It's an implementation on specific hardware that was broken. Not the first time, nor the last. If the *algorithm* would have been broken, now *that* would have been news!
Superficially, the decision sounds fine - of course we want students to analyze the scientific evidence! The problem is that the creationists are going to come back with a novel definition of 'scientific' evidence that treats Intelligent Design as a scientific hypothesis, and they're going to demand textbooks that include a treatment of all kinds of nonsensical 'theories'. ID is not scientific. It has no evidence in its favor (pointing out that we lack intermediate fossils showing the evolution of the lesser red-necked Argentinian swamp leech is not evidence that it was designed). But the Discovery Institute does have another bad textbook waiting in the wings for the next round of textbook-buying decisions in Texas.
"It's at times like this, isn't it, that you realise just how much we need the United Nations - about as much as we need an ear infection." Priceless. Here (Or here, with subtitles in several languages)
Obviously, the closer you are to the equator, the smaller the difference between daylight hours in summer and winter.
However, for those North/South of about 30 degrees, the difference is significant. Not to mention the (measured, reference unavailable) reduction in traffic accidents due to fewer people driving home from work in the dark.
For encrypting single files, gpg is probably the simplest solution. Note that you don't have to bother with key-rings, digital signatures, etc. Just use conventional encryption and a GOOD (can't emphasize this enough) password.
A more user-friendly approach would be to use an encrypting file system, such as TrueCrypt, which presents a single file as a drive on your machine, and backup the encrypted file regularly.
Actually, the collector was only exposed part of the time - one side was exposed to stellar wind, the other side was exposed in the vicinity of the comet. I assume the visible samples are from the latter.
This doesn't invalidate your conclusion, though - collision with dust needs to be taken into account at high speeds.
Kudos for a well-written and intellectually honest reply.
You might wish to browse through http://talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ for direct non-circular evidence of speciation from less to more complex forms.
To state that there is no "minimal or no willingness to offer convincing evidence" is just plain wrong.
Evolution is considered to be both s theory and a fact (see http://talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html). It is also science in the strict sense of being able to generate hypothesis which are falsifiable by observation. It is as much a science as astronomy and archaeology are. Creationalism (and it's modern version, intelligent design) is not.
I agree with you that in principle, evolution does not contradict the existence of a diety. Particularly so since evolution does not claim to deal with the question of the origin of life. This distinction, however,is lost on many beleivers, Christian and otherwise, particularly in the USA. Perhaps they feel that the removal of the need of a god as a creator of species (and man in particular) leaves the diety as nothing more than a master of ceremony, as Daniel Dennett recently put it.
Corresponding disclaimer: I'm an atheist - a member of the only minority against which discrimination is both politically correct and actively encouraged.
1. Evolution theory is, in essence, simple. You've described it pretty accurately in a couple of sentences. It's also very simple to misunderstand, e.g., get only the "random variation part". Quantum mechanics is so counter-intuitive as to be considered incomprehensible.
2. Evolution theory poses a clear and present danger to the religious worldview, insofar as one of the strongest (perhap the strongest) cases for belief in a diety is the argument from design ("can you imagine a building without a builder?" etc.). The whole point of evolution undermines this argument: Yes, it is possible to get from something simple to something complex without a "designer". Quantum mechanics, OTOH, falls under "god works in mysterious ways" to most folks.
U3 is an initiative of flash card vendors to make applications available on any (windows) computer with a USB socket, without installing, changing the registry or leaving data behind on the host's harddrive.
Of course, security is always an issue - not everyone would (or should) trust a random PC not to sniff all the data on the inserted disk-on-key.
Since passwords are not going to dissapear tomorrow, applications such as PasswordSafe allow users to keep separate and random passwords for each account, while the user need only remember a single (hopefully strong) password.
While both of the above algorithms are "broken" in the sense that a collision may be found relatively easily, if a signature is done on both hashes, the attacker has to find a message that provides the same MD5 hash and the same SHA-1 hash, which I strongly doubt is possible theoretically. In other words, if I provide text T and a signature derived from both MD5(T) and SHA1(T), an attacker wil have to find T' such that MD5(T) == MD5(T') AND SHA1(T) == SHA1(T'). Note also that using SHA-1 (or MD5 for that matter) with HMAC is still secure, which means that many protocols using HMAC are OK.
The dilemma is between passwords that are easy to remember, and hence crack, or too hard to remember, resulting in them being written down.
An alternative solution is Password Safe, a well-regarded application that "allows you to have a different password for all the different programs and websites that you deal with, without actually having to remember all those usernames and passwords". The main version is for Windows, but Linux variants (as well as an older PocketPC version) are also available. Full disclosure - I'm the project administrator.
The site may have good intentions, but the end result is that the passwrds it generates are passed in the clear to the user's machine. Not such a good idea (at least if they'd have used SSL...). Also, the generated passwords are quite structured, making them much less entropic then they seem - if an attacker knows that a user has used this site (e.g., by looking at the victim's browser history), she can mount an attack considerably stronger than brute-force.
For this to have anything to do with evolution, the new trait (bipedalism, in this case), has to be passable to the descendants of the animal with the trait.
If this trait is a result of illness, it's hard to see how this can change the animal's genome, making it passable to future genrations.
While Arthur C. Clarke certainly popularized the idea of a space elevator in his science fiction novel "The Fountains of Paradise", the original concept is credited to the Russian engineer Yuri Artsutanov, who published it in 1960. See, for example, here
Clay Shirky makes a strong case why micropayments haven't taken off, and probably won't in the forseeable future. In short, the difference between "free" and "only $0.005" is much larger than only half a cent - it's a change in the mindset of the reader. The article also references more academic papers describing the weaknesses of micropayments.
Slashdot Mirror
The protocol, not the frog (which it was named after).
Since when do young Americans think?
Venus and Mars are alright tonight?
It's an implementation on specific hardware that was broken. Not the first time, nor the last. If the *algorithm* would have been broken, now *that* would have been news!
Chalk up another vote for teamviewer. Latest version doesn't even require an installation. Recommended.
Superficially, the decision sounds fine - of course we want students to analyze the scientific evidence! The problem is that the creationists are going to come back with a novel definition of 'scientific' evidence that treats Intelligent Design as a scientific hypothesis, and they're going to demand textbooks that include a treatment of all kinds of nonsensical 'theories'. ID is not scientific. It has no evidence in its favor (pointing out that we lack intermediate fossils showing the evolution of the lesser red-necked Argentinian swamp leech is not evidence that it was designed). But the Discovery Institute does have another bad textbook waiting in the wings for the next round of textbook-buying decisions in Texas.
For more details, see here.
"It's at times like this, isn't it, that you realise just how much we need the United Nations -
about as much as we need an ear infection."
Priceless.
Here
(Or here, with subtitles in several languages)
And what have you learned from them?
I like to respond by asking how much money the person earns.
http://www.freenas.org/ - FreeBSD based, a pleasure to install, configure and use.
Obviously, the closer you are to the equator, the smaller the difference between daylight hours in summer and winter.
However, for those North/South of about 30 degrees, the difference is significant. Not to mention the (measured, reference unavailable) reduction in traffic accidents due to fewer people driving home from work in the dark.
For encrypting single files, gpg is probably the simplest solution. Note that you don't have to bother with key-rings, digital signatures, etc. Just use conventional encryption and a GOOD (can't emphasize this enough) password.
A more user-friendly approach would be to use an encrypting file system, such as TrueCrypt, which presents a single file as a drive on your machine, and backup the encrypted file regularly.
Actually, the collector was only exposed part of the time - one side was exposed to stellar wind, the other side was exposed in the vicinity of the comet. I assume the visible samples are from the latter.
This doesn't invalidate your conclusion, though - collision with dust needs to be taken into account at high speeds.
Kudos for a well-written and intellectually honest reply.
You might wish to browse through http://talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ for direct non-circular evidence of speciation from less to more complex forms.
To state that there is no "minimal or no willingness to offer convincing evidence" is just plain wrong.
Evolution is considered to be both s theory and a fact (see http://talkorigins.org/faqs/evolution-fact.html). It is also science in the strict sense of being able to generate hypothesis which are falsifiable by observation. It is as much a science as astronomy and archaeology are. Creationalism (and it's modern version, intelligent design) is not.
I agree with you that in principle, evolution does not contradict the existence of a diety. Particularly so since evolution does not claim to deal with the question of the origin of life. This distinction, however,is lost on many beleivers, Christian and otherwise, particularly in the USA. Perhaps they feel that the removal of the need of a god as a creator of species (and man in particular) leaves the diety as nothing more than a master of ceremony, as Daniel Dennett recently put it.
Corresponding disclaimer: I'm an atheist - a member of the only minority against which discrimination is both politically correct and actively encouraged.
Simple, really:
1. Evolution theory is, in essence, simple. You've described it pretty accurately in a couple of sentences. It's also very simple to misunderstand, e.g., get only the "random variation part". Quantum mechanics is so counter-intuitive as to be considered incomprehensible.
2. Evolution theory poses a clear and present danger to the religious worldview, insofar as one of the strongest (perhap the strongest) cases for belief in a diety is the argument from design ("can you imagine a building without a builder?" etc.). The whole point of evolution undermines this argument: Yes, it is possible to get from something simple to something complex without a "designer". Quantum mechanics, OTOH, falls under "god works in mysterious ways" to most folks.
U3 is an initiative of flash card vendors to make applications available on any (windows) computer with a USB socket, without installing, changing the registry or leaving data behind on the host's harddrive.
Of course, security is always an issue - not everyone would (or should) trust a random PC not to sniff all the data on the inserted disk-on-key.
Actually, PasswordSafe is actively maintained on SourceForge: http://passwordsafe.sourceforge.net/
You don't need to trust Schneier's rep, as the sources are available...
As to the Crypto, AES is currently much less reviewed than Blowfish, as it'smuch newer and 3DES, while reliable, is relatively SLOW...
Note: I'm the current project admin.
Actually, Bruce Schneier wrote exactly such an application, and put in on SourceForge a while ago, where it is now currently maintained:
PasswordSafe
Note: I'm the project's current admin.
Note: I'm the project's admin on SourceForge.
While both of the above algorithms are "broken" in the sense that a collision may be found relatively easily, if a signature is done on both hashes, the attacker has to find a message that provides the same MD5 hash and the same SHA-1 hash, which I strongly doubt is possible theoretically.
In other words, if I provide text T and a signature derived from both MD5(T) and SHA1(T), an attacker wil have to find T' such that MD5(T) == MD5(T') AND SHA1(T) == SHA1(T').
Note also that using SHA-1 (or MD5 for that matter) with HMAC is still secure, which means that many protocols using HMAC are OK.
The dilemma is between passwords that are easy to remember, and hence crack, or too hard to remember, resulting in them being written down.
An alternative solution is Password Safe, a well-regarded application that "allows you to have a different password for all the different programs and websites that you deal with, without actually having to remember all those usernames and passwords". The main version is for Windows, but Linux variants (as well as an older PocketPC version) are also available.
Full disclosure - I'm the project administrator.
The site may have good intentions, but the end result is that the passwrds it generates are passed in the clear to the user's machine. Not such a good idea (at least if they'd have used SSL...).
Also, the generated passwords are quite structured, making them much less entropic then they seem - if an attacker knows that a user has used this site (e.g., by looking at the victim's browser history), she can mount an attack considerably stronger than brute-force.
For this to have anything to do with evolution, the new trait (bipedalism, in this case), has to be passable to the descendants of the animal with the trait.
If this trait is a result of illness, it's hard to see how this can change the animal's genome, making it passable to future genrations.
Nice story, though...
While Arthur C. Clarke certainly popularized the idea of a space elevator in his science fiction novel "The Fountains of Paradise", the original concept is credited to the Russian engineer Yuri Artsutanov, who published it in 1960. See, for example, here
Clay Shirky makes a strong case why micropayments haven't taken off, and probably won't in the forseeable future. In short, the difference between "free" and "only $0.005" is much larger than only half a cent - it's a change in the mindset of the reader. The article also references more academic papers describing the weaknesses of micropayments.