So basically even if your adversary has a trillion dollar budget to attack you with they CANNOT tap that fiber line without destroying the communication in the process.
With a trillion-dollar budget, my adversary could mount a man-in-the-middle attack. Part of the process necessary for quantum encryption to work is a second communications channel, which the parties use to communicate which bits in the quantum stream to use for encryption. The parties then use that channel (or possibly a third channel) to transmit the encrypted data. If an evesdropper can mount a man-in-the-middle attack against both (all three) channels, then he/she can compromise the encryption. With a trillion-dollar budget, this should be doable in many cases.
Here is a recursive solution that does not involve making a copy of the list. In addition, it is tail-recursive, which means that (if the compiler understands tail recursion) reversing long lists doesn't take up any more stack than reversing short lists.
This code also fixes a minor error in your code where you had an invalid forward declaration. Other than that (and minor things like formatting and symbol names (e.g., "list" instead of "item")), I would have come up with the same solution that you did. I don't really see the advantage of recursion in this case; the iterative version is easier to understand IMO. (At least, in C; in LISP, the recursive version is better.)
I've noticed that companies whose name begins with the letter "V" can't be trusted. For example, I have had business with about a dozen car dealerships. The only two that I had trouble with had names beginning with the letter "V". I don't do business any more with companies whose names begin with the letter "V". I would advise everyone else to do the same.
Oh, yeah, and the Van Allen Belt contains radiation that is dangerous or lethal to astronauts. Coincidence? I think not!
Also, "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" was the worst Star Trek movie evar. So don't trust the letter "V", even when it means "5".
While all of the innovations in the article were good innovations (i.e., used mostly for good purposes), I think that bad innovations (innovations used mostly for immoral purposes) should also be considered. In that vein, I would say that truck bombs, using passenger planes as cruise missiles, mailing anthrax, and other new methods of terrorism could be considered among the top 25 innovations, if you consider the effects that they have had on our society. Look at how much such terrorist acts have changed the world, in terms of making many governments more authoritarian (and some more militarily aggressive), and making average people even more sheep-like, than ever before.
It's a stockyard where cattle are kept while awaiting various kinds of inhumane treatment (e.g., branding, slaughter, etc.) at the hands of their depraved owners or their employees. The stockyard allows the vicious Cattle Processing Unit (CPU) to access the cattle more efficiently than having to fetch each cow individually from the open range when it's needed to be the subject of one vile torture or another.
Oh, wait, that's not a "cash cow"; that's a "cow cache".
I'd be pissed if I just paid $500k and they released the engine GPL a week later too.
OTOH, if they said "We're going to release the source code in December 2004", and let prospective customers know this, then those customers could decide whether or not it's worth it to buy a license (either to get it early, or to release a closed-source game).
What I thought was more interesting about that picture was the streaks (mid-lower right and top middle). Are they particles that are part of Saturn's rings? (There are also several white dots and a white streak in front of Iapetus, but I assume that they are caused by artifacts, cosmic rays, or transmission problems.)
The only people who caused unfair taxation are the lunkheads who actually passed the taxes into laws. They're the ones who should get 100% of the blame.
But they wouldn't have passed the taxes into law if they hadn't been pressured by special-interest groups, and the special-interest groups would not have pressured them if people had not been engaging in copyright infringement. So, while the "lunkheads" who passed these unfair taxes into law do deserve part of the blame, the blame must be shared with the special-interest groups and the copyright infringers.
An analogy is the increasingly totalitarian legislation that has been passed in the USA and some other countries since September 11, 2001. Congress and the President are largely responsible for the increasing erosion of our civil rights, but they would not have been able to enact such measures if it hadn't been for the terrorists. The blame for the increasing totalitarianism of our federal government must therefore be shared among Congress, the President, countries harboring terrorists, and the terrorists themselves. Similarly, the blame for DMCA, CDR tariffs, etc., must be shared among the various legislative bodies, the **AA and their equivalents in other nations, and the copyright infringers themselves.
As for simple layering the same protocol, consider this (silly example): Exchanging each letter with the letter n positions futher along the alphabet does not get more secure by being done multiple times.
That's true, but:
Adding layers doesn't make it any less secure,
Adding bits to a single key in the letter-shifting method by itself doesn't make it any more secure, and
Stacking that encryption method and a second method, each with a key size of n/2, will probably be more secure than using the letter-shifting method alone with a key size of n.
Your example caused me to think of a simplistic case where a combination of methods, each with a key size of n/number-of-methods, may be less secure than a single method with a key size of n: your letter-shifting method combined with a simple XOR method. In this case, it may be true that the combination is less secure than the XOR method by itself with twice the key size. This is due to the fact that the letter-shifting encryption method does not benefit at all from a larger key size, and thus taking bits from the method that does benefit from a larger key size to give it to a method that does not, will of course cause the security of the system as a whole to decrease. It is still more secure, though, than the letter-shifting method taken by itself.
Now, let's assume that the flaw in the letter-shifting method wasn't discovered unitl after it been used for a few years. We now have three types of encryption systems (relevant to this example):
The system that used letter-shifting by itself, with key size n.
The system that used XOR by itself, with key size n.
The system that used the letter-shifting method in combination with the XOR method, each with key size n/2.
After the flaw in the letter-shifting method is discovered, the people who used letter-shifting by itself are totally screwed, those who used XOR by itself are unaffected, and those who used the combination are partially-screwed. I'd rather be partially-screwed than totally screwed. The thing is, it's not possible to tell in advance whether or not a single encryption method is flawed. (If it were possible, such a method wouldn't have been used in the first place.) Using a combination of different methods is a way of avoiding putting all of one's eggs in one basket.
Can anyone state a case where a combination of encryption methods, where each has a different key of size n/number-of-methods, is demonstrably less secure than each and every one of the methods used by itself with key size n? I don't see how a chain of methods could be any weaker than its weakest link, even when the weakest link, used by itself, would have a larger key size.
Two forms of encryption, if composited, can be either weaker, the same, or stronger then either seperately
I can see this being the case if one uses the same key in each layer, but I don't see how this could happen if different layers use different keys.
An obvious advantage to using multiple layers of encryption is that if the algorithm used to encrypt one layer is broken, the other layers still offer some protection of the message.
"Welcome to the new millenium - it's gonna be a long one."
I was going to post the witty reply, "Not any longer than the last one.", but then I remembered that the Earth's rotation is slowing down, so the new millenium actually will be longer than the last one (possibly by several minutes), so my reply is instead "Not much longer than the last one.".
Those damn internet criminals that take from the rich and give to the poor. How dare they be romanticized.
If you think that you are comparing these "pirates" (i.e., massive copyright violators) with Robin Hood, then you're wrong. Robin Hood didn't take from the rich and give to the poor; he took from the tax collectors and gave to the taxed. Now, it turns out that most of the taxed were poor and most of the tax collectors were rich (or those working for the rich), but Robin Hood did not steal from, say, merchants and traders, who were better-off than average, nor did he give to beggars, who were worse-off than average. Robin Hood should be romanticized because he fought against unfair taxation, not because of the rich-to-poor myth. (Also, when he finally (re)gained his earlship, it wouldn't surprise me if his moral outlook changed and he engaged in some taxation himself.)
Note that the actions of these "pirates" and their cheerleaders has actually caused unfair taxation in places like Canada and Germany, in the form of tariffs on CDR media, computers, etc. They should not be applauded.
Please do not take the above as an endorsement of the RIAA and MPAA and their non-American equivalents, who have engaged in some very scummy, immoral, sleazy, unethical, slimy activities. Deciding who to root for in this conflict is like trying to decide who to root for in a conflict between the KKK and the Black Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s, or between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, or between Bush and Gore/Kerry in the 2000s, or between the Israeli Defense Force and the PLO at the current time, etc.
Oh, one final thing: the copyright violators do not "take [steal] from the rich and give to the poor"; they steal from rich (??AA executives and lawyers, movie and record studios, A-list actors and musicians, etc.) and poor (non-A-list actors and musicians, extras, grips, concession stand operators, roadies, grunts who work in your local record store/DVD rental place/movie theater, etc.) alike, and give to all, rich or poor (but not too poor to be able to afford computers), who are willing to compromise their integrities by downloading copyrighted material to which they are not entitled.
The article to which your sig links contains the following passage:
Nothing will enhance your life more than knowing you are part of the 900,000 people (assuming no one has ID "0") who were wise enough to stop posting anonymously.[*]
The number should be 999,999.
[*]The quoted text was probably reproduced under some "Fair Use" provision or other of current copyright law, and thus hopefully does not constitute copyright infringement, but who knows these days?
In addition to the New Madrid Fault mentioned in other posts, you would also have to worry about the Yellowstone Caldera. The bottom line is that you are not safe anywhere.
Nobody worthy of being called a guru would use the word "n00b".
A real guru also wouldn't act snide and condescending to those seeking knowledge, either. Many "Linux gurus", especially those who hang around message boards, IRC rooms, etc., aren't really "gurus" at all.
From dictionary.com, here is the meaning of "guru" that is closest to the people that hang out around boards:
An expert, especially in "Unix guru". Implies not only wizard skill but also a history of being a knowledge resource for others.
The type of person who writes "RTFM n00b" does not fit this profile. (Perhaps I should have written "pseudo-guru".) OTOH, a person who writes "Here is how to do it, n00b" does fit the definition.
Note also that there is a difference between "guru" and "UNIX (or Linux) guru" (according to dictionary.com).
Well, that was the whole point of writing that it was still stuck in the 20th century, to mean that it wasn't up-to-date. Back in the 20th century (prior to 2001 or 2000, depending on your point of view), we used to say "still stuck in the 19th century" to mean that something wasn't current (or was old fashioned). Here in the 21st century, we say that something is still stuck in the 20th century to mean that it isn't current. If I had written "still stuck in the 21st century", it wouldn't really mean very much, because this is the 21st century.
But god forbid I ask a question on IRC or anywhere that someone knows anything about linux.
As has been explained countless times in many places, you have to be adversarial if you want your question to be answered on a Linux board. You don't ask a question directly; rather, you write something like "Linux sucks because it can't do X but Windows can.".
To use your USB mouse example, you probably went on a board or IRC somewhere and wrote:
I can't get my XYZ brand USB mouse to work.
Can someone tell me what modules I have to load and what settings I have to make in the config file? Thanks.
Note that you asked a reasonable question and thanked people in advance for their help. This is a recipe for disaster. The board gurus will pounce on you like a... like a... ah, like a board guru on a newbie, responding with comments like "RTFA n00b!" or "Go back to Windows if you can't be bothered to learn the simplest basics about Linux" or other equally-informative messages of encouragement. Instead, you should have written something like:
It's too bad that Linux is still stuck in the 20th century.
It doesn't even support a USB mouse. In Windows, I can just plug it in. Until Linux can support modern hardware, it will always be playing catch-up to Windows. It's definitely not "ready for the desktop".
You will have Linux gurus crawling out of the woodwork to show you that, yes, Linux does support a USB mouse, and the reason you couldn't get it to work was probably one of the following: X, Y, or Z, and here is how to work around or fix the problem, and here is where you can find additional information, and here is where you can get drivers or other needed software, or a more user-friendly front end, etc., etc. Note that their attitude will be as snotty (or snottier) as with the nice method of asking, but you will get the information that you require.
Note to mods: The above may appear to be flamebait or an attempt at humor, but this method actually works. Try it!
A "sol" is something that leaves your body when you die. When NASA refers to "325 sols", they mean that the rover has run over 325 Martians.
Re:"no one has..survived a landing without a chute
on
Closer to Human Flight
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Nobody ever volunteered to jump without a parachute before.
That's not true, either. I remember seeing a video once of a Hollywood stuntman who jumped out of an airplane without a parachute or "flying suit", and landed on an airbag (not the car kind; the kind that Hollywood stuntmen use for falling-from-a-great-height stunts).
I think that there also have been several cases where a stuntman jumped out of an airplane without a parachute, another stuntman handed him a parachute in mid-air, and the first stuntman put it on and deployed it before reaching the ground. (One James Bond movie (with Roger Moore as Bond) started with Bond fighting in mid-air with a bad guy and taking his parachute. I think that this was one of those cases.)
Slashdot Mirror
Part of the process necessary for quantum encryption to work is a second communications channel, which the parties use to communicate which bits in the quantum stream to use for encryption.
The parties then use that channel (or possibly a third channel) to transmit the encrypted data.
If an evesdropper can mount a man-in-the-middle attack against both (all three) channels, then he/she can compromise the encryption.
With a trillion-dollar budget, this should be doable in many cases.
In addition, it is tail-recursive, which means that (if the compiler understands tail recursion) reversing long lists doesn't take up any more stack than reversing short lists.This code also fixes a minor error in your code where you had an invalid forward declaration.
Other than that (and minor things like formatting and symbol names (e.g., "list" instead of "item")), I would have come up with the same solution that you did.
I don't really see the advantage of recursion in this case; the iterative version is easier to understand IMO.
(At least, in C; in LISP, the recursive version is better.)
It took him less than six and a half minutes to calculate the leangth of a year?
That's pretty impressive.
I've noticed that companies whose name begins with the letter "V" can't be trusted.
For example, I have had business with about a dozen car dealerships.
The only two that I had trouble with had names beginning with the letter "V".
I don't do business any more with companies whose names begin with the letter "V".
I would advise everyone else to do the same.
Oh, yeah, and the Van Allen Belt contains radiation that is dangerous or lethal to astronauts.
Coincidence?
I think not!
Also, "Star Trek V: The Final Frontier" was the worst Star Trek movie evar.
So don't trust the letter "V", even when it means "5".
While all of the innovations in the article were good innovations (i.e., used mostly for good purposes), I think that bad innovations (innovations used mostly for immoral purposes) should also be considered.
In that vein, I would say that truck bombs, using passenger planes as cruise missiles, mailing anthrax, and other new methods of terrorism could be considered among the top 25 innovations, if you consider the effects that they have had on our society.
Look at how much such terrorist acts have changed the world, in terms of making many governments more authoritarian (and some more militarily aggressive), and making average people even more sheep-like, than ever before.
The stockyard allows the vicious Cattle Processing Unit (CPU) to access the cattle more efficiently than having to fetch each cow individually from the open range when it's needed to be the subject of one vile torture or another.
Oh, wait, that's not a "cash cow"; that's a "cow cache".
"Do not look at LASER with remaining eye."
Ah, OK, thanks for the info.
I didn't know about the long exposure times, but I guess that it makes some sense, being so far from the sun and all.
Are they particles that are part of Saturn's rings?
(There are also several white dots and a white streak in front of Iapetus, but I assume that they are caused by artifacts, cosmic rays, or transmission problems.)
So, while the "lunkheads" who passed these unfair taxes into law do deserve part of the blame, the blame must be shared with the special-interest groups and the copyright infringers.
An analogy is the increasingly totalitarian legislation that has been passed in the USA and some other countries since September 11, 2001.
Congress and the President are largely responsible for the increasing erosion of our civil rights, but they would not have been able to enact such measures if it hadn't been for the terrorists.
The blame for the increasing totalitarianism of our federal government must therefore be shared among Congress, the President, countries harboring terrorists, and the terrorists themselves.
Similarly, the blame for DMCA, CDR tariffs, etc., must be shared among the various legislative bodies, the **AA and their equivalents in other nations, and the copyright infringers themselves.
- Adding layers doesn't make it any less secure,
- Adding bits to a single key in the letter-shifting method by itself doesn't make it any more secure, and
- Stacking that encryption method and a second method, each with a key size of n/2, will probably be more secure than using the letter-shifting method alone with a key size of n.
Your example caused me to think of a simplistic case where a combination of methods, each with a key size of n/number-of-methods, may be less secure than a single method with a key size of n: your letter-shifting method combined with a simple XOR method. In this case, it may be true that the combination is less secure than the XOR method by itself with twice the key size.This is due to the fact that the letter-shifting encryption method does not benefit at all from a larger key size, and thus taking bits from the method that does benefit from a larger key size to give it to a method that does not, will of course cause the security of the system as a whole to decrease.
It is still more secure, though, than the letter-shifting method taken by itself.
Now, let's assume that the flaw in the letter-shifting method wasn't discovered unitl after it been used for a few years.
We now have three types of encryption systems (relevant to this example):
- The system that used letter-shifting by itself, with key size n.
- The system that used XOR by itself, with key size n.
- The system that used the letter-shifting method in combination with the XOR method, each with key size n/2.
After the flaw in the letter-shifting method is discovered, the people who used letter-shifting by itself are totally screwed, those who used XOR by itself are unaffected, and those who used the combination are partially-screwed.I'd rather be partially-screwed than totally screwed.
The thing is, it's not possible to tell in advance whether or not a single encryption method is flawed.
(If it were possible, such a method wouldn't have been used in the first place.)
Using a combination of different methods is a way of avoiding putting all of one's eggs in one basket.
Can anyone state a case where a combination of encryption methods, where each has a different key of size n/number-of-methods, is demonstrably less secure than each and every one of the methods used by itself with key size n?
I don't see how a chain of methods could be any weaker than its weakest link, even when the weakest link, used by itself, would have a larger key size.
How about "And I, for one, welcome our new undead pixel policy overlords."?
An obvious advantage to using multiple layers of encryption is that if the algorithm used to encrypt one layer is broken, the other layers still offer some protection of the message.
Robin Hood didn't take from the rich and give to the poor; he took from the tax collectors and gave to the taxed.
Now, it turns out that most of the taxed were poor and most of the tax collectors were rich (or those working for the rich), but Robin Hood did not steal from, say, merchants and traders, who were better-off than average, nor did he give to beggars, who were worse-off than average.
Robin Hood should be romanticized because he fought against unfair taxation, not because of the rich-to-poor myth.
(Also, when he finally (re)gained his earlship, it wouldn't surprise me if his moral outlook changed and he engaged in some taxation himself.)
Note that the actions of these "pirates" and their cheerleaders has actually caused unfair taxation in places like Canada and Germany, in the form of tariffs on CDR media, computers, etc.
They should not be applauded.
Please do not take the above as an endorsement of the RIAA and MPAA and their non-American equivalents, who have engaged in some very scummy, immoral, sleazy, unethical, slimy activities.
Deciding who to root for in this conflict is like trying to decide who to root for in a conflict between the KKK and the Black Panthers in the 1960s and 1970s, or between Iraq and Iran in the 1980s, or between Bush and Gore/Kerry in the 2000s, or between the Israeli Defense Force and the PLO at the current time, etc.
Oh, one final thing: the copyright violators do not "take [steal] from the rich and give to the poor"; they steal from rich (??AA executives and lawyers, movie and record studios, A-list actors and musicians, etc.) and poor (non-A-list actors and musicians, extras, grips, concession stand operators, roadies, grunts who work in your local record store/DVD rental place/movie theater, etc.) alike, and give to all, rich or poor (but not too poor to be able to afford computers), who are willing to compromise their integrities by downloading copyrighted material to which they are not entitled.
[*]The quoted text was probably reproduced under some "Fair Use" provision or other of current copyright law, and thus hopefully does not constitute copyright infringement, but who knows these days?
The bottom line is that you are not safe anywhere.
Many "Linux gurus", especially those who hang around message boards, IRC rooms, etc., aren't really "gurus" at all.
From dictionary.com, here is the meaning of "guru" that is closest to the people that hang out around boards:The type of person who writes "RTFM n00b" does not fit this profile.
(Perhaps I should have written "pseudo-guru".)
OTOH, a person who writes "Here is how to do it, n00b" does fit the definition.
Note also that there is a difference between "guru" and "UNIX (or Linux) guru" (according to dictionary.com).
Well, that was the whole point of writing that it was still stuck in the 20th century, to mean that it wasn't up-to-date.
Back in the 20th century (prior to 2001 or 2000, depending on your point of view), we used to say "still stuck in the 19th century" to mean that something wasn't current (or was old fashioned).
Here in the 21st century, we say that something is still stuck in the 20th century to mean that it isn't current.
If I had written "still stuck in the 21st century", it wouldn't really mean very much, because this is the 21st century.
You don't ask a question directly; rather, you write something like "Linux sucks because it can't do X but Windows can.".
To use your USB mouse example, you probably went on a board or IRC somewhere and wrote:Note that you asked a reasonable question and thanked people in advance for their help.
This is a recipe for disaster.
The board gurus will pounce on you like a
Instead, you should have written something like:You will have Linux gurus crawling out of the woodwork to show you that, yes, Linux does support a USB mouse, and the reason you couldn't get it to work was probably one of the following: X, Y, or Z, and here is how to work around or fix the problem, and here is where you can find additional information, and here is where you can get drivers or other needed software, or a more user-friendly front end, etc., etc.
Note that their attitude will be as snotty (or snottier) as with the nice method of asking, but you will get the information that you require.
Note to mods: The above may appear to be flamebait or an attempt at humor, but this method actually works.
Try it!
I remember seeing a video once of a Hollywood stuntman who jumped out of an airplane without a parachute or "flying suit", and landed on an airbag (not the car kind; the kind that Hollywood stuntmen use for falling-from-a-great-height stunts).
I think that there also have been several cases where a stuntman jumped out of an airplane without a parachute, another stuntman handed him a parachute in mid-air, and the first stuntman put it on and deployed it before reaching the ground.
(One James Bond movie (with Roger Moore as Bond) started with Bond fighting in mid-air with a bad guy and taking his parachute.
I think that this was one of those cases.)