Dead simple. Take a SHA1 hash of the voter's name and address, a secret string Joe entered at the polling place and the candidates he voted for. Publish the list of hashes in the paper. Joe Voter calculates the hash himself and looks for it in the list. If it's not there, someone is playng games. You need the secret string because Joe's name and address are public knowledge.
And when 5% of the voters forget their password and think it's something else, did they forget it or were 5% of the votes just stolen? Who verifies that they actually know their own string?
Which won't happen until someone designs a better method of inputting data.
I'm afraid that will have to wait until someone figures out how to input data into a small portable device using voice input. Then we could have wireless communication with voice transmission, now that would really be something.:)
It was a product of defensive engineering, and software containing the inevitable bugs can be made much safer by taking a defensive approach to programming. It's better not to have an out-of-bounds situation at all, but that's no reason not to do bounds-checking wherever an OOB might pose a hazard. Yes it costs money to code all those extra checks, but that's what engineers do in most other disciplines.
Exactly. And the only reason this is different with bridges is because people don't ACCEPT bridges falling, we consider it a tragedy, so we're willing to accept the amount of resource investment it takes to make the bridge stable with redundant defensive systems. And it's precisely this reason that we need to get rid of the attitude that having security holes in software is acceptable and unavoidable. (Thus, the above post not being a troll post.)
Materials have defects, so engineers got used to compensating for this with redundant systems, and the end result is a structure which is typically stable and fault tolerant. Programmers look at code as exact, so they think they should fix the problem by getting rid of the defects, but this makes the arrogant assumption that we're smart enough to spot every defect just by looking. This needs to be changed to the assumption that the best programmers will make mistakes and introduce defects, and therefore these defects should be compensated for defensively.
Why the hell not? Good bridges are the ones that don't fall down.
I know perfectly well that it's difficult to write bug free, or at least security problem free, code of any meaningful size, but it's about time we start to change our software development focus. Reasonable development techniques exist which are more difficult to do, but which result in code with a high degree of verifiably secure code.
You can't just trust that "the code is out there, so someone will read it." Every piece of security-conscious code written needs to be peer-reviewed, at least twice, by equally competent programmers to the one who wrote it. The peer reviewers need to nitpick at every bad design and programming technique decision. Every piece of security-conscious code should be software-fault injected after every release build, and all anomalous subcompenent behavior handled in an appropriate manner (and then peer reviewed again).
I'm sure there are quite a few other equally solid techniques that aren't being implemented across the board for security critical code. There's no fundamental limit to human ability which says we can't write secure code, we just need better procedures to prevent, catch, and block human errors.
What you have said doesn't really help much.... because there must be more to it than just having new states. People have proposed computers with more than two states in the past.
A quantum computer is completely different than a classical computer with more than 2 states. When people say a quantum computer can have multiple states, they are also implying freaky properties called "superposition" and "entanglement".
The example I usually use, which is not a particularly useful calculation on a quantum computer, is the following. Say you take two quantum bytes, each of which has a superposition of all possible values from 0-255, multiply them together, and store the result in a third byte. Now the third byte simultaneously contains the results of all possible multiplications of numbers from 0-255 with numbers from 0-255. As soon as you look at the third byte to see what the answer is, it collapses into a single answer, randomly chosen from the possible answers. Let's say this time it collapses into the answer 12.
Where it gets interesting, is that because the answer collapsed into 12, the first two bytes also collapsed, just because we looked at the third one. The first two bytes now only contain pairs of numbers which can multiply to produce 12:
1, 12 2, 6 3, 4 4, 3 6, 2 12, 1
Take unusual behavior like this where operations can be performed on entangled states, add some clever mathematicians, and the end result is that we get some algorithms that compute things in polynomial time that are believed to only be computable in exponential time on a classical computer.
The only problem, is that it's rather difficult to actually build a quantum computer, and there's a lot of work to be done before a useful sized one is built anywhere.
Why would scientists have a different set of ethics than, say, workers in munitions factories?
Many scientists are unique in what they are able and driven to create. If you are in a small group of people with the ability to visualize and bring something into the world, you have a responsibility to contemplate what that could mean, and who should receive it.
Let's say you're the only person in the world who has thought of how to construct a dematerializing ray which can turn a tank into vapor, and can be built from standard components. What if you figure no one else will think of the same idea for hundreds of years, then do you make it? And if you make it, what do you do with it? Post the instructions on Slashdot?
These are difficult questions to grope with, and the ethical complexities run deep. The scientists who worked to develop the nuclear bomb were affected by it for much of their lives. The world was also greatly affected by the results of their work.
What do you do if you're a scientist in Germany in 1934, after the book burning and antisemitism began but before the war began, and your government asks you to help build a nuclear bomb, which you and only a few others in the world are able to do. Do you help?
If you can make such a decision lightly, then I hope you're never one of those people able to build such a device. Those decisions can change the course of human events.
You block it by default and you make it easy for the ones who know what theure doing to have access to it. How freaking hard is that?
You must be new to this planet. Welcome. On behalf of my species I would like to introduce you to a creature we have called "management". This is a subspecies similar to the "spider", yet instead of a silky web, it weaves a web of sticky red tape. This red tape is used to trap and devour people who thought it would be easy to convince an organization to make an exception.
Has anyone ever stopped to think that there is no TOE?... At best I think that if we find a TOE it will have extremely poor predictive value because it will be so generic that it tells us not too much more about our universe than we already know, and simply give physicists new universes to wank around in.
The phenomenon you describe is already the state of physics. The best theories we have which provide the most fundamental information are often least useful for direct macroscopic prediction because they are so computationally expensive.
There are two reasons to search for a TOE (which is really just a continual search for each more fundamental theory). The first, is that with each new more fundamental theory allows us to make approximated theories, which give us computable predictive results. The second, is that each new more fundamental theory shows us new boundary conditions at an extreme limit. These boundary conditions are where "new physics" is.
Funny, I haven't heard anything about it prior to today. Guess I'm just out of the loop then...
Well, since it's not official yet, it could just be that someone is imagining a Beowulf Cluster. (Wouldn't be the first time.) Hopefully it turns out to be true. The more supercomputers, the better the world.
So the question herein lies, what happens when you shift an infinitely repeating decimal 1 place to the left? Does it magically gain a new decimal place on the right? This may happen, but that violates the basic laws of normal numbers.
Yes, it does. The strangeness of this principle of infinities is more clearly seen when you consider the problem of the infinite hotel.
Suppose there is a hotel with a countably (each room is numbered, 1 through infinity) infinite number of rooms, and every room is full. In the middle of the night a bus stops by with an infinite number of passengers. The bus driver asks the hotel manager if he has room for the new guests even though the hotel is full. The hotel manager says, "Sure, there's plenty of room." How does he fit the new guests?
There are a lot of solutions, but the simplest is just that every guest already in the hotel moves from room n to room 2*n. Then all the new guests fill in the odd numbered rooms (of which there are an infinite number).
This probably violates your common sense intuition, but that's because common sense intuition deals with finite numbers of things. If you think about it for a while, it makes sense for this to work in a hotel with an infinite number of rooms.
The idea of shifting all the 9's left one spot is the same thing. There are an infinite number of 9's to the right of them to fill in all the previous spots. If you go to the infinite hotel, kick out the guest in room 1, and ask all the other guests to move from room n to room n-1, then all your rooms are full again, even though you have one less guest.
0.99...9 + 0.00...1 = 1, yes, but this is not the question at hand. The flaw is in your usage of infinite. Infinite does not mean, "Everytime we think of it, we add another 9." It means that the listing of 9's is boundless. It is then incorrect to say, "I will add 1 to the last 9," because there by definition is no last 9.
This isn't the kind of technique you can meaningfully discuss without some sort of reported accuracy. If they take the skull of Don King and produce a computer generated image of Danny Devito, then it's not particularly useful.
Um... correct me if I'm wrong... but this would imply that it is impossible to construct an AND gate, right? Because it is impossible to extend a conventional AND gate (or OR, or NOR, or NAND) so that it is reversible. That is, you can't make a reversible gate that takes n inputs to n outputs, such that one of the outputs is the AND of all the inputs.
All this means for quantum computing, is that in order to emulate an irreversible gate like AND, you have to also keep around enough extra information in the output so that you can still reverse the computation. (A, B, 0) --> (A, B, A^B), for example, could be a valid quantum gate. This restriction only applies for as long as you want to maintain a superposition of values in A and B. There are tricks to try to keep this explosion of storage needs under control, but it will be a significant problem with large algorithms.
If this idea catches on, open source developers everywhere could band together and create the final open source game, OpenWallet, after which we would all promptly go bankrupt.
they haven't proven anything to me other than that in the hands of an untrained newbie without an eye toward optimizing performance Gentoo gets poorer performance than the average Linux distribution.
It's probably not fair to call them untrained newbies. From the article it sounded like there were several skilled people participating in the test.
But yes, provided their hardware was identical like they said it was, what they did show is precisely that. In the hands of someone who makes an effort, but may not go to extremes, Gentoo can perform poorer than a binary distribution. If it's true, this is a useful observation, because it can tell some people whether or not Gentoo is right for them.
In other words, it takes more than just compiling the source yourself to get good performance, and if you're not going to do these extra things, don't run Gentoo for performance.
Slashdot Mirror
I patented "ignition, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, take-off"
Then we will simply use a one-click rocket.
Dead simple. Take a SHA1 hash of the voter's name and address, a secret string Joe entered at the polling place and the candidates he voted for. Publish the list of hashes in the paper. Joe Voter calculates the hash himself and looks for it in the list. If it's not there, someone is playng games. You need the secret string because Joe's name and address are public knowledge.
And when 5% of the voters forget their password and think it's something else, did they forget it or were 5% of the votes just stolen? Who verifies that they actually know their own string?
Which won't happen until someone designs a better method of inputting data.
:)
I'm afraid that will have to wait until someone figures out how to input data into a small portable device using voice input. Then we could have wireless communication with voice transmission, now that would really be something.
It was a product of defensive engineering, and software containing the inevitable bugs can be made much safer by taking a defensive approach to programming. It's better not to have an out-of-bounds situation at all, but that's no reason not to do bounds-checking wherever an OOB might pose a hazard. Yes it costs money to code all those extra checks, but that's what engineers do in most other disciplines.
Exactly. And the only reason this is different with bridges is because people don't ACCEPT bridges falling, we consider it a tragedy, so we're willing to accept the amount of resource investment it takes to make the bridge stable with redundant defensive systems. And it's precisely this reason that we need to get rid of the attitude that having security holes in software is acceptable and unavoidable. (Thus, the above post not being a troll post.)
Materials have defects, so engineers got used to compensating for this with redundant systems, and the end result is a structure which is typically stable and fault tolerant. Programmers look at code as exact, so they think they should fix the problem by getting rid of the defects, but this makes the arrogant assumption that we're smart enough to spot every defect just by looking. This needs to be changed to the assumption that the best programmers will make mistakes and introduce defects, and therefore these defects should be compensated for defensively.
Good software !== no bugs ever.
Why the hell not? Good bridges are the ones that don't fall down.
I know perfectly well that it's difficult to write bug free, or at least security problem free, code of any meaningful size, but it's about time we start to change our software development focus. Reasonable development techniques exist which are more difficult to do, but which result in code with a high degree of verifiably secure code.
You can't just trust that "the code is out there, so someone will read it." Every piece of security-conscious code written needs to be peer-reviewed, at least twice, by equally competent programmers to the one who wrote it. The peer reviewers need to nitpick at every bad design and programming technique decision. Every piece of security-conscious code should be software-fault injected after every release build, and all anomalous subcompenent behavior handled in an appropriate manner (and then peer reviewed again).
I'm sure there are quite a few other equally solid techniques that aren't being implemented across the board for security critical code. There's no fundamental limit to human ability which says we can't write secure code, we just need better procedures to prevent, catch, and block human errors.
What you have said doesn't really help much.... because there must be more to it than just having new states. People have proposed computers with more than two states in the past.
A quantum computer is completely different than a classical computer with more than 2 states. When people say a quantum computer can have multiple states, they are also implying freaky properties called "superposition" and "entanglement".
The example I usually use, which is not a particularly useful calculation on a quantum computer, is the following. Say you take two quantum bytes, each of which has a superposition of all possible values from 0-255, multiply them together, and store the result in a third byte. Now the third byte simultaneously contains the results of all possible multiplications of numbers from 0-255 with numbers from 0-255. As soon as you look at the third byte to see what the answer is, it collapses into a single answer, randomly chosen from the possible answers. Let's say this time it collapses into the answer 12.
Where it gets interesting, is that because the answer collapsed into 12, the first two bytes also collapsed, just because we looked at the third one. The first two bytes now only contain pairs of numbers which can multiply to produce 12:
1, 12
2, 6
3, 4
4, 3
6, 2
12, 1
Take unusual behavior like this where operations can be performed on entangled states, add some clever mathematicians, and the end result is that we get some algorithms that compute things in polynomial time that are believed to only be computable in exponential time on a classical computer.
The only problem, is that it's rather difficult to actually build a quantum computer, and there's a lot of work to be done before a useful sized one is built anywhere.
Why would scientists have a different set of ethics than, say, workers in munitions factories?
Many scientists are unique in what they are able and driven to create. If you are in a small group of people with the ability to visualize and bring something into the world, you have a responsibility to contemplate what that could mean, and who should receive it.
Let's say you're the only person in the world who has thought of how to construct a dematerializing ray which can turn a tank into vapor, and can be built from standard components. What if you figure no one else will think of the same idea for hundreds of years, then do you make it? And if you make it, what do you do with it? Post the instructions on Slashdot?
These are difficult questions to grope with, and the ethical complexities run deep. The scientists who worked to develop the nuclear bomb were affected by it for much of their lives. The world was also greatly affected by the results of their work.
What do you do if you're a scientist in Germany in 1934, after the book burning and antisemitism began but before the war began, and your government asks you to help build a nuclear bomb, which you and only a few others in the world are able to do. Do you help?
If you can make such a decision lightly, then I hope you're never one of those people able to build such a device. Those decisions can change the course of human events.
You block it by default and you make it easy for the ones who know what theure doing to have access to it.
How freaking hard is that?
You must be new to this planet. Welcome. On behalf of my species I would like to introduce you to a creature we have called "management". This is a subspecies similar to the "spider", yet instead of a silky web, it weaves a web of sticky red tape. This red tape is used to trap and devour people who thought it would be easy to convince an organization to make an exception.
Has anyone ever stopped to think that there is no TOE? ...
At best I think that if we find a TOE it will have extremely poor predictive value because it will be so generic that it tells us not too much more about our universe than we already know, and simply give physicists new universes to wank around in.
The phenomenon you describe is already the state of physics. The best theories we have which provide the most fundamental information are often least useful for direct macroscopic prediction because they are so computationally expensive.
There are two reasons to search for a TOE (which is really just a continual search for each more fundamental theory). The first, is that with each new more fundamental theory allows us to make approximated theories, which give us computable predictive results. The second, is that each new more fundamental theory shows us new boundary conditions at an extreme limit. These boundary conditions are where "new physics" is.
Maybe they should have used a computer.
Clippy: "It looks like you're trying to sue us, would you like me to delete all of your files?"
Funny, I haven't heard anything about it prior to today. Guess I'm just out of the loop then...
Well, since it's not official yet, it could just be that someone is imagining a Beowulf Cluster. (Wouldn't be the first time.) Hopefully it turns out to be true. The more supercomputers, the better the world.
Some days I think Slashdot needs a +10, Insightful...
the BSA and RIAA will rain the holy shitstorm of litigation on the school.
When was the last time someone sued the phone companies for criminals using public payphones in the street? Wouldn't we all find that idea ridiculous?
What makes you think that the slashdot effect changes the content of the music?
Actually, I think what he was trying to say was something along the lines of:
In Soviet Russia, music slashdots you.
Tempting to mod that down, but instead I'll reply with a correction.
This is the correct paper:
Low-Rate TCP-Targeted Denial of Service Attacks (The Shrew vs. the Mice and Elephants)
This is the abstract you read:
Robustness to Inflated Subscription in Multicast Congestion Control
These are separate papers by different authors. The TCP DoS does not involve Multicast.
"I've been thinking about how wonderful it would be if all people renounced violence forever."
"That's a beautiful thought, Dogbert."
"If nobody else was violent, I could conquer the whole stupid planet with just a butter knife."
~ Dogbert and Dilbert, Dilbert by: Scott Adams
So the question herein lies, what happens when you shift an infinitely repeating decimal 1 place to the left? Does it magically gain a new decimal place on the right? This may happen, but that violates the basic laws of normal numbers.
Yes, it does. The strangeness of this principle of infinities is more clearly seen when you consider the problem of the infinite hotel.
Suppose there is a hotel with a countably (each room is numbered, 1 through infinity) infinite number of rooms, and every room is full. In the middle of the night a bus stops by with an infinite number of passengers. The bus driver asks the hotel manager if he has room for the new guests even though the hotel is full. The hotel manager says, "Sure, there's plenty of room." How does he fit the new guests?
There are a lot of solutions, but the simplest is just that every guest already in the hotel moves from room n to room 2*n. Then all the new guests fill in the odd numbered rooms (of which there are an infinite number).
This probably violates your common sense intuition, but that's because common sense intuition deals with finite numbers of things. If you think about it for a while, it makes sense for this to work in a hotel with an infinite number of rooms.
The idea of shifting all the 9's left one spot is the same thing. There are an infinite number of 9's to the right of them to fill in all the previous spots. If you go to the infinite hotel, kick out the guest in room 1, and ask all the other guests to move from room n to room n-1, then all your rooms are full again, even though you have one less guest.
0.99...9 + 0.00...1 = 1, yes, but this is not the question at hand. The flaw is in your usage of infinite. Infinite does not mean, "Everytime we think of it, we add another 9." It means that the listing of 9's is boundless. It is then incorrect to say, "I will add 1 to the last 9," because there by definition is no last 9.
This isn't the kind of technique you can meaningfully discuss without some sort of reported accuracy. If they take the skull of Don King and produce a computer generated image of Danny Devito, then it's not particularly useful.
Um... correct me if I'm wrong... but this would imply that it is impossible to construct an AND gate, right? Because it is impossible to extend a conventional AND gate (or OR, or NOR, or NAND) so that it is reversible. That is, you can't make a reversible gate that takes n inputs to n outputs, such that one of the outputs is the AND of all the inputs.
All this means for quantum computing, is that in order to emulate an irreversible gate like AND, you have to also keep around enough extra information in the output so that you can still reverse the computation. (A, B, 0) --> (A, B, A^B), for example, could be a valid quantum gate. This restriction only applies for as long as you want to maintain a superposition of values in A and B. There are tricks to try to keep this explosion of storage needs under control, but it will be a significant problem with large algorithms.
Obligatory Where's George link.
This can only officially be resolved with a Slashdot poll.
Chant with me, poll, poll, poll...
If this idea catches on, open source developers everywhere could band together and create the final open source game, OpenWallet, after which we would all promptly go bankrupt.
they haven't proven anything to me other than that in the hands of an untrained newbie without an eye toward optimizing performance Gentoo gets poorer performance than the average Linux distribution.
It's probably not fair to call them untrained newbies. From the article it sounded like there were several skilled people participating in the test.
But yes, provided their hardware was identical like they said it was, what they did show is precisely that. In the hands of someone who makes an effort, but may not go to extremes, Gentoo can perform poorer than a binary distribution. If it's true, this is a useful observation, because it can tell some people whether or not Gentoo is right for them.
In other words, it takes more than just compiling the source yourself to get good performance, and if you're not going to do these extra things, don't run Gentoo for performance.
We also don't shoot the idiot for calling it a sucky country.
Perhaps one of the most insightful comments ever posted on Slashdot.