That's a good comparison. Who's more impaired, a woman with carpal tunnel for a decade, or a woman with one arm with no carpal tunnel? Who would do better at changing diapers, brushing teeth, tending the garden, doing laundry, carrying groceries, and typing on a computer?
I suspect the one-armed woman will do better at all those tasks except for changing diapers.
The FBI's argument was that because the device only intercepted intra-computer communication (i.e. from the keyboard to the CPU) and not computer to computer communications, those communications are not protected by the Wiretap statute (18 USC 2518 [cornell.edu]).
Ah, so reading someone's diary is less of a privacy invasion than listening in on their telephone calls? I'm surprised that anyone would make that argument, much less be persuaded by it.
The way I learned it in biology class, all cells have these "telomers", which are a bunch of extra segments the end of the DNA. Every time the cells split they cut off a segment. When all the segments are gone, the cell doesn't split anymore. All cells eventually die. Cancer is caused when cells figure out how to pad extra telomers on the end of the DNA so they can keep splitting.
So, you get cancer if you remove the mechanism for aging? Didn't we know that already?
CG, plus tools for manipulating voices, plus the internet, eventually will mean that one person can produce and distribute a movie on their own with about as much effort as it takes to write a book and publish it on the internet today.
A quote from a recent news announcement by MHTX, which has been trying to make a product out of its methanol consuming, lithographically manufactured, fuel cells for several years now:
New generation cell phones now being introduced to consumers require power well beyond the capacity of current lithium ion batteries to power them for long periods. Manhattan Scientifics believes the solution lies in portable charging devices that provide a constantly charged state. Earlier this month, the company announced its cooperative fuel cell development work with the Mihama Corporation where an earlier version of the PowerHolster(TM) was demonstrated at a trade show in Japan.
I recall a classmate in college observing that I was quite an odd bird because for me learning was an end in itself. Most everyone else (especially him) was there as a stepping stone to getting a job. Everyone learned, but the motives were different.
I personally think that at least 10% of the students were there for learning's sake, rather than as a means to some different end.
As for which motive I most admire, hmmm. I think that would go to Laura Lemay, who visualized her ideal job (one that did not quite exist yet) and created a degree to suit her to it.
I know the first 40 bytes have noticable correlations to the key. That's avoided by skipping the first 256 bytes. I know that if you see 2^^31 bytes of an RC4 stream you can distinguish it from random noise. That's not an interesting flaw at all, unless you're generating 2gig of data and you don't want anyone to know which encryption protocol you're using. Did you mean something more by saying "RC4 is broken"?
What is the correlation between being homosexual and being left handed? I've spotted articles saying that both occur with about the same frequency (10% of the population), both seem part nature part nurture, and the correlation to nature was stronger in lefthandedness than homosexuality. But I haven't found what the correlation is between the two. Should be 10%, if they are unrelated.
The MMR shot (Measles-Mumps-Rubella), given at age 1 1/2. I have one such article on my desk. The Measles vaccine gives a rash and fever, the other two seem pretty reaction free. The theory was that one of the other two gets through some membranes it shouldn't due to reactions to the Measles, then triggered Autism. European studies show that if there is a correlation between MMR and Autism, the correlation isn't very strong. The shots can be given separately, as they had for decades before they were combined, at a slight expense to parents (and extra doctor visit for child).
If one identical twin has autism, the other does too, 9 out of 10 times. If one child in a family has autism, the chances of the next having autism too are 1 in 20. 1 in 3 if two children already have autism. That's quite a correlation to genetics. It does imply that it involves more than one gene, otherwise the 90% for identical twins would imply at least 45% for separate siblings.
The question, "Is there a program of length n that passes this test suite in polynomial time?" is NP-complete. Algorithm: guess the program, then run it through the test suite. I believe an O(n) algorithm for that would make mighty big changes to computer science.
I was just shopping for Christmas lights. I saw the LED Christmas lights. $8. Those looked like a good idea.
But the real story was that I had a very hard time finding the computer controlled ones anymore ("multifunction", 8 modes, color coordinated patterns). The guy at Orchard Supply claimed he'd been there three years and had never heard of such a thing. Er, right. Home Depot finally had them, $8, but only with red, green, yellow strands (no blue anymore). Close enough.
My previous multifunction color bulbs, which I bought from Orchard Supply three years ago, had the control circuit short out last year. Nice "poof" sound. Perhaps the new ones will last longer. If they'd had multifunction LED strands, I would have got them.
Assuming nanotech, and 100x100x100 atom processors that operate at the speed of light, a nanocomputer the size of the sun running a million years can do 2^268 instructions. I don't think brute forcing a keyspace of size 2^255 with a conventional computer will ever happen.
A quantum computer I hear only has to cover sqrt(n) of a keyspace of n to get the right answer. A 1-meter cube nanocomputer running 1 second could do 2^129 instructions, so a quantum nanocomputer that can break a keyspace of size 2^255 is believable.
http://burtleburtle.net/bob/crypto/magnitude.htm l
The first lines of patents tend to be broad, but not because the patents are broad, but rather because the first lines are introducing the field that the patent is in.
The first few claims are often the same way, giving definitions and context for claims built on them. Claims aren't supposed to be that way, but often they are anyhow. I was once told that a claim had to be a single sentence and could not contain the word "or". Makes things tricky.
The only new sites I go to are the ones I find through Google while trying to answer questions. If your site is the only one that can answer my question, I will find it. If yours is one of a hundred, I won't ever visit it.
I've said for a long time, you'll know when computer animation has really arrived when we start getting new Shirley Temple movies that are indistinguishable from the old ones.
Y'know, it shouldn't be possible to use publicly available information as accepted proof of identity in the first place. There's no need for it.
Every computer should ship with a smart card reader. Driver's licenses and credit cards should be replaced with smart cards that can do challenge/response or public key encryption, and never let the private keys out of the card. The public key (or whatever it takes to recognize the card is authentic) can be in databases, but that isn't proof of identity. Since the private key isn't anywhere but the card, you can't get it without stealing (or at least physically examining) the card. If the card is reported stolen, you have to show up somewhere in person for fingerprints and an eye scan to get another. It would be very hard to steal one person's identity, and stealing the identity of all Oregonians just wouldn't happen.
IIRC, the same scheme would take away a lot of the motivation for Microsoft's passport infrastructure.
What if we allow companies stabilizing open source projects to disallow the copying of their stable releases, but require that they ship with modifiable code, and require that they return their bug fixes to the mainline? The companies still have a value-added product, customers can still fix bugs they find in those stable releases, and the mainline still gets all the bug fixes. A mainline that has moved on a bit plus all the bug fixes from a stabilized release is not as good as a stabilized release, because the product as a whole has not been tested.
I've been following the company that makes the fuel cells for the fuel-cell bike (MHTX) for several years. Their initial goal was micro-fuel cells (on sheets of plastic, manufactured with printed circuit technology) for cell phones, target early 2001. They're still working on it. They're also doing water filtration (same porous polymer technology as the fuel cell), holographic memory (going nowhere due to lack of suitable material), haptics (feel honey or molasses with a mouse), and some internet image format. The stock had a big run-up peaking in Feb. 2000, and they bought a German company making more traditional fuel cells (NovArs). The German fuel cells are the ones in the bike.
The stock generally goes down. They make an announcement of a prototype, the stock shoots up a bunch, then it returns to going down. Nowadays they make an announcement of a prototype like this and the stock barely budges from its downward spiral. They claim to have a large investor who promised to keep them going until Dec 31, 2003. It seems to be a race: will they lose funding, or will they get a product first? And if they get a product, will it prevent them from going broke?
It would be really nice if they succeeded. Poor batteries are holding back the rest of technology nowadays.
Woke my wife and 3-year old daughter to watch it on our back deck. Bundled up in heavy winter jackets. Between 2:15am and 3:00am PST, we saw one about every 5 seconds. Best show I've ever seen -- I've never seen more than one every 5 minutes before. On an average, non-meteor-shower night, I see about one every 20 minutes.
There was a point they radiated from. If I looked there, instead of seeing long streaks, I saw bright spots that moved slightly then died out (rocks shooting straight at us). Scary.
Many bright ones left trails for 5-10 seconds. One had a path that wasn't straight, it veered left about 1 degree at one point. I didn't notice any color in any of them. They didn't all radiate from the same point, some seemed to be going at large angles to the rest of them.
My daughter said they were rocks falling from the sky, and catching fire, and they were brown and looked like big balls and they went really fast. We had trouble coaxing her outside because there were rocks falling from the sky.
Nobody else in suburbia was out watching it. Several coworkers drove out to Pescadaro Beach and saw a good show. Good for them!
I just bought a DVD player. I peeked behind my entertainment unit at the big tangle of boxes and cords, found some promising terminals, and plugged it in.
The picture cycled from clear, to grey, then back again. Hum. Checked the user manual, and it was due to copy protection! The DVD player had to be plugged directly to the TV or it wouldn't work. But I wanted to play the sound through my good speakers, not the TV's speakers. I tried plugging it into the amplifier. Now the video was clear, but the sound was distorted. User manual says, copy protection: it's supposed to be that way. OK, so I hooked it directly to the TV. Now I could play DVDs. But now the VCR wasn't plugged in. Perhaps I could hook the VCR through the DVD player? No, no terminals for that. Perhaps the TV had two sets of video terminals? It did!
I still don't have the DVD playing through my good speakers. I haven't exhausted all combinations of terminals though. Perhaps there's an audio output from the TV that can be routed to the good speakers, without turning on the copy protection noise or the video distortion.
If the TV didn't have the spare set of video inputs, I'd send the DVD player back because the copyright protection measures would prevent me from using a VCR. But the TV did have a spare set of video terminals. Not being able to play the DVD through good speakers isn't annoying enough to be worth the effort of returning it.
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Compound primary keys! Highly discouraged, you know. Causes no end of trouble when you decide to change your state name or social security number.
That's a good comparison. Who's more impaired, a woman with carpal tunnel for a decade, or a woman with one arm with no carpal tunnel? Who would do better at changing diapers, brushing teeth, tending the garden, doing laundry, carrying groceries, and typing on a computer?
I suspect the one-armed woman will do better at all those tasks except for changing diapers.
Ah, so reading someone's diary is less of a privacy invasion than listening in on their telephone calls? I'm surprised that anyone would make that argument, much less be persuaded by it.
The way I learned it in biology class, all cells have these "telomers", which are a bunch of extra segments the end of the DNA. Every time the cells split they cut off a segment. When all the segments are gone, the cell doesn't split anymore. All cells eventually die. Cancer is caused when cells figure out how to pad extra telomers on the end of the DNA so they can keep splitting.
So, you get cancer if you remove the mechanism for aging? Didn't we know that already?
CG, plus tools for manipulating voices, plus the internet, eventually will mean that one person can produce and distribute a movie on their own with about as much effort as it takes to write a book and publish it on the internet today.
I recall a classmate in college observing that I was quite an odd bird because for me learning was an end in itself. Most everyone else (especially him) was there as a stepping stone to getting a job. Everyone learned, but the motives were different.
I personally think that at least 10% of the students were there for learning's sake, rather than as a means to some different end.
As for which motive I most admire, hmmm. I think that would go to Laura Lemay, who visualized her ideal job (one that did not quite exist yet) and created a degree to suit her to it.
RC4 is broken? Oh really?
I know the first 40 bytes have noticable correlations to the key. That's avoided by skipping the first 256 bytes. I know that if you see 2^^31 bytes of an RC4 stream you can distinguish it from random noise. That's not an interesting flaw at all, unless you're generating 2gig of data and you don't want anyone to know which encryption protocol you're using. Did you mean something more by saying "RC4 is broken"?
What is the correlation between being homosexual and being left handed? I've spotted articles saying that both occur with about the same frequency (10% of the population), both seem part nature part nurture, and the correlation to nature was stronger in lefthandedness than homosexuality. But I haven't found what the correlation is between the two. Should be 10%, if they are unrelated.
The MMR shot (Measles-Mumps-Rubella), given at age 1 1/2. I have one such article on my desk. The Measles vaccine gives a rash and fever, the other two seem pretty reaction free. The theory was that one of the other two gets through some membranes it shouldn't due to reactions to the Measles, then triggered Autism. European studies show that if there is a correlation between MMR and Autism, the correlation isn't very strong. The shots can be given separately, as they had for decades before they were combined, at a slight expense to parents (and extra doctor visit for child).
Er. I may be mistaken, but you're description is better explained by lack of common interests than by lack of ability to interpret social cues.
If one identical twin has autism, the other does too, 9 out of 10 times. If one child in a family has autism, the chances of the next having autism too are 1 in 20. 1 in 3 if two children already have autism. That's quite a correlation to genetics. It does imply that it involves more than one gene, otherwise the 90% for identical twins would imply at least 45% for separate siblings.
The question, "Is there a program of length n that passes this test suite in polynomial time?" is NP-complete. Algorithm: guess the program, then run it through the test suite. I believe an O(n) algorithm for that would make mighty big changes to computer science.
But the real story was that I had a very hard time finding the computer controlled ones anymore ("multifunction", 8 modes, color coordinated patterns). The guy at Orchard Supply claimed he'd been there three years and had never heard of such a thing. Er, right. Home Depot finally had them, $8, but only with red, green, yellow strands (no blue anymore). Close enough.
My previous multifunction color bulbs, which I bought from Orchard Supply three years ago, had the control circuit short out last year. Nice "poof" sound. Perhaps the new ones will last longer. If they'd had multifunction LED strands, I would have got them.
Assuming nanotech, and 100x100x100 atom processors that operate at the speed of light, a nanocomputer the size of the sun running a million years can do 2^268 instructions. I don't think brute forcing a keyspace of size 2^255 with a conventional computer will ever happen.
m l
A quantum computer I hear only has to cover sqrt(n) of a keyspace of n to get the right answer. A 1-meter cube nanocomputer running 1 second could do 2^129 instructions, so a quantum nanocomputer that can break a keyspace of size 2^255 is believable.
http://burtleburtle.net/bob/crypto/magnitude.ht
The first lines of patents tend to be broad, but not because the patents are broad, but rather because the first lines are introducing the field that the patent is in.
The first few claims are often the same way, giving definitions and context for claims built on them. Claims aren't supposed to be that way, but often they are anyhow. I was once told that a claim had to be a single sentence and could not contain the word "or". Makes things tricky.
How would you go about testing Murphy Law? It seems to me that if Murphy's Law was true, any such test would give you a false negative.
We developers used to be stationed on the 13th floor, on the premise that that was unlucky, so bugs would show up sooner. Didn't work.
The only new sites I go to are the ones I find through Google while trying to answer questions. If your site is the only one that can answer my question, I will find it. If yours is one of a hundred, I won't ever visit it.
I've said for a long time, you'll know when computer animation has really arrived when we start getting new Shirley Temple movies that are indistinguishable from the old ones.
Y'know, it shouldn't be possible to use publicly available information as accepted proof of identity in the first place. There's no need for it.
Every computer should ship with a smart card reader. Driver's licenses and credit cards should be replaced with smart cards that can do challenge/response or public key encryption, and never let the private keys out of the card. The public key (or whatever it takes to recognize the card is authentic) can be in databases, but that isn't proof of identity. Since the private key isn't anywhere but the card, you can't get it without stealing (or at least physically examining) the card. If the card is reported stolen, you have to show up somewhere in person for fingerprints and an eye scan to get another. It would be very hard to steal one person's identity, and stealing the identity of all Oregonians just wouldn't happen.
IIRC, the same scheme would take away a lot of the motivation for Microsoft's passport infrastructure.
What if we allow companies stabilizing open source projects to disallow the copying of their stable releases, but require that they ship with modifiable code, and require that they return their bug fixes to the mainline? The companies still have a value-added product, customers can still fix bugs they find in those stable releases, and the mainline still gets all the bug fixes. A mainline that has moved on a bit plus all the bug fixes from a stabilized release is not as good as a stabilized release, because the product as a whole has not been tested.
The stock generally goes down. They make an announcement of a prototype, the stock shoots up a bunch, then it returns to going down. Nowadays they make an announcement of a prototype like this and the stock barely budges from its downward spiral. They claim to have a large investor who promised to keep them going until Dec 31, 2003. It seems to be a race: will they lose funding, or will they get a product first? And if they get a product, will it prevent them from going broke?
It would be really nice if they succeeded. Poor batteries are holding back the rest of technology nowadays.
There was a point they radiated from. If I looked there, instead of seeing long streaks, I saw bright spots that moved slightly then died out (rocks shooting straight at us). Scary.
Many bright ones left trails for 5-10 seconds. One had a path that wasn't straight, it veered left about 1 degree at one point. I didn't notice any color in any of them. They didn't all radiate from the same point, some seemed to be going at large angles to the rest of them.
My daughter said they were rocks falling from the sky, and catching fire, and they were brown and looked like big balls and they went really fast. We had trouble coaxing her outside because there were rocks falling from the sky.
Nobody else in suburbia was out watching it. Several coworkers drove out to Pescadaro Beach and saw a good show. Good for them!
The picture cycled from clear, to grey, then back again. Hum. Checked the user manual, and it was due to copy protection! The DVD player had to be plugged directly to the TV or it wouldn't work. But I wanted to play the sound through my good speakers, not the TV's speakers. I tried plugging it into the amplifier. Now the video was clear, but the sound was distorted. User manual says, copy protection: it's supposed to be that way. OK, so I hooked it directly to the TV. Now I could play DVDs. But now the VCR wasn't plugged in. Perhaps I could hook the VCR through the DVD player? No, no terminals for that. Perhaps the TV had two sets of video terminals? It did!
I still don't have the DVD playing through my good speakers. I haven't exhausted all combinations of terminals though. Perhaps there's an audio output from the TV that can be routed to the good speakers, without turning on the copy protection noise or the video distortion.
If the TV didn't have the spare set of video inputs, I'd send the DVD player back because the copyright protection measures would prevent me from using a VCR. But the TV did have a spare set of video terminals. Not being able to play the DVD through good speakers isn't annoying enough to be worth the effort of returning it.
Did they find exactly who invented writing? What are the earliest statements they've found? What do they say?