Assuming a bevy of approved escrow cryptosystems were somehow made available overnight, and made flexible enough to support the myriad distributed applications that rely on cryptographic software for their security, what's next? I mean, if I'm to be protected from the evil-doers who use cryptography to further their ends, what's the government going to do to stop them from constructing their own non-approved cryptosystems? I demand protection!
So you say that the government can just sniff for encrypted traffic that's not encrypted via the approved cryptosystems. But how will it know that? There are plenty of perfectly innocent compressed binary attachments flying around the net at any given instant. Any one of those could contain an encrypted message. Will somebody be cracking each one of those open, looking for an unapproved cryptosystem? The effort involved at tracking all those leads seems like an enormous misdirection of energy. And if they find the sender, what exactly are the charges? How would you prove that a block of apparently random binary data (which is what the output of a good cryptosystem looks like) is in fact an encrypted message? Do you just lock a person up until the spill the key or (if it's really just a random block of bits) rot?
Keep in mind that the bastards who attacked us last week were willing to (A) die and (B) train for years to be pilots. What is it about picking up a copy of Applied Cryptography and typing in one of the algorithms that's more challenging than either of those things?
There's a big difference between Microsoft (and whatever johnny-come-lately fabricated trustee companies that spring up) and banks. Banks have a culture wholly different from companies like Microsoft. I'm not saying they're divine or infallible, but simply that the way they look at the world and their responsibilities for information are shaped by years and years of living within a complex web of federal and state regulations, and of sitting on the "capital" of essentially unlimited public trust. They don't "think out of the box" about ways to use information they control. The comparison to ATM networks is therefore (in my opinion) structurally accurate but misleading.
Reread what I wrote, Mr. Coward. I clearly said that society agrees to a variety of measures designed to reduce the possibility of harm coming to individuals. That is distinctly different from a hypothetical right to safety.
Rights are about personal freedom. A "right" that implies somebody else has to make some sacrifice on your behalf seems obviously bogus to me.
But people have the right to go to work without buildings falling on them, too.
That is a fallacy Jon, or at least a distortion. The implication is that people have a right to be protected from bad things by society, and I strongly disagree.
If the government were dropping buildings on people, then clearly that would be as criminal as if a terrorist were to do it, and I would expect some consequences. But in much the same sense, I do not have a right to be free from disease. I do not have a right to be ensured that my car will not be stolen. I do not have a right to not be robbed by a criminal.
Think of it this way: a particular sort of crime -- that is, an act defined societally as a crime -- does not imply that potential victims have a right not to be victimized. Society condemns and punishes perpetrators of crimes, and on popular agreement puts in place systems and mechanisms to make perpetration of crime more difficul. None of that implies that citizens have unlimited rights to safety.
No, you don't, as that statement is an oxymoron. Sun operating systems never ran on VAXes, as Digital and Sun were in direct fierce competition. It was probably SunOs 3 (on Suns:-) or 4.2 BSD.
If you've never seen purple potatoes cooked, you'd be amazed at how beautiful they are. The purple is a really rich color, like the mineral sugelite. I've made them as straight boiled/salted potatoes, i.e.: wash and peel (or just partially peel, if you like; just peel a strip around the potato's waist), then place in a saucepan and just barely cover with salted water. Cook over a strong fire mostly uncovered until the water is almost cooked away or the potatoes are fork-tender. Then, carefully drain off most of the remaining water, drop in a good lump of butter, cover the pan, and return to a very low fire. Wait a minute for the butter to melt, then (holding the lid firmly) shake the pan sharply a few times. Let it go a couple minutes covered, then uncover and allow the potatoes to get starchy on the outside. These look just spectacular on a plate.
You can also cut them in big chunks and make "steak fries". They look normal on the outside (i.e., brown), but they're purple on the inside.
I've never had a guest flip out over the color, other than to remark on how nice they look.
For now, maybe (and I do mean maybe), but can you honestly believe that Microsoft isn't working on a suite of Passport-related ActiveX plugins (or.Net or whatever) that work on any browser so long as it's an IE version running on a Windows platform? Or an IE release that has native support for HTML extensions needed to effectively use Passport?
Problem is they can't respond quickly enough to prevent CPU burnout. The probes are polled at most once per second, and the probe itself doesn't detect the temperature rise very fast.
The Athlons apparently take only a small number of seconds to burn out, so a software solution is inadequate - indeed, that's the point of the article. The PIII and PIV have internal coolant failure handling.
So they could have, like, a fixed locally-stored image of a tit that remains in the lower right hand corner, and the rest of the screen can then be filled with random swirly colors.
So that's a factor of 100 difference. With some clever algorithms (eg. Div-X), making use of the fact that NTSC is generally lossy...
Umm, wait a sec -- in the VideoCD compression phase you've already taken all the advantage you can of the slop in the original NTSC. You're talking about 100X compression of an already tightly-compressed data stream, which is to say that you're going to find sufficient redundancy in the data to remove 99% of it.
Pull the other one.
Re:Microsoft should be sued
on
Code Red III
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· Score: 1
Either way, he took deliberate action to make his PC a server, and with it, took on the responsibility of keeping that server up-to-date.
Or else his PC vendor sold him the thing pre-configured with Win2K Server. That doesn't seem unlikely to me at all. And in any case, an OS installation that includes turning on a web server by default seems stupid.
So with Apple now being aggressive about digital (LCD) displays, and seeing as they already push their computers as multimedia tools, will they be the first to jump on the bandwagon of keeping media streams encrypted up to the point where the bits are turned into light?
bzzt but thanks for playing. If you manufacture something, then you have created a thing. When you sell the thing, you no longer have it.
And to enable the market to work, we have to treat intellectual labor as if it were physical labor, within the bounds of copyright law.
Translation: because I think my social planning ideas are valid, the State should use its power of coercive force to create an artificial situation of scarcity so that a market can come about.
Keep in mind that the whole concept of "intellectual property" is fairly new. The world went on nicely for quite some time without it, with PLENTY of significant works of art produced. As a specific example, it should be noted that Mozart did not benefit from anything like the copyright notions we have today. He was paid by people who wanted new Mozart music, despite the fact that there was already Mozart music in existance, often memorized by musicians able to play it back at will.
You're still misreading it. The players must all simultaneously either answer or pass (in other words, choose to not guess).
I'm no mathematician, but the "answer" to this seemed totally obvious; it was literally the first thing that popped into my head when I read the part about being able to pass.
The set of possible hat color picks are:
RRR
RRB
RBR
RBB
BRR
BRB
BBR
BBB
Six of the eight involve two of one color and one of the other; there's your 75%.
Not that this is going to be successful, but just like anybody running (non-mass-market OS) on a (non-mass-market CPU) using a (non-mass-market browser) feels about Shockwave or VRML pages today, this Curl stuff would render any site using it worthless for such situations. And note that you just have to fit one of those descriptions, possibly, for Curl pages to be inaccessible. Note that they describe their technology as a "dynamic native compiler". How soon do you suppose they'll have the Alpha Linux version ready?
Of course, any company that would do a Curl-only web site is probably so stupid that they wouldn't stay in business very long anyway, but I see no reason to introduce more opportunities for stupid people to screw themselves.
Re:I want one, and have for a long time!
on
FPGA Supercomputers
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· Score: 1
if you have a massively parallel grid of single bit computing cells with a delay of a single clock on ALL operations, almost all timing problems can be resolved and race conditions are only a matter of looking for circular references.
And if pigs had wings...
Seriously, the electrical problems around creating such a device are pretty daunting. And once you've got your million one-bit cells out there computing away, how exactly do you get the answers out? What's going to synchronize and arbitrate the communication system? What about storage? How do you arbitrate access to storage? And if you just plan on using the array itself for storage, with only a small minority of the processors connected to actual storage, then suddenly you've constrained the throughput considerably.
People have been looking for the Holy Grail of CPU architecture for quite some time. It seems to be the case that straightforward applications of COTS hardware will win every time. Note that in the case of Starbridge, pretty much everything is vaporware. Their web site has been trying to create a developer base of Viva programmers for a couple years now. Well where are they? Surely there'd be at least a few out there who could testify to the veracity of their claims. They've also been promising their various billion gigaflop configurations for a long time; where are they? At least a couple of the companies who've signed up to use the technology have vague connections right back to Starbridge.
Basically, the whole thing looks like a scam to me.
Maybe, but they have no qualms about using quicksort for simple arrays of primitive types.
That 40% makes a significant difference if the comparison function is complicated. Clearly, the fact that the comparison involves a function call already makes it way more expensive than a simple comparison of two primitive values.
Well, surprise, but in many (if not most) real code situations, quicksort is not the fastest sort to use. The best thing it's got going for it is the fact that the space overhead is constant. But when you're sorting lists of objects, and the comparison involves something expensive (like a function call) while interchanges are cheap (like exchanging a couple of pointers in an array), then a merge sort is going to be better.
Try it for yourself. Code up both, and keep track of how many comparisons are done. You'll find that merge sort does about 40% fewer comparisons than quicksort. I'll gladly trade the space (on my ridiculously memory-loaded server) for speed.
Check the javadocs for the sort routines in java.util.Arrays. You'll note that the ones not sorting simple arrays of primitive types do not use quicksort.
Baloney. Just wait until your management changes. The new PHB will not know of the havoc you've wrought. The best thing is when some layer of middle management (at which there's no understanding of code maintenance anyway) picks you as a shiny toy because of the fabulous work you've done and the incredible dedication you show at being willing to pitch in and fight fires whenever it's necessary. So you get promoted to Poo Bah Engineer and you never have to work again. You can also demand favors from the legions of lowly scum-level programmers trying desparately to figure out what your software does.
Ow, Oo, oww, you're idiotic opinion is causing me mental anguish! It literally hurts me to think there are people as stupid as you! I want your speech stopped!
I so fervently wish that dumbasses like you would get a clue, and realize that when you steal my couch I no longer have a couch. When I copy a song, the original copy remains in absolutely perfect condition, exactly as useable as it was prior to the making of the copy.
Intellectual "property" that can be non-destructively copied is only property because it's thusly defined. This idea that content creators are being cheated out of potential profits presupposes this property concept. Does that promote content creation? Maybe, but at the expense of everyones obvious freedom to make non-destructive copies of information. Why it's taken as gospel truth that the world absolutely needs content creators (and most importantly the megalomaniacal corporations that acquire and market the content) to spew forth ever-more "art" is beyond me. I don't give a rat's ass if some garage band in Idaho won't be able to create content if people freely copy their songs. Tough shit.
Slashdot Mirror
So you say that the government can just sniff for encrypted traffic that's not encrypted via the approved cryptosystems. But how will it know that? There are plenty of perfectly innocent compressed binary attachments flying around the net at any given instant. Any one of those could contain an encrypted message. Will somebody be cracking each one of those open, looking for an unapproved cryptosystem? The effort involved at tracking all those leads seems like an enormous misdirection of energy. And if they find the sender, what exactly are the charges? How would you prove that a block of apparently random binary data (which is what the output of a good cryptosystem looks like) is in fact an encrypted message? Do you just lock a person up until the spill the key or (if it's really just a random block of bits) rot?
Keep in mind that the bastards who attacked us last week were willing to (A) die and (B) train for years to be pilots. What is it about picking up a copy of Applied Cryptography and typing in one of the algorithms that's more challenging than either of those things?
There's a big difference between Microsoft (and whatever johnny-come-lately fabricated trustee companies that spring up) and banks. Banks have a culture wholly different from companies like Microsoft. I'm not saying they're divine or infallible, but simply that the way they look at the world and their responsibilities for information are shaped by years and years of living within a complex web of federal and state regulations, and of sitting on the "capital" of essentially unlimited public trust. They don't "think out of the box" about ways to use information they control. The comparison to ATM networks is therefore (in my opinion) structurally accurate but misleading.
Rights are about personal freedom. A "right" that implies somebody else has to make some sacrifice on your behalf seems obviously bogus to me.
That is a fallacy Jon, or at least a distortion. The implication is that people have a right to be protected from bad things by society, and I strongly disagree.
If the government were dropping buildings on people, then clearly that would be as criminal as if a terrorist were to do it, and I would expect some consequences. But in much the same sense, I do not have a right to be free from disease. I do not have a right to be ensured that my car will not be stolen. I do not have a right to not be robbed by a criminal.
Think of it this way: a particular sort of crime -- that is, an act defined societally as a crime -- does not imply that potential victims have a right not to be victimized. Society condemns and punishes perpetrators of crimes, and on popular agreement puts in place systems and mechanisms to make perpetration of crime more difficul. None of that implies that citizens have unlimited rights to safety.
No, you don't, as that statement is an oxymoron. Sun operating systems never ran on VAXes, as Digital and Sun were in direct fierce competition. It was probably SunOs 3 (on Suns
You can also cut them in big chunks and make "steak fries". They look normal on the outside (i.e., brown), but they're purple on the inside.
I've never had a guest flip out over the color, other than to remark on how nice they look.
For now, maybe (and I do mean maybe), but can you honestly believe that Microsoft isn't working on a suite of Passport-related ActiveX plugins (or
The Athlons apparently take only a small number of seconds to burn out, so a software solution is inadequate - indeed, that's the point of the article. The PIII and PIV have internal coolant failure handling.
So they could have, like, a fixed locally-stored image of a tit that remains in the lower right hand corner, and the rest of the screen can then be filled with random swirly colors.
Umm, wait a sec -- in the VideoCD compression phase you've already taken all the advantage you can of the slop in the original NTSC. You're talking about 100X compression of an already tightly-compressed data stream, which is to say that you're going to find sufficient redundancy in the data to remove 99% of it.
Pull the other one.
Or else his PC vendor sold him the thing pre-configured with Win2K Server. That doesn't seem unlikely to me at all. And in any case, an OS installation that includes turning on a web server by default seems stupid.
so they can help David Letterman so he'll stop whining.
So with Apple now being aggressive about digital (LCD) displays, and seeing as they already push their computers as multimedia tools, will they be the first to jump on the bandwagon of keeping media streams encrypted up to the point where the bits are turned into light?
Massive STRIDES, not "strives". GEEZ.
bzzt but thanks for playing. If you manufacture something, then you have created a thing. When you sell the thing, you no longer have it.
Translation: because I think my social planning ideas are valid, the State should use its power of coercive force to create an artificial situation of scarcity so that a market can come about.
Keep in mind that the whole concept of "intellectual property" is fairly new. The world went on nicely for quite some time without it, with PLENTY of significant works of art produced. As a specific example, it should be noted that Mozart did not benefit from anything like the copyright notions we have today. He was paid by people who wanted new Mozart music, despite the fact that there was already Mozart music in existance, often memorized by musicians able to play it back at will.
I'm no mathematician, but the "answer" to this seemed totally obvious; it was literally the first thing that popped into my head when I read the part about being able to pass.
The set of possible hat color picks are:
- RRR
- RRB
- RBR
- RBB
- BRR
- BRB
- BBR
- BBB
Six of the eight involve two of one color and one of the other; there's your 75%.When was the last TeX bug award given out?
Of course, any company that would do a Curl-only web site is probably so stupid that they wouldn't stay in business very long anyway, but I see no reason to introduce more opportunities for stupid people to screw themselves.
And if pigs had wings ...
Seriously, the electrical problems around creating such a device are pretty daunting. And once you've got your million one-bit cells out there computing away, how exactly do you get the answers out? What's going to synchronize and arbitrate the communication system? What about storage? How do you arbitrate access to storage? And if you just plan on using the array itself for storage, with only a small minority of the processors connected to actual storage, then suddenly you've constrained the throughput considerably.
People have been looking for the Holy Grail of CPU architecture for quite some time. It seems to be the case that straightforward applications of COTS hardware will win every time. Note that in the case of Starbridge, pretty much everything is vaporware. Their web site has been trying to create a developer base of Viva programmers for a couple years now. Well where are they? Surely there'd be at least a few out there who could testify to the veracity of their claims. They've also been promising their various billion gigaflop configurations for a long time; where are they? At least a couple of the companies who've signed up to use the technology have vague connections right back to Starbridge.
Basically, the whole thing looks like a scam to me.
That 40% makes a significant difference if the comparison function is complicated. Clearly, the fact that the comparison involves a function call already makes it way more expensive than a simple comparison of two primitive values.
Try it for yourself. Code up both, and keep track of how many comparisons are done. You'll find that merge sort does about 40% fewer comparisons than quicksort. I'll gladly trade the space (on my ridiculously memory-loaded server) for speed.
Check the javadocs for the sort routines in java.util.Arrays. You'll note that the ones not sorting simple arrays of primitive types do not use quicksort.
Baloney. Just wait until your management changes. The new PHB will not know of the havoc you've wrought. The best thing is when some layer of middle management (at which there's no understanding of code maintenance anyway) picks you as a shiny toy because of the fabulous work you've done and the incredible dedication you show at being willing to pitch in and fight fires whenever it's necessary. So you get promoted to Poo Bah Engineer and you never have to work again. You can also demand favors from the legions of lowly scum-level programmers trying desparately to figure out what your software does.
I'm not making that up.
Oh, go screw you'reself.
Dumbass.
I so fervently wish that dumbasses like you would get a clue, and realize that when you steal my couch I no longer have a couch. When I copy a song, the original copy remains in absolutely perfect condition, exactly as useable as it was prior to the making of the copy.
Intellectual "property" that can be non-destructively copied is only property because it's thusly defined. This idea that content creators are being cheated out of potential profits presupposes this property concept. Does that promote content creation? Maybe, but at the expense of everyones obvious freedom to make non-destructive copies of information. Why it's taken as gospel truth that the world absolutely needs content creators (and most importantly the megalomaniacal corporations that acquire and market the content) to spew forth ever-more "art" is beyond me. I don't give a rat's ass if some garage band in Idaho won't be able to create content if people freely copy their songs. Tough shit.