Exactly -- there have been stories of people who take chips home with them, to have a 'starting pot' for next time, only to find out when they return that the casino has changed their chip styles and no longer accepts the old ones
Casino chips cost something like 0.25 to 0.30 each, and you buy them from the casino for $5 and up -- why would they care if you take them off the lot?
I guess you didn't follow the link - it's a text document, with the prime in question represented as an ASCII base-10 string. 1 byte per digit. 6+ megabytes total.
It's not the most compact form, to be sure, but it is, as advertised, 6 megabytes of primey goodness.
Base64 isn't acceptable for DNS -- it has to be case-sensitive, while DNS isn't, and it uses '+', '/', and '=', which are all illegal in domain name components.
Also, the RFC says that the internationalized domain name spec requires that any domain name containing all low-ASCII characters shouldn't be changed by the new standard. A straight base64 or similar encoding would end up mangling existing ASCII domain names as well.
I believe that it was not so much the curves themselves, but the methods for quickly finding them, which were patented.
After several attacks were published showing that large numbers of elliptic curves were too weak for use in known ECC cryptosystems, software techniques had to be developed which allowed the fast generateion of curves which are known to avoid all of the weak areas. Those methods, to a large extent, are all patented.
It's a similar problem to finding 'safe' primes for use in RSA. You can do it the slow, brute force way, or you can license a patented algorithm from someone to do it much faster.
the light is scattered randomly and evenly in all directions --- not preferentially back toward the source!
That is true.. what the author of that quote may have been thinking of is the corner mirrors placed on the moon by one of the Apollo teams, used to measure the precise distance to the moon.
It is, however, a fairly peculiar property, and one that isn't often seen here. Most materials have some reflectivity -- that is, incident light is not scattered evenly in all directions, but is biased towards the line of reflection. The fact that moondust is almost perfectly non-reflective is the reason that the moon always looks uniformly lit across its surface.
What determines the apparent brightness of the beamspot is the observer's angle with respect to the surface that the beam shines on, not the observer's angle with respect to the beam itself. This is obvious when you think about it, and completely familiar from the way light works on the earth.
The fact that it reflects equally in all directions means that the brightness is most definitely not dependent on the observers angle wrt to the surface.
Take a look at the moon sometime - right up to the terminator, it looks roughly equally bright all across its surface, despite the fact that, being spherical, its angle to you varies quite dramatically.
No, it's metric. One calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. The "Calorie" is pretty much just used for food labeling, since it keeps the numbers in a range where people can easily understand them, and it looks better than kCal.
That's easy. Let's say you have a text file that consists of 14,000 instances of the word "begat".
Of course, you don't actually have a file like that. What you have is the dictionary file, which should contain exactly one copy of each word.
Dictionaries tend to compress really well because they are already in alphabetical order, and because, most of the time, every word contains some prefix in common with the word immediately preceeding it (in fact, this should be true for all but 26 words in the file). Compression takes advantage of those prefixes by storing them as references to earlier parts of the file, rather than spelling out "behaviour, behavioural, behaviourally, behavioured, behaviourism" and so on.
Scrbmilang the words in the file means that the compression algorithm doesn't have those prefixes to work with anymore, and so it takes a lot more bits to describe the position of each letter in each word.
Write to EMI Canada. Explain that your disc doesn't work properly in your CD player, and they'll send you a real CD version of the album.
Friends of mine have received real CDs with the latest Massive Attack, Blur, and Radiohead albums on them, just for the trouble of writing. I'd do it myself, except that my copy seems to work perfectly under Linux. Go figure.
Why would you call tech support about that sort of thing?
Linksys has an email address, security@linksys.com set up so that you can report things like this. Tech support is for people who can't tell the LAN cable from the WAN cable, or need to be told to power-cycle their routers.
And if you don't hear anything back for a while after emailing them there, try posting it to Bugtraq -- that'll get their attention, if nothing else.
Hey, lady, you tryin' to kipe these or somethin'??
"Um, no, actually, I'm trying to pay for them."
(Meanwhile, of course, her husband is being tackled by three armed security guards in the parking lot)
Re:Here's an interesting quote
on
Open Source Law
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm not saying that it's reasonable; on the contrary, I believe that it is absurd for a society not to collectively own the laws under which it lives.
What I am saying is that this is the way these laws have been developed; the existing trade-off allowed goverments to adopt as law very high quality building codes, electrical codes, etc., at almost no cost.
If this had not been the case, then goverments would have had to spend a lot of money to commission specialists to write these codes for them. I am not saying whether I feel that society is better or worse for not having spent that money, simply that the situation has changed now, and I am curious to see what will happen the next time these newly public domain laws are up for review.
Re:Here's an interesting quote
on
Open Source Law
·
· Score: 1
Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the recipient who doesn't get it.
Re:Here's an interesting quote
on
Open Source Law
·
· Score: 2, Informative
what would that mean exactly?
Well, it basically means that you can't go around making copies of the law itself. If you need a copy, you will have to order it from someone who is authorised to make copies, and you will presumably have to pay for it.
Traditionally, this has been the case for large codes such as building codes or electrical codes. These are law, and you can go down to your local branch of government (city hall, legislature, etc) and read the copy they have there, but you can't photocopy the whole thing and take it home with you.
If you were a construction company, or a law firm specialising in defending construction companies (or homeowners against construction companies,) then it would be in your best interest to purchase a copy of the local building codes. You wouldn't have to -- you could do all of your research at city hall -- but it would make good business sense.
These sorts of laws were allowed to be copyrighted in the past because they are generally drafted by large national engineering bodies, who tend to put a lot of work and resources into them. Charging for copies to the people who actually use them offsets much of that cost. It will be interesting to see how this decision affects things the next time the codes are up for review.
It's not necessarily a bad thing; it just means that distributed computing is better suited to some problems than others.
There's a whole class of problems which can take a tremendously long time to solve, but for which the solution, once found, can be verified very quickly.
The distributed.net key-cracking contest was like this -- you don't have to double check every piece of work because once you've found the key, it is trivial to test it to make sure it's right. The OGR project works the same way, and I suspect that SETI uses a similar model.
If it was true that you had to double-check everything then there would be absolutely no benefit to distributed computing. You'd be better off just building a supercomputer and doing everything just once.
SETI@Home harvested more than a million CPU years worth more than a billion dollars. It sent out a billion jobs of 1/2 MB each. This petabyte of network bandwidth cost about a million dollars. The SETI@Home peers donated a billion dollars of free CPU time and also donated 1012 watt-hours which is about 100M$ of electricity
No, it doesn't include the value of user-performed maintenance, but as an economic analysis, it would be pretty negligent to not include the value of donated CPU-time and electricity.
Slashdot Mirror
Casino chips cost something like 0.25 to 0.30 each, and you buy them from the casino for $5 and up -- why would they care if you take them off the lot?
It's not the most compact form, to be sure, but it is, as advertised, 6 megabytes of primey goodness.
Also, the RFC says that the internationalized domain name spec requires that any domain name containing all low-ASCII characters shouldn't be changed by the new standard. A straight base64 or similar encoding would end up mangling existing ASCII domain names as well.
After several attacks were published showing that large numbers of elliptic curves were too weak for use in known ECC cryptosystems, software techniques had to be developed which allowed the fast generateion of curves which are known to avoid all of the weak areas. Those methods, to a large extent, are all patented.
It's a similar problem to finding 'safe' primes for use in RSA. You can do it the slow, brute force way, or you can license a patented algorithm from someone to do it much faster.
That is true.. what the author of that quote may have been thinking of is the corner mirrors placed on the moon by one of the Apollo teams, used to measure the precise distance to the moon.
It is, however, a fairly peculiar property, and one that isn't often seen here. Most materials have some reflectivity -- that is, incident light is not scattered evenly in all directions, but is biased towards the line of reflection. The fact that moondust is almost perfectly non-reflective is the reason that the moon always looks uniformly lit across its surface.
What determines the apparent brightness of the beamspot is the observer's angle with respect to the surface that the beam shines on, not the observer's angle with respect to the beam itself. This is obvious when you think about it, and completely familiar from the way light works on the earth.
The fact that it reflects equally in all directions means that the brightness is most definitely not dependent on the observers angle wrt to the surface.
Take a look at the moon sometime - right up to the terminator, it looks roughly equally bright all across its surface, despite the fact that, being spherical, its angle to you varies quite dramatically.
Hey - that's no mirror! (Thanks for finding the original source, though - the links within the article actually work from that page).
I've the same thing on mine.
Unfortunately, neither paper nor adhesive will interfere with a magnetic field.
No, it's metric. One calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of one gram of water by one degree Celsius. The "Calorie" is pretty much just used for food labeling, since it keeps the numbers in a range where people can easily understand them, and it looks better than kCal.
Of course, you don't actually have a file like that. What you have is the dictionary file, which should contain exactly one copy of each word.
Dictionaries tend to compress really well because they are already in alphabetical order, and because, most of the time, every word contains some prefix in common with the word immediately preceeding it (in fact, this should be true for all but 26 words in the file). Compression takes advantage of those prefixes by storing them as references to earlier parts of the file, rather than spelling out "behaviour, behavioural, behaviourally, behavioured, behaviourism" and so on.
Scrbmilang the words in the file means that the compression algorithm doesn't have those prefixes to work with anymore, and so it takes a lot more bits to describe the position of each letter in each word.
Friends of mine have received real CDs with the latest Massive Attack, Blur, and Radiohead albums on them, just for the trouble of writing. I'd do it myself, except that my copy seems to work perfectly under Linux. Go figure.
Linksys has an email address, security@linksys.com set up so that you can report things like this. Tech support is for people who can't tell the LAN cable from the WAN cable, or need to be told to power-cycle their routers.
And if you don't hear anything back for a while after emailing them there, try posting it to Bugtraq -- that'll get their attention, if nothing else.
Those aren't pins, they're plastic spaces between the contacts. RJ-11 is a two pair jack, though the jack itself is wide enough for three pairs.
No, try summing 1/1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + ...
Having a zero limit is not sufficient for the sum to converge on a finite number.
Screenshots
"Um, no, actually, I'm trying to pay for them."
(Meanwhile, of course, her husband is being tackled by three armed security guards in the parking lot)
What I am saying is that this is the way these laws have been developed; the existing trade-off allowed goverments to adopt as law very high quality building codes, electrical codes, etc., at almost no cost.
If this had not been the case, then goverments would have had to spend a lot of money to commission specialists to write these codes for them. I am not saying whether I feel that society is better or worse for not having spent that money, simply that the situation has changed now, and I am curious to see what will happen the next time these newly public domain laws are up for review.
Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the recipient who doesn't get it.
Well, it basically means that you can't go around making copies of the law itself. If you need a copy, you will have to order it from someone who is authorised to make copies, and you will presumably have to pay for it.
Traditionally, this has been the case for large codes such as building codes or electrical codes. These are law, and you can go down to your local branch of government (city hall, legislature, etc) and read the copy they have there, but you can't photocopy the whole thing and take it home with you.
If you were a construction company, or a law firm specialising in defending construction companies (or homeowners against construction companies,) then it would be in your best interest to purchase a copy of the local building codes. You wouldn't have to -- you could do all of your research at city hall -- but it would make good business sense.
These sorts of laws were allowed to be copyrighted in the past because they are generally drafted by large national engineering bodies, who tend to put a lot of work and resources into them. Charging for copies to the people who actually use them offsets much of that cost. It will be interesting to see how this decision affects things the next time the codes are up for review.
There's a whole class of problems which can take a tremendously long time to solve, but for which the solution, once found, can be verified very quickly.
The distributed.net key-cracking contest was like this -- you don't have to double check every piece of work because once you've found the key, it is trivial to test it to make sure it's right. The OGR project works the same way, and I suspect that SETI uses a similar model.
If it was true that you had to double-check everything then there would be absolutely no benefit to distributed computing. You'd be better off just building a supercomputer and doing everything just once.
SETI@Home harvested more than a million CPU years worth more than a billion dollars. It sent out a billion jobs of 1/2 MB each. This petabyte of network bandwidth cost about a million dollars. The SETI@Home peers donated a billion dollars of free CPU time and also donated 1012 watt-hours which is about 100M$ of electricity
No, it doesn't include the value of user-performed maintenance, but as an economic analysis, it would be pretty negligent to not include the value of donated CPU-time and electricity.
Isn't that what an RFID scanner is for? Why not just buy one of those, and remove tags until it doesn't go off anymore?
The better ones get linked to from slashdot with some degree of regularity.
Now OC takes out an ad on /., and suddenly its a conspiracy?
I don't think so.
A couple tens of thousandths is more like 20 * 1/1000 RPM, or about 1 rotation every 50 minutes or so
Still damn slow
Firmware for one of their wireless access points, which apparently includes a minimal Linux OS.
The characters were only 4 pixels wide, and hard to read at times, but it worked.