New AVX SIMD is coming out soon. The first set of 256bit registers are suppose to be 2xs as fast as SSE and later 512bit and 1024bit AVX are suppose to be another ~2-4xs faster than the 256bit. I guess one of the benefits of AVX is the new register sizes are suppose to give transparent speed increases. So a program made for 256bit AVX will automatically see faster calculations when the new 512bit AVX registers come out. Sounds good to me. They're suppose to be 3 operandi instructions.
A password based on a phrase where you substitute 3-4 letters for a few special characters and insert 1-4 extra characters into the middle of a word as to mess with the length, would be about has hard to break as the AES key itself. This would be an easy to remember password that would only take a few seconds to type and would render dictionary attacks useless.
"a large distributed attack should be able to 'crack' it with much less difficulty than reversing the AES itself"
Of course brute forcing a 256bit key could take 1,000,000,000,000 computers that could do 1,000,000,000,000 AES comparisons per second(aka, about 32,768 cores at 3ghz) about 1.8e+42 millennia. So, by "much less", so you mean to reduce the effectiveness to 1/10^42(0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000001%) would only take those 1 trillion 32k core 3ghz super computers 1000 years to break.
Assuming this person used a semi-decent password, the only way to get around this would be torture, key got cached/written down, bugged his keyboard, or general luck.
Fun fact told to me via a PHD in encryption. A 256bit symmetric algorithm that has no work around (AES has flaws that reduces its effectiveness) and using computers so efficient that it takes the theoretically smallest amount of energy to flip a bit, would on average consume most of the energy in the known universe to break a single key. (Think consuming all the stars in the Milkyway galaxy just a start)
"It is not crazy to think that the NSA could have this capability." I would say overly optimistic.
One of the popular Open Source clustered file systems, I think gluster, had/has a write up about how they moved to ECC memory on their nodes.
They had an issue where about every TB of data written to the cluster, one of the nodes would report having different checksums than the other nodes. At first the thought maybe a hardware fault. Turns out switching to ECC completely removed the issue. They said the end result was every so much data will inherently acquire a an error when traveling through the memory.
I actually have my 401k quite diverse, so I hope that helps some. My quarterly report actually dropped ~8% after the "crash", but the quarter after jumped something like 15%. It's been fairly level now.
An interesting side note. The local community bank that my job goes through actually removed the defunct investments about 3 months before they went belly up.
We got a company wide letter stating that several investment options were removed because of unsound practices and all investments in those areas would automatically be moved into some other default investments. Three months later, the bubble burst and all those investments dropped like a rock. Go Go community banks!
Apple sells hardware, Microsoft sells an OS. When Apple switched to BSD, it didn't bother them because the OS does not make much money. If Microsoft started selling an OS that didn't make money, they'd go under instantly.
You're post seems very good and I like a lot of the points. Based on what you're saying, it seems filtering the internet is putting a band-aid over the symptoms of a bad educational system. So it does solve some of the issues at hand, but obviously doesn't fix the root of the problem.
I found I did worse in high school than college. I went from a D student in school to a A student in my major and B+ overall. The only real difference between High School and College is in college they treat you like an adult, so you acted like one. College should start around 16 when you start to understand what you like.
The funny thing is the stuff my teachers in High School hated about me where my strong points and helped me do well in my major. The teachers in my major loved me. Well.... most...
A great example I can think about is how likely a parent would leave their kids at home alone. I'm getting to the age where lots of people around me have kids and many have 8-14 year olds. So many parents don't trust their kid(s) to be home alone. They tell me how their kids are just too young. When that pops up, I just have to tell them how when I was 11, I was babysitting my brothers for ~12 hours a day for 2 years. We're talking about a 3 year old and a 4 month old. My brothers are now 18 and 16 and both honor roll students with 4.0 and taking advanced math and yes, we come from a poor family. Think going out to see a movie about once every 3-4 years, owning 2 pair of pants and one pair of shoes, kind of poor.
We all grew up on TV and the internet in a divorced family and my mom thinks porn is funny.
The moral of this story. TV, Internet, and porn will get you kids that have 4.0 GPAs and take advanced math with kids two years older than them... wait.. WTF kind of moral is that?!
meh.. I have ADD and got a C in Eng101 and failed Eng102 then passed Eng102 with a D in college.. Yes, ADD is a disability so don't flog my karma too badly.
My Uni specifically stated you can browse ANYTHING so long as it's legal and you have to stop or move if someone says it offends them. That was for all public workstations.
I worked for the IT at my Uni and found out how well they took advantage of AD policies and really locked down those computers as to make it very hard for someone to get virii installed. Computers were also automatically re-imaged once per week. That was cool. Central server would weekly execute a script to force the computers to reboot and the PXE server switched to a new image and re-imaged the machines. Helped to keep the computers running well.
"I've still got more in the bank than a third of the people in their 50s do"
Exactly. One news article said something like 80% of Americans within a decade of retirement have under $10k set aside for retirement. I'm not sure how true this is, but I have over $10k in my 401k and I've only been working for 2 years out of college and I live paycheck-to-paycheck because I'm making under $40k and I have medical bills and my wife can't find work.
Heck, this last tax season, I only put in $2k into my 401k, so the government gave me an extra $1k back on taxes for it, so it effectively only cost $1k, and my company matched 75% of that, so another $1.5k. In the end, it cost me only $1k to put $3.5k into my 401k. Last year, I only put $1.5k in, but no tax bump from that year. So, I paid in $2.5k and it's worth over $10k in only 2 years time.
I know too many people who spend $20/night to go to a bar and complain how they don't have any money...
My step dad killed the $800 back-light in his 54" LCD with in 2 months of purchasing it because of this. Luckily it was under warranty and it didn't cost him a penny to get it replaced.
The tech support guys said he sees this all the time and "If you turn on the TV, don't turn it off for at least and hour". Had the TV for over 2 years now and no problems sense.
kind of like how we went from serial to parallel back to serial interfaces with computers?:P
Re:Time to change your OS to OSX or BSD
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 1
Win7 will bring better battery life for my new laptop I get next month. And XP would have a hard time taking advantage of the i5 CPU. AND NO MORE IE6!!! F YEAH!
"...but the requirement to track licenses as well" meh. IT sends us an email any time we get an audit and we run some program MS gives us. Takes about 1 minute out of our day and that's it. For the IT people who actually manage the audits, it takes about 1-2 hours out of their day and that's only 2-3 people for a company of almost 1000.
With over 60,000 customers in North America and more around the world, we can count on one hand how many didn't have any Windows servers to run our product. It would probably be hard to develop/debug for our software if our customers ran on a different OS than us. Not to mention all the databases we have to move around. Nearly all of our customer already have MS SQL installed before installing our software. It's just plain easier to use MS SQL on our end than us training their IT on how to work a free alternative.
Not to mention C#+VS.Net is fun to program in. And Microsoft about gives our entire state free software for colleges. Hard to find a college that doesn't teach MS as the standard.
Win7 has a whole new kernel over Vista. Not even close to the same.
Both Vista and 7 share the same higher level API, which is why drivers/etc are compatible, but 7handles memory better. 7 also has fewer locks, so it scales better with multi-IO and CPUs. 7 does have more overhead, but the overhead is mostly a fixed cost. It might run slower than XP/Vista in a few areas, but why care about running fast on single/dual cores with 8/16 cores coming out soon.
Yeah, I've often wondered whether the alleged rises in ADD and autism are just artifacts of changing methods used to diagnose them.
One semi-reliable sign of A.D.D. is stimulants settling a person down. I have a few friends who do NOT have A.D.D. and have taken Adderall(stimulant) and it made them hyper. Me and several other people who actually have A.D.D. get relaxed by Adderall and partially by caffeine. Most A.D.D. is caused by part of the frontal lobe, which is used for concentration, being hypo-active. Stimulants help liven this part up and makes it easier to concentrate.
I'm sure there's a lot of false positives with it being so easy to just hand out drugs. Probably caused by poor parenting and a child just wanting attention.
$44 for 16/2 with "250GB" cap, but my ISP's CEO recently said they do not and won't, for the foreseeable future, enforce it.
ohh ohhh.. 0 packet loss and crazy low pings(18ms to Chicago, 30ms to NewYork, 40ms to Dallas and 0-5ms jitter) even during peak hours.. and I get my rated speed. and power boost is nice. Downloading 2MB(bytes)/sec from Steam AND still getting 24mbit/sec from speedtest and 18ms ping because of power boost. That's about 40mbit for a small burst
For an extra $15 I could upgrade to 25/3.. but mehh..
I'll take these speeds so long as they keep the quality. I'd rather have something more like 60/10 but P2P users would probably lag it to hell.
"Point is, if you're splashing out money to get a faster drive, get a "budget" SSD"
Show me a "budget" 500GB SSD. They're not competing with speed, they're mixing speed and *size* and it has a pretty good lead on other 500GB traditional HDs.
I could see a 2TB HD with 16GB of flash being really nice to RAID for storage. ZFS + RAID-6z + 8 of these + small SSD added to the RAID pool for caching.
But still, I can't wait for cheap 500GB SSDs with great (200MB/sec+ and 10k IO/sec+) performance.
Since Vista already supported hybrid drives, I would *assume* the Windows would check for this stuff. Also, Vista/7 already disables readyboost automatically against drives that are SSDs.
Another issue that would crop up is SuperFetch runs under the ReadyBoost service and Superfetch is really nice.
Wikipedia: SuperFetch is a technology that pre-loads commonly used applications into memory to reduce their load times.
It actually caches commonly used files, not just "apps"
Essentially, it uses free memory to speed up your system by caching data directly into your RAM, which is even faster than any SSD. Sysinternals now has a utility that will show which files and offsets of those files are in memory. I noticed it has a ton of my game files loaded up in there which explains why my HD rarely reads while playing games.
I'm assuming this would only be used for vehicles that already have some version of this feature already implemented. Mazda plans on rolling out a tech that causes the engine to stop at the peak of compression. This way, when the vehicle is ready to go again, all it does is spark and it's instantly running again. Obviously, hybrids will have no issues at all with this.
As for safety, they could easily only have the engine shut-down if at the lights IF the break is being pressed. If the gas is pressed or the break is released for x seconds, it could automatically start back up. Essentially, it's not saying the car HAS to turn off, it's just suggesting and the car decides.
"This seems interesting technically but frankly I wouldn't want to be the person who buys some stock with the understanding that each share is worth $40, when in reality it has dropped recently and is worth less. There are actual people behind these trades, and you can't just give them strategically inaccurate information to stabilize the market..."
It could be averaged over something like a 5 second sliding window and also you could add it something like if the median differs too much from the mean, then it invalidates some of the data points that are used for the average. This would remove most of the ability to make profit on trading "noise"
In a nutshell: Millisecond 0.5: Price is $15.00 Millisecond 1: BUY BUY BUY Millisecond 1.5: Price is $15.01 Millisecond 2: SELL SELL SELL
Rinse and repeat.
And these people use 10gig connections with 1/10th microsecond latency and several VERY high speed computers interconnected with infinaband which has latencies measured in nanoseconds.
Essentially you have a large initial investment and hooks into high places, then you can get "free" money. As far as I know, parasitic relationships typically aren't healthy especially when it comes to money.
[...] BTW religion is mind control propaganda as evil as evil can be. Just because some non-religious people are evil too, doesn't excuse the 10,000 years of horrifying abuse we have suffered as a result of failing to realize that religion is a sure symptom of insanity and acting accordingly. Hello?
Dictionary.com: "the body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices" "a point or matter of ethics or conscience"
Religion is nothing more than a way of living and ethics. I'm fairly sure that EVERYONE has a form of religion even if it doesn't have a formal name.
Listening is your computer(brain) waiting for data to arrive in the form of sound waves.
Listening is an object awaiting data.
But sadly 95% of the population gets by with just enough intelligence or luck to reproduce. I guess one person's luck is another person's unluck.
It's probably a curse to be in that other 5% as I'm sure most Slashdotters know the feeling.
side note: I don't think DHCP is an open invitation. It's just an automated response that happens no matter what, assuming the system is working correctly.
#1. Google has no real power, so even *if* they did find out something about someone, they couldn't really do anything #2. A bunch of engineers with large amounts of data love to find out statistics and have no real care about the individual data points #3. Because of #1 and #2, Google has no real reason to care about the actual personal data, if anything, they collected and would only care about useful statistics #4. The government likes to dictate what people can and can't do and loves to "look busy" by making useless laws and enforcing them.
Why would anyone want a government to have that data..
Not to mention a crap ton of mac-address is about useless other than....OPEN WIFI IS ILLIGAL IN GERMANY. yeah.. lets hand all that data over so the government can head out and start "enforcing" their wifi rules on all of those open APs.
Slashdot Mirror
ROFL!
New AVX SIMD is coming out soon. The first set of 256bit registers are suppose to be 2xs as fast as SSE and later 512bit and 1024bit AVX are suppose to be another ~2-4xs faster than the 256bit. I guess one of the benefits of AVX is the new register sizes are suppose to give transparent speed increases. So a program made for 256bit AVX will automatically see faster calculations when the new 512bit AVX registers come out. Sounds good to me. They're suppose to be 3 operandi instructions.
A password based on a phrase where you substitute 3-4 letters for a few special characters and insert 1-4 extra characters into the middle of a word as to mess with the length, would be about has hard to break as the AES key itself. This would be an easy to remember password that would only take a few seconds to type and would render dictionary attacks useless.
"a large distributed attack should be able to 'crack' it with much less difficulty than reversing the AES itself"
Of course brute forcing a 256bit key could take 1,000,000,000,000 computers that could do 1,000,000,000,000 AES comparisons per second(aka, about 32,768 cores at 3ghz) about 1.8e+42 millennia. So, by "much less", so you mean to reduce the effectiveness to 1/10^42(0.00000000000000000000000000000000000000001%) would only take those 1 trillion 32k core 3ghz super computers 1000 years to break.
Assuming this person used a semi-decent password, the only way to get around this would be torture, key got cached/written down, bugged his keyboard, or general luck.
Fun fact told to me via a PHD in encryption. A 256bit symmetric algorithm that has no work around (AES has flaws that reduces its effectiveness) and using computers so efficient that it takes the theoretically smallest amount of energy to flip a bit, would on average consume most of the energy in the known universe to break a single key. (Think consuming all the stars in the Milkyway galaxy just a start)
"It is not crazy to think that the NSA could have this capability." I would say overly optimistic.
One of the popular Open Source clustered file systems, I think gluster, had/has a write up about how they moved to ECC memory on their nodes.
They had an issue where about every TB of data written to the cluster, one of the nodes would report having different checksums than the other nodes. At first the thought maybe a hardware fault. Turns out switching to ECC completely removed the issue. They said the end result was every so much data will inherently acquire a an error when traveling through the memory.
It's not a matter of "if", but when.
Good point.
I actually have my 401k quite diverse, so I hope that helps some. My quarterly report actually dropped ~8% after the "crash", but the quarter after jumped something like 15%. It's been fairly level now.
An interesting side note. The local community bank that my job goes through actually removed the defunct investments about 3 months before they went belly up.
We got a company wide letter stating that several investment options were removed because of unsound practices and all investments in those areas would automatically be moved into some other default investments. Three months later, the bubble burst and all those investments dropped like a rock. Go Go community banks!
Apple sells hardware, Microsoft sells an OS. When Apple switched to BSD, it didn't bother them because the OS does not make much money. If Microsoft started selling an OS that didn't make money, they'd go under instantly.
You're post seems very good and I like a lot of the points. Based on what you're saying, it seems filtering the internet is putting a band-aid over the symptoms of a bad educational system. So it does solve some of the issues at hand, but obviously doesn't fix the root of the problem.
I found I did worse in high school than college. I went from a D student in school to a A student in my major and B+ overall. The only real difference between High School and College is in college they treat you like an adult, so you acted like one. College should start around 16 when you start to understand what you like.
The funny thing is the stuff my teachers in High School hated about me where my strong points and helped me do well in my major. The teachers in my major loved me. Well.... most...
A great example I can think about is how likely a parent would leave their kids at home alone. I'm getting to the age where lots of people around me have kids and many have 8-14 year olds. So many parents don't trust their kid(s) to be home alone. They tell me how their kids are just too young. When that pops up, I just have to tell them how when I was 11, I was babysitting my brothers for ~12 hours a day for 2 years. We're talking about a 3 year old and a 4 month old. My brothers are now 18 and 16 and both honor roll students with 4.0 and taking advanced math and yes, we come from a poor family. Think going out to see a movie about once every 3-4 years, owning 2 pair of pants and one pair of shoes, kind of poor.
We all grew up on TV and the internet in a divorced family and my mom thinks porn is funny.
The moral of this story. TV, Internet, and porn will get you kids that have 4.0 GPAs and take advanced math with kids two years older than them... wait.. WTF kind of moral is that?!
meh.. I have ADD and got a C in Eng101 and failed Eng102 then passed Eng102 with a D in college.. Yes, ADD is a disability so don't flog my karma too badly.
My Uni specifically stated you can browse ANYTHING so long as it's legal and you have to stop or move if someone says it offends them. That was for all public workstations.
I worked for the IT at my Uni and found out how well they took advantage of AD policies and really locked down those computers as to make it very hard for someone to get virii installed. Computers were also automatically re-imaged once per week. That was cool. Central server would weekly execute a script to force the computers to reboot and the PXE server switched to a new image and re-imaged the machines. Helped to keep the computers running well.
that might be illegal even if the parents agree to it.
"I've still got more in the bank than a third of the people in their 50s do"
Exactly. One news article said something like 80% of Americans within a decade of retirement have under $10k set aside for retirement. I'm not sure how true this is, but I have over $10k in my 401k and I've only been working for 2 years out of college and I live paycheck-to-paycheck because I'm making under $40k and I have medical bills and my wife can't find work.
Heck, this last tax season, I only put in $2k into my 401k, so the government gave me an extra $1k back on taxes for it, so it effectively only cost $1k, and my company matched 75% of that, so another $1.5k. In the end, it cost me only $1k to put $3.5k into my 401k. Last year, I only put $1.5k in, but no tax bump from that year. So, I paid in $2.5k and it's worth over $10k in only 2 years time.
I know too many people who spend $20/night to go to a bar and complain how they don't have any money...
My step dad killed the $800 back-light in his 54" LCD with in 2 months of purchasing it because of this. Luckily it was under warranty and it didn't cost him a penny to get it replaced.
The tech support guys said he sees this all the time and "If you turn on the TV, don't turn it off for at least and hour". Had the TV for over 2 years now and no problems sense.
kind of like how we went from serial to parallel back to serial interfaces with computers? :P
Win7 will bring better battery life for my new laptop I get next month. And XP would have a hard time taking advantage of the i5 CPU. AND NO MORE IE6!!! F YEAH!
"...but the requirement to track licenses as well" meh. IT sends us an email any time we get an audit and we run some program MS gives us. Takes about 1 minute out of our day and that's it. For the IT people who actually manage the audits, it takes about 1-2 hours out of their day and that's only 2-3 people for a company of almost 1000.
With over 60,000 customers in North America and more around the world, we can count on one hand how many didn't have any Windows servers to run our product. It would probably be hard to develop/debug for our software if our customers ran on a different OS than us. Not to mention all the databases we have to move around. Nearly all of our customer already have MS SQL installed before installing our software. It's just plain easier to use MS SQL on our end than us training their IT on how to work a free alternative.
Not to mention C#+VS.Net is fun to program in. And Microsoft about gives our entire state free software for colleges. Hard to find a college that doesn't teach MS as the standard.
Win7 has a whole new kernel over Vista. Not even close to the same.
Both Vista and 7 share the same higher level API, which is why drivers/etc are compatible, but 7handles memory better. 7 also has fewer locks, so it scales better with multi-IO and CPUs. 7 does have more overhead, but the overhead is mostly a fixed cost. It might run slower than XP/Vista in a few areas, but why care about running fast on single/dual cores with 8/16 cores coming out soon.
Request that they stop "spamming" you, otherwise you will make use of CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and they can be fined for thousands of $$$ per spam.
Yeah, I've often wondered whether the alleged rises in ADD and autism are just artifacts of changing methods used to diagnose them.
One semi-reliable sign of A.D.D. is stimulants settling a person down. I have a few friends who do NOT have A.D.D. and have taken Adderall(stimulant) and it made them hyper. Me and several other people who actually have A.D.D. get relaxed by Adderall and partially by caffeine. Most A.D.D. is caused by part of the frontal lobe, which is used for concentration, being hypo-active. Stimulants help liven this part up and makes it easier to concentrate.
I'm sure there's a lot of false positives with it being so easy to just hand out drugs. Probably caused by poor parenting and a child just wanting attention.
$44 for 16/2 with "250GB" cap, but my ISP's CEO recently said they do not and won't, for the foreseeable future, enforce it.
ohh ohhh.. 0 packet loss and crazy low pings(18ms to Chicago, 30ms to NewYork, 40ms to Dallas and 0-5ms jitter) even during peak hours.. and I get my rated speed. and power boost is nice. Downloading 2MB(bytes)/sec from Steam AND still getting 24mbit/sec from speedtest and 18ms ping because of power boost. That's about 40mbit for a small burst
For an extra $15 I could upgrade to 25/3.. but mehh..
I'll take these speeds so long as they keep the quality. I'd rather have something more like 60/10 but P2P users would probably lag it to hell.
"Point is, if you're splashing out money to get a faster drive, get a "budget" SSD"
Show me a "budget" 500GB SSD. They're not competing with speed, they're mixing speed and *size* and it has a pretty good lead on other 500GB traditional HDs.
I could see a 2TB HD with 16GB of flash being really nice to RAID for storage. ZFS + RAID-6z + 8 of these + small SSD added to the RAID pool for caching.
But still, I can't wait for cheap 500GB SSDs with great (200MB/sec+ and 10k IO/sec+) performance.
Since Vista already supported hybrid drives, I would *assume* the Windows would check for this stuff. Also, Vista/7 already disables readyboost automatically against drives that are SSDs.
Another issue that would crop up is SuperFetch runs under the ReadyBoost service and Superfetch is really nice.
Wikipedia: SuperFetch is a technology that pre-loads commonly used applications into memory to reduce their load times.
It actually caches commonly used files, not just "apps"
Essentially, it uses free memory to speed up your system by caching data directly into your RAM, which is even faster than any SSD. Sysinternals now has a utility that will show which files and offsets of those files are in memory. I noticed it has a ton of my game files loaded up in there which explains why my HD rarely reads while playing games.
I'm assuming this would only be used for vehicles that already have some version of this feature already implemented. Mazda plans on rolling out a tech that causes the engine to stop at the peak of compression. This way, when the vehicle is ready to go again, all it does is spark and it's instantly running again. Obviously, hybrids will have no issues at all with this.
As for safety, they could easily only have the engine shut-down if at the lights IF the break is being pressed. If the gas is pressed or the break is released for x seconds, it could automatically start back up. Essentially, it's not saying the car HAS to turn off, it's just suggesting and the car decides.
"This seems interesting technically but frankly I wouldn't want to be the person who buys some stock with the understanding that each share is worth $40, when in reality it has dropped recently and is worth less. There are actual people behind these trades, and you can't just give them strategically inaccurate information to stabilize the market..."
It could be averaged over something like a 5 second sliding window and also you could add it something like if the median differs too much from the mean, then it invalidates some of the data points that are used for the average. This would remove most of the ability to make profit on trading "noise"
In a nutshell:
Millisecond 0.5: Price is $15.00
Millisecond 1: BUY BUY BUY
Millisecond 1.5: Price is $15.01
Millisecond 2: SELL SELL SELL
Rinse and repeat.
And these people use 10gig connections with 1/10th microsecond latency and several VERY high speed computers interconnected with infinaband which has latencies measured in nanoseconds.
Essentially you have a large initial investment and hooks into high places, then you can get "free" money. As far as I know, parasitic relationships typically aren't healthy especially when it comes to money.
[...]
BTW religion is mind control propaganda as evil as evil can be. Just because some non-religious people are evil too, doesn't excuse the 10,000 years of horrifying abuse we have suffered as a result of failing to realize that religion is a sure symptom of insanity and acting accordingly. Hello?
Dictionary.com: "the body of persons adhering to a particular set of beliefs and practices"
"a point or matter of ethics or conscience"
Religion is nothing more than a way of living and ethics. I'm fairly sure that EVERYONE has a form of religion even if it doesn't have a formal name.
Listening is your computer(brain) waiting for data to arrive in the form of sound waves.
Listening is an object awaiting data.
But sadly 95% of the population gets by with just enough intelligence or luck to reproduce. I guess one person's luck is another person's unluck.
It's probably a curse to be in that other 5% as I'm sure most Slashdotters know the feeling.
side note: I don't think DHCP is an open invitation. It's just an automated response that happens no matter what, assuming the system is working correctly.
Exactly.
#1. Google has no real power, so even *if* they did find out something about someone, they couldn't really do anything
#2. A bunch of engineers with large amounts of data love to find out statistics and have no real care about the individual data points
#3. Because of #1 and #2, Google has no real reason to care about the actual personal data, if anything, they collected and would only care about useful statistics
#4. The government likes to dictate what people can and can't do and loves to "look busy" by making useless laws and enforcing them.
Why would anyone want a government to have that data..
Not to mention a crap ton of mac-address is about useless other than....OPEN WIFI IS ILLIGAL IN GERMANY. yeah.. lets hand all that data over so the government can head out and start "enforcing" their wifi rules on all of those open APs.
My ISP uses 128bit AES with rolling keys on our cable modems along with many other large ISP like Time Warner. Been standard since DOCSIS2.0.
Your ISP must suck.