I'm Still Waiting for Blake's 7 to Finish
on
Lost Ends
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· Score: 1
I was left high and dry with the unsatisfactory ending of Blake's 7. Why would I invest my time in another series that was likely to do the same thing? I dodged that bullet.
>In the UK we drive largely manual gearbox and holding a phone while driving means not changing gear or letting go of the steering wheel while changing gear!
More random means harder to predict. If you can predict the next bit with better than 50/50 chance, you don't have perfect entropy. The actual entropy is a function of how well an optimal predictor can predict future output.
If you can predict 8 out of 10 bits then the bit stream is less entropic than one for which you can predict 7 out of 10 bits. If you can only predict 5 out of 10 bits, then you have perfect entropy. If you can predict fewer than 5 out of 10 bits, you're doing it wrong.
1 flip flop in a metastable state can produce at most 1 bit of entropy.
1 flip flip in a metastable state tends to produce in excess of 0.5 bits of entropy. It depends on many things, but done properly a normal circuit of this type wouldn't be producing anything nearly as small one 20th of a bit of entropy per flip flop.
The gains from combining an array of 20 flip flops to produce one really good entropic bit will only asymptotically take the randomness towards 1 bit per bit.
TFA doesn't cite references, so it's hard to go and check.
'To table' has colloquial meaning that might change from place to place. However in both the US and UK, when you are operating under Roberts Rules or a variant of it, an item (e.g. motion) is 'on the floor' when its being discussed. Passing a motion 'To table' it is to figuratively take it from the floor (where people on the floor are discussing it) and place it on the table (so we don't forget it). A motion to take it from the table is a motion to bring it back to the floor for discussion. Sometimes the 'table' is literal and bits of paper are used to record the motion that is tabled.
The procedural difference between anything else you might do to defer work is that in a motion to table you can't say "let's table this until 3.30pm", you can only table it. To take it from the table requires a new motion to take it from the table.
UK and US parliamentary procedural rules and Robert's rules of order (used in formal meetings everywhere) are all in the same family of rule sets.
It's quite possible that in UK parlimentary rules you could table a motion so that it's up for future discussion, without it ever having been on the floor, but I don't know the specifics of the UK rules. However in either case, being 'tabled' means it's not being formally considered, it's just on the table waiting to be picked up for future discussion.
> They then asked me, seriously, "oh, we have a brother in Dallas, do you know him?"
Odds are that they were repeating an oft repeated joke. The correct response is to keep a straight face, roll with it and give a dead pan response, such as "Yes, but we quit talking to him after he was convicted of arson last year".
They should do San Jose to Portland instead. The sheer volume of techies passing between these two cities would make such a railway line profitable. Intel alone runs a small fleet of private jets to ferry staff back and fourth, because it's cheaper than filling commercial flights. And that's just the internal traffic within a single company.
Also, Portland and San Jose is full of the sort of people who like trains, so the opposition would be less.
SMS uses messages on management connections that have stronger, more redundant error correction than the voice bearers. This is why in marginal signal situations, you can text but not talk.
Before long, companies will start adding up their 'cloud' costs and conclude that a few rackmount PCs in an air conditioned room would be cheaper, clouds will go out of fashion for a few years, then a bunch of other companies will have a great idea to be an outsourcer for compute time, give it a stupid name like 'cyberether' or some such nonsense and the cycle will start again.
My ancestors didn't come over on a ship, because I came over on United, connecting through Chicago, in 1999.
Some time in the future, historians will put my travel records in a big online database along with the records of millions of others, for non historians to check out for a few minutes before forgetting about it.
This will probably become an arms race, in order to use vs detect subtler and subtler patterns in the bytes.
I don't think so. A good cryptographic PRNG or encryption algorithm+mode yields data that is indistinguishable from random. In that respect, it is already game over.
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I was left high and dry with the unsatisfactory ending of Blake's 7. Why would I invest my time in another series that was likely to do the same thing? I dodged that bullet.
>In the UK we drive largely manual gearbox and holding a phone while driving means not changing gear or letting go of the steering wheel while changing gear!
That's what your knees are for.
Read NIST SP800-90. It shows the way.
>I always thought the WiFi radio in laptops would be a good thing for generating random numbers.
It's been done.
More random means harder to predict. If you can predict the next bit with better than 50/50 chance, you don't have perfect entropy. The actual entropy is a function of how well an optimal predictor can predict future output.
If you can predict 8 out of 10 bits then the bit stream is less entropic than one for which you can predict 7 out of 10 bits. If you can only predict 5 out of 10 bits, then you have perfect entropy. If you can predict fewer than 5 out of 10 bits, you're doing it wrong.
I detect BS.
1 flip flop in a metastable state can produce at most 1 bit of entropy.
1 flip flip in a metastable state tends to produce in excess of 0.5 bits of entropy. It depends on many things, but done properly a normal circuit of this type wouldn't be producing anything nearly as small one 20th of a bit of entropy per flip flop.
The gains from combining an array of 20 flip flops to produce one really good entropic bit will only asymptotically take the randomness towards 1 bit per bit.
TFA doesn't cite references, so it's hard to go and check.
'To table' has colloquial meaning that might change from place to place. However in both the US and UK, when you are operating under Roberts Rules or a variant of it, an item (e.g. motion) is 'on the floor' when its being discussed. Passing a motion 'To table' it is to figuratively take it from the floor (where people on the floor are discussing it) and place it on the table (so we don't forget it). A motion to take it from the table is a motion to bring it back to the floor for discussion. Sometimes the 'table' is literal and bits of paper are used to record the motion that is tabled.
The procedural difference between anything else you might do to defer work is that in a motion to table you can't say "let's table this until 3.30pm", you can only table it. To take it from the table requires a new motion to take it from the table.
UK and US parliamentary procedural rules and Robert's rules of order (used in formal meetings everywhere) are all in the same family of rule sets.
It's quite possible that in UK parlimentary rules you could table a motion so that it's up for future discussion, without it ever having been on the floor, but I don't know the specifics of the UK rules. However in either case, being 'tabled' means it's not being formally considered, it's just on the table waiting to be picked up for future discussion.
> They then asked me, seriously, "oh, we have a brother in Dallas, do you know him?"
Odds are that they were repeating an oft repeated joke. The correct response is to keep a straight face, roll with it and give a dead pan response, such as "Yes, but we quit talking to him after he was convicted of arson last year".
>SCO has terminated Darl McBride
That's a bit harsh. Couldn't they just have fired him?
> You also clearly don't know Portland
Fail! I live there.
They should do San Jose to Portland instead. The sheer volume of techies passing between these two cities would make such a railway line profitable. Intel alone runs a small fleet of private jets to ferry staff back and fourth, because it's cheaper than filling commercial flights. And that's just the internal traffic within a single company.
Also, Portland and San Jose is full of the sort of people who like trains, so the opposition would be less.
Do development on the Inmos Transputer? Of course I did. I used to work for Inmos. Never a dull moment.
Offtopic? This deserves +5 funny.
M to the P to P to the Y.
The reason that your data will not decrypt and die.
SMS uses messages on management connections that have stronger, more redundant error correction than the voice bearers. This is why in marginal signal situations, you can text but not talk.
You didn't give a reference in either the first or second time you said it.
Worthless.
Your friend's UK gallons are bigger than your US gallons.
50 MPG in the UK is 40 MPG in the US.
Can we go back to calling it timeshare instead?
Before long, companies will start adding up their 'cloud' costs and conclude that a few rackmount PCs in an air conditioned room would be cheaper, clouds will go out of fashion for a few years, then a bunch of other companies will have a great idea to be an outsourcer for compute time, give it a stupid name like 'cyberether' or some such nonsense and the cycle will start again.
Well DNS operators do appear to be in a bit of a bind don't they?
I am British.
My ancestors didn't come over on a ship, because I came over on United, connecting through Chicago, in 1999.
Some time in the future, historians will put my travel records in a big online database along with the records of millions of others, for non historians to check out for a few minutes before forgetting about it.
But WiMAX is cheaper, faster and it just bloody works.
AES applied correctly makes an excellent PRNG. SP800-90 gives details.
There exist cryptosystems that do explicitly obfuscate the length of the underlaying data. It is not a new thing.
To give you an understanding, I deal with random numbers and I cannot use a computer based random number generator because they generate patterns.
I understand that you are not using a good enough PRNG. A high cryptographic quality PRNG seeded with high quality entropy will meet your needs.
This will probably become an arms race, in order to use vs detect subtler and subtler patterns in the bytes.
I don't think so. A good cryptographic PRNG or encryption algorithm+mode yields data that is indistinguishable from random. In that respect, it is already game over.
People don't typically have files full of true random numbers floating around anyway.
I do.