Subatomic particles don't have orbits. That's just a convenient image used.
OTOH, it probably *would* mean that planets wouldn't orbit suns. But does it mean that stars don't exist? I don't think so. But they might tend to grow very slowly.
While as I understand it, this is believed true, it doesn't conflict with General Relativity, much less Special Relativity. This is basically just saying that parts of the universe so distant that they are beyond the observable edge of the universe will STAY beyond the observable edge of the universe, and that there are places in between that can see both use and some of those places equally red shifted.
I think it also implies that the red shift of distant objects is increasing at a rate that increases as the get further away. The theoretical observable edge of the universe is where the red shift shifts gamma radiation down to 0 cycles/second, but we'll never actually be able to observe things that far away because of information theory's limits on bits/second by frequency.
Sorry, but no. It could be a lot smaller than that, if it were wrapped. And perhaps it is.
Because when we look out, we are also looking back, it's quite difficult to be certain we aren't re-scanning the same volumes several times, while thinking we are looking straight outl. (Think of magnetized ball bearings circling around a steel sphere in zero G.)
OTOH, we have reason to believe that we have the mass about right. (Or is that the "average mass/volume"?)
I'm not a physicist, but things are a lot more complicated than simple pictures make it look. And we don't know in exactly what way. Dark Matter and Dark Energy were both complete surprises, and we still can't properly explain them.
Still, this makes me wonder about 5-dimensional stars exploding to give rise to 4-dimensional black holes. (I'm not at all sure that you can generalize in that way, some things only work in the lower dimensionalities. But I'm also not sure how high the series could be extended. An interesting math project, but not really physics. (I'm not sure about the 4-d stars to 3-d uniiiverse, that might be physics.)
OTOH, the summary did leave me slightly confused. Our normal space *IS* a 4-d space, with time being a slightly odd dimension. So perhaps what they are saying is that the surface of a black hole is a separate universe of a lower dimension. (I don't think that's what they meant, but I wonder if that's what their math said.)
Not precisely. He doesn't think of himself as the only user. Micropayments is a perfectly reasonable model, that has just never taken off. Pertially because there's usually so much overhead to managing them. And THAT is partially because of legal constraints.
OTOH, please note that I did say "partially". There are other reasons that it hasn't taken off, and the "free rider" problem is one of them. There's no obvious way around that. But someone *might* find a way if the legal obstacles were removed, and the overhead were lower.
Well, BSD generally attracks fewer developes than GPL, and you need to own the copyright to change the license, but outside of that it's a reasonable idea.
Well, I prefer an over-driven triode, but those are harder to get than they used to be. Nothing wrong with a mic as a source. In fact, many computers come with them built-in. Chop and hash that source a few times, compress it lightly, and fold with an xor and you've got a pretty random signal. The problem comes if you want your random numbers to follow some standardized distribution. And you usually do. Uniform random distribution and Normal random distribution are the ones usually needed, but sometimes Gaussian.
OTOH, if we're talking about something built into the system (like/dev/random) then the fancy manipulation can be handled by someone else. But that someone probably won't be able to depend on a user supplied external source of randomness.
I really doubt that the street-view thing was a government plant. I also, however, doubt that Google management planned it. In either case I'd need good evidence. (Not proof, which one can't expect to get in that kind of a situation, and I'll admit that even getting evidence about motivations, and who decided what, is quite iffy.)
Lambda expressions have been around since the 1950's. Most people haven't liked them. I don't find them inherently any better than any other approach, but they have different strengths. (OTOH, you can prove that anything Turing complete is, in a way, equivalent to anything else that is...)
To me short lamda expressions are OK. Longer ones are iffy, and ones over about 7 expressions long should be done some other way.
FWIW, to me the best concept of OOP was encapsulation. The best concept of it's predecessor was structured programing. And the best concept of functional programming is probably invariance...but not everything either can or should be made invariant.
OOP needs to develop a concept to allow it to deal with multiprocessing without requireing invariance. In database systems the analogous concept is called "eventual consistency". Something where when an object is in a state of flux it can accept inputs, but can only emit outputs whose state is not in doubt. This is clearly a superset of invariance.
I've recently read that the NSA is getting a "large" quantum computer. (I think they were having it special built.) I "know" that quantum computers are supposed to dramatically improve the speed of prime factorization, but do they solve Elliptic Curves faster?
If all you want is random, you can get that (at a slow rate) from any geiger counter. Or from a hot diode. Or from many other places.
It's my understanding that these numbers aren't supposed to just be random, but to have some other important properties...probably not being prime, though that may be a part of it.
I haven't yet heard a plausible explanation from anybody. This makes the argument stronger. It doesn't really matter who raised the question if it can't be answered.
At that time it was, I believe, illegal to export cryptographic tools, like ssh. (Which is why some of them were developed in Europe.)
Also, at that time the NSA was avoiding spying on US citizens.
Both of these are no longer true. So we can't presume the current NSA will act as "benevolently" as the one of that time. (OTOH, I'm not sure that some cryptographic tools aren't still considered munitions, and therefore banned for export without a permit.)
FWIW, since that "100 mile zone" is also around any international airport, they can create new extensions ad-lib without changing any laws or regulations. It already appears to cover most of the populace.
IIRC, China is making it's own computer system out of parts that are mainly, if not entirely, sourced locally.
Germany probably could, and may. It'll take awhile, though. Don't know about France or Britain. Possilbly there will be a pan-eurpoean model, with customization for each country.
An interesting question would be "What about strong encryption?". I doubt that many countries would be happy with encryption being used within their boarders that they couldn't control. Canada might not mind, and perhaps not New Zealand, but Austrailia seems to be nearly as paranoid about that as the US, and once you get outside of the Commonwealth countries...well, the only ones that don't care are the ones that can't afford to run an electronic spying system. E.g., Vanuatu probably doesn't care.
Perhaps some BSD derivative might be more appropriate. The impression I got (admittedly, I'm full of ignorance on the subject) is that Linus though the ARM SoC designers were intentionally designing systems to be incompatible. Perhaps I'm wrong?
OTOH, various past experiences have prepared me to believe that LOTS of companies want to set up a walled garden, and want someone else to provide the software to make it work. I have scant sympathy for any misfortune that happens to someone like that.
The first couple of times this post appeared, I was willing to give the poster the benefit of the doubt. (Disagreeing with me isn't proof of anything, except, occasionally, common sense.) But essentially the same post has now repeated several times.
I hadn't even considered the halting problem. To me it just looked to complex to be taken seriously as a suggestion.
OTOH, it's quite plausible that it produces a weaker than reasonable series of randome numbers, which makes it QUITE important that/dev/random ?/dev/urandom ? uses multiple sources.
P.S.: I'm not clear on the difference between/dev/random and/dev/urandom...I don't believe that I'd even heard of/dev/urandom before today.
While true, you need to realize (you probably do) that if you are posting without a handle there is no particular reason to attach any credibility to any statement or claim that you make. You don't have a reputation separate from all the other "Anonymous Coward"s, and are generally and reasonably shoved into the same category as the lowest common denominator of them. If you clearly aren't a troll, you may be taken more seriously, but being "clearly not a troll" is difficult.
Odd. That was analogous to my reaction to reading an MS EULA a decade+ ago. And shortly (a couple of years later) to reading an Apple EULA attached to an important security fix. I resolved to never depend on them for anything. It's been inconvenient at times (at that time Linux didn't have an adequate word processor), but overall I've never regretted the decision.
If he really honestly knows what he is doing, and this is completely his intent, then his actions and intent combined form damaging malice for trying to destroy all encryption under Linux, knowingly willingly and purposely.
Nonsense. There are other sources of random numbers, and IIUK, the kernel routines actually use those sources in combination with the CPU instruction. If they combine them properly, this should strengthen the randomness. But even without the (possibly subverted) RdRand instruction, the other sources of randomness would allow encryption to exist....but it might require that you type a sentence or so, so that there would be enough randomness stored in the system. IIRC, some systems used to require that when they ran low on entropy.
Slashdot Mirror
Subatomic particles don't have orbits. That's just a convenient image used.
OTOH, it probably *would* mean that planets wouldn't orbit suns. But does it mean that stars don't exist? I don't think so. But they might tend to grow very slowly.
Are stable orbits needed for the creation of stars that explode into black holes? I would think that unstable orbits might favor them.
While as I understand it, this is believed true, it doesn't conflict with General Relativity, much less Special Relativity. This is basically just saying that parts of the universe so distant that they are beyond the observable edge of the universe will STAY beyond the observable edge of the universe, and that there are places in between that can see both use and some of those places equally red shifted.
I think it also implies that the red shift of distant objects is increasing at a rate that increases as the get further away. The theoretical observable edge of the universe is where the red shift shifts gamma radiation down to 0 cycles/second, but we'll never actually be able to observe things that far away because of information theory's limits on bits/second by frequency.
Sorry, but no. It could be a lot smaller than that, if it were wrapped. And perhaps it is.
Because when we look out, we are also looking back, it's quite difficult to be certain we aren't re-scanning the same volumes several times, while thinking we are looking straight outl. (Think of magnetized ball bearings circling around a steel sphere in zero G.)
OTOH, we have reason to believe that we have the mass about right. (Or is that the "average mass/volume"?)
I'm not a physicist, but things are a lot more complicated than simple pictures make it look. And we don't know in exactly what way. Dark Matter and Dark Energy were both complete surprises, and we still can't properly explain them.
Still, this makes me wonder about 5-dimensional stars exploding to give rise to 4-dimensional black holes. (I'm not at all sure that you can generalize in that way, some things only work in the lower dimensionalities. But I'm also not sure how high the series could be extended. An interesting math project, but not really physics. (I'm not sure about the 4-d stars to 3-d uniiiverse, that might be physics.)
OTOH, the summary did leave me slightly confused. Our normal space *IS* a 4-d space, with time being a slightly odd dimension. So perhaps what they are saying is that the surface of a black hole is a separate universe of a lower dimension. (I don't think that's what they meant, but I wonder if that's what their math said.)
Not precisely. He doesn't think of himself as the only user. Micropayments is a perfectly reasonable model, that has just never taken off. Pertially because there's usually so much overhead to managing them. And THAT is partially because of legal constraints.
OTOH, please note that I did say "partially". There are other reasons that it hasn't taken off, and the "free rider" problem is one of them. There's no obvious way around that. But someone *might* find a way if the legal obstacles were removed, and the overhead were lower.
Well, BSD generally attracks fewer developes than GPL, and you need to own the copyright to change the license, but outside of that it's a reasonable idea.
Well, I prefer an over-driven triode, but those are harder to get than they used to be. Nothing wrong with a mic as a source. In fact, many computers come with them built-in. Chop and hash that source a few times, compress it lightly, and fold with an xor and you've got a pretty random signal. The problem comes if you want your random numbers to follow some standardized distribution. And you usually do. Uniform random distribution and Normal random distribution are the ones usually needed, but sometimes Gaussian.
OTOH, if we're talking about something built into the system (like /dev/random) then the fancy manipulation can be handled by someone else. But that someone probably won't be able to depend on a user supplied external source of randomness.
Well, not quite. But it's what you should expect if you depend on proprietary APIs and *can't* host your own site.
Before or after they take office?
I really doubt that the street-view thing was a government plant. I also, however, doubt that Google management planned it. In either case I'd need good evidence. (Not proof, which one can't expect to get in that kind of a situation, and I'll admit that even getting evidence about motivations, and who decided what, is quite iffy.)
Lambda expressions have been around since the 1950's. Most people haven't liked them. I don't find them inherently any better than any other approach, but they have different strengths. (OTOH, you can prove that anything Turing complete is, in a way, equivalent to anything else that is...)
To me short lamda expressions are OK. Longer ones are iffy, and ones over about 7 expressions long should be done some other way.
FWIW, to me the best concept of OOP was encapsulation. The best concept of it's predecessor was structured programing. And the best concept of functional programming is probably invariance...but not everything either can or should be made invariant.
OOP needs to develop a concept to allow it to deal with multiprocessing without requireing invariance. In database systems the analogous concept is called "eventual consistency". Something where when an object is in a state of flux it can accept inputs, but can only emit outputs whose state is not in doubt. This is clearly a superset of invariance.
How does this relate to quantum computers?
I've recently read that the NSA is getting a "large" quantum computer. (I think they were having it special built.) I "know" that quantum computers are supposed to dramatically improve the speed of prime factorization, but do they solve Elliptic Curves faster?
If all you want is random, you can get that (at a slow rate) from any geiger counter. Or from a hot diode. Or from many other places.
It's my understanding that these numbers aren't supposed to just be random, but to have some other important properties...probably not being prime, though that may be a part of it.
I haven't yet heard a plausible explanation from anybody. This makes the argument stronger. It doesn't really matter who raised the question if it can't be answered.
At that time it was, I believe, illegal to export cryptographic tools, like ssh. (Which is why some of them were developed in Europe.)
Also, at that time the NSA was avoiding spying on US citizens.
Both of these are no longer true. So we can't presume the current NSA will act as "benevolently" as the one of that time. (OTOH, I'm not sure that some cryptographic tools aren't still considered munitions, and therefore banned for export without a permit.)
People who are experts seem to have been saying that it only hardened DES a little bit, when others were trying to get it made a lot harder.
I'm not an expert, so I can't evaluate whether this is a true assertion or not...but it seems plausible.
If you doubt that the Department of Homeland Security is defending treason, would committing treason be more accurate?
FWIW, since that "100 mile zone" is also around any international airport, they can create new extensions ad-lib without changing any laws or regulations. It already appears to cover most of the populace.
IIRC, China is making it's own computer system out of parts that are mainly, if not entirely, sourced locally.
Germany probably could, and may. It'll take awhile, though. Don't know about France or Britain. Possilbly there will be a pan-eurpoean model, with customization for each country.
An interesting question would be "What about strong encryption?". I doubt that many countries would be happy with encryption being used within their boarders that they couldn't control. Canada might not mind, and perhaps not New Zealand, but Austrailia seems to be nearly as paranoid about that as the US, and once you get outside of the Commonwealth countries...well, the only ones that don't care are the ones that can't afford to run an electronic spying system. E.g., Vanuatu probably doesn't care.
Perhaps some BSD derivative might be more appropriate. The impression I got (admittedly, I'm full of ignorance on the subject) is that Linus though the ARM SoC designers were intentionally designing systems to be incompatible. Perhaps I'm wrong?
OTOH, various past experiences have prepared me to believe that LOTS of companies want to set up a walled garden, and want someone else to provide the software to make it work. I have scant sympathy for any misfortune that happens to someone like that.
Troll or astroturfer?
The first couple of times this post appeared, I was willing to give the poster the benefit of the doubt. (Disagreeing with me isn't proof of anything, except, occasionally, common sense.) But essentially the same post has now repeated several times.
I'm beginning to tilt towards astroturfer.
I hadn't even considered the halting problem. To me it just looked to complex to be taken seriously as a suggestion.
OTOH, it's quite plausible that it produces a weaker than reasonable series of randome numbers, which makes it QUITE important that /dev/random ? /dev/urandom ? uses multiple sources.
P.S.: I'm not clear on the difference between /dev/random and /dev/urandom...I don't believe that I'd even heard of /dev/urandom before today.
While true, you need to realize (you probably do) that if you are posting without a handle there is no particular reason to attach any credibility to any statement or claim that you make. You don't have a reputation separate from all the other "Anonymous Coward"s, and are generally and reasonably shoved into the same category as the lowest common denominator of them. If you clearly aren't a troll, you may be taken more seriously, but being "clearly not a troll" is difficult.
Odd. That was analogous to my reaction to reading an MS EULA a decade+ ago. And shortly (a couple of years later) to reading an Apple EULA attached to an important security fix. I resolved to never depend on them for anything. It's been inconvenient at times (at that time Linux didn't have an adequate word processor), but overall I've never regretted the decision.
If he really honestly knows what he is doing, and this is completely his intent, then his actions and intent combined form damaging malice for trying to destroy all encryption under Linux, knowingly willingly and purposely.
Nonsense. There are other sources of random numbers, and IIUK, the kernel routines actually use those sources in combination with the CPU instruction. If they combine them properly, this should strengthen the randomness. But even without the (possibly subverted) RdRand instruction, the other sources of randomness would allow encryption to exist....but it might require that you type a sentence or so, so that there would be enough randomness stored in the system. IIRC, some systems used to require that when they ran low on entropy.