It is co-operation. The human being is a social animal because if you don't watch each other's backs, the sabre tooth tiger will first eat the other guy and then eat you. (A simplistic example of why if we are all selfish, we will all just die out).
Cold water is denser than ice. So compressing H2O near its melting point actually tends to melt it rather than freeze it. Extremely high pressure can turn this back into solid state again.
Gliese 436 b is supposed to be at a surface temperature of 520 Kelvin. The phase diagram of H2O indicates that for certain "exotic" forms of ice to form at that temperature, you need more than 10^9 Pascals of pressure. It would be interesting to calculate the gravitational force on the surface of the planet, and at what depth pressures of 10^9 Pa can be created by gravity, from the known data about the mass and size of the planet.
how much revenue will he lose?
Of course not all real websites of interest are correctly spelled English words. Nevertheless an extension to Firefox that would avoid these SEO squat sites would not be too hard.
Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics
They can be used to pre-stage a DVD you are going to burn a few times, but they are not really useable as generic rewritable storage devices for a long time.
Combining client side info with what server sees is the only way to do this, and that means the client has to send information to the server without the user being aware of it. Good reason to stick to Firefox.
Unfortunately, too many slashdot submissions these days don't have what can really be called a summary. Instead they have a short excerpt from the article they are supposed to be summarizing, and the excerpt is as likely as not to have the most relevant points from the story in it.
OK, I don't like it that a Nortel board member strong armed another company they have a minority interest in, but the article/blog entry on this is rather one sided. This excerpt for example:
What you want me to publish a document that we're more expensive than Nortel and harder to use? How the heck do you expect me to print a retraction for something that is a) true and b) out of my control now that it is in the blogosphere?"
I interrupted Chris's retelling of the conversation with Vikram and asked Chris, "How long have they had PBXtra for?"
Incredulously, Chris responds, "They haven't even installed it yet. It's still in the box."
So, if it is not even installed yet, how do they know it is easier to use?
Those other algorithms have not been in use as widely or as long as RSA has been, (DH is a protocol, not an algorithm). So they have not been analyzed as extensively as RSA. The fact that more work has gone into factoring does not necessarily mean that the other public key algorithms are more secure.
Some details of the computation size.
on
A Mighty Number Falls
·
· Score: 3, Informative
From http://www.ddj.com/blog/portal/archives/2007/05/wo rld_record_fo.html
Using the sieve program developed at the University of Bonn, NTT, EPFL, and the University of Bonn respectively provided 84.1 percent, 8.3 percent, and 7.6 percent of the calculation resources, and the calculation amount equivalent to 95 years of operation on a 3-Ghz Pentium D. PC clusters at NTT and EPFL, consisting of 110 and 36 PCs, respectively, were run in parallel for more than two months for the calculations. The results were 47 non-trivial solutions of the simultaneous equations defined by an approximate 70,000,000 x 70,000,000 large sparse linear matrix.
Re:"the writing is on the wall" for 1024-bit
on
A Mighty Number Falls
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Yes, The RSA Algorithm for public key encryption is based on the difficulty of factoring very large numbers. The key size is the number of bits in the number that has to be factored to break the encryption. Many of the modern security systems, including Verisign certificates for secure websites are based on RSA encryption and 1024 is a very common key size in use. Thus the ease of factoring 1024 bit numbers would indeed be a matter of concern.
The sieving step of the algorithm is indeed embarrassingly parallel, but what about the linear algebra step? I am pretty sure that part is not FPGA-able, yet.
"Last time, it took nine years for us to generalize from a special to a non-special hard-to factor number (155 digits). I won't make predictions, but let's just say it might be a good idea to stay tuned."
Not now, but in a few years Moore's law will trump
on
A Mighty Number Falls
·
· Score: 1
And by that time, I presume somebody would have figured an algorithm that works on general numbers as well as the SNFS works on 2^n - 1 type of numbers.
In a hundred years, the Smithsonian will be under water.
Does this "challenge" have any legal significance?
on
Microsoft, Sue Me First
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I remember stories about McDonalds and Disney taking aggressive action to defend their exclusive rights even against small-time infringers with the justification that refraining to sue could have been construed as abandoning their trademark.
So, if microsoft does not sue these people, would it be tantamount to abandoning their right to sue later, or is it all just a bunch of meaningless hot air?
Some of these governments claim that they are doing this filtering for the benefit of the public, to protect national interests, morality or whatever.
OK, so if it is such a good thing, why not make it a transparent process instead of hiding it?
From the BBC report:
"What's regrettable about net filtering is that almost always this is happening in the shadows. There's no place you can get an answer as a citizen from your state about how they are filtering and what is being filtered."
From an SJ Mercury News report on the same issue:
Nine countries, including China, Pakistan and Vietnam, use technology to conceal their censorship, disguising it with techniques such as flashing network error messages.
As is too common, the./ summary doesn't have the relevant portions of the article under discussion, so let me try to summarize the main points of their argument.
1. It is better to focus resources on high risk security bugs.
2. We get rated better (internally and externally) for fixing publically known problems.
3. Hackers usually find additional bugs by examining patches to existing bugs, so a patch could expose more bugs than fixes are available for.
4. If we disclose a bug and fix it, it just escalates the "arms race" with the hackers. Better to keep it hidden.
5. Not all customers immediately patch. So by announcing a patch to previously unknown to the public bug, we actually exponentially increase the chances of that bug being exploited by hackers.
Indians are a blend of Caucasoid and Australoid (Dravidian) ethnicities. Those are not ethnicities, those are races. I don't think any reasonable person would consider, say Indonesians and Japanese, as belonging to the same ethnicity, but they have racial similarities.
The question of what race Indians belong to is interesting. There is some recent evidence that maybe the correct classification is to recognize "Indian" itself as a separate race.
Taleyarkhan's use of "Asian" cannot be called wrong. Most US government statistics that are broken down on racial/ethnic lines list "Indian Asian" as a subgroup of "Asian".
Irrespective of the merits of the reverends Jackson and Sharpton, and regardless of whether criticism of Teleyarkhan in this case is motivated by racism, it remains a fact there are no highly visible individuals or organizations that can create a big media storm against cases of anti-Asian or anti-Indian racism.
Yes, I know India is in Asia, but that is not the sense "Asian" is usually used in the US.
Rusi Taleyarkhan is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (now Chennai)
Slashdot Mirror
It is co-operation. The human being is a social animal because if you don't watch each other's backs, the sabre tooth tiger will first eat the other guy and then eat you. (A simplistic example of why if we are all selfish, we will all just die out).
Cold water is denser than ice. So compressing H2O near its melting point actually tends to melt it rather than freeze it. Extremely high pressure can turn this back into solid state again.
Gliese 436 b is supposed to be at a surface temperature of 520 Kelvin. The phase diagram of H2O indicates that for certain "exotic" forms of ice to form at that temperature, you need more than 10^9 Pascals of pressure. It would be interesting to calculate the gravitational force on the surface of the planet, and at what depth pressures of 10^9 Pa can be created by gravity, from the known data about the mass and size of the planet.
how much revenue will he lose? Of course not all real websites of interest are correctly spelled English words. Nevertheless an extension to Firefox that would avoid these SEO squat sites would not be too hard.
This will show him!
Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics
They can be used to pre-stage a DVD you are going to burn a few times, but they are not really useable as generic rewritable storage devices for a long time.
Combining client side info with what server sees is the only way to do this, and that means the client has to send information to the server without the user being aware of it.
Good reason to stick to Firefox.
Unfortunately, too many slashdot submissions these days don't have what can really be called a summary. Instead they have a short excerpt from the article they are supposed to be summarizing, and the excerpt is as likely as not to have the most relevant points from the story in it.
This was no exception.
OK, I don't like it that a Nortel board member strong armed another company they have a minority interest in, but the article/blog entry on this is rather one sided. This excerpt for example:
What you want me to publish a document that we're more expensive than Nortel and harder to use? How the heck do you expect me to print a retraction for something that is a) true and b) out of my control now that it is in the blogosphere?"
I interrupted Chris's retelling of the conversation with Vikram and asked Chris, "How long have they had PBXtra for?"
Incredulously, Chris responds, "They haven't even installed it yet. It's still in the box."
So, if it is not even installed yet, how do they know it is easier to use?
Those other algorithms have not been in use as widely or as long as RSA has been, (DH is a protocol, not an algorithm). So they have not been analyzed as extensively as RSA. The fact that more work has gone into factoring does not necessarily mean that the other public key algorithms are more secure.
From http://www.ddj.com/blog/portal/archives/2007/05/wo rld_record_fo.html
Using the sieve program developed at the University of Bonn, NTT, EPFL, and the University of Bonn respectively provided 84.1 percent, 8.3 percent, and 7.6 percent of the calculation resources, and the calculation amount equivalent to 95 years of operation on a 3-Ghz Pentium D. PC clusters at NTT and EPFL, consisting of 110 and 36 PCs, respectively, were run in parallel for more than two months for the calculations. The results were 47 non-trivial solutions of the simultaneous equations defined by an approximate 70,000,000 x 70,000,000 large sparse linear matrix.
Yes, The RSA Algorithm for public key encryption is based on the difficulty of factoring very large numbers. The key size is the number of bits in the number that has to be factored to break the encryption. Many of the modern security systems, including Verisign certificates for secure websites are based on RSA encryption and 1024 is a very common key size in use. Thus the ease of factoring 1024 bit numbers would indeed be a matter of concern.
RSA 101.
The sieving step of the algorithm is indeed embarrassingly parallel, but what about the linear algebra step? I am pretty sure that part is not FPGA-able, yet.
"Last time, it took nine years for us to generalize from a special to a non-special hard-to factor number (155 digits). I won't make predictions, but let's just say it might be a good idea to stay tuned."
And by that time, I presume somebody would have figured an algorithm that works on general numbers as well as the SNFS works on 2^n - 1 type of numbers.
In a hundred years, the Smithsonian will be under water.
I remember stories about McDonalds and Disney taking aggressive action to defend their exclusive rights even against small-time infringers with the justification that refraining to sue could have been construed as abandoning their trademark. So, if microsoft does not sue these people, would it be tantamount to abandoning their right to sue later, or is it all just a bunch of meaningless hot air?
That would be funny. No mail in rebates in China.
OK, so if it is such a good thing, why not make it a transparent process instead of hiding it?
From the BBC report: "What's regrettable about net filtering is that almost always this is happening in the shadows. There's no place you can get an answer as a citizen from your state about how they are filtering and what is being filtered."
From an SJ Mercury News report on the same issue: Nine countries, including China, Pakistan and Vietnam, use technology to conceal their censorship, disguising it with techniques such as flashing network error messages.
Jurors are frequently disqualified for knowing too much, but it should be the opposite for a judge, I think.
As is too common, the ./ summary doesn't have the relevant portions of the article under discussion, so let me try to summarize the main points of their argument.
1. It is better to focus resources on high risk security bugs.
2. We get rated better (internally and externally) for fixing publically known problems.
3. Hackers usually find additional bugs by examining patches to existing bugs, so a patch could expose more bugs than fixes are available for.
4. If we disclose a bug and fix it, it just escalates the "arms race" with the hackers. Better to keep it hidden.
5. Not all customers immediately patch. So by announcing a patch to previously unknown to the public bug, we actually exponentially increase the chances of that bug being exploited by hackers.
The question of what race Indians belong to is interesting. There is some recent evidence that maybe the correct classification is to recognize "Indian" itself as a separate race.
Taleyarkhan's use of "Asian" cannot be called wrong. Most US government statistics that are broken down on racial/ethnic lines list "Indian Asian" as a subgroup of "Asian".
Irrespective of the merits of the reverends Jackson and Sharpton, and regardless of whether criticism of Teleyarkhan in this case is motivated by racism, it remains a fact there are no highly visible individuals or organizations that can create a big media storm against cases of anti-Asian or anti-Indian racism.
Yes, I know India is in Asia, but that is not the sense "Asian" is usually used in the US. Rusi Taleyarkhan is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (now Chennai)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weakly_interacting_ma ssive_particle