this is better off as an appendix to a web-distributed sci-fi graphic novel.

But let me give kudos to Andrea Fasce for the Galaxy Applet also running on the page. Schlick graphics.

As for the overall concept, there is some merit. There has to be some merit to wild ideas, eg Jules Verne. In this, not necessarily in reducing a spacecraft's inertial mass by shielding it from gravity, but in changing the properties of the space around it. Go pick up Six Not-So-Easy Pieces, and read Feynman's lecture on warped space-time. I don't think it'll solve the problem of making a ship go incredibly fast, but it could fix some of the problem of getting a human to travel interstellarly within their own lifetime.

But hey, I'm just another sci-fi buff with feet still on the Earth (last I checked).
Keep dreaming, keep reaching, keep working towards the unreachable goal. - me.

Re:Wasn't that an Afternoon Special by Nicolas+MONNET · 2000-03-29 02:09 · Score: 1 · on Geek Profiling: The Next W.A.V.E.

Here's a link for you.

Bill and Ted's Excellent Phear by oxytocin · 2000-03-21 02:22 · Score: 1 · on Why The Future Doesn't Need Us

A large part of the fear that Bill (and Ted) express comes from looking at the nature of exponential growth. To illustrate, I'm reminded of a funny joke Ralph Merkle (nanotechnologist) makes when people ask him about the state of "progress in nanotechnology", to which he always replies "We're at the Knee of the Curve." The joke is that with an exponential-rate growth curve, every point is the "knee". Exponential growth is no laughing matter. Moore's Law has been a reality for decades and since Gordon Moore first stated in 1965 transistor technology has increased about 8 million fold. And next year it'll be 16 million fold. That's a lot. Bill (and lots of others) look down the road to "30 Years From Now" at which point we'll have seen a 8,796,093,022,208 fold improvement since 1965.

Now we connect this exponential growth to human growth: I was watching on "the nature of things" how Australapithicine man was stuck with the high-technology of STONE KNIVES for 1 million years. That is slow evolution, but in the last 10,000 years the world's population has gone from 1 Million to 6 Billion. This could only be supported by massive advances in technology -- namely agriculture and trade. This evolution of technology is what scares Bill (and Ted). This figure of "30 Years" is sometimes referred to as "The Singularity" (coined by Vernor Vinge I believe) where we can no longer predict what will happen.

Everything that humans invent is subject to change, and in the coming years we will no doubt see changes in things like

Computers
Networks
Medicine
Business
Law
Government
War
Everything Else

What will an 8 trillion fold increase in technology give us? No one can know but its safe to say it *could* be very bad , or it could be very good. Whatever it is we can expect that the foundations of our society will be shaken over and over and over again. Will this drive some people nuts? Probably. Do nutty people do bad things? Sometimes. Just look at James Bond; every one has an evil genius out to destroy the world. Given an open source nanotechnology replicator, could Nutty Joe (Black Hat) Hacker write some nasty code that gets by all the filters/defenses in their BreadMaker/Nano-instantiator?

There is a lot to phear but a lot to hope too. Personally one of the greatest fears I have is of artificial resistance to change from entrenched businesses. It doesn't pay to support a technology that obsoletes you (conspiratorists, think of whats been alleged about the Oil Industry and new energy sources or the Pharmaceutical Industry and a "cure for cancer") so there can be a lot of resistance which ultimately restricts the 'forces of good' to develop the safety of the technology as quickly as possible, and allows the free radikals to operate in a world without the philosophical precepts of safety. It is my hope that we'll see a shift to a business model that includes its own demise -- I learned this idea a long time ago at an IETF conference where they were starting a new working group (HTTP-NG maybe) and one of the first things discussed was its wrap-up!

If we don't consider the end of our forseeable future, perhaps we deserve to have robots with laser's in their eyes to wipe out this "annoying species".

I'll leave you with one other hopeful thing I've learned. The awesome advances in Computer development has only been outstripped by one thing: human's ability to absorb the incredible change and then bitch about how 256MB for a video card is "so yesterday". B^)

Everything? by eht · 2000-03-04 00:36 · Score: 1 · on OpenGL for Palm OS Environment

everything.blockstackers.com ? why not everything2.com ?

Is CmdrTaco just PSFN? by N-Wing · 2000-02-23 23:44 · Score: 2 · on Slashdot's 10,000th Story

For those who have been to [Everything 2] may have seen some people just [NFN]. Could CmdrTaco just be posting pointless stories in order to increase his story count? That is, is he just [PSFN]?

Lets see ... "Atmel Chip for Embedded Linux Devices" has almost no posts under it. That means that nobody cares about it. That means that Taco posts pointless stories. That means he is just [Posting Stories for Numbers].