their order page only requires that the cardholder's name and e-mail addresses be filled out. i can only imagine how many computers bill gates could afford.;)
i'm sorry if i sound anti-religious here, but spirituality and taking part in a religion have nothing to do with morality.
people who are dependent on religion to learn morals will have a hard time learning to spot when their chosen religion is doing "bad" things. just stop and think about al qaeda, kkk, those people who bombed abortion clinics in the name of some sort of christianity, or any other infamous religious terrorist groups. the world abounds in them.
true morality is simply taught by parents setting an example for their kids. this takes time and attention from the parents. by attending religious events with their children, parents end up spending more time with their children and generally set a good example (people in religious events i've attended tend to be pretty considerate and respectful toward one another) for their children to follow.
i don't mean any offense to any religion out there, but that is my pan-religious explanation of why religion is often associated with morality.
my apologies, wrote my last post without fully understanding the situation.
basically, when your browser is connecting to https://thoughtcrime.org/ the site is sending out a certificate saying that they are www.amazon.com. internet explorer *does* catch this problem if you don't change the name entry (for instance in your hosts file) since the site is quite directly showing you a certificate that doesn't belong to it.
the real problem is revealed when you change your computer's association of the name www.amazon.com to point to thoughtcrime.org's machine. at this point, when you visit the fake https://www.amazon.com/ your browser receives a certificate that says it's from www.amazon.com and indeed your computer thinks that www.amazon.com is that machine.
so the real problem is that at this point, internet explorer (and yes, konqueror) doesn't check the chain of who issued the certificate, it just sees that the certificate seems to match the dude who's showing it to you and proceeds without an error. in fact, the certificate that internet explorer just accepted was manufactured by the folks at thoughtcrime, who are not the certificate authority dudes that should be the only ones allowed to issue certificates!
Excellent points, since there should always be alternative non Palladium compliant hardware around as long as there's a demand for it. =)
The answer to who needs hardware to do the security work would be everyone. You can find ways around any software solution. However, if your hardware denies you permission to do things, you're outta luck.
n this case, the hardware chip is not merely a cryptography accelerator. The chip should have your unique key stored inside it in hardware and the key should not be accessible to outside software (so hopefully no cheesy Microsoft viruses will be fishing for them). The purpose of the chip is not to encrypt more quickly than you otherwise could, it basically sits there and everything you do you have to ask it for permission first.
This new startup isn't offering anything new. Just look at the SpamAssassin page. There's a link to Deersoft's Microsoft Outlook version of SpamAssassin, which already exists and uses Razor, so uses the same democratic spam blocking techniques.
"makes sense in theory if you know geometry?????" maybe if you understand geometry but not if you understand compression. here is an explanation of how compression really works. the article starts off on the right foot by bringing up the pigeonhole principle and bitspace:
according to the pigeonhole principle, to represent an arbitrary string of n bits, you need n bits. think about it, there are 2^n possible configurations of n bits so you absolutely have to be able to express 2^n possible pieces of data. that should be fairly clear.
so traditional lossless compression really works by rearranging these representations of the 2^n bits such that you can use shorter representations for things that you expect to see more frequently (based on patterns or perhaps just plain statistical frequency). (at this point, maybe look up basic huffman coding as an example of statistical compression techniques)
getting back to the zeosync thing, though:
the article then continues on by asserting that you cannot get back higher dimensional data from lower dimensions, but that you can get lower dimensional data from higher dimensions. this is true. however, it's not for free.
in a higher dimension, you actually have an infinite number of mappings for the same lower dimensional piece of data. for instance, the two dimensional point (1, 2) can be equally well represented as (1, 2, 0) or (1, 2, 192). developing a one to one mapping of a higher dimensional space to a lower dimensional space completely defeats the purpose of a higher dimensional space being used, since at that point a 2 dimensional representation will be identical to the three dimensional representation in terms of useful information.
now they claim they have a relational differentiation encoding technique that can represent a point that is both a square and a cube. this is not a big deal. let's say a 2 dimensional square (2, 2) is mapped into 3 dimensions. for example, we can choose to map it as (2, 2, 0) or (2, 2, 2). note that (2, 2, 2) is a cube, just as they predicted! wow!
somehow they claim that this ability will result in some savings when compressing, but the real problem is that (2, 2, 2) takes more space to store than (2, 2) and it is also now ambiguous what it means. you'd need to tack on another piece of information like how many dimensions to interpret the result as.
so in summary, at best, they are breaking even with the straight 2 dimensional representation of the data and at worst they are requiring additional space by using higher dimensions.
(yes, i know no one will read this post probably, but still, these zeosync guys were trying to convince people that their techniques would work by means of throwing around buzzwords. that's inexcusable but fairly typical of vaporware. they're trying to take advantage of the fact that it's unintuitive to think in dimensions higher than 3, so people will be less able to shoot them down.)
There aren't enough video game lobbyists pressuring Congress. Keep in mind, the movie industry does contribute quite a bit of money to various political campaigns....
his site is a.com while official school sites of major universities tend to be.edu. that should be a big clue for the user.
besides, as others have pointed out, he has disclaimers stating that he is not affiliated with the official school site and. he should not be obligated to remove helpful links from his page unless deep linking is really prohibited. heh.
you realize that by disassembling the program to skip the license agreement you just broke the law right? reverse engineering software is not quite legal.;)
Of course this all depends on the definition of virus, but let's look closer:
Spyware installs itself on the user's computer while the user is installing something he/she considers useful (e.g. Kazaa). This is much the same mechanism by which trojan viruses work.
Spyware causes the user's computer to surreptitiously behave in a fashion that is usually undesirable to the user. Viruses usually cause some sort of harm, so the similarity is there also.
The only real step that is lacking is spyware being able to spread from user to user directly instead of being downloaded along with the main application.
Maybe spyware should be in a new class of software called "parasite" instead of "virus." Of course parasitic computing is already a term that has been coined, so it might be too late. =)
We cannot depend on the United States government alone to stop spammers since more and more spam is coming from overseas. Remember all those recent bits about so much spam coming from China that ISP's are starting to reject all mail from China?
The real solution would be to improve technology to make spam much more difficult. For instance, the open relay lists are a good start.
The United States government cannot govern those in other countries.
if the pen replaces both the mouse and the keyboard, imagine trying to aim a weapon while moving....
thus there is no way this pen device (a new optical mouse) could replace both mouse and keyboard. i must admit, i think it would be a very usable replacement for just mice, though since people are probably more precise with their fingers than with their whole hands. (i use mice with my fingers. =)
Here is a quick comment about about the graphics, though:
The game looks great, but one thing that seems to be lacking is a real justification for the 3d graphics. The gameplay is still largely the same 2d game with a few different elevations (like Starcraft), so there doesn't seem to be much of a real gain in switching to 3d graphics.
Of course, one big drawback of switching to 3d graphics is that the minimum system requirement is much higher now. Starcraft ran on my old Pentium-133 really well, whereas Warcraft 3 actually requires a halfway decent machine by today's standards. In order to keep the system requirements reasonable, Blizzard did make the models fairly low poly, though. Hopefully multiplayer performance won't bring decent machines to a crawl (Are they planning on allowing 8 player games in the release version?).
In my opinion, they should have kept the game a 2d game to keep the system requirements extremely low since the game is still effectively a 2d game.
No, someone has been spreading around an erroneous interpretation of the paper. From the abstract:
"This reduction of total cost from L^(2.852...+o(1)) to L^(1.976...+o(1) means that a ((3.009...+o(1))d)-digit factorization with the new machine has the same cost as a d-digit factorization with previous machines."
In plain terms: A factorization of a number that has 3 times as many digits will have the same cost as a the number did before.
Hope this clarifies why this is a breakthrough (that may be important).
The trick? In an ellipse, if you shoot a ray from one of the foci and bounce off the ellipse, you'll pass through the other focus. In effect, the sound that comes from one focus (and goes out in all directions) will bounce off the walls and converge again at the other focus.
Slashdot folks are the "grown ups" most in touch with their inner children. After all, where else is it particularly cool to still play with Lego (Mindstorm)s?
Slashdot Mirror
https://secure.castle.org.uk/cgi-bin/ctlor.pl
;)
their order page only requires that the cardholder's name and e-mail addresses be filled out. i can only imagine how many computers bill gates could afford.
jpg is a lossy compression scheme and png is lossless, so png is much more of a replacement for the lossless gif format. =)
i'm sorry if i sound anti-religious here, but spirituality and taking part in a religion have nothing to do with morality.
people who are dependent on religion to learn morals will have a hard time learning to spot when their chosen religion is doing "bad" things. just stop and think about al qaeda, kkk, those people who bombed abortion clinics in the name of some sort of christianity, or any other infamous religious terrorist groups. the world abounds in them.
true morality is simply taught by parents setting an example for their kids. this takes time and attention from the parents. by attending religious events with their children, parents end up spending more time with their children and generally set a good example (people in religious events i've attended tend to be pretty considerate and respectful toward one another) for their children to follow.
i don't mean any offense to any religion out there, but that is my pan-religious explanation of why religion is often associated with morality.
i doubt it. the ps2 just doesn't have the muscle for it. i doom3 is pretty texture heavy and the ps2 just can't handle massive texturing.
my apologies, wrote my last post without fully understanding the situation.
basically, when your browser is connecting to https://thoughtcrime.org/ the site is sending out a certificate saying that they are www.amazon.com. internet explorer *does* catch this problem if you don't change the name entry (for instance in your hosts file) since the site is quite directly showing you a certificate that doesn't belong to it.
the real problem is revealed when you change your computer's association of the name www.amazon.com to point to thoughtcrime.org's machine. at this point, when you visit the fake https://www.amazon.com/ your browser receives a certificate that says it's from www.amazon.com and indeed your computer thinks that www.amazon.com is that machine.
so the real problem is that at this point, internet explorer (and yes, konqueror) doesn't check the chain of who issued the certificate, it just sees that the certificate seems to match the dude who's showing it to you and proceeds without an error. in fact, the certificate that internet explorer just accepted was manufactured by the folks at thoughtcrime, who are not the certificate authority dudes that should be the only ones allowed to issue certificates!
no, no, the vulnerability is that they can pretend that they are amazon.com even though they aren't really amazon.com.
Excellent points, since there should always be alternative non Palladium compliant hardware around as long as there's a demand for it. =)
The answer to who needs hardware to do the security work would be everyone. You can find ways around any software solution. However, if your hardware denies you permission to do things, you're outta luck.
n this case, the hardware chip is not merely a cryptography accelerator. The chip should have your unique key stored inside it in hardware and the key should not be accessible to outside software (so hopefully no cheesy Microsoft viruses will be fishing for them). The purpose of the chip is not to encrypt more quickly than you otherwise could, it basically sits there and everything you do you have to ask it for permission first.
This new startup isn't offering anything new. Just look at the SpamAssassin page. There's a link to Deersoft's Microsoft Outlook version of SpamAssassin, which already exists and uses Razor, so uses the same democratic spam blocking techniques.
http://www.deersoft.com/sp_pro.html
"makes sense in theory if you know geometry?????" maybe if you understand geometry but not if you understand compression. here is an explanation of how compression really works. the article starts off on the right foot by bringing up the pigeonhole principle and bitspace:
according to the pigeonhole principle, to represent an arbitrary string of n bits, you need n bits. think about it, there are 2^n possible configurations of n bits so you absolutely have to be able to express 2^n possible pieces of data. that should be fairly clear.
so traditional lossless compression really works by rearranging these representations of the 2^n bits such that you can use shorter representations for things that you expect to see more frequently (based on patterns or perhaps just plain statistical frequency). (at this point, maybe look up basic huffman coding as an example of statistical compression techniques)
getting back to the zeosync thing, though:
the article then continues on by asserting that you cannot get back higher dimensional data from lower dimensions, but that you can get lower dimensional data from higher dimensions. this is true. however, it's not for free.
in a higher dimension, you actually have an infinite number of mappings for the same lower dimensional piece of data. for instance, the two dimensional point (1, 2) can be equally well represented as (1, 2, 0) or (1, 2, 192). developing a one to one mapping of a higher dimensional space to a lower dimensional space completely defeats the purpose of a higher dimensional space being used, since at that point a 2 dimensional representation will be identical to the three dimensional representation in terms of useful information.
now they claim they have a relational differentiation encoding technique that can represent a point that is both a square and a cube. this is not a big deal. let's say a 2 dimensional square (2, 2) is mapped into 3 dimensions. for example, we can choose to map it as (2, 2, 0) or (2, 2, 2). note that (2, 2, 2) is a cube, just as they predicted! wow!
somehow they claim that this ability will result in some savings when compressing, but the real problem is that (2, 2, 2) takes more space to store than (2, 2) and it is also now ambiguous what it means. you'd need to tack on another piece of information like how many dimensions to interpret the result as.
so in summary, at best, they are breaking even with the straight 2 dimensional representation of the data and at worst they are requiring additional space by using higher dimensions.
(yes, i know no one will read this post probably, but still, these zeosync guys were trying to convince people that their techniques would work by means of throwing around buzzwords. that's inexcusable but fairly typical of vaporware. they're trying to take advantage of the fact that it's unintuitive to think in dimensions higher than 3, so people will be less able to shoot them down.)
That is a complete sentence.
Nothing (subject) could be (verb) scarier (adjective ).
Don't be distracted by the other somewhat awkward clauses in the sentence.
There aren't enough video game lobbyists pressuring Congress. Keep in mind, the movie industry does contribute quite a bit of money to various political campaigns....
his site is a .com while official school sites of major universities tend to be .edu. that should be a big clue for the user.
besides, as others have pointed out, he has disclaimers stating that he is not affiliated with the official school site and. he should not be obligated to remove helpful links from his page unless deep linking is really prohibited. heh.
you realize that by disassembling the program to skip the license agreement you just broke the law right? reverse engineering software is not quite legal. ;)
Of course this all depends on the definition of virus, but let's look closer:
Spyware installs itself on the user's computer while the user is installing something he/she considers useful (e.g. Kazaa). This is much the same mechanism by which trojan viruses work.
Spyware causes the user's computer to surreptitiously behave in a fashion that is usually undesirable to the user. Viruses usually cause some sort of harm, so the similarity is there also.
The only real step that is lacking is spyware being able to spread from user to user directly instead of being downloaded along with the main application.
Maybe spyware should be in a new class of software called "parasite" instead of "virus." Of course parasitic computing is already a term that has been coined, so it might be too late. =)
We cannot depend on the United States government alone to stop spammers since more and more spam is coming from overseas. Remember all those recent bits about so much spam coming from China that ISP's are starting to reject all mail from China?
The real solution would be to improve technology to make spam much more difficult. For instance, the open relay lists are a good start.
The United States government cannot govern those in other countries.
if the pen replaces both the mouse and the keyboard, imagine trying to aim a weapon while moving....
thus there is no way this pen device (a new optical mouse) could replace both mouse and keyboard. i must admit, i think it would be a very usable replacement for just mice, though since people are probably more precise with their fingers than with their whole hands. (i use mice with my fingers. =)
Here is a quick comment about about the graphics, though:
The game looks great, but one thing that seems to be lacking is a real justification for the 3d graphics. The gameplay is still largely the same 2d game with a few different elevations (like Starcraft), so there doesn't seem to be much of a real gain in switching to 3d graphics.
Of course, one big drawback of switching to 3d graphics is that the minimum system requirement is much higher now. Starcraft ran on my old Pentium-133 really well, whereas Warcraft 3 actually requires a halfway decent machine by today's standards. In order to keep the system requirements reasonable, Blizzard did make the models fairly low poly, though. Hopefully multiplayer performance won't bring decent machines to a crawl (Are they planning on allowing 8 player games in the release version?).
In my opinion, they should have kept the game a 2d game to keep the system requirements extremely low since the game is still effectively a 2d game.
No, someone has been spreading around an erroneous interpretation of the paper. From the abstract:
"This reduction of total cost from L^(2.852...+o(1)) to L^(1.976...+o(1) means that a ((3.009...+o(1))d)-digit factorization with the new machine has the same cost as a d-digit factorization with previous machines."
In plain terms: A factorization of a number that has 3 times as many digits will have the same cost as a the number did before.
Hope this clarifies why this is a breakthrough (that may be important).
That effect is based on ellipses (not parabolas).
The trick? In an ellipse, if you shoot a ray from one of the foci and bounce off the ellipse, you'll pass through the other focus. In effect, the sound that comes from one focus (and goes out in all directions) will bounce off the walls and converge again at the other focus.
i thought there were crabs today that were that size or bigger.
http://www.vlewis.net/page2a.html
the giant spider crab apparently has been 3.7m.
This person is clearly a hardcore programmer.
"as to 2) filter the politics - can't stress that enough."
Normal people would have labeled the third item in the list "3". On the other hand, real programmers count from 0... =)
Heh, this is exactly the right audience!
Slashdot folks are the "grown ups" most in touch with their inner children. After all, where else is it particularly cool to still play with Lego (Mindstorm)s?
carmack is cool in that he's one of the last bastions of hope for non microsoft controlled game development (i.e. he uses open gl).
long live open gl (hopefully)!
ouch, now that would be all too fitting (being beaten up by a guy named fluffypancakes). ;)
They posted the Reuter's article under "Lifestyles" instead of "Technology" or "Science."