How about a large dish coated with a think layer of soft material which you put into an orbit you want to clean and after its been there for a while fire the retros and burn the lot up in the atmosphere.
For some reason, one thing I haven't seen people mention so far in this thread is the fact that to be in orbit at a given height above Earth, you have to be travelling at a very specific orbital velocity. So the umbrella either has to be going with the flow, in which case it's not going to catch up to any of the space debris (unless the debris has an eccentric orbit), or against the flow, in which case it is going to impact the space debris with a very high velocity.
I suppose a third option is to have it going with the flow, but faster than orbital velocity, in which case it's going to need a lot of fuel... (remember, a spacecraft has to eject balast every time it changes direction, otherwise conservation of momentum would be violated.)
Game companies charge exhorbitant prices for their products. Where does this money go? Mostly to cover the cost of marketing, programmers, middlemen in retail, etc. But ask yourself what has been the biggest breakthrough in game design in the last 10 years. It's mostly the art design, isn't it? Game companies employ overworked, underappreciated artists who are treated like ordinary employees. They generally receive a flat rate for designing the look of the game and they don't get any significant percentage of sales. Rather than buying the game at a store, get it off Gnutella and send a couple of $$ to the people who really deserve it.
Whuh... Did I just hear a slashdot geek call Microsoft employees even bigger geeks? I'd take what your friend told you with a grain of salt, especially since it doesn't make much sense. I actually worked at Microsoft for a few months as a university student, and my impression was that the workers there were pretty normal, as far as coders go. I've met a lot wierder people since then.
I was working on a pretty trivial part of NT, so the build system didn't affect me. However, when you walked around the halls you could see who checked in code that broke the build because they would have a "build breaker award" taped to their office window. It seemed to be in good fun, but I suppose it could result in a CYA mentality.
Also, I remember there being problems with source control, like the article mentioned, though not specific to NT. I seem to remember that Word Viewer used a different codestream from Word and the sample files in the SDK are merely very out-of-date versions of some of the small apps that ship with Windows.
Because humans have a nearly unique ability to modify the environment's carrying capacity through the use of technology. (I say "nearly unique" because there is limited use of tools documented in a handful of other species, e.g. chimps.)
That's great and all, but how about we make sure we have a solution to the environmental problem before we merrily let it get out of hand. I have no doubt that mankind will someday discover the cure for cancer, but if they don't find the cure before I'm dead then it's not doing me any good, is it? (okay I admit it, that was cheap. I don't actually have cancer, but you get the point.)
I can't possibly know with 100% certainty what Microsoft's intentions are, but there stands a reasonable chance they are intended for their benefit and any consumer benefits are purely coincidental.
I don't know why you considered that a "karma burning philosophical schpeel", since you don't say anything remotely controversial and, if anything, you are whoring.
I suspect the reason Microsoft wants to put DRM into the OS is twofold:
a) They are very vocal anti-software piracy advocates, which makes them sympathetic to the music/film industries' own piracy problem.
b) They demonstrate to the government that closed-source software has the advantage that users can't modify it for illicit purposes.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that the central idea of the Turing Test is correct -- a fake indistinguishable from the original is the same kind of thing as the original. I happen to actually believe that assumption. But Wallace is also assuming that a canned set of stock responses is reasonably possible to achieve such a thing. But it clearly isn't.
The Turing Test is usually qualified as the 10-question Turing Test or the 50-question Turing Test. To really pass the full Turing Test you have to be able to act like a human for an arbitrarily large number of questions.
As usual seems many people did not read the article. The lawsuit is NOT about tracking the individuals in their vehicles (though the article does play that aspect up). The lawsuit is about wording in the contract. Specifically that the renters thought it was $1/mile in the "out of bounds" area and Budget charged them $1/mile on their whole trip. Having not actually seen the contract, I cannot comment on whose right, but this leads to the point.
I agree. For one thing, it's bad that the contract was hard to understand. But on top of that, $1 per mile is an absolutely exorbitant charge. You can rent a car with unlimited mileage for a week for only $300 or so. If you take it on a multi-state road trip, as I have done, you could easily rack up 2000 miles. How is it possible that some rental companies will charge you $300 for that trip, and others will charge $2300. $1 per mile is clearly an unreasonable assessment of the wear and tear on the car.
Is this really true, or is market 'growth' simply a matter of harvesting natural capital and calling it 'growth'? Surely, the true amount of wealth/resources is a zero-sum game even if the $$$ don't necessarily reflect that?
The economy is clearly not a zero-sum game. When the economy is hot, everyone prospers. In a recession, everyone suffers.
The government can control the supply of printed money, but net worth can still be created on paper. A lot of money is tied up in stocks and other investments. If the value of a stock goes up, money is created. If the stock goes bust, money is destroyed.
Wealth is not a fixed commodity either. Wealth represents the ability of an economy to produce goods that people want and distribute them among consumers. If you produce goods that society needs, you increase its wealth. If you produce goods that no one wants then the amount of goods is the same as before, but the wealth of society is not increased.
I think your wrong here. Just because it's opensource doesn't mean jobs are lost. You need to look at how opensource works.
I find it highly unlikely that the original poster doesn't "understand" how open source works. I could explain it to you but there's so many good articles on that subject. Some others and myself make good money with opensource and we contribute back with development.
The fact that you personally are making money with open source does not mean that it is easy to do so. After 90% of the work force gets laid off, it would be pretty selfish of you to claim that since you still have a job there is obviously no problem. Alot of those companies use opensource technology to make their software better.
My employer does that. It has made our software more fully featured, but I'm not sure about higher quality. What sucks for me is that my job is worse. Opensource is usually on the cutting edge. Nan can still sell Blender support,documentation etc... There's still lots of money to be made.
That remains to be seen. I don't doubt that there is money to be made, but there is no proof that there is "lots" of money available. Write me back when an open source company makes more money than Microsoft. Nah... too unlikely. Write me back when an open souce company stays in business for ten years. Before you start yelling at everyone, maybe you should do you home work.
You see, this is silly. You flame a guy for stating his opinion, even though your counter-example has not been proven true.
Years ago, I attended a lecture by a Christian Science nut. He was explaining how after the great flood, all the water froze and that's how the animals migrated to other continents, when someone interrupted and asked why the carnivores hadn't eaten the herbavores on the ark. At this point the lecturer got angry and replied that the if the guy had been to the previous lectures he would have known that all animals were initially vegetarian and they didn't become carnivores until around 3000 BC.
The point is, there may be many essays on open source out there, but they are all, to some extent, works of fiction. In the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond talks about how "successful" his open source project was, but he measured his success in terms of number of users, and not money. Netscape released an essay on the business case for open source, but AFAIK they never made any money from it. The only really successful open source business case to date was the IPO, but that one has dried up too.
Lots of people have lost huge investments, not least the public who have invested (often indirectly) in different kinds of tech-companies. Wrong. The amount of money some people have lost is precisely the amount of money other people have won. Like in any zero-sum scheme.
Sorry to have to give you a lesson in econ 101, but the economy and the stock market are not zero-sum games.
The bits in the pad cannot be generated by an algorithm or cipher. They must be truly random, using a real random source such as specialized hardware, radioactive decay timings, etc
This is one of the axioms used in proving that a one-time pad is "perfectly secure". If you don't use truly random numbers, there is no reason why your algorithm can't be secure; it just doesn't really deserve to be called "theoretically unbreakable".
We already have ciphers which are based on algorithm-generated "one time pads." They are called stream ciphers. A stream cipher is simply a long string of pseudo-random data (derived from a shared key) which is XOR'ed with the text. It sounds like this kid has just invented a new kind of stream cipher.
Stream ciphers are faster than block ciphers but they are less widely used because they also tend to be less secure. Block ciphers are less susceptible to attacks because the per-round encryption keys are data-dependent. Who knows -- maybe this kid has invented the best stream cipher in the world (but I doubt it). I hope they enjoy the $20,000 patent, 'cause it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
You're right, but perhaps for the wrong reason. The patent is worthless because there are numerous free alternatives. Encryption inventors think a lot like open source advocates. Give away your algorithm for free and use your newfound fame to sell your books, network monitoring services, etc (e.g. Bruce Schneier).
Where is it described as such? In crypto, 'one-way' means 'irreversible' or at least 'computationally irreversible'.
The basic security of DES derives from a progression of pseudorandom numbers which are XORed with the plaintext (or portions thereof). The derivation of these pseudorandom numbers is a one way operation, even though the actual encryption is not. The only time I have seen the term 'one-way cipher' used is in referring to hash functions.
RSA encryption is sometimes called a one-way trapdoor cipher.
The DVD has the music on it- I could legally get on LimeWire and download backups of the music I just bought without neeeding a soundtrack.
These days, a lot of films have soundtracks that were "inspired by the movie." You'll probably find one song over the opening credits and another over the closing credits. The rest may not even appear in the film at all. CDs are overpriced, plain and simple.
I don't know why a DVD for a movie that I am probably only ever going to watch 2 or 3 times is worth more than a CD that I will probably listen to 100 times or more.
First prove to me... Then prove to me... Then prove to me...
Since when has the burden of proof been transfered from the copyright violator to the copyright holder? Sure, that's any easy way to win any argument when the other party wants to argue more than you do. It's much easier to nitpick at someone else's argument than to formulate your own.
I'm going to stick a gun to your head. I'll let you go, but only on three conditions:
First prove to me that guns don't kill people, people do. Otherwise, I won't feel guilty when the gun kills you.
Then prove to me that your life is good for society as a whole. As we all know, when the founding fathers included "thou shalt not kill" in the constitution, they meant for that protection to only apply for the first 12 years of your life.
Then prove to me why you should be allowed to have a monopoly on your blood when I have a colony of pet vampire bats who are equally deserving of it.
Ignore the fact that I have no right to point the gun at you in the first place. That's not relevant here, apparently.
Okie doke, forgive me if I'm missing something here, but is Fermat's Last Theorem the same as the conjecture mentioned in the article? The one that took Dr. Andrew Wiles seven years to solve?
You're missing the point. Fermat's Last Theorem was created in 1630 and solved in 1993 (363 years later). The Riemann hypothesis was composed in 1859, so at that rate it won't be solved until 2222. $1M may not be worth much in 220 years.
Andrew Wiles may have spent seven years of dedicated time on Fermat's Last Theorem, but this doesn't mean that the conjecture itself was solved in seven years. Huge leaps in mathematical theory needed to take place before Wiles could realize his proof. Anyway, Wiles didn't prove FLT so much as he proved the Taniyama-Shimura-Weil conjecture, which was of interest because someone else had already proved that FLT would follow from TSW.
TSW conjectures that "all semistable elliptic curves with rational coefficients are modular". This statement would probably have sounded like gibberish to Fermat, so it really trivializes the problem to claim that the conjecture was solved in seven years. Whole branches of mathematics had to be invented before FLT could be proved.
I went to university as a young, green freshman thinking I wanted to learn. After a couple of years there I realized that all I wanted was a degree. I'm a person who is genuinely interested in learning and I follow the latest math and science news with great interest. However at university they spend a lot of time teaching you procedures for applying formulas, because those make the best kinds of test questions. I find that type of knowledge very mundane. I would rather decide for myself the kinds of things I want to learn.
Your experiences may vary, but I would have dropped out of university a lot sooner if I had thought I could do so without endangering my earning potential. But there are a lot of people who attend university because they want to. Do you really think most of these students would pay tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, to get the official diploma if they didn't have to? Many of these students used to stand in line to get a refund for the $5 "voluntary" contribution to the school paper.
Your analogy is stupid. As if the $50,000 that one might spend to get a "brand name" education somehow relates to whether you will pay $20 for a CD or steal it off the net. I can only speak for myself, but when I buy a CD, I buy it for the music. I don't steal it off the net because I'm a fairly honest person, but I will buy it from a used CD store if I can get a better price.
Anyway, back on the original topic. I think the story submitter needs to decide what kind of knowledge about math he wants to learn. I have an interest in math, but I don't need to apply it in real life, so I am content to read about cryptography, logic, fractals, Fermat's last theorem, and all the pop-math stuff. You can find excellent books for the lay reader, with the best probably being "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid". Martin Gardner's columns from Scientific American have all been archived and published in book form. As for learning whole subject areas, try to skim a variety of books rather than reading one in depth. That way, you will get a better grasp of the subject matter (and if you find that you prefer one of the books over the others, at least you have a point of reference).
I've read on numerous occasions that NA has versions of PGP updated to run on OS X and XP, but aren't releasing them. Something to do with 9/11 maybe? It seems stupid to simply throw away a defacto standard.
Why is the immediate reaction to news like this on Slashdot always a conspiracy theory? Have you considered the possibility that companies like NAI (which are in business to make money) simply don't see any reason why they should give a product away for free? They paid good money for PGP and it turned out to be a real turkey.
Apparently they still sell the command line version. In an odd-case of open source business cases reversing themselves, Phil wants them to open source the GUI. If they do that, how long will it be before someone writes an open source set of command line tools? I guess they could release it with a special license that prohibits you from developing command line tools. Of course, someone would do it anyway and lawsuits would ensue.
The whole dead man's switch thing is pretty funny. Basically what Zimmerman is saying is "here's a product that I know is going to drive you into bankruptcy, so I'm taking advance precautions." If you really want the program then go buy it. Get together a consortium of interested parties and start a fund to buy back the rights. Of course, it would never work, but that's never stopped people before.
-a The advantage of the GPL is that your customers can maintain and upgrade your software, even after you go bankrupt.
Admittedly, it's not the latest and greatest - but this is open source folks, surely some talented hackers out there can expand on what is already open?
Try reading the article before you post. The article tells you why this couldn't happen.
Ok, exactly how is the GPL to be blamed? Because someone can't take the work of 100's of people, turn around and sell it, keeping all the $$$ to themselves? Sounds very parasitic to me.
All I said that was that the GPL is bad for business. The GPL provides low-cost alternatives to commodity products. This drives profits down. lol! This is the worst case senerio. You speak of price wars as if they are a bad thing.
Price wars are good for the consumer, but bad for business. I see more people being able to buy good cars cheaper, thus sustaining the manufacturer and allowing them keep the workers happy and from striking giving them a raise. Cheaper cars == more cars bought == more profits
I find that unlikely. The relationship between sale price and units sold is a complex, non-linear one. When you make something cheaper, you may sell more of them, but at some point the market will saturate. The fact is, most people who need a car already have one and most people don't need two cars, so there is limited growth potential. I've not read anything about a negative impact on the auto industry. Would you like to provide links?
It was a hypothetical example that I made up. I don't think I claimed any differently. Hint: "Let's say..."
I have absolutely no problem with registration. Especially if the site is free. It's reasonable to give demographic information, geographic information and possibly what industry you are in, nothing more.
I don't mind giving them whatever information they want, except for my name, address, and phone number. I'm willing to tell them which city I live in and give a rough approximation of my postal code. If they want an e-mail address, I use one of my spam-bait accounts. I once made the mistake of giving my real e-mail to a site with an opt-out policy. At least I gave a fake name, so that helps with the spam filter.
For newspaper registration, I'll even fill out those boring forms on whether I intend to buy a car in the next year and such. The way I see it, we are very lucky that newspapers are willing to offer their content for free, especially to out-of-state readers. If they want to show me targeted advertising, I'm perfectly willing to help out... as long as I don't get extra spam, junk mail, or telephone solicitations.
You said "How can anyone say that open source is bad for business?" I believe that open source (or more specifically the GPL) is bad for business. Some businesses will prosper because of the GPL; others will suffer. Whether the prospering will outweigh the suffering is a highly debatable. You make it sound like it's cut and dry. One might think that lower costs will help a business prosper, but that only applies on an case by case basis. If costs decline for the whole industry then profits will also go down due to fiercer competition. Why? Because profit margins tend to stabilize at a percentage of costs.
The only time when lower costs will really help an industry is when it opens up new market segments. Again, this may help some industries at the expense of others. Open source will certainly hurt the software industry. It will either help or hurt the hardware industry (there are arguments either way). Other industries won't be nearly as affected, and the change may be positive or negative.
Let's say a car manufacturer starts using open source software. The wholesale price of a car is $10000, with $2000 being profit. Open source saves them $500 per car in operating costs. That increases their profit margin from 25% to 31%, at least for the first year. The next year, all the other manufacturers use open source. The union goes on strike, demanding a piece of the pie, and price wars erode the higher profits. As I said, profit margins tend to stabilize at a percentage of costs. The wholesale cost of a car declines by $600. The new margin is still 25%, but now that's only $1900. Unless the reduced price allows them to sell more cars, open source has been bad for the car business. This is just an example; it can go either way, depending on specific circumstances.
So how can anyone say that open source is bad for business? I happen to be a business of one person, focusing on open source software consulting. My expenses are low and the value I provide is high. And I'm quite profitable, thank you very much.
Whether or not your conclusion is correct, I think you need a quick lesson in logic. As every logician knows, X=>Y means ~Y=>~X. However, all your anecdote has proven is that the statement "it is not possible to make money from open source" is false. That's not the claim you made. It may be possible for open source to be good for your business, but bad for business overall.
Today, Windows is totally out of reach of amateur developers. It is one of the most complex development environments imaginable
I'm not sure what you mean. MFC made it possible for some pretty amateur programmers to start developing full-fledged GUI applications right out of the box. VB as well.
Slashdot Mirror
How about a large dish coated with a think layer of soft material which you put into an orbit you want to clean and after its been there for a while fire the retros and burn the lot up in the atmosphere.
For some reason, one thing I haven't seen people mention so far in this thread is the fact that to be in orbit at a given height above Earth, you have to be travelling at a very specific orbital velocity. So the umbrella either has to be going with the flow, in which case it's not going to catch up to any of the space debris (unless the debris has an eccentric orbit), or against the flow, in which case it is going to impact the space debris with a very high velocity.
I suppose a third option is to have it going with the flow, but faster than orbital velocity, in which case it's going to need a lot of fuel... (remember, a spacecraft has to eject balast every time it changes direction, otherwise conservation of momentum would be violated.)
-a
Game companies charge exhorbitant prices for their products. Where does this money go? Mostly to cover the cost of marketing, programmers, middlemen in retail, etc. But ask yourself what has been the biggest breakthrough in game design in the last 10 years. It's mostly the art design, isn't it? Game companies employ overworked, underappreciated artists who are treated like ordinary employees. They generally receive a flat rate for designing the look of the game and they don't get any significant percentage of sales. Rather than buying the game at a store, get it off Gnutella and send a couple of $$ to the people who really deserve it.
-a
According to IMDB [imdb.com] the original stapler was just painted anyways:
Yeah. According to the story submission too. Or didn't you read that?
-a
Whuh... Did I just hear a slashdot geek call Microsoft employees even bigger geeks? I'd take what your friend told you with a grain of salt, especially since it doesn't make much sense. I actually worked at Microsoft for a few months as a university student, and my impression was that the workers there were pretty normal, as far as coders go. I've met a lot wierder people since then.
I was working on a pretty trivial part of NT, so the build system didn't affect me. However, when you walked around the halls you could see who checked in code that broke the build because they would have a "build breaker award" taped to their office window. It seemed to be in good fun, but I suppose it could result in a CYA mentality.
Also, I remember there being problems with source control, like the article mentioned, though not specific to NT. I seem to remember that Word Viewer used a different codestream from Word and the sample files in the SDK are merely very out-of-date versions of some of the small apps that ship with Windows.
-a
Don't they realize that most people who use shared WiFi links are merely trying out the service and they will eventually buy their own subscription.
-a
Yes I am karma-whoring. What's it to you?
Because humans have a nearly unique ability to modify the environment's carrying capacity through the use of technology. (I say "nearly unique" because there is limited use of tools documented in a handful of other species, e.g. chimps.)
That's great and all, but how about we make sure we have a solution to the environmental problem before we merrily let it get out of hand. I have no doubt that mankind will someday discover the cure for cancer, but if they don't find the cure before I'm dead then it's not doing me any good, is it? (okay I admit it, that was cheap. I don't actually have cancer, but you get the point.)
-a
I can't possibly know with 100% certainty what Microsoft's intentions are, but there stands a reasonable chance they are intended for their benefit and any consumer benefits are purely coincidental.
I don't know why you considered that a "karma burning philosophical schpeel", since you don't say anything remotely controversial and, if anything, you are whoring.
I suspect the reason Microsoft wants to put DRM into the OS is twofold:
a) They are very vocal anti-software piracy advocates, which makes them sympathetic to the music/film industries' own piracy problem.
b) They demonstrate to the government that closed-source software has the advantage that users can't modify it for illicit purposes.
-a
For the sake of argument, let's assume that the central idea of the Turing Test is correct -- a fake indistinguishable from the original is the same kind of thing as the original. I happen to actually believe that assumption. But Wallace is also assuming that a canned set of stock responses is reasonably possible to achieve such a thing. But it clearly isn't.
The Turing Test is usually qualified as the 10-question Turing Test or the 50-question Turing Test. To really pass the full Turing Test you have to be able to act like a human for an arbitrarily large number of questions.
-a
As usual seems many people did not read the article. The lawsuit is NOT about tracking the individuals in their vehicles (though the article does play that aspect up). The lawsuit is about wording in the contract. Specifically that the renters thought it was $1/mile in the "out of bounds" area and Budget charged them $1/mile on their whole trip. Having not actually seen the contract, I cannot comment on whose right, but this leads to the point.
I agree. For one thing, it's bad that the contract was hard to understand. But on top of that, $1 per mile is an absolutely exorbitant charge. You can rent a car with unlimited mileage for a week for only $300 or so. If you take it on a multi-state road trip, as I have done, you could easily rack up 2000 miles. How is it possible that some rental companies will charge you $300 for that trip, and others will charge $2300. $1 per mile is clearly an unreasonable assessment of the wear and tear on the car.
-a
Is this really true, or is market 'growth' simply a matter of harvesting natural capital and calling it 'growth'? Surely, the true amount of wealth/resources is a zero-sum game even if the $$$ don't necessarily reflect that?
The economy is clearly not a zero-sum game. When the economy is hot, everyone prospers. In a recession, everyone suffers.
The government can control the supply of printed money, but net worth can still be created on paper. A lot of money is tied up in stocks and other investments. If the value of a stock goes up, money is created. If the stock goes bust, money is destroyed.
Wealth is not a fixed commodity either. Wealth represents the ability of an economy to produce goods that people want and distribute them among consumers. If you produce goods that society needs, you increase its wealth. If you produce goods that no one wants then the amount of goods is the same as before, but the wealth of society is not increased.
-a
I think your wrong here. Just because it's opensource doesn't mean jobs are lost. You need to look at how opensource works.
I find it highly unlikely that the original poster doesn't "understand" how open source works.
I could explain it to you but there's so many good articles on that subject. Some others and myself make good money with opensource and we contribute back with development.
The fact that you personally are making money with open source does not mean that it is easy to do so. After 90% of the work force gets laid off, it would be pretty selfish of you to claim that since you still have a job there is obviously no problem.
Alot of those companies use opensource technology to make their software better.
My employer does that. It has made our software more fully featured, but I'm not sure about higher quality. What sucks for me is that my job is worse.
Opensource is usually on the cutting edge. Nan can still sell Blender support
That remains to be seen. I don't doubt that there is money to be made, but there is no proof that there is "lots" of money available. Write me back when an open source company makes more money than Microsoft. Nah... too unlikely. Write me back when an open souce company stays in business for ten years.
Before you start yelling at everyone, maybe you should do you home work.
You see, this is silly. You flame a guy for stating his opinion, even though your counter-example has not been proven true.
Years ago, I attended a lecture by a Christian Science nut. He was explaining how after the great flood, all the water froze and that's how the animals migrated to other continents, when someone interrupted and asked why the carnivores hadn't eaten the herbavores on the ark. At this point the lecturer got angry and replied that the if the guy had been to the previous lectures he would have known that all animals were initially vegetarian and they didn't become carnivores until around 3000 BC.
The point is, there may be many essays on open source out there, but they are all, to some extent, works of fiction. In the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric Raymond talks about how "successful" his open source project was, but he measured his success in terms of number of users, and not money. Netscape released an essay on the business case for open source, but AFAIK they never made any money from it. The only really successful open source business case to date was the IPO, but that one has dried up too.
-a
Lots of people have lost huge investments, not least the public who have invested (often indirectly) in different kinds of tech-companies.
Wrong. The amount of money some people have lost is precisely the amount of money other people have won. Like in any zero-sum scheme.
Sorry to have to give you a lesson in econ 101, but the economy and the stock market are not zero-sum games.
-a
The bits in the pad cannot be generated by an algorithm or cipher. They must be truly random, using a real random source such as specialized hardware, radioactive decay timings, etc
This is one of the axioms used in proving that a one-time pad is "perfectly secure". If you don't use truly random numbers, there is no reason why your algorithm can't be secure; it just doesn't really deserve to be called "theoretically unbreakable".
We already have ciphers which are based on algorithm-generated "one time pads." They are called stream ciphers. A stream cipher is simply a long string of pseudo-random data (derived from a shared key) which is XOR'ed with the text. It sounds like this kid has just invented a new kind of stream cipher.
Stream ciphers are faster than block ciphers but they are less widely used because they also tend to be less secure. Block ciphers are less susceptible to attacks because the per-round encryption keys are data-dependent. Who knows -- maybe this kid has invented the best stream cipher in the world (but I doubt it).
I hope they enjoy the $20,000 patent, 'cause it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
You're right, but perhaps for the wrong reason. The patent is worthless because there are numerous free alternatives. Encryption inventors think a lot like open source advocates. Give away your algorithm for free and use your newfound fame to sell your books, network monitoring services, etc (e.g. Bruce Schneier).
-a
Where is it described as such? In crypto, 'one-way' means 'irreversible' or at least 'computationally irreversible'.
The basic security of DES derives from a progression of pseudorandom numbers which are XORed with the plaintext (or portions thereof). The derivation of these pseudorandom numbers is a one way operation, even though the actual encryption is not.
The only time I have seen the term 'one-way cipher' used is in referring to hash functions.
RSA encryption is sometimes called a one-way trapdoor cipher.
-a
The DVD has the music on it- I could legally get on LimeWire and download backups of the music I just bought without neeeding a soundtrack.
These days, a lot of films have soundtracks that were "inspired by the movie." You'll probably find one song over the opening credits and another over the closing credits. The rest may not even appear in the film at all.
CDs are overpriced, plain and simple.
I don't know why a DVD for a movie that I am probably only ever going to watch 2 or 3 times is worth more than a CD that I will probably listen to 100 times or more.
-a
First prove to me...
Then prove to me...
Then prove to me...
Since when has the burden of proof been transfered from the copyright violator to the copyright holder? Sure, that's any easy way to win any argument when the other party wants to argue more than you do. It's much easier to nitpick at someone else's argument than to formulate your own.
I'm going to stick a gun to your head. I'll let you go, but only on three conditions:
First prove to me that guns don't kill people, people do. Otherwise, I won't feel guilty when the gun kills you.
Then prove to me that your life is good for society as a whole. As we all know, when the founding fathers included "thou shalt not kill" in the constitution, they meant for that protection to only apply for the first 12 years of your life.
Then prove to me why you should be allowed to have a monopoly on your blood when I have a colony of pet vampire bats who are equally deserving of it.
Ignore the fact that I have no right to point the gun at you in the first place. That's not relevant here, apparently.
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Okie doke, forgive me if I'm missing something here, but is Fermat's Last Theorem the same as the conjecture mentioned in the article? The one that took Dr. Andrew Wiles seven years to solve?
You're missing the point. Fermat's Last Theorem was created in 1630 and solved in 1993 (363 years later). The Riemann hypothesis was composed in 1859, so at that rate it won't be solved until 2222. $1M may not be worth much in 220 years.
Andrew Wiles may have spent seven years of dedicated time on Fermat's Last Theorem, but this doesn't mean that the conjecture itself was solved in seven years. Huge leaps in mathematical theory needed to take place before Wiles could realize his proof. Anyway, Wiles didn't prove FLT so much as he proved the Taniyama-Shimura-Weil conjecture, which was of interest because someone else had already proved that FLT would follow from TSW.
TSW conjectures that "all semistable elliptic curves with rational coefficients are modular". This statement would probably have sounded like gibberish to Fermat, so it really trivializes the problem to claim that the conjecture was solved in seven years. Whole branches of mathematics had to be invented before FLT could be proved.
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I went to university as a young, green freshman thinking I wanted to learn. After a couple of years there I realized that all I wanted was a degree. I'm a person who is genuinely interested in learning and I follow the latest math and science news with great interest. However at university they spend a lot of time teaching you procedures for applying formulas, because those make the best kinds of test questions. I find that type of knowledge very mundane. I would rather decide for myself the kinds of things I want to learn.
Your experiences may vary, but I would have dropped out of university a lot sooner if I had thought I could do so without endangering my earning potential. But there are a lot of people who attend university because they want to. Do you really think most of these students would pay tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, to get the official diploma if they didn't have to? Many of these students used to stand in line to get a refund for the $5 "voluntary" contribution to the school paper.
Your analogy is stupid. As if the $50,000 that one might spend to get a "brand name" education somehow relates to whether you will pay $20 for a CD or steal it off the net. I can only speak for myself, but when I buy a CD, I buy it for the music. I don't steal it off the net because I'm a fairly honest person, but I will buy it from a used CD store if I can get a better price.
Anyway, back on the original topic. I think the story submitter needs to decide what kind of knowledge about math he wants to learn. I have an interest in math, but I don't need to apply it in real life, so I am content to read about cryptography, logic, fractals, Fermat's last theorem, and all the pop-math stuff. You can find excellent books for the lay reader, with the best probably being "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid". Martin Gardner's columns from Scientific American have all been archived and published in book form. As for learning whole subject areas, try to skim a variety of books rather than reading one in depth. That way, you will get a better grasp of the subject matter (and if you find that you prefer one of the books over the others, at least you have a point of reference).
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I've read on numerous occasions that NA has versions of PGP updated to run on OS X and XP, but aren't releasing them. Something to do with 9/11 maybe? It seems stupid to simply throw away a defacto standard.
Why is the immediate reaction to news like this on Slashdot always a conspiracy theory? Have you considered the possibility that companies like NAI (which are in business to make money) simply don't see any reason why they should give a product away for free? They paid good money for PGP and it turned out to be a real turkey.
Apparently they still sell the command line version. In an odd-case of open source business cases reversing themselves, Phil wants them to open source the GUI. If they do that, how long will it be before someone writes an open source set of command line tools? I guess they could release it with a special license that prohibits you from developing command line tools. Of course, someone would do it anyway and lawsuits would ensue.
The whole dead man's switch thing is pretty funny. Basically what Zimmerman is saying is "here's a product that I know is going to drive you into bankruptcy, so I'm taking advance precautions." If you really want the program then go buy it. Get together a consortium of interested parties and start a fund to buy back the rights. Of course, it would never work, but that's never stopped people before.
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The advantage of the GPL is that your customers can maintain and upgrade your software, even after you go bankrupt.
Admittedly, it's not the latest and greatest - but this is open source folks, surely some talented hackers out there can expand on what is already open?
Try reading the article before you post. The article tells you why this couldn't happen.
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Ok, exactly how is the GPL to be blamed? Because someone can't take the work of 100's of people, turn around and sell it, keeping all the $$$ to themselves? Sounds very parasitic to me.
All I said that was that the GPL is bad for business. The GPL provides low-cost alternatives to commodity products. This drives profits down.
lol! This is the worst case senerio. You speak of price wars as if they are a bad thing.
Price wars are good for the consumer, but bad for business.
I see more people being able to buy good cars cheaper, thus sustaining the manufacturer and allowing them keep the workers happy and from striking giving them a raise. Cheaper cars == more cars bought == more profits
I find that unlikely. The relationship between sale price and units sold is a complex, non-linear one. When you make something cheaper, you may sell more of them, but at some point the market will saturate. The fact is, most people who need a car already have one and most people don't need two cars, so there is limited growth potential.
I've not read anything about a negative impact on the auto industry. Would you like to provide links?
It was a hypothetical example that I made up. I don't think I claimed any differently. Hint: "Let's say..."
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I have absolutely no problem with registration. Especially if the site is free. It's reasonable to give demographic information, geographic information and possibly what industry you are in, nothing more.
I don't mind giving them whatever information they want, except for my name, address, and phone number. I'm willing to tell them which city I live in and give a rough approximation of my postal code. If they want an e-mail address, I use one of my spam-bait accounts. I once made the mistake of giving my real e-mail to a site with an opt-out policy. At least I gave a fake name, so that helps with the spam filter.
For newspaper registration, I'll even fill out those boring forms on whether I intend to buy a car in the next year and such. The way I see it, we are very lucky that newspapers are willing to offer their content for free, especially to out-of-state readers. If they want to show me targeted advertising, I'm perfectly willing to help out... as long as I don't get extra spam, junk mail, or telephone solicitations.
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You said "How can anyone say that open source is bad for business?" I believe that open source (or more specifically the GPL) is bad for business. Some businesses will prosper because of the GPL; others will suffer. Whether the prospering will outweigh the suffering is a highly debatable. You make it sound like it's cut and dry. One might think that lower costs will help a business prosper, but that only applies on an case by case basis. If costs decline for the whole industry then profits will also go down due to fiercer competition. Why? Because profit margins tend to stabilize at a percentage of costs.
The only time when lower costs will really help an industry is when it opens up new market segments. Again, this may help some industries at the expense of others. Open source will certainly hurt the software industry. It will either help or hurt the hardware industry (there are arguments either way). Other industries won't be nearly as affected, and the change may be positive or negative.
Let's say a car manufacturer starts using open source software. The wholesale price of a car is $10000, with $2000 being profit. Open source saves them $500 per car in operating costs. That increases their profit margin from 25% to 31%, at least for the first year. The next year, all the other manufacturers use open source. The union goes on strike, demanding a piece of the pie, and price wars erode the higher profits. As I said, profit margins tend to stabilize at a percentage of costs. The wholesale cost of a car declines by $600. The new margin is still 25%, but now that's only $1900. Unless the reduced price allows them to sell more cars, open source has been bad for the car business. This is just an example; it can go either way, depending on specific circumstances.
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So how can anyone say that open source is bad for business? I happen to be a business of one person, focusing on open source software consulting. My expenses are low and the value I provide is high. And I'm quite profitable, thank you very much.
Whether or not your conclusion is correct, I think you need a quick lesson in logic. As every logician knows, X=>Y means ~Y=>~X. However, all your anecdote has proven is that the statement "it is not possible to make money from open source" is false. That's not the claim you made. It may be possible for open source to be good for your business, but bad for business overall.
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Today, Windows is totally out of reach of amateur developers. It is one of the most complex development environments imaginable
I'm not sure what you mean. MFC made it possible for some pretty amateur programmers to start developing full-fledged GUI applications right out of the box. VB as well.
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