I have put together a database of upskirt photos collected from the internet. For a small fee and a reference upskirt picture you can peruse my collection and find out if you were a victim.
fixed that for you
No way, dude. I don't want upskirt photos from every perv who pays his way into the database. I just want to pay my way into the database to "search" it myself. Alone.
The problem is that it's not very secure because there's a finite search space. If the database and system were illicitly copied, a dictionary attack (aka "preparing a rainbow table") would serve well to "unhash" most of the data in the database.
There are only 60 million Britons, and you can probably get or guess a good share of their names. Input them into the hashing routine, and you get a hash: let's say that "JOHN SMYTHE" hashes to "abc123". Next, you generate the 100 million possible taxpayer identification numbers, and hash those: "111-22-33-444" hashes to "def456". Once you've built the rainbow tables, if you look in the database and find a row with "abc123 def456", you know that JOHN SMYTHE's taxpayer number is 111-22-33-444. You know everybody's taxpayer number.
Salting the hashes makes the problem harder, but you can't salt an index value or it's unsearchable. So key columns are going to be unsalted. And what are likely to be the key columns? Name and TIN.
Hashing only secures data when there is an infinite set of probable values. There is not an infinite set of names or TINs.
The green reasons don't drive the passion. They're strong arguments, but that's not the answer you were looking for. The passion comes from the denial for purely political reasons. When it's important enough, we can keep stuff out of the wrong hands. We can indeed get rid of it by burying it deep -- hundreds of meters beneath the bottom of the ocean is an almost perfect natural storage repository. We can monitor the hell out of the corporations using it (we already do.) Every problem facing nuclear power has been solved.
Because there are no valid reasons to say "no", being told "no" by intentionally stupid people for invalid reasons ignites a negative emotion -- anger. Anger is just as motivating as the positive passions.
The real answer is anger at willfully stupid people. Ordinary, garden-variety stupid people don't bother me, because I know that some people don't have the capacity to learn. It's the ones that deliberately refuse to learn from history or from mountains of evidence that really piss me off.
Because nuclear power is greener than fossil fuels (the emissions are tiny, solid and containable, and it doesn't destroy whole ecosystems like hydroelectric dams), it's more effective/efficient than terrestrial sources (a nuclear plant is very "compact" compared to the land mass of solar array or a giant farm of 1MW windmills ) and we have enough fuel to run them for centuries (as opposed to oil and gas which are rapidly dwindling, and could be used for other purposes such as plastics and lubrication.) Read all of the above posts to understand more of the benefits. They are very exciting.
The drawbacks are all about the waste: how do you store a thing that's dangerous for tens of thousands of years? How do you adequately protect a thing that's desired by terrorists?
As engineers, we see those as solvable problems. But they are never implemented because of the political opposition, not because of any technical reason. And nothing pisses us off faster than pointing out a perfectly valid solution to a problem only to be told we can't do that because some ignorant people are afraid. "No, you can't run a nuclear train through my town, even though the cars have been crash tested at 150 MPH," or "You can't bury that waste thousands of feet below the ancient burial grounds of my already dead great-great-great grandparents, we must honor them properly from within our sacred Casinos."
That's where my passion comes from, and it's probably not an uncommon sentiment here on/.
I built this lighthouse in the swamp. People said I was daft to build a lighthouse in a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em.
It sank into the swamp.
So I built another one. That one sank into the swamp. So I built a third lighthouse. That one burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad, the strongest lighthouse in this swamp.
I am the sweeper planet. I am here to protect you from the terrible secret of space.
I am the pusher planet. DO NOT TRUST THE SWEEPER PLANET. Sweeping will not protect you from the terrible secret of space. Pushing will protect you from the terrible secret of space.
I should have tagged it with a smiley face. It was just a joke.
The only punch cards I may still have would be a few personal notes, and the last time I saw them the ink had faded making them almost illegible. (The holes, however, are still fully intact.) I'd likely have to decode the holes by hand if I wanted to recover the data.
30 years ago I punched my programs on "archival quality" punch cards. They weren't like regular cardboard cards, they had a higher rag content that would assure they'd retain their shape longer with less chance of bending.
By brand, you mean "manufacturer". Most big names, such as Sony, etc., don't make their own disks, but buy them from an external factory and place their own labels on them. The various manufacturers have different chemicals and dyes embedded in their discs, and its that chemical composition that determines the longevity.
Usually the brand will buy discs exclusively from one factory, but some of the off-brands (such as house-branded Office Depot or no-name discs at Micro Center) could be sourced from anywhere, and their quality will vary widely.
We have a peak load controller that my power company can use to shut down our air conditioner for 20 minutes out of every hour during times of peak energy usage. Their program is called Cycled Air, and for this inconvenience, I get all my air-conditioning electricity run through a separate meter, and I pay a discounted rate for all of it (not just when it's cycled.)
Smart Appliances might try to give me the same benefit as Cycled Air, but the problem with a Smart Appliance is that I could cheat. The reason I can't cheat with my air conditioner is that it's hard-wired into the separate metered circuit. I can't just plug it into a regular outlet. There is also no outlet on that metered circuit that would let me use my "cheap electricity" to temporarily run other equipment.
Smart Appliances will move that problem into the domain of hackers, where they will be hacked. A hacker could take a smart appliance and lobotomize the smarts to make an extra-powerful device that wastes electricity, or could repurpose the "Smart" circuitry to falsely report "I'm being energy efficient, give me a discount" to the power company.
I can tell you that, believe it or not, attorneys have far higher ethical standards than what you propose.
That's right. Don't let the actions of a mere 95% of the practitioners of the field sway you into believing that all lawyers believe "the end justifies the means."
Oh, I've just thought of a third option for improving your performance. If getting the data in a timely fashion (faster than level "z") is important to you, you can choose to get it through a different protocol that uses a different ruleset. Downloading it via http: would put you at level "w", and you'd have the data in your hands much faster. It may cost you more (you might have to pay for a subscription to a web service that lets you download n GB per month) or it might be hard (hosting a copyrighted file is generally frowned upon) but it's an option that impacts you and only you, and it's fully under your control.
But specific protocols imply certain usage patterns: VoIP implies that there are two humans who will not be able to communicate if their service is degraded below level "x". Video on demand (Hulu, for example) means there is one human who will not be able to use the service if it is degraded below the level "y". Web traffic is slightly more forgiving in that it's not dependent on any specific sustained level of data transfer, but needs a certain responsiveness to be practical for one user, so let's call that "w". P2P traffic, on the other hand, is seen as impacting no human in real time, so the service could be dropped to level "z" and still be useful.
You may think that assigning the value of 1% to "z" somehow wrong. OK, fine, let's fix that. But how? I see only two ways to address the issue: increase capacity of the network or lower some of the other variables. One of those requires a huge hardware investment, the costs of which will have to borne by all consumers. The other is a cheap setting in a router, which will impact all x, y, and w consumers.
In reality, I think that the setting "z" was pushed down to 1% because of a demand by the rest of the users to increase x, y, and w. If it's worth it to you to get better P2P service, perhaps you should consider contracting with your provider to increase your capacity? A leased line would provide you with your own controllable values for x, y, w, and z.
Heck, what about video game patches, add ons, downloads of Linux distros, etc, etc, etc. All of these are entirely legal, and all of them can use P2P.
The difference is that you're not sitting at the end of the pipe watching your P2P bits arrive, while the phone and video and streaming audio users are. If your phone service has to compete with your P2P service, which would you rather have go badly?
If you are downloading a distro, and at the same time you place a VoIP phone call, what do you do if the audio is all broken up? Do you pause the torrent client to get better phone service? I do*. Now, put the torrent client in your neighbor's house, where you don't have have the ability to pause your neighbor's download when you want to use the phone. Is it fair?
And before you cry "but the bandwidth! the bandwidth! I paid for the bandwidth!" bandwidth is NOT the same as capacity. If you want a guarantee of capacity, sign a contract to rent a fiber between you and your server. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that it's a multi-use, multi-user network, it's shared, and there will be packet loss when it's saturated.
This isn't a question about Net Neutrality at all. This is a question about network management. If you asked people this question: "Do you think data being consumed in real time (video, phone calls, etc.) should have higher priority than data being transferred for later use?" the answer from a reasonable person is likely to be "yes". And it's not a bad answer.
The actual Net Neutrality question is: "Do you think Rogers Cablesystem should be allowed to degrade Vonage's VoIP traffic if they don't similarly degrade Rogers' own VoIP traffic?"
The real problems come from confusingly bad articles like these, where people are being mislead to believe network management is the same as net neutrality. That's the lie that is being used to skew the statistics of public opinion. And it doesn't help that P2P proponents try to use the same lie to claim some mythical rights under the guise of net neutrality, either. If a router has a choice between discarding one packet or another, it's disruptive to fewer people if it throws away the VoIP packet. That's traffic shaping 101, and has nothing to do with network neutrality.
It's more like not paying the pilots on a Seattle to Portland flight.
Yeah? Well screw them guys, it's the cabin stewards who bring me the peanuts, not the pilots. What's the pilot going to do about it, crash the damn plane? Not when he's sitting in it too.
You're right, except that baking a cake also passes the transformation test: an article is materially transformed from one state to another (eggs and flour are transformed into delicious cake.) It's not that math creates an exclusion to patentability, but math WITHOUT the transformation of a material article does. That was the point of Bilski, and that's the point of this patent invalidation. No material thing was changed in the execution of this program, apart from magnetic polarities on a hard disk and phosphor on a screen, and those machines are already patented.
In this case, only people changed behavior as a result of the math. That's not patentable. But if there was a machine changing behavior as a result of the math, (such as motors driving a carriage that carves a sculpture out of wood with a neon backlit spoon,) that whole machine could be patented.
The patent lawyers I've recently seen working insisted on adding ridiculous claims to software patents, "claiming a system with a CPU and memory" hoping to defend against Bilski. It's almost laughable, because the lawyers are essentially copy/pasting definitions from their CSci 101 textbooks without understanding a word of what they're really claiming. Ultimately, though, this case looks like it's the first in a long line of bad patents to be mowed down. I am not crying.
Slashdot Mirror
I have put together a database of upskirt photos collected from the internet. For a small fee and a reference upskirt picture you can peruse my collection and find out if you were a victim.
fixed that for you
No way, dude. I don't want upskirt photos from every perv who pays his way into the database. I just want to pay my way into the database to "search" it myself. Alone.
The problem is that it's not very secure because there's a finite search space. If the database and system were illicitly copied, a dictionary attack (aka "preparing a rainbow table") would serve well to "unhash" most of the data in the database.
There are only 60 million Britons, and you can probably get or guess a good share of their names. Input them into the hashing routine, and you get a hash: let's say that "JOHN SMYTHE" hashes to "abc123". Next, you generate the 100 million possible taxpayer identification numbers, and hash those: "111-22-33-444" hashes to "def456". Once you've built the rainbow tables, if you look in the database and find a row with "abc123 def456", you know that JOHN SMYTHE's taxpayer number is 111-22-33-444. You know everybody's taxpayer number.
Salting the hashes makes the problem harder, but you can't salt an index value or it's unsearchable. So key columns are going to be unsalted. And what are likely to be the key columns? Name and TIN.
Hashing only secures data when there is an infinite set of probable values. There is not an infinite set of names or TINs.
now he is simply a slimy scammer trading in stolen goods. The man is a disgrace.
Or possibly an MP.
Same thing.
The green reasons don't drive the passion. They're strong arguments, but that's not the answer you were looking for. The passion comes from the denial for purely political reasons. When it's important enough, we can keep stuff out of the wrong hands. We can indeed get rid of it by burying it deep -- hundreds of meters beneath the bottom of the ocean is an almost perfect natural storage repository. We can monitor the hell out of the corporations using it (we already do.) Every problem facing nuclear power has been solved.
Because there are no valid reasons to say "no", being told "no" by intentionally stupid people for invalid reasons ignites a negative emotion -- anger. Anger is just as motivating as the positive passions.
The real answer is anger at willfully stupid people. Ordinary, garden-variety stupid people don't bother me, because I know that some people don't have the capacity to learn. It's the ones that deliberately refuse to learn from history or from mountains of evidence that really piss me off.
Because nuclear power is greener than fossil fuels (the emissions are tiny, solid and containable, and it doesn't destroy whole ecosystems like hydroelectric dams), it's more effective/efficient than terrestrial sources (a nuclear plant is very "compact" compared to the land mass of solar array or a giant farm of 1MW windmills ) and we have enough fuel to run them for centuries (as opposed to oil and gas which are rapidly dwindling, and could be used for other purposes such as plastics and lubrication.) Read all of the above posts to understand more of the benefits. They are very exciting.
The drawbacks are all about the waste: how do you store a thing that's dangerous for tens of thousands of years? How do you adequately protect a thing that's desired by terrorists?
As engineers, we see those as solvable problems. But they are never implemented because of the political opposition, not because of any technical reason. And nothing pisses us off faster than pointing out a perfectly valid solution to a problem only to be told we can't do that because some ignorant people are afraid. "No, you can't run a nuclear train through my town, even though the cars have been crash tested at 150 MPH," or "You can't bury that waste thousands of feet below the ancient burial grounds of my already dead great-great-great grandparents, we must honor them properly from within our sacred Casinos."
That's where my passion comes from, and it's probably not an uncommon sentiment here on /.
Oddly enough (and assuming you meant to write "flammable" instead of "inflammable")...
Oddly enough, "flammable" and "inflammable" mean the same thing.
Yeah, that was a painful lesson!
I built this lighthouse in the swamp. People said I was daft to build a lighthouse in a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show 'em.
It sank into the swamp.
So I built another one. That one sank into the swamp. So I built a third lighthouse. That one burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up! And that's what you're gonna get, lad, the strongest lighthouse in this swamp.
Pak chooie unf was spelled out in the video. It's non-English nonsense, as opposed to the whole song which is bog standard nonsense.
How many of those apps are good, you ask? Well I ask you who could do without I am rich!
As well as being an amateur astronomer, Anthony is a keen Linux enthusiast. His home built telescope is controlled by his Linux box.
But not tonight, I bet it's not controlling a damn thing.
I am the sweeper planet. I am here to protect you from the terrible secret of space.
I am the pusher planet. DO NOT TRUST THE SWEEPER PLANET. Sweeping will not protect you from the terrible secret of space. Pushing will protect you from the terrible secret of space.
I should have tagged it with a smiley face. It was just a joke.
The only punch cards I may still have would be a few personal notes, and the last time I saw them the ink had faded making them almost illegible. (The holes, however, are still fully intact.) I'd likely have to decode the holes by hand if I wanted to recover the data.
30 years ago I punched my programs on "archival quality" punch cards. They weren't like regular cardboard cards, they had a higher rag content that would assure they'd retain their shape longer with less chance of bending.
By brand, you mean "manufacturer". Most big names, such as Sony, etc., don't make their own disks, but buy them from an external factory and place their own labels on them. The various manufacturers have different chemicals and dyes embedded in their discs, and its that chemical composition that determines the longevity.
Usually the brand will buy discs exclusively from one factory, but some of the off-brands (such as house-branded Office Depot or no-name discs at Micro Center) could be sourced from anywhere, and their quality will vary widely.
Woooosh!
We have a peak load controller that my power company can use to shut down our air conditioner for 20 minutes out of every hour during times of peak energy usage. Their program is called Cycled Air, and for this inconvenience, I get all my air-conditioning electricity run through a separate meter, and I pay a discounted rate for all of it (not just when it's cycled.)
Smart Appliances might try to give me the same benefit as Cycled Air, but the problem with a Smart Appliance is that I could cheat. The reason I can't cheat with my air conditioner is that it's hard-wired into the separate metered circuit. I can't just plug it into a regular outlet. There is also no outlet on that metered circuit that would let me use my "cheap electricity" to temporarily run other equipment.
Smart Appliances will move that problem into the domain of hackers, where they will be hacked. A hacker could take a smart appliance and lobotomize the smarts to make an extra-powerful device that wastes electricity, or could repurpose the "Smart" circuitry to falsely report "I'm being energy efficient, give me a discount" to the power company.
I can tell you that, believe it or not, attorneys have far higher ethical standards than what you propose.
That's right. Don't let the actions of a mere 95% of the practitioners of the field sway you into believing that all lawyers believe "the end justifies the means."
Oh, I've just thought of a third option for improving your performance. If getting the data in a timely fashion (faster than level "z") is important to you, you can choose to get it through a different protocol that uses a different ruleset. Downloading it via http: would put you at level "w", and you'd have the data in your hands much faster. It may cost you more (you might have to pay for a subscription to a web service that lets you download n GB per month) or it might be hard (hosting a copyrighted file is generally frowned upon) but it's an option that impacts you and only you, and it's fully under your control.
But specific protocols imply certain usage patterns: VoIP implies that there are two humans who will not be able to communicate if their service is degraded below level "x". Video on demand (Hulu, for example) means there is one human who will not be able to use the service if it is degraded below the level "y". Web traffic is slightly more forgiving in that it's not dependent on any specific sustained level of data transfer, but needs a certain responsiveness to be practical for one user, so let's call that "w". P2P traffic, on the other hand, is seen as impacting no human in real time, so the service could be dropped to level "z" and still be useful.
You may think that assigning the value of 1% to "z" somehow wrong. OK, fine, let's fix that. But how? I see only two ways to address the issue: increase capacity of the network or lower some of the other variables. One of those requires a huge hardware investment, the costs of which will have to borne by all consumers. The other is a cheap setting in a router, which will impact all x, y, and w consumers.
In reality, I think that the setting "z" was pushed down to 1% because of a demand by the rest of the users to increase x, y, and w. If it's worth it to you to get better P2P service, perhaps you should consider contracting with your provider to increase your capacity? A leased line would provide you with your own controllable values for x, y, w, and z.
Heck, what about video game patches, add ons, downloads of Linux distros, etc, etc, etc. All of these are entirely legal, and all of them can use P2P.
The difference is that you're not sitting at the end of the pipe watching your P2P bits arrive, while the phone and video and streaming audio users are. If your phone service has to compete with your P2P service, which would you rather have go badly?
If you are downloading a distro, and at the same time you place a VoIP phone call, what do you do if the audio is all broken up? Do you pause the torrent client to get better phone service? I do*. Now, put the torrent client in your neighbor's house, where you don't have have the ability to pause your neighbor's download when you want to use the phone. Is it fair?
And before you cry "but the bandwidth! the bandwidth! I paid for the bandwidth!" bandwidth is NOT the same as capacity. If you want a guarantee of capacity, sign a contract to rent a fiber between you and your server. Otherwise, you have to deal with the fact that it's a multi-use, multi-user network, it's shared, and there will be packet loss when it's saturated.
* well I did when I had Vonage.
it's disruptive to more people if it throws away the VoIP packet.
Oops, fixed that for me.
This isn't a question about Net Neutrality at all. This is a question about network management. If you asked people this question: "Do you think data being consumed in real time (video, phone calls, etc.) should have higher priority than data being transferred for later use?" the answer from a reasonable person is likely to be "yes". And it's not a bad answer.
The actual Net Neutrality question is: "Do you think Rogers Cablesystem should be allowed to degrade Vonage's VoIP traffic if they don't similarly degrade Rogers' own VoIP traffic?"
The real problems come from confusingly bad articles like these, where people are being mislead to believe network management is the same as net neutrality. That's the lie that is being used to skew the statistics of public opinion. And it doesn't help that P2P proponents try to use the same lie to claim some mythical rights under the guise of net neutrality, either. If a router has a choice between discarding one packet or another, it's disruptive to fewer people if it throws away the VoIP packet. That's traffic shaping 101, and has nothing to do with network neutrality.
>look innocent
I see no innocent here.
>
It's more like not paying the pilots on a Seattle to Portland flight.
Yeah? Well screw them guys, it's the cabin stewards who bring me the peanuts, not the pilots. What's the pilot going to do about it, crash the damn plane? Not when he's sitting in it too.
You're right, except that baking a cake also passes the transformation test: an article is materially transformed from one state to another (eggs and flour are transformed into delicious cake.) It's not that math creates an exclusion to patentability, but math WITHOUT the transformation of a material article does. That was the point of Bilski, and that's the point of this patent invalidation. No material thing was changed in the execution of this program, apart from magnetic polarities on a hard disk and phosphor on a screen, and those machines are already patented.
In this case, only people changed behavior as a result of the math. That's not patentable. But if there was a machine changing behavior as a result of the math, (such as motors driving a carriage that carves a sculpture out of wood with a neon backlit spoon,) that whole machine could be patented.
The patent lawyers I've recently seen working insisted on adding ridiculous claims to software patents, "claiming a system with a CPU and memory" hoping to defend against Bilski. It's almost laughable, because the lawyers are essentially copy/pasting definitions from their CSci 101 textbooks without understanding a word of what they're really claiming. Ultimately, though, this case looks like it's the first in a long line of bad patents to be mowed down. I am not crying.