This will always be a problem with packet-radio style technologies like this. Current wireless standards are pushing to a packet-radio style architecture, and they are grappling with this very problem. Currently, all voice traffic on a wireless link is scrambled... however, the trend is NOT to have mandatory layer-2 encryption for packet data. Rather, the general consensus is "if people want security, they better enable encryption themselves, 'cuz we won't". So, yeah, if you don't want your IRC sessions or telnet connections sniffed, either encrypt the sessions themselves, or set up an encrypted tunnel with a fixed host somewhere and tunnel all your traffic through that with the fixed host acting as a gateway/relay. SSH does this quite nicely, or you can go the way of IPSec (or TLS/SSL for TCP stuff).
There's a very good reason... what happens if you change the underlying architecture of the object you're dealing with, but a bazillion lines of code use your get and set methods? Well, easy, just change the methods to do the right thing and voila! all the code that uses your object still works. If this code just accessed your variables directly, you're screwed. Hell, in Java, even if your internal representation changes from floats to doubles (perhaps to increase the accuracy of calculations within the class), if you access the variables directly, ALL the code has to be changed to cast the variables. If you have get and set methods, it's a trivial change. It's called abstraction... you develop an interface which is abstracted away from the implementation. Trust me, it's a very good thing.
Actually, it's been discovered that these games were most definitely NOT licensed from Sega or their respective manufacturer. So, (as I suspected), this thing, if it's real, would most definitely be illegal. At least, the games they ship with it are.
Actually, that number keeps fluctuating. The last figure I'd heard, IIRC, estimated the Universe's age at around 14 to 15 billion years... or maybe I'm just remembering wrong.:) Although I'm almost positive the 6 billion figure you mentioned isn't quite right...
Oooh, you're stepping on slippery ground there.:) The fact is, society is *filled* with double standards regarding what we can and can't do to our bodies. No, apparently drug use is wrong. BUT, alcohol abuse is fine and dandy. Hmm... both mind-altering chemicals... possible abuse in both cases... alcohol == good, drugs == bad! Similarly, prostitution is bad... but sleeping around for free is fine! I could go on (smoking, for example), but the main point I'm trying to make is that talking about the rights a woman has to control over her body are not nearly as cut and dried as you think. And if you want to start talking about the rights of the baby, the same above examples (drugs, alcohol, smoking) still apply...
Re:Haven't I seen all this before?
on
Perl 6 Showcase
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· Score: 1
Well, IMHO, there's a simple answer to this question. Lisp is functional. Perl is essentially procedural (well, you can code functionally, etc, but most don't...). Why is this an issue? Well, your average joe started coding in Basic or Pascal or what have you, and these are procedural. So, despite all the advantages Lisp has, it's a bitch to learn to code in (hell, a lot of 3rd year CS students don't get recursion). So, if you can put all those wonderful features Lisp has into a procedural language like Perl, you immediately have a leg up on Lisp, simply from an ease-of-use stand point. Thus you're more likely to indoctrinate new programmers into your language.
Actually, IIRC, an atheist doesn't believe there is any higher being, of any sort. The type of person you are referring to is an agnostic...:)
Mir will stay up... until February...
on
Mir Lives
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· Score: 1
For those of you who *read* the article, this is redundant, but it should probably be mentioned (for those folks who didn't) that the guy who wrote the original article submission was somewhat misleading in that the funding provided will keep Mir up until February, after which it's fate is undetermined. Likely, without additional outside funds, it will be brought down. But, the point is, according to the article, this influx of cash was necessary, irrespective of whether or not it's going to get "scuttled".
I think the point this guy is trying to make, on the economic side of things, is that there's a limit where the ratio of good to bad RAM is as high as it's going to be. IOW, there's always going to be a certain percentage of bad RAM in a given production run. So, why not make this semi-broken RAM viable, by selling it cheap for commodity PCs. This could help reduce prices on cheap PCs and make computing power and the Internet more accessible to those with tight funding (poorer folks, libraries, schools, non-profit orgs).
Okay, no offense, but unless you're joking, that's one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard. What this does is associates Linux with the ability to compensate for bad hardware. It makes Linux look MORE robust, not less... yeesh, some people...
As I understand it, their "Freedom Network" provides total anonymity. IOW, when you transmit traffic through their network, there is no way for the site, or anyone in between, to trace that traffic back to you. So it's much better than PGP or other systems, which simply protect the integrity and privacy of the data. This system also protects the identity of the source. Of course, this is all IIRC... someone correct me if I'm off base, here.:)
No, it says that "each *attacked* sound sample" (note, emphasis added by me:), meaning, after the sound sample was attacked and the watermarking removed. At least, that's the way I read it. So, their tests say, after we've verified that the watermark is gone, we'll check the sound quality. If it's equal to or better than a 64 kbps MP3 (per channel or total, I don't care), we'll consider that a break.
Not to mention that, unfortunately, as the old saying goes, common sense ain't so common, especially in the case of technological issues like this one. The question is, how many people have a full enough understanding of the issues as a whole to really be able to formulate accurate opinions? How many lay-people out there understand the state of internet censorship software and realize how flawed it is? The fact is, referring to the "common-sense conclusions that most people reach" may not be all that accurate, which is why basing laws on popular support isn't always the greatest idea (slavery, anyone?)
But, you see, that's a tricky thing. Do we elect our officials to do what we want them to do, or to do what they think is right? And how do politicians decide? After all, they want to be elected, so doing something that's relatively unpopular, even if it's in line with their morals, may not necessarily be possible. Such is the case with Internet censorship. The average joe is fairly ignorant of the state of censorship software, and so they say "Censor! Censor!" Mr or Ms. Politician says "No, the stuff doesn't work!". BUT, said politician doesn't want to piss off the public. So, they do what they know is wrong anyway, like passing bills to make library censorship mandatory.
The thing is, as I understand it, watermarking is supposed to avoid this very thing. The idea is that the watermark is encoded in "noise" frequencies in the sound data, so that it can't be discerned by the human ear, but, with the proper decoder, provides information. The theory goes that if you pass said sound sample through various filtering software, decode it, re-encode it, etc, the watermarking (ideally) will remain, because it's stored in the audio itself... if you want to retain high-quality audio (in order to pirate it), you can't trash the watermark either... now, whether it will work in practice is another thing.:)
But the point of a good file system is to avoid getting into a state with this kind of inconsistency in the first place. Granted, you want to be able to recover gracefully when there are problems, but the best situation is where, even in a sudden power-down or other strange situation, the filesystem can survive relatively unscathed.
This wouldn't be necessary in a fail-safe environment. The idea is that the last file that was being compiled by the kernel wouldn't quite make it to disk, but the rest of the files would be fine. Just deleting that one last file and then restarting make should begin the compile process from where it left off... ideally.:) Even better, if the makefile was designed so that each object file was built in a separate directory and then moved into place after it was properly compiled, you wouldn't have to worry about deleting the dirty file before restarting the compile. Much nicer than having to start right back from the beginning, as in your example.
ARGH! I don't even live in the US and I'm getting friggin' sick and tired of people saying "I want to vote for that guy, but I don't want to waste my vote!" That's ridiculous! The point of democracy is to vote your conscience, vote for the guy who would do the best job. NOT for the lesser of two evils among the big party candidates! Gawd, nothing will change if people keep thinking this way! This point has been made before, but where would Linux be if people didn't use it, despite the fact that it started off with a tiny user base? This is no different! Granted, you won't change things over night by voting for a 3rd party or independant candidate, but in time, perhaps you will! Frankly, NOT voting your conscience is, IMHO, wasting your vote, since you're throwing it away on someone you don't really want in office anyway!
"Most gun laws are bullshit. The only people we have to worry about with guns are criminals. Criminals do not legally buy and register guns. It would be dumb (from a criminal standpoint) if they did. Hence, gun laws only apply to law-abiding citizens."
Well, then how do you explain the exponentially higher level of gun-related deaths per-capita in the states, relative to other countries, like Canada? Or the difference in the number of violent crimes involving firearms? Granted, there's going to be many factors involved in this, but I think gun regulation is at least partially to blame. For example, there are no regulations, AFAIK, which describe how a firearm should be stored, such as stored in a locked cabinet and not loaded. I suspect just regulating storage would greatly reduce the number of accidental gun-related injuries. And yes yes, I'm aware that enforcement would be an issue, but just having the law in place would be a deterrant, and would provide a method for charging folks if their weapons are involved in an accident.
Actually, the title is really not confusing at all, assuming you follow wireless at all.:) I work with advanced wireless stuff, and these terms (1G, 2G, 3G, etc) are tossed around all the time. They're really marketting terms, BUT... eh.:) IIRC, 1G was based on AMPS, the initial wireless architecture, 2G, which fragmented the wireless market in the states, is what we have now, using CDMA, TDMA, and GSM, and 3G involves CDMA2000 (WCDMA). Basically, 3G involves an evolution from circuit switched technologies to packet-based transport, and a switch of focus from voice to voice and data transport, and a large increase in available bandwidth for wireless devices.
Besides, 3 gigs would be written 3 Gb... or 3 Gbps.:)
More strict than the states, definitely, and getting stricter (mandatory licensing is taking effect here... and good thing, too, IMHO).
Re:Implications to Cryptography
on
Does P = NP?
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· Score: 2
Actually, aside from your math mistake that someone else pointed out:), the ability to get a polynomial time algorithm for an NP-complete problem could be quite problematic for cryptography, even if the terms are in the range you specified. The reason is that a polynomial time algorithm can often be transformed into a parallel algorithm with lower coefficients. So, it could be possible, ideally, to take your O(n^1260) and transform it into an O(n) algorithm running on 1260 processors. Of course, that's the absolutely best case, but the fact is that polynomial time algorithms can be made to benefit from parallel processing, which is quite cheap these days (ie, "We could make a Beowulf cluster of these!";), making less efficient algorithms useful.
Slashdot Mirror
This will always be a problem with packet-radio style technologies like this. Current wireless standards are pushing to a packet-radio style architecture, and they are grappling with this very problem. Currently, all voice traffic on a wireless link is scrambled... however, the trend is NOT to have mandatory layer-2 encryption for packet data. Rather, the general consensus is "if people want security, they better enable encryption themselves, 'cuz we won't". So, yeah, if you don't want your IRC sessions or telnet connections sniffed, either encrypt the sessions themselves, or set up an encrypted tunnel with a fixed host somewhere and tunnel all your traffic through that with the fixed host acting as a gateway/relay. SSH does this quite nicely, or you can go the way of IPSec (or TLS/SSL for TCP stuff).
There's a very good reason... what happens if you change the underlying architecture of the object you're dealing with, but a bazillion lines of code use your get and set methods? Well, easy, just change the methods to do the right thing and voila! all the code that uses your object still works. If this code just accessed your variables directly, you're screwed. Hell, in Java, even if your internal representation changes from floats to doubles (perhaps to increase the accuracy of calculations within the class), if you access the variables directly, ALL the code has to be changed to cast the variables. If you have get and set methods, it's a trivial change. It's called abstraction... you develop an interface which is abstracted away from the implementation. Trust me, it's a very good thing.
Actually, it's been discovered that these games were most definitely NOT licensed from Sega or their respective manufacturer. So, (as I suspected), this thing, if it's real, would most definitely be illegal. At least, the games they ship with it are.
Now now, that's not a fair comparison at all... virtually everyone has more to say than Brittany Spears. Yeesh. ;)
Actually, that number keeps fluctuating. The last figure I'd heard, IIRC, estimated the Universe's age at around 14 to 15 billion years... or maybe I'm just remembering wrong. :) Although I'm almost positive the 6 billion figure you mentioned isn't quite right...
Unfortunately, I have to agree completely... it's +5 insightful now! Yeesh...
Oooh, you're stepping on slippery ground there. :) The fact is, society is *filled* with double standards regarding what we can and can't do to our bodies. No, apparently drug use is wrong. BUT, alcohol abuse is fine and dandy. Hmm... both mind-altering chemicals... possible abuse in both cases... alcohol == good, drugs == bad! Similarly, prostitution is bad... but sleeping around for free is fine! I could go on (smoking, for example), but the main point I'm trying to make is that talking about the rights a woman has to control over her body are not nearly as cut and dried as you think. And if you want to start talking about the rights of the baby, the same above examples (drugs, alcohol, smoking) still apply...
Well, IMHO, there's a simple answer to this question. Lisp is functional. Perl is essentially procedural (well, you can code functionally, etc, but most don't...). Why is this an issue? Well, your average joe started coding in Basic or Pascal or what have you, and these are procedural. So, despite all the advantages Lisp has, it's a bitch to learn to code in (hell, a lot of 3rd year CS students don't get recursion). So, if you can put all those wonderful features Lisp has into a procedural language like Perl, you immediately have a leg up on Lisp, simply from an ease-of-use stand point. Thus you're more likely to indoctrinate new programmers into your language.
Actually, IIRC, an atheist doesn't believe there is any higher being, of any sort. The type of person you are referring to is an agnostic... :)
For those of you who *read* the article, this is redundant, but it should probably be mentioned (for those folks who didn't) that the guy who wrote the original article submission was somewhat misleading in that the funding provided will keep Mir up until February, after which it's fate is undetermined. Likely, without additional outside funds, it will be brought down. But, the point is, according to the article, this influx of cash was necessary, irrespective of whether or not it's going to get "scuttled".
I think the point this guy is trying to make, on the economic side of things, is that there's a limit where the ratio of good to bad RAM is as high as it's going to be. IOW, there's always going to be a certain percentage of bad RAM in a given production run. So, why not make this semi-broken RAM viable, by selling it cheap for commodity PCs. This could help reduce prices on cheap PCs and make computing power and the Internet more accessible to those with tight funding (poorer folks, libraries, schools, non-profit orgs).
As I understand it, their "Freedom Network" provides total anonymity. IOW, when you transmit traffic through their network, there is no way for the site, or anyone in between, to trace that traffic back to you. So it's much better than PGP or other systems, which simply protect the integrity and privacy of the data. This system also protects the identity of the source. Of course, this is all IIRC... someone correct me if I'm off base, here. :)
No, it says that "each *attacked* sound sample" (note, emphasis added by me :), meaning, after the sound sample was attacked and the watermarking removed. At least, that's the way I read it. So, their tests say, after we've verified that the watermark is gone, we'll check the sound quality. If it's equal to or better than a 64 kbps MP3 (per channel or total, I don't care), we'll consider that a break.
Not to mention that, unfortunately, as the old saying goes, common sense ain't so common, especially in the case of technological issues like this one. The question is, how many people have a full enough understanding of the issues as a whole to really be able to formulate accurate opinions? How many lay-people out there understand the state of internet censorship software and realize how flawed it is? The fact is, referring to the "common-sense conclusions that most people reach" may not be all that accurate, which is why basing laws on popular support isn't always the greatest idea (slavery, anyone?)
But, you see, that's a tricky thing. Do we elect our officials to do what we want them to do, or to do what they think is right? And how do politicians decide? After all, they want to be elected, so doing something that's relatively unpopular, even if it's in line with their morals, may not necessarily be possible. Such is the case with Internet censorship. The average joe is fairly ignorant of the state of censorship software, and so they say "Censor! Censor!" Mr or Ms. Politician says "No, the stuff doesn't work!". BUT, said politician doesn't want to piss off the public. So, they do what they know is wrong anyway, like passing bills to make library censorship mandatory.
The thing is, as I understand it, watermarking is supposed to avoid this very thing. The idea is that the watermark is encoded in "noise" frequencies in the sound data, so that it can't be discerned by the human ear, but, with the proper decoder, provides information. The theory goes that if you pass said sound sample through various filtering software, decode it, re-encode it, etc, the watermarking (ideally) will remain, because it's stored in the audio itself... if you want to retain high-quality audio (in order to pirate it), you can't trash the watermark either... now, whether it will work in practice is another thing. :)
But the point of a good file system is to avoid getting into a state with this kind of inconsistency in the first place. Granted, you want to be able to recover gracefully when there are problems, but the best situation is where, even in a sudden power-down or other strange situation, the filesystem can survive relatively unscathed.
This wouldn't be necessary in a fail-safe environment. The idea is that the last file that was being compiled by the kernel wouldn't quite make it to disk, but the rest of the files would be fine. Just deleting that one last file and then restarting make should begin the compile process from where it left off... ideally. :) Even better, if the makefile was designed so that each object file was built in a separate directory and then moved into place after it was properly compiled, you wouldn't have to worry about deleting the dirty file before restarting the compile. Much nicer than having to start right back from the beginning, as in your example.
ARGH! I don't even live in the US and I'm getting friggin' sick and tired of people saying "I want to vote for that guy, but I don't want to waste my vote!" That's ridiculous! The point of democracy is to vote your conscience, vote for the guy who would do the best job. NOT for the lesser of two evils among the big party candidates! Gawd, nothing will change if people keep thinking this way! This point has been made before, but where would Linux be if people didn't use it, despite the fact that it started off with a tiny user base? This is no different! Granted, you won't change things over night by voting for a 3rd party or independant candidate, but in time, perhaps you will! Frankly, NOT voting your conscience is, IMHO, wasting your vote, since you're throwing it away on someone you don't really want in office anyway!
Well, then how do you explain the exponentially higher level of gun-related deaths per-capita in the states, relative to other countries, like Canada? Or the difference in the number of violent crimes involving firearms? Granted, there's going to be many factors involved in this, but I think gun regulation is at least partially to blame. For example, there are no regulations, AFAIK, which describe how a firearm should be stored, such as stored in a locked cabinet and not loaded. I suspect just regulating storage would greatly reduce the number of accidental gun-related injuries. And yes yes, I'm aware that enforcement would be an issue, but just having the law in place would be a deterrant, and would provide a method for charging folks if their weapons are involved in an accident.
Besides, 3 gigs would be written 3 Gb... or 3 Gbps. :)
More strict than the states, definitely, and getting stricter (mandatory licensing is taking effect here... and good thing, too, IMHO).
Actually, aside from your math mistake that someone else pointed out :), the ability to get a polynomial time algorithm for an NP-complete problem could be quite problematic for cryptography, even if the terms are in the range you specified. The reason is that a polynomial time algorithm can often be transformed into a parallel algorithm with lower coefficients. So, it could be possible, ideally, to take your O(n^1260) and transform it into an O(n) algorithm running on 1260 processors. Of course, that's the absolutely best case, but the fact is that polynomial time algorithms can be made to benefit from parallel processing, which is quite cheap these days (ie, "We could make a Beowulf cluster of these!" ;), making less efficient algorithms useful.