Anything is countable in binary or decimal. A count of sectors on a disk or bits on a wire is not naturally binary or decimal. It happens to be the case that for many uses, they're stored in binary, but we store numbers in binary and express them in decimal all the time.
The only real reason to have counts be powers of two is to make some internal math faster and more consistent. For example, because a memory page is 4096 bytes, you can mask the least significant 12 bits in a memory address to separate it into a page number and offset into the page.
That's not something a user ever needs to see. It never needs to be printed on a package.
The problem is that power-of-two prefixes can occur along with SI units, which is very confusing. It's not at all intuitive that 10.00 MB/s = 10.49 bytes/microsecond. (More evil is when 10.00 Mbits/s = 10.00 bits/microsecond, but is 76.3 MB/s.)
Well, a lot of lower-frequency radiation (sub-microwave) should, but they have long (> cm) wavelengths, and generally in imaging you have a hard time resolving anything less than the wavelength of the light you're using.
I suppose the obvious answer is X-rays, since that's what they use, but that's ionizing. For a while people were working on visible-frequency imaging, but I don't really know how that turned out.
Nothing, because a "GiB" is not a thing. 1 GB is 1073741824 Bytes. It always has been, and it always will be.
I think it's clear that everyone who uses "GiB" disagrees with you.
Note that the "G" is not an SI scalar. No one ever said it was, and there's no reason it needs to be.
Right, except that it uses the same symbol as the SI prefix (not scalar, prefix), has approximately the same value, was specifically chosen to have the same symbol and approximately same value intentionally, and so it easily confused with it.
T is Tesla. Or is it tera? K is Kelvin, or is it kilo? Gy is Giga...something? Oh no, it's just grays!
As you mention, there's no ambiguity because you can't have a bare prefix. T is just Tesla, since it's not followed by a unit. T(unit) is a tera-(unit), and (prefix)T is a (prefix)-Tesla. K is easier, since the SI prefix for kilo- is a lowercase k and not an uppercase. Gy is easy because there's no SI unit "y". Sure, it's confusing with "year", which is not an SI unit, but time units are ugly anyway.
...if you look at practical usage, where people and fields use units and variables of their own, or don't always use the proper case, it's far worse.
Yes, idiosyncratic unit systems are hard to understand unless you're familiar with that particular system. Hence standardized unit systems like SI.
And then there's the mass fraction. Yup, kg/kg. The symbol for this unit? 1. That's right. The digit 1. Anytime you divide a mass by a mass you better add a superfluous 1 in there otherwise you're not compliant with the SI quackery!
According to whom? There are tons of dimensionless quantities out there, and as far as I know, nobody ever adds a digit "1" when writing them. It is proper to write out that their units (or dimensions) are 1 in pedagogy, when you want to explicitly write out the unit, since you can't very well leave a blank space. Even that's uncommon, though: it's more typical to say that mass fraction is dimensionless or unitless. When writing out quantities, you certainly don't add anything for the units. For example, "The atomic weight of beryllium is 9.01," or "the Reynolds number Re ~= 4 x 10^7."
The imaging depth for THz is shallow enough that it could only theoretically detect skin cancers. Whether or not that's even reasonable is outside my expertise, though.
Except that the discussion was clearly about DVD playing software. Otherwise the qualifier "which use the disc directly" would be unnecessary. Plus, it's in the context of access to the contents of the DVD from computer software. (That is, after all, what TFQ and essentially every substantive comment is about.)
VLC isn't actually limited by the operating system's region restrictions. It will ignore DVD regions as well on Windows as it does on Linux. It can, however, be limited by the DVD reader firmware.
It's even more impressive if you compare it to other physical quantities. In scientific parlance, 2^128 (a short AES key) is large. Very large. 2^256 is enormous -- substantially larger than the number of atoms in the universe (approximately). Brute-forcing a 256-bit key is impossible without using truly novel techniques.
While the customer loyalty things often track your purchases (not to spy on you or other fell purposes, but for useful statistical data), that's not what they're "for". What they're *for* is manipulating your shopping patterns to create store loyalty, which, while it usually doesn't seem effective consciously, is actually pretty effective.
As far as I know, some RSA systems take this in to account.
In AES, there's no known reason for one AES key to be weaker or stronger than another, as far as I know. The keys also have no restrictions -- every one of the possible 2^256 AES-256 keys are valid. So cryptosystems generate them using secure random number generators. As far as I know, nobody protects against the incredibly remote possibility that a key with a "pattern" is selected, but with a 256-bit key, really the likelihood of that is very, very, very small. So as a result, key brute-forcing has no reason to try one key before another.
But then, there's no reason to attempt AES key brute-forcing, 128 or 256. It's impossible with any current technology.
If your computer crashes, then your disk is ruined. You'd need to supply the backup key. If the backup key is even vaguely easy to access, then that's how they'll crack your disk regardless, because obtaining the copy of the backup key is almost certainly easier than cracking your password.
User or manufacturer. FDE has been broken when it's implemented as on-disk encryption and the manufacturer either implemented poor encryption (while labeling it otherwise) or had a "backup" key.
They cost money to operate, and funding for that sort of thing isn't quite as hidden and mysterious as people think.
I don't necessarily think that the number of covert bases in a given country should be available, but otherwise I don't see why the information shouldn't be public. Certainly the total number of covert foreign bases should be.
When Shor's algorithm has factorized a number, using 10500 or so times the computational resources that can be seen to be present, where was the number factorized? There are only about 1080 atoms in the visible universe, an utterly minuscule number compared with 10500. So if the visible universe were the extent of physical reality, physical reality would not even remotely contain the resources required to factorize such a large number. Who did factorize it, then? How, and where, was the computation performed?
His general view is that Shor's algorithm is performing the classical factorization computation but in parallel using quantum-mechanical superposition. (His argument from this is that the superposed states must map to alternative universes, but that's not really necessary to go in to.) This is a common but completely incorrect interpretation of Shor's algorithm. As far as I know, the only way to come to this incorrect understanding is to not really be familiar with how Shor's algorithm works, but just what its end result is. Shor's algorithm doesn't even really perform factorization, per se. It happens to be able to perform factorization in modular arithmetic space (which is the kind that is cryptographically relevant) because it turns out that you can turn modular factorization into a period-finding problem. Shor's algorithm is really just an efficient quantum-mechanical period-finding algorithm, kind of like a quantum-mechanical Fourier transform. None of what it does is mysteriously parallel. (I think Mermin's quantum computation book is a good source for understanding how Shor's algorithm operates. He also addresses, at least in some of the talks I've been to on the subject, common misinterpretations of quantum computation.)
No, there are multiple ways that there is "redness".
The most biologically direct is that it's an EM response spectrum that one of the cone types in our eyes is sensitive to. You can excite the red cones and perceive redness without EM radiation from the "red" frequency range. (To be more pedantic, really anything our brains perceive as red counts, even if the red cones were not directly excited.)
Then, there is a portion of the EM spectrum that could be called "red".
Then, there are molecules that filter or reflect light such that, with the appropriate lighting, causes it to appear red. "Redness" isn't really an internal property of these molecules, though, since whether they appear red depends (in constructed cases, strongly depends) on the input lighting.
No, I mean his comments about quantum computation indicate that he really doesn't know what he's talking about compared to people who actually study quantum computation. He makes statements that are flat-out false.
Quantum computation isn't really that hard to understand. Quantum mechanics is somewhat unintuitive, but within the context of quantum mechanics, quantum computation is tricky, mathematically, but not difficult to understand.
David Deutsch is famous for saying that MWI is the only interpretation that gives any kind of sense to quantum computation. And, you know, I'm inclined to agree with him.
His understanding of quantum computation is also astoundingly flawed.
Those are things that make it entertaining, not interesting. Although I probably should have clarified that people seemed to think the ideas in The Matrix were interesting, when in fact they were simple, rehashed philosophy.
Slashdot Mirror
Anything is countable in binary or decimal. A count of sectors on a disk or bits on a wire is not naturally binary or decimal. It happens to be the case that for many uses, they're stored in binary, but we store numbers in binary and express them in decimal all the time.
The only real reason to have counts be powers of two is to make some internal math faster and more consistent. For example, because a memory page is 4096 bytes, you can mask the least significant 12 bits in a memory address to separate it into a page number and offset into the page.
That's not something a user ever needs to see. It never needs to be printed on a package.
The problem is that power-of-two prefixes can occur along with SI units, which is very confusing. It's not at all intuitive that 10.00 MB/s = 10.49 bytes/microsecond. (More evil is when 10.00 Mbits/s = 10.00 bits/microsecond, but is 76.3 MB/s.)
Well, a lot of lower-frequency radiation (sub-microwave) should, but they have long (> cm) wavelengths, and generally in imaging you have a hard time resolving anything less than the wavelength of the light you're using.
I suppose the obvious answer is X-rays, since that's what they use, but that's ionizing. For a while people were working on visible-frequency imaging, but I don't really know how that turned out.
That's a bunch of crap.
Nothing, because a "GiB" is not a thing. 1 GB is 1073741824 Bytes. It always has been, and it always will be.
I think it's clear that everyone who uses "GiB" disagrees with you.
Note that the "G" is not an SI scalar. No one ever said it was, and there's no reason it needs to be.
Right, except that it uses the same symbol as the SI prefix (not scalar, prefix), has approximately the same value, was specifically chosen to have the same symbol and approximately same value intentionally, and so it easily confused with it.
T is Tesla. Or is it tera? K is Kelvin, or is it kilo? Gy is Giga...something? Oh no, it's just grays!
As you mention, there's no ambiguity because you can't have a bare prefix. T is just Tesla, since it's not followed by a unit. T(unit) is a tera-(unit), and (prefix)T is a (prefix)-Tesla. K is easier, since the SI prefix for kilo- is a lowercase k and not an uppercase. Gy is easy because there's no SI unit "y". Sure, it's confusing with "year", which is not an SI unit, but time units are ugly anyway.
...if you look at practical usage, where people and fields use units and variables of their own, or don't always use the proper case, it's far worse.
Yes, idiosyncratic unit systems are hard to understand unless you're familiar with that particular system. Hence standardized unit systems like SI.
And then there's the mass fraction. Yup, kg/kg. The symbol for this unit? 1. That's right. The digit 1. Anytime you divide a mass by a mass you better add a superfluous 1 in there otherwise you're not compliant with the SI quackery!
According to whom? There are tons of dimensionless quantities out there, and as far as I know, nobody ever adds a digit "1" when writing them. It is proper to write out that their units (or dimensions) are 1 in pedagogy, when you want to explicitly write out the unit, since you can't very well leave a blank space. Even that's uncommon, though: it's more typical to say that mass fraction is dimensionless or unitless. When writing out quantities, you certainly don't add anything for the units. For example, "The atomic weight of beryllium is 9.01," or "the Reynolds number Re ~= 4 x 10^7."
The imaging depth for THz is shallow enough that it could only theoretically detect skin cancers. Whether or not that's even reasonable is outside my expertise, though.
This is still below the ionization threshold, and so will not cause cancer at any appreciable rate.
Having tried to "fix" the Windows systems of many people who wouldn't know their ass from a USB port, I can assure you this is not the case.
Except that the discussion was clearly about DVD playing software. Otherwise the qualifier "which use the disc directly" would be unnecessary. Plus, it's in the context of access to the contents of the DVD from computer software. (That is, after all, what TFQ and essentially every substantive comment is about.)
VLC isn't actually limited by the operating system's region restrictions. It will ignore DVD regions as well on Windows as it does on Linux. It can, however, be limited by the DVD reader firmware.
VLC and Mplayer are uncommon?
They get representatives in proportion to their population.
They get fewer electoral votes per capita than other states.
It's even more impressive if you compare it to other physical quantities. In scientific parlance, 2^128 (a short AES key) is large. Very large. 2^256 is enormous -- substantially larger than the number of atoms in the universe (approximately). Brute-forcing a 256-bit key is impossible without using truly novel techniques.
Who would bother recycling silicon? Difficult-to-make silicon-based molecules, maybe. But silicon is insanely common.
That's completely true, but keep in mind, they were going to do that anyway, one way or another.
While the customer loyalty things often track your purchases (not to spy on you or other fell purposes, but for useful statistical data), that's not what they're "for". What they're *for* is manipulating your shopping patterns to create store loyalty, which, while it usually doesn't seem effective consciously, is actually pretty effective.
As far as I know, some RSA systems take this in to account.
In AES, there's no known reason for one AES key to be weaker or stronger than another, as far as I know. The keys also have no restrictions -- every one of the possible 2^256 AES-256 keys are valid. So cryptosystems generate them using secure random number generators. As far as I know, nobody protects against the incredibly remote possibility that a key with a "pattern" is selected, but with a 256-bit key, really the likelihood of that is very, very, very small. So as a result, key brute-forcing has no reason to try one key before another.
But then, there's no reason to attempt AES key brute-forcing, 128 or 256. It's impossible with any current technology.
Could've been worse. Could've been Climategate II: Electric Boogaloo.
We don't have wealth taxes in the U.S., with the exception of the real estate (property) tax.
If your computer crashes, then your disk is ruined. You'd need to supply the backup key. If the backup key is even vaguely easy to access, then that's how they'll crack your disk regardless, because obtaining the copy of the backup key is almost certainly easier than cracking your password.
User or manufacturer. FDE has been broken when it's implemented as on-disk encryption and the manufacturer either implemented poor encryption (while labeling it otherwise) or had a "backup" key.
He's just conflating "concrete" and "real". I think that's a stupid position, but then we'd just be arguing philosophy that was covered by the Greeks.
They cost money to operate, and funding for that sort of thing isn't quite as hidden and mysterious as people think.
I don't necessarily think that the number of covert bases in a given country should be available, but otherwise I don't see why the information shouldn't be public. Certainly the total number of covert foreign bases should be.
Shor's algorithm is probably the best example.
In The Fabric of Reality, he says:
When Shor's algorithm has factorized a number, using 10500 or so times the computational resources that can be seen to be present, where was the number factorized? There are only about 1080 atoms in the visible universe, an utterly minuscule number compared with 10500. So if the visible universe were the extent of physical reality, physical reality would not even remotely contain the resources required to factorize such a large number. Who did factorize it, then? How, and where, was the computation performed?
His general view is that Shor's algorithm is performing the classical factorization computation but in parallel using quantum-mechanical superposition. (His argument from this is that the superposed states must map to alternative universes, but that's not really necessary to go in to.) This is a common but completely incorrect interpretation of Shor's algorithm. As far as I know, the only way to come to this incorrect understanding is to not really be familiar with how Shor's algorithm works, but just what its end result is. Shor's algorithm doesn't even really perform factorization, per se. It happens to be able to perform factorization in modular arithmetic space (which is the kind that is cryptographically relevant) because it turns out that you can turn modular factorization into a period-finding problem. Shor's algorithm is really just an efficient quantum-mechanical period-finding algorithm, kind of like a quantum-mechanical Fourier transform. None of what it does is mysteriously parallel. (I think Mermin's quantum computation book is a good source for understanding how Shor's algorithm operates. He also addresses, at least in some of the talks I've been to on the subject, common misinterpretations of quantum computation.)
No, there are multiple ways that there is "redness".
The most biologically direct is that it's an EM response spectrum that one of the cone types in our eyes is sensitive to. You can excite the red cones and perceive redness without EM radiation from the "red" frequency range. (To be more pedantic, really anything our brains perceive as red counts, even if the red cones were not directly excited.)
Then, there is a portion of the EM spectrum that could be called "red".
Then, there are molecules that filter or reflect light such that, with the appropriate lighting, causes it to appear red. "Redness" isn't really an internal property of these molecules, though, since whether they appear red depends (in constructed cases, strongly depends) on the input lighting.
No, I mean his comments about quantum computation indicate that he really doesn't know what he's talking about compared to people who actually study quantum computation. He makes statements that are flat-out false.
Quantum computation isn't really that hard to understand. Quantum mechanics is somewhat unintuitive, but within the context of quantum mechanics, quantum computation is tricky, mathematically, but not difficult to understand.
David Deutsch is famous for saying that MWI is the only interpretation that gives any kind of sense to quantum computation. And, you know, I'm inclined to agree with him.
His understanding of quantum computation is also astoundingly flawed.
Those are things that make it entertaining, not interesting. Although I probably should have clarified that people seemed to think the ideas in The Matrix were interesting, when in fact they were simple, rehashed philosophy.