I don't think it was the TI 30; some googling has turned up an image of the TI-30 and I seem to recall the calculator I'm thinking of as being bigger, hence probably older.
My dad's an engineer, and hence has had quite a number of calculators over the years.
I'm afraid to say, though, that it wouldn't have been that crazy if it had been the TI-30: I was born in 1977.
Not necessarily. This graphic puts the 2000 election results in a different light.
According to the Federal Election Commission, the following are the results for the 2000 presidential popular vote:
Gore: 50,999,897
Bush: 50,456,002
The difference is 543,895. Dividing by the total number of votes, 105,405,100, we compute a proportional difference of 0.005160044438, or 0.52%.
As was pointed out to me when I brought this up recently, this is within the margin of error of the voting system.
So, statistically, the 2000 presidential popular vote was indeterminate, as was the Florida vote for the Electoral College. If we ignore the error margin and just count who has the most votes, though, then Gore did definitely win the popular vote.
I must say I don't know what you hope to demonstrate by the map you linked. So the land area of Bush supporters is greater than the land area of Gore supporters: so what? Voting power varies with population, not land area.
Perhaps you're referring to the "population won by Bush: 143 million" bit in the link you have. I'm not sure where they got this number; it definitely wasn't the popular vote figures which I listed above. My guess is that they got this number by comparing the sum of the populations of all the states which voted for Bush with the sum of the populations of all the states which voted for Gore.
This number is basically meaningless. Imagine you have two states which vote 50.1% for Bush and 49.9% for Gore. Then the "population voting for Bush" would be the sum of the populations of each state, and the "population voting for Gore" would be 0. You cannot convince me this is a reasonable representation of the situation.
In many ways, Frankel's future encapsulates the debate over the future of the Internet itself. Does it become just a distribution system for corporate product or more of a way to subvert that corporate control?
I swear my JonKatz filter should have caught this.
Yeah, thanks. I actually studied in Cork last year, and I took so much Irish history that you'd think I'd remember it. It's been a long day.
Well, as you said, they'd been functionally independent from the UK since just after WWI, and that was the important bit. When all the treaties were actually signed and links broken is mostly academic after that, so I don't think anyone would blame you for forgetting.
Of course, their money is made out of crappier fibers; it doesn't hold up nearly as well as a US bill. From some people who are world travellers, I'm told the people in other countries don't even bother spot-checking a bill to see if it's genuine. They feel it with their hands. Apparently, tt's pretty easy to distinguish the real paper from the fake.
Sorry, I don't understand: if foreign bills are made from better crappier fibers than U.S. bills, why is it easier to recognize fake foreign bills by texture alone?
If U.S. bills were truly better quality paper, I would think it would be easier to recognize legitimate bills from the texture of the paper.
If I'm not mistaken, they're part of the United Kingdom.
Er, you're quite wrong on that one. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. The Irish Republic, which is most of the land area of Ireland, is quite separate.
According to a radio news story, you can not only use the watch to buy gas, but at some locations in Chicago you can also use it at McDonald's.
Hmm, so with a simple button press, I can aid the both the oil and gas industry, and McDonalds.
I don't think that's quite enough: could we add an option to make a micropayment to McDonnell-Douglas, Coke, and (oh what the hell) the U.S. Department of Homeland Security while we're at it?
But why they were even looking to see how KISS's stuff worked is a bit curious.
Part of accepting 'fair use' is accepting that people poking around in software they've bought are not doing something particularly evil.
I remember the fun I had back in 1991 with the first version of Civilization, when I discovered that replacing the content of the story.txt file let me rewrite the text of the opening sequence of the game.
Yeah, maybe I and the hundreds of other geeks who discovered this were freaks. But we weren't wrong.
you start permuting attributes into arbitrary orders and stuff, a person examining a file would probably find this sort of curious.
Yeah, I'm somewhat concerned about that myself. Almost any HTML generator will probably just spit out the tags in some arbitrary but fixed order throughout the document.
But I still think that a lot of human HTML authors would be inclined to permute a tag here and there, so it wouldn't be terribly easy for someone to write a script to test whether a big batch of HTML files had any embedded messages without getting a lot of false positives.
Anyway, thanks for the feedback. It is a cool little program to use, and it was fun to write.
But embedding a message introduces redundancy, by an amount proportional to the capacity of the stego system.
I don't think you mean 'redundancy' here, since the added data is obviously not redundant. It can't be, since it has to encode the steganographic message.
I think you mean 'apparent redundancy', i.e. the container file would appear to be redundant to someone who doesn't know there's a secret message since it's larger than it needs to be.
However, this problem can be avoided if the encoder simply chooses a steganographic method which does not increase container size. As a trivial example of this idea, consider
Clearly, tag attributes must have some fixed order when written into a file. My program simply permutes them in a specific way within the file, thus encoding content without increasing container size.
The general idea is to make use of the existing redundancy of the container to encode data. The one caveat here is that the amount of container redundancy is bounded above by the size of the container, so there is a fixed maximum amount of data that can be encoded.
And I suppose you want to count those votes by hand, too? I can just see it...
Um, up here in Canada we do hand counts in every provincial and federal election.
This includes the fall 2000 federal election, which occurred a month or so after the 2000 American presidential election. Polls closed sometime early in the evening or so, and conclusive results were ready by 11:00 or so.
In fact, Letterman even did a running joke during the whole Florida ballot recount fiasco on "updates on the Canadian election" where he would simply repeat the results of the Canadian election ad nauseum, underscoring the point that it was over.
Mind you, the race in 2000 Canadian election wasn't anywhere near as tight as the Gore/Bush race. But it's not true that hand-counts necessarily imply greater ambiguity or more lag time.
The U.S. has about ten times the number of people voting, but it can simply hire ten times the number of vote-counters. I suspect this will be still be easily cheaper than buying a gazillion Diebold machines and facing the inevitable court challenges resulting from the lack of paper trails.
But you're right: transportation is a political necessity, because most Americans aren't going to stop driving unless there's either an alternative or they're compelled to. Now if gasoline were heavily taxed, we might actually see real development of hydrogen or electric cars, or mass public transit (on the scale of European countries).
There are a lot of people who honestly believe that the only reason electric or hybrid cars don't yet exist is due to actions by oil companies and oil company bigwigs. And these people are not crazy tree-hugging alien-visited psycho conspiracy theorists.
There seems to be an unstated assumption in the article that dooming 15-37 percent of species to extinction is in itself a negative thing, which means that we have somehow accepted as true the idea that a species should exist perpetually. The historical record suggests that species tend to have their time and then disappear; either in some form of mass extinction event or by slowly fading away.
This is rather like saying that because, at some point in the past, lightning has sparked a fire that has burned down someone's house, that I shouldn't complain if you take a match to mine.
On an ecological time scale we are already in one of the greatest mass extinctions since the K-T extinction. A mere second ago in evolutionary terms, we had horses, mastodons, sabretooth cats, and giant ground sloths in North America.
Yes, there have been times in the past vast proportions of life on the planet have gone extinct. But these have occurred a finite and small number of times over the last billion years. Do you really want another, right now?
We have a very good reason for being concerned about this. The world probably won't miss cheetahs or kangaroos or blue whales all that much. But if we somehow succeed in killing off, say, bluegreen algae -- the foundation of much of the marine ecosystem -- we will almost certainly not survive ourselves.
As others pointed out, I was the one who was confused here.
I interpreted "one-way" to mean non-injective, whereas in cryptography it has a perfectly established and well-defined meaning of 'difficult to invert'.
So, sorry to the person I corrected, and ignore the claims made in the parent of this message.
If they had used a real one-way function, such as MD5, it would not be possible to come up with another value that hashed to the same result.
Uh, you're confusing two things.
A one-way function is simply some function which is not one-to-one. For example, consider the length function L which maps words to integers, e.g. L("bob")=3, L("A")=1.
It's not possible, given an integer n, to find the specific word that mapped to n, simply because there isn't an unique one. This is what makes it one-way.
The fact that there are multiple possible passwords for this Word document is proof that it is a one-way function.
What you're talking about is the ease of finding some element of the preimage of a given hash, which is a separate concept. MD5 is good because for some given value, it's really hard to find anything which hashes to that value, not because it's somehow 'more one-way'.
In fact, the most one-way function of all is a constant function, which is obviously totally useless for authentication.
It's this developer's problem, and only this developer's problem.
Are you sure about this? I would say at least that it's the problem of the organization who provided the unscrupulous developer with access to the proprietary code, which could be the developer (who was perhaps an employee of the owner of the code, or was working independently) or this developer's employer.
In any case, I'm not convinced that the legal system would find fault only with the initial leak. It may very well find fault with anyone who used the tainted code down the line. It may be analogous to the idea of 'possession of stolen property' -- just because you're not the original thief doesn't absolve you of guilt in the eyes of the law.
Well, you don't need a subpoena to look at the open code, but to conclude that there is or isn't stolen code there you would need to see the closed code too. And that you do need a subpoena for.
No; that's an advantage of open source: no closet. If there be skeletons, they be out in the open where they can be discovered by anyone looking for them.
If the issue is that proprietary closed-source code was placed by an unscrupulous developer into an open-source product, then the openness of open source won't help you.
There are still skeletons in your closet, and for the casual reader of open-source code there's no way to distinguish the initially proprietary code from totally new code written by this aforementioned unscrupulous developer.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it was the TI 30; some googling has turned up an image of the TI-30 and I seem to recall the calculator I'm thinking of as being bigger, hence probably older.
My dad's an engineer, and hence has had quite a number of calculators over the years.
I'm afraid to say, though, that it wouldn't have been that crazy if it had been the TI-30: I was born in 1977.
My dad used to have a huge ancient calculator from the 60's or 70's. I vividly remember it because it had a red alarm-clock style display.
:)
When you performed an arithmetic operation the whole screen would turn to garbage for a moment, then the answer would be displayed.
I never saw this for myself, but he claims that if you tried to divide by zero the machine would just keep chugging away forever.
According to the Federal Election Commission, the following are the results for the 2000 presidential popular vote:
The difference is 543,895. Dividing by the total number of votes, 105,405,100, we compute a proportional difference of 0.005160044438, or 0.52%. As was pointed out to me when I brought this up recently, this is within the margin of error of the voting system.
So, statistically, the 2000 presidential popular vote was indeterminate, as was the Florida vote for the Electoral College. If we ignore the error margin and just count who has the most votes, though, then Gore did definitely win the popular vote.
I must say I don't know what you hope to demonstrate by the map you linked. So the land area of Bush supporters is greater than the land area of Gore supporters: so what? Voting power varies with population, not land area.
Perhaps you're referring to the "population won by Bush: 143 million" bit in the link you have. I'm not sure where they got this number; it definitely wasn't the popular vote figures which I listed above. My guess is that they got this number by comparing the sum of the populations of all the states which voted for Bush with the sum of the populations of all the states which voted for Gore.
This number is basically meaningless. Imagine you have two states which vote 50.1% for Bush and 49.9% for Gore. Then the "population voting for Bush" would be the sum of the populations of each state, and the "population voting for Gore" would be 0. You cannot convince me this is a reasonable representation of the situation.
In many ways, Frankel's future encapsulates the debate over the future of the Internet itself. Does it become just a distribution system for corporate product or more of a way to subvert that corporate control?
I swear my JonKatz filter should have caught this.
Yeah, thanks. I actually studied in Cork last year, and I took so much Irish history that you'd think I'd remember it. It's been a long day.
Well, as you said, they'd been functionally independent from the UK since just after WWI, and that was the important bit. When all the treaties were actually signed and links broken is mostly academic after that, so I don't think anyone would blame you for forgetting.
It's true that we have gone from doubling our knowledge of the world in three years to just eighteen months.
Its a bit suspicious that everything seems to be doubling every 18 months.
Methinks the 18 month figure is a bit exaggerated. Most of the mathematical theorems and scientific theories I know are a wee bit older than that.
Just out of curiosity, do 7-11s in other countries have Americans working in them?
:))
Here in Canada, most of the 7-11 clerks seem to be Canadians.
(Yeah, we probably don't really count.
Of course, their money is made out of crappier fibers; it doesn't hold up nearly as well as a US bill. From some people who are world travellers, I'm told the people in other countries don't even bother spot-checking a bill to see if it's genuine. They feel it with their hands. Apparently, tt's pretty easy to distinguish the real paper from the fake.
Sorry, I don't understand: if foreign bills are made from better crappier fibers than U.S. bills, why is it easier to recognize fake foreign bills by texture alone?
If U.S. bills were truly better quality paper, I would think it would be easier to recognize legitimate bills from the texture of the paper.
The Republic of Ireland (Eire) was founded in 1949, but it had been separate from the UK since 1927.
See this wiki page on Irish history for details.
Why am I not surprised that a user named Albanach is from Scotland? :)
There is, alas, no user Sassanach.
If I'm not mistaken, they're part of the United Kingdom.
Er, you're quite wrong on that one. Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. The Irish Republic, which is most of the land area of Ireland, is quite separate.
According to a radio news story, you can not only use the watch to buy gas, but at some locations in Chicago you can also use it at McDonald's.
Hmm, so with a simple button press, I can aid the both the oil and gas industry, and McDonalds.
I don't think that's quite enough: could we add an option to make a micropayment to McDonnell-Douglas, Coke, and (oh what the hell) the U.S. Department of Homeland Security while we're at it?
the creation of Lucy the robot (named for the famous fossil hominid)
:)
Here we have a humanoid robot named after an ancient hominid female was named after a famous Beatles song.
I think it would be really cool, as a homage to the Fab Four, to give this female robot kaleidoscope eyes.
Well, that or make her dispense LSD.
But why they were even looking to see how KISS's stuff worked is a bit curious.
Part of accepting 'fair use' is accepting that people poking around in software they've bought are not doing something particularly evil.
I remember the fun I had back in 1991 with the first version of Civilization, when I discovered that replacing the content of the story.txt file let me rewrite the text of the opening sequence of the game.
Yeah, maybe I and the hundreds of other geeks who discovered this were freaks. But we weren't wrong.
When are they going to stop distributing Apple binary codecs without permission?
Can you provide a reference to this?
you start permuting attributes into arbitrary orders and stuff, a person examining a file would probably find this sort of curious.
Yeah, I'm somewhat concerned about that myself. Almost any HTML generator will probably just spit out the tags in some arbitrary but fixed order throughout the document.
But I still think that a lot of human HTML authors would be inclined to permute a tag here and there, so it wouldn't be terribly easy for someone to write a script to test whether a big batch of HTML files had any embedded messages without getting a lot of false positives.
Anyway, thanks for the feedback. It is a cool little program to use, and it was fun to write.
But embedding a message introduces redundancy, by an amount proportional to the capacity of the stego system.
I don't think you mean 'redundancy' here, since the added data is obviously not redundant. It can't be, since it has to encode the steganographic message.
I think you mean 'apparent redundancy', i.e. the container file would appear to be redundant to someone who doesn't know there's a secret message since it's larger than it needs to be.
However, this problem can be avoided if the encoder simply chooses a steganographic method which does not increase container size. As a trivial example of this idea, consider
this stegangraphic tool I wrote which is based on permuting HTML tag attributes.
Clearly, tag attributes must have some fixed order when written into a file. My program simply permutes them in a specific way within the file, thus encoding content without increasing container size.
The general idea is to make use of the existing redundancy of the container to encode data. The one caveat here is that the amount of container redundancy is bounded above by the size of the container, so there is a fixed maximum amount of data that can be encoded.
And I suppose you want to count those votes by hand, too? I can just see it...
Um, up here in Canada we do hand counts in every provincial and federal election.
This includes the fall 2000 federal election, which occurred a month or so after the 2000 American presidential election. Polls closed sometime early in the evening or so, and conclusive results were ready by 11:00 or so.
In fact, Letterman even did a running joke during the whole Florida ballot recount fiasco on "updates on the Canadian election" where he would simply repeat the results of the Canadian election ad nauseum, underscoring the point that it was over.
Mind you, the race in 2000 Canadian election wasn't anywhere near as tight as the Gore/Bush race. But it's not true that hand-counts necessarily imply greater ambiguity or more lag time.
The U.S. has about ten times the number of people voting, but it can simply hire ten times the number of vote-counters. I suspect this will be still be easily cheaper than buying a gazillion Diebold machines and facing the inevitable court challenges resulting from the lack of paper trails.
It's only a necessity because we made it one.
But you're right: transportation is a political necessity, because most Americans aren't going to stop driving unless there's either an alternative or they're compelled to. Now if gasoline were heavily taxed, we might actually see real development of hydrogen or electric cars, or mass public transit (on the scale of European countries).
There are a lot of people who honestly believe that the only reason electric or hybrid cars don't yet exist is due to actions by oil companies and oil company bigwigs. And these people are not crazy tree-hugging alien-visited psycho conspiracy theorists.
There seems to be an unstated assumption in the article that dooming 15-37 percent of species to extinction is in itself a negative thing, which means that we have somehow accepted as true the idea that a species should exist perpetually. The historical record suggests that species tend to have their time and then disappear; either in some form of mass extinction event or by slowly
fading away.
This is rather like saying that because, at some point in the past, lightning has sparked a fire that has burned down someone's house, that I shouldn't complain if you take a match to mine.
On an ecological time scale we are already in one of the greatest mass extinctions since the K-T extinction. A mere second ago in evolutionary terms, we had horses, mastodons, sabretooth cats, and giant ground sloths in North America.
Yes, there have been times in the past vast proportions of life on the planet have gone extinct. But these have occurred a finite and small number of times over the last billion years. Do you really want another, right now?
We have a very good reason for being concerned about this. The world probably won't miss cheetahs or kangaroos or blue whales all that much. But if we somehow succeed in killing off, say, bluegreen algae -- the foundation of much of the marine ecosystem -- we will almost certainly not survive ourselves.
Uh, you're confusing two things.
As others pointed out, I was the one who was confused here.
I interpreted "one-way" to mean non-injective, whereas in cryptography it has a perfectly established and well-defined meaning of 'difficult to invert'.
So, sorry to the person I corrected, and ignore the claims made in the parent of this message.
If they had used a real one-way function, such as MD5, it would not be possible to come up with another value that hashed to the same result.
Uh, you're confusing two things.
A one-way function is simply some function which is not one-to-one. For example, consider the length function L which maps words to integers, e.g. L("bob")=3, L("A")=1.
It's not possible, given an integer n, to find the specific word that mapped to n, simply because there isn't an unique one. This is what makes it one-way.
The fact that there are multiple possible passwords for this Word document is proof that it is a one-way function.
What you're talking about is the ease of finding some element of the preimage of a given hash, which is a separate concept. MD5 is good because for some given value, it's really hard to find anything which hashes to that value, not because it's somehow 'more one-way'.
In fact, the most one-way function of all is a constant function, which is obviously totally useless for authentication.
It's this developer's problem, and only this developer's problem.
Are you sure about this? I would say at least that it's the problem of the organization who provided the unscrupulous developer with access to the proprietary code, which could be the developer (who was perhaps an employee of the owner of the code, or was working independently) or this developer's employer.
In any case, I'm not convinced that the legal system would find fault only with the initial leak. It may very well find fault with anyone who used the tainted code down the line. It may be analogous to the idea of 'possession of stolen property' -- just because you're not the original thief doesn't absolve you of guilt in the eyes of the law.
Well, you don't need a subpoena to look at the open code, but to conclude that there is or isn't stolen code there you would need to see the closed code too. And that you do need a subpoena for.
No; that's an advantage of open source: no closet. If there be skeletons, they be out in the open where they can be discovered by anyone looking for them.
If the issue is that proprietary closed-source code was placed by an unscrupulous developer into an open-source product, then the openness of open source won't help you.
There are still skeletons in your closet, and for the casual reader of open-source code there's no way to distinguish the initially proprietary code from totally new code written by this aforementioned unscrupulous developer.