From the BBC link: NZ$56,500, or $40,000 US. Yeah, 40 grand's gonna get you:
24 upright pillars and connecting lintels that is 30m in diameter and about 4m high. In the centre of the henge is a 5m-tall obelisk, the eye of which points at the south celestial pole.
a tiled mosaic that runs out from the obelisk
a 10m analemma, the figure of eight pattern that the path of sun traces over a year.
six heel stones, the markers for the rising and setting points of the sun at solstice and equinox.
While I find this next idea revolting, "Inside, with an eye to performances and weddings that will be held here, the stones are also wired for sound", perhaps the wedding fees can be used to subsidize and improve this thing. But seriously... weddings in an aged, scruffy, shotcrete-replica stonehenge!?
... On the other hand, for that kind of money, cryptanalysis takes on different textures - why spend a billion to crack SHA-1 when you can buy the right
wet-ware unit for a million?
I am not a wet-ware unit, I am a free ma.... a million bucks, huh?! Hmm... Ok!
(Seriously, can someone confirm: is 'buy the right wet-ware unit' simply another way of saying bribery and extortion, or did I miss some/. story on cybernetic implants of radeon chips or crays or something?)
Why do people insist on calling these projects such silly names ?:P I've been trying to get my company to go with NetMail, but... Hula ? My boss will just laugh at me:(
Ah, you mean silly names like:
Amiga or apple, bob or beowulf, cairo, dongles, EBCDIC or EULA's, FOSS, GoDaddy (I was the only one at my superbowl party to know what they sold/did before or after their ad), honeypots, intuit, java, the Kompany, lisp or LAMP, macintosh or mozilla, newegg or numega, outlook, python or perl or php-nuke, quark, raid, scsi (whether you pronounce it scuzzy or sexy), twiki or TeX, unix, vax, wifi or windows, x, yahoo, zip or zope?
(forgive me, I know there are plenty of wierder names... my point is that any new brand name or jargon carries a risk of misinterpretation)
Based on past experience, do like I do and say you think 'HULA' is an acronym. Better yet, slather on some business jargon or statistics. Your bosses will nod and and pretend to have read about it being the next new thing so they could claim credit for ordering you to use it. That's how I got to implement a LAMP server and a few other FOSS apps long before they'd trust Linux. Or how I got the ok for Numega. 'Raid'ing the important database drives scared one company's leadership until we explained it. One old boss was screamin' mad to find out that 'scuzzy' drives cost *more*. And one of my homebrewing friends got all excited when I mentioned I was helping put together a honeynet. Not that I blame him... free fermentables sound a lot more interesting than getting hacked on purpose.
Speaking of which, it's beer-fiftynine. Gotta run!
Consider how many Jews and Muslims have avoided learning Perl because of the offensive beast on the cover of the O'Reilly book!
I'll bite... aside from a reputation for being twice as ornery as a mule, why would anyone from the mideast be offended by a camel?! Or did you mean to say lots of Jews and Muslims (and christians and hindus and buddhists and atheists and... ) have started to hate camels because camels remind them of an unpleasant Perl experience? Of the two, that statement makes more sense...
Heads, the first words out of my mouth are "start up a dos window and type deltree/y \windows, then hit return"
Tails, they're "Do you talk to your doctor this way?"
After getting appropriate feedback from the first round, I'd offer up the remaining comment from above. Maybe one could toss in a "You should rethink that habit."
Where the heck did 'reactionary: not exactly...' come from!? All I did was hit reply, and people above/below me in the thread got the re: Layered Implementation.
I agree with almost all of what you say: Getting caught with encryption could be a death sentence, encryption and steg have different goals, they can supplant one another in a reciprocity sort of way, etc. But let me say this again: it is so damn hard to do steg well, that anyone living in an area where coded transmissions are life-risking acts, should think twice. Me, I'd stay *clear* the fsck away from steg.
Steg isn't just *hard*, like encryption (where one can get good encryption, or carefully implement a published, trusted algorithm and be safe). It's harder. Each implementation has to be robust against all sorts of preliminary cryptanalysis techniques, plus you're dealing with stuff beyond your control (like machine-specific traits in scanner or camera output). Stuff that is *beyond your control* can reveal steg being used. For hiding data in photos, for example, all it sometimes takes is *looking* at histograms of the bytes found in normal images off a device vs. the histograms of bytes found in steg'd ones. Try it! The graphs nearly scream 'STEG!!!' at you (because each consumer device will have some characteristic 'gap' or overloading in the range of possible values, or because of compression algorithms in the device, if they save to jpg or mpeg).
I'm still not claiming expertise, but if but my life depended on this stuff, I'd tend toward lower-tech: I'd hide the info somewhere boring and plausibly-deniable.
(a half-joke: INVENTION? Man, that's exactly the mindset that makes me hate IP patent law./)
Similarly, I'd rather pay 50 a year to cover my.001% of the cost of a handful of engineers to maintain a wireless (phone or 11b) infrastructure in my community, than $20 a month to comcast, sbc, verizon, etc etc etc. Which has incidentally grown to 40 a month.
I don't like subsidizing marketers, ad wonks, and account managers. A free system eliminates them. My local power utility is has fewer people working for it than any one cellphone provider locally, and costs a ***load less than all the cellphone-industry people on the local company payrolls, even given the much larger infrastructure costs and maintenance complexity of a power grid compared to a company with a few dozen cellphone towers.
I don't care how inefficient or corrupt a government is, it's trivial to keep them more efficient than the 3x increase in manpower a firm gets when they're retailers.
Oh, and public infrastructure (like power, roads and schools) deserves more credit than 'business competition' in explaining progress.
If you eliminate a company's market, the money just goes somewhere else. I refuse to subscribe to the FOSS-hurts-america-by-hurting-microsoft school of thought: the money we don't spend on microsoft becomes our own profit. We then spend it on something else, creating new innovations and stretching our productivity. It's a zero-net equation, unless we tuck the capital value into a mattress somewhere where it cannot be reinvested (even a bank account leverages money into new uses)
Innovation happens for reasons other than profit. Most of the engineers I know like innovating/creating stuff just to scratch an itch. The arts thrived until this last century despite a system that almost literally starved the artists. And of all our motivators, profit is the motive most likely to lead to piracy/theft of ideas.
Only a dreamer thinks that innovation and quality are the prime criteria for market success. Crap with good marketing prevails way too often. Marketing perverts the market of ideas that everyone idealizes as being the result of competition. Innovation happens *in spite* of the lawyers, salesmen, ad campaigns, etc, not because of 'em.
So, here's my bottom line: Given the choices you offer, I'd rather have a world with 1/10th the marketing and crapulence that infests my life, and with lots more engineers. How exactly will embracing your worldview lead to that future?
Oh, and tonight I'm gonna work on my taxes. Tell me again how the current system in the US is the optimum design? It sucks largely because the tax prep industry lobbies to keep it stressful and complicated. Check this out:
http://www.iwf.org/issues/issues_detail.asp?Articl eID=449
IANBS (I Am Not Bruce Schneier), but Strong Encryption beats steg plus encryption, based on my (limited, but relevant) practical experience.
That runs counterintuitive, so let me scratch the why/how:
Steg: it's incredibly hard to really hide stuff. If you stick data into the unimportant pixelbits of A/V data, statistical analysis of the sort of data that is created by the source (camera, scanner, etc) makes it *trivial* to detect that stuff is being hidden. The better you hide it, the more you sacrifice signal to noise.
Steg plus encryption: easily detected, and steg limits the data pipe. If you have a lot of steg data, creating enough host data to mask it becomes a huge damn PITA.
Strong encryption: data compresses, not expands. Detection and break costs can be reasonably calculated, and algorithms can be picked that achieve an acceptable break cost. And there are mechanisms like dvd-length one-time pads that can make the data flow utterly unassailable as long as it remains encrypted. All that you're left with is attacks outside that space (bribery, extortion, threats, wiretaps, and so on become the cheapest win).
Incidentally, W.A.S.T.E. has an design aspect that does a great job of balancing steg and encryption: encrypt everything with an algorithm that is computationally expensive to brute-force, then shove copious amounts of probably-not-significant data down the encrypted channel. It's like the shortwave number-reader frequencies: by creating a perpetual, huge stream of junk code, you get rid of the above-mentioned weaknesses, and gain the advantage of creating an encrypted and steg'd stream.
It isn't hopeless. But even a best-case scenario is likely to hurt like hell.
EU Patents has a nice parallel in environmentalism: every day can see any company make an independent attempt to damage the environment. Being an environmentalist is pretty masochistic: fighting losing battles and waking up each day wondering who is going to try to subvert the system.
Every day, a new battle. And a certainty that some really disturbing stuff will happen in spite of your best efforts. But fight wisely and you win wider support gradually, until it can become impossible to even attack some high-profile targets (the Grand Canyon is safe from dams for the forseeable future, but wasn't safe 50 yrs ago -- hopefully we'll someday see the same level of citizen control over a greatly-defanged copyright and patent hierarchy).
The bad news is that the attack just shifts to lower-profile targets, and it's impossible to generate widespread support for every small project. At that point, the best populist defense are to create umbrella protections like the Endangered Species Act, parks or wilderness designations, and raising overall minimum standards of quality (the Clean Air act, not the malaprop 'healthy forest' act).
(Sorry for all the US'ian analogies, but the only European example of citizen activism I know beans about is CAMRA.)
I still can't do tax software on linux. Heck, I'd be happy if someone managed to create tex or pdf forms I could fill in. But no-oo!
Web interfaces don't work, because I have a consulting S-Corp form or three, but last time I checked, even the 1040 long form and schedule C's (which I couldn't live without) aren't handled by the web-based tax tools. Besides, I'm utterly freaked about a website hosting my tax data.
Since I'm pretty sick of perpetually nursing along my home computers anyway, Mac Mini here I come...
Heh, you're still a whippersnapper. I remember 3-digit numbers, needing an operator to dial out of my area, eavesdropping on the line. And not far from here is the tiny town that was the last in the US to rely entirely on a switchboard and multiple-ring party lines. Or so the regional news announced when they finally changed to newer technology. Until roughly 15 years ago, every phone call required that one pick up the phone and tell a switchboard operator where you wanted to call. Granted, the town is in the middle of nowhere, with some residents living 1-3 miles from the switchboard, and only had roughly a dozen phone lines.
Meanwhile, at an auction last week, I saw a Norstar 16-line digital PBX with direct in-dialing, about 30 handsets, several system modules and more tech than that li'l town needed... sell for $50.
Most techies would be amazed at some of the long-abandoned technologies that are still in use out in these isolated places.
Heh, I'd forgotten the exact zipcode. Nods to Jake and Elwood, and my favorite ball team, I've given it out a few times myself. Rates right up there with 567-68-0515 (Nixon's social security number).
Incidentally, *years* ago, an older cousin of mine was drafted for Viet Nam. At his induction (or whatever they call it) he wrote in the address of his favorite bar. Defends himself now by saying 'well, I didn't have a permanent address and I pretty much lived there...' Due to his lingering hangover or whatever, he promptly forgot having done so.
Several years go by. And he's become expert in half a dozen asian languages and is just beginning work as a translator and cultural analyst for the military or CIA or whatever. One day, he's called in for a review of his TS clearance application, but in an odd location that he wasn't familiar with.
He gets there, and is wordlessly escorted into a white interogation chamber, complete with 2-way mirror. Where he sits. Alone. Checks door, it's locked. An hour of waiting, and someone opens the door. In walks a guy wearing the proverbial black suit and mirrored sunglasses. Guy sits. Places a couple folders on the table. Pulls out his application. Asks him to review it and confirm all the facts. He does. Then the guy pulls out the other form: a copy of his induction paperwork, address circled in red. Yeah... 1060 W. Addison (well, for us, it's 626 Lewis St.). Guy points to it. Asks, please explain this.
A blank stare as he digs back into his past, a vague recall, and a hurried 'that was something of a joke, since I didn't have a more permanent address' gets a long pause. Sunglasses come off. Guy's definitely not amused, and asks him asked "Are there any other *jokes* you'd like to come clean about?"
A career later, retired, he usually mutters: ya know, that should have been my first clue that I needed to get the hell outa there... Don't bother keeping your nose clean. You'll be happier if you just know when to blow.
Actually the lack of Firewire 800 is a deal-breaker for me. Without it, there is no way to get any kind of high-speed mass storage connected to the thing. It uses a laptop-grade (ie; slow) HD and has no gigabit for connecting to a shared RAID.
Yeah, my grandma was saying the same thing when I told her about the mac mini.</irony>
Kee-ripes. Everyone keeps pretending like this is not an entry-level computer! Stop it. Wake up! If you're shoppin' for a graphics workstation (the most common user of gigabit-shared RAID that I'm aware of) and you can't fork out $1500, you're not doing the 'what's my time worth' math right.
<Me>Squirms, struggling to resist a lame math vs. Decimal Dave joke/pun
Not to interrupt your rant & I'm seriously thinking of getting a mac mini, but I believe it only has 100, not gigabit ethernet. Please, someone let me know if I'm mistaken.
Read the article. Seriously. Even if you just glance thru it and read the last paragraphs (where a senior Social Security administrator makes his own recommendations, which are quite modest compared to the president's major shifts).
Now, since I promised to go point-by-point if you took the time to reply, here goes. No reply is needed, either. For readability, I've italicized quotes from the Lowenstein/NYT article, but haven't done much more to show all the individual cuts, etc.:
I think Bush has a serious number of faults. He spends way too much money.... The difference is that the Democrats want a larger government.
I'm one of many Dems that think it's damn ironic that we're now the party of fiscal restraint.
The average life expectancy as I stated it, was misleading. I apologize. The correct answer would be found here: http://www.ssa.gov/history/lifeexpect.html. Notice how the percentage of people expected to reach 65 is only slightly obove 50%. Notice how that percentage & the number of people over 65 have increased dramatically. The life expectancy has also increased (although only slightly). All these make me wonder about the setup of Social Security.
The SSA chart stops short of showing longterm predictions. Here's what the article says about predictions made by SSA (both in 1934 and more recently:
In 1934, when Franklin Roosevelt formed the Committee on Economic Security to design what was in effect the first federal safety net, the committee hired three actuaries to stargaze into the future. The actuaries predicted that the proportion of Americans over 65 -- then only 5.4 percent -- would rise to 12.65 percent in 1990, meaning that retiree costs would soar. They were just a tad high; the actual figure would be 12.49 percent.
And several underlying assumptions of that middle projection tend to exaggerate the potential deficit. The first concerns longevity. A 65-year-old man today can expect to live to nearly 82. According to the most likely projection, in 2080 he should expect to live to 86. Goss says that the agency is assuming that medical technology will deliver more ''miracles.'' Most demographers agree with him, and some even think the agency is not being optimistic enough. The only trouble is, as Goss notes, that over the past 20 years ''they have been wrong at every turn. There has been less improvement than we were expecting.'' Indeed, the improvement in mortality has slowed significantly. And no one is sure why it has slowed. Nonetheless, the agency expects a sharp rebound over ensuing decades. Its fiscal gloominess thus depends on a speculative uptick in medical miracles.
Next, you wrote:
As for Occam's Razor, I've heard the past 3 presidents (including Bill Clinton) claim that SS is in trouble. If SS wasn't in trouble why did John Kerry have plans to fix it?
My answer? Kerry screwed up and let the Republicans frame the issue. As for whether SS is in trouble, the SS Admin was badly burned for being too optimistic in the 70's and 80s. That's discussed in the article, but in a scattered fashion that doesn't lend itself to an outtake that I can find. But he does disagree that there's trouble:
And, contrary to widespread belief, recent demographic trends have been modestly better (from an actuary's gloomy standpoint) than anticipated. For instance, longevity hasn't increased as much as expected. Partly as a result, since 1997 the agency has pushed back, by 13 years, the date at which it projects its reserves will be exhausted. In other words, as the cries of impending doom started to crescendo, the guardians of the system have grown more optimistic.
Further, I'd say that progressives and Democrats are trying to anticipate the risk. If we use pessimistic #'s, an adjustment is needed to get Social Security to rock-solid levels (since the cost is estimated to be a 1.8
The life expectancy calculations you mentioned are a myth. Debunked by the NYT article. Further, the original Social Security estimates of life expectancy were almost spot-on perfect. They actually anticipated a longer life expectancy by a year or two, not a much shorter one.
Similarly, everything you said reads like a talking point list from the Republicans. And without going back and doing a point-by-point analysis of your claims vs the NYT, I think the article refutes every claim you made. If you want to argue this, start the point-by-point, quoting the NYT article or historical documents and I'll willingly commit the effort. But I won't waste my time on something I suspect is partisan astroturfing by an anti-SS advocate.
My take: the republicans have hated Social Security since day 1. They've tried to kill it at least 4 times. Now, they're saying it's doomed to bankruptcy and must be dramatically changed to be saved. Ironically, the remedy is very similar to the previous attempts to destroy it. Hmmm...
Republicans hate SS. They also hate that it's been unassailable (the proverbial 3rd rail). If they are the only ones that say it's doomed, Occam's Razor says they're lying.
Even the village idiot finds plenty to laugh about.
I've reread, and I didn't build any straw men, I called your statements lazy shallow and dumb-ass (not you), and I presented examples and arguments in favor of what I originally said. If anything, I appreciate you demonstrating the dangerous mindset I was decrying.
Once I've demonstrated, via argument, that something you believe is dumb-ass, lazy or shallow, I can call *IT* dumbass, lazy, or shallow without it being namecalling. Doing so is generally poor form, but I don't mind the slip-up considering the crap you're spewing. Oops, did it again.
It isn't that I'm self-absorbed, it's that your views are so blissfully spared the ravages of intelligence, and you're to self-unaware to realize that that's bad. I can hardly expect you to shut up or learn, so I'll just fix the FoF rating and redirect your answers to/dev/null
What a sad set of straw-man attacks. This is incredibly off-topic, but it's late on a Friday and I'm just waiting for a download...
1 - There are a *lot* of dams on the Columbia river that I advocate against. Regularly. But then, I see the economic damage of the lost salmon runs (I grew up in a town that was jam-packed during salmon runs, by fishermen from all over the world), and I'm not afraid of the alternatives (wind, nuke, solar, or coal). And to be honest, I'd be cool with putting the Army C of E to work for 50 years, replacing dams with low-head fish-friendly bulb turbine dams to get some of the hydro energy. It'd cost a bit, but there's that limitless-power deal to sweeten the economic pot...
(notice how I disagree with you completely, but don't resort to swearing and insults as shallow non-arguments like you did)
2 - What about non-extremists? As my OP said, it is more important that the most extreme voices be encouraged, to make sure that people don't ever feel compelled to shut up. As happened with people who were against the US war in Iraq, if we shout down people (like you are by putting up such a ridiculous straw man and pretending it is what *rational* opponents of you believe), we all lose. It's better to hear the dissent (no matter how nutty), then thin things down to *informed* facts and findings. That's a way to let any independent reviewer confirm good judgement, and exposes mistakes, corruption, or incompetence.
3 - Anti-tech people should really imagine what life would look like without pvc, internal-combustion cars, modern medicine, etc. I agree, it's impossible to sustain humanity without all our advancements. But we still need to balance things a lot more than you're apparently willing to do.
It's lazy to shout people down. It's lazy to pretend like any opposition is a lunatic from the opposite extreme. It's lazy to invent dumb-ass straw-man examples like you just did.
Hell, look at how these stupid hippies tried to stop Cassini from ever occuring. They were so afraid of the 0.001% chance of Cassini crashing into Earth (which itself had a fraction of a percent chance of actually contaminating the planet with any plutonium) that they wanted the entire mission shut down.
Speaking of 1 in 100,000 odds, that's about the risk that space science faces due to anti-Pu Activists.
Now, alongside Cassini, put up your 'settling the world=genocide' pre-emptive denial, and toss in Love Canal, Bhopal, TMI, and Chernyobl, or any other man-made disasters that come to mind.
Every risk deserves attention. Ethics and economics are a scary combination. I'm as cynical as the next guy about whether lawyers are worth the grief they cause, yet I get really nervous about calls for lawsuit limits due to it's risk of making product liability an economic calculation (I don't ever want to hear a business argument of "we will make $X million profit per anticipated casualty, and lawsuits are cost-limited to $250k in damages, each").
I'll conceed we're cushy enough that we seem to have become a nation of scaredy-cats. Land of the Free, Home of the Brave has become Land of the Safe, Home of the Timid. I agree that the risk of a Pu event due to Cassini was tiny. And I was eager to see Cassini's opposition lose. But I'm glad that people stood up in opposition. The questions need to be asked, answered, debated. And the risks we face need to include utter bankruptcy and disgrace if we disregard risks and our actions kill bystanders. Sometimes the level of responsibility should literally be harsher than just being 'willing to die', whether for commerce or knowledge.
As anyone who studies risk analysis knows, just because the odds are miniscule, doesn't mean the damage still wouldn't be terrible if something goes horribly wrong, and we should never hide from that discussion. Ethically, we literally need to promote the review of these serious (albeit tiny) risks. We can't brush them aside. Not while asking bystanders to die if we screw up.
Please don't talk trash about people that are just trying to keep our decisions humane.
Oh, and (Mayflower - Columbus) = 128. Columbus: 1492. Mayflower: 1620. 128 *YEARS* between 'em. And the costs, complexities, etc... they're too different to compare simplistically.
there is more to the world than the just usa. really. the world does not revolve around the usa. for real. there are other cultures and peoples and governments out there. no, really. the world does not orbit the united states. for true
And I wager that us-ians would be better world citizens if things shifted enough to where we weren't a political, economic and military superpower. As I cringe at our Iraq situation and shake my head in disgust at the things overheard from a sizeable population of simplistic crisco-eaters I run into daily, I wonder if that isn't our immediate future. There's evidence we're already overstretched militarily, we're certainly not a political leader right now, and economically, we're slippin'.
Slashdot Mirror
- 24 upright pillars and connecting lintels that is 30m in diameter and about 4m high. In the centre of the henge is a 5m-tall obelisk, the eye of which points at the south celestial pole.
-
a tiled mosaic that runs out from the obelisk
-
a 10m analemma, the figure of eight pattern that the path of sun traces over a year.
-
six heel stones, the markers for the rising and setting points of the sun at solstice and equinox.
While I find this next idea revolting, "Inside, with an eye to performances and weddings that will be held here, the stones are also wired for sound", perhaps the wedding fees can be used to subsidize and improve this thing. But seriously... weddings in an aged, scruffy, shotcrete-replica stonehenge!?(Seriously, can someone confirm: is 'buy the right wet-ware unit' simply another way of saying bribery and extortion, or did I miss some /. story on cybernetic implants of radeon chips or crays or something?)
Amiga or apple, bob or beowulf, cairo, dongles, EBCDIC or EULA's, FOSS, GoDaddy (I was the only one at my superbowl party to know what they sold/did before or after their ad), honeypots, intuit, java, the Kompany, lisp or LAMP, macintosh or mozilla, newegg or numega, outlook, python or perl or php-nuke, quark, raid, scsi (whether you pronounce it scuzzy or sexy), twiki or TeX, unix, vax, wifi or windows, x, yahoo, zip or zope?
(forgive me, I know there are plenty of wierder names... my point is that any new brand name or jargon carries a risk of misinterpretation)
Based on past experience, do like I do and say you think 'HULA' is an acronym. Better yet, slather on some business jargon or statistics. Your bosses will nod and and pretend to have read about it being the next new thing so they could claim credit for ordering you to use it. That's how I got to implement a LAMP server and a few other FOSS apps long before they'd trust Linux. Or how I got the ok for Numega. 'Raid'ing the important database drives scared one company's leadership until we explained it. One old boss was screamin' mad to find out that 'scuzzy' drives cost *more*. And one of my homebrewing friends got all excited when I mentioned I was helping put together a honeynet. Not that I blame him... free fermentables sound a lot more interesting than getting hacked on purpose.
Speaking of which, it's beer-fiftynine. Gotta run!
I'd toss a coin.
/y \windows, then hit return"
Heads, the first words out of my mouth are "start up a dos window and type deltree
Tails, they're "Do you talk to your doctor this way?"
After getting appropriate feedback from the first round, I'd offer up the remaining comment from above. Maybe one could toss in a "You should rethink that habit."
Where the heck did 'reactionary: not exactly...' come from!? All I did was hit reply, and people above/below me in the thread got the re: Layered Implementation.
Wierd.
How about J. Cash Penney?
Oh, wait... that was department-store chain founder JC Penney's real name.
Not sure if you knew, but you hit so close with G Penny Cash that I had to mention it.
I agree with almost all of what you say: Getting caught with encryption could be a death sentence, encryption and steg have different goals, they can supplant one another in a reciprocity sort of way, etc. But let me say this again: it is so damn hard to do steg well, that anyone living in an area where coded transmissions are life-risking acts, should think twice. Me, I'd stay *clear* the fsck away from steg.
Steg isn't just *hard*, like encryption (where one can get good encryption, or carefully implement a published, trusted algorithm and be safe). It's harder. Each implementation has to be robust against all sorts of preliminary cryptanalysis techniques, plus you're dealing with stuff beyond your control (like machine-specific traits in scanner or camera output). Stuff that is *beyond your control* can reveal steg being used. For hiding data in photos, for example, all it sometimes takes is *looking* at histograms of the bytes found in normal images off a device vs. the histograms of bytes found in steg'd ones. Try it! The graphs nearly scream 'STEG!!!' at you (because each consumer device will have some characteristic 'gap' or overloading in the range of possible values, or because of compression algorithms in the device, if they save to jpg or mpeg).
I'm still not claiming expertise, but if but my life depended on this stuff, I'd tend toward lower-tech: I'd hide the info somewhere boring and plausibly-deniable.
Smite, smitten, smote. Ergo, SmoteKitten.
"Oh, I see, it's one of those irregular verbs: I'm eccentric, you're odd, she's around the twist!" -- Yes, Prime Minister.
Similarly, I'd rather pay 50 a year to cover my .001% of the cost of a handful of engineers to maintain a wireless (phone or 11b) infrastructure in my community, than $20 a month to comcast, sbc, verizon, etc etc etc. Which has incidentally grown to 40 a month.
I don't like subsidizing marketers, ad wonks, and account managers. A free system eliminates them. My local power utility is has fewer people working for it than any one cellphone provider locally, and costs a ***load less than all the cellphone-industry people on the local company payrolls, even given the much larger infrastructure costs and maintenance complexity of a power grid compared to a company with a few dozen cellphone towers.
I don't care how inefficient or corrupt a government is, it's trivial to keep them more efficient than the 3x increase in manpower a firm gets when they're retailers.
Oh, and public infrastructure (like power, roads and schools) deserves more credit than 'business competition' in explaining progress.
If you eliminate a company's market, the money just goes somewhere else. I refuse to subscribe to the FOSS-hurts-america-by-hurting-microsoft school of thought: the money we don't spend on microsoft becomes our own profit. We then spend it on something else, creating new innovations and stretching our productivity. It's a zero-net equation, unless we tuck the capital value into a mattress somewhere where it cannot be reinvested (even a bank account leverages money into new uses)
Innovation happens for reasons other than profit. Most of the engineers I know like innovating/creating stuff just to scratch an itch. The arts thrived until this last century despite a system that almost literally starved the artists. And of all our motivators, profit is the motive most likely to lead to piracy/theft of ideas.
Only a dreamer thinks that innovation and quality are the prime criteria for market success. Crap with good marketing prevails way too often. Marketing perverts the market of ideas that everyone idealizes as being the result of competition. Innovation happens *in spite* of the lawyers, salesmen, ad campaigns, etc, not because of 'em.
So, here's my bottom line: Given the choices you offer, I'd rather have a world with 1/10th the marketing and crapulence that infests my life, and with lots more engineers. How exactly will embracing your worldview lead to that future? Oh, and tonight I'm gonna work on my taxes. Tell me again how the current system in the US is the optimum design? It sucks largely because the tax prep industry lobbies to keep it stressful and complicated. Check this out: http://www.iwf.org/issues/issues_detail.asp?Articl eID=449
That runs counterintuitive, so let me scratch the why/how:
Steg: it's incredibly hard to really hide stuff. If you stick data into the unimportant pixelbits of A/V data, statistical analysis of the sort of data that is created by the source (camera, scanner, etc) makes it *trivial* to detect that stuff is being hidden. The better you hide it, the more you sacrifice signal to noise.
Steg plus encryption: easily detected, and steg limits the data pipe. If you have a lot of steg data, creating enough host data to mask it becomes a huge damn PITA.
Strong encryption: data compresses, not expands. Detection and break costs can be reasonably calculated, and algorithms can be picked that achieve an acceptable break cost. And there are mechanisms like dvd-length one-time pads that can make the data flow utterly unassailable as long as it remains encrypted. All that you're left with is attacks outside that space (bribery, extortion, threats, wiretaps, and so on become the cheapest win).
Incidentally, W.A.S.T.E. has an design aspect that does a great job of balancing steg and encryption: encrypt everything with an algorithm that is computationally expensive to brute-force, then shove copious amounts of probably-not-significant data down the encrypted channel. It's like the shortwave number-reader frequencies: by creating a perpetual, huge stream of junk code, you get rid of the above-mentioned weaknesses, and gain the advantage of creating an encrypted and steg'd stream.
EU Patents has a nice parallel in environmentalism: every day can see any company make an independent attempt to damage the environment. Being an environmentalist is pretty masochistic: fighting losing battles and waking up each day wondering who is going to try to subvert the system.
Every day, a new battle. And a certainty that some really disturbing stuff will happen in spite of your best efforts. But fight wisely and you win wider support gradually, until it can become impossible to even attack some high-profile targets (the Grand Canyon is safe from dams for the forseeable future, but wasn't safe 50 yrs ago -- hopefully we'll someday see the same level of citizen control over a greatly-defanged copyright and patent hierarchy).
The bad news is that the attack just shifts to lower-profile targets, and it's impossible to generate widespread support for every small project. At that point, the best populist defense are to create umbrella protections like the Endangered Species Act, parks or wilderness designations, and raising overall minimum standards of quality (the Clean Air act, not the malaprop 'healthy forest' act).
(Sorry for all the US'ian analogies, but the only European example of citizen activism I know beans about is CAMRA.)
And we're back to this fundamental need on Linux:
I still can't do tax software on linux. Heck, I'd be happy if someone managed to create tex or pdf forms I could fill in. But no-oo!
Web interfaces don't work, because I have a consulting S-Corp form or three, but last time I checked, even the 1040 long form and schedule C's (which I couldn't live without) aren't handled by the web-based tax tools. Besides, I'm utterly freaked about a website hosting my tax data.
Since I'm pretty sick of perpetually nursing along my home computers anyway, Mac Mini here I come...
Meanwhile, at an auction last week, I saw a Norstar 16-line digital PBX with direct in-dialing, about 30 handsets, several system modules and more tech than that li'l town needed... sell for $50.
Most techies would be amazed at some of the long-abandoned technologies that are still in use out in these isolated places.
Heh, I'd forgotten the exact zipcode. Nods to Jake and Elwood, and my favorite ball team, I've given it out a few times myself. Rates right up there with 567-68-0515 (Nixon's social security number).
Incidentally, *years* ago, an older cousin of mine was drafted for Viet Nam. At his induction (or whatever they call it) he wrote in the address of his favorite bar. Defends himself now by saying 'well, I didn't have a permanent address and I pretty much lived there...' Due to his lingering hangover or whatever, he promptly forgot having done so.
Several years go by. And he's become expert in half a dozen asian languages and is just beginning work as a translator and cultural analyst for the military or CIA or whatever. One day, he's called in for a review of his TS clearance application, but in an odd location that he wasn't familiar with.
He gets there, and is wordlessly escorted into a white interogation chamber, complete with 2-way mirror. Where he sits. Alone. Checks door, it's locked. An hour of waiting, and someone opens the door. In walks a guy wearing the proverbial black suit and mirrored sunglasses. Guy sits. Places a couple folders on the table. Pulls out his application. Asks him to review it and confirm all the facts. He does. Then the guy pulls out the other form: a copy of his induction paperwork, address circled in red. Yeah... 1060 W. Addison (well, for us, it's 626 Lewis St.). Guy points to it. Asks, please explain this.
A blank stare as he digs back into his past, a vague recall, and a hurried 'that was something of a joke, since I didn't have a more permanent address' gets a long pause. Sunglasses come off. Guy's definitely not amused, and asks him asked "Are there any other *jokes* you'd like to come clean about?"
A career later, retired, he usually mutters: ya know, that should have been my first clue that I needed to get the hell outa there... Don't bother keeping your nose clean. You'll be happier if you just know when to blow.
Kee-ripes. Everyone keeps pretending like this is not an entry-level computer! Stop it. Wake up! If you're shoppin' for a graphics workstation (the most common user of gigabit-shared RAID that I'm aware of) and you can't fork out $1500, you're not doing the 'what's my time worth' math right.
<Me>Squirms, struggling to resist a lame math vs. Decimal Dave joke/pun
Not to interrupt your rant & I'm seriously thinking of getting a mac mini, but I believe it only has 100, not gigabit ethernet. Please, someone let me know if I'm mistaken.
Now, since I promised to go point-by-point if you took the time to reply, here goes. No reply is needed, either. For readability, I've italicized quotes from the Lowenstein/NYT article, but haven't done much more to show all the individual cuts, etc.:
I'm one of many Dems that think it's damn ironic that we're now the party of fiscal restraint.
The SSA chart stops short of showing longterm predictions. Here's what the article says about predictions made by SSA (both in 1934 and more recently:
Next, you wrote:
My answer? Kerry screwed up and let the Republicans frame the issue. As for whether SS is in trouble, the SS Admin was badly burned for being too optimistic in the 70's and 80s. That's discussed in the article, but in a scattered fashion that doesn't lend itself to an outtake that I can find. But he does disagree that there's trouble:
Further, I'd say that progressives and Democrats are trying to anticipate the risk. If we use pessimistic #'s, an adjustment is needed to get Social Security to rock-solid levels (since the cost is estimated to be a 1.8
The life expectancy calculations you mentioned are a myth. Debunked by the NYT article. Further, the original Social Security estimates of life expectancy were almost spot-on perfect. They actually anticipated a longer life expectancy by a year or two, not a much shorter one.
Similarly, everything you said reads like a talking point list from the Republicans. And without going back and doing a point-by-point analysis of your claims vs the NYT, I think the article refutes every claim you made. If you want to argue this, start the point-by-point, quoting the NYT article or historical documents and I'll willingly commit the effort. But I won't waste my time on something I suspect is partisan astroturfing by an anti-SS advocate.
My take: the republicans have hated Social Security since day 1. They've tried to kill it at least 4 times. Now, they're saying it's doomed to bankruptcy and must be dramatically changed to be saved. Ironically, the remedy is very similar to the previous attempts to destroy it. Hmmm...
Republicans hate SS. They also hate that it's been unassailable (the proverbial 3rd rail). If they are the only ones that say it's doomed, Occam's Razor says they're lying.
Even the village idiot finds plenty to laugh about.
/dev/null
I've reread, and I didn't build any straw men, I called your statements lazy shallow and dumb-ass (not you), and I presented examples and arguments in favor of what I originally said. If anything, I appreciate you demonstrating the dangerous mindset I was decrying.
Once I've demonstrated, via argument, that something you believe is dumb-ass, lazy or shallow, I can call *IT* dumbass, lazy, or shallow without it being namecalling. Doing so is generally poor form, but I don't mind the slip-up considering the crap you're spewing. Oops, did it again.
It isn't that I'm self-absorbed, it's that your views are so blissfully spared the ravages of intelligence, and you're to self-unaware to realize that that's bad. I can hardly expect you to shut up or learn, so I'll just fix the FoF rating and redirect your answers to
What a sad set of straw-man attacks. This is incredibly off-topic, but it's late on a Friday and I'm just waiting for a download...
1 - There are a *lot* of dams on the Columbia river that I advocate against. Regularly. But then, I see the economic damage of the lost salmon runs (I grew up in a town that was jam-packed during salmon runs, by fishermen from all over the world), and I'm not afraid of the alternatives (wind, nuke, solar, or coal). And to be honest, I'd be cool with putting the Army C of E to work for 50 years, replacing dams with low-head fish-friendly bulb turbine dams to get some of the hydro energy. It'd cost a bit, but there's that limitless-power deal to sweeten the economic pot...
(notice how I disagree with you completely, but don't resort to swearing and insults as shallow non-arguments like you did)
2 - What about non-extremists? As my OP said, it is more important that the most extreme voices be encouraged, to make sure that people don't ever feel compelled to shut up. As happened with people who were against the US war in Iraq, if we shout down people (like you are by putting up such a ridiculous straw man and pretending it is what *rational* opponents of you believe), we all lose. It's better to hear the dissent (no matter how nutty), then thin things down to *informed* facts and findings. That's a way to let any independent reviewer confirm good judgement, and exposes mistakes, corruption, or incompetence.
3 - Anti-tech people should really imagine what life would look like without pvc, internal-combustion cars, modern medicine, etc. I agree, it's impossible to sustain humanity without all our advancements. But we still need to balance things a lot more than you're apparently willing to do.
It's lazy to shout people down. It's lazy to pretend like any opposition is a lunatic from the opposite extreme. It's lazy to invent dumb-ass straw-man examples like you just did.
There was an IT shop next to the hallowed grounds of Guinness?! Shit! I always find out about these things a day too late...
Speaking of 1 in 100,000 odds, that's about the risk that space science faces due to anti-Pu Activists.
Now, alongside Cassini, put up your 'settling the world=genocide' pre-emptive denial, and toss in Love Canal, Bhopal, TMI, and Chernyobl, or any other man-made disasters that come to mind.
Every risk deserves attention. Ethics and economics are a scary combination. I'm as cynical as the next guy about whether lawyers are worth the grief they cause, yet I get really nervous about calls for lawsuit limits due to it's risk of making product liability an economic calculation (I don't ever want to hear a business argument of "we will make $X million profit per anticipated casualty, and lawsuits are cost-limited to $250k in damages, each").
I'll conceed we're cushy enough that we seem to have become a nation of scaredy-cats. Land of the Free, Home of the Brave has become Land of the Safe, Home of the Timid. I agree that the risk of a Pu event due to Cassini was tiny. And I was eager to see Cassini's opposition lose. But I'm glad that people stood up in opposition. The questions need to be asked, answered, debated. And the risks we face need to include utter bankruptcy and disgrace if we disregard risks and our actions kill bystanders. Sometimes the level of responsibility should literally be harsher than just being 'willing to die', whether for commerce or knowledge.
As anyone who studies risk analysis knows, just because the odds are miniscule, doesn't mean the damage still wouldn't be terrible if something goes horribly wrong, and we should never hide from that discussion. Ethically, we literally need to promote the review of these serious (albeit tiny) risks. We can't brush them aside. Not while asking bystanders to die if we screw up.
Please don't talk trash about people that are just trying to keep our decisions humane.
Oh, and (Mayflower - Columbus) = 128. Columbus: 1492. Mayflower: 1620. 128 *YEARS* between 'em. And the costs, complexities, etc... they're too different to compare simplistically.
And I wager that us-ians would be better world citizens if things shifted enough to where we weren't a political, economic and military superpower. As I cringe at our Iraq situation and shake my head in disgust at the things overheard from a sizeable population of simplistic crisco-eaters I run into daily, I wonder if that isn't our immediate future. There's evidence we're already overstretched militarily, we're certainly not a political leader right now, and economically, we're slippin'.