The definitive reference on RISC vs. CISC is this paper by John Mashey, http://www.inf.tu-dresden. de/~ag7/mashey/RISCvsCISC.html, an expansion of an article that originally appeared in the March 26, 1992 _Microprocessor Report_. In short, RISCs are designed to pipeline (and multi-issue) efficiently, and generate fast code, using a set of operations demonstrated to be necessary for the relevant applications, under the assumption that you have good compiler technology. Therefore, they tend:
to have lots of registers
not to have ccomplex addressing modes (to have a "load-store architecture"; by contrast, there is a worst-case indirect-idexed VAX (CISC) instruction which can generate 43 page-faults before it completes executing. That plays hell with pipelining!)
have fixed-size (often 32-bit) binary instruction format, for easy decoding
possibly to have alignment restrictions on memory operations.
One view of what Intel is attempting with its forthcoming Merced is to take these RISC ideas, and extend them by demanding that the compiler perform instruction-to-instruction dependency checking, and then format them into "bundles" of instructions that can all be safely issued at the same time.
Actually, SGI began by giving their STL implemementation to the Experimental Gnu Compiler System people (who wrote the (finally!) integrated egcs version of the gnu compiler system (gcc/g++/g77/...) that finally was accepted back by FSF as gcc 2.9.5). You can check all this out at the EGCS web-site, http://www.cygnus.com/egcs/, where there are complete archives of the development disucssions and mailing lists (great reference for any software archaeologists out there!).
Perhaps what they mean is "porting, along with their compiler suite, to their Intel boxes, the 320's and 540's"?
...Now despite what most people think, the bottleneck (in this example) is in fact the I/O...
LL, tell me about the analysis of computational complexity of your problem... or have you even analyzed it?? To model a particular domain for a particular time period, assuming a fixed archival output frequency (e.g., "We are saving snapshots every 15 minutes for analysis and archiving"), your I/O requirements vary inversely with the cube of your spatial resolution, whereas your computational intensity varies inversely with the fourth power. If you have a system with both performing satisfactorily at 5 KM, then at 100 M, you need 50^3 times the I/O but 50^4 times the CPU. In other words, if you bring in a new system in which you've scaled everything up by the same factor, and you think you have enough I/O, then you're way underpowered in the CPU department (you need 50 times more than you've got!!).
The design is for a hybrid-parallel design, in which the model domain is a rectangular grid split up into tiles, with each tile assigned to a (potentially shared-memory-parallel) node with either message passing or HPF parallelism between tiles; each tile is then broken up into patches, with OpenMP-style parallelism on the node. The WRF is targeting resolutions better than 10 km in the horizontal and 10 mb in the vertical -- so a regional forecast can expect grid sizes on the order of 300x300 horizontal x 100 vertical x 30 sec temporal, with research applications an order of magnitude finer yet. Note that computational intensity scales with the fourth power of the resolution (because of the dt-scaling issue), whereas memory usage scales with the cube. So high resolution forecasts are very compute-intensive, and improving the resolution to what we really want can chew up all available compute capacity for the foreseeable future.
A few other thoughts:
Not only are the Alpha 264s unmatched in terms of both floating point performance and memory bandwidth (although the next-generation PPC is very good in that regard also), they are also among the best at dealing with the data-dependencies and access-latencies which occur in real scientific codes.
DEC^H^H^HCompaq probably has the best compiler technology of anybody out there commercially (IBM are also very good technically, but as Toon Moene of the Netherlands Met Office put it, "XLF was the first compiler I ever encountered that made you write a short novel on the command line in order to get decent performance."
Note for AC # 68 State-of-the-art weather models are not spectral models. Spectral models are appropriate only for very coarse scales at which cloud effects are only crudely parameterized (and to some extent are only appropriate on vector-style machines (and not current microprocessor/parallel) because of the way they generate humongous vector-lengths). At the WRF scales, the flow is not weakly compressible! Note that the global data motion implied by the FFTs in hybrid spectral/explicit models is a way to absolutely kill scalability for massively parallel systems. Finally, spectral models do not support air quality forecasting, such as we are doing (see http://envpro.ncsc.org/projects/NAQP/).
Weather modeling is a problem which has exponentially-growing divergence of solutions (two "nearby" initial conditions lead to different solutions that diverge exponentially in time), so as coyote-san suggests, there is a tendency to run multiple "ensemble" forecasts, each of which is itself a computationally-intense problem. So far, I haven't managed to get the funding to develop a stochastic alternative (which will be a fairly massive undertaking -- any volunteers?) This means weather modeling can soak up all avaailable CPU power for the (foreseeable)^2 future. At least the individual runs in ensemble forecasts are embarassingly-parallel.
An aside to LHOOQtius ov Borg: have you tried the GNU java compiler (now a part of the gcc system -- for the intensive apps, generating native machine code is much faster.
Reading through the bill, I see no meaningful penalties for misconduct on the government's part. I'd like to suggest a slashdot write-in suggestion to amend the bill to add a new section 2713(d) which states that for each improper disclosure of recovery information, of information obtained thereby, or for fraudulent testimony pursuant to the obtaining of an order under section 1712, all parties involved shall be individually liable for civil damages of $50,000 or treble damages, whichever is greater, plus court costs.
See how the Administration likes the bill then. As it stands, do you really expect the DOJ to slap its own hand when it breaks the law on this point?
According to a Gartner Group study reported this morning on CNet (http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-2 02-114579.html) upgrading from NT4 to WIN2K can be expected to cost a business $2050/machine; Win98-Win2K $3100/machine. At 7500+ machines, that will add up! $15M can do rather a bit of development.
2. What kind of performance do they get compared to something like the Athlon? 8. Where can I get one? Actually, there's a couple of other vendors that you should be ableto get one from, VA Linux comes to mind a s possibily. API may have a list ofvendors on their site, but I'm not sure.
As far as performance goes, the '264s are todays king-of-the-heap for numerical (FP-intensive) computation, but you definitely want DEC (Compaq)'s Alpha compilers (with Linux versions now available for beta-test-- because they use the Alpha predicated instructions (and some other technical stuff about bit-alignment vs. byte/word alignment in "gcc), they will perform 20-30% better than EGCS gcc, which itself will do much better on Alphas than the previous "standard" gcc 2.7.x or 2.8.x (the latest 2.9.5 is egcs gcc).
Re:NO - uptimes DO mean something
on
Kernel 2.2.12
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...Back in the 80's I ran a slough of DOS machines, and after a while, usually a week or so, of uptime, they locked up. All of them, no matter what version, or what processor. I used to tell the folks around me that they just wouldn't run for that long without a reboot...
Actually, this one is probably a 32-bit calendar overflow, the MS version of the 2038-bug -- except that:
since the system calendar counts milliseconds instead of seconds like the the UNIX system calendar does, you get a crash 1000 times faster-- 14.7 days, iirc. And this one affects all MS systems up through NT4. (One of the NT service packs fixed this, I believe, and I'm not sure about Win98.)
MS systems are so flaky anyway that no one was able to keep them up long enough often enough to discover/diagnose this 32-bit overflow as a cause of system crashes until some time in 1996.
While there have been a few cases of big companies going after a small, legitimate player who happens to have a domain name containing their trademark (ajax.org comes to mind), this is certainly not the norm. I do not agree that this is a 'great precedent'.
As a small-time businessman, I would be extremely frustrated if a domain name speculator decided to hold a domain name containing my trademark hostage...
As a small-time businessman, you would find it even more frustrating if some big-corporation IP-litigation terrorist decided to attack you over your domain name.
As a case in point, I absolutely refuse to deal with Gateway2000, because of their record in engaging in such suits. As a matter of record,
Gateway Networking, Inc. (GNI) of Raleigh NC was into networking before Gateway2000 Computers (GW2K) was into computers.
GNI was on the Net before GW2K (not surprising for a networking company).
GW2K has trademarked Gateway2000", "Gateway2K", "GW2000", and "GW2K", but not the English word "Gateway"
GW2K sued GNI anyway, and forced a substantial out-of-court settlement (the details of which are not disclosed).
There are also numerous other examples of such IP-litigation terrorism from GW2K (who seem to think they own rights to the Holstein cow in all contexts -- I don't see anything in trademark law which supports their suit against a state university's Ag department for using Holsteins on their web site!)
(See Cornell's Legal Information Institute http://fatty.law.cornell.edu/ for the United States Code (as well as various other legal-information resources.)
principle rule of software development is that software never gets smaller or faster (That software is faster is only the result of faster hardware.)
Then I'm doing something wrong... I wrote a net of (-3200) lines of code last week. And my new version of the MM5V3.1 meteorology forecast model is 20% faster, on the same hardware it's been running on!
"you'll get about half way into the project, realize the way you are solving your problem is all wrong and you have to scrap your work" ... Also, a great book to read about the software design process is "the mythical man-month". It's old, but the ideas are still useful.
The silver-anniversary edition of Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month came out in 1995, with four new chapters, btw. The principal revision he makes in his judgement is in the value of abstraction and data hiding, which he says he did not properly appreciate back in 1970.
Fred also has said,
When you build a truly new complex system, if it is truly new, you almost certainly get it right the first time. The thing to do is to do the best job you can of the analysis, then of the design, and finally of the implementation. If it is a truly new and complex system, you'll probably get something that
almost works. Throw it in the trash and go take a 3-month vacation. This time, the product will work to solve the original problem, but will not be elegant, extensible, and flexible -- it won't solve the problem behind the problem. The danger is that you will stop here and will be stuck with its limitations forever. What you should do is throw this one in the trash too, take another 3-month vacation, and once more analyze/design/implement. The result will finally be a high-quality system.
I do scientific computing, in large heterogeneous networked environments. There are usually several versions of everything running. The code base is large enough that it is a pain in the a** to have to re-compile and re-link everything (even if everyone had consistent versions, which they don't).
Among other things, I've had to deal with the Sun WorkShopPro family of compilers, particularly f77 and f90, versions 3.0, 3.2, 3.5, 4.0, 4.2, and 5.0. Taken pair-wise, that's 12 combinations -- no two of which are link-compatible. (Of course, Sun claims that they are...:-) I wish they'd reimburse me for about $12K in extra labor that incompatibility has cost us just this last week;-(
And the PHB's are Sun-bigots, in love with their stuff. It's hard to make them listen to reason.
I still think that it will probably be shaped like a gaussian curve though.
No!
Every key is assumed just as likely as any other key (in a brute force attack). Key number 1 is exactly as likely as key number 2^63 is exactly as likely as key number 2^64 - 1. Thius means that the distribution is uniform.
That's what the remarks by Gilmore and Brazier concerning controllable search order was about. Unless you're extremely careful about the randomness of your key-generation technology, your actual key-ditribution will not be uniform, and your keys will most probably fall within a very small fraction of the potential key-space. If you understand how they are distributed, you can shrink the sub-4-minute mean time to crack into something far smaller -- probably under one second, and dominated by set-up time rather than by the cracking computation itself.
Actually, there was an extensive article by Andrew Schulman in the September 1993 Dr. Dobbs J. -- check it out at http://www.ddj.com/articles/1 993/9309/9309d/9309d.htm. It is sometimes called the AARD code, from the initials found with the Microsoft copyright notice in the code.
Summary:
This code is present in beta test versions starting at pre-release build 3.10.068 and later, including the versions which shipped (albeit in quiescent form).
It is thoroughly encrypted with a mechanism that can be exposed only by the use of hardware debuggers such as Soft-ICE. It is the only code segment so encrypted.
The code performs a check to see whether certain MS data structures are present -- the "country information" field of all things, and segment-alignment info -- that have nothing to do with the functionality of MS-Windows:
"The effect of the AARD code is to create a new and highly artificial test of DOS compatibility. The obfuscations and encryptions make it difficult to even determine what is being tested. An indication that the AARD code's obfuscation is successful is the fact that Novell's most recent version of DR DOS (that is, Novell DOS 7) fails the test, even though it is otherwise far more compatible with MS-DOS than previous versions."
"WIN.COM and other programs incorporating AARD code don't make any use of the information gained..."
Given the current video cards that have NTSC out (like the TNT I have at home, and the Matrox I have at the office), and all that sort of thing, how hard would it be to emulate these Personal VCR devices with a current linux system? We already see linux-based MP3-player/FM-radio systems in the ruggedized car-radio form-factor.
The case was made that you need special disk drives that can read and write simultaneously. How hard will this be to emulate, by just using enough RAM as an intermediate buffer between the receiver and a disk drive (or RAID array)? It's getting to the point that 256M desktops aren't that rare or that expensive. (I'm writing this from a 512M machine. A consumer PC will probably need at least that much to run M$ Win2K comfortably, anyway!:-)
And if I can make my linux desktop act like a personal VCR, I'll have a lot more customizability for the interface, and a lot more programmable operation. Does anyone want to start work on a Linux PVCR project?
...To be of any real consequence there must be STRONG pentalies and they must be evenly applied.
Applied by whom? The executive branch has a decided conflict of interest when it comes to punishing itself. Congress does not execute the laws; besides, there are far too many bureaucrats for them to exercise detailed supervision.
For effective results, you need to turn to civil penalties, together with removal of sovreign immunity for bureaucrats who break the laws. How does this sound:
Unauthorized decryption and unauthorized disclosure of encrypted communications shall be subject to civil penalties of $100,000 per offense or treble actual damages, whichever is greater. Sovreign immunity does not serve as a defense from individual liability. No Federal funds may be used in defense against any such suit (no deep pockets). Loser pays double the court costs to the winner (I don't want to encourage frivolous suits, either).
Tell me -- would there have been a "Filegate" if something like that had been in effect for the disclosure of confidential FBI files?
In response to various musings on this page about key lengths, etc., a good reference is the paper "Minimal Key Lengths for Symmetric Ciphers to Provide Adequate Commercial Security" by M. Blaze, W. Diffie, R. Rivest, B. Schneier, T. Shimomura, E. Thompson, and M. Weiner. Note that the claim "Moore's Law will catch up with encryption" is decidedly false: Both Moore's Law and decryption effort are exponential growth problems (Moore having a smaller growth factor)), while encryption effort is polynomial or less (N log N, generally). So encryption can get 'way ahead of even decryption aided by Moore's Law.
Another interesting paper is "The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third-Party Encryption, by H. Abelson, R. Anderson, S. Bellovin, J. Benaloh, M. Blaze, W. Diffie, J. Gilmore, P. Neumann, R. Rivest, J. Schiller, and B. Schneier.
Re:This would be GREAT for armor piercing shells.
on
Element 118 detected
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...in the "classic" light-water US reactors, U-235 was the only desired product and U-238 was the only left over (besides the trans-uranic wastes and such). With the newer style of IFB breeder reactors, we convert U-235 to plutonium, thereby "breeding" more fuel (U-238 is not used at all in a breeder reactor). However, the initial plutonium is turned into U-235.
Wrong on multiple counts.
U235 fissions easily with slow neutrons, and is the "classic" reactor fuel. U238 captures slow neutrons, and then beta-decays first into Neptunium-239, then Plutonium-239. Plutonium-239 is itself fissionable, and is the bulk of fuel for breeder reactors.
Given lots of breeder reactors, Plutonium-239 is much easier to come by than purified U235 (which requires massive industrial facilities to separate), hence the arms control weenies don't like it (and don't like breeder reactors).
Very fast neutrons (such as those produced by deuterium-tritium fusion) can cause U238 to fission, hence the construction of the "multistage" fission-fusion-fission structure used for the really high-megatonnage bombs: a "shaped" fission explosion squeezes and heats up the deuterium/tritium core, which fuses and releases lots of very fast neutrons, which then cause the outer U238 jacket to fission. Nasty devices!
All of this is relatively-accessible public info; I'm not giving you the numbers for neutron cross-sections, though.:-)
Daniel P. Moloney, Associate Editor of the theology/philosophy journal First Things wrote an article in february about the Yale Eight, coed bathrooms, and "ubiquitous sexualization of the environment." He received a response from a CalTechie about its open-door/closed-door protocol for dealing with the coed-bathroom occupancy problem. Dr. Moloney's response:
Roy Koczela and his Caltech fellows deserve credit for finding a hack to solve the problem of co-ed bathrooms... [emphasis mine]
If a theologian can understand that part of the language, why the [deleted] can't a journalist?
Solution: Everytime an article is published misusing the term 'hacker', any Slashdot reader could type his name and email address into a couple text boxes, and exectute a short perl script, and a general letter explaining the actual meaning of the term 'hacker' would be sent off to the offending party...
...if there were no complaints to this address yet (in the last 24 hours or so), the letter is mailed and the address recorded. If there has already been a complaint to that address, no mail is sent...
First offenders should get the nice version (just the definitions. etc.).
For repeat offenders, try to take advantage of the liberal press's penchant for political correctness: make it clear to them that they are using hate speech every bit as offensive as "nigger."
Instead of saying there's a 40 per cent chance of rain tomorrow afternoon, the NWS can now say it will rain from 2:15 to 3:30 p.m. Instead of making forecasts for standard 30-kilometer grids, supercomputers can narrow them to one kilometer (the storm will be in Queens, not the Bronx).
Here's a first cut on what the computational costs of that are: to improve the horizontal resolution dx by a factor of 30, you have to improve the dy and dz by the same, and dt by either a factor of 30 (in a transport-dominated situation) or 30^2 = 900 (in a diffusion-dominated situation; the transition from transport-dominated to diffusion dominated tends to happen somewhere in the general neighhborhood of 1 KM, btw). Going from a 30 KM horizontal resolution to a 1 KM resolution requires at least 30^4 = 810,000 increase in the compute power required, as well as a corresponding increase in the quality of the observational data used to drive the forecast. (Fortunately, satellite data is starting to be useful for that, but not everything is visible from satellites -- particularly, not the underlying soil moisture below 1 cm., and satellites don't have truly adequate temporal frequency, either.)
<SHAMELESS PLUG>
That fourth-power relationship is why my group is running our (meteorology+air pollution) forecasts this summer at 15 KM resolution instead of, say, 12, which would have been twice as expensive (since (12/15)^4 = 0.512); see http://envpro.ncsc.org/projects/NAQP/
They do produce a very good Fortan compiler for Intel, though (Compaq Visual Fortran), but that only runs under Windows...
According to Steve Lionel (DEC^H^H^HCPQ Fortran guru) in a posting on comp.lang.fortran at about the time DEC introduced their product for Windows, they keep a common code base which conditionally compiles for VMS, OSF (now Tru64), and Windows (both x86 and Alpha). In fact (later Lionel post), that's why the version 5 of DVF did it own transcendental functions instead of using the built in x87 hardware intrinsics. (IIRC, DVF6 now _does_ use x87 intrinsics).
Is it credible that publishers will not bother to publish uncopyrighted works, for fear that a rival publisher will break in and ruin their monopoly? Not very. Nearly all works written before 1900 are in the public domain, yet pre-1900 works are still published, and still sell.
But publishers still claim copyright. This has long been a bone of contention among singers of medieval, rennaissance, and classical music. From my own recent reqertoire, some examples:
Haydn,
The Creation (1799) page ii:Copyright 1991 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved...this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form or by any means with the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press.
Vivaldi,
Gloria(1708) Copyright 1961 by Walton Music Corporation. All rights reserved...
Handel,
Messiah (1749) Copyright 1959 by Novello & Co. No part of this publication may be copied or reproduced...
Huh ?? All of these should be in the public domain by now.
Case-law says that they can copyright the editorial markings, etc., but that they must identify just what is copyrighted. They do not. They claim copyright for the whole thing.
IMNHO, they are fraudulently abusing copyright in order to maintain a monopoly by threat of copyright-litigation terrorism. The penalties for this sort of fraud should be at least as severe as the penalties for other copyright infringement -- and in assessing the sentence, every cpoy published should be counted toward determining the severity of the sentence.
To be fair to music publishers, not all of them seem to do this -- Kalmus and Schirmer don't seem to, at least judging by the (several) copies of works they've published that I have copies of. Which further establishes Long's point: Kalmus and Schirmer don't find this sort of litigation-terrorism necessary in order to survive!
Slashdot Mirror
One view of what Intel is attempting with its forthcoming Merced is to take these RISC ideas, and extend them by demanding that the compiler perform instruction-to-instruction dependency checking, and then format them into "bundles" of instructions that can all be safely issued at the same time.
fwiw
Perhaps what they mean is "porting, along with their compiler suite, to their Intel boxes, the 320's and 540's"?
If you want to benchmark, then do a meaningful benchmark!
A few other thoughts:
- Not only are the Alpha 264s unmatched in terms of both floating point performance and memory bandwidth (although the next-generation PPC is very good in that regard also), they are also among the best at dealing with the data-dependencies and access-latencies which occur in real scientific codes.
- DEC^H^H^HCompaq probably has the best compiler technology of anybody out there commercially (IBM are also very good technically, but as Toon Moene of the Netherlands Met Office put it, "XLF was the first compiler I ever encountered that made you write a short novel on the command line in order to get decent performance."
- Note for AC # 68 State-of-the-art weather models are not spectral models. Spectral models are appropriate only for very coarse scales at which cloud effects are only crudely parameterized (and to some extent are only appropriate on vector-style machines (and not current microprocessor/parallel) because of the way they generate humongous vector-lengths). At the WRF scales, the flow is not weakly compressible! Note that the global data motion implied by the FFTs in hybrid spectral/explicit models is a way to absolutely kill scalability for massively parallel systems. Finally, spectral models do not support air quality forecasting, such as we are doing (see http://envpro.ncsc.org/projects/NAQP/).
- Weather modeling is a problem which has exponentially-growing divergence of solutions (two "nearby" initial conditions lead to different solutions that diverge exponentially in time), so as coyote-san suggests, there is a tendency to run multiple "ensemble" forecasts, each of which is itself a computationally-intense problem. So far, I haven't managed to get the funding to develop a stochastic alternative (which will be a fairly massive undertaking -- any volunteers?) This means weather modeling can soak up all avaailable CPU power for the (foreseeable)^2 future. At least the individual runs in ensemble forecasts are embarassingly-parallel.
An aside to LHOOQtius ov Borg: have you tried the GNU java compiler (now a part of the gcc system -- for the intensive apps, generating native machine code is much faster.Hi, Greg! Didn't know you were here!
See how the Administration likes the bill then. As it stands, do you really expect the DOJ to slap its own hand when it breaks the law on this point?
According to a Gartner Group study reported this morning on CNet (http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-2 02-114579.html) upgrading from NT4 to WIN2K can be expected to cost a business $2050/machine; Win98-Win2K $3100/machine. At 7500+ machines, that will add up! $15M can do rather a bit of development.
As far as performance goes, the '264s are todays king-of-the-heap for numerical (FP-intensive) computation, but you definitely want DEC (Compaq)'s Alpha compilers (with Linux versions now available for beta-test-- because they use the Alpha predicated instructions (and some other technical stuff about bit-alignment vs. byte/word alignment in "gcc), they will perform 20-30% better than EGCS gcc, which itself will do much better on Alphas than the previous "standard" gcc 2.7.x or 2.8.x (the latest 2.9.5 is egcs gcc).
As a case in point, I absolutely refuse to deal with Gateway2000, because of their record in engaging in such suits. As a matter of record,
- Gateway Networking, Inc. (GNI) of Raleigh NC was into networking before Gateway2000 Computers (GW2K) was into computers.
- GNI was on the Net before GW2K (not surprising for a networking company).
- GW2K has trademarked Gateway2000", "Gateway2K", "GW2000", and "GW2K", but not the English word "Gateway"
- GW2K sued GNI anyway, and forced a substantial out-of-court settlement (the details of which are not disclosed).
There are also numerous other examples of such IP-litigation terrorism from GW2K (who seem to think they own rights to the Holstein cow in all contexts -- I don't see anything in trademark law which supports their suit against a state university's Ag department for using Holsteins on their web site!)(See Cornell's Legal Information Institute http://fatty.law.cornell.edu/ for the United States Code (as well as various other legal-information resources.)
Fred also has said,
Among other things, I've had to deal with the Sun WorkShopPro family of compilers, particularly f77 and f90, versions 3.0, 3.2, 3.5, 4.0, 4.2, and 5.0. Taken pair-wise, that's 12 combinations -- no two of which are link-compatible. (Of course, Sun claims that they are... :-) I wish they'd reimburse me for about $12K in extra labor that incompatibility has cost us just this last week;-(
And the PHB's are Sun-bigots, in love with their stuff. It's hard to make them listen to reason.
fwiw
Every key is assumed just as likely as any other key (in a brute force attack). Key number 1 is exactly as likely as key number 2^63 is exactly as likely as key number 2^64 - 1. Thius means that the distribution is uniform.
That's what the remarks by Gilmore and Brazier concerning controllable search order was about. Unless you're extremely careful about the randomness of your key-generation technology, your actual key-ditribution will not be uniform, and your keys will most probably fall within a very small fraction of the potential key-space. If you understand how they are distributed, you can shrink the sub-4-minute mean time to crack into something far smaller -- probably under one second, and dominated by set-up time rather than by the cracking computation itself.
Summary:
The case was made that you need special disk drives that can read and write simultaneously. How hard will this be to emulate, by just using enough RAM as an intermediate buffer between the receiver and a disk drive (or RAID array)? It's getting to the point that 256M desktops aren't that rare or that expensive. (I'm writing this from a 512M machine. A consumer PC will probably need at least that much to run M$ Win2K comfortably, anyway! :-)
And if I can make my linux desktop act like a personal VCR, I'll have a lot more customizability for the interface, and a lot more programmable operation. Does anyone want to start work on a Linux PVCR project?
For effective results, you need to turn to civil penalties, together with removal of sovreign immunity for bureaucrats who break the laws. How does this sound:
Tell me -- would there have been a "Filegate" if something like that had been in effect for the disclosure of confidential FBI files?Latin day is dies (accusative case diem), so your neologism mean something more like
Another interesting paper is "The Risks of Key Recovery, Key Escrow, and Trusted Third-Party Encryption, by H. Abelson, R. Anderson, S. Bellovin, J. Benaloh, M. Blaze, W. Diffie, J. Gilmore, P. Neumann, R. Rivest, J. Schiller, and B. Schneier.
An interesting bibliography is on Bruce Schneier's Counterpane site.
U235 fissions easily with slow neutrons, and is the "classic" reactor fuel. U238 captures slow neutrons, and then beta-decays first into Neptunium-239, then Plutonium-239. Plutonium-239 is itself fissionable, and is the bulk of fuel for breeder reactors.
Given lots of breeder reactors, Plutonium-239 is much easier to come by than purified U235 (which requires massive industrial facilities to separate), hence the arms control weenies don't like it (and don't like breeder reactors).
Very fast neutrons (such as those produced by deuterium-tritium fusion) can cause U238 to fission, hence the construction of the "multistage" fission-fusion-fission structure used for the really high-megatonnage bombs: a "shaped" fission explosion squeezes and heats up the deuterium/tritium core, which fuses and releases lots of very fast neutrons, which then cause the outer U238 jacket to fission. Nasty devices!
All of this is relatively-accessible public info; I'm not giving you the numbers for neutron cross-sections, though. :-)
If a theologian can understand that part of the language, why the [deleted] can't a journalist?
First offenders should get the nice version (just the definitions. etc.).
For repeat offenders, try to take advantage of the liberal press's penchant for political correctness: make it clear to them that they are using hate speech every bit as offensive as "nigger."
<SHAMELESS PLUG>
That fourth-power relationship is why my group is running our (meteorology+air pollution) forecasts this summer at 15 KM resolution instead of, say, 12, which would have been twice as expensive (since (12/15)^4 = 0.512); see http://envpro.ncsc.org/projects/NAQP/
</SHAMELESS PLUG>
fwiw
Case-law says that they can copyright the editorial markings, etc., but that they must identify just what is copyrighted. They do not. They claim copyright for the whole thing.
IMNHO, they are fraudulently abusing copyright in order to maintain a monopoly by threat of copyright-litigation terrorism. The penalties for this sort of fraud should be at least as severe as the penalties for other copyright infringement -- and in assessing the sentence, every cpoy published should be counted toward determining the severity of the sentence.
To be fair to music publishers, not all of them seem to do this -- Kalmus and Schirmer don't seem to, at least judging by the (several) copies of works they've published that I have copies of. Which further establishes Long's point: Kalmus and Schirmer don't find this sort of litigation-terrorism necessary in order to survive!