If all I do is send 100 byte messages, why would I use the whole 4K at one shot? Just divide the pad into 40 chunks and send the number of the chunk to use with each encrypted message.
The point is, if you say something is bad because such-and-such did it, then you can also argue that eating, drinking, and sleeping are horrific crimes, since the number of historical figures who did not indulge in them at one time or another is rather limited.
...until Philips finds it more profitable to discard that rule.
Given that Philips is still making and selling CD players, it would very much be in their interest to see that their drives do not start barfing on CD's claiming to be authentic Compact Discs. I don't see these "pre-scratched" discs bearing Philips' CD logo for long.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Steganography isn't encryption -- it's concealment.
And DeCSS isn't a copy-protection circumvention device, but you ask 100 reporters or politicians and guess what every one of them'll think it is. Sadly, what [insert random internet related topic here] is isn't nearly as important as what it appears to be to the general public.
They are letting us do the research that will someday make it cost-effective to send people into space on a large scale.
I fail to see how microsats make it easier to get out of this gravity well. And what gives you the idea that NASA really wants lots of people in space? All they ever needed to do was make it reasonably inexpensive to reach orbit. No small task, to be sure, but they've had 50 years and umpteen billions of dollars to do it with. The rest of us would have taken care of the rest. Everything, absolutely everything else they did should have been secondary to that. But instead, they have spent many times more putting a flag on the moon than they have on, say, scramjets and laser boosts and other potentially very cheap means of getting to orbit. Yes, the stuff they've done is certainly very impressive, but how useful is it to know the components of lunar regolith when nobody has set foot there for over 30 years and there are no such plans in the forseeable future? Or that there are planets in other star systems light-years away when we can barely go 60 miles straight up? It's all wonderful, fascinating knowledge and, with the way NASA's been going, completely and totally useless.
If you talk to people about your plans to whack a goose, they can't convict you of conspiracy to commit goose-whacking because there's no law against conspiring to goose-whack.
Except the latest craze in DC is to consider talking about a crime as bad as actually commiting it, especially when it involves anything electronic.
Hitler, the famed innovator had the same scheme going
Reverse argument. A man can be bad because of what he does. An action is not bad because of the man who does it. Hitler may have been the friggin Antichrist, but he did make the trains run on time. At least until they got bombed into shrapnel by all the people he'd managed to piss off...
However, I do agree with you that this particular 'innovation' should be relegated to the scrap heap.
I really love the ability of Slashdot readers to draw out (and argue out) the finer points of their insanity
Well, dammit, what else am I supposed to do with my time? The doctors only let me out of the cell for half an hour every day. You suggesting I should do something other than peruse/.?
I whipped up with a slightly more phoenetic alphabet for English a while back. Got rid of letters whose sounds were made by others (c, x, q, y), added letters for the 'sh', 'ng', 'ch' sounds and different vowel pronunciations (3 for the letter 'a'!), changed how others work (j used for the soft, g for the hard) and the like. Looked freaky in writing but would probably be worlds easier to learn. With the extras, it came to something like 30 letters. And of course you'd end lumping all like-pronounced words with the same spelling (pair, pare, pear), but that's just 'tû fki bd'.
I've no doubt it's been done elsewhere by someone with better motivations than having an hour to kill, though.
The US is currently the biggest supplier of humanitarian aid to the Afghani people. They still hate the US, no matter how much food we send. If you read the article, you get a sense of the mindset of these people. They don't care if they receive material goods, they feel they are fighting for a "higher cause". Even those who are not suicide-bomber fanatics will fight viciously if their homeland is invaded.
Some of them have probably convinced themselves that the more misery they inflict on everyone the better heaven will be, too. I can just see the Taliban at work; "Ok, let's see how we can improve the afterlife for Afghans. Hmmm, ok, how about we try to turn the clock back 10000 years and outlaw agriculture. Yeah, that's it! We'll revert to hunter-gatherers. That'll show those decadent infidels!"
I really can't figure out what to do with a belief system like that. You can't make peace with them, since they'll try to kill you at every opportunity. You can't simply ignore them for the same reasons. You can't help them out of the mire, since they'll just take offense to it. All you got left is killing them en masse, which is a wholly unacceptable option.
Are they trying for polar orbits or what? I had thought the launch bonus you get from launching near the equator made it much less economical to head towards the poles.
why is it that everytime a news source, such as slashdot, reports negativly on a politician, that if the political views of the politician coincide with that of the news source, that they fail to mention the politicians political party???
Because as a rule, both Democrats and Republicans are equally stupid when it comes to technology. So really, what's the point in them telling us what we already know? "The Democrats are pushing for a general ban on n-type transistors in the hopes of making buttered bread land on the dry side? No real surprise there, the Republicans are trying to get rid of the p-types for the same reason."
Actually, I agree with you. I'd like to know which party in general and which chumps in particular are pissing away the Bill of Rights in the name of ineffective measures. And for the love of god, get rid of the voice votes!
On the surface or in the air, maybe. Underground or on airless surfaces, it could be used for massive excavations. In space, it can be used for propulsion.
Really, there's almost no technology ever developed by mankind that doesn't have its up side as well as the downside. I'm having trouble coming up with a useful application for nerve gasses, but I'm sure there's one out there.
Oh? How? You're sure as hell not going to keep people from bringing knives onto a plane; it's hard enough keeping out bomb and guns. Put a guard on every flight? Guess who'd be the first to die in a hijacking. Make the cockpit door impenetrable? Pilots gotta open the door sometime during the flight, so terrorists would just have to have good timing.
Interestingly enough, the only effective force in all this was the thing that would be on the plane in any event: passengers. These terrorists may have ruined it for other would-be hijackers. From now on passengers on hijacked flights will know that there's a good chance that the hijackers are on a suicide mission. It'd have been better if the Pennsylvania flight had not crashed, but I know that I for one will simply not let a flight I'm on be hijacked and crashed into a building by some punks with knives. If I'm gonna die, I'll choose to do it on my own terms and to take them with me.
However, I do agree that it's hard to make a suicide fighter afraid. The suicide bomber is beyond fear for himself, but fear for the death of his cause is certainly there. The terrorist usually has financial or political backers who are not quite as willing to throw their lives away. They must be made to fear what will happen to them if they support terrorism.
I'm sure that they said the exact same thing as they planned the hijacking
They either thought that they wouldn't be caught or that if they were, the revenge would be light or nonexistent, or that they would accomplish something worthwhile with it. If they had government support, that government evidently thinks that we'd not be willing to hurt them. That attitude needs to change. Obviously there's still a large group of people crazy enough to think that they're invincible and that destroying two buildings would bring the US to its knees, but if their financial backers knew that doing so would mean death for them, failure of their cause, and ruin for their country, would they give out money so easily? This is why bin Laden is particularly dangerous; crazy and self-funded.
Some of the actions abroad of our own agencies in the past few decades have been utterly reprehensible, but they were perfectly willing to do them because they knew that about the worst they'd get would be bad PR back home.
How can you trust the US Government irrevocably and without question on one issue, then say I'm not going to upgrade my encryption to the backdoor version because you can't trust those jerks in Washington!
Who said anything about trusting them implicitly? I'll be damned if the government doesn't at least tell us what the hell they're up to in this. I can fairly well trust them on this topic because of the massive amounts of media attention. Look at how fast the fighting in Kabul was reported. If the government undertakes anything big enough (and something big is the only thing the populace will accept for this), we'll find out about it.
Besides, the situations are totally different. Back doors in encryption programs, aside from being ineffective and unenforcable, puts power over how you use your computer in the hands of FBI agents who can barely turn their PC's on. Same for the DMCA, UCITA, son-of-DMCA, (whatever its name was,/. archive is down), CDA, and every other piece of techno-legislation. The people who wrote them chose not to actually talk to anyone who knew anything about computers and the result is bad and getting worse.
Imagine the case where a normal star smashes into a black hole
Uh, it still applies. The star is not a single entity and can be (and is!) broken down into smaller chunks for easy digestion. An electron, as far as we know, cannot.
Does someone need to walk into downtown LA or San Fransico with a suitcase mininuke and kill 300,000 people before you wonder if search and seizure without just cause is REALLY that big of a deal?
And making it so The Man no longer needs a search warrant will help with that scenario how? Are cops going to start doing random checks of briefcases on the street? Can you conceive of how bad the situation would be if any cop could walk into your house and take whatever he wanted without need of a warrant and not violate the law in doing so?
Please note that this catastrophe was done with knives. Knives. Millions of dollars spent on x-ray equipment to find guns and bombs and they kill 10,000 people with some fucking Ginsu's. Logically, the only way to prevent it from happening is to outlaw knives. That sound effective to you?
It's very, very, very hard to defend against terrorism. You've got a massive amount of area/people/buildings/vehicles to defend while the terrorists can concentrate their actions at any point. Classic offense/defense scenario. The best way to prevent terrorism is to make it clear that terrorist actions will be ineffectual and that retribution for such actions will be swift, awesome, and inevitable.
The speed at whih a black hole decays is in proportion to its total mass. A black hole as tiny as the article is suggesting wouldn't last more that a trillionth of a second. It wouldn't have time to suck up anything.
On the last Black Hole article on/., someone said that a hole can't eat up anything larger than its event horizon. This means that to suck in even an electron, it has to be at least a certain mass to add any new mass. I make no claims about its validity.
No kidding. I'd really rather something like this was done in orbit or at a Lagrange point or something so that if the facility does go fubar, we'd have a little time to do something before it sinks into our tender little planet.
Slashdot Mirror
If all I do is send 100 byte messages, why would I use the whole 4K at one shot? Just divide the pad into 40 chunks and send the number of the chunk to use with each encrypted message.
The point is, if you say something is bad because such-and-such did it, then you can also argue that eating, drinking, and sleeping are horrific crimes, since the number of historical figures who did not indulge in them at one time or another is rather limited.
Only if compliant with Red Book...
...until Philips finds it more profitable to discard that rule.
Given that Philips is still making and selling CD players, it would very much be in their interest to see that their drives do not start barfing on CD's claiming to be authentic Compact Discs. I don't see these "pre-scratched" discs bearing Philips' CD logo for long.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Steganography isn't encryption -- it's concealment.
And DeCSS isn't a copy-protection circumvention device, but you ask 100 reporters or politicians and guess what every one of them'll think it is. Sadly, what [insert random internet related topic here] is isn't nearly as important as what it appears to be to the general public.
They are letting us do the research that will someday make it cost-effective to send people into space on a large scale.
I fail to see how microsats make it easier to get out of this gravity well. And what gives you the idea that NASA really wants lots of people in space? All they ever needed to do was make it reasonably inexpensive to reach orbit. No small task, to be sure, but they've had 50 years and umpteen billions of dollars to do it with. The rest of us would have taken care of the rest. Everything, absolutely everything else they did should have been secondary to that. But instead, they have spent many times more putting a flag on the moon than they have on, say, scramjets and laser boosts and other potentially very cheap means of getting to orbit. Yes, the stuff they've done is certainly very impressive, but how useful is it to know the components of lunar regolith when nobody has set foot there for over 30 years and there are no such plans in the forseeable future? Or that there are planets in other star systems light-years away when we can barely go 60 miles straight up? It's all wonderful, fascinating knowledge and, with the way NASA's been going, completely and totally useless.
If you talk to people about your plans to whack a goose, they can't convict you of conspiracy to commit goose-whacking because there's no law against conspiring to goose-whack.
Except the latest craze in DC is to consider talking about a crime as bad as actually commiting it, especially when it involves anything electronic.
Hitler, the famed innovator had the same scheme going
Reverse argument. A man can be bad because of what he does. An action is not bad because of the man who does it. Hitler may have been the friggin Antichrist, but he did make the trains run on time. At least until they got bombed into shrapnel by all the people he'd managed to piss off...
However, I do agree with you that this particular 'innovation' should be relegated to the scrap heap.
I really love the ability of Slashdot readers to draw out (and argue out) the finer points of their insanity
/.?
Well, dammit, what else am I supposed to do with my time? The doctors only let me out of the cell for half an hour every day. You suggesting I should do something other than peruse
I whipped up with a slightly more phoenetic alphabet for English a while back. Got rid of letters whose sounds were made by others (c, x, q, y), added letters for the 'sh', 'ng', 'ch' sounds and different vowel pronunciations (3 for the letter 'a'!), changed how others work (j used for the soft, g for the hard) and the like. Looked freaky in writing but would probably be worlds easier to learn. With the extras, it came to something like 30 letters. And of course you'd end lumping all like-pronounced words with the same spelling (pair, pare, pear), but that's just 'tû fki bd'.
I've no doubt it's been done elsewhere by someone with better motivations than having an hour to kill, though.
Well, they'll apparently letting them use the building normally, so whatever damage there is must not be too bad
Either that or they're very well insured.
they'd have the additional problem of bringing such heavy equipment near the site without raising suspicions
Hide it in plain sight. There's already so much equipment there, who'd care about a few more?
Cheyney wanting a full-scale invasion isn't entirely unexpected
Well sure. No way he's not gonna die of a heart attack before the end of this term, so he wants to see some action right away!
The US is currently the biggest supplier of humanitarian aid to the Afghani people. They still hate the US, no matter how much food we send. If you read the article, you get a sense of the mindset of these people. They don't care if they receive material goods, they feel they are fighting for a "higher cause". Even those who are not suicide-bomber fanatics will fight viciously if their homeland is invaded.
Some of them have probably convinced themselves that the more misery they inflict on everyone the better heaven will be, too. I can just see the Taliban at work; "Ok, let's see how we can improve the afterlife for Afghans. Hmmm, ok, how about we try to turn the clock back 10000 years and outlaw agriculture. Yeah, that's it! We'll revert to hunter-gatherers. That'll show those decadent infidels!"
I really can't figure out what to do with a belief system like that. You can't make peace with them, since they'll try to kill you at every opportunity. You can't simply ignore them for the same reasons. You can't help them out of the mire, since they'll just take offense to it. All you got left is killing them en masse, which is a wholly unacceptable option.
No, no, no! In space, you call it 'earthshine'.
Are they trying for polar orbits or what? I had thought the launch bonus you get from launching near the equator made it much less economical to head towards the poles.
why is it that everytime a news source, such as slashdot, reports negativly on a politician, that if the political views of the politician coincide with that of the news source, that they fail to mention the politicians political party???
Because as a rule, both Democrats and Republicans are equally stupid when it comes to technology. So really, what's the point in them telling us what we already know? "The Democrats are pushing for a general ban on n-type transistors in the hopes of making buttered bread land on the dry side? No real surprise there, the Republicans are trying to get rid of the p-types for the same reason."
Actually, I agree with you. I'd like to know which party in general and which chumps in particular are pissing away the Bill of Rights in the name of ineffective measures. And for the love of god, get rid of the voice votes!
The bomb's ONLY purpose was for mass destruction
On the surface or in the air, maybe. Underground or on airless surfaces, it could be used for massive excavations. In space, it can be used for propulsion.
Really, there's almost no technology ever developed by mankind that doesn't have its up side as well as the downside. I'm having trouble coming up with a useful application for nerve gasses, but I'm sure there's one out there.
I still have all of mine. Really, the best part of building anything with Construx was to see how much punishment it took to destroy it.
One thing's for sure, you couldn't store it with a 32-bit integer!
But better airline security would
Oh? How? You're sure as hell not going to keep people from bringing knives onto a plane; it's hard enough keeping out bomb and guns. Put a guard on every flight? Guess who'd be the first to die in a hijacking. Make the cockpit door impenetrable? Pilots gotta open the door sometime during the flight, so terrorists would just have to have good timing.
Interestingly enough, the only effective force in all this was the thing that would be on the plane in any event: passengers. These terrorists may have ruined it for other would-be hijackers. From now on passengers on hijacked flights will know that there's a good chance that the hijackers are on a suicide mission. It'd have been better if the Pennsylvania flight had not crashed, but I know that I for one will simply not let a flight I'm on be hijacked and crashed into a building by some punks with knives. If I'm gonna die, I'll choose to do it on my own terms and to take them with me.
However, I do agree that it's hard to make a suicide fighter afraid. The suicide bomber is beyond fear for himself, but fear for the death of his cause is certainly there. The terrorist usually has financial or political backers who are not quite as willing to throw their lives away. They must be made to fear what will happen to them if they support terrorism.
I'm sure that they said the exact same thing as they planned the hijacking
/. archive is down), CDA, and every other piece of techno-legislation. The people who wrote them chose not to actually talk to anyone who knew anything about computers and the result is bad and getting worse.
They either thought that they wouldn't be caught or that if they were, the revenge would be light or nonexistent, or that they would accomplish something worthwhile with it. If they had government support, that government evidently thinks that we'd not be willing to hurt them. That attitude needs to change. Obviously there's still a large group of people crazy enough to think that they're invincible and that destroying two buildings would bring the US to its knees, but if their financial backers knew that doing so would mean death for them, failure of their cause, and ruin for their country, would they give out money so easily? This is why bin Laden is particularly dangerous; crazy and self-funded.
Some of the actions abroad of our own agencies in the past few decades have been utterly reprehensible, but they were perfectly willing to do them because they knew that about the worst they'd get would be bad PR back home.
How can you trust the US Government irrevocably and without question on one issue, then say I'm not going to upgrade my encryption to the backdoor version because you can't trust those jerks in Washington!
Who said anything about trusting them implicitly? I'll be damned if the government doesn't at least tell us what the hell they're up to in this. I can fairly well trust them on this topic because of the massive amounts of media attention. Look at how fast the fighting in Kabul was reported. If the government undertakes anything big enough (and something big is the only thing the populace will accept for this), we'll find out about it.
Besides, the situations are totally different. Back doors in encryption programs, aside from being ineffective and unenforcable, puts power over how you use your computer in the hands of FBI agents who can barely turn their PC's on. Same for the DMCA, UCITA, son-of-DMCA, (whatever its name was,
Imagine the case where a normal star smashes into a black hole
Uh, it still applies. The star is not a single entity and can be (and is!) broken down into smaller chunks for easy digestion. An electron, as far as we know, cannot.
Does someone need to walk into downtown LA or San Fransico with a suitcase mininuke and kill 300,000 people before you wonder if search and seizure without just cause is REALLY that big of a deal?
And making it so The Man no longer needs a search warrant will help with that scenario how? Are cops going to start doing random checks of briefcases on the street? Can you conceive of how bad the situation would be if any cop could walk into your house and take whatever he wanted without need of a warrant and not violate the law in doing so?
Please note that this catastrophe was done with knives. Knives. Millions of dollars spent on x-ray equipment to find guns and bombs and they kill 10,000 people with some fucking Ginsu's. Logically, the only way to prevent it from happening is to outlaw knives. That sound effective to you?
It's very, very, very hard to defend against terrorism. You've got a massive amount of area/people/buildings/vehicles to defend while the terrorists can concentrate their actions at any point. Classic offense/defense scenario. The best way to prevent terrorism is to make it clear that terrorist actions will be ineffectual and that retribution for such actions will be swift, awesome, and inevitable.
The speed at whih a black hole decays is in proportion to its total mass. A black hole as tiny as the article is suggesting wouldn't last more that a trillionth of a second. It wouldn't have time to suck up anything.
/., someone said that a hole can't eat up anything larger than its event horizon. This means that to suck in even an electron, it has to be at least a certain mass to add any new mass. I make no claims about its validity.
On the last Black Hole article on
Here.
No kidding. I'd really rather something like this was done in orbit or at a Lagrange point or something so that if the facility does go fubar, we'd have a little time to do something before it sinks into our tender little planet.