It very much looks like they quickly concluded that it was encrypted with a one-time pad. Bearing in mind that this was encrypted using practices devised by the same institution that's trying to decrypt it now, this conclusion can't be difficult to reach. Now, a truly random OTP with a length that is equal to or longer than the length of the message has been mathematically proven to be 100% secure against cryptanalysis by anyone who doesn't have the key. So that's what they're doing now - figuring out if the key is archived somewhere.
Interesting post in an otherwise duff discussion thread full of awful stereotyping. Yes, I believe in the brain's ability to rewire itself. Born without empathy? Some of them will discover that this is why their life sucks so badly, and train themselves empathy. And I mean genuine empathy, not learning how to fake it. It's probably not the easiest thing to do, going by testimonies of people forced to rewire part of their brain after an accident, but a lot can be done with perseverance. As a much more extreme case study, I give you the well-published story of Mary Bell: at very young age, a heinous archetypical psychopath - just reading about the things she did makes your hair stand up. Now, reportedly, a 55 years old grandmother who has an unremarkable life and carpingly raised a daughter who is now ~28 years old and has a child of her own that should be ~4 years old by now. http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/famous/bell/index_1.html (very long read but it's really worth it) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1110123/Child-killer-Mary-Bell-grandmother-51-But-I-left-grief-says-victims-mother.html
Granted, not all of them do change and those that don't should probably be kept away from positions of power. All I'm saying is that having a childhood diagnosis of Autism, Asperger's or Psychopathy does not necessarily doom these people to harm others and live at odds with society. This is also why I am against the dead sentence: the person you'd be executing today is not necessarily the same person you'd be releasing 12 years from now.
It's amazing; bring up "climate change", and/. is suddenly full of (1) comments containing same old fallacious rebutted-ad-nauseum arguments like parent and (2) transparent trolls trying to steer the discussion in a different direction. And 80% of them are ACs, much more than in most other stories. I'm honestly wondering how much of this is astroturfing...
Clean burning means: better furnaces to produce less PAHs and better scrubbers and filters to stop Mercury, PAH and Sulfur emissions, so that people living nearby don't get health problems. It doesn't mean less CO2. Antoine Lavoisier lived in the 1700s, yet even today people don't seem to get that burning 12g of carbon will always give you 44g of CO2, no matter how.
Coal power is so last-century. I'm astonished that the US is still building new coal plants with today's knowledge of what it does to climate. Coal is the ultimate form of sequestered carbon; it's almost pure carbon, readily buried underground. Just leave it where it is already, we have better ways to generate electricity today.
These arguments always sound a bit like "I exercised yesterday and it made me tired; I couldn't concentrate on anything anymore and went to bed. Also, today, I was working against a deadline and skipped lunch. At some point, I couldn't stand it anymore and had a snack. I was suddenly mentally much more alert and had a clearer view on the problem at hand. Conclusion: less exercise and more snacking promotes mental alertness in life."
My point is: the economy isn't a simple as you think. There have been war economies that were very strong despite the huge drain of the war. Government investments in clean energy may help combat recession. People buying energy-efficient products, insulating their houses,... constitutes "consumer spending", which is widely regarded as good for the economy. Yes, some coal-fired power plants will have to close, but to compensate, whole new market sectors (wind turbines, solar panels, insulation products) may arise (or at least grow a lot), creating employment. Out with the old, in with the new - it's called progress. If we're smart about it, we might out-innovate other countries, pulling jobs back to our homeland and improving our trade deficit. I'm not saying all this is etched in stone, but predicting economic doom seems a bit premature.
Not a single point rebutted. Nice. The mother of all conspiracies: the world bank and the government and the scientists and the military and the insurance companies are trying to make you believe global warming is real because it's in their interest. Don't drink their kool-aid! Everyone is crazy but me!
Okay, let me ask you this: why are you here? We're trying to evaluate and discuss the news on climate change, but you're flooding all threads with inflammatory and offtopic comments, making a serious discussion impossible. Is someone paying you to do this? Cause I can't imagine it being fun...
You see, unlike the rest of the posters here I am not against humans (probably the only one here). I don't see people as a liability (unless the government meddles and turns them into a liability), they are a valuable resource.
I agree, you can make them do labor, cut of their hair and make fabric out of it, ad once they die, you can make glue out of them, use them as fertilizer... Never let a human go to waste, I always say! </sarcasm>
TFA was mostly talking about faster hardware. And there's nothing as good at squeezing the last bit of performance out of the hardware than a recent, presumably customized Linux kernel. Bar running on the bare metal, which no game designer is going to pump developer hours into. Hardware has simply become too complex; I don't know much about console design, but I'm sure all current consoles do run an operating system of some kind. Is the prospect of it being a Linux kernel really that repulsive? If yes, I'd start getting paranoid about all the appliances in my household...
It's not like they'd have to rewrite their game from scratch - given a good initial choice of libraries/APIs and a modular software architecture, the investment of porting a Windows game to Linux is not that terrible. Especially relative to the amount of money that goes into into art and level design (none of which requires any porting) in big commercial games. So a tentative business model would be: release the game on Windows through Steam, then make a Linux port for extra revenue. Initially, this second revenue stream will be a lot smaller than the Windows version's, but again, so is the additional investment. And it has potential for growth; the steam box could potentially beat other consoles in hardware specs, making the same game look nicer, and allowing for more complex games to be run on it. It could be a stepping stone for console gamers to get into hardcore PC games. Valve doesn't even necessarily have to produce and sell the steamboxen themseves; they could just offer steam for Linux as an option to whichever intrepid company feels compelled to throw together some PC hardware and a minimalist Debian-based Linux distro and sell it as a console. The resulting competition could result in very attractive price/performance for the consumer - think the game console version of the Android ecosystem. In summary, there is a baseline potential for a modest second revenue stream with a fair return on investment, and lots of exciting possibilities for growth. How do you like my sales pitch?
One more thing: Valve expressed its extreme displeasure with Windows 8's "walled garden" model. They could offer PC gamers to run steam from a bootable Linux flash drive, or better, do something like Portable Ubuntu but with better graphics support. I personally think the chances are pretty slim Valve will go that far, but it's not 100% impossible, and it would make Linux ports even more attractive to game publishers.
Thinking about this a bit more, I might be wrong. There actually is a mechanism to induce inflation; it's just not a permanent one. Specifically, if the 3/4 of mined Bitcoins that are not in circulation are indeed being hoarded by BC's inventors and/or early adaptors, then these people have the ability to induce a healthy controlled inflation for decades to come by slowly letting their stash trickle into the system. While making good money throughout the process. Insidious!
"Deflation; It can only go up in value unsustainably" (I'm stunned this class of retard can type at all!)
Sir, I totally agree, it is an amazing feat you can type at all. Have you even read this?
Let me summarize it for you: they wholeheartedly admit that
- Deflation is inevitable
- Economists generally agree that a low level of inflation is a good thing for a currency
- Nobody is quite sure about what might happens (sic, and while this may be formally true in the sense that nobody is quite sure about anything except death, it is misleading; economists generally agree that deflation will inhibit spending and therefore hurts the economy)
- They have only a mechanism (infinite divisibility) in place to combat the obvious consequences of deflation. This is really important! The paragraph about the infinite divisibility is either criminally dishonest or mindbogglingly stupid. Infinite divisibility does not change the fact that the BC you keep in your wallet steadily increase in value, which is exactly what inhibits spending and hurts the economy.
But as he said -- it may just be the influence that grows. Nominally someone
could create a currency that works like bitcoin but has the same inflation
properties as targeted by the central banks (3%/year). This may be possible
to do on top of bitcoin's own proof-of-work stream.
I strongly suspect it isn't; this just sounds all kinds of wrong. But for the sake of intellectual masturbation, let's suppose it is. Well, a fixed 3%/year rate in an all-BC economy would be disastrous; central banks use their control over inflation rates as a tool to mitigate depressions and such. So you'll have to put someone into the driver's seat. Good luck getting people to agree on whom, and preventing the driver from abusing their power.
A pretty big shop is called a mall. 10 years ago I walked into a mall at Thapae Gate in Chiang Mai which was owned by the now Prime Minister of Thailand. None of the shops where selling anything but the car park was full of staff cars, escalators working etc. like something out of a horror film. On paper the mall was trading. I also know of holiday resorts on Samui that do not have any guests, same thing. It is easy and it does not involve moving money travelling from one country to another.
How is setting up a storefront mall easy? Or more pertinently, how is using BC not orders of magnitude easier?
How can it not be deflationary?
- There is a hard limit on how many bitcoins can be made.
- Once a bitcoin is lost (for example in a hard drive crash), there's no way to replace it.
- Even if no bitcoins are ever lost, just the presence of economic growth (which hopefully won't entirely disappear) will make any currency that has a hard limit deflate. Controlled government-induced inflation of currencies over time is a feature. Seeing it as a bug is arguably the greatest fallacy of the BC supporters.
I don't think a lot of people question bitcoin's deflationary nature. Subject of debate is
- what are the consequence of this deflationary nature?
- should something be done about it?
- what?
- what are the consequences of doing something about it?
<opinion> Most of the scenarios I see spell doom for BC:
- Nothing changes --> deflation --> doom
- Attempt to inflate it --> not everyone agrees on how --> war of the BC forks --> confidence in decentralized digital currencies devastated --> government-backed schemes like MintChip snatch the price
- Entity X somehow (?) succeeds to induce controlled inflation without triggering fork wars --> people realize just how much power they're putting in the hands of Entity X - decide a large democratically-elected government can be trusted better --> MintChip
- BC somehow becomes a runaway hit --> existing traceability-based economy, system of taxes, law enforcement, option trading,... threatened --> legislative crackdown --> MintChip </opinion>
Slashdot Mirror
It very much looks like they quickly concluded that it was encrypted with a one-time pad. Bearing in mind that this was encrypted using practices devised by the same institution that's trying to decrypt it now, this conclusion can't be difficult to reach. Now, a truly random OTP with a length that is equal to or longer than the length of the message has been mathematically proven to be 100% secure against cryptanalysis by anyone who doesn't have the key. So that's what they're doing now - figuring out if the key is archived somewhere.
Interesting post in an otherwise duff discussion thread full of awful stereotyping. Yes, I believe in the brain's ability to rewire itself. Born without empathy? Some of them will discover that this is why their life sucks so badly, and train themselves empathy. And I mean genuine empathy, not learning how to fake it. It's probably not the easiest thing to do, going by testimonies of people forced to rewire part of their brain after an accident, but a lot can be done with perseverance. As a much more extreme case study, I give you the well-published story of Mary Bell: at very young age, a heinous archetypical psychopath - just reading about the things she did makes your hair stand up. Now, reportedly, a 55 years old grandmother who has an unremarkable life and carpingly raised a daughter who is now ~28 years old and has a child of her own that should be ~4 years old by now.
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/famous/bell/index_1.html (very long read but it's really worth it)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1110123/Child-killer-Mary-Bell-grandmother-51-But-I-left-grief-says-victims-mother.html
Granted, not all of them do change and those that don't should probably be kept away from positions of power. All I'm saying is that having a childhood diagnosis of Autism, Asperger's or Psychopathy does not necessarily doom these people to harm others and live at odds with society. This is also why I am against the dead sentence: the person you'd be executing today is not necessarily the same person you'd be releasing 12 years from now.
So in addition to altruism, you also have no concept of sarcasm. Interesting. Is this an attempt to pass the Turing test?
It's amazing; bring up "climate change", and /. is suddenly full of (1) comments containing same old fallacious rebutted-ad-nauseum arguments like parent and (2) transparent trolls trying to steer the discussion in a different direction. And 80% of them are ACs, much more than in most other stories. I'm honestly wondering how much of this is astroturfing...
Better to have awkward, clumsy progress in sorta the right direction than going backward.
There, fixed that for you.
Almost all coal plants are clean burning.
Clean burning means: better furnaces to produce less PAHs and better scrubbers and filters to stop Mercury, PAH and Sulfur emissions, so that people living nearby don't get health problems. It doesn't mean less CO2. Antoine Lavoisier lived in the 1700s, yet even today people don't seem to get that burning 12g of carbon will always give you 44g of CO2, no matter how.
Coal power is so last-century. I'm astonished that the US is still building new coal plants with today's knowledge of what it does to climate. Coal is the ultimate form of sequestered carbon; it's almost pure carbon, readily buried underground. Just leave it where it is already, we have better ways to generate electricity today.
These arguments always sound a bit like "I exercised yesterday and it made me tired; I couldn't concentrate on anything anymore and went to bed. Also, today, I was working against a deadline and skipped lunch. At some point, I couldn't stand it anymore and had a snack. I was suddenly mentally much more alert and had a clearer view on the problem at hand. Conclusion: less exercise and more snacking promotes mental alertness in life." My point is: the economy isn't a simple as you think. There have been war economies that were very strong despite the huge drain of the war. Government investments in clean energy may help combat recession. People buying energy-efficient products, insulating their houses,... constitutes "consumer spending", which is widely regarded as good for the economy. Yes, some coal-fired power plants will have to close, but to compensate, whole new market sectors (wind turbines, solar panels, insulation products) may arise (or at least grow a lot), creating employment. Out with the old, in with the new - it's called progress. If we're smart about it, we might out-innovate other countries, pulling jobs back to our homeland and improving our trade deficit. I'm not saying all this is etched in stone, but predicting economic doom seems a bit premature.
Not a single point rebutted. Nice. The mother of all conspiracies: the world bank and the government and the scientists and the military and the insurance companies are trying to make you believe global warming is real because it's in their interest. Don't drink their kool-aid! Everyone is crazy but me!
Okay, let me ask you this: why are you here? We're trying to evaluate and discuss the news on climate change, but you're flooding all threads with inflammatory and offtopic comments, making a serious discussion impossible. Is someone paying you to do this? Cause I can't imagine it being fun...
...said the troll.
Ok, this is getting surreal. I'm considering Godwinning some more of your discussion threads to discourage people from feeding you, troll.
You see, unlike the rest of the posters here I am not against humans (probably the only one here). I don't see people as a liability (unless the government meddles and turns them into a liability), they are a valuable resource.
I agree, you can make them do labor, cut of their hair and make fabric out of it, ad once they die, you can make glue out of them, use them as fertilizer... Never let a human go to waste, I always say! </sarcasm>
Wow, I thought people like you only existed in fiction.
TFA was mostly talking about faster hardware. And there's nothing as good at squeezing the last bit of performance out of the hardware than a recent, presumably customized Linux kernel. Bar running on the bare metal, which no game designer is going to pump developer hours into. Hardware has simply become too complex; I don't know much about console design, but I'm sure all current consoles do run an operating system of some kind. Is the prospect of it being a Linux kernel really that repulsive? If yes, I'd start getting paranoid about all the appliances in my household...
It's not like they'd have to rewrite their game from scratch - given a good initial choice of libraries/APIs and a modular software architecture, the investment of porting a Windows game to Linux is not that terrible. Especially relative to the amount of money that goes into into art and level design (none of which requires any porting) in big commercial games. So a tentative business model would be: release the game on Windows through Steam, then make a Linux port for extra revenue. Initially, this second revenue stream will be a lot smaller than the Windows version's, but again, so is the additional investment. And it has potential for growth; the steam box could potentially beat other consoles in hardware specs, making the same game look nicer, and allowing for more complex games to be run on it. It could be a stepping stone for console gamers to get into hardcore PC games. Valve doesn't even necessarily have to produce and sell the steamboxen themseves; they could just offer steam for Linux as an option to whichever intrepid company feels compelled to throw together some PC hardware and a minimalist Debian-based Linux distro and sell it as a console. The resulting competition could result in very attractive price/performance for the consumer - think the game console version of the Android ecosystem. In summary, there is a baseline potential for a modest second revenue stream with a fair return on investment, and lots of exciting possibilities for growth. How do you like my sales pitch?
One more thing: Valve expressed its extreme displeasure with Windows 8's "walled garden" model. They could offer PC gamers to run steam from a bootable Linux flash drive, or better, do something like Portable Ubuntu but with better graphics support. I personally think the chances are pretty slim Valve will go that far, but it's not 100% impossible, and it would make Linux ports even more attractive to game publishers.
Thinking about this a bit more, I might be wrong. There actually is a mechanism to induce inflation; it's just not a permanent one. Specifically, if the 3/4 of mined Bitcoins that are not in circulation are indeed being hoarded by BC's inventors and/or early adaptors, then these people have the ability to induce a healthy controlled inflation for decades to come by slowly letting their stash trickle into the system. While making good money throughout the process. Insidious!
Woah man, easy on the crystal meth, it's bad for your blood pressure. Take a few deep breaths and try to express yourself in a coherent fashion.
"Deflation; It can only go up in value unsustainably" (I'm stunned this class of retard can type at all!)
Sir, I totally agree, it is an amazing feat you can type at all. Have you even read this?
Let me summarize it for you: they wholeheartedly admit that
- Deflation is inevitable
- Economists generally agree that a low level of inflation is a good thing for a currency
- Nobody is quite sure about what might happens (sic, and while this may be formally true in the sense that nobody is quite sure about anything except death, it is misleading; economists generally agree that deflation will inhibit spending and therefore hurts the economy)
- They have only a mechanism (infinite divisibility) in place to combat the obvious consequences of deflation. This is really important! The paragraph about the infinite divisibility is either criminally dishonest or mindbogglingly stupid. Infinite divisibility does not change the fact that the BC you keep in your wallet steadily increase in value, which is exactly what inhibits spending and hurts the economy.
Here's a more elaborate explanation on why deflation is inevitable
Please Mod up. As this is a radically different perspective from 99% of the comments I read on the subject. I will post AC to encourage this.
HAAHAHAHAHA! Laughing so hard it hurts! You almost had me there. Best parody post evar!
But as he said -- it may just be the influence that grows. Nominally someone could create a currency that works like bitcoin but has the same inflation properties as targeted by the central banks (3%/year). This may be possible to do on top of bitcoin's own proof-of-work stream.
I strongly suspect it isn't; this just sounds all kinds of wrong. But for the sake of intellectual masturbation, let's suppose it is. Well, a fixed 3%/year rate in an all-BC economy would be disastrous; central banks use their control over inflation rates as a tool to mitigate depressions and such. So you'll have to put someone into the driver's seat. Good luck getting people to agree on whom, and preventing the driver from abusing their power.
A pretty big shop is called a mall. 10 years ago I walked into a mall at Thapae Gate in Chiang Mai which was owned by the now Prime Minister of Thailand. None of the shops where selling anything but the car park was full of staff cars, escalators working etc. like something out of a horror film. On paper the mall was trading. I also know of holiday resorts on Samui that do not have any guests, same thing. It is easy and it does not involve moving money travelling from one country to another.
How is setting up a storefront mall easy? Or more pertinently, how is using BC not orders of magnitude easier?
How can it not be deflationary?
- There is a hard limit on how many bitcoins can be made.
- Once a bitcoin is lost (for example in a hard drive crash), there's no way to replace it.
- Even if no bitcoins are ever lost, just the presence of economic growth (which hopefully won't entirely disappear) will make any currency that has a hard limit deflate. Controlled government-induced inflation of currencies over time is a feature. Seeing it as a bug is arguably the greatest fallacy of the BC supporters.
I don't think a lot of people question bitcoin's deflationary nature. Subject of debate is
- what are the consequence of this deflationary nature?
- should something be done about it?
- what?
- what are the consequences of doing something about it?
<opinion>
Most of the scenarios I see spell doom for BC:
- Nothing changes --> deflation --> doom
- Attempt to inflate it --> not everyone agrees on how --> war of the BC forks --> confidence in decentralized digital currencies devastated --> government-backed schemes like MintChip snatch the price
- Entity X somehow (?) succeeds to induce controlled inflation without triggering fork wars --> people realize just how much power they're putting in the hands of Entity X - decide a large democratically-elected government can be trusted better --> MintChip
- BC somehow becomes a runaway hit --> existing traceability-based economy, system of taxes, law enforcement, option trading,... threatened --> legislative crackdown --> MintChip
</opinion>
You, sir, owe me a new keyboard. +1 hilarious.
3) The GOP will distance itself from its own committee's results (like we've never seen that happen before) and we won't hear another word about it.