RL> I find this truly depressing because I don't RL> want pre-digested movies and entertainment.
Can you name an "undigested" movie? True, a lot of blockbusters are more sugary and condescending than other movies, but any movie is still a mediated experience. Rather than go live life like W.R. Hearst, we watch Citizen Kane. Rather than actually experiencing nature, we get a synthesized version of it from a PBS documentary or biology textbook.
Actually, this is not unlike the Neal Stephenson "Cryptonomicon" essay posted to/. a while back. The essence of the essay was that folks these days prefer mediated experiences to "real" ones. People want easy-to-digest movies, people want idiot-proof GUIs.
However, "Star Wars", as entertainment, works.
Windows, as an operating system, does not work.
If watching Star Wars sucked as much ass as using Windows -- and if they make a "Jar-Jar Binks Meet the Ewoks" saturday morning cartoon, it just might -- I would have to agree with you. Certainly Gates and Lucas are both fanatical about guarding intellectual property, and both have sunk their claws into other industries. Lucas, however, makes good stuff.
Kershner takes credit for allowing the actors to ad-lib lines, not for the lines themselves. From the article:
Salon> But at Kershner's prodding, Ford came up Salon> with just the right piece of macho Salon> wit: instead of "I love you, too," a Salon> sardonic "I know."
IIRC, making this sort of thing difficult was part of the design of the Internet. The US military wanted a way for, say, Little Rock and Boise to communicate even if all the major cities were taken out.
If the US really wanted to sever Serbia from the Internet, it would have to stop all traditional internet connections (not a trivial thing). It would also have to bomb the phone lines, stop ham radio transmissions, etc. And as others have mentioned, this wouldn't stop the sneakernet; only a tight police force able to prevent smuggling would do that.
Here's a question: Why has the shutdown of satillite feeds taken several serb sites down? Does that much internet traffic go through satillites?
They may have continued on the air; however, they were bombed by NATO for this purpose. An article at CNN from April 23 describes the bombing.
CNN correspondent Brent Sadler reported seeing two bodies pulled from the rubble as rescue workers used bulldozers to reach other bodies trapped beneath the wreckage of the building.
Sadler said the attack, which destroyed what NATO claimed was the nerve center of Serb propaganda, left behind "a scene of complete devastation".
That might be Yet Another Loophole. Open random American-made C file in vi, put caps lock on, lean elbow on 'j' key. Repeat.
ocie> This restriction sounds stupid and totally ocie> unenforcable.
Of course it's stupid and totally unenforcable! I could carry a printout of the RSA source code across borders (I think), but not a floppy disk containing the source code files. Laws are like operating systems. At first they are crafted wisely and economically. Then, as decades go by, little seemingly-necessary bits get added on. Eventually, the whole system becomes one big nonsensical mess.
Installing a new kernel is not some guilty pleasure. He was advocating that people install the development kernel only with caution and forethought. It would not, therefore, be hypocritical of him to install the development kernel with caution and forethought.
> And what if, like me, you were planning on using > your vacation for your honeymoon? Forget it.
Good god, man. What's the point of working?
> You get married, you show up at work the next > day or else your job won't be here when you > get back.
Bullshit. You're getting paid US$38k a year for 60-hour-a-week cobol Y2k work at a major telco? You have the proverbial bull by the proverbial testes here. Squeeze a little! So what if you miss a week? If your boss doesn't have the Y2k stuff done by the big deadline, his or her ass is toast. S/he's never going to be able to find another cobol hacker before the turn of the millenium. Squeeze. Even if you're not doing Y2k stuff explicitly, coders of all stripes are in short supply right now. Squeeeeeeeze.
A shitty job is nothing compared to your honeymoon. Stand up for yourself, god dammit!
Their site just has the source code zipped up, requiring registration. The FAQ gives no useful details. What kind of "network abstraction" is it? Are there any real docs?
Taking statements out of context can radically skew the tone of a comment, but is not strictly misquotation. I recall an article which took some of Linus Torvalds' comments way out of context (I think he called the distro companies "leeches," and there was the "we shall crush microsoft" comment that was blown out of proportion).
The SCO CEO probably did say those things, but they probably didn't have the meaning put upon them by the reporter. It's hard to say anything substational and not be vulnerable to stuff being taken out of context. This is why politicians seem to talk and talk and yet say absolutely nothing.
Ellis-D> "If we are what we eat, then the only Ellis-D> real humans are cannibals."
No! This is not wholly correct, as cannibals who ate non-cannibals would therefore not be cannibals. The only real humans would be those cannibals who only eat other cannibals, who in turn must only eat other cannibals. (And unless the cannibals had some non-ingestive means of gaining energy -- photosynthesis, perhaps, or direct injection of nutrients -- they would all die, as the laws of entropy dictate that the system would burn itself out.)
Thus we see that when the act of eating becomes an act of definition ("we are what we eat"), the undecidability problems inherent in all formalized systems of definition pop up.
Here's an idea -- take a computer language that uses some finite character set. Figure out a one-to-one mapping of the set of strings-comprised-of-that-character-set to the set of natural numbers. This means you can convert any string on that character set into a unique natural number, and vice versa. Then figure out a one-to-one mapping of colors (red, green, blue 3-tuples) to natural numbers. Then you'd have a way to turn any color into a unique natural number, and vice versa. What this gives you is a method for converting any string on this alphabet to its own unique color. And given any color, you'd be able to derive the corresponding string on that alphabet.
What this means, of course, is that you could smuggle code around by encoding it as some very specific shade of pink (or whatever), dyeing a bit of fabric that color, then analyzing it later (assuming you have a sufficiently powerful spectrophotometer). Now that would be cool.
Sweet mother of god, I tried out Lynx v2.8 based on this post, and was quite impressed indeed. The last version of lynx I used was on VMS a year ago. It didn't support cookies, choked on wierd HTML, yadda yadda yadda. Sweet! A fast, stable browser! Man this is nice.
The characters in the movie also contended that military service was a grand calling; the futuristic society only granted citizenship to veterans. But what the characters in the book believe is not the same thing as the message of the book -- just because the bureaucrats in 1984 love the principles of Ingsoc doesn't mean George Orwell was trying to promote totalitarianism.
Some of the other posters in this thread claimed that the movie is a parody of the book. Perhaps I'll take your advice and read it one of these days.
I also thought Starship Troopers was bland Hollywood action-movie crap when I first saw it. A friend of mine then pointed out some of the satirical elements to it. The movie is subtly sympathetic to the bugs. There's one scene with (approximately) the dialogue:
Reporter guy: "Some people say that the bugs are only defending their territory, that they only started attacking people when people colonized their home world."
Rico: "Yeah? Well, I'm from Buenos Aires. And I say, kill 'em all!"
This is the sort of "kill them all and let God sort them out" logic that fascist nations like Hitler's Germany and the current U.S. use to justify war.
The "they're afraid" stuff at the end was double-edged too. The bugs are scared of dying, that's why they're fighting. Militaristic propaganda works by taking the self-defensive actions of others and exaggerating it, making it seem threatening. Leaving the bugs alone would have ended the war -- the bugs were only fighting out of fear. In a fascist society, however, any fighting at all is seen as a dire threat to the society as a whole.
If Starship Troopers seems totally simplistic, I think that was intentional. The overly bright, almost pastel, colors, the abrasively cheerful news bites, the totally idiotic love triangle, etc., are supposed to be satiristic.
Misha> it is stupid to think of NP if the key Misha> length is fixed. b/c if you can solve in in Misha> O(p(x)) for length x, then solving the Misha> whole thing for any length would Misha> be O(p(x)*x) which is still polynomial if p Misha> is polynomial.
I'm afraid I couldn't understand what you meant here. Could you clarify it?
The question wasn't about RSA decryption, it was about general fixed-key decryption, regardless of cryptographic problems whose decryption on deterministic machines relied upon the intractability of NP-complete problems.
There are a few non-deterministic computational systems around, but they are impractical. One of the RSA trirumvirate had an article in Scientific American about a DNA computer he had designed. The system was turing-complete and non-deterministic, but totally impractical in its current state. (IIRC, a computational step could be non-deterministic, but each step also required a technician to do a gel electrophoresis and DNA analysis. Yechh!) Quantum computers are also non-deterministic but currently impractical.
EthanW> This assumes [...] that the encryption EthanW> strength is based on an NP problem (rather EthanW> than something even harder).
That was the essence of the question. I asserted that any fixed-length-key encryption could be broken in polynomial time by a non-deterministic machine. I failed to note the caveat that the set of all functions computable in polynomial time by a deterministic machine (even if P=NP) is a proper subset of all functions computable in polynomial time by a non-deterministic machine.
You're right -- a proof of P=NP is not the same thing as building a non-deterministic machine. So a proof of P=NP would not break all fixed-key encryption, but building a non-deterministic machine would. Thanks for the clarification; my schooling in complexity classes pretty much stopped at P and NP.:)
I had a discussion on another thread about this, with few conclusions drawn. My speculation was that any fixed-key encryption algorithm could be broken by a non-deterministic machine in polynomial time. That is, encryption using a key of x bits could be broken by the non-deterministic machine trying all 2^x possible keys in parallel. I think I recall Bruce Schneier saying something to this effect in one of the "Crypto-gram" newsletters, but I may be misremembering. Any theorist slashdotters willing to comment?
There might be some explanations lying around in earlier/. threads on the Shamir NYT article. Schneier's Applied Cryptography has some brief stuff on it; it's also described with more depth in van Whatshisface's Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, volume A I believe. A more down-to-earth description of it can be found in The Turing Omnibus, if your local library has a copy.
The box in sneakers was (if I read the movie correctly) a proof of P=NP. It could solve any encryption relatively instantly. Shamir's box still bangs its head against exponential complexity; increase the key length a little and the necessary resources double. This means that people aren't going to be breaking into air traffic control computers with Shamir's box, since the airlines can just increase their key lengths to keep their secrets (even if they have too many). I'm glad this article was here -- the NYTimes article was totally vague, and when I first read it I thought Shamir might actually have come up with P=NP. That would be something.
Bridges are built out of lumber and metal. They are built upon concrete and earth. They are bombarded by wind and precipitation. They are driven upon by cars and trucks.
These physical objects are governed by physical laws. Given the properties of a car, I can tell how much stress it will put on a bridge. Given a metal, I determine how resilient it is and extrapolate that result. I can estimate, with reasonable accuracy, the stability of the soil upon which I build my bridge. An I-beam is an I-beam is and I-beam.
This is not the case with software components. Use this object with that IPC mechanism, you segfault. Call this function and fail to catch that error, you hang. Software components interact with each other in weird, unpredictable ways. If a bird lands on one specific part of your bridge, does it crumble to the ground? Of course not. But I have a function in the project I'm working on which will crash if the no-op statement
cout << "";
is not included. Why? Who the hell knows? Some small error compounded with some other small error makes my program crash if this statement isn't there. Programs aren't like bridges.
stevew> It could also be argued that the "guild" stevew> already exists - it's called ACM.
It has no punitive ability. No employer will care if you get kicked out of the ACM. It's more like a club, a place folks go to share information and hand out awards.
(And as I try for the third time to submit a "Plain Old Text" post with less-than symbols in it, I stand by my "code != bridge" argument.)
Slashdot Mirror
RL> I find this truly depressing because I don't
RL> want pre-digested movies and entertainment.
Can you name an "undigested" movie? True, a lot of blockbusters are more sugary and condescending than other movies, but any movie is still a mediated experience. Rather than go live life like W.R. Hearst, we watch Citizen Kane. Rather than actually experiencing nature, we get a synthesized version of it from a PBS documentary or biology textbook.
There are, uh, pot coffeeshops in Canada? Not that I care. *nervous cough.*
BTW, Anonymous Coward who started this thread: Well done. I wish I had the privs to moderate your post up. Damn funny.
Actually, this is not unlike the Neal Stephenson "Cryptonomicon" essay posted to /. a while back. The essence of the essay was that folks these days prefer mediated experiences to "real" ones. People want easy-to-digest movies, people want idiot-proof GUIs.
However, "Star Wars", as entertainment, works.
Windows, as an operating system, does not work.
If watching Star Wars sucked as much ass as using Windows -- and if they make a "Jar-Jar Binks Meet the Ewoks" saturday morning cartoon, it just might -- I would have to agree with you. Certainly Gates and Lucas are both fanatical about guarding intellectual property, and both have sunk their claws into other industries. Lucas, however, makes good stuff.
Kershner takes credit for allowing the actors to ad-lib lines, not for the lines themselves. From the article:
Salon> But at Kershner's prodding, Ford came up
Salon> with just the right piece of macho
Salon> wit: instead of "I love you, too," a
Salon> sardonic "I know."
IIRC, making this sort of thing difficult was part of the design of the Internet. The US military wanted a way for, say, Little Rock and Boise to communicate even if all the major cities were taken out.
If the US really wanted to sever Serbia from the Internet, it would have to stop all traditional internet connections (not a trivial thing). It would also have to bomb the phone lines, stop ham radio transmissions, etc. And as others have mentioned, this wouldn't stop the sneakernet; only a tight police force able to prevent smuggling would do that.
Here's a question: Why has the shutdown of satillite feeds taken several serb sites down? Does that much internet traffic go through satillites?
CNN correspondent Brent Sadler reported
seeing two bodies pulled from the rubble as
rescue workers used bulldozers to reach
other bodies trapped beneath the wreckage
of the building.
Sadler said the attack, which destroyed what
NATO claimed was the nerve center of Serb
propaganda, left behind "a scene of complete
devastation".
It was for this reason that Serbian TV was bombed. C-SPAN was showing Serbian news, and NATO needed to control information.
That might be Yet Another Loophole. Open random American-made C file in vi, put caps lock on, lean elbow on 'j' key. Repeat.
ocie> This restriction sounds stupid and totally
ocie> unenforcable.
Of course it's stupid and totally unenforcable! I could carry a printout of the RSA source code across borders (I think), but not a floppy disk containing the source code files. Laws are like operating systems. At first they are crafted wisely and economically. Then, as decades go by, little seemingly-necessary bits get added on. Eventually, the whole system becomes one big nonsensical mess.
Installing a new kernel is not some guilty pleasure. He was advocating that people install the development kernel only with caution and forethought. It would not, therefore, be hypocritical of him to install the development kernel with caution and forethought.
> And what if, like me, you were planning on using
> your vacation for your honeymoon? Forget it.
Good god, man. What's the point of working?
> You get married, you show up at work the next
> day or else your job won't be here when you
> get back.
Bullshit. You're getting paid US$38k a year for 60-hour-a-week cobol Y2k work at a major telco? You have the proverbial bull by the proverbial testes here. Squeeze a little! So what if you miss a week? If your boss doesn't have the Y2k stuff done by the big deadline, his or her ass is toast. S/he's never going to be able to find another cobol hacker before the turn of the millenium. Squeeze. Even if you're not doing Y2k stuff explicitly, coders of all stripes are in short supply right now. Squeeeeeeeze.
A shitty job is nothing compared to your honeymoon. Stand up for yourself, god dammit!
Their site just has the source code zipped up, requiring registration. The FAQ gives no useful details. What kind of "network abstraction" is it? Are there any real docs?
Taking statements out of context can radically skew the tone of a comment, but is not strictly misquotation. I recall an article which took some of Linus Torvalds' comments way out of context (I think he called the distro companies "leeches," and there was the "we shall crush microsoft" comment that was blown out of proportion).
The SCO CEO probably did say those things, but they probably didn't have the meaning put upon them by the reporter. It's hard to say anything substational and not be vulnerable to stuff being taken out of context. This is why politicians seem to talk and talk and yet say absolutely nothing.
Ellis-D> "If we are what we eat, then the only
Ellis-D> real humans are cannibals."
No! This is not wholly correct, as cannibals who ate non-cannibals would therefore not be cannibals. The only real humans would be those cannibals who only eat other cannibals, who in turn must only eat other cannibals. (And unless the cannibals had some non-ingestive means of gaining energy -- photosynthesis, perhaps, or direct injection of nutrients -- they would all die, as the laws of entropy dictate that the system would burn itself out.)
Thus we see that when the act of eating becomes an act of definition ("we are what we eat"), the undecidability problems inherent in all formalized systems of definition pop up.
Here's an idea -- take a computer language that uses some finite character set. Figure out a one-to-one mapping of the set of strings-comprised-of-that-character-set to the set of natural numbers. This means you can convert any string on that character set into a unique natural number, and vice versa. Then figure out a one-to-one mapping of colors (red, green, blue 3-tuples) to natural numbers. Then you'd have a way to turn any color into a unique natural number, and vice versa. What this gives you is a method for converting any string on this alphabet to its own unique color. And given any color, you'd be able to derive the corresponding string on that alphabet.
What this means, of course, is that you could smuggle code around by encoding it as some very specific shade of pink (or whatever), dyeing a bit of fabric that color, then analyzing it later (assuming you have a sufficiently powerful spectrophotometer). Now that would be cool.
Sweet mother of god, I tried out Lynx v2.8 based on this post, and was quite impressed indeed. The last version of lynx I used was on VMS a year ago. It didn't support cookies, choked on wierd HTML, yadda yadda yadda. Sweet! A fast, stable browser! Man this is nice.
The characters in the movie also contended that military service was a grand calling; the futuristic society only granted citizenship to veterans. But what the characters in the book believe is not the same thing as the message of the book -- just because the bureaucrats in 1984 love the principles of Ingsoc doesn't mean George Orwell was trying to promote totalitarianism.
Some of the other posters in this thread claimed that the movie is a parody of the book. Perhaps I'll take your advice and read it one of these days.
I also thought Starship Troopers was bland Hollywood action-movie crap when I first saw it. A friend of mine then pointed out some of the satirical elements to it. The movie is subtly sympathetic to the bugs. There's one scene with (approximately) the dialogue:
Reporter guy: "Some people say that the bugs are only defending their territory, that they only started attacking people when people colonized their home world."
Rico: "Yeah? Well, I'm from Buenos Aires. And I say, kill 'em all!"
This is the sort of "kill them all and let God sort them out" logic that fascist nations like Hitler's Germany and the current U.S. use to justify war.
The "they're afraid" stuff at the end was double-edged too. The bugs are scared of dying, that's why they're fighting. Militaristic propaganda works by taking the self-defensive actions of others and exaggerating it, making it seem threatening. Leaving the bugs alone would have ended the war -- the bugs were only fighting out of fear. In a fascist society, however, any fighting at all is seen as a dire threat to the society as a whole.
If Starship Troopers seems totally simplistic, I think that was intentional. The overly bright, almost pastel, colors, the abrasively cheerful news bites, the totally idiotic love triangle, etc., are supposed to be satiristic.
Misha> it is stupid to think of NP if the key
Misha> length is fixed. b/c if you can solve in in
Misha> O(p(x)) for length x, then solving the
Misha> whole thing for any length would
Misha> be O(p(x)*x) which is still polynomial if p
Misha> is polynomial.
I'm afraid I couldn't understand what you meant here. Could you clarify it?
The question wasn't about RSA decryption, it was about general fixed-key decryption, regardless of cryptographic problems whose decryption on deterministic machines relied upon the intractability of NP-complete problems.
There are a few non-deterministic computational systems around, but they are impractical. One of the RSA trirumvirate had an article in Scientific American about a DNA computer he had designed. The system was turing-complete and non-deterministic, but totally impractical in its current state. (IIRC, a computational step could be non-deterministic, but each step also required a technician to do a gel electrophoresis and DNA analysis. Yechh!) Quantum computers are also non-deterministic but currently impractical.
EthanW> This assumes [...] that the encryption
EthanW> strength is based on an NP problem (rather
EthanW> than something even harder).
That was the essence of the question. I asserted that any fixed-length-key encryption could be broken in polynomial time by a non-deterministic machine. I failed to note the caveat that the set of all functions computable in polynomial time by a deterministic machine (even if P=NP) is a proper subset of all functions computable in polynomial time by a non-deterministic machine.
You're right -- a proof of P=NP is not the same thing as building a non-deterministic machine. So a proof of P=NP would not break all fixed-key encryption, but building a non-deterministic machine would. Thanks for the clarification; my schooling in complexity classes pretty much stopped at P and NP. :)
I had a discussion on another thread about this, with few conclusions drawn. My speculation was that any fixed-key encryption algorithm could be broken by a non-deterministic machine in polynomial time. That is, encryption using a key of x bits could be broken by the non-deterministic machine trying all 2^x possible keys in parallel. I think I recall Bruce Schneier saying something to this effect in one of the "Crypto-gram" newsletters, but I may be misremembering. Any theorist slashdotters willing to comment?
There might be some explanations lying around in earlier /. threads on the Shamir NYT article. Schneier's Applied Cryptography has some brief stuff on it; it's also described with more depth in van Whatshisface's Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, volume A I believe. A more down-to-earth description of it can be found in The Turing Omnibus, if your local library has a copy.
The box in sneakers was (if I read the movie correctly) a proof of P=NP. It could solve any encryption relatively instantly. Shamir's box still bangs its head against exponential complexity; increase the key length a little and the necessary resources double. This means that people aren't going to be breaking into air traffic control computers with Shamir's box, since the airlines can just increase their key lengths to keep their secrets (even if they have too many). I'm glad this article was here -- the NYTimes article was totally vague, and when I first read it I thought Shamir might actually have come up with P=NP. That would be something.
The first two of these three posts were mangled by the HTML parser. Please delete them (if you have the privs), leaving the third post.
stevew> The bridge metaphor does apply!
Bridges are built out of lumber and metal. They are built upon concrete and earth. They are bombarded by wind and precipitation. They are driven upon by cars and trucks.
These physical objects are governed by physical laws. Given the properties of a car, I can tell how much stress it will put on a bridge. Given a metal, I determine how resilient it is and extrapolate that result. I can estimate, with reasonable accuracy, the stability of the soil upon which I build my bridge. An I-beam is an I-beam is and I-beam.
This is not the case with software components. Use this object with that IPC mechanism, you segfault. Call this function and fail to catch that error, you hang. Software components interact with each other in weird, unpredictable ways. If a bird lands on one specific part of your bridge, does it crumble to the ground? Of course not. But I have a function in the project I'm working on which will crash if the no-op statement
cout << "";
is not included. Why? Who the hell knows? Some small error compounded with some other small error makes my program crash if this statement isn't there. Programs aren't like bridges.
stevew> It could also be argued that the "guild"
stevew> already exists - it's called ACM.
It has no punitive ability. No employer will care if you get kicked out of the ACM. It's more like a club, a place folks go to share information and hand out awards.
(And as I try for the third time to submit a "Plain Old Text" post with less-than symbols in it, I stand by my "code != bridge" argument.)