I don't know what kind of standards these American Colleges require, but that math problem was set in the same general form (1 to 1000) as some of the ones we did for fun in Primary School ("standard 4" or age 10)...
It is extraordinarily simple.
Spoiler Warning...
.
.
.
.
Imagine brute-forcing it by hand. (Oh the pain)
It would be easier if the number you were adding on was the same each time, yes? Ok, how do you make that happen?
Simple. Add in pairs.
Start with Nothing.
Add 1 and 999,999
Add 2 and 999,998
etc...
continue until you have just added 500,000 and 500,000. You'll need to subtract 500,000 because you added it twice... Ok, easy... Now add the 1,000,000 that you haven't added yet...
Well, it now seems that we add 1,000,000 500,000 times, subtract 500,000, then add 1,000,000...
That seems like multiplying 1,000,000 by 500,000 then adding 500,000 to me. Should a college student be ready to multiply and add yet?
Result: 500,000,500,000
Hardly scholarship material... In New Zealand primary school, we solved a specific case {1..1000} in 30 minutes, then a couple years later in intermediate (12 yrs old) we solved the general case using algebra. At 14 yrs old we were taught to solve similar problems again with algebraic summing of finite series (and that was the easier part of the course)
This is not a troll, but if this college seriously expects to vet scholorship recipients using this, perhaps they should use a REAL test.
Perhaps it's like the lottery rules in this country - if the lottery runners are not a registered non-profit organisation, they get taxed, so they make you answer a completely brainless question as part of a "competition", then randomly pick out the winner because they had "too many correct answers"...
Singing bye-bye,
this part of the hard drive,
maybee data, someday later,
now it's just gotten fried.
I pressed a button, kissed his data goodbye,
I hope this makes my customer cry,
I hope this makes my customer cry.
From this article it seems that some partner websites will require an additional 4 digit PIN in order to access services on that sites (such as banks etc)...
This is insane! If only *some* of the sites require the 4 digit PIN, and all the passwords and email addresses for the passport sites are the same (through passport itself), then what on earth is stopping someone who obtained your password (through brute force or whatever) from trying any site that requires a PIN as well with a simple 10,000 step PIN cracker??? Cracking a 4 digit PIN at internet speed is TRIVIAL!
Adding that 4 digit PIN is like adding a knot in the sticky tape holding your bicycle to the post.. It's just one more easily circumventable step in a flawed access-restriction service.
I really hate their stupid registration system, so I had a rant at them:
Your registration system is annoying. I would read articles linked in by other sources (and thereby increase your viewership) if it weren't for this silly system.
I personally find it disgusting that I would have to give up the privacy of anonymity to simply read the content of your site! It's not like I have to pay you when I sign up - I could give completely false information and make a fake account.
The things is that I'm not keen to circumvent your registration process by providing false information, because it seems more and more likely these days that exercising prudent anonymity (even spam protection, a false email address) may result in a prosecution for "Circumventing a copyright measure"...
In fact, some overzealous young legal mind is likely to pick up on this and say it's "Fraud" to provide your site false information too.
Where does it end? Please - bring down your site's towered walls... What possible advantage do you gain by collecting all this information? Is it moral to collect the information when the only useful purpose of it would be spam??
I know you may want demographics, user profiles, etc... But requiring the full identity of some casual browser is bound to turn him/her off your site.
Any (irrational, nonrepeating) number which we can get the nth digit of by a straightforward, direct formula, that exhibits close-to-randomness would work for the purposes of encryption...
But...
With using pi, the fun part comes when you tell someone that the encrypted data they're trying to break has just been xor'd with pi at different starting points a few times, and that you don't feel like telling them the starting points:)
Even better - the starting points could be taken as a integer equivalent of say an MD5 hash of each of three thirds or four quarters of the password you used:)
I'd personally hate to be the cryptographer trying to break into your data when the keyspace is potentially infinite depending on password length:) Rubbing it in their faces that it's just xor'd with pi would just be icing on the cake:)
...All I want for Christmass (3042) is the look on their face when they hit the last 2048bit key and still can't get to my pr0n...
Because we can now skip forward in pi orders of magnitude further than before, we could (if we wanted) use pi (with a random and gigantic start point or seed) as an xor source for cheap and nasty encryption:)
Well, perhaps it's better that they have an audio stream - that way they can pay for the streaming with an audio ad "This lunar event was proudly brought to you by Joe's!"..
Yes... Much more preferable to have an audio stream - it will avoid them having to superimpose "EAT AT JOE's" in bold, bright flashing lights over the corona:)
I'd love someone to tell me what the heck you need all this switching grunt
for just at the moment though (aside from 'whee, imagine a beowul...'):)
spose we'll all have one of these one day though;)
Does it disturb anyone that NASA didn't keep in contact with this probe,
even if only for the sheer PR value of having a 'human presence' so far
away from our home planet?
This doesn't bode well for generation-based or worse yet, sleeper missions
to remote places, does it:)
So I guess this revolutionary technology leap will allow our schoolchildren to blind their teachers, football antiheroes, parents and friends with blue lasers now?:)
I can just see the little idiots shining their rainbow adjustable human blinding tools around at concerts and riots, oh the joy... oh the rapture...
I have some fair skill when it comes to Perl/CGI development, and would also like to do some work for charitable organisations, to see them get online and helping people on the net...
Perhaps there is a need for a bulletin board of some kind for this - I wonder if Slashdot might be able to host this kind of forum out of the kindness in their blessed penguin hearts:)
Seriously, a moderated roster of some sort would be ideal - sort of like matching up a jobsearch site with an employment wanted column... You could even have jobs that fit a certain criteria emailed to you - each one with an ID number or something along those lines...
Anyone else think this could make more people sympathetic to the open source movement?
I myself quit working and became a student for just the reasons above - too much stress, and it was taking the fun out of my net:)
Seriously though, I ended up working from wherever the internet was, wherever a box with SSH could 'jack me in' so to speak, it just all got a bit much - now I try to enjoy my net, and keep work as seperate as possible (not easy for a CGI/perl coder though eh?):)
I can't believe Symantec didn't use a simple hash instead of symmetric encryption... I mean... duh!:)
All it would take is to take a ban list, and use a nice harsh crypt or CRC sum on each entry, with different seeds for each entry - when you are testing a URL for p0rn-ness, extract its domain and test it, then add in the path as well, and check it. easy.
Hmmm... I wonder if this Blacklist decryption software could be used to retrieve some URLs for my bookmarks file... Where's the source again?;)
print <<__ENDRANT__; I think you may have hit on one of the key problems slowing down Linux's widespread take-up. Attitudes like "Nobody gives 2 shits what you think [if you write code or documentation for plex86] someone might listen to you" are hardly likely to encourage new users into the friendly, supportive atmosphere that we are supposed to be.
For your information, I have released several programs into GPL, mostly CGI and Web Log Analysis. If someone suggested that the name of my program sounded odd, or hard to remember, I would most likely take notice, or at least consider the suggestion of a new name.
One of the reasons heaps of people are anti-micro$oft in my part of the world is that they feel that they can't possibly have any effect on anything the behemoth company does - this is a very frustrating feeling, and one that it would pay the Linux world to pay attention to lest we alienate the people we are trying to rescue from the monolithic monetarily mammoth megacorp.
Personally, I think FreeMWare sounds good. It implies the freeness of the software, and everyone knew what VMWare was (presumably), so they know what it does.
plex86 is perhaps *too similar* to plain ol' "x86" for people to actually remember it:) Strange as that may sound...
Hmm perhaps a better name would have been VirtPC or something along those lines?
Slashdot Mirror
All I can say is that when you search for "Ulkarnis" on google, you actually get my site, ulkarnis.rpg.net.nz
On Teoma, you get nowhere close, despite meta tag descriptors and keywords, page title, etc...
I'll stick with Google.
I don't know what kind of standards these American Colleges require, but that math problem was set in the same general form (1 to 1000) as some of the ones we did for fun in Primary School ("standard 4" or age 10)...
It is extraordinarily simple.
Spoiler Warning...
.
.
.
.
Imagine brute-forcing it by hand. (Oh the pain)
It would be easier if the number you were adding on was the same each time, yes? Ok, how do you make that happen?
Simple. Add in pairs.
Start with Nothing.
Add 1 and 999,999
Add 2 and 999,998
etc...
continue until you have just added 500,000 and 500,000. You'll need to subtract 500,000 because you added it twice... Ok, easy... Now add the 1,000,000 that you haven't added yet...
Well, it now seems that we add 1,000,000 500,000 times, subtract 500,000, then add 1,000,000...
That seems like multiplying 1,000,000 by 500,000 then adding 500,000 to me. Should a college student be ready to multiply and add yet?
Result: 500,000,500,000
Hardly scholarship material... In New Zealand primary school, we solved a specific case {1..1000} in 30 minutes, then a couple years later in intermediate (12 yrs old) we solved the general case using algebra. At 14 yrs old we were taught to solve similar problems again with algebraic summing of finite series (and that was the easier part of the course)
This is not a troll, but if this college seriously expects to vet scholorship recipients using this, perhaps they should use a REAL test.
Perhaps it's like the lottery rules in this country - if the lottery runners are not a registered non-profit organisation, they get taxed, so they make you answer a completely brainless question as part of a "competition", then randomly pick out the winner because they had "too many correct answers"...
Singing bye-bye,
this part of the hard drive,
maybee data, someday later,
now it's just gotten fried.
I pressed a button, kissed his data goodbye,
I hope this makes my customer cry,
I hope this makes my customer cry.
From this article it seems that some partner websites will require an additional 4 digit PIN in order to access services on that sites (such as banks etc)...
This is insane! If only *some* of the sites require the 4 digit PIN, and all the passwords and email addresses for the passport sites are the same (through passport itself), then what on earth is stopping someone who obtained your password (through brute force or whatever) from trying any site that requires a PIN as well with a simple 10,000 step PIN cracker??? Cracking a 4 digit PIN at internet speed is TRIVIAL!
Adding that 4 digit PIN is like adding a knot in the sticky tape holding your bicycle to the post.. It's just one more easily circumventable step in a flawed access-restriction service.
I really hate their stupid registration system, so I had a rant at them:
Your registration system is annoying. I would read articles linked in by other sources (and thereby increase your viewership) if it weren't for this silly system.
I personally find it disgusting that I would have to give up the privacy of anonymity to simply read the content of your site! It's not like I have to pay you when I sign up - I could give completely false information and make a fake account.
The things is that I'm not keen to circumvent your registration process by providing false information, because it seems more and more likely these days that exercising prudent anonymity (even spam protection, a false email address) may result in a prosecution for "Circumventing a copyright measure"...
In fact, some overzealous young legal mind is likely to pick up on this and say it's "Fraud" to provide your site false information too.
Where does it end? Please - bring down your site's towered walls... What possible advantage do you gain by collecting all this information? Is it moral to collect the information when the only useful purpose of it would be spam??
I know you may want demographics, user profiles, etc... But requiring the full identity of some casual browser is bound to turn him/her off your site.
Any (irrational, nonrepeating) number which we can get the nth digit of by a straightforward, direct formula, that exhibits close-to-randomness would work for the purposes of encryption...
:)
:)
:) Rubbing it in their faces that it's just xor'd with pi would just be icing on the cake :)
But...
With using pi, the fun part comes when you tell someone that the encrypted data they're trying to break has just been xor'd with pi at different starting points a few times, and that you don't feel like telling them the starting points
Even better - the starting points could be taken as a integer equivalent of say an MD5 hash of each of three thirds or four quarters of the password you used
I'd personally hate to be the cryptographer trying to break into your data when the keyspace is potentially infinite depending on password length
...All I want for Christmass (3042) is the look on their face when they hit the last 2048bit key and still can't get to my pr0n...
This is good :)
:)
Because we can now skip forward in pi orders of magnitude further than before, we could (if we wanted) use pi (with a random and gigantic start point or seed) as an xor source for cheap and nasty encryption
"Atom wave interfering with itself." (PHOTO: Courtesy of W. Ketterle, MIT)
:) Sorry, it just tickles my geekly sense of the absurd :)
LOL
Well, perhaps it's better that they have an audio stream - that way they can pay for the streaming with an audio ad "This lunar event was proudly brought to you by Joe's!"..
:)
Yes... Much more preferable to have an audio stream - it will avoid them having to superimpose "EAT AT JOE's" in bold, bright flashing lights over the corona
Work? turn off the computer?, go outside?, get a tan?
:)
A geek craves not these things
I have but one comment... "This is sweet" :)
:)
;)
I'd love someone to tell me what the heck you need all this switching grunt
for just at the moment though (aside from 'whee, imagine a beowul...')
spose we'll all have one of these one day though
Does it disturb anyone that NASA didn't keep in contact with this probe,
:)
even if only for the sheer PR value of having a 'human presence' so far
away from our home planet?
This doesn't bode well for generation-based or worse yet, sleeper missions
to remote places, does it
So I guess this revolutionary technology leap will allow our schoolchildren :)
to blind their teachers, football antiheroes, parents and friends with blue lasers now?
I can just see the little idiots shining their rainbow adjustable human blinding
tools around at concerts and riots, oh the joy... oh the rapture...
:)
I have some fair skill when it comes to Perl/CGI development, and would also like
:)
to do some work for charitable organisations, to see them get online and helping people on the net...
Perhaps there is a need for a bulletin board of some kind for this
- I wonder if Slashdot might be able to host this kind of forum out of the kindness in their blessed penguin hearts
Seriously, a moderated roster of some sort would be ideal - sort of like matching up a
jobsearch site with an employment wanted column... You could even have jobs
that fit a certain criteria emailed to you - each one with an ID number or something along those lines...
Anyone else think this could make more people sympathetic to the open source movement?
I myself quit working and became a student for just the reasons above :)
:)
- too much stress, and it was taking the fun out of my net
Seriously though, I ended up working from wherever the internet was, wherever a box with SSH
could 'jack me in' so to speak, it just all got a bit much - now I try to enjoy my net,
and keep work as seperate as possible (not easy for a CGI/perl coder though eh?)
Coffee GOOD - COFFEE GOOD!
I can't believe Symantec didn't use a simple hash instead of symmetric encryption... I mean... duh! :)
;)
All it would take is to take a ban list, and use a nice harsh crypt or CRC sum on each entry, with different seeds for each entry - when you are testing a URL for p0rn-ness, extract its domain and test it, then add in the path as well, and check it. easy.
Hmmm... I wonder if this Blacklist decryption software could be used to retrieve some URLs for my bookmarks file... Where's the source again?
How constructive :)
print <<__ENDRANT__;
I think you may have hit on one of the key problems slowing down Linux's widespread take-up. Attitudes like "Nobody gives 2 shits what you think [if you write code or documentation for plex86] someone might listen to you" are hardly likely to encourage new users into the friendly, supportive atmosphere that we are supposed to be.
For your information, I have released several programs into GPL, mostly CGI and Web Log Analysis. If someone suggested that the name of my program sounded odd, or hard to remember, I would most likely take notice, or at least consider the suggestion of a new name.
One of the reasons heaps of people are anti-micro$oft in my part of the world is that they feel that they can't possibly have any effect on anything the behemoth company does - this is a very frustrating feeling, and one that it would pay the Linux world to pay attention to lest we alienate the people we are trying to rescue from the monolithic monetarily mammoth megacorp.
__ENDRANT__
Personally, I think FreeMWare sounds good. It implies the freeness of the software, and everyone knew what VMWare was (presumably), so they know what it does.
:) Strange as that may sound...
plex86 is perhaps *too similar* to plain ol' "x86" for people to actually remember it
Hmm perhaps a better name would have been VirtPC or something along those lines?