It would be amusing to take a small, highly illegal image file, strip the 4cc header off the front, and append binary bits to make it a large prime. Use that as the public portion of a public/private keypair, and get a large company or project to widely distribute it as an important public key. Wait a year or two, then expose the key to point out the absurdity of the laws involved.
Of course it wouldn't actually change anything, laws and lawmakers being what they are. It would, however, be funny. Until your mom went to jail for having a legit copy of the key in her browser cache.
Thank you. This was my reading of the article as well - basically, yet another school teacher complaining about how he's doing it wrong, without understanding why he's doing what he's doing.
Gates is an extremely smart guy. He's using the leveraged model so as to do the most good with his resources. He's pulling in previously "evil" parties and getting them to -help-, thereby making them less evil. He's putting resources where they have the most effect, which is different from putting resources where it makes you feel good.
Yes, it does limit the number of channels, because the channels are not perfectly orthogonal due to the presence of noise. No single channel coding scheme can bypass Shannon; neither can any combination of elegant channel coding algorithms. Shannon is not a physical 'limit' to be worked around; it is a theoretical limit, and it does not care one whit about the properties of the channel or the modulations used.
If you transmit bits in the presence of noise, Shannon applies.
It most definitely does apply here, even if it happens to not be the current limit. The number of bits you can get through the channel without error is dependent on the S/N ratio, and that's all there is to it. DVB gets so few bits/hz because it's got to work at amazingly bad S/N ratios over huge distances; this is allowed to use 90+ bits/hz because the line is short and because the S/N ratio is very high. Whether or not this is scalable to distances of more than a foot or usable in the real world is a valid question.
WIMPs are hypothetical, and neither in nor out. Mirror matter is hypothetical, and neither in nor out. String theory is untestable, and is a hypothesis, not a theory.
As for your theory, it's not even a theory - it's an idea, and probably hasn't even reached the hypothesis stage, much less the theory stage. A theory has to be testably disprovable: for a hypothesis to become a theory, you have to define observations or tests capable of disproving it. (Note that a theory has to be disprovable, not provable. This is intentional.)
As for your idea, you're looking at the universe as a big, macro-sized 'thing' that is capable of being under construction and subject to change. You consider the universe capable of "getting weirder" as though "weird" were some bulk property, like water being "wet".
The fact of the matter is that the universe is composed of many, many, many small particles, that all obey very simple rules, and that pretty much everything we've ever observed is explained by those very simple rules. There is no global 'weird' which has been increasing - the last 13 billion years are perfectly well explained by these same simple rules.
There are places where we know those rules work differently than we expect - but that in no way invalidates the places where we do know how they work.
While I can understand David's point, I think he misses a critical aspect of the conversation: there is no fundamental 'right' that guarantees that a musician should be able to make money off of his or her work, just as there is no 'right' that guarantees that buggy whip manufacturers should always be paid for whips.
The simple fact of the matter is that we live in a post-scarcity economy when it comes to music. You cannot charge much money (if any) in a post-scarcity economy - it doesn't matter what your product is. Music is in no way different from buggy whips: the supply/demand ratio is nearly infinite. (Demand for buggy whips is near zero, supply of music is nearly unlimited.) With an extremely high supply/demand ratio, the cost of the supply nears the production cost - and there are plenty of musicians out there releasing music at zero cost.
The constitution doesn't say "musicians must always be compensated for their work", just like the constitution doesn't say "programmers must be compensated for their work" or "hairdressers must be compensated for their work". The market has changed out from under David, and the sooner he realizes that, the sooner he'll be able to make the transition to a new regime.
Until then, he's just another complainer on his way to obsolescence.
I'd upvote this if I could. This is exactly correct, and part of the reason the system as described is infeasible - for any reasonable length of wire, multiple passive taps can extract the direction of propagation for changes in noise level.
It should be noted that the article explicitly addresses this issue, however they only do so by declaring that the frequency response of the noise sources be substantially lower than the wire transit times - so if you're talking about a a wire with 10 us of delay (2 km with ~2e8 m/s electrical wire speed), your data rate will be necessarily less than 100 kbps. In fact, it will be substantially lower - half of the transferred bits must be discarded off the top as insecure (LL or HH combinations), and the noise spectra must be sufficiently below the wire transit time to fall below the shannon limit for real passive detectors.
While an interesting idea, I would personally rank it as less useful than quantum cryptography, even given QC's obvious problems - if only because QC seems more implementable over long distances and has no data rate constraint due to distance. The performance of this method is necessarily sub-light-speed limited to prevent eavesdropping, guaranteeing that no more than 0.5 bits can be sent per light speed propagation delay of the wire.
[For the record, just because there is scientific fraud and error, does not mean that science and research should be ignored. It means we should give it lower weight as evidence, but the simple fact of the matter is that it is still the best evidence we have. You could have simply provided your last link without adding the snide implication that all science sucks; the other two links contributed nothing to the conversation.]
Thank you for the last of the three links. That contains some interesting papers and is good evidence for your statement, even given the vested interest of the publisher.
I agree, and I'm all about unnatural. I disdain 'organic' anything, and will buy non-organic even against a price difference (which never happens.) I take a handful of supplements; every one has been manufactured in a laboratory. Pretty much the only 'organic' things I look for are deep sea fish, because that's the most effective way to get DHA and EPA. (Most farm raised fish has virtually none.)
Personally, most 'organic' stuff creeps me out, especially when it comes to supplements. God only knows what's in that bottle of algae or your 'megavitamin natural supplement'. When I'm taking five grams of piracetam or a gram of ascorbic acid that was constructed in a lab, I know exactly what's in it - the assay sheet tells me. If I take the ginko root tonic provided by the local shaman, I could be ingesting liquified pig brains for all I know.
This is already a reality with naturally-fed animals. For example, beef can provide us with all the healthy fats and oils we need when the cow is grass-fed and range raised. When chickens are raised on a diet or worms that grow in fresh cow dung, the consistency, flavor, and overall health of their eggs is substantially higher than what is generally available in the supermarket.
Please post research papers backing this statement. This is a rather exceptional claim that requires more than your assertion as evidence. Simply because something is 'naturally-fed' doesn't mean it's healthy, and beef is really big on being unhealthy by default.
I can't blame the computer for not doing well on these; a lot of crossword puzzles are a puzzle of "guess what the creator was thinking", and not a puzzle of words and language. Quite frankly, I'm not interested in guessing what someone else happens to be thinking when they write down a clue like "blue, red, and big"; I find that fundamentally uninteresting and of no long term value.
I have the same problem with many Mensa puzzles. A lot of them I can do, but puzzles that require deep and specific information from an extremely narrow field are really not useful tests of intelligence. Just as the "SNOISSIWNOOW" question above requires deep and specific information about an extremely narrow field (the narrow field being "how certain subsets of human minds think"), so to do questions such as "guess the next number in the sequence: 3, 5, 205782654, 6, 308" (which also requires knowledge about how certain human minds think). Neither answer is derivable, and both must be guessed via trial and error from models that few people will have.
The most common response to this viewpoint has been along the lines of "ha ha, you just can't think outside the box". In reality, I'm actually pretty damned good at thinking outside the box. What I'm not particularly good at is thinking inside someone else's box, because if I actually need to know, I can simply talk to them and ask them. It's far more efficient.
Honestly, if the treatment works, and we can commercialize it at ANY (finite) cost, it will bring about a major new medical treatment industry. In 1980, there was no amount of money that could sequence the human genome in a year, and in 1995 there was no amount of money that could buy the technology in a modern cell phone. If a broad spectrum, effective cancer treatment can be shown to exist, the price -will- fall.
As another poster said, this is about virtual pair production, which we see all the time. But there's an interesting side effect of pair production which I figured I'd toss out there: it makes vacuum an imperfect insulator. If you apply enough voltage across a chunk of vacuum, current -will- start to flow. In other words, vacuum has a breakdown voltage as a result of virtual pair production.
This breakdown point is at roughly the voltage required to separate virtual particle pairs that come into existence. Suppose a pair of the two lightest species, an electron and a positron, pops into existence for a moment. Before they can mutually annihilate, a huge external electric field pulls them apart and pays the energy debt to create them. The resulting electron flow to the positive terminal and the positron flow to the negative terminal are an electrical current, reducing the potential difference of the field.
This same effect of separating virtual particles via a huge electric field is what the experiment is proposing to measure. Normal matter breaks down long before the required field strength is met, so the only way to create an electric field that strong is via photons, which in a laser pulse all constructively combine to give small regions of space huge electric and magnetic fields.
Something that has always confused me about crypto implementations is why chained block modes and ciphers with an actual 'inverse' operation (like AES) are used. I understand the technical arguments and I know that in some cases, chained modes really are the optimal solution; but they aren't "so optimal" that they're far and away the best choice. Usually they're only optimal in some minor technical fashion.
However, most of the attacks I've seen against ciphers involve these modes. For some reason, the chained construction is simply harder to implement and design around. The few systems I've designed used counter mode, because it's just easier to think about and design against, and can use a cipher without an inverse. It does have more overhead, but if you're encrypting for provable security you'd think that some overhead would be expected.
However, as I understand it, counter mode wouldn't really have helped here unless some kind of replay prevention and MIC checks were also used, which I believe is infeasible due to the XML design space. The spec itself simply leaks the data due to data formatting stupidity and server responses; no amount of crypto will help if your server basically tells you the data bits.
I think you need to seriously re-evaluate your decision making. Let me help you lay it out in bare form:
One the one side, we have a 99+% probability of complete dysfunction and death.
On the other side, we have "some unknown side effect that could prove to be even worse and/or may not work".
Sit down and really think for a minute about your "unknown side effect" scenarios. What are the odds of it working, 1%, 5%, 10%, 50%? What are the odds of catastrophic failure, 1%, 5%, 10%, 50%? What are the odds of failure that isn't catastrophic? Why did you pick the numbers that you picked? What evidence do you have for those numbers?
Quite frankly, if it doesn't work or if it fails catastrophically, she's dead anyway, so the losses are roughly equivalent. The odds of success however, are vastly different - because doing nothing is guaranteed to fail, while trying the treatment is not. Taking a larger view, there is also a general research value in having her try treatment, because that additional data may help save the lives of others.
I've been doing this for a long time, and have settled on the concept of a long term data archive for this purpose. It contains approximately half a terabyte of data that I consider to be 'important', and a few hundred megabytes of data that I consider 'very important'.
The first thing to be aware of is that a data archive is useless if it's not readily available 24/7. You don't back up data by putting it on tapes and throwing it in a box in the closet. Putting tapes in a closet is useful, but it should be considered a 'catastrophic recovery option to be used as a last resort'.
The main machine that houses the 'live' archive contains two large drives, each with a full copy of an operating system and the data archive. The currently booting disk is considered current; its archive is live. The second drive is an older copy of the archive, and is generally only a few days out of date. Rsync via atq automatically mirrors the archive and operating system to the second drive every few nights.
The backup machine has a similar setup, but it has older versions of the data archive. I update each archive on the backup machine every two months, staggered so there's always a copy of the archive about a month old, and always a copy about two months old. Having older versions of the archive available helps in the rare situations where you blow away something you shouldn't have. The backup machine should be off site if you can manage it.
For the 'very important' data, I keep copies on a handful of external machines and maintain them either via revision control or rsync. In the 'catastrophic backup' regime, I keep decommissioned disks containing old copies of the archive off site, usually in the hands of reliable friends and family.
It should be noted that I've found it important to run a nightly MD5 or SHA-256 checksum of every file in the archive, even if you don't do anything with it. (I actually compare against previous values, but that's not the important part.) This seems to greatly extend the lifetime of disks and reduce disk failure; I don't have a good explanation for this, but I suspect that reading from the bulk of the disk periodically allows the drive to identify and rewrite refresh questionable sectors before the data is unreadable. The disk need not go bad or have a catastrophic failure for data to become unreadable; mechanical aging and magnetic decoherence can simply put a sector above the ability of the FEC in the drive to recover, if left too long.
I don't use revision control on the bulk of the data in the archive. 95+% of the archive is considered long term read-only storage. Your usage may be different, and you may choose to use revision control on the entire archive. That doesn't really change the nature of the backup process though.
In defense of the MUD developers, I understand extremely well the strengths of LPC, and I want it "way the fuck far away" from my builders. IMHO part of what makes a game world good is its consistency; game physics should work roughly the same everywhere, and while there should be surprises and special cases, they shouldn't be game breaking.
A lot of it boils down to complexity. For a well built, globally consistent world, you need a fairly small ruleset that limits what can be built. Not because it's a hard requirement, but because human builders and editors simply can't keep track of the interactions well enough to self limit, no matter how good they are. The down side of a small ruleset is limited world complexity. In the end, it's a tradeoff between consistency and complexity, and getting the balance right is hard.
We've mostly kept it under control by allowing a handful of special hooks that can be programmed using a fairly small set of features. Even so, occasionally something unexpectedly nasty sneaks through, and we have to make modifications to fix it up.
I hate to be a shill, but if you're actually in the market for a MUD you might want to take a look at Alter Aeon. In my opinion, we can easily hold our own against DR.
I'm in the game industry, and I know exactly where they keep getting their money: investors looking to make a quick buck. Gaming is becoming the new rage, and everyone is trying to get a piece of the pie. Anyone with minimum competence and a business plan can get a couple million dollars these days. I've personally tracked a couple of these games (Earth Eternal springs to mind) from creation to destruction to see what was going on.
It's really just another bubble. It'll seethe and froth for a while, but eventually it'll settle down into a stable market.
WoW is one of the few games that I persistently lost players to. WoW really does have nearly everything - an actual social environment, huge game world to explore, hooks to keep you leveling, stuff to do, stuff to learn. WoW isn't the juggernaut because it's the largest; WoW is the juggernaut because they built a damned good game that appeals to a lot of people.
I understand completely what Bartle is saying, and I don't just see it in facebook games. A lot of MMOs seem to be going the same direction - emphasize item collection and checkpoints over actually having a fun game. The down side of this is that the MMO and social game space are incredibly full of games like this and it's hard for truly original, independent games to get noticed. The up side is that I've been watching these games drop like flies for the last four years. The psychological tricks and 'next upgrade' hooks that pull in people don't appear to work forever. People gradually build up immunity, and I suspect that immunity builds much faster than is currently believed.
I've been running the MUD Alter Aeon for sixteen years now, and I've seen a lot of people come and go through the game. I have had a lot of players leave and tell me they're going to go play a different game; a couple months later, they're almost always back. The reasons vary; sometimes it's because they finished all the available content, sometimes because the game is just bad, sometimes because it costs too much, or is boring, or there's noone to talk to.
I know a big part of our success is because the social aspect of AA is an actual social aspect, with friends and community instead of my mom harvesting eggs for me. People talk, play, and occasionally even fall in love on AA; I have not yet heard of that happening in farmville. That said, the social aspect only goes so far. Until recently, I felt that AA's actual story content was middle of the road at best; but having actually explored and looked at the garbage other games are putting forward, I now understand why we have a loyal, growing player base while other games die. Not only do we have a lot of awesome content, but our game mechanics and customization allow people to build up truly unusual characters that you can't easily construct on other games. There's also a lot of "emergent" gameplay, where learning the various complexities of the game can really pay off in some situations.
I think to really have an outstanding MMO, you have to have everything - the psychological hooks to give people something to progress toward; actual gameplay that's fun and interesting; game and world interactions that are complex and are fun to learn; and a strong social element for people to really communicate and work together. New MMOs without an established player base that think they can get away with only one are going to be sorely disappointed.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be amusing to take a small, highly illegal image file, strip the 4cc header off the front, and append binary bits to make it a large prime. Use that as the public portion of a public/private keypair, and get a large company or project to widely distribute it as an important public key. Wait a year or two, then expose the key to point out the absurdity of the laws involved.
Of course it wouldn't actually change anything, laws and lawmakers being what they are. It would, however, be funny. Until your mom went to jail for having a legit copy of the key in her browser cache.
Thank you. This was my reading of the article as well - basically, yet another school teacher complaining about how he's doing it wrong, without understanding why he's doing what he's doing.
Gates is an extremely smart guy. He's using the leveraged model so as to do the most good with his resources. He's pulling in previously "evil" parties and getting them to -help-, thereby making them less evil. He's putting resources where they have the most effect, which is different from putting resources where it makes you feel good.
-dentin
You are wrong. IBM was extremely close to being busted up, sold off, and closed in the early 90's. Lou Gerstner barely managed to save the company.
I know. I was working there.
-dentin
Yes, it does limit the number of channels, because the channels are not perfectly orthogonal due to the presence of noise. No single channel coding scheme can bypass Shannon; neither can any combination of elegant channel coding algorithms. Shannon is not a physical 'limit' to be worked around; it is a theoretical limit, and it does not care one whit about the properties of the channel or the modulations used.
If you transmit bits in the presence of noise, Shannon applies.
-dentin
It most definitely does apply here, even if it happens to not be the current limit. The number of bits you can get through the channel without error is dependent on the S/N ratio, and that's all there is to it. DVB gets so few bits/hz because it's got to work at amazingly bad S/N ratios over huge distances; this is allowed to use 90+ bits/hz because the line is short and because the S/N ratio is very high. Whether or not this is scalable to distances of more than a foot or usable in the real world is a valid question.
-dentin
Your score card is hosed:
WIMPs are hypothetical, and neither in nor out.
Mirror matter is hypothetical, and neither in nor out.
String theory is untestable, and is a hypothesis, not a theory.
As for your theory, it's not even a theory - it's an idea, and probably hasn't even reached the hypothesis stage, much less the theory stage. A theory has to be testably disprovable: for a hypothesis to become a theory, you have to define observations or tests capable of disproving it. (Note that a theory has to be disprovable, not provable. This is intentional.)
As for your idea, you're looking at the universe as a big, macro-sized 'thing' that is capable of being under construction and subject to change. You consider the universe capable of "getting weirder" as though "weird" were some bulk property, like water being "wet".
The fact of the matter is that the universe is composed of many, many, many small particles, that all obey very simple rules, and that pretty much everything we've ever observed is explained by those very simple rules. There is no global 'weird' which has been increasing - the last 13 billion years are perfectly well explained by these same simple rules.
There are places where we know those rules work differently than we expect - but that in no way invalidates the places where we do know how they work.
-dentin
While I can understand David's point, I think he misses a critical aspect of the conversation: there is no fundamental 'right' that guarantees that a musician should be able to make money off of his or her work, just as there is no 'right' that guarantees that buggy whip manufacturers should always be paid for whips.
The simple fact of the matter is that we live in a post-scarcity economy when it comes to music. You cannot charge much money (if any) in a post-scarcity economy - it doesn't matter what your product is. Music is in no way different from buggy whips: the supply/demand ratio is nearly infinite. (Demand for buggy whips is near zero, supply of music is nearly unlimited.) With an extremely high supply/demand ratio, the cost of the supply nears the production cost - and there are plenty of musicians out there releasing music at zero cost.
The constitution doesn't say "musicians must always be compensated for their work", just like the constitution doesn't say "programmers must be compensated for their work" or "hairdressers must be compensated for their work". The market has changed out from under David, and the sooner he realizes that, the sooner he'll be able to make the transition to a new regime.
Until then, he's just another complainer on his way to obsolescence.
-dentin
I'd upvote this if I could. This is exactly correct, and part of the reason the system as described is infeasible - for any reasonable length of wire, multiple passive taps can extract the direction of propagation for changes in noise level.
It should be noted that the article explicitly addresses this issue, however they only do so by declaring that the frequency response of the noise sources be substantially lower than the wire transit times - so if you're talking about a a wire with 10 us of delay (2 km with ~2e8 m/s electrical wire speed), your data rate will be necessarily less than 100 kbps. In fact, it will be substantially lower - half of the transferred bits must be discarded off the top as insecure (LL or HH combinations), and the noise spectra must be sufficiently below the wire transit time to fall below the shannon limit for real passive detectors.
While an interesting idea, I would personally rank it as less useful than quantum cryptography, even given QC's obvious problems - if only because QC seems more implementable over long distances and has no data rate constraint due to distance. The performance of this method is necessarily sub-light-speed limited to prevent eavesdropping, guaranteeing that no more than 0.5 bits can be sent per light speed propagation delay of the wire.
-dentin
[For the record, just because there is scientific fraud and error, does not mean that science and research should be ignored. It means we should give it lower weight as evidence, but the simple fact of the matter is that it is still the best evidence we have. You could have simply provided your last link without adding the snide implication that all science sucks; the other two links contributed nothing to the conversation.]
Thank you for the last of the three links. That contains some interesting papers and is good evidence for your statement, even given the vested interest of the publisher.
I agree, and I'm all about unnatural. I disdain 'organic' anything, and will buy non-organic even against a price difference (which never happens.) I take a handful of supplements; every one has been manufactured in a laboratory. Pretty much the only 'organic' things I look for are deep sea fish, because that's the most effective way to get DHA and EPA. (Most farm raised fish has virtually none.)
Personally, most 'organic' stuff creeps me out, especially when it comes to supplements. God only knows what's in that bottle of algae or your 'megavitamin natural supplement'. When I'm taking five grams of piracetam or a gram of ascorbic acid that was constructed in a lab, I know exactly what's in it - the assay sheet tells me. If I take the ginko root tonic provided by the local shaman, I could be ingesting liquified pig brains for all I know.
This is already a reality with naturally-fed animals. For example, beef can provide us with all the healthy fats and oils we need when the cow is grass-fed and range raised. When chickens are raised on a diet or worms that grow in fresh cow dung, the consistency, flavor, and overall health of their eggs is substantially higher than what is generally available in the supermarket.
Please post research papers backing this statement. This is a rather exceptional claim that requires more than your assertion as evidence. Simply because something is 'naturally-fed' doesn't mean it's healthy, and beef is really big on being unhealthy by default.
I can't blame the computer for not doing well on these; a lot of crossword puzzles are a puzzle of "guess what the creator was thinking", and not a puzzle of words and language. Quite frankly, I'm not interested in guessing what someone else happens to be thinking when they write down a clue like "blue, red, and big"; I find that fundamentally uninteresting and of no long term value.
I have the same problem with many Mensa puzzles. A lot of them I can do, but puzzles that require deep and specific information from an extremely narrow field are really not useful tests of intelligence. Just as the "SNOISSIWNOOW" question above requires deep and specific information about an extremely narrow field (the narrow field being "how certain subsets of human minds think"), so to do questions such as "guess the next number in the sequence: 3, 5, 205782654, 6, 308" (which also requires knowledge about how certain human minds think). Neither answer is derivable, and both must be guessed via trial and error from models that few people will have.
The most common response to this viewpoint has been along the lines of "ha ha, you just can't think outside the box". In reality, I'm actually pretty damned good at thinking outside the box. What I'm not particularly good at is thinking inside someone else's box, because if I actually need to know, I can simply talk to them and ask them. It's far more efficient.
Honestly, if the treatment works, and we can commercialize it at ANY (finite) cost, it will bring about a major new medical treatment industry. In 1980, there was no amount of money that could sequence the human genome in a year, and in 1995 there was no amount of money that could buy the technology in a modern cell phone. If a broad spectrum, effective cancer treatment can be shown to exist, the price -will- fall.
Larry Niven - Protector
Fred Hoyle - The Black Cloud
As another poster said, this is about virtual pair production, which we see all the time. But there's an interesting side effect of pair production which I figured I'd toss out there: it makes vacuum an imperfect insulator. If you apply enough voltage across a chunk of vacuum, current -will- start to flow. In other words, vacuum has a breakdown voltage as a result of virtual pair production.
This breakdown point is at roughly the voltage required to separate virtual particle pairs that come into existence. Suppose a pair of the two lightest species, an electron and a positron, pops into existence for a moment. Before they can mutually annihilate, a huge external electric field pulls them apart and pays the energy debt to create them. The resulting electron flow to the positive terminal and the positron flow to the negative terminal are an electrical current, reducing the potential difference of the field.
This same effect of separating virtual particles via a huge electric field is what the experiment is proposing to measure. Normal matter breaks down long before the required field strength is met, so the only way to create an electric field that strong is via photons, which in a laser pulse all constructively combine to give small regions of space huge electric and magnetic fields.
Just FYI.
Understood. This is one of those 'minor technical' reasons I was talking about.
Something that has always confused me about crypto implementations is why chained block modes and ciphers with an actual 'inverse' operation (like AES) are used. I understand the technical arguments and I know that in some cases, chained modes really are the optimal solution; but they aren't "so optimal" that they're far and away the best choice. Usually they're only optimal in some minor technical fashion.
However, most of the attacks I've seen against ciphers involve these modes. For some reason, the chained construction is simply harder to implement and design around. The few systems I've designed used counter mode, because it's just easier to think about and design against, and can use a cipher without an inverse. It does have more overhead, but if you're encrypting for provable security you'd think that some overhead would be expected.
However, as I understand it, counter mode wouldn't really have helped here unless some kind of replay prevention and MIC checks were also used, which I believe is infeasible due to the XML design space. The spec itself simply leaks the data due to data formatting stupidity and server responses; no amount of crypto will help if your server basically tells you the data bits.
I think you need to seriously re-evaluate your decision making. Let me help you lay it out in bare form:
One the one side, we have a 99+% probability of complete dysfunction and death.
On the other side, we have "some unknown side effect that could prove to be even worse and/or may not work".
Sit down and really think for a minute about your "unknown side effect" scenarios. What are the odds of it working, 1%, 5%, 10%, 50%? What are the odds of catastrophic failure, 1%, 5%, 10%, 50%? What are the odds of failure that isn't catastrophic? Why did you pick the numbers that you picked? What evidence do you have for those numbers?
Quite frankly, if it doesn't work or if it fails catastrophically, she's dead anyway, so the losses are roughly equivalent. The odds of success however, are vastly different - because doing nothing is guaranteed to fail, while trying the treatment is not. Taking a larger view, there is also a general research value in having her try treatment, because that additional data may help save the lives of others.
-dentin
Yeah, this would be fine, or even "wc /dev/sd?". As long as the drive is read from periodically, it seems to help a lot.
I've been doing this for a long time, and have settled on the concept of a long term data archive for this purpose. It contains approximately half a terabyte of data that I consider to be 'important', and a few hundred megabytes of data that I consider 'very important'.
The first thing to be aware of is that a data archive is useless if it's not readily available 24/7. You don't back up data by putting it on tapes and throwing it in a box in the closet. Putting tapes in a closet is useful, but it should be considered a 'catastrophic recovery option to be used as a last resort'.
The main machine that houses the 'live' archive contains two large drives, each with a full copy of an operating system and the data archive. The currently booting disk is considered current; its archive is live. The second drive is an older copy of the archive, and is generally only a few days out of date. Rsync via atq automatically mirrors the archive and operating system to the second drive every few nights.
The backup machine has a similar setup, but it has older versions of the data archive. I update each archive on the backup machine every two months, staggered so there's always a copy of the archive about a month old, and always a copy about two months old. Having older versions of the archive available helps in the rare situations where you blow away something you shouldn't have. The backup machine should be off site if you can manage it.
For the 'very important' data, I keep copies on a handful of external machines and maintain them either via revision control or rsync. In the 'catastrophic backup' regime, I keep decommissioned disks containing old copies of the archive off site, usually in the hands of reliable friends and family.
It should be noted that I've found it important to run a nightly MD5 or SHA-256 checksum of every file in the archive, even if you don't do anything with it. (I actually compare against previous values, but that's not the important part.) This seems to greatly extend the lifetime of disks and reduce disk failure; I don't have a good explanation for this, but I suspect that reading from the bulk of the disk periodically allows the drive to identify and rewrite refresh questionable sectors before the data is unreadable. The disk need not go bad or have a catastrophic failure for data to become unreadable; mechanical aging and magnetic decoherence can simply put a sector above the ability of the FEC in the drive to recover, if left too long.
I don't use revision control on the bulk of the data in the archive. 95+% of the archive is considered long term read-only storage. Your usage may be different, and you may choose to use revision control on the entire archive. That doesn't really change the nature of the backup process though.
In defense of the MUD developers, I understand extremely well the strengths of LPC, and I want it "way the fuck far away" from my builders. IMHO part of what makes a game world good is its consistency; game physics should work roughly the same everywhere, and while there should be surprises and special cases, they shouldn't be game breaking.
A lot of it boils down to complexity. For a well built, globally consistent world, you need a fairly small ruleset that limits what can be built. Not because it's a hard requirement, but because human builders and editors simply can't keep track of the interactions well enough to self limit, no matter how good they are. The down side of a small ruleset is limited world complexity. In the end, it's a tradeoff between consistency and complexity, and getting the balance right is hard.
We've mostly kept it under control by allowing a handful of special hooks that can be programmed using a fairly small set of features. Even so, occasionally something unexpectedly nasty sneaks through, and we have to make modifications to fix it up.
I hate to be a shill, but if you're actually in the market for a MUD you might want to take a look at Alter Aeon. In my opinion, we can easily hold our own against DR.
I'm in the game industry, and I know exactly where they keep getting their money: investors looking to make a quick buck. Gaming is becoming the new rage, and everyone is trying to get a piece of the pie. Anyone with minimum competence and a business plan can get a couple million dollars these days. I've personally tracked a couple of these games (Earth Eternal springs to mind) from creation to destruction to see what was going on.
It's really just another bubble. It'll seethe and froth for a while, but eventually it'll settle down into a stable market.
WoW is one of the few games that I persistently lost players to. WoW really does have nearly everything - an actual social environment, huge game world to explore, hooks to keep you leveling, stuff to do, stuff to learn. WoW isn't the juggernaut because it's the largest; WoW is the juggernaut because they built a damned good game that appeals to a lot of people.
I understand completely what Bartle is saying, and I don't just see it in facebook games. A lot of MMOs seem to be going the same direction - emphasize item collection and checkpoints over actually having a fun game. The down side of this is that the MMO and social game space are incredibly full of games like this and it's hard for truly original, independent games to get noticed. The up side is that I've been watching these games drop like flies for the last four years. The psychological tricks and 'next upgrade' hooks that pull in people don't appear to work forever. People gradually build up immunity, and I suspect that immunity builds much faster than is currently believed.
I've been running the MUD Alter Aeon for sixteen years now, and I've seen a lot of people come and go through the game. I have had a lot of players leave and tell me they're going to go play a different game; a couple months later, they're almost always back. The reasons vary; sometimes it's because they finished all the available content, sometimes because the game is just bad, sometimes because it costs too much, or is boring, or there's noone to talk to.
I know a big part of our success is because the social aspect of AA is an actual social aspect, with friends and community instead of my mom harvesting eggs for me. People talk, play, and occasionally even fall in love on AA; I have not yet heard of that happening in farmville. That said, the social aspect only goes so far. Until recently, I felt that AA's actual story content was middle of the road at best; but having actually explored and looked at the garbage other games are putting forward, I now understand why we have a loyal, growing player base while other games die. Not only do we have a lot of awesome content, but our game mechanics and customization allow people to build up truly unusual characters that you can't easily construct on other games. There's also a lot of "emergent" gameplay, where learning the various complexities of the game can really pay off in some situations.
I think to really have an outstanding MMO, you have to have everything - the psychological hooks to give people something to progress toward; actual gameplay that's fun and interesting; game and world interactions that are complex and are fun to learn; and a strong social element for people to really communicate and work together. New MMOs without an established player base that think they can get away with only one are going to be sorely disappointed.