Walasin likes the free hotel rooms and meals he gets for gambling -- about $2,000 per trip. The data the casino gets in return doesn't matter to him; he figures a lot of it's out there anyway.
"Why would one have any more paranoia about The Taj having information," he said, "than if Sears or AT&T had that information?"
Mr. Walasin fails to understand one key difference between the data mining he mentions and that of the casinos -- the casinos have a right to turn down anyone they want from gambling even for the sole reason that they consider the person too lucky. You don't need to worry about your credit card company having your demographic information, because credit card companies aren't allowed to discrimate based on them. If I were a gambler I would use a fake name and get a fake "rewards card" after each 'lucky streak' (Be it from counting high cards in blackjack or some other odds-manipulation, or just plain luck). As Spellchekur astutely points out "Can you imagine having a string of good luck at the Taj and then walking into some casino in Paris and being asked to leave the premises?"
One casino datamining and discriminating is bad enough. But can you imagine a... of, oh you know... ~
Maybe you should write The Idiot's Guide to Coffee. Cuz' next to you, let's face it, we're all idiots. Here I was thinking my 7 USD *$s coffee was worth a turd. What must have I been thinking? ~
At first I read "biofeedback" for "Optical Feedback" in the title "Optical Feedback For Perfect Coffee", which immediately set off in my mind the idea that you have a feedback loop to adjust the amount of sugar and cream in your coffee, as well as its "strength" (the slidable thing that looks like the sliding scale on your toaster [y'know "bread/charcoal"] ). This isn't what the article actually is, the article just makes sure that there's a 1:1 correlation between the strength you ask for and the strength you get. My problem is I don't know what strength I want, and I don't know how much sugar I want and I don't know how much milk I want. My wife makes me the perfect cup of coffee, but that's because she spent years trying different combinations and thereby adjusting her own internal feedback loop, until she got a "feel" for how much of each setting made for the best cup of coffee.
Now if in addition to this new machine in the article, which makes sure that the setting specified is the setting received, there were a second machine that adjusted this setting, and also doled sugar and cream out for you, based on a feedback loop whereby after each cup you would specify 1) how much you liked it. Or, for advanced users, 2) whether it was too sweet for you or too bitter and 3) whether it was too strong for you or too dull. (Too hard coffee or too hard cream).
The beauty of this is that with even the most modest OS and statistical software the first variable alone (how much you liked it -- even if you don't know why you did or did not like it) would let the average user approach PerfectCup after about 7 cups (rough estimate) of more grossly suboptimal coffee.
Further tweaks could perfect the milk/cream ratio ("Half and half" is just such a ball-park estimate:]) -- think "alpha channel", where RGB is coffee-strength/sugar level/milk level.
Of course each coffee bean would be associated with a particular set of settings, and each member of your household would also. (Just don't let Microsoft find out or you'll need a Passport(R) to get your morning cup of joe.:])
Oh, and you could sometimes ask for something more jolty and sometimes something more sweet. Like one bean for one person might have a "morning" (jolty), "meal" (nice good cup) and "desert" (rather sweet, milder) setting. What do we say, gang? Worth starting on sourceforge?
this reminds me. Tell someone "Say boast three times fast." ("okay. boast, boast, boast.") "Now what do you put in a toaster?" ("toast") "No, you mentally deficient individual, you put bread in. Toast is what you take out." [joint polite laugh.]
--
Disclaimer: I am vegan. I would exploit the above software to get me a decent cup of coffee with real-non-dairy-creamer (the kind that isn't laced with whey) or else with soy milk. The real reason I want to make the OS opensource is so I could compile me these custom mods. That and ssh'ing into my coffee maker. ("What are you doing?" "Oh I'm just logging onto my coffee server [ha] to set the timer for a nice big cup of coffee when I get back home. Wait a minute lemme check the web cam to see if I left my mug in. Yep." How cool is that?) ~
haha. good one. just don't tell intel, or they'll have a hissy-fit, back the whole thing to hell and back with capital, and turn IBM-y with the linux support. And here they were quaking in their boots about how efficient linux was;-) ~
Well keep up the good work. If only every slashdot post were as well-thought-out and, more important,/clear/. Even when you rant, you rant with form:) ~
Some browsers (opera), recognizing the fact that crashes do happen, are now saving the window/url chain state so they can resume more or less where they left off. Mozilla isn't doing this, and should. Besides taking the sting out of crashes, it lets you shut down without worrying about losing all your windows. This is a big deal, for a small amount of programming effort.
I browse hard. I'll have thirty internet explorer windows open, some for a period of a week, before they get read. Every night before I got to sleep I manually cut and paste the url from each window into "current context.txt"...obviously this is a crappy solution. Anyone know of a prog that let's me save a URL tree / reload one (so that on reload all the same windows appear, and the back/forward buttons in each window point to the same place)? I tried looking for awhile and could find nothing. Thanks. ~
And I especially like the way I need 650 megabytes of one-time giberish if I want to transmit 650 megabytes of data. Do you think has encrypted its source tree? You bet. You think it keeps the encryption key on as many disks as the source? NBL.
And another thing: you don't need to disclose the length of the message. Just set a size for every message, say, 1000 characters, and always send 1000. If you only have 40 characters, then just XOR 0 with 9960 bits from the one-time pad. It's equally giberish. If you want more than 1000 characters, then write near the end "Continued next message.". Through a one-time-pad method, you are guaranteed to be secure, but you need to have met securely with anyone you want to communicate with, and exchanged as much random data as you ever want to send. Random data is hard to find and keep secure, when there's lots and lots and lots of it. (As much as you ever need to transmit before you meet securely again). Through PGP, if I want only you to see a message, I get your private key from a server I trust. It doesn't matter if anyone else sees the key, they can't unencrypt what I encrypt just because they have it too. That's why it's ASYMMETRIC. Only the private key can unencrypt. So now here I am at an unsecure computer, with my every step watched and recorded, I download my own public key, I encrypt a file on the harddrive, and I erase the original. They've seen my key, but they still can't unencrypt anything. ~
Dude you're such a karma whore. The next time there's any story about encryption, I'm going to write "Sounds pretty slick, but how secure is it if you don't make sure no one's looking over your shoulder while you compose the message before it's encrypted?" or "Sounds pretty slick, but how secure is it if you accidentally publish you private key?"
Of course that particular factoid is bogus. i.e. They took the data rate of DVD (~8MB/second) and divided it into the throughput, and then state that that's how many simultaneous streams can be played. Of course anyone who's ever actually tried that knows that the constant seeking between the streams absolutely BRUTALIZES throughput, so unless you had 8 streams encoded intertwined there isn't a chance in hell.
No, it's still close. Let's prove 4 streams.
Article says there's a 69.3 MB/s throughput, a 2 MB buffer, and an 8.9 msec average seek time. Let's assume the average seek time.
Time 0: seek to Stream 1.(takes 8.9 ms)
Time 8.9: read 0.5 megabytes.(takes 7.21 ms)
[7.21 is (0.5 megs / 69.3 throughput)]
Time 16.11: seek to Stream 2.(takes 8.9 ms)
Time 25.01: read 0.5 megabytes.(takes 7.21)
Time 32.22: seek to stream 3.(takes 8.9 ms)
Time 41.12: read 0.5 megabytes.(takes 7.21)
Time 48.33: seek to stream 4.(takes 8.9 ms)
Time 57.23: read 0.5 megabytes.(takes 7.21 ms)
Time 64.44: give software your 2meg buffer.
Now 4 streams at 8MB/sec = 32 megs per second.
That means you need 2 megabytes of data every (2/32=) 0.0625 seconds. You only actually get 2 megabytes of data every 0.06444 seconds (as shown above), which means you need a seek time just slightly better than average, and we're assuming that software will cache 0.5 megs ahead in each stream. If there's enough RAM, you can cache significantly more than that. (So that software asks for 5 megabytes at a time, in each of the streams one after the other. Then you approach what they say is 8 streams. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume software that caches more than just 0.5 megs, or one sixteenth of a second.)
~
Everyone take this survey to get Dell to start offering AMD Athlon: http://www.dell.com/html/us/segments/dhs/intel_amd _survey.htm?keycode=6Vc00&DGV
But go to a different page before you paste it in, so that they won't know we're all coming from slashdot.:) ~
"To prevent pools of non-Microsoft applications from forming, Microsoft likes to appropriate what it calls "commodity protocols" (off-the-shelf,
public protocols such as HTML, JavaScript, CSS and many more), and add proprietary extensions that prevent the formation of competing application
pools"
which leads to:
"Microsoft can't play its "embrace and extend" game with GPL-licensed software because the company can't appropriate and modify the code. If Linux
had been released under the BSD license, Microsoft would have probably already released a version of Linux, Linux++ or Linux# or L-Nux, with a
variety of maddeningly incompatible oddities that taken together would make it even more difficult to develop applications for Linux."
and "A GPL-licensed application pool is indeed forming around Linux, and Microsoft can't figure out how to attack it. You can't attack the
companies, because--as Eazel recently proved--the software's still around, even if the company shuts down or gives up on the product. " In other words, opensource software can't "die" (no longer evolve) just because its creaters (the company the made it) dies.
(The first half of the article drew a parallel with IBM in the old days, when it changed its processor code not to become more efficient than upstart
Amdahl, but to make it incompatible, allowing IBM to capitalize on the fact that if you wanted a processor that ran all code written for the IBM, you
needed to buy an IBM.)
It's an interesting story, though, and the author tries very hard to keep it interesting. ("But I've included lots of subheadings so you can skim
around, if you like."..."Still with me?"..."Doubtful? Read this:")
Of course this isn't news for any of us who remember ASCII back when it was ASCII (ie "standard", as opposed to duffed just enough by Microsoft to
make any Windows text outside what's on a keyboard totally nondeterministic when used between DOS and Windows).
One question for the gang: the author seems to assume that you can GPL a standard (he mentions "HTML, JavaScript, CSS", which last time I checked weren't source codes but standards), which keeps Microsoft from
adding proprietary extentions. Is this in fact the case? I certainly haven't heard of a standard that's GPL'd. And if it is, does that mean
Microsoft can use a binary implementation of the standard to add its proprietary hooks onto, as an "extention"? This can't affect the GPL, because it doesn't even USE the source code, let alone modify it. (IE, if ASCII were a binary standard, could it find an implementation of this standard with a nice API, then write a wrapper which uses it but makes each #!xyz!# series, where xyz are 000-999, show up in a Microsoft, incompatible, way, with a special symbol associated with it instead? It's not
modifying the standard, it's just using an executable made with it...)
...what about LGPL? Can it "#include <REAL LGPL'd ASCII.h>" inside "MSASCII.h", where MASASCII duffs up the standard, and end up with something incompatible on a source level, but not in violation of LGPL because "REAL LGPL'd ASCII.h" doesn't change??
But see, I think the the author's wrong: even if
Microsoft were making linux, the GPL'd linux we all know and love, then its MSLinux, which would be commercial, although the source-code would be distributed, would still be incompatible with
every other linux. So what if you have the source code? We don't have the source code to MS-Word, but we've certainly reverse engineered it enough
that we might as well have -- we have filters that translate Word into any other format you want. Doesn't mean that Word doesn't have more
market share because of the fact that it doesn't output richtext by default: on the contrary, that's what keeps it on every one of my coworker's
desktops. We need to read our attachments! ~
very good. i said about the same thing a little later (click my user #id) and whatever comment of mine is before this one, "Re: Possible Work Around". ~
That means that renaming Metallica songs
to "Metalica" wont have any effect since it's
using the fingerprint and not the actual file
name to ID the song
Conversely, it's fine to share songs with artist Metallica and with a Metallica title, as long as your client is cracked to return a fingerprint from a public domain source, and only send the copyright version to clients who prove to you that they're also cracked. (Client-to-client authentication. Naturally this would be done in a way so that when the napster server asks the client what version it is, unless the server uses the secret-handshake that a cracked client asks with, will get back the uncracked version.). Great for us. We can start using Napster's servers like in the old days!
Remember folks: any program that "authenticates" by sending something that it computes into a register in volatile memory, is easily crackable. Find the code in the assembly where it's done computing the fingerprint, and substitute the pre-cooked, freeware fingerprint into that memory area. Duh.
Works on lockable-memory architectures, too, because you're hacking the binary itself, not intruding on its memory area during run-time. Of course, if it's a smart client, it'll check it's own size with complex CRCs and stuff, but then you can just find the part of the assembly where its done computing its own CRC, and then substitute the precooked CRC from the original client. In other words, any security that isn't MATHEMATICAL, that TRUSTS the client to do its own authentication/isn't secure on an enduser's computer!/
Repeat after me: the moment you let someone run your client on a machine you don't control, you can no longer trust your client, however well you designed it, to perform any calculation correctly, to return any data correctly, or in any other way behave how you want/expect it to, unless there is a mathematical reason that the client can only treat its data a certain way. (For instance because it doesn't have all the information necessary to perform it a differenct way, or because there are public keys that result from the calculation only when correctly done, and which you can check with a private key, etc.) ~
hahahahaha. I'm laughing mao. This can't, of course, be serious. here:"We've developed a unique client-side nozzle (CSN), which functions just like a conventional modem" heh. And:
Dial-up/ISDN 128 Kbps
Frame relay (T-1) and
DSL (copper wire) 1.5 Mbps
DSL (air interfaces) and
Ethernet (LAN) 1 Gbps
Optical fiber (OC-192) 9.95 Gbps
Optical fiber (OC-192 with DWDM) 318 Gbps
WaterNet Unlimited
Almost had me fooled, Zigurd. Did you just make that site? How'd you get it registered so fast and, more importantly, why "dutch"?
Oh wait, click "who we are" at the bottom of that page. April fools. ~
Okay. So we transmit through the flourescent lights (/. article), which of course doesn't work if you're trying to get some shut-eye or setting up GOOD lighting that bathes your room in light. Now we transmit through the power lines, which doesn't work if you live in California at the wrong time or if you have vacuum cleaners or massive electrovactic flux capacitors or whatever: point is, there's light radiation all over the place, there's power radiation all over the place, hell, there's even radio pollution all over the place (which is why Bluetooth's failing so miserably, as we all know...). But what means of communication do we have that has no parasite devices riding it yet? What magic, wonderful link is there between us and the outside world, over which there is transmited the equivilent of terabytes of raw, reliable data, but which currently isn't at all modulated, although it easily can be made to be, so that rather than what amounts to static today, we get real-live bits?
we need to start sending last-mile data down the water pipes.
Yes, it's true, we have a system that currently can vary in pressure by hundreds of pounds per square inch, that currently has a fairly fixed pressure whose modulations no data-gobbling devices currently utilize, and which services a relatively few number of homes per pipe. Sure, it'll be a shared bandwidth -- or "pipe diameter" -- among all the homes in an area, but then so wasn't broadband cable -- and who's laughing at/that/ today? My roughest calculations show an upper bounds, based on where brownian motion starts to interfere with your data, in excess of 2.82 exobauds of data per household. (The lower bounds, based on the pressure difference that you can modulate not when no water flows through the pipes [and when brownian motion therefore is the only thing screwing you] but rather when everyone turns on every water faucet on full, flushes all their toilets, and opens the fire hydrants outside,/still/ results in good, clean data of about 750kbps, with generous redundancy for error-correction. Either way, lower bounds, upper bounds, that's a good hefty amount of bandwidth).
Latency? That's estimatable from the speed of sound through water -- since sound is, after all, modulation -- which is "1400 and 1570 m/sec (4593 and 5151 ft/sec). This is roughly 1.5 km/sec (just under 1 mile/sec) or about four times faster than sound travels through air." (Although it "depends on the temperature of the water, its salinity, and the pressure ") Now granted, a second to travel a mile might seem excessive, but bear in mind that, based on the above, the information still travels four times as fast as if you were to yell it. Maybe we can have an asymmetric system, so that you dial in with your modem, and have downloads come through the fat pipe. Okay, enough silliness.
Does this work through filtered power sources? I know any decent UPS works so that the power you're actually getting comes from the battery, past a filter, and what goes/into/ the battery is the raw power, also past a filter/surge protector.
All I know is, there's not a 'raw' connection anywhere near my computer -- just a long extention cord (the one-connection kind) going into my UPS, which leads to a power strip. Maybe it'll be good for all the lo-tech homes, though... ~
Re:"Conclusions and recommendations"
on
MilSpec Biotech
·
· Score: 1
I really just wanted to find something that translated "dulce et decorum est pro patria mori". I didn't look at the page I ended up with very hard though -- it just translated it as "it is sweet to die for one's country" and not "it is sweet/and proper/..." (et decorum). ~
Now bear in mind that Google couldn't even come up with the phrase, however much I +'d it to death, on its top ten list. If I only have that one phrase in memory on Google, I can't find it.
The problem is that you +'ed it too much. If you search for +"+but +that +the +dread" you'll notice that it gives you some warnings. Google's ignoring all of the +'s you added, because you're using some of them incorrectly. ("dread" is not a stop word, for example)
Instead, try searching for "but +that +the dread". Then you'll get what you're looking for.
Wow, that's so informative! (uh, that wasn't sarcastic) It doesn't actually/say/ it's ignoring them, it just says some of them are redundant. Thanks!
I wanted to make sure that it was still a phrase search, though, and the sites didn't just come up because but, that, the, and dread were "kinda near" each other or all there or something. Removing the quotation marks (so it's not a phrase search) gets me irrelevant pages. Rearranging the words WITHIN the quotation marks gets me irrelevant pages. So far so good.
Now I search for something very obscure to get a phrase to phrase-quote. I downloaded the complete works of william shakespeare (etext -- other formats ) [1]
First I wanted to use only stop words (hehe. I got the list from most common words in English.)
Now I wrote a program (C++ unfortunately, I don't know perl:( ) to go through the text file word-by-word, resetting a CurrentPhrase and CurrentNumWords whenever it passes a word that isn't one of these:"of a to in is that it for was on are as with at be this from I by what", and possibly setting HighPhrase to be CurrentPhrase if the CurrentNumWords is more than the HighestNumWords. Thus, at the end, we'll end up with a HighPhrase that has the most number of words in a row taken only from these allowed words. The phrase it ends up with? "from what it is to a", which grepping shaks12.txt I find at:
"
Oph. Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?
Ham. Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner transform
honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can
translate beauty into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox,
but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once.
Oph. Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
"
Now first I try altavista:
+"from what it is to a", which instantly (~ 1 second) spits back "We found 45 results:" including what looks like lots of hamlet. Now -hamlet +"from what it is to a" -hamlet:
We found 10 results:
Now google. First I tried:
+"+from +what +it +is +to +a" which sputtered for such a long time loading that I thought I would get back "your search took too long, please make it more specific." (which had happened to me before). But waiting patiently, I got:
"Results 1 - 10 of about 39. Search took 30.45 seconds" (which mostly look like they're from Hamlet, too)
I was thinking, wow, I'd never had a search take that long. It was probably because these search words are rarely if ever asked for together so that their intersections were hardly cached at all. Next, I wanted to make sure that most of the 39 were relevant, so: +"+from +what +it +is +to +a" -hamlet
Brings: Results 1 - 1 of 1. Search took 30.54 seconds
I was surprised it took this long again, since I would think it would have had my results cached from the first time around. When I hit the search button again, it only took 0.31 seconds to come up with the same results.
Anyway, what does this prove? Altavista is STILL better at phrase searching: google missed 9 things with the phrase "from what it is to a" but without Hamlet. (Apparently this means it didn't miss any WITH hamlet because Google's 39 original hits + 9 missed non-hamlet ones = Altavista's 45 hits). Plus, Altavista answered instantly and google took >30 seconds. What does this prove? That Altavista is better for phrase searching, even when you obey all of Google's tempersome rules.:)
Robert Viragh
[1]FYI, this is 5.2 megabytes, and gets paginated into 2184 pages in M$ Word, 10-sized font. At 50 non-blank lines per page, if Shakespeare had been productive for 50 years, working 16 hours a day 6 days a week, he would have been able to spend 2.2 hours on each line.* Prolific my ass.
On the other hand, there is not a line of his you could find that has not been specifically, actively considered for at least half an hour in total by a single scholar. Of course not all of them are interested in all of Shakespeare. I am not so obsessed with him as I appear to be either. Only actually read a few of his plays, and a relatively small percent of the ones I was SUPPOSED to in school.
*Numbers: 50 years * 52 weeks * 6 days per week * 26 hours per week = 249,600 hours. 2184 pages * 50 lines per page = 109200. Divide the two answers = 2.2 hours per line.) ~
Slashdot Mirror
One casino datamining and discriminating is bad enough. But can you imagine a... of, oh you know...
~
Maybe you should write The Idiot's Guide to Coffee. Cuz' next to you, let's face it, we're all idiots. Here I was thinking my 7 USD *$s coffee was worth a turd. What must have I been thinking?
~
We've had this for years. Just melt dry ice.
~
At first I read "biofeedback" for "Optical Feedback" in the title "Optical Feedback For Perfect Coffee", which immediately set off in my mind the idea that you have a feedback loop to adjust the amount of sugar and cream in your coffee, as well as its "strength" (the slidable thing that looks like the sliding scale on your toaster [y'know "bread/charcoal"] ). This isn't what the article actually is, the article just makes sure that there's a 1:1 correlation between the strength you ask for and the strength you get. My problem is I don't know what strength I want, and I don't know how much sugar I want and I don't know how much milk I want. My wife makes me the perfect cup of coffee, but that's because she spent years trying different combinations and thereby adjusting her own internal feedback loop, until she got a "feel" for how much of each setting made for the best cup of coffee.
:]) -- think "alpha channel", where RGB is coffee-strength/sugar level/milk level.
Now if in addition to this new machine in the article, which makes sure that the setting specified is the setting received, there were a second machine that adjusted this setting, and also doled sugar and cream out for you, based on a feedback loop whereby after each cup you would specify 1) how much you liked it. Or, for advanced users, 2) whether it was too sweet for you or too bitter and 3) whether it was too strong for you or too dull. (Too hard coffee or too hard cream). The beauty of this is that with even the most modest OS and statistical software the first variable alone (how much you liked it -- even if you don't know why you did or did not like it) would let the average user approach PerfectCup after about 7 cups (rough estimate) of more grossly suboptimal coffee.
Further tweaks could perfect the milk/cream ratio ("Half and half" is just such a ball-park estimate
Of course each coffee bean would be associated with a particular set of settings, and each member of your household would also. (Just don't let Microsoft find out or you'll need a Passport(R) to get your morning cup of joe.:])
Oh, and you could sometimes ask for something more jolty and sometimes something more sweet. Like one bean for one person might have a "morning" (jolty), "meal" (nice good cup) and "desert" (rather sweet, milder) setting. What do we say, gang? Worth starting on sourceforge?
this reminds me. Tell someone "Say boast three times fast." ("okay. boast, boast, boast.") "Now what do you put in a toaster?" ("toast") "No, you mentally deficient individual, you put bread in. Toast is what you take out." [joint polite laugh.]
--
Disclaimer: I am vegan. I would exploit the above software to get me a decent cup of coffee with real-non-dairy-creamer (the kind that isn't laced with whey) or else with soy milk. The real reason I want to make the OS opensource is so I could compile me these custom mods. That and ssh'ing into my coffee maker. ("What are you doing?" "Oh I'm just logging onto my coffee server [ha] to set the timer for a nice big cup of coffee when I get back home. Wait a minute lemme check the web cam to see if I left my mug in. Yep." How cool is that?)
~
haha. good one. just don't tell intel, or they'll have a hissy-fit, back the whole thing to hell and back with capital, and turn IBM-y with the linux support. And here they were quaking in their boots about how efficient linux was ;-)
~
Well keep up the good work. If only every slashdot post were as well-thought-out and, more important, /clear/. Even when you rant, you rant with form :)
~
~
I love your reasoning. Have you written any books?
~
And I especially like the way I need 650 megabytes of one-time giberish if I want to transmit 650 megabytes of data. Do you think has encrypted its source tree? You bet. You think it keeps the encryption key on as many disks as the source? NBL.
And another thing: you don't need to disclose the length of the message. Just set a size for every message, say, 1000 characters, and always send 1000. If you only have 40 characters, then just XOR 0 with 9960 bits from the one-time pad. It's equally giberish. If you want more than 1000 characters, then write near the end "Continued next message.". Through a one-time-pad method, you are guaranteed to be secure, but you need to have met securely with anyone you want to communicate with, and exchanged as much random data as you ever want to send. Random data is hard to find and keep secure, when there's lots and lots and lots of it. (As much as you ever need to transmit before you meet securely again). Through PGP, if I want only you to see a message, I get your private key from a server I trust. It doesn't matter if anyone else sees the key, they can't unencrypt what I encrypt just because they have it too. That's why it's ASYMMETRIC. Only the private key can unencrypt. So now here I am at an unsecure computer, with my every step watched and recorded, I download my own public key, I encrypt a file on the harddrive, and I erase the original. They've seen my key, but they still can't unencrypt anything.
~
Dude you're such a karma whore. The next time there's any story about encryption, I'm going to write "Sounds pretty slick, but how secure is it if you don't make sure no one's looking over your shoulder while you compose the message before it's encrypted?" or "Sounds pretty slick, but how secure is it if you accidentally publish you private key?"
jeez.
~
Shrodinger's cat, Meow
plus 128 more cats
now we meow secure.
~
Shoeringer's cat, Meow, plus 128 more cats, Now we meow secure.
~
methinks I remember an unbreakable cryptosystem, also via satellite. This piece does not mention Professor Rabin.
~
Are you kidding? With the right timing you can get 80 gigs of prime memory for $120 + shipping.
~
Article says there's a 69.3 MB/s throughput, a 2 MB buffer, and an 8.9 msec average seek time. Let's assume the average seek time.
Time 0: seek to Stream 1.(takes 8.9 ms)
Time 8.9: read 0.5 megabytes.(takes 7.21 ms)
[7.21 is (0.5 megs / 69.3 throughput)]
Time 16.11: seek to Stream 2.(takes 8.9 ms)
Time 25.01: read 0.5 megabytes.(takes 7.21)
Time 32.22: seek to stream 3.(takes 8.9 ms)
Time 41.12: read 0.5 megabytes.(takes 7.21)
Time 48.33: seek to stream 4.(takes 8.9 ms)
Time 57.23: read 0.5 megabytes.(takes 7.21 ms)
Time 64.44: give software your 2meg buffer.
Now 4 streams at 8MB/sec = 32 megs per second.
That means you need 2 megabytes of data every (2/32=) 0.0625 seconds.
You only actually get 2 megabytes of data every 0.06444 seconds (as shown above), which means you need a seek time just slightly better than average, and we're assuming that software will cache 0.5 megs ahead in each stream. If there's enough RAM, you can cache significantly more than that. (So that software asks for 5 megabytes at a time, in each of the streams one after the other. Then you approach what they say is 8 streams. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume software that caches more than just 0.5 megs, or one sixteenth of a second.)
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Everyone take this survey to get Dell to start offering AMD Athlon:d _survey.htm?keycode=6Vc00&DGV :)
http://www.dell.com/html/us/segments/dhs/intel_am
But go to a different page before you paste it in, so that they won't know we're all coming from slashdot.
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which leads to:
"Microsoft can't play its "embrace and extend" game with GPL-licensed software because the company can't appropriate and modify the code. If Linux had been released under the BSD license, Microsoft would have probably already released a version of Linux, Linux++ or Linux# or L-Nux, with a variety of maddeningly incompatible oddities that taken together would make it even more difficult to develop applications for Linux."
(The first half of the article drew a parallel with IBM in the old days, when it changed its processor code not to become more efficient than upstart Amdahl, but to make it incompatible, allowing IBM to capitalize on the fact that if you wanted a processor that ran all code written for the IBM, you needed to buy an IBM.)
It's an interesting story, though, and the author tries very hard to keep it interesting. ("But I've included lots of subheadings so you can skim around, if you like."..."Still with me?"..."Doubtful? Read this:")
Of course this isn't news for any of us who remember ASCII back when it was ASCII (ie "standard", as opposed to duffed just enough by Microsoft to make any Windows text outside what's on a keyboard totally nondeterministic when used between DOS and Windows).
One question for the gang: the author seems to assume that you can GPL a standard (he mentions "HTML, JavaScript, CSS", which last time I checked weren't source codes but standards), which keeps Microsoft from adding proprietary extentions. Is this in fact the case? I certainly haven't heard of a standard that's GPL'd. And if it is, does that mean Microsoft can use a binary implementation of the standard to add its proprietary hooks onto, as an "extention"? This can't affect the GPL, because it doesn't even USE the source code, let alone modify it. (IE, if ASCII were a binary standard, could it find an implementation of this standard with a nice API, then write a wrapper which uses it but makes each #!xyz!# series, where xyz are 000-999, show up in a Microsoft, incompatible, way, with a special symbol associated with it instead? It's not modifying the standard, it's just using an executable made with it...)
...what about LGPL? Can it "#include <REAL LGPL'd ASCII.h>" inside "MSASCII.h", where MASASCII duffs up the standard, and end up with something incompatible on a source level, but not in violation of LGPL because "REAL LGPL'd ASCII.h" doesn't change??
But see, I think the the author's wrong: even if Microsoft were making linux, the GPL'd linux we all know and love, then its MSLinux, which would be commercial, although the source-code would be distributed, would still be incompatible with every other linux. So what if you have the source code? We don't have the source code to MS-Word, but we've certainly reverse engineered it enough that we might as well have -- we have filters that translate Word into any other format you want. Doesn't mean that Word doesn't have more market share because of the fact that it doesn't output richtext by default: on the contrary, that's what keeps it on every one of my coworker's desktops. We need to read our attachments!
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very good. i said about the same thing a little later (click my user #id) and whatever comment of mine is before this one, "Re: Possible Work Around".
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Remember folks: any program that "authenticates" by sending something that it computes into a register in volatile memory, is easily crackable. Find the code in the assembly where it's done computing the fingerprint, and substitute the pre-cooked, freeware fingerprint into that memory area. Duh.
Works on lockable-memory architectures, too, because you're hacking the binary itself, not intruding on its memory area during run-time. Of course, if it's a smart client, it'll check it's own size with complex CRCs and stuff, but then you can just find the part of the assembly where its done computing its own CRC, and then substitute the precooked CRC from the original client. In other words, any security that isn't MATHEMATICAL, that TRUSTS the client to do its own authentication
Repeat after me: the moment you let someone run your client on a machine you don't control, you can no longer trust your client, however well you designed it, to perform any calculation correctly, to return any data correctly, or in any other way behave how you want/expect it to, unless there is a mathematical reason that the client can only treat its data a certain way. (For instance because it doesn't have all the information necessary to perform it a differenct way, or because there are public keys that result from the calculation only when correctly done, and which you can check with a private key, etc.)
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I agree that it's important to have editorial discretion and, after all, you never remove posts. It just might be walking a dangerous line is all.
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hahahahaha. I'm laughing mao. This can't, of course, be serious. here:"We've developed a unique client-side nozzle (CSN), which functions just like a conventional modem" heh. And:
Dial-up/ISDN 128 Kbps
Frame relay (T-1) and DSL (copper wire) 1.5 Mbps
DSL (air interfaces) and Ethernet (LAN) 1 Gbps
Optical fiber (OC-192) 9.95 Gbps
Optical fiber (OC-192 with DWDM) 318 Gbps
WaterNet Unlimited
Almost had me fooled, Zigurd. Did you just make that site? How'd you get it registered so fast and, more importantly, why "dutch"?
Oh wait, click "who we are" at the bottom of that page. April fools.
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Okay. So we transmit through the flourescent lights (/. article), which of course doesn't work if you're trying to get some shut-eye or setting up GOOD lighting that bathes your room in light. Now we transmit through the power lines, which doesn't work if you live in California at the wrong time or if you have vacuum cleaners or massive electrovactic flux capacitors or whatever: point is, there's light radiation all over the place, there's power radiation all over the place, hell, there's even radio pollution all over the place (which is why Bluetooth's failing so miserably, as we all know...). But what means of communication do we have that has no parasite devices riding it yet? What magic, wonderful link is there between us and the outside world, over which there is transmited the equivilent of terabytes of raw, reliable data, but which currently isn't at all modulated, although it easily can be made to be, so that rather than what amounts to static today, we get real-live bits?
/that/ today? My roughest calculations show an upper bounds, based on where brownian motion starts to interfere with your data, in excess of 2.82 exobauds of data per household. (The lower bounds, based on the pressure difference that you can modulate not when no water flows through the pipes [and when brownian motion therefore is the only thing screwing you] but rather when everyone turns on every water faucet on full, flushes all their toilets, and opens the fire hydrants outside, /still/ results in good, clean data of about 750kbps, with generous redundancy for error-correction. Either way, lower bounds, upper bounds, that's a good hefty amount of bandwidth).
we need to start sending last-mile data down the water pipes.
Yes, it's true, we have a system that currently can vary in pressure by hundreds of pounds per square inch, that currently has a fairly fixed pressure whose modulations no data-gobbling devices currently utilize, and which services a relatively few number of homes per pipe. Sure, it'll be a shared bandwidth -- or "pipe diameter" -- among all the homes in an area, but then so wasn't broadband cable -- and who's laughing at
Latency? That's estimatable from the speed of sound through water -- since sound is, after all, modulation -- which is "1400 and 1570 m/sec (4593 and 5151 ft/sec). This is roughly 1.5 km/sec (just under 1 mile/sec) or about four times faster than sound travels through air." (Although it "depends on the temperature of the water, its salinity, and the pressure ") Now granted, a second to travel a mile might seem excessive, but bear in mind that, based on the above, the information still travels four times as fast as if you were to yell it. Maybe we can have an asymmetric system, so that you dial in with your modem, and have downloads come through the fat pipe. Okay, enough silliness.
(i'm kidding)
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Does this work through filtered power sources? I know any decent UPS works so that the power you're actually getting comes from the battery, past a filter, and what goes /into/ the battery is the raw power, also past a filter/surge protector.
All I know is, there's not a 'raw' connection anywhere near my computer -- just a long extention cord (the one-connection kind) going into my UPS, which leads to a power strip. Maybe it'll be good for all the lo-tech homes, though...
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I really just wanted to find something that translated "dulce et decorum est pro patria mori". I didn't look at the page I ended up with very hard though -- it just translated it as "it is sweet to die for one's country" and not "it is sweet /and proper/..." (et decorum).
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I wanted to make sure that it was still a phrase search, though, and the sites didn't just come up because but, that, the, and dread were "kinda near" each other or all there or something. Removing the quotation marks (so it's not a phrase search) gets me irrelevant pages. Rearranging the words WITHIN the quotation marks gets me irrelevant pages. So far so good. Now I search for something very obscure to get a phrase to phrase-quote. I downloaded the complete works of william shakespeare (etext -- other formats ) [1]
First I wanted to use only stop words (hehe. I got the list from most common words in English.)
Now I wrote a program (C++ unfortunately, I don't know perl
"
Oph. Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?
Ham. Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner transform
honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can
translate beauty into his likeness. This was sometime a paradox,
but now the time gives it proof. I did love you once.
Oph. Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
"
Now first I try altavista: +"from what it is to a", which instantly (~ 1 second) spits back "We found 45 results:" including what looks like lots of hamlet. Now -hamlet
+"from what it is to a" -hamlet:
We found 10 results:
Now google. First I tried: +"+from +what +it +is +to +a" which sputtered for such a long time loading that I thought I would get back "your search took too long, please make it more specific." (which had happened to me before). But waiting patiently, I got:
"Results 1 - 10 of about 39. Search took 30.45 seconds" (which mostly look like they're from Hamlet, too)
I was thinking, wow, I'd never had a search take that long. It was probably because these search words are rarely if ever asked for together so that their intersections were hardly cached at all. Next, I wanted to make sure that most of the 39 were relevant, so:
+"+from +what +it +is +to +a" -hamlet
Brings: Results 1 - 1 of 1. Search took 30.54 seconds
I was surprised it took this long again, since I would think it would have had my results cached from the first time around. When I hit the search button again, it only took 0.31 seconds to come up with the same results.
Anyway, what does this prove? Altavista is STILL better at phrase searching: google missed 9 things with the phrase "from what it is to a" but without Hamlet. (Apparently this means it didn't miss any WITH hamlet because Google's 39 original hits + 9 missed non-hamlet ones = Altavista's 45 hits). Plus, Altavista answered instantly and google took >30 seconds. What does this prove? That Altavista is better for phrase searching, even when you obey all of Google's tempersome rules.
Robert Viragh
[1]FYI, this is 5.2 megabytes, and gets paginated into 2184 pages in M$ Word, 10-sized font. At 50 non-blank lines per page, if Shakespeare had been productive for 50 years, working 16 hours a day 6 days a week, he would have been able to spend 2.2 hours on each line.* Prolific my ass. On the other hand, there is not a line of his you could find that has not been specifically, actively considered for at least half an hour in total by a single scholar. Of course not all of them are interested in all of Shakespeare. I am not so obsessed with him as I appear to be either. Only actually read a few of his plays, and a relatively small percent of the ones I was SUPPOSED to in school.
*Numbers: 50 years * 52 weeks * 6 days per week * 26 hours per week = 249,600 hours. 2184 pages * 50 lines per page = 109200. Divide the two answers = 2.2 hours per line.)
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