Honest question. Does anyone in the PHP care about this? Last I knew, they were just getting into objects with a halfway decent (though a little kooky) system. Isn't the PHP community mostly just people who want to bash out webpages, with the rest made up of people who think it's a good platform for large-scale frameworks?
I'm not trying to dis the community, those are valid concerns and there should be a tool for those people. But ISTM that AOP is much more likely to succeed in Java than PHP; one might as well try to introduce AOP to Visual Basic users. Hmmm... heh.
I think in Python so the whole idea of calling it a "paradigm" is a bit foreign to me anyhow; I was using it, as relevant, before it had a name, and I know LISPers were, too. A "technique", yes, a valuable one, but I'm not sure it is worth loading it down with the baggage of being a "paradigm" so much as a "good OO technique that is easier with language support but still possible without".
Well, as somebody who earned a degree at a respected state university with a 4.0 while working full time after serving six years active duty military to pay for it, I can say that I'm anything but spoiled.
Oh yes, you are so the majority.
Sorry, this is a pet peeve of mine, people who seem to just mentally edit out qualifiers like "most" or "some" or "the majority" and automatically slam them to whichever absolute makes for the best rant. Unless you are convinced that you are an average case around here, I can still respect you, disrespect the majority, and leave you with no grounds to consider me a hypocrite. Try to be less touchy, OK?
And as I have said in the past, I do not do my best writing for slashdot. It's a waste of time, in more ways than one. (One subtle one is every second you waste reviewing, you're losing readers, and while I don't do this for readership it is pointless to waste my time if nobody is going to see it; this is the reason I never reply to threads from more than a day ago even if there is a raging argument.) You missed a few typos, if you're going to be an ass about it, I also added an "e" to "undergrad" right in the second paragraph. I'm sure that's not an exhaustive list.
I've always thought that if you have a 4.0 grade average, and you have anything less than a massive course load from the best college in your major, you must not be challenging yourself.
I have a Master's Degree in Comp. Sci., and I did not graduate from my undergrade with a 4.0; it was around a 3.5. I had something like a 3.8 in major, but I preferred to challenge myself outside my major. (MSU made that easy with their "Honors College" program, which gets you out of the generic crap courses, provided you replace them with real classes. So, for instance, instead of the Generic Social Studies classes that you normally hear people bitching about, I took several real psychology classes; if you can't find something that you like, what the hell are you doing in college? (That program also got me into the hard math courses no questions asked, and I was able to make several other nice substitutions for harder courses that were actually easier for me in a way because I liked them.) In the event you recently started attending or are thinking of going to MSU, I highly recommend hooking up with them.)
I had an English History class that I got a hard-fought 2.0 in. While this is one of my weaker grades, I'm also proud of this one; it was solidly in the middle of the pack in that class, which was eight other history majors. (Woohoo, two hour essay tests with four questions, graded on grammar, spelling, and historical synthesis! Pity that class wasn't labelled as one of the "writing intensive" ones, it beat the snot out of the one I had that was actually labelled as such and I'dve preferred to spend those credits elsewhere.) I also took the advanced physics and never got a 4.0... but I understand it better than those who took the standard one. (Non-calculus based mechanics leaves you with a bit of an inferior understanding, but non-(multi-variate-)calculus electromagnetism is nearly a waste of time!)
So no, I didn't carry a 4.0, because I pushed myself as hard as I could. I, too, would be concerned about someone who got a pure 4.0 in undergrad, and would want to examine their transcript closely, to make sure it wasn't loaded with too many "basketweaving for jocks" equivalents. A pity there isn't a way to have a "difficulty adjustment" for GPAs; I know that my "grade performance average" would end up higher than quite a lot of the "grade point average" 4.0s.
As others have pointed out, college is what you make it. If you find that your classes are so easy you could just read the book, take harder classes. Self-fulfilling prophecies, anyone?
(I don't say this stuff to brag; frankly I don't give a shit what the average Slashdot denizen thinks of this. I don't much respect the majority of you anyways when it comes to things like this; quite a lot of you are spoiled little snots when it comes to academics. But if it helps even one person get something good out of college, it's worth it.)
Yeah, I know... "The media isn't biased! They cover 90% of the crap from one candidate and make up new crap and bury the retractions, but they're balanced because the cover the 10 most egregious percent of the crap from the other guy! How much more balanced do you need?"
The only way, the only way to argue that media coverage is balanced is argument by anecdote, where you hold up an example or two of "balance" from the other side and consider the argument closed. Take a view of the whole, though, and it's clear that the "one or two examples" comprise almost the only examples.
(And an example of a buried retraction: How many of you are unaware that the turkey story is 100% faked up as a political issue, that the core is of no importance whatsoever? Those retractions sure didn't get as much play as the accusations. To be fair, this is Standard Operating Procedure, but it still tilts the playing field when you have to retract a lot of things about one side and almost nothing from the other.)
Sigh. What you wrote is essentially meaningless --- at least I can't see how to generalize the definition of a bit.
I'm pretty sure you are talking about what would be the great-grandparent to this message, and that's not me.
You are, I assume, referring to "fuzzy logic" here.
Not necessarily. Let's try this: A bit, fundamentally, is a statement of knowlegde of a binary proposition. A 1 means that you are fully confident it is true, a 0 means that you are fully confident it is false.
Is that the only definition of bit? Hell no! But what fundamental math concept only has one applicable definition? (Is it just me or is discrete even worse than continuous this way?) Certainly as I said it is useful. Fuzzy logic is one case, but not a very exciting one since it was shown to be equivalent to non-fuzzy logic; error correction is a much more relevant, albeit practical (i.e., not "mathematical":-) ) one.
Obviously the idea of a fractional bit falls right out of this probabilistic definition; it's something you only have a probability for, not a certainty. But it can come up in other contexts too; there is a measure of entropy which naturally gives fractional bits. It is easy to create a parity scheme for data transmission that provides 1.5 bits of protection; a one-bit error is guaranteed to be detected but a two bit error has a 50-50 chance of going undetected. (Nothing like that is in use AFAIK, probabilistic detection was pure anathema to computer science until fairly recently, but one can be constructed.) Here, it is not that there is a.5 bit floating around, but the protection the algorithm and data would provide is neither 1 bit nor 2: 1.5.
Fractional bits are like QM superpositions; you're right in the sense that they can't be "observed" (for some suitable definition of "observed"), and thus in way they aren't "real", but without them a lot of math "stops working".
As for the way that other guy tried to use it, at this point I don't even remember, so I can't speak to whether he used it correctly. I was just trying to clarify my original point with solid examples and take a shot at explaining fractional bits. I'll also re-recommend going to the source on this one; a full understanding of encryption is something few people even can obtain and even fewer can dedicate the time, but for an experienced mathematician, the introductory terms and definitions are fairly easy and, at least in the computer domain, actually quite useful as thinking tools. I only wish I could point you at a free online source easily... well, let me see... well, this is a start, I guess, though it is so ugly in plaintext it is hard to read and didn't have what I was hoping for, but I'm not sure anything like that would be online anyhow... at any rate, the algorithms and crack techniques have passed beyond what any Mere Mortal could hope to understand or contribute to in any reasonable time period, but the basics are quite basic.
UML is useless because it can largely not be meaningfully verified, kept up to date, or executed. As a communication language in the middle of a design session a simplified version of it has a place, but there's little point in trying to drive development with it.
I can't point to a project that does everything UML tries, only it works, because state of the art has not advanced there yet, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something, be it software or an agenda.
But I do know one thing that you must internalize: If it doesn't execute, automatically, it won't be kept up to date.
The best thing I've found so far is a strong coding style that emphasizes readability above most everything else (none of this "np_doSCRTtrd" crap, give me "mainWindow" or something... even in C++ where this is strongly counterculture), comments for why the code is doing what it is doing, and unit tests to provide and verify specification compliance.
Nope, that's not complete; it is difficult to borderline impossible to unit test everything. But this will take you far past anything UML can do reasonably, so it's a start. (I'm inclined to think the way forward is to make more things more testable; while unit tests have problems with multithreading even in theory, a lot of the practical problems one encounters comes from a lack of testability built into libraries. The canonical example of this is GUI libraries; there is no fundamental reason GUIs should be hard to test... if you could post events to simulate anything the user might do, that alone would nearly be enough, and you'd think this wouldn't be hard...) It's just the best I know, and, like I said, as far as I can see it handily defeats UML in every way that matters to me, so the fact that it doesn't fulfill the promises of UML doesn't bother me, especially as I'm not convinced anything can.
You said you were a mathematician, and I'm not much of a crypto guy either, though I am confident about what I posted. I'd recommend going to the source and getting the full math treatment.
There is a dichotomy between the level of math I am talking about and level you were. I was talking mostly pure math and saying it may or may not apply practically, you're starting practically and trying to argue up to the math. If you're a mathematician, you should know how good that idea is:-)
The trivial example is, for instance, ROT13, which decrypts itself. Apply it once, and while by modern standards that might as well be plaintext, it is slightly harder to read. "Layer" it with ROT13 again, and now you've decreased the security, not increased it.
"Layering" Ceasar ciphers does nothing to increase the underlying security of the encryption, though unless you get very unlucky or careless it won't "undo" the encryption. All layering does is change the ultimate symbol matching table and all "layers" can trivially be decrypted in one fell swoop; a modern attacker won't even have any way to know there were layers in the first place, they are so transparent!
On the other hand, it is widely thought that while DES had an excessively small keysize, the algorithm was reasonably secure enough that you could layer it three times for 3DES and get a "new" algorithm that is still useful.
I'm sure that modern encryption has been scrutinized for this sort of weakness, but even so, it's the kind of thing that ought to be instinctively repulsive mathematically; when you composite two encryption forms together you are basically creating a new one, with unknown characteristics. Any monster can pop out of the folds of math-space and bite you. Better to stick with what we mostly know about.
Also, fractional bits pop up all the time in info theory and encryption (a branch of info theory). One example of a fractional bit, though not related to encryption so much as error correction, is a value that you know is either one or zero, but you only know it is a one with 90% confidence. That isn't a full bit, but neither is it zero bits. Happens all the time. In fact, technically, in the real world we never deal with bits, as we can never be 100% certain. Inside your processor it is so close to 100% as to make no difference, but as you get out into the world the uncertainties can reach our threshold of conciousness, and fractional bits is the most natural way to work with error correction situations.
Re:For what it's worth...
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At least, that's the way the schools I attend teach it.
You know how "everyone" always says they learned nothing at school?
I've learned they are apparently serious... and you see it in actions like this.
I swear, I'd never hire someone who claimed to learn "nothing" in school, anymore then I'd hire someone who only learned in school; I'd be too afraid they were literally, 100% telling the truth! (I'm not saying this to dis the self-taught, which can be great; I'm saying that if you sat through years of classes and learned nothing, absolutely nothing, either you are an absolute flaming genius 'cause you worked out the assembled wisdom of thousands/millions of man-years of some discipline by yourself, or you are someone who has completely wasted a remarkable opportunity.)
While we defeinitely know security by obfuscation is stupid in terms of computer security, safety by layers makes sense. If there were several layers of encryption (asymmetrical and symmetrical), compromising the system takes more time, and if one layer fails, the game isn't over just yet.
In the way you meant that, you are dangerously wrong, though possibly in a primarily academic sense.
If by layers you mean multiple forms of ID (password + physical token), then you are OK.
If by layers you mean one data stream should be protected by multiple composited types of encryption, you are, at least mathematically, wrong. Compositing encryption techniques has unpredictable results. Two forms of encryption, if composited, can be either weaker, the same, or stronger then either seperately; it takes careful analysis to know which, to the extent we can know at all.
It is possible this is primarily academic as if I could weaken DES by re-encrypting it with AES, AES would constitute a "break" of DES; common sense certainly tells you that seems unlikely.
But you don't know.
Generally speaking, if you want something more secure, don't add multiple layers of encryption. Add more bits.
This is mostly academic anyways as with modern encryption adding more bits is almost always (i.e., 99.9999%+ of the bits transmitted, easily) a complete waste of time. Security should be analysed in terms of what it costs to break (and the value of the thing being protected), and modern encryption is, practically speaking, so absurdly secure (when correctly used!) that we've long since passed the point where it is more effective to hold you up at gun point and demand the secured item, or any number of other things that don't involve tapping communications and decrypting it. (When it takes the entire known universe converted into a 100% efficient computer billions of years to crack by brute force, you're fairly safe, and the larger key sizes of AES get into such absurdities to crack naively. It isn't that hard since adding one bit doubles the keyspace, and even the entire known universe isn't that large when you take the log of it...)
However, what I was referring to is turtles or fish being able to see in two, three or four more dimensions than we currently do.
Would you care to define how you are using the term "dimension" here? Has string theory revealed that turtles see in seven dimensions?
You're either way, way, way beyond me or you don't know what the hell you're talking about. And I'm not encouraged by some of the rest of your message:
Ah, it depends upon which organism you are referring to. I assume you mean humans and if so, there is considerable overlap in the pigments, especially in the red and green pigments. The blue and green also overlap to some extent.
Do we not know what "completely" means? What's your point?
They are an evolutionary subset of eyes as our eyes
Again, what's your point? Human eyes are a subset of the set of every eye's capability? No kidding. You do have some points here but they are pretty hard to discern behind some very unclear thinking/communication.
I'm also disturbed by your claim that other eyes have been evolving for "longer".... unless time looped funny its about the same time for all since life crawled out of the sludge. Are you getting at the idea that other creatures breed faster and there have been more generations?
Actually, you may be surprised at what one could do and how things could be improved.
But I think you missed my point, which is that improvements aren't free once your reach (near) optimality. (Look up the idea of Pareto optimality.) You can't create an eye that takes the best of eagles, turtles, bees, and increase resolution, and do this and do that. You can do it on paper, you can do it in your head, but you can't do it in reality, or it would be already done. Every time you improve an aspect of the human eye, you're going to degrade another aspect.
This is assuming you don't throw the whole thing out and start anew with inorganic technology, which can probably be made vastly superior with work, but technically that's just another point on the pareto optmality frontier, one that can't be reached by evolution, which is to say, you still won't have eyes that zoom and are compact and don't draw power and see in a billion spectra and etc. etc. etc.
If you are talking about being able to understand symbolic representation of higher order information, dolphins, gorillas and even octopus can learn to interpret symbology from meaning and their retinas are good enough to resolve finely detailed information.
I hear this line a lot, usually supported by "look, there's this one thing that a dolphin can do as well as a human", completely ignoring the fact that we do much, much, much more than "one thing" well. Yes, a few higher animals can do some limited symbolic recognition and even more limited manipulation, but it's not even remotely similar in quality to what we've got, and anyone telling you otherwise is either misguided or selling you an agenda. Humans aren't the best at everything universally, but there is nothing on this planet that even comes close for general purpose cognition.
Actually, there is plenty of bandwidth available. Where are you getting your information?
I refer to the whole system. The bottleneck for vision isn't really in the eye. My eye dumps tons of data into my brain and I still fail to do things like see the keys sitting right in front of me. That is not a failing of the sensor.
I reject as equally misguided the claims that humans are the best at everything (which you don't much hear any more) and the claim that humans are nothing special. Both are equally deluded, equally wrong, equally a result of deliberate self-deception. Our eyes may not be the greatest thing on the planet, but my personal vision problems stem from the staggering amount of high-level processing I have to do, as in the previous example, not the eye itself. More spectra or a zoom l
Birds, fish and many reptiles have much more sophisticated retinas that perceive what we would term a multi-spectral visual world.
We'd call it "multispectrum" because we don't see there. But we see "multispectrum" too... otherwise what do you call red, green, and blue? The curves for those receptors don't completely overlap.
Of course human eyes aren't a proper superset of every eye's capability in the world. There isn't room in one eye for that, and if you did jam it all in you'd be bitching about our crappy resolution! But they are quite good for what they do, and the brain behind them is unsurpassed, if you consider seeing not just as raw pixel collection but as understanding the world. Nobody else has a visual system that can read.
Artificial eyes will be cool but it's going to be hard to jam any more info down the optic nerve and through the visual system that we already are unless we do a full brain replacement.
Evolution is not magic. It is powerful but not omnipotent.
Neural networks seem to only be able to concentrate on one thing at a time. Your brain can "multitask" right now, to the extent that your "multitasking" doesn't require any one part of the brain to be doing two things. Walking and talking? So trivial that we don't even have to explicitly learn it, there's almost no overlap. Designing a class network and writing a song? Both need full creative power and can't be done at once in any reasonable way.
This is not a "neuron" problem, this is not something that can be evolved away. This is a structure problem, a network problem. The problem isn't that we can't multitask, it is that you can not be creative in more than one task at once, you can not intensely read more than one thing at once.
The problem is not that we can't do more than one thing at once, the problem a given cognitive "ability" can't be multitasked without severe penalty, and that penalty isn't going to go away unless you get off the neural substrate.
(Now, I'm being fuzzy on this "ability" thing because right now, nobody could define it precisely. But even so, they exist. You only have one basic speech center, and you can not apply it 100% to two tasks. And you have to understand that 100% almost in the CPU sense; I have successfully carried on two conversations at once for a time (as in, non-stop talking even as I'm listening to the other guy), but I wasn't getting 100% on each conversation, I was maybe 15%. Isolated exceptions can arise because you can "create" a new "ability" through practice, just as we all basically have "walking" circuits that don't count much against our multitasking. But again, that's not the way we are trying to multitask in the info age; you can't practice "reading Slashdot" until it passes below concious awareness, it's too complicated, and even if you did, it would not be 100% as effective as a concious reading.)
What exactly is it you wish this "right to exercise the first amendment on private property to be"?
Did you read my essay?
One point you are missing is that ownership is not just a series of rights, but a series of responsibilities. You sing the praise of Earthlink's ownership rights, without considering that they may not want them. If they "own" your website and can shut it off for any reason, they are also responsible for it. Earthlink probably doesn't want this, and yes, people have sued service providers, and gotten disturbingly far. All in all, I think they'd want to be common carriers.
The flip side is that as common carriers, once they contract they not only "don't have to", but they can't discriminate based on content, barring warrants and such.
Yes, Earthlink owns their wires. But if they want to sell/rent them, it is not inconceivable that we, as a society, choose to regulate on what grounds they can offer that contract. Property rights are not that absolute; contracts can override them, that's almost what a contract is. You ask what my "right" is, my "right" is $9.95 a month.
We are not left with a choice between "property" and "free speech"; there is a very reasonable compromise that works for everybody. Unfortunately, some people (I'm thinking lawmakers here) and many companies think so short-term they are too stupid to see it immediately, they have to be bitten first. Hopefully the legal system won't smell an opportunity to wipe out free speech in this manner and will choose this compromise.
Um, that logically means that you have no free speech rights. At all. What -- we only have the right not to be silenced by the government, but anyone else can shut you up at will because you are on their property? Put a roof over land, and the constitution ends at the parking lot? Work - school - malls - airports - anyplace on earth - is private property. This is madness.
If I understand the law correctly, this is currently something of a grey area, but a literal reading of the law would say you are correct. It is a gaping hole in the system as it currently exists because there are legal minefields every which way you look.
When I carefully defined "free speech" for an essay I wrote I had to explicitly point this out; times have changed since the first amendment was written, and the majority of speech now takes place on private grounds. We're going to have to deal with this sooner or later because a naive interpretation of property laws does largely negate your free speech today (detailed argument in linked essay, relevant paragraph:).
Considering both the target of the speech and the publisher of the speech is necessary. Suppose I use an Earthlink-hosted web page to criticise a Sony-released movie. If Earthlink can suppress my speech for any reason they please (on the theory that they own the wires and the site hosting), and have no legal or ethical motivation to not suppress the speech, then in theory, all Sony would have to do is convince Earthlink it is in their best interest to remove my site. The easiest way to do that is simply cut Earthlink a check exceeding the value to Earthlink of continuing to host my page, which is a trivial amount of money to Sony. In the absence of any other considerations, most people would consider this a violation of my right to ``free speech'', even though there's may be nothing actually illegal in this scenario. So if we allow the owner of the means of expression to shut down our speech for any reason they see fit, it's only a short economic step to allow the target of the expression to have undue influence, especially in this age where the gap between one person's resources and one corporation's resources continues to widen.
On the down side, welcome to the land of magic and wonder, where arcane bugs haunt the long forgotten planes of DOM...
Yeah, I dug into Mozilla development gung ho over the past year or so, and I've completely abandoned it... well, I'm in the process of creating a replacement XBL, but after that's done, I'm out. In painfully slow succession, I've tried in a serious way Moz's RDF support, XUL, and XBL, and in every case I have rapidly exceeded their capabilities (to the tune of segfaults) and gone back to JS + DOM. (For RDF, I now dump out my data as a JS file and use XMLHttpRequest to retrieve it and "eval" to run it; this is what Google Suggest uses. I beat them by about a month, I know others beat them by more:-) but it works and you'll be stunned how fast it is, even for many kilobytes of data; by far the fastest solution I've found, even independent of the fact that loading any sort of XML in Moz causes a huge stall of some kind and tends to cause crashes and memory leaks in nothing flat.)
I'm preparing a series of half rants, half detailed indictments on why the Mozilla specific technologies are not just poorly implemented at the moment for any task other than being a web browser, but why Javascript + DOM is usually, on the balance, a superior solution. ("On the balance" means that while my JS implementation of XBL is neither a subset nor a superset of "true" XBL, on the whole the benefits level out in favor of my JS implementation... and if I were willing to go pure Moz instead of cross-platform it would be a total win.) I don't want to repeat them here in toto, but, well, that's actually the basic argument: Me, a single schmoe, can replicate most of XBL in a couple of weeks, in Javascript, and it is actually much more reliable too, for reasons that will only make sense if you used Moz's XBL support for anything serious, like widgets that can load remote data or include other widgets in interesting ways. How much time has been spent on XBL, which is still behind?
Unless you need a XUL widget like "popup" that has no good HTML replacement, you're just better off with JS and DOM. Most people don't understand how powerful JS really is, and I've found it to be surprisingly speedy, too.
(To show I'm not just spouting off randomly, here is my current XBL in JS implementation. Still in development, but it oughta show I'm serious about this, and even now I'm finding it more pleasing to work with overall than real XBL. What stops me from releasing the rants right now is, well, there's some writing to be done yet, but instead of just bitching I want to have some constructive solutions as well; xbl.js is a big part of that, and right now I'm working on the POPUP element because I need that for my app. Ranting is great but I find they are even more powerful when they are not purely negative.)
Details forthcoming at a later date, but next time you're reaching for XUL or XBL, if it isn't for a Mozilla extension, stop and make sure you don't really want to do it in cross-platform JS + DOM. See, the thing is, those libraries are well tested and optimized in a variety of situations; I'm not encountering bugs hourly like I felt like I was in Moz.
Finally, to preempt some of the obvious responses, I'm not saying XBL or something was a bad idea; in fact the idea is so good I'm re-implementing it. I'm saying the implementation right now is so dodgy it isn't worth playing with when there is another less cool, but more functional, alternative available today in the form of JS + DOM.... and what advantages XUL or XBL have over my JS implementation are only a few small hooks away from being exposed to the JS as well.
If you mine enough random sentances, you can get some truly profound stuff. Every geek should spend at least a couple of hours with some source text and a markov chain generator.
But it isn't the random generator that is profound, it is the person doing the selection.
Similarly, while the majority of what the kids say may be worthless, a selection process can make the raw material look more intelligent than it is. You are probably reading more into the sentances than the kids actually meant, because you're only getting the sentances that you can read more into.
Not saying it isn't fake, but it doesn't have to be.
I guess I'd just like to see the math on how they come up with these numbers.
Nobody's stopping you; it's not a secret. Go get it.
But get ready for some heavy lifting; as you dig into it you'll very quickly realize why they didn't try to put any in a popular news article.
I'm not too up on it myself but you can start with phase spaces, I think, though that hardly touches the real fun, which is the probabilistic aspect of determining the path of an object through all of the influences of the solar system... while I'm not up on the details I do know they don't use naive formulations of that problem, they've got some powerful and brain-bending tricks to prevent the estimate from diffusing too quickly.
It seems that if there is such a close race that there is only 10 votes in it, then it's not really democracy that's deciding the winner of this. Instead it comes down to combinations of random events.
Yes.
But before you get too upset about it, remember that Democracy here has basically stated that it "doesn't care" which one wins.
Thus, the real issue here is getting a happy loser more than obtaining a winner; practically speaking they both won or lost equally and "fair" or "meaning" really isn't on the table here, since they can't share the office.
Abstractly, this is just something that happens every so often; short-term exciting, but not worth getting too upset over in the long term. Concretely, if it makes people more aware of the pervasive voting fraud that is always done by both sides, some good might even come of it.
you join us and you get a password you access through nocatauth and then gain full speed open access at the wireless points.... these tools are useless against that scheme.
Will it stand up to someone who knows how to change their MAC address and other information to match a subscriber? Collect four or five of them and odds are that at any given time one of them isn't present.
Part of the reason that WEP is fundamentally insecure goes beyond just the broken encryption; once you've cracked the key you can be anyone. You can't create a secure system without solid identification of something (doesn't have to be "a person", but "a network card", "an account", something), and with WEP you can't do that.
I seem to recall specific legislature in some state in America, easy mod points to those who know it.
You are probably thinking the UCITA; most of the good sites covering it seem to be dead. Last I knew a bastardized version (mostly in ways Slashdotters would approve of) of it had been passed in a couple of states and it was dead in the water in quite a lot of others, and in general the issue is dead now. That little end-run didn't work.
Google can still get you some good info, but I think the site that I remember that had a nice, state-by-state breakdown is gone. More easy karma to someone who finds it, maybe in archive.org...
Slashdot Mirror
Honest question. Does anyone in the PHP care about this? Last I knew, they were just getting into objects with a halfway decent (though a little kooky) system. Isn't the PHP community mostly just people who want to bash out webpages, with the rest made up of people who think it's a good platform for large-scale frameworks?
I'm not trying to dis the community, those are valid concerns and there should be a tool for those people. But ISTM that AOP is much more likely to succeed in Java than PHP; one might as well try to introduce AOP to Visual Basic users. Hmmm... heh.
I think in Python so the whole idea of calling it a "paradigm" is a bit foreign to me anyhow; I was using it, as relevant, before it had a name, and I know LISPers were, too. A "technique", yes, a valuable one, but I'm not sure it is worth loading it down with the baggage of being a "paradigm" so much as a "good OO technique that is easier with language support but still possible without".
Well, as somebody who earned a degree at a respected state university with a 4.0 while working full time after serving six years active duty military to pay for it, I can say that I'm anything but spoiled.
Oh yes, you are so the majority.
Sorry, this is a pet peeve of mine, people who seem to just mentally edit out qualifiers like "most" or "some" or "the majority" and automatically slam them to whichever absolute makes for the best rant. Unless you are convinced that you are an average case around here, I can still respect you, disrespect the majority, and leave you with no grounds to consider me a hypocrite. Try to be less touchy, OK?
And as I have said in the past, I do not do my best writing for slashdot. It's a waste of time, in more ways than one. (One subtle one is every second you waste reviewing, you're losing readers, and while I don't do this for readership it is pointless to waste my time if nobody is going to see it; this is the reason I never reply to threads from more than a day ago even if there is a raging argument.) You missed a few typos, if you're going to be an ass about it, I also added an "e" to "undergrad" right in the second paragraph. I'm sure that's not an exhaustive list.
I've always thought that if you have a 4.0 grade average, and you have anything less than a massive course load from the best college in your major, you must not be challenging yourself.
I have a Master's Degree in Comp. Sci., and I did not graduate from my undergrade with a 4.0; it was around a 3.5. I had something like a 3.8 in major, but I preferred to challenge myself outside my major. (MSU made that easy with their "Honors College" program, which gets you out of the generic crap courses, provided you replace them with real classes. So, for instance, instead of the Generic Social Studies classes that you normally hear people bitching about, I took several real psychology classes; if you can't find something that you like, what the hell are you doing in college? (That program also got me into the hard math courses no questions asked, and I was able to make several other nice substitutions for harder courses that were actually easier for me in a way because I liked them.) In the event you recently started attending or are thinking of going to MSU, I highly recommend hooking up with them.)
I had an English History class that I got a hard-fought 2.0 in. While this is one of my weaker grades, I'm also proud of this one; it was solidly in the middle of the pack in that class, which was eight other history majors. (Woohoo, two hour essay tests with four questions, graded on grammar, spelling, and historical synthesis! Pity that class wasn't labelled as one of the "writing intensive" ones, it beat the snot out of the one I had that was actually labelled as such and I'dve preferred to spend those credits elsewhere.) I also took the advanced physics and never got a 4.0... but I understand it better than those who took the standard one. (Non-calculus based mechanics leaves you with a bit of an inferior understanding, but non-(multi-variate-)calculus electromagnetism is nearly a waste of time!)
So no, I didn't carry a 4.0, because I pushed myself as hard as I could. I, too, would be concerned about someone who got a pure 4.0 in undergrad, and would want to examine their transcript closely, to make sure it wasn't loaded with too many "basketweaving for jocks" equivalents. A pity there isn't a way to have a "difficulty adjustment" for GPAs; I know that my "grade performance average" would end up higher than quite a lot of the "grade point average" 4.0s.
As others have pointed out, college is what you make it. If you find that your classes are so easy you could just read the book, take harder classes. Self-fulfilling prophecies, anyone?
(I don't say this stuff to brag; frankly I don't give a shit what the average Slashdot denizen thinks of this. I don't much respect the majority of you anyways when it comes to things like this; quite a lot of you are spoiled little snots when it comes to academics. But if it helps even one person get something good out of college, it's worth it.)
If anyone happens to read this and is interested, I've created a sourceforge project for it.
Typical US stinginess. 5,000 resurrection potions would be much more useful, but oh no, we need them for ourselves.
Come on people, open up your backpacks and give!
Yeah, I know... "The media isn't biased! They cover 90% of the crap from one candidate and make up new crap and bury the retractions, but they're balanced because the cover the 10 most egregious percent of the crap from the other guy! How much more balanced do you need?"
The only way, the only way to argue that media coverage is balanced is argument by anecdote, where you hold up an example or two of "balance" from the other side and consider the argument closed. Take a view of the whole, though, and it's clear that the "one or two examples" comprise almost the only examples.
(And an example of a buried retraction: How many of you are unaware that the turkey story is 100% faked up as a political issue, that the core is of no importance whatsoever? Those retractions sure didn't get as much play as the accusations. To be fair, this is Standard Operating Procedure, but it still tilts the playing field when you have to retract a lot of things about one side and almost nothing from the other.)
Sigh. What you wrote is essentially meaningless --- at least I can't see how to generalize the definition of a bit.
:-) ) one.
.5 bit floating around, but the protection the algorithm and data would provide is neither 1 bit nor 2: 1.5.
I'm pretty sure you are talking about what would be the great-grandparent to this message, and that's not me.
You are, I assume, referring to "fuzzy logic" here.
Not necessarily. Let's try this: A bit, fundamentally, is a statement of knowlegde of a binary proposition. A 1 means that you are fully confident it is true, a 0 means that you are fully confident it is false.
Is that the only definition of bit? Hell no! But what fundamental math concept only has one applicable definition? (Is it just me or is discrete even worse than continuous this way?) Certainly as I said it is useful. Fuzzy logic is one case, but not a very exciting one since it was shown to be equivalent to non-fuzzy logic; error correction is a much more relevant, albeit practical (i.e., not "mathematical"
Obviously the idea of a fractional bit falls right out of this probabilistic definition; it's something you only have a probability for, not a certainty. But it can come up in other contexts too; there is a measure of entropy which naturally gives fractional bits. It is easy to create a parity scheme for data transmission that provides 1.5 bits of protection; a one-bit error is guaranteed to be detected but a two bit error has a 50-50 chance of going undetected. (Nothing like that is in use AFAIK, probabilistic detection was pure anathema to computer science until fairly recently, but one can be constructed.) Here, it is not that there is a
Fractional bits are like QM superpositions; you're right in the sense that they can't be "observed" (for some suitable definition of "observed"), and thus in way they aren't "real", but without them a lot of math "stops working".
As for the way that other guy tried to use it, at this point I don't even remember, so I can't speak to whether he used it correctly. I was just trying to clarify my original point with solid examples and take a shot at explaining fractional bits. I'll also re-recommend going to the source on this one; a full understanding of encryption is something few people even can obtain and even fewer can dedicate the time, but for an experienced mathematician, the introductory terms and definitions are fairly easy and, at least in the computer domain, actually quite useful as thinking tools. I only wish I could point you at a free online source easily... well, let me see... well, this is a start, I guess, though it is so ugly in plaintext it is hard to read and didn't have what I was hoping for, but I'm not sure anything like that would be online anyhow... at any rate, the algorithms and crack techniques have passed beyond what any Mere Mortal could hope to understand or contribute to in any reasonable time period, but the basics are quite basic.
UML is useless because it can largely not be meaningfully verified, kept up to date, or executed. As a communication language in the middle of a design session a simplified version of it has a place, but there's little point in trying to drive development with it.
I can't point to a project that does everything UML tries, only it works, because state of the art has not advanced there yet, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something, be it software or an agenda.
But I do know one thing that you must internalize: If it doesn't execute, automatically, it won't be kept up to date.
The best thing I've found so far is a strong coding style that emphasizes readability above most everything else (none of this "np_doSCRTtrd" crap, give me "mainWindow" or something... even in C++ where this is strongly counterculture), comments for why the code is doing what it is doing, and unit tests to provide and verify specification compliance.
Nope, that's not complete; it is difficult to borderline impossible to unit test everything. But this will take you far past anything UML can do reasonably, so it's a start. (I'm inclined to think the way forward is to make more things more testable; while unit tests have problems with multithreading even in theory, a lot of the practical problems one encounters comes from a lack of testability built into libraries. The canonical example of this is GUI libraries; there is no fundamental reason GUIs should be hard to test... if you could post events to simulate anything the user might do, that alone would nearly be enough, and you'd think this wouldn't be hard...) It's just the best I know, and, like I said, as far as I can see it handily defeats UML in every way that matters to me, so the fact that it doesn't fulfill the promises of UML doesn't bother me, especially as I'm not convinced anything can.
You said you were a mathematician, and I'm not much of a crypto guy either, though I am confident about what I posted. I'd recommend going to the source and getting the full math treatment.
:-)
There is a dichotomy between the level of math I am talking about and level you were. I was talking mostly pure math and saying it may or may not apply practically, you're starting practically and trying to argue up to the math. If you're a mathematician, you should know how good that idea is
The trivial example is, for instance, ROT13, which decrypts itself. Apply it once, and while by modern standards that might as well be plaintext, it is slightly harder to read. "Layer" it with ROT13 again, and now you've decreased the security, not increased it.
"Layering" Ceasar ciphers does nothing to increase the underlying security of the encryption, though unless you get very unlucky or careless it won't "undo" the encryption. All layering does is change the ultimate symbol matching table and all "layers" can trivially be decrypted in one fell swoop; a modern attacker won't even have any way to know there were layers in the first place, they are so transparent!
On the other hand, it is widely thought that while DES had an excessively small keysize, the algorithm was reasonably secure enough that you could layer it three times for 3DES and get a "new" algorithm that is still useful.
I'm sure that modern encryption has been scrutinized for this sort of weakness, but even so, it's the kind of thing that ought to be instinctively repulsive mathematically; when you composite two encryption forms together you are basically creating a new one, with unknown characteristics. Any monster can pop out of the folds of math-space and bite you. Better to stick with what we mostly know about.
Also, fractional bits pop up all the time in info theory and encryption (a branch of info theory). One example of a fractional bit, though not related to encryption so much as error correction, is a value that you know is either one or zero, but you only know it is a one with 90% confidence. That isn't a full bit, but neither is it zero bits. Happens all the time. In fact, technically, in the real world we never deal with bits, as we can never be 100% certain. Inside your processor it is so close to 100% as to make no difference, but as you get out into the world the uncertainties can reach our threshold of conciousness, and fractional bits is the most natural way to work with error correction situations.
At least, that's the way the schools I attend teach it.
You know how "everyone" always says they learned nothing at school?
I've learned they are apparently serious... and you see it in actions like this.
I swear, I'd never hire someone who claimed to learn "nothing" in school, anymore then I'd hire someone who only learned in school; I'd be too afraid they were literally, 100% telling the truth! (I'm not saying this to dis the self-taught, which can be great; I'm saying that if you sat through years of classes and learned nothing, absolutely nothing, either you are an absolute flaming genius 'cause you worked out the assembled wisdom of thousands/millions of man-years of some discipline by yourself, or you are someone who has completely wasted a remarkable opportunity.)
While we defeinitely know security by obfuscation is stupid in terms of computer security, safety by layers makes sense. If there were several layers of encryption (asymmetrical and symmetrical), compromising the system takes more time, and if one layer fails, the game isn't over just yet.
In the way you meant that, you are dangerously wrong, though possibly in a primarily academic sense.
If by layers you mean multiple forms of ID (password + physical token), then you are OK.
If by layers you mean one data stream should be protected by multiple composited types of encryption, you are, at least mathematically, wrong. Compositing encryption techniques has unpredictable results. Two forms of encryption, if composited, can be either weaker, the same, or stronger then either seperately; it takes careful analysis to know which, to the extent we can know at all.
It is possible this is primarily academic as if I could weaken DES by re-encrypting it with AES, AES would constitute a "break" of DES; common sense certainly tells you that seems unlikely.
But you don't know.
Generally speaking, if you want something more secure, don't add multiple layers of encryption. Add more bits.
This is mostly academic anyways as with modern encryption adding more bits is almost always (i.e., 99.9999%+ of the bits transmitted, easily) a complete waste of time. Security should be analysed in terms of what it costs to break (and the value of the thing being protected), and modern encryption is, practically speaking, so absurdly secure (when correctly used!) that we've long since passed the point where it is more effective to hold you up at gun point and demand the secured item, or any number of other things that don't involve tapping communications and decrypting it. (When it takes the entire known universe converted into a 100% efficient computer billions of years to crack by brute force, you're fairly safe, and the larger key sizes of AES get into such absurdities to crack naively. It isn't that hard since adding one bit doubles the keyspace, and even the entire known universe isn't that large when you take the log of it...)
However, what I was referring to is turtles or fish being able to see in two, three or four more dimensions than we currently do.
Would you care to define how you are using the term "dimension" here? Has string theory revealed that turtles see in seven dimensions?
You're either way, way, way beyond me or you don't know what the hell you're talking about. And I'm not encouraged by some of the rest of your message:
Ah, it depends upon which organism you are referring to. I assume you mean humans and if so, there is considerable overlap in the pigments, especially in the red and green pigments. The blue and green also overlap to some extent.
Do we not know what "completely" means? What's your point?
They are an evolutionary subset of eyes as our eyes
Again, what's your point? Human eyes are a subset of the set of every eye's capability? No kidding. You do have some points here but they are pretty hard to discern behind some very unclear thinking/communication.
I'm also disturbed by your claim that other eyes have been evolving for "longer".... unless time looped funny its about the same time for all since life crawled out of the sludge. Are you getting at the idea that other creatures breed faster and there have been more generations?
Actually, you may be surprised at what one could do and how things could be improved.
But I think you missed my point, which is that improvements aren't free once your reach (near) optimality. (Look up the idea of Pareto optimality.) You can't create an eye that takes the best of eagles, turtles, bees, and increase resolution, and do this and do that. You can do it on paper, you can do it in your head, but you can't do it in reality, or it would be already done. Every time you improve an aspect of the human eye, you're going to degrade another aspect.
This is assuming you don't throw the whole thing out and start anew with inorganic technology, which can probably be made vastly superior with work, but technically that's just another point on the pareto optmality frontier, one that can't be reached by evolution, which is to say, you still won't have eyes that zoom and are compact and don't draw power and see in a billion spectra and etc. etc. etc.
If you are talking about being able to understand symbolic representation of higher order information, dolphins, gorillas and even octopus can learn to interpret symbology from meaning and their retinas are good enough to resolve finely detailed information.
I hear this line a lot, usually supported by "look, there's this one thing that a dolphin can do as well as a human", completely ignoring the fact that we do much, much, much more than "one thing" well. Yes, a few higher animals can do some limited symbolic recognition and even more limited manipulation, but it's not even remotely similar in quality to what we've got, and anyone telling you otherwise is either misguided or selling you an agenda. Humans aren't the best at everything universally, but there is nothing on this planet that even comes close for general purpose cognition.
Actually, there is plenty of bandwidth available. Where are you getting your information?
I refer to the whole system. The bottleneck for vision isn't really in the eye. My eye dumps tons of data into my brain and I still fail to do things like see the keys sitting right in front of me. That is not a failing of the sensor.
I reject as equally misguided the claims that humans are the best at everything (which you don't much hear any more) and the claim that humans are nothing special. Both are equally deluded, equally wrong, equally a result of deliberate self-deception. Our eyes may not be the greatest thing on the planet, but my personal vision problems stem from the staggering amount of high-level processing I have to do, as in the previous example, not the eye itself. More spectra or a zoom l
Birds, fish and many reptiles have much more sophisticated retinas that perceive what we would term a multi-spectral visual world.
We'd call it "multispectrum" because we don't see there. But we see "multispectrum" too... otherwise what do you call red, green, and blue? The curves for those receptors don't completely overlap.
Of course human eyes aren't a proper superset of every eye's capability in the world. There isn't room in one eye for that, and if you did jam it all in you'd be bitching about our crappy resolution! But they are quite good for what they do, and the brain behind them is unsurpassed, if you consider seeing not just as raw pixel collection but as understanding the world. Nobody else has a visual system that can read.
Artificial eyes will be cool but it's going to be hard to jam any more info down the optic nerve and through the visual system that we already are unless we do a full brain replacement.
Be careful... "dumbass employer" and "distributed computing client" can be a combination hazardous to your health.
Ooo, nice try but you fail. Device 8 is the disk drive and GP said tape drive.
Evolution is not magic. It is powerful but not omnipotent.
Neural networks seem to only be able to concentrate on one thing at a time. Your brain can "multitask" right now, to the extent that your "multitasking" doesn't require any one part of the brain to be doing two things. Walking and talking? So trivial that we don't even have to explicitly learn it, there's almost no overlap. Designing a class network and writing a song? Both need full creative power and can't be done at once in any reasonable way.
This is not a "neuron" problem, this is not something that can be evolved away. This is a structure problem, a network problem. The problem isn't that we can't multitask, it is that you can not be creative in more than one task at once, you can not intensely read more than one thing at once.
The problem is not that we can't do more than one thing at once, the problem a given cognitive "ability" can't be multitasked without severe penalty, and that penalty isn't going to go away unless you get off the neural substrate.
(Now, I'm being fuzzy on this "ability" thing because right now, nobody could define it precisely. But even so, they exist. You only have one basic speech center, and you can not apply it 100% to two tasks. And you have to understand that 100% almost in the CPU sense; I have successfully carried on two conversations at once for a time (as in, non-stop talking even as I'm listening to the other guy), but I wasn't getting 100% on each conversation, I was maybe 15%. Isolated exceptions can arise because you can "create" a new "ability" through practice, just as we all basically have "walking" circuits that don't count much against our multitasking. But again, that's not the way we are trying to multitask in the info age; you can't practice "reading Slashdot" until it passes below concious awareness, it's too complicated, and even if you did, it would not be 100% as effective as a concious reading.)
What exactly is it you wish this "right to exercise the first amendment on private property to be"?
Did you read my essay?
One point you are missing is that ownership is not just a series of rights, but a series of responsibilities. You sing the praise of Earthlink's ownership rights, without considering that they may not want them. If they "own" your website and can shut it off for any reason, they are also responsible for it. Earthlink probably doesn't want this, and yes, people have sued service providers, and gotten disturbingly far. All in all, I think they'd want to be common carriers.
The flip side is that as common carriers, once they contract they not only "don't have to", but they can't discriminate based on content, barring warrants and such.
Yes, Earthlink owns their wires. But if they want to sell/rent them, it is not inconceivable that we, as a society, choose to regulate on what grounds they can offer that contract. Property rights are not that absolute; contracts can override them, that's almost what a contract is. You ask what my "right" is, my "right" is $9.95 a month.
We are not left with a choice between "property" and "free speech"; there is a very reasonable compromise that works for everybody. Unfortunately, some people (I'm thinking lawmakers here) and many companies think so short-term they are too stupid to see it immediately, they have to be bitten first. Hopefully the legal system won't smell an opportunity to wipe out free speech in this manner and will choose this compromise.
Work - school - malls - airports - anyplace on earth - is private property. This is madness.
If I understand the law correctly, this is currently something of a grey area, but a literal reading of the law would say you are correct. It is a gaping hole in the system as it currently exists because there are legal minefields every which way you look.
When I carefully defined "free speech" for an essay I wrote I had to explicitly point this out; times have changed since the first amendment was written, and the majority of speech now takes place on private grounds. We're going to have to deal with this sooner or later because a naive interpretation of property laws does largely negate your free speech today (detailed argument in linked essay, relevant paragraph:).
On the down side, welcome to the land of magic and wonder, where arcane bugs haunt the long forgotten planes of DOM...
:-) but it works and you'll be stunned how fast it is, even for many kilobytes of data; by far the fastest solution I've found, even independent of the fact that loading any sort of XML in Moz causes a huge stall of some kind and tends to cause crashes and memory leaks in nothing flat.)
Yeah, I dug into Mozilla development gung ho over the past year or so, and I've completely abandoned it... well, I'm in the process of creating a replacement XBL, but after that's done, I'm out. In painfully slow succession, I've tried in a serious way Moz's RDF support, XUL, and XBL, and in every case I have rapidly exceeded their capabilities (to the tune of segfaults) and gone back to JS + DOM. (For RDF, I now dump out my data as a JS file and use XMLHttpRequest to retrieve it and "eval" to run it; this is what Google Suggest uses. I beat them by about a month, I know others beat them by more
I'm preparing a series of half rants, half detailed indictments on why the Mozilla specific technologies are not just poorly implemented at the moment for any task other than being a web browser, but why Javascript + DOM is usually, on the balance, a superior solution. ("On the balance" means that while my JS implementation of XBL is neither a subset nor a superset of "true" XBL, on the whole the benefits level out in favor of my JS implementation... and if I were willing to go pure Moz instead of cross-platform it would be a total win.) I don't want to repeat them here in toto, but, well, that's actually the basic argument: Me, a single schmoe, can replicate most of XBL in a couple of weeks, in Javascript, and it is actually much more reliable too, for reasons that will only make sense if you used Moz's XBL support for anything serious, like widgets that can load remote data or include other widgets in interesting ways. How much time has been spent on XBL, which is still behind?
Unless you need a XUL widget like "popup" that has no good HTML replacement, you're just better off with JS and DOM. Most people don't understand how powerful JS really is, and I've found it to be surprisingly speedy, too.
(To show I'm not just spouting off randomly, here is my current XBL in JS implementation. Still in development, but it oughta show I'm serious about this, and even now I'm finding it more pleasing to work with overall than real XBL. What stops me from releasing the rants right now is, well, there's some writing to be done yet, but instead of just bitching I want to have some constructive solutions as well; xbl.js is a big part of that, and right now I'm working on the POPUP element because I need that for my app. Ranting is great but I find they are even more powerful when they are not purely negative.)
Details forthcoming at a later date, but next time you're reaching for XUL or XBL, if it isn't for a Mozilla extension, stop and make sure you don't really want to do it in cross-platform JS + DOM. See, the thing is, those libraries are well tested and optimized in a variety of situations; I'm not encountering bugs hourly like I felt like I was in Moz.
Finally, to preempt some of the obvious responses, I'm not saying XBL or something was a bad idea; in fact the idea is so good I'm re-implementing it. I'm saying the implementation right now is so dodgy it isn't worth playing with when there is another less cool, but more functional, alternative available today in the form of JS + DOM.... and what advantages XUL or XBL have over my JS implementation are only a few small hooks away from being exposed to the JS as well.
If you mine enough random sentances, you can get some truly profound stuff. Every geek should spend at least a couple of hours with some source text and a markov chain generator.
But it isn't the random generator that is profound, it is the person doing the selection.
Similarly, while the majority of what the kids say may be worthless, a selection process can make the raw material look more intelligent than it is. You are probably reading more into the sentances than the kids actually meant, because you're only getting the sentances that you can read more into.
Not saying it isn't fake, but it doesn't have to be.
I guess I'd just like to see the math on how they come up with these numbers.
Nobody's stopping you; it's not a secret. Go get it.
But get ready for some heavy lifting; as you dig into it you'll very quickly realize why they didn't try to put any in a popular news article.
I'm not too up on it myself but you can start with phase spaces, I think, though that hardly touches the real fun, which is the probabilistic aspect of determining the path of an object through all of the influences of the solar system... while I'm not up on the details I do know they don't use naive formulations of that problem, they've got some powerful and brain-bending tricks to prevent the estimate from diffusing too quickly.
It seems that if there is such a close race that there is only 10 votes in it, then it's not really democracy that's deciding the winner of this. Instead it comes down to combinations of random events.
Yes.
But before you get too upset about it, remember that Democracy here has basically stated that it "doesn't care" which one wins.
Thus, the real issue here is getting a happy loser more than obtaining a winner; practically speaking they both won or lost equally and "fair" or "meaning" really isn't on the table here, since they can't share the office.
Abstractly, this is just something that happens every so often; short-term exciting, but not worth getting too upset over in the long term. Concretely, if it makes people more aware of the pervasive voting fraud that is always done by both sides, some good might even come of it.
you join us and you get a password you access through nocatauth and then gain full speed open access at the wireless points.... these tools are useless against that scheme.
Will it stand up to someone who knows how to change their MAC address and other information to match a subscriber? Collect four or five of them and odds are that at any given time one of them isn't present.
Part of the reason that WEP is fundamentally insecure goes beyond just the broken encryption; once you've cracked the key you can be anyone. You can't create a secure system without solid identification of something (doesn't have to be "a person", but "a network card", "an account", something), and with WEP you can't do that.
I seem to recall specific legislature in some state in America, easy mod points to those who know it.
You are probably thinking the UCITA; most of the good sites covering it seem to be dead. Last I knew a bastardized version (mostly in ways Slashdotters would approve of) of it had been passed in a couple of states and it was dead in the water in quite a lot of others, and in general the issue is dead now. That little end-run didn't work.
Google can still get you some good info, but I think the site that I remember that had a nice, state-by-state breakdown is gone. More easy karma to someone who finds it, maybe in archive.org...