> Since when has that been a problem with > Democrats? Heck, tell 'em you're an illegal > alien and they might let you vote twice. > > (Woah, easy people. It was a joke...)
Yah, 's better to have that than a party that denies you your legitimate vote.
> However if we expand our view to nuclear > weapons, *any* detonation would be horrible.
Though vaporization doesn't actually make it any better. Remember that lasers don't actually destroy things: they just boil them until they're not structured enough to cascade and go boom anymore. That's great for traditional incindiary weapons, but arguably vaporized uranium and plutonium mixed with heavy metals in a cloud starting at half a mile up is worse; there are very few things as chemically toxic as plutonium, even before you consider the horrible side effects.
Our own portable chernobyl cloud generator. But with heavy metal instead of hydrogen. Wise? I sure think so. *kaff*
> > I mean, Starbuck was the womanizer - the > > fighter pilot stereotype. > > So why can't a woman do this? I think America > is ready for a kick-ass lesbian who drags her > scores back to the cave for some hot stuff.
So I think all of Slashdot is now wondering "why don't you work for Sci-Fi?"... or Skinemax, or *something*...
> Nah, it was actually pretty good -- at least > until they rearched Earth and the kids had > superpowers or something equally stupid.
The rationale for Galactica 1980, the second series you're referring to (which all BG fans have unspokenly agreed to forget permanently) was that gravity on Kobold (the original home planet in the nebula), and therefore on the twelve chosen planets for colonies and on the battlestars was tremendously higher. They didn't have superpowers, they were just used to 7-8g. They weren't flying. They were jumping.
And now you see why we know to forget it. Move along. Reached Earth? Never happened.
> > a reputation as a maker of top-quality stereo > > equipment > > where did you hear this one?!! Sony makes > bottom of the barrel audio equipment, both at > home garbage and mobile trash.
No, douche.
1) "Reputation for." Ask the man on the street if they'd rather have a Sony stereo or an Aiwa. Ask them how they'd feel about a Gershman, a Roksan, or an Accoustic Zen rack, and they'll tell you that they'd rather have something made by Bose or Panasonic.
2) If you really think that Sony is bottom barrel, you need to go to Radio Shack. Granted, they're not Bowers and Wilkins, but they're also not Olympus nor Realistic. Frankly, I can name a dozen companies off of the top of my head that I'd rather have a Sony than, even though I'm aware of better stuff like Marantz, Atlantis, and so forth.
3) You should consider founding arguments and reducing punctuation.
> You haven't looked at LCD recently, I guess. I > paid under $280 for a KDS 15" LCD to replace a > 17" (16.1 viewable) Trinitron and it has no > smearing whatsoever.
For what it's worth, you can get CRTs at half that price, and the video quality is generally better. OTOH, the eyestrain is worse, the desk space is further consumed, and the power draw is higher.
I prefer the video quality, myself. DOS textmode should have visible aliasing on capital 'S'es, by gum.
The poster which suggested millisecond lag time was significant is correct. Whereas a clean refresh rate above 80hz is good enough for nearly everyone (60hz is an average, not a top end, for the individual human's visual intake capacities; 75hz isn't uncommon as a visible rate,) having parts of previous images causes a blurring effect that's visible even above the eye's intake rate.
Think about audio anti-aliasing, double rates and the nyquist rate. Even though we can only hear at ~20kHz, we play back at 44kHz, because aliasing (especially with stereo waveform comparisons) allows us to pick up details. Our wetware is surprisingly good at exceeding its input capacities with pattern recognition.
If you don't believe me, go to a CompUSA and try doing something that requires lots of video update with significant color change - a "trippy" video game, 1960s Sesame Street or even the lines-on-black screensavers, and just watch the ghosting.
On the one hand, I do not support penalties for software developers which open security holes. I've seen some good arguments that suggest that the problem would be akin to suing an engineering concern over a faulty building, but I don't believe them to be accurate; these are attacks, committed against studied weaknesses of a design. We didn't sue the people that built the World Trade Centers for the damage caused by the falling buildings (though, in my opinion disgustingly, I did hear a few people rumble about the topic.)
On the other hand, though, I believe Microsoft to be reprehensible in their behavior here. The weakness was published, according to the Slashdot article (yeah, we know how accurate those are, but still,) in June of '02. Seven months and change.
Seven months.
Now, when someone leverages a widespread exploit that broadsides a company, even Big M$, I'm all for fixing it, learning, and moving on with life. But there has been more than enough time for them to patch this.
They're supposed to be on some trustworthy computing initiative, right? And this is recieving/no/ press coverage outside of independant sites like the 'net?
We need to do something. It's getting bad; we've seen real, concerted attacks on the 'net a couple of times, lately. This one apparently got to five of the root servers; the one a few months back did the same, and it probably won't be too much longer until they make actual headway.
We can't do a damn thing to M$. This has been shown: they're convicted monopolists and nothing happened.
However: the/media/ can do something to M$. The media is basically why M$ exists. M$ got big by being the superior marketer in every way, and I would enjoy arguments otherwise. M$ is our 800 lb. repeating joke for exactly the reasons the jokes suggest: our pointy haired bosses prefer Outlook and Exchange to corporate security, internet stability and good neighbor policies.
It's time for us to put our weight where it matters. The media doesn't exist on a lark: it's there because we [read|watch|etc] it.
Why are we still doing this?
It's time we started really letting people know what's going on. It's time for us to begin to collect and catalog the serious vulnerabilities and risks on the 'net, and in a nonpartisan fashion. We need to log things that have nothing to do with M$. We need to track everything.
And we need a way to show just how many of the really serious problems - code red, nimda, IIS (which should be called a trojan, IMNSHO); potential things like curious yellow; it's just a mess what would happen if someone tried more than one concurrent attack in more than a haphazard Gargamel-style "this'll get Papa Internet and all his meddling little smurfs" fashion.
Not all badguys are stupid, and soon enough one of them will figure out how to go about it: don't give them one thing to vaccinate at once, and let each problem propogate the entire set.
We are sitting ducks for as long as we allow big corporations with both the knowledge of and the resources to fix their problems get away with things like this. Over the last two years, attacks have gotten more and more serious, and we've listened to platitudes about trustworthy computing and focus less on featuritis (doubtless so they can thing up new indispensible widgets) and more on security (which they verifiably have not done; though their product release rates have dropped, their patch release rates haven't even climbed by as fast as their hole discovery rates.)
We have a lot of intelligent people at slashdot. Unless I'm a loon (well, probably in spite of it, natch) we're looking at one of our last chances to get fixes underway in time.
I don't have the planning abilities, resources, foresight or time to organize a self-help movement. That said, I firmly believe that it needs to be done. This is my appeal: someone who can, please begin to keep a timeline of the problems, a review of their comparative severities (this, code red, and other things which crippled the 'net should be nicely high on that list), and a running tally of who's responsible for what ratio among each threat level.
We have places like CERT, which release top ten lists per OS, thinking they're being helpful while muddying the waters for the corporate types who genuinely do not understand the risk by making it look as if other things are as vulnerable as M$ products.
It's time that we stop whining and start acting. No silly email campaigns where they get mocked in alternating caps and numbers-for-letters, no derision, no humiliation; fun and cathartic as they may be, they would weaken what I feel is nearing on being a desperate purpose.
Please comment. Maybe I'm overreacting. I'd like to see how you all feel.
I feel it important to point out that I own seven comics from various eras in DC, mostly early-mid 70s, which have all hashed this out.
In every single case, Batman wins. The only comic I own where Clark Kent beats Bruce Wayne is where Bruce Wayne is under the mind control of Brainiac, and where Clark uses a lesson learned from Bruce earlier in the comic to undo the problems.
DC has always put Bruce's brains over Clark's powers, though always with significant difficulty.
> how long until we see a computer constructed > using bong water?
Depends on what you mean by using. I made Abongcus some years ago, which is a bong made from a decorative abacus with very thick siderails. However, the water from the bong is not used in computation of anything other than the distance to the nearest chicken nugget.
> Yes i know that water doesn't conduct > electricity. But most water cooling systems use > water with addatives which cause them to conduct.
That's odd: heat transfer systems don't usually give a damn about electrical capacitance, and in my admittedly limited experience, in those cases where they do, it's to eliminate said, not promote it.
Water conducts heat without additives. Has anyone else ever heard of tainted-water cooling?
The bottom of my mouse has a red light on it. Yours may have a ball or two disks. Either way, when I pick it up off the table the cursor stops moving. Imagine trying to draw a picture or a diagram, or write words, but every time you try to make a mark it starts exactly where the last one ended...
Well, admittedly, there are other sorts of mice. However, I thought that the idea would be obvious enough. Apparently, either it wasn't, or you didn't learn cursive in grade school.
1a) Look into summasketch pens from the 1980s
They have a special tablet and a coil of wire to detect their position. How is that different from having a special pad?
The pucks and the later pens have inductance tracking, but the early pens couldn't fit it due to the large coiul required early on. They were plastic balls with rollers on the other end, and they didn't work very well. That's why I gave a date, which you'd know if you actually looked.
Simpy put, the poincare conjecture implies that every compact n-manifold is homotopy-equivalent to the n-sphere iff it is homeomorphic to the n-sphere.
You don't really have a very good grasp of the word "simply", do you?
> or what amounts to a little over 10 days ,... > I'm frightened... do people seriously have that > much time??? And where can I get some?
It's easy. Just got back from work? Pop in a CD, hit "grab" (there are a number of programs which read a CD, connect to CDDX, drop the info, run it through the compresser, name, and plop it out; I'm fond of AudioGrabber), sit down, read your mail. When the CD pops out, plop in another one until it's done. Repeat until done with email, slashdot for the day. One month will generally chew through ~100 cds that way. Playing Angband? Don't get interrupted, but set one in as you start and one as you're done. Etc.
Now, at ~100CDs/month, you can chew through a 1k CD collection in under a year without investing any real time.
Then again, you know he got those CDs from Napster.:)
I've been sitting on an invention for six months now. I'm debating whether to 'give it to the world' or patent it. I would obviously like to feed my family on the fruits of my endeavour but don't see much hope in the open source route. My invention improves upon the 80 year old One-Time Pad encryption turning it into a 'Many-Time Pad'.
This implies a misunderstanding of the notion of a one-time pad. The significance of a one-time pad is that it *cannot* be broken, even by brute force, because the key is of at least the length of the document, and because the key is not stored or regeneratable. There is no way to reconstitute the document, because in a one-time pad, the document could be anything underneath.
Consider the simple case of modulo-addition crypto. Take a source and a key, both of length N. Add the values of each stream's position [i] together. If the sum exceeds the radix of storage, store the sum modulo storage's radix (generally, 256, the size of a byte.) On decrypt, if subtracting the key position drops a value below 0, add the storage's radix (basically, de-modulo on demand), and you're golden.
Though that's not particularly difficult to crack, given a repeating key (when the source stream exceeds the key stream's length, it is common to simply loop the key stream), in a one-time pad this cannot be broken. Why? Because that sum you have could represent *any* character, because the key's value could be the other summand. Therefore, a message of length 13 could be:
"hello, world!"
"bomb the cars"
"chocolate bar"
"steven wright"
You'll note that it's fairly easy to derive a key which gives the encrypted stream "AAAAAAAAAAAAA" for each of those. This is why a one-time pad cannot be broken: there's no way to tell what the key was, and therefore no way to tell the contents of a key.
Many-time pad is very, very vague, probably necessarily so. However, not to be rude, but it seems like you might consider a read or two through Applied Cryptography before you begin to announce a new development in one of the most difficult fields of mathematics currently active.
> My question is this: Could I sell enough $10 > shareware GPG extensions to compensate for not > locking in 20 years of patent protection (and > the $20,000 to patent it)?"
No. However, you also won't sell a proprietary encryption algorithm. Moreso than for any other software I'm aware of, peer review of crypto algorithms is/absolutely//nessecary/.
Read at Bruce Schneier's page. He explains it better than I expect to be able to. (cryptome.org, IIRC)
> if you had developed a new form of encryption, > what would you do?
Mail it to the NSA and be watched for the rest of my life by the NSA, instead of mailing it to SlashDot and being watched for the rest of my life by the NSA. At least that way the NSA thinks I'm valuable and trustable.
There are in fact no cryptosystems current which are both considered secure and well understood. The closest you can come are the RSA algs or Blowfish.
> Since when is taking toxic material out of the > ground and letting it sit on the surface (where > rain washes it into rivers, animals eat it... > people eat it) a good idea?
It isn't. Luckily, nobody said anything about leaving it on the surface. Read into things often?
Though, of course, the prospect of coming across a heavy-like-iron (and shiny to boot) industrial cabbage does lead to a number of interesting puns.
Slashdot Mirror
> Since when has that been a problem with
> Democrats? Heck, tell 'em you're an illegal
> alien and they might let you vote twice.
>
> (Woah, easy people. It was a joke...)
Yah, 's better to have that than a party that denies you your legitimate vote.
Weren't we angry about Florida?
> However if we expand our view to nuclear
> weapons, *any* detonation would be horrible.
Though vaporization doesn't actually make it any better. Remember that lasers don't actually destroy things: they just boil them until they're not structured enough to cascade and go boom anymore. That's great for traditional incindiary weapons, but arguably vaporized uranium and plutonium mixed with heavy metals in a cloud starting at half a mile up is worse; there are very few things as chemically toxic as plutonium, even before you consider the horrible side effects.
Our own portable chernobyl cloud generator. But with heavy metal instead of hydrogen. Wise? I sure think so. *kaff*
> Re: Scott Bakula
>
> Would replace Dirk Benedict as Starbuck, of
> course.
I choose to believe that the original poster knows Starbuck is being recast as a woman. That makes this far funnier.
> > I mean, Starbuck was the womanizer - the
... or Skinemax, or *something*...
> > fighter pilot stereotype.
>
> So why can't a woman do this? I think America
> is ready for a kick-ass lesbian who drags her
> scores back to the cave for some hot stuff.
So I think all of Slashdot is now wondering "why don't you work for Sci-Fi?"
> Nah, it was actually pretty good -- at least
> until they rearched Earth and the kids had
> superpowers or something equally stupid.
The rationale for Galactica 1980, the second series you're referring to (which all BG fans have unspokenly agreed to forget permanently) was that gravity on Kobold (the original home planet in the nebula), and therefore on the twelve chosen planets for colonies and on the battlestars was tremendously higher. They didn't have superpowers, they were just used to 7-8g. They weren't flying. They were jumping.
And now you see why we know to forget it. Move along. Reached Earth? Never happened.
> > a reputation as a maker of top-quality stereo
> > equipment
>
> where did you hear this one?!! Sony makes
> bottom of the barrel audio equipment, both at
> home garbage and mobile trash.
No, douche.
1) "Reputation for." Ask the man on the street if they'd rather have a Sony stereo or an Aiwa. Ask them how they'd feel about a Gershman, a Roksan, or an Accoustic Zen rack, and they'll tell you that they'd rather have something made by Bose or Panasonic.
2) If you really think that Sony is bottom barrel, you need to go to Radio Shack. Granted, they're not Bowers and Wilkins, but they're also not Olympus nor Realistic. Frankly, I can name a dozen companies off of the top of my head that I'd rather have a Sony than, even though I'm aware of better stuff like Marantz, Atlantis, and so forth.
3) You should consider founding arguments and reducing punctuation.
> You haven't looked at LCD recently, I guess. I
> paid under $280 for a KDS 15" LCD to replace a
> 17" (16.1 viewable) Trinitron and it has no
> smearing whatsoever.
For what it's worth, you can get CRTs at half that price, and the video quality is generally better. OTOH, the eyestrain is worse, the desk space is further consumed, and the power draw is higher.
I prefer the video quality, myself. DOS textmode should have visible aliasing on capital 'S'es, by gum.
> Your eye can't pick up more than 60 fps anyway.
The poster which suggested millisecond lag time was significant is correct. Whereas a clean refresh rate above 80hz is good enough for nearly everyone (60hz is an average, not a top end, for the individual human's visual intake capacities; 75hz isn't uncommon as a visible rate,) having parts of previous images causes a blurring effect that's visible even above the eye's intake rate.
Think about audio anti-aliasing, double rates and the nyquist rate. Even though we can only hear at ~20kHz, we play back at 44kHz, because aliasing (especially with stereo waveform comparisons) allows us to pick up details. Our wetware is surprisingly good at exceeding its input capacities with pattern recognition.
If you don't believe me, go to a CompUSA and try doing something that requires lots of video update with significant color change - a "trippy" video game, 1960s Sesame Street or even the lines-on-black screensavers, and just watch the ghosting.
My laptop is pretty bad about it.
> that's why they have grey vertical bars instead
> of black when watching 4:3 television on a 16:9
> display
Amusingly, the manual to my television suggests that it's because black bars would add inappropriate contrast and distort the end-result image.
Which I think is kinda bogus, because the grey bars are balls-on-distracting.
> ms released a patch for this 6 months ago.
Nice job completely avoiding the nature of the message.
> Then you must have never played Trade Wars 2002.
My lad, I can't decide if you meant to say Yankee Trader or Stars!.
So, I'm getting a little bit peeved.
/no/ press coverage outside of independant sites like the 'net?
/media/ can do something to M$. The media is basically why M$ exists. M$ got big by being the superior marketer in every way, and I would enjoy arguments otherwise. M$ is our 800 lb. repeating joke for exactly the reasons the jokes suggest: our pointy haired bosses prefer Outlook and Exchange to corporate security, internet stability and good neighbor policies.
On the one hand, I do not support penalties for software developers which open security holes. I've seen some good arguments that suggest that the problem would be akin to suing an engineering concern over a faulty building, but I don't believe them to be accurate; these are attacks, committed against studied weaknesses of a design. We didn't sue the people that built the World Trade Centers for the damage caused by the falling buildings (though, in my opinion disgustingly, I did hear a few people rumble about the topic.)
On the other hand, though, I believe Microsoft to be reprehensible in their behavior here. The weakness was published, according to the Slashdot article (yeah, we know how accurate those are, but still,) in June of '02. Seven months and change.
Seven months.
Now, when someone leverages a widespread exploit that broadsides a company, even Big M$, I'm all for fixing it, learning, and moving on with life. But there has been more than enough time for them to patch this.
They're supposed to be on some trustworthy computing initiative, right? And this is recieving
We need to do something. It's getting bad; we've seen real, concerted attacks on the 'net a couple of times, lately. This one apparently got to five of the root servers; the one a few months back did the same, and it probably won't be too much longer until they make actual headway.
We can't do a damn thing to M$. This has been shown: they're convicted monopolists and nothing happened.
However: the
It's time for us to put our weight where it matters. The media doesn't exist on a lark: it's there because we [read|watch|etc] it.
Why are we still doing this?
It's time we started really letting people know what's going on. It's time for us to begin to collect and catalog the serious vulnerabilities and risks on the 'net, and in a nonpartisan fashion. We need to log things that have nothing to do with M$. We need to track everything.
And we need a way to show just how many of the really serious problems - code red, nimda, IIS (which should be called a trojan, IMNSHO); potential things like curious yellow; it's just a mess what would happen if someone tried more than one concurrent attack in more than a haphazard Gargamel-style "this'll get Papa Internet and all his meddling little smurfs" fashion.
Not all badguys are stupid, and soon enough one of them will figure out how to go about it: don't give them one thing to vaccinate at once, and let each problem propogate the entire set.
We are sitting ducks for as long as we allow big corporations with both the knowledge of and the resources to fix their problems get away with things like this. Over the last two years, attacks have gotten more and more serious, and we've listened to platitudes about trustworthy computing and focus less on featuritis (doubtless so they can thing up new indispensible widgets) and more on security (which they verifiably have not done; though their product release rates have dropped, their patch release rates haven't even climbed by as fast as their hole discovery rates.)
We have a lot of intelligent people at slashdot. Unless I'm a loon (well, probably in spite of it, natch) we're looking at one of our last chances to get fixes underway in time.
I don't have the planning abilities, resources, foresight or time to organize a self-help movement. That said, I firmly believe that it needs to be done. This is my appeal: someone who can, please begin to keep a timeline of the problems, a review of their comparative severities (this, code red, and other things which crippled the 'net should be nicely high on that list), and a running tally of who's responsible for what ratio among each threat level.
We have places like CERT, which release top ten lists per OS, thinking they're being helpful while muddying the waters for the corporate types who genuinely do not understand the risk by making it look as if other things are as vulnerable as M$ products.
It's time that we stop whining and start acting. No silly email campaigns where they get mocked in alternating caps and numbers-for-letters, no derision, no humiliation; fun and cathartic as they may be, they would weaken what I feel is nearing on being a desperate purpose.
Please comment. Maybe I'm overreacting. I'd like to see how you all feel.
I feel it important to point out that I own seven comics from various eras in DC, mostly early-mid 70s, which have all hashed this out.
In every single case, Batman wins. The only comic I own where Clark Kent beats Bruce Wayne is where Bruce Wayne is under the mind control of Brainiac, and where Clark uses a lesson learned from Bruce earlier in the comic to undo the problems.
DC has always put Bruce's brains over Clark's powers, though always with significant difficulty.
> The idea predates the electrical computer. In the
> 1930s John Maynard Keynes
*cough* mechanical computer *cough* charles babbage (1791-1871) *cough* difference engine (1851) *cough* ada lovelace *cough* etc
> how long until we see a computer constructed
> using bong water?
Depends on what you mean by using. I made Abongcus some years ago, which is a bong made from a decorative abacus with very thick siderails. However, the water from the bong is not used in computation of anything other than the distance to the nearest chicken nugget.
> Yes i know that water doesn't conduct
> electricity. But most water cooling systems use
> water with addatives which cause them to conduct.
That's odd: heat transfer systems don't usually give a damn about electrical capacitance, and in my admittedly limited experience, in those cases where they do, it's to eliminate said, not promote it.
Water conducts heat without additives. Has anyone else ever heard of tainted-water cooling?
1) Look at the bottom of your mouse.
The bottom of my mouse has a red light on it. Yours may have a ball or two disks. Either way, when I pick it up off the table the cursor stops moving. Imagine trying to draw a picture or a diagram, or write words, but every time you try to make a mark it starts exactly where the last one ended...
Well, admittedly, there are other sorts of mice. However, I thought that the idea would be obvious enough. Apparently, either it wasn't, or you didn't learn cursive in grade school.
1a) Look into summasketch pens from the 1980s
They have a special tablet and a coil of wire to detect their position. How is that different from having a special pad?
The pucks and the later pens have inductance tracking, but the early pens couldn't fit it due to the large coiul required early on. They were plastic balls with rollers on the other end, and they didn't work very well. That's why I gave a date, which you'd know if you actually looked.
1b) Hang head in shame.
I'll leave that part to you.
Sure about that?
> Smash-O-Matic
:P
Is that anything like sledge-o-matic?
Simpy put, the poincare conjecture implies that every compact n-manifold is homotopy-equivalent to the n-sphere iff it is homeomorphic to the n-sphere.
You don't really have a very good grasp of the word "simply", do you?
> > I can certainly imagine ways of doing that that
> > DON'T require digital paper.
>
> Just out of curiosity, how else would you do it?
1) Look at the bottom of your mouse.
1a) Look into summasketch pens from the 1980s.
1b) Hang head in shame.
2) ???
3) Profit
> I think the best thing about this is the
> possibility of getting emails from people written
> in their own hand!
Y'know, that's funny, I talked my physician into email just to get away from his handwriting.
> or what amounts to a little over 10 days , ...
:)
> I'm frightened... do people seriously have that
> much time??? And where can I get some?
It's easy. Just got back from work? Pop in a CD, hit "grab" (there are a number of programs which read a CD, connect to CDDX, drop the info, run it through the compresser, name, and plop it out; I'm fond of AudioGrabber), sit down, read your mail. When the CD pops out, plop in another one until it's done. Repeat until done with email, slashdot for the day. One month will generally chew through ~100 cds that way. Playing Angband? Don't get interrupted, but set one in as you start and one as you're done. Etc.
Now, at ~100CDs/month, you can chew through a 1k CD collection in under a year without investing any real time.
Then again, you know he got those CDs from Napster.
I've been sitting on an invention for six months now. I'm debating whether to 'give it to the world' or patent it. I would obviously like to feed my family on the fruits of my endeavour but don't see much hope in the open source route. My invention improves upon the 80 year old One-Time Pad encryption turning it into a 'Many-Time Pad'.
/absolutely/ /nessecary/.
This implies a misunderstanding of the notion of a one-time pad. The significance of a one-time pad is that it *cannot* be broken, even by brute force, because the key is of at least the length of the document, and because the key is not stored or regeneratable. There is no way to reconstitute the document, because in a one-time pad, the document could be anything underneath.
Consider the simple case of modulo-addition crypto. Take a source and a key, both of length N. Add the values of each stream's position [i] together. If the sum exceeds the radix of storage, store the sum modulo storage's radix (generally, 256, the size of a byte.) On decrypt, if subtracting the key position drops a value below 0, add the storage's radix (basically, de-modulo on demand), and you're golden.
Though that's not particularly difficult to crack, given a repeating key (when the source stream exceeds the key stream's length, it is common to simply loop the key stream), in a one-time pad this cannot be broken. Why? Because that sum you have could represent *any* character, because the key's value could be the other summand. Therefore, a message of length 13 could be:
"hello, world!"
"bomb the cars"
"chocolate bar"
"steven wright"
You'll note that it's fairly easy to derive a key which gives the encrypted stream "AAAAAAAAAAAAA" for each of those. This is why a one-time pad cannot be broken: there's no way to tell what the key was, and therefore no way to tell the contents of a key.
Many-time pad is very, very vague, probably necessarily so. However, not to be rude, but it seems like you might consider a read or two through Applied Cryptography before you begin to announce a new development in one of the most difficult fields of mathematics currently active.
> My question is this: Could I sell enough $10
> shareware GPG extensions to compensate for not
> locking in 20 years of patent protection (and
> the $20,000 to patent it)?"
No. However, you also won't sell a proprietary encryption algorithm. Moreso than for any other software I'm aware of, peer review of crypto algorithms is
Read at Bruce Schneier's page. He explains it better than I expect to be able to. (cryptome.org, IIRC)
> if you had developed a new form of encryption,
> what would you do?
Mail it to the NSA and be watched for the rest of my life by the NSA, instead of mailing it to SlashDot and being watched for the rest of my life by the NSA. At least that way the NSA thinks I'm valuable and trustable.
Big Brother Am Be Your Friend, Yo.
> we now have really good, well understood cyphering
2 29 &mode=thread&tid=93
> methods up to a level where the failure in security
> won't be from the method of encryption.
This is especially funny in light of:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/09/008
There are in fact no cryptosystems current which are both considered secure and well understood. The closest you can come are the RSA algs or Blowfish.
> Since when is taking toxic material out of the
> ground and letting it sit on the surface (where
> rain washes it into rivers, animals eat it...
> people eat it) a good idea?
It isn't. Luckily, nobody said anything about leaving it on the surface. Read into things often?
Though, of course, the prospect of coming across a heavy-like-iron (and shiny to boot) industrial cabbage does lead to a number of interesting puns.