Sounds like they've discovered a Kemplerer Rosette [burtleburtle.net].:)
I believe that a Kemplerer Rosette is characterized as being a stable gravitational configuration of bpdoes orbiting a single point at similar distances and speeds in such a way that all bodies are equidistant, and is further characterized in that one could envision a regular polygon of n-sides, where n is the number of bodies, and if one vertex is mapped to the location of one body, and the center of the polygon is mapped to the common orbit location, then all other vertexes will correspond to locations where the other bodies reside.
This ring of stars, being randomly located, would not qualify. In addition, a Kemplerer Rosette is only stable against small perturbations; if the bodies are far enough apart that other gravitational influences grow large with respect to their gravitational influence on each other, then it is no longer stable.
Could this be part of the elusive 'dark matter' talked about so much lately?
Yes.
Most scientists believe that dark matter makes up 80 - 95% of the total gravitational mass of the galaxy, and probably the universe.
Dark matter is simply the term given to matter that we haven't observed yet, except indirectly through its gravitational effect.
This is certainly some portion of the dark matter. But I wouldn't say a significant part, or even a part really worth mentioning. While the dark matter is almost definitely comprised of several different sources, it seems certain to me that there is an entire class of gravitational objects that we have yet to observe, and this is the cause of the dark matter. Whether its dark stars, black holes, heavy neutrinos, or some even more strange and cosmic form of matter I don't know. It could be all of those and more.
Point being, if the dark matter within the Milky Way is only 80% of the mass of the galaxy, and not say 95% as some researchers suggest... this would make it 400% of the mass of the observed portion of the galaxy. These stars are, according to the article, 1% of the mass of the (previously) observed portion of the galaxy. Which makes them 0.25% of the mass of dark matter required to account for gravitational effects that are otherwise unexplained. If dark matter turns out to be a significantly larger percentage, such as 95%, then these stars only account for.05% of the mass of dark matter.
For those who question the value of determining either the cause or the exact amount of dark matter in the universe, this debate is pivotal for determining the final fate of the universe. So far our calculations of the total mass of the universe, including the dark matter, are riding the knife-edge required to make the universe exactly stable. If there is a little more mass than this, then the current expansion of the universe will one day reverse, until the universe contracts back to a singularity. If there is a little less mass than this, then the current expansion of the universe will continue infinitely.
This is all according to current theory on the creation and eventual fate of the universe and is subject to change with brilliance, genius, and persperation.
In the article: "If the ring turns out to be due to a satellite galaxy, it would mean that we are seeing the Milky Way cannibalizing a small galaxy and incorporating it into the galactic disk..." But what if it's the other way around?
Wouldn't that be like the researcher who, several years ago, proposed the theory that The Odyssey was not written by Homer the blind poet but was in fact written by a completely different blind poet named Homer?
Fractal dimension is not spatial dimensionality (axes) as normally taught in physics classes.
Technically, this is known as the Hilbert dimension and is a representation of how complicated and self-referential a particular form is.
It has to do with boundaries and with derivatives. How folded is a boundary? Let's say you have a 2-d fractal shape of some sort. The outside edge has some non-intuitive length because of its complexity. Imagine an outside edge that is so incredibly complex that by virtue of its complexity, it is somewhere in between being a length and an area. It is so twisty and convoluted that it cannot be described simply by a measurement in centimeters, but centimeters squared is a little too much for it.
This is a fractional dimension. No real life (matter) objects exhibit fractional dimensions; only hypothetical objects can exhibit them. This is because atoms have sizes and crystal structure, and cannot occupy the same place at the same time, which provides concrete limits on the amount of complexity in an object. Fractional dimensionality can only come from a complexity that is infinite in scope... the object must be convoluted at any scale at which you wish to measure it. Things made of tiny balls aren't like that.
Note: I may have gotten the name "Hilbert" wrong. It's been 6 years since I had any formal schooling or use for Chaos Theory.
The wind on Mars isn't like the wind on Earth.. Since the atmosphere is so thin on Mars, you would have to have friggin enormous sized windstorms to even begin to power such a thing as this.
I guess it's a good thing that the windstorms on Mars cover entire hemispheres and last for weeks then, huh?
Well, it seems pi is normal, which means any finite sequence appears somewhere along the expansion of the number. So trivially, that image of a circle is in there somewhere, as is an image of a triangle, the source to Linux 4.0, an image of Bush playing with G.I. Joe dolls on his desk and so on.
As a matter of fact, there have even been cryptosystems proposed on that very fact; randomize either your input stream or your cipher stream by finding at what position in pi it first appears. This isn't an encryption method, just a way of making it more difficult to detect pseudo-random number sequences.
The basic problem being, how do you create randomness from mathematical certainty. True mathematical randomness is a very difficult thing to do. Any purely software based method of computing random numbers is susceptible to a sophisticated enough method of prediction, and is therefore not random at all.
All of these cryptosystems are merely proposed and not implemented, because they don't really add randomness while adding a lot of computation. They don't add randomness because they are STILL purely computational methods of deriving random numbers, and even if the numbers are mathematically completely random and indistinguishable from static, there's still a sophisticated algorithm that can predict the next number.
BTW, if your PKI keypair was created without either a hardware random number generator, or you wacking on your spacebar a couple hundred times, you should throw it away and make a new one with a program that makes good keypairs.
Did you think, at all, before you wrote that? What do you think "equilibrium" means?
It is possible to have unstable points of equilibrium. As a matter of fact, in chaotic systems, stability is a range, not a quality.
For instance, chaoticians talk about stability vs. small perturbations as seperate from basic stability.
As an example, there is a Lagrange point of gravitational equilibrium between the Earth and the Sun. This is a point where the gravity of the earth equals the gravity of the sun. All the forces of the system balance out and cancel. Unfortunately, this point is not stable, even against small perturbations. Any perturbation, even one caused by random atomic motion (i.e. "heat") is enough to cause one force to be greater than the other. In other words, while this system has a point of equilibrium, it tends not to be in equilibrium.
However, there are other systems that tend towards equilibrium. A spherical pit is an example. A marble at any location in the pit tends to drive the system toward it's point of equilibrium; where the marble is in the bottom center. If you perturb the marble in any way, it will tend to come back to rest in the center. If you perturb it hard enough, it CAN fly right out of the pit. So there's a certain amount of perturbation that the system is stable against. Make a bigger pit or a heavier marble or steeper sides and you increase that stability. Make the pit shallower or smaller, or lighten the marble and you decrease the stability.
If you were a physicist, you would characterize this system as having a certain stability, represented by the amount of work required to push the system out of equilibrium. For instance, if you had to push the marble at 10 Newtons for 1 second to just barely push it out of the pit, you could say that the system is stable against 10 Newton-seconds, which I believe are called Joules.
Make the pit so shallow that its perfectly flat, and the system has an infinity of equilibriums, that is at every point the forces in the system balance, but no stability; the system doesn't prefer to be in any particular state.
If you introduce population genetics to "The WB Frog," will he suddenly change sex and have the potential to bear young (as do amphibians when populations are all female, i think)
Actually, only some amphibian populations are like that. Amphibians in general have really wierd sex lives, though. I think it has to do with their hybrid air/water lives. Everything else about their biology is screwy, not to mention their lifestyle, that their sex life kinda has to be screwy... what other creature has first a fish society involving things as extant as schooling behaviour, and then completely sheds it to sit on the edge of a pond, croaking, attracting predators all day long?
Anyways, getting to the point, there's even a race of frogs, I think they're in Africa somewhere, where all adults are female. Tadpoles are male. Tadpoles are also food. Adults would rather eat anything than species tadpoles, and prefer the tadpoles of other adults as opposed to their own. In areas where the frog is fairly succesful, you get a simple little ecology. Tadpoles eat pond scum and other simple plant life, and frogs eat the tadpoles. Highly succesful tadpoles eventually become frogs. Frogs lay eggs that are later fertilized by tadpoles.
Caveat: this is all anecdotal, related to me by two sci-fi authors in the foreward of a series of books based on the idea (Legacy of Heorot and it's sequel, by Larry Niven and Steve Pournelle), a magazine article author who didn't provide any references, and a friend of mine who's somewhat of a rennaissance man. So while I have no doubt that the above story is somewhat based in reality, certain features may be inflated. For instance, I have some question as to whether a frog would eat tadpoles.
When the Eden first came out, that's EXACTLY what I did.
EPIA 800 MHz. 5.6" LCD screen (TV resolution, but who cares?) 4GB IBM Travelstar. DVD Drive. GPS. MP3. Wireless/Wired network. 7" acrylic cube case. Built in mouse, infrared remote, flexible/indestructible keyboard.
Then I drove to Peoria Illinois on July 17, and back on July 22. Anyone else who was in Peoria that weekend give me a shout cause I got MCL. It's about a 16 hour drive for me. The passengers loved it, I loved it. Never bored.
The only thing I've used it for since is to show some friends some music videos I downloaded off the net at concerts.
Now, I don't consider it exactly wasted because the computer itself is portable, and very convenient as a portable DVD player as well as computing device. And the LCD is mostly portable. One bolt and it's out of the car. And I've got a tripod I can screw it onto, and a 12V power supply. Since I do digital mixing live for parties, it's been a great help. No more dragging around a huge monitor everywhere.
Point being, it hasn't been used in my car except on a roadtrip. The week after I built it when I was still all excited about it. There are two primary issues:
1. It's not permanently wired. It takes some work to wire it in. And I don't always have the time to wire it in when I bring it out from my house or a gig or a friend's house or whatever. I plan on fixing that with a cradle. I only use about 20 wires when it's in the car (mouse+keyboard+gps = 5-wire USB port, video = 2-wire RCA, audio out = 3-wire stereo headphone jack, infrared = 9-wire RS232, power = 2-wire DC), and I'm basically just gonna hook all those up to a centronics connector and that should solve that problem.
2. Usability. It's not incredibly useable. First off, it's not instant on which is a problem. I can mostly fix that, but not all the way. The user input isn't unified. You use a combination of mouse and IR remote commands to control everything. The main problem there is I have a few different pieces of software. Hopefully Windows Media Player 9 will get slightly better support for DVD and I can use that. Then all I gotta do is get a better remote. My IR software is learning, so it works with any remote. I just gotta get one with all the buttons I need. Easier said than done, and if you're a computer or remote control manufacturer and you want my advice, feel free to contact me with regard to this. The short is I'm gonna ditch the Windows Explorer interface and use Windows Media Player as the primary interface to interact with the computer, and wire that up to be controlled in toto by a remote control.
So, if you're planning on building a car computer make sure that those two issues are covered. BTW, a keyboard on the dash doesn't work so don't even think about it. My only other advice is install a seperate lighter socket for it if you're gonna power it off that and not permanently wire it in. Whether you wire it in or not, put in a relay. You want that power off when the car is off. Even in standby mode (computer Instant-Off, LCD in standby) it sucks down a battery in a couple hours without the alternator on. Hard drives are cheap. Car batteries/electrical systems are not. Plus, your car will run without a hard drive. It won't run without a battery.
I'm a digital DJ. I would buy that CD in a second.
Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited
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Does this 'school of thought' actually, you know, 'exist'? Like in the 'real world', as opposed to in your mind. If so, I'd like to know more about it - do you have any references you could point me to?
No I don't have any references. I did a quick google search and didn't find anything. It's a 'school of thought' in that when talking with people I know, you know, in the 'real world', that kinda 'exist' and when I 'told' them about it, 'they' agreed that 'it sounds' plausible. That these people, all of whom know something both about 'computers' and 'chess', all agreed that it certainly has not been proven that a perfect game equals a draw or win every time.
Riposte: do you have a reference that says that a perfect game is possible? Because unless there's a logic proof of same, then my viewpoint is as valid as yours.
Oh, and just because you put my words in quotes doesn't mean they have any less value.
In chess, strategy is equally important to board condition
In the context of talking about whether the game of chess is a theoretical win or draw, all that matters is the 'board condition'.
Yes, but what about the move before this theoretical win or draw? And the move before that? What about planning, cunning, and trickery? What about a branch of play that receives a low initial score, so it isn't explored by the brute force algorithm, but that makes it possible to solve the endgame?
There are most likely branches of play that look to be promising but that a significantly skilled chess player can turn into a win.
First of all, I assume you mean to say "don't look to be promising", because the sentence doesn't make any sense otherwise. Assuming that's what you meant, we're talking about whether chess is a theoretical win or draw - all that matters is what happens with perfect play, not whether the position "looks promising".
Let me rephrase: There are most likely branches of play that look to be promising to an AI but that a significantly skilled chess opponent can turn into a win.
That done... assume by "looks promising", I mean "This is a branch of the tree that gets a high score and therefore is further scrutinized by the AI, and may even result in a move being made to bring this branch into being," but I assumed that most programmers would understand what "looks promising" means.
Artificial Intelligence has absolutely nothing to do with emulating HUMAN intelligence, as you seem to believe. Artifical Intelligence is about embuing a machine with the ability to go beyond it's basic programming
Well, as someone who works in AI research, I gotta say - thanks for defining our field for us, man.
Look, I, and everyone here, certainly understands that AI is a tough field to define and that most people choose to define it a little differently. I gave what I have heard, over the years, to be a generally accepted definition. I rebuffed a definition that I believed to be false. For instance, I do not consider that a computer must pass a turing test to display intelligence.
What is your problem, anyways?
Certainly a chess program can never truly go beyond it's programming; which is to win a game of chess. But what about it's basic programming; a few thousand lines of code written by a team.
So is there some well-defined distinction between 'programming' and 'basic programming' that you're trying to make here?
No. Not well-defined. In case you haven't figured it out, I could give a flying fuck about well-defined. I care about me-defined. Words and thought images that matter to me. I think it was pretty clear from context that 'programming' could be construed to be the particular problem that a program was written to solve, and that 'basic programming' is the basic code written to solve that problem. No tricks, no voodoo, no special optimizations. Just code.
It can take those lines of code and make assumptions, strategies, tactics, and observations. This most certainly is beyond it's basic programming, which really just included a set of the rules for chess and a way to look ahead a few dozen moves predictively.
Err... how do you know exactly what the 'basic programming' of this hypothetical chess program exactly includes? If, as you say, the 'basic program' really just consisted of an algorithm to search game trees, then that is exactly what the program will do - it's not going to magically start 'making assumptions, strategies, and tactics' unless that is in the code.
I'm discussing a theoretical opponent that does those things and happens to be embodied by bits running through a piece of silicon. Though I vehemently oppose the turing test as a measure of general artificial intelligence, I will borrow it as a tool to use to measure specialized intelligence. In this case, if the program acts as a human player would act, then couldn't it be said to be utilizing the same process as a human player?
Or to state another way: most chess AI programs, recognizing limited resources (time alloted for game, processing abilities) must prune their predictive tree in some way; some way of discarding branches that seem to be unfruitful and exploring ones that seem fruitful. Could not this algorithm be said to be making assumptions, strategies, and tactics?
Sorry all, for the tone. It's just that, being someone who actually knows something about chess and ai, that last post caused me physical pain, and I had to get it off my chest.
I apologize to you for the consternation. Maybe I should've prefaced my post with something to the effect of IANACP or IANAAIP or something equally banal. Except I didn't want to be cute. And I don't apologize for my opinions. I would've prefaced my post with "This is just my opinion." But this is slashdot. Every post is someone's opinion. That's the beauty of slashdot. I very sorry that your viewpoint differs from mine.
And I'm very very sorry that you find your viewpoint so important to you that you feel physical pain when someone says something that contradicts your viewpoint.
Warning - if you have a soft place in your heart for cute goofy stoner chicks
Doesn't everyone have a soft place for cute goofy stoner chicks?
I just assumed that was a universal maxim, like how art on sci-fi magazines and novels has nothing to do with the stories to be found inside, or how mice, no matter how optical, self cleaning, nanotech, will always need to be cleaned at the crucial moment of the game winning frag...
Re:Would Poker be a good AI test?
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Behind Deep Blue
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That was my point actually. It seems like a simple economics problem.
But I've played quite a few of the various computer monopolies, and every one that I've played has been vulnerable to 3-way trades. That is, property that is invaluable to you and invaluable to the computer agent you are purchasing from, but extremely valuable to a third party can be had cheaply. Therefore the "seems to be"... I don't think any serious economics or AI people have ever really looked at it.
There is one very important part here; that this value is a more or less arbitrary continuum. Though initial costs and future earnings certainly factor into the value proposition, there are cases where even that is superseded by something humans are good at and computers are bad at; judgement calls.
For example, let's say you own a monopoly. Noone else does. Someone wants to trade with you, net result, you get one more monopoly and they get one more monopoly. Most value algorithms that I can think of would say that this is a more-or-less even trade. Maybe a little bit of cash should be thrown in by one side or the other, but it's an even trade.
But I would never make that trade, all other things being equal, because it would erode a significant advantage. This is just a simple example; there are more complex ones, that I think humans would be good at solving and a simple algorithm bad at solving.
BTW, Monopoly is not 100% luck. There is one choice that you can make that affects your board position, which is ultimately what decides wins and losses.
Whether or not to stay in jail.
Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited
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If you could work out all possible games of chess, you'd be able to determine the optimum strategy for each player, and 'solve' the game of chess. You'd find one of three results:
My point being that, until we've done that, one can't really make a statement to the effect of "An infinitely powerful computer will always win"... which is, paraphrased, what the original poster said.
There are two ways to prove such a statement; both of them result in a general solution to the game of chess, as you describe. The first way is to compute all possible games and characterize them mathematically. Though difficult, this is possible. This is analguous to brute-forcing a public-key encryption algorithm whose key-length is equal to the number of possible moves. It's gonna take a while, but it's possible. There's no reason you can't do it.
The second way is to take a couple dozen smart mathematicians and have them look at the system and analyze it mathematically. This is analguous to breaking an algorithm. Most algorithms it's possible to break, though a precious few it is not. So far chess looks unbreakable, and we've found pretty strong evidence that it is theoretically unbreakable.
Re:Would Poker be a good AI test?
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Behind Deep Blue
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Go is surprisingly difficult to play well; we have yet to build a computer that can beat a moderately skilled human player.
And, Moore's law not withstanding, we probably won't be able to build a computer to brute force the problem. It'll HAVE to be solved by an AI that thinks and strategizes, instead of one that just computes the entire game tree and picks the best branch.
Another game that seems surprisingly difficult to program well is Monopoly; the value of any particular piece of property for trading is a complex algorithm involving not only the player's personal desire, but the value the opponent may place on that piece of property as well as the value that every other opponent MAY be able to place on it at any point in the future. It doesn't seem hard, I just think the hardcore AI guys don't consider a contemporary board game worthy of their attention.
Of course if I could pick a contemporary game that would be the ultimate AI test, I'd go with Turing's approach and pick Dungeons and Dragons. Because there's no way to brute force the thing EVER, and it requires GENERAL problem solving and logic algorithms...
Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited
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Are you *sure* that they're proven that Chess is always a tuie (if played perfectly)? I thought that, due to the nature of the game mathematicians haven't been able to prove one way or another what the end of the game would be. just for my personal knowledge, can you cite a source for these claims?
Actually, I said that there were two schools of thought and that neither one was proven. So, yeah, you're right and so am I. No proof. None. And I kept up the same "I don't know which one is right and neither does anyone else" tone throughout the whole post.
Read more carefully before replying next time. Move along. Nothing to see here.
Re:Please, Deep Blue is not AI, chess is a limited
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Behind Deep Blue
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now that computers can process far enough into the game, they need never lose.
There are actually two major branches of thought on the matter, neither one is proven. The statement you make is one such branch of thought, that can be stated more precisely as:
A perfectly played game of chess will never result in a loss, and will only result in a tie if the opponent also plays a perfect game
However there is also another school of thought, which points out the lie in your statement. This thought can be stated as:
In chess, strategy is equally important to board condition. There are most likely branches of play that look to be promising but that a significantly skilled chess player can turn into a win.
The reasoning behind this is that there is no single opening move that results in the entire game-tree having no checkmates for one player. And that no subsequent move can prune out checkmates, until the end-game. Thus, a perfect player could possibly get itself into a situation where a check mate is forced on it.
I don't know whether that's true or not. One part of me says yes, that seems true, while another part of me says, why doesn't the program just choose a path where any move it can make results in an end-game with no checkmates with itself. I'm not sure such a path exists; even if it does, I would call a system built to choose this path AI.
Artificial Intelligence has absolutely nothing to do with emulating HUMAN intelligence, as you seem to believe. Artifical Intelligence is about embuing a machine with the ability to go beyond it's basic programming.
Certainly a chess program can never truly go beyond it's programming; which is to win a game of chess. But what about it's basic programming; a few thousand lines of code written by a team. It can take those lines of code and make assumptions, strategies, tactics, and observations. This most certainly is beyond it's basic programming, which really just included a set of the rules for chess and a way to look ahead a few dozen moves predictively.
Such a system would certainly qualify, in my eyes, as AI.
The problem with that is why symmetric encryption is being used less frequently, except in certain sectors.
How do Alice and Bruce agree on a key to use without giving Charlie a chance to intercept it?
There has yet to be a better answer than:
Alice gets on a plane and goes where Bruce is, where they proceed into a concrete bunker, inside a faraday cage, into a pitch black room filled with white sound generators, where Alice whispers sweet nothings into Bruce's ear.
The quantum-crypto-over-fiber guys are coming close to it, using the polarization of photons to convey meaning.
If I recall correctly, the reason why you sometimes see huge keys that are 1024 or 2048 bits long is the possibility that a weakness is found in the encryption technique that makes it a lot faster to brute force the key.
Or to paraphrase Neal Stephenson:
If someone knew that Avi was using 4096 bit keys, the could conclude one of the following about him:
a) He is very paranoid b) He believes that fundamental advances in cryptographic technique will be made in the near future that will require very strong cryptography c) He has a planning horizon of several centuries
In reality, Randy thinks it is a bit of each.
If anyone's curious, I strongly believe that every citizen on earth should follow Avi's example, as a little bit of all three of the above can't hurt anyone and might certainly help everyone at some point in the future.
If someone where more concerned about long term security, they could setup a system to refresh the keys on any encrypted data, say every year or every quarter.
That's the absolute worse thing you could do.
Disclaimer: IANAC, but I've read quite a bit on the subject, and implement it frequently.
If you change your keys periodically, you are doing so under the assumption that your documents are in danger of being received, and your keys being cracked.
Let's setup the following situation:
Alice wants to send a document to Bruce. They meet in person and agree on a key. This key works for both locking and unlocking documents, that is it is symmetric.
Alice encrypts a document for Bruce and transmits it over radio. She later learns that it may have been intercepted by Charlie, whom she really doesn't want to read her messages, so she and Bruce meet in person and agree on a new key together.
Alice decides that to be safe, she had better unencrypt everything she ever encrypted, and re-encrypt it with her new key, which she's pretty sure Charlie hasn't brute-forced yet.
Charlie never found the old key. He didn't have the time or resources; he's hoping to break Alice's crypto-system before he has to brute force it. One day while rummaging through Alice's hard drive, because Charlie's friend Dave is a pretty good cracker and can do stuff like that, he finds a document with the same date/time stamp as a transmission he intercepted. He compares it to the intercept and finds that it is an entirely different set of bits.
By comparing the two sets of bits, which are, thanks to our incredibly complicated elliptical curve encryption algorithm, basically noise, he can glean information. As a matter of fact, if he's right and the source of this document is the exact same as the source of the first document, he stands a good chance of making some interesting assumptions about the original document, and depending on the exact details of the cryptosystem and how it's applied to the documents, this could be (in order from best case to worst case):
a) Portions of the unencrypted document b) the unencrypted document (this would probably require a crib) c) portions of one or both of the keys used, this may be limited to mathematical facts about the keys... this would make a brute-force approach take a significantly less amount of time d) one or both of the keys used to encrypt the document
In fact, the absolute best case that can occur, from Alice's point of view, is that Charlie will now have to mount a known-plaintext attack, which while difficult, is orders of magnitude easier than a known-ciphertext attack.
Mine used to. I brought it in for service and they didn't have any comparable model to replace it with. So I asked for any GSM phone with infrared.
Know how many they had? 0. Nadda. Nil. Not a single digital phone with infrared port. Data cables, when you can find them, are $60 or so. For a cable. You know, the thing with a $3 connector at each end and ~8x6ft thin copper wires in between.
I wish I wasn't dyslexic so I could make my own cables. Every time I try, I end up soldering half the wires backwards...
What? I have Blue Sub No 6. all on one disc. I've never seen it sold any other way.
Are you talking about the movie or the series? How much did you pay for that disc? Can you look up the publisher? Was this before or after Toonami paid to have the translation redone
A quick search on Amazon shows the four discs, each one episode, currently on sale for $17.95, and "Blue Submarine No. 6: The Movie (Edited Version)" on sale for the same amount.
I don't think we'll ever see a 10-album-on-one-disc release.
Why? Cause I currently see companies that try to make as many discs as possible for a series, because customers equate discs to value.
Example 1: Blue Sub No. 6. 4 22-minute episodes. It could've easily fit on 1 disc. But it was released as 4 discs, each only 22 minutes long. At $30/disc (I know you can get it cheaper; I was satisfying my impulse-shopping drive at the time) it was not cheap. As a matter of fact, I can't remember the last time I spent more than $1 / minute for any for of entertainment. Possible exception being on the phone last night. (j/k)
You see this kind of thing all the time in anime; a series that could be compressed and sold on less discs is instead spaced out as much as possible in order to increase revenue. While, for instance, all the star treks or all the Aliens on one disc (or even an entire season of B5) would be awesome, I don't think we'll see it...
I do not know why noone considers Java as performant.
I have a few words / acronyms...
1. JIT. As in Just-In-Time compilation. Meaning Java software approaches native speed as time goes on.
2. JNI. As in Java Native Interface. Ok, so you have a couple C++ libraries that really have to be as fast as they possibly can be, without necessarily incurring the wrath of the platform demon by being written in assembly. That doesn't mean that the 90% of your code that doesn't vastly effect the performance of your system ALSO has to be written in C++.
3. Silicon. As in what chips are made of. Including chips that run Java. Though these are really targetted at the embedded market, to have your coffee machine run Java or whatever, a high-performance version is available. It plugs into your PCI bus. And runs Java there instead of in the main processor.
Oh, not exactly on-topic, but insert obligatory note of how.NET is language-independent, supposedly platform-independent, being an open standard and all, and performant, as its compiled and not runtimed.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like they've discovered a Kemplerer Rosette [burtleburtle.net]. :)
I believe that a Kemplerer Rosette is characterized as being a stable gravitational configuration of bpdoes orbiting a single point at similar distances and speeds in such a way that all bodies are equidistant, and is further characterized in that one could envision a regular polygon of n-sides, where n is the number of bodies, and if one vertex is mapped to the location of one body, and the center of the polygon is mapped to the common orbit location, then all other vertexes will correspond to locations where the other bodies reside.
This ring of stars, being randomly located, would not qualify. In addition, a Kemplerer Rosette is only stable against small perturbations; if the bodies are far enough apart that other gravitational influences grow large with respect to their gravitational influence on each other, then it is no longer stable.
Could this be part of the elusive 'dark matter' talked about so much lately?
.05% of the mass of dark matter.
Yes.
Most scientists believe that dark matter makes up 80 - 95% of the total gravitational mass of the galaxy, and probably the universe.
Dark matter is simply the term given to matter that we haven't observed yet, except indirectly through its gravitational effect.
This is certainly some portion of the dark matter. But I wouldn't say a significant part, or even a part really worth mentioning. While the dark matter is almost definitely comprised of several different sources, it seems certain to me that there is an entire class of gravitational objects that we have yet to observe, and this is the cause of the dark matter. Whether its dark stars, black holes, heavy neutrinos, or some even more strange and cosmic form of matter I don't know. It could be all of those and more.
Point being, if the dark matter within the Milky Way is only 80% of the mass of the galaxy, and not say 95% as some researchers suggest... this would make it 400% of the mass of the observed portion of the galaxy. These stars are, according to the article, 1% of the mass of the (previously) observed portion of the galaxy. Which makes them 0.25% of the mass of dark matter required to account for gravitational effects that are otherwise unexplained. If dark matter turns out to be a significantly larger percentage, such as 95%, then these stars only account for
For those who question the value of determining either the cause or the exact amount of dark matter in the universe, this debate is pivotal for determining the final fate of the universe. So far our calculations of the total mass of the universe, including the dark matter, are riding the knife-edge required to make the universe exactly stable. If there is a little more mass than this, then the current expansion of the universe will one day reverse, until the universe contracts back to a singularity. If there is a little less mass than this, then the current expansion of the universe will continue infinitely.
This is all according to current theory on the creation and eventual fate of the universe and is subject to change with brilliance, genius, and persperation.
In the article: "If the ring turns out to be due to a satellite galaxy, it would mean that we are seeing the Milky Way cannibalizing a small galaxy and incorporating it into the galactic disk..." But what if it's the other way around?
Wouldn't that be like the researcher who, several years ago, proposed the theory that The Odyssey was not written by Homer the blind poet but was in fact written by a completely different blind poet named Homer?
Fractal dimension is not spatial dimensionality (axes) as normally taught in physics classes.
Technically, this is known as the Hilbert dimension and is a representation of how complicated and self-referential a particular form is.
It has to do with boundaries and with derivatives. How folded is a boundary? Let's say you have a 2-d fractal shape of some sort. The outside edge has some non-intuitive length because of its complexity. Imagine an outside edge that is so incredibly complex that by virtue of its complexity, it is somewhere in between being a length and an area. It is so twisty and convoluted that it cannot be described simply by a measurement in centimeters, but centimeters squared is a little too much for it.
This is a fractional dimension. No real life (matter) objects exhibit fractional dimensions; only hypothetical objects can exhibit them. This is because atoms have sizes and crystal structure, and cannot occupy the same place at the same time, which provides concrete limits on the amount of complexity in an object. Fractional dimensionality can only come from a complexity that is infinite in scope... the object must be convoluted at any scale at which you wish to measure it. Things made of tiny balls aren't like that.
Note: I may have gotten the name "Hilbert" wrong. It's been 6 years since I had any formal schooling or use for Chaos Theory.
The wind on Mars isn't like the wind on Earth.. Since the atmosphere is so thin on Mars, you would have to have friggin enormous sized windstorms to even begin to power such a thing as this.
I guess it's a good thing that the windstorms on Mars cover entire hemispheres and last for weeks then, huh?
It's a joke. Laugh.
Well, it seems pi is normal, which means any finite sequence appears somewhere along the expansion of the number. So trivially, that image of a circle is in there somewhere, as is an image of a triangle, the source to Linux 4.0, an image of Bush playing with G.I. Joe dolls on his desk and so on.
As a matter of fact, there have even been cryptosystems proposed on that very fact; randomize either your input stream or your cipher stream by finding at what position in pi it first appears. This isn't an encryption method, just a way of making it more difficult to detect pseudo-random number sequences.
The basic problem being, how do you create randomness from mathematical certainty. True mathematical randomness is a very difficult thing to do. Any purely software based method of computing random numbers is susceptible to a sophisticated enough method of prediction, and is therefore not random at all.
All of these cryptosystems are merely proposed and not implemented, because they don't really add randomness while adding a lot of computation. They don't add randomness because they are STILL purely computational methods of deriving random numbers, and even if the numbers are mathematically completely random and indistinguishable from static, there's still a sophisticated algorithm that can predict the next number.
BTW, if your PKI keypair was created without either a hardware random number generator, or you wacking on your spacebar a couple hundred times, you should throw it away and make a new one with a program that makes good keypairs.
Did you think, at all, before you wrote that? What do you think "equilibrium" means?
It is possible to have unstable points of equilibrium. As a matter of fact, in chaotic systems, stability is a range, not a quality.
For instance, chaoticians talk about stability vs. small perturbations as seperate from basic stability.
As an example, there is a Lagrange point of gravitational equilibrium between the Earth and the Sun. This is a point where the gravity of the earth equals the gravity of the sun. All the forces of the system balance out and cancel. Unfortunately, this point is not stable, even against small perturbations. Any perturbation, even one caused by random atomic motion (i.e. "heat") is enough to cause one force to be greater than the other. In other words, while this system has a point of equilibrium, it tends not to be in equilibrium.
However, there are other systems that tend towards equilibrium. A spherical pit is an example. A marble at any location in the pit tends to drive the system toward it's point of equilibrium; where the marble is in the bottom center. If you perturb the marble in any way, it will tend to come back to rest in the center. If you perturb it hard enough, it CAN fly right out of the pit. So there's a certain amount of perturbation that the system is stable against. Make a bigger pit or a heavier marble or steeper sides and you increase that stability. Make the pit shallower or smaller, or lighten the marble and you decrease the stability.
If you were a physicist, you would characterize this system as having a certain stability, represented by the amount of work required to push the system out of equilibrium. For instance, if you had to push the marble at 10 Newtons for 1 second to just barely push it out of the pit, you could say that the system is stable against 10 Newton-seconds, which I believe are called Joules.
Make the pit so shallow that its perfectly flat, and the system has an infinity of equilibriums, that is at every point the forces in the system balance, but no stability; the system doesn't prefer to be in any particular state.
If you introduce population genetics to "The WB Frog," will he suddenly change sex and have the potential to bear young (as do amphibians when populations are all female, i think)
Actually, only some amphibian populations are like that. Amphibians in general have really wierd sex lives, though. I think it has to do with their hybrid air/water lives. Everything else about their biology is screwy, not to mention their lifestyle, that their sex life kinda has to be screwy... what other creature has first a fish society involving things as extant as schooling behaviour, and then completely sheds it to sit on the edge of a pond, croaking, attracting predators all day long?
Anyways, getting to the point, there's even a race of frogs, I think they're in Africa somewhere, where all adults are female. Tadpoles are male. Tadpoles are also food. Adults would rather eat anything than species tadpoles, and prefer the tadpoles of other adults as opposed to their own. In areas where the frog is fairly succesful, you get a simple little ecology. Tadpoles eat pond scum and other simple plant life, and frogs eat the tadpoles. Highly succesful tadpoles eventually become frogs. Frogs lay eggs that are later fertilized by tadpoles.
Caveat: this is all anecdotal, related to me by two sci-fi authors in the foreward of a series of books based on the idea (Legacy of Heorot and it's sequel, by Larry Niven and Steve Pournelle), a magazine article author who didn't provide any references, and a friend of mine who's somewhat of a rennaissance man. So while I have no doubt that the above story is somewhat based in reality, certain features may be inflated. For instance, I have some question as to whether a frog would eat tadpoles.
When the Eden first came out, that's EXACTLY what I did.
EPIA 800 MHz. 5.6" LCD screen (TV resolution, but who cares?) 4GB IBM Travelstar. DVD Drive. GPS. MP3. Wireless/Wired network. 7" acrylic cube case. Built in mouse, infrared remote, flexible/indestructible keyboard.
Then I drove to Peoria Illinois on July 17, and back on July 22. Anyone else who was in Peoria that weekend give me a shout cause I got MCL. It's about a 16 hour drive for me. The passengers loved it, I loved it. Never bored.
The only thing I've used it for since is to show some friends some music videos I downloaded off the net at concerts.
Now, I don't consider it exactly wasted because the computer itself is portable, and very convenient as a portable DVD player as well as computing device. And the LCD is mostly portable. One bolt and it's out of the car. And I've got a tripod I can screw it onto, and a 12V power supply. Since I do digital mixing live for parties, it's been a great help. No more dragging around a huge monitor everywhere.
Point being, it hasn't been used in my car except on a roadtrip. The week after I built it when I was still all excited about it. There are two primary issues:
1. It's not permanently wired. It takes some work to wire it in. And I don't always have the time to wire it in when I bring it out from my house or a gig or a friend's house or whatever. I plan on fixing that with a cradle. I only use about 20 wires when it's in the car (mouse+keyboard+gps = 5-wire USB port, video = 2-wire RCA, audio out = 3-wire stereo headphone jack, infrared = 9-wire RS232, power = 2-wire DC), and I'm basically just gonna hook all those up to a centronics connector and that should solve that problem.
2. Usability. It's not incredibly useable. First off, it's not instant on which is a problem. I can mostly fix that, but not all the way. The user input isn't unified. You use a combination of mouse and IR remote commands to control everything. The main problem there is I have a few different pieces of software. Hopefully Windows Media Player 9 will get slightly better support for DVD and I can use that. Then all I gotta do is get a better remote. My IR software is learning, so it works with any remote. I just gotta get one with all the buttons I need. Easier said than done, and if you're a computer or remote control manufacturer and you want my advice, feel free to contact me with regard to this. The short is I'm gonna ditch the Windows Explorer interface and use Windows Media Player as the primary interface to interact with the computer, and wire that up to be controlled in toto by a remote control.
So, if you're planning on building a car computer make sure that those two issues are covered. BTW, a keyboard on the dash doesn't work so don't even think about it. My only other advice is install a seperate lighter socket for it if you're gonna power it off that and not permanently wire it in. Whether you wire it in or not, put in a relay. You want that power off when the car is off. Even in standby mode (computer Instant-Off, LCD in standby) it sucks down a battery in a couple hours without the alternator on. Hard drives are cheap. Car batteries/electrical systems are not. Plus, your car will run without a hard drive. It won't run without a battery.
I'm a digital DJ. I would buy that CD in a second.
Does this 'school of thought' actually, you know, 'exist'? Like in the 'real world', as opposed to in your mind. If so, I'd like to know more about it - do you have any references you could point me to?
No I don't have any references. I did a quick google search and didn't find anything. It's a 'school of thought' in that when talking with people I know, you know, in the 'real world', that kinda 'exist' and when I 'told' them about it, 'they' agreed that 'it sounds' plausible. That these people, all of whom know something both about 'computers' and 'chess', all agreed that it certainly has not been proven that a perfect game equals a draw or win every time.
Riposte: do you have a reference that says that a perfect game is possible? Because unless there's a logic proof of same, then my viewpoint is as valid as yours.
Oh, and just because you put my words in quotes doesn't mean they have any less value.
In chess, strategy is equally important to board condition
In the context of talking about whether the game of chess is a theoretical win or draw, all that matters is the 'board condition'.
Yes, but what about the move before this theoretical win or draw? And the move before that? What about planning, cunning, and trickery? What about a branch of play that receives a low initial score, so it isn't explored by the brute force algorithm, but that makes it possible to solve the endgame?
There are most likely branches of play that look to be promising but that a significantly skilled chess player can turn into a win.
First of all, I assume you mean to say "don't look to be promising", because the sentence doesn't make any sense otherwise. Assuming that's what you meant, we're talking about whether chess is a theoretical win or draw - all that matters is what happens with perfect play, not whether the position "looks promising".
Let me rephrase: There are most likely branches of play that look to be promising to an AI but that a significantly skilled chess opponent can turn into a win.
That done... assume by "looks promising", I mean "This is a branch of the tree that gets a high score and therefore is further scrutinized by the AI, and may even result in a move being made to bring this branch into being," but I assumed that most programmers would understand what "looks promising" means.
Artificial Intelligence has absolutely nothing to do with emulating HUMAN intelligence, as you seem to believe. Artifical Intelligence is about embuing a machine with the ability to go beyond it's basic programming
Well, as someone who works in AI research, I gotta say - thanks for defining our field for us, man.
Look, I, and everyone here, certainly understands that AI is a tough field to define and that most people choose to define it a little differently. I gave what I have heard, over the years, to be a generally accepted definition. I rebuffed a definition that I believed to be false. For instance, I do not consider that a computer must pass a turing test to display intelligence.
What is your problem, anyways?
Certainly a chess program can never truly go beyond it's programming; which is to win a game of chess. But what about it's basic programming; a few thousand lines of code written by a team.
So is there some well-defined distinction between 'programming' and 'basic programming' that you're trying to make here?
No. Not well-defined. In case you haven't figured it out, I could give a flying fuck about well-defined. I care about me-defined. Words and thought images that matter to me. I think it was pretty clear from context that 'programming' could be construed to be the particular problem that a program was written to solve, and that 'basic programming' is the basic code written to solve that problem. No tricks, no voodoo, no special optimizations. Just code.
It can take those lines of code and make assumptions, strategies, tactics, and observations. This most certainly is beyond it's basic programming, which really just included a set of the rules for chess and a way to look ahead a few dozen moves predictively.
Err... how do you know exactly what the 'basic programming' of this hypothetical chess program exactly includes? If, as you say, the 'basic program' really just consisted of an algorithm to search game trees, then that is exactly what the program will do - it's not going to magically start 'making assumptions, strategies, and tactics' unless that is in the code.
I'm discussing a theoretical opponent that does those things and happens to be embodied by bits running through a piece of silicon. Though I vehemently oppose the turing test as a measure of general artificial intelligence, I will borrow it as a tool to use to measure specialized intelligence. In this case, if the program acts as a human player would act, then couldn't it be said to be utilizing the same process as a human player?
Or to state another way: most chess AI programs, recognizing limited resources (time alloted for game, processing abilities) must prune their predictive tree in some way; some way of discarding branches that seem to be unfruitful and exploring ones that seem fruitful. Could not this algorithm be said to be making assumptions, strategies, and tactics?
Sorry all, for the tone. It's just that, being someone who actually knows something about chess and ai, that last post caused me physical pain, and I had to get it off my chest.
I apologize to you for the consternation. Maybe I should've prefaced my post with something to the effect of IANACP or IANAAIP or something equally banal. Except I didn't want to be cute. And I don't apologize for my opinions. I would've prefaced my post with "This is just my opinion." But this is slashdot. Every post is someone's opinion. That's the beauty of slashdot. I very sorry that your viewpoint differs from mine.
And I'm very very sorry that you find your viewpoint so important to you that you feel physical pain when someone says something that contradicts your viewpoint.
But, all the same, fuck you.
Warning - if you have a soft place in your heart for cute goofy stoner chicks
Doesn't everyone have a soft place for cute goofy stoner chicks?
I just assumed that was a universal maxim, like how art on sci-fi magazines and novels has nothing to do with the stories to be found inside, or how mice, no matter how optical, self cleaning, nanotech, will always need to be cleaned at the crucial moment of the game winning frag...
That was my point actually. It seems like a simple economics problem.
But I've played quite a few of the various computer monopolies, and every one that I've played has been vulnerable to 3-way trades. That is, property that is invaluable to you and invaluable to the computer agent you are purchasing from, but extremely valuable to a third party can be had cheaply. Therefore the "seems to be"... I don't think any serious economics or AI people have ever really looked at it.
There is one very important part here; that this value is a more or less arbitrary continuum. Though initial costs and future earnings certainly factor into the value proposition, there are cases where even that is superseded by something humans are good at and computers are bad at; judgement calls.
For example, let's say you own a monopoly. Noone else does. Someone wants to trade with you, net result, you get one more monopoly and they get one more monopoly. Most value algorithms that I can think of would say that this is a more-or-less even trade. Maybe a little bit of cash should be thrown in by one side or the other, but it's an even trade.
But I would never make that trade, all other things being equal, because it would erode a significant advantage. This is just a simple example; there are more complex ones, that I think humans would be good at solving and a simple algorithm bad at solving.
BTW, Monopoly is not 100% luck. There is one choice that you can make that affects your board position, which is ultimately what decides wins and losses.
Whether or not to stay in jail.
If you could work out all possible games of chess, you'd be able to determine the optimum strategy for each player, and 'solve' the game of chess. You'd find one of three results:
My point being that, until we've done that, one can't really make a statement to the effect of "An infinitely powerful computer will always win"... which is, paraphrased, what the original poster said.
There are two ways to prove such a statement; both of them result in a general solution to the game of chess, as you describe. The first way is to compute all possible games and characterize them mathematically. Though difficult, this is possible. This is analguous to brute-forcing a public-key encryption algorithm whose key-length is equal to the number of possible moves. It's gonna take a while, but it's possible. There's no reason you can't do it.
The second way is to take a couple dozen smart mathematicians and have them look at the system and analyze it mathematically. This is analguous to breaking an algorithm. Most algorithms it's possible to break, though a precious few it is not. So far chess looks unbreakable, and we've found pretty strong evidence that it is theoretically unbreakable.
Go is surprisingly difficult to play well; we have yet to build a computer that can beat a moderately skilled human player.
And, Moore's law not withstanding, we probably won't be able to build a computer to brute force the problem. It'll HAVE to be solved by an AI that thinks and strategizes, instead of one that just computes the entire game tree and picks the best branch.
Another game that seems surprisingly difficult to program well is Monopoly; the value of any particular piece of property for trading is a complex algorithm involving not only the player's personal desire, but the value the opponent may place on that piece of property as well as the value that every other opponent MAY be able to place on it at any point in the future. It doesn't seem hard, I just think the hardcore AI guys don't consider a contemporary board game worthy of their attention.
Of course if I could pick a contemporary game that would be the ultimate AI test, I'd go with Turing's approach and pick Dungeons and Dragons. Because there's no way to brute force the thing EVER, and it requires GENERAL problem solving and logic algorithms...
Are you *sure* that they're proven that Chess is always a tuie (if played perfectly)? I thought that, due to the nature of the game mathematicians haven't been able to prove one way or another what the end of the game would be. just for my personal knowledge, can you cite a source for these claims?
Actually, I said that there were two schools of thought and that neither one was proven. So, yeah, you're right and so am I. No proof. None. And I kept up the same "I don't know which one is right and neither does anyone else" tone throughout the whole post.
Read more carefully before replying next time. Move along. Nothing to see here.
now that computers can process far enough into the game, they need never lose.
There are actually two major branches of thought on the matter, neither one is proven. The statement you make is one such branch of thought, that can be stated more precisely as:
A perfectly played game of chess will never result in a loss, and will only result in a tie if the opponent also plays a perfect game
However there is also another school of thought, which points out the lie in your statement. This thought can be stated as:
In chess, strategy is equally important to board condition. There are most likely branches of play that look to be promising but that a significantly skilled chess player can turn into a win.
The reasoning behind this is that there is no single opening move that results in the entire game-tree having no checkmates for one player. And that no subsequent move can prune out checkmates, until the end-game. Thus, a perfect player could possibly get itself into a situation where a check mate is forced on it.
I don't know whether that's true or not. One part of me says yes, that seems true, while another part of me says, why doesn't the program just choose a path where any move it can make results in an end-game with no checkmates with itself. I'm not sure such a path exists; even if it does, I would call a system built to choose this path AI.
Artificial Intelligence has absolutely nothing to do with emulating HUMAN intelligence, as you seem to believe. Artifical Intelligence is about embuing a machine with the ability to go beyond it's basic programming.
Certainly a chess program can never truly go beyond it's programming; which is to win a game of chess. But what about it's basic programming; a few thousand lines of code written by a team. It can take those lines of code and make assumptions, strategies, tactics, and observations. This most certainly is beyond it's basic programming, which really just included a set of the rules for chess and a way to look ahead a few dozen moves predictively.
Such a system would certainly qualify, in my eyes, as AI.
The problem with that is why symmetric encryption is being used less frequently, except in certain sectors.
How do Alice and Bruce agree on a key to use without giving Charlie a chance to intercept it?
There has yet to be a better answer than:
Alice gets on a plane and goes where Bruce is, where they proceed into a concrete bunker, inside a faraday cage, into a pitch black room filled with white sound generators, where Alice whispers sweet nothings into Bruce's ear.
The quantum-crypto-over-fiber guys are coming close to it, using the polarization of photons to convey meaning.
If I recall correctly, the reason why you sometimes see huge keys that are 1024 or 2048 bits long is the possibility that a weakness is found in the encryption technique that makes it a lot faster to brute force the key.
Or to paraphrase Neal Stephenson:
If someone knew that Avi was using 4096 bit keys, the could conclude one of the following about him:
a) He is very paranoid
b) He believes that fundamental advances in cryptographic technique will be made in the near future that will require very strong cryptography
c) He has a planning horizon of several centuries
In reality, Randy thinks it is a bit of each.
If anyone's curious, I strongly believe that every citizen on earth should follow Avi's example, as a little bit of all three of the above can't hurt anyone and might certainly help everyone at some point in the future.
If someone where more concerned about long term security, they could setup a system to refresh the keys on any encrypted data, say every year or every quarter.
That's the absolute worse thing you could do.
Disclaimer: IANAC, but I've read quite a bit on the subject, and implement it frequently.
If you change your keys periodically, you are doing so under the assumption that your documents are in danger of being received, and your keys being cracked.
Let's setup the following situation:
Alice wants to send a document to Bruce. They meet in person and agree on a key. This key works for both locking and unlocking documents, that is it is symmetric.
Alice encrypts a document for Bruce and transmits it over radio. She later learns that it may have been intercepted by Charlie, whom she really doesn't want to read her messages, so she and Bruce meet in person and agree on a new key together.
Alice decides that to be safe, she had better unencrypt everything she ever encrypted, and re-encrypt it with her new key, which she's pretty sure Charlie hasn't brute-forced yet.
Charlie never found the old key. He didn't have the time or resources; he's hoping to break Alice's crypto-system before he has to brute force it. One day while rummaging through Alice's hard drive, because Charlie's friend Dave is a pretty good cracker and can do stuff like that, he finds a document with the same date/time stamp as a transmission he intercepted. He compares it to the intercept and finds that it is an entirely different set of bits.
By comparing the two sets of bits, which are, thanks to our incredibly complicated elliptical curve encryption algorithm, basically noise, he can glean information. As a matter of fact, if he's right and the source of this document is the exact same as the source of the first document, he stands a good chance of making some interesting assumptions about the original document, and depending on the exact details of the cryptosystem and how it's applied to the documents, this could be (in order from best case to worst case):
a) Portions of the unencrypted document
b) the unencrypted document (this would probably require a crib)
c) portions of one or both of the keys used, this may be limited to mathematical facts about the keys... this would make a brute-force approach take a significantly less amount of time
d) one or both of the keys used to encrypt the document
In fact, the absolute best case that can occur, from Alice's point of view, is that Charlie will now have to mount a known-plaintext attack, which while difficult, is orders of magnitude easier than a known-ciphertext attack.
Mine used to. I brought it in for service and they didn't have any comparable model to replace it with. So I asked for any GSM phone with infrared.
Know how many they had? 0. Nadda. Nil. Not a single digital phone with infrared port. Data cables, when you can find them, are $60 or so. For a cable. You know, the thing with a $3 connector at each end and ~8x6ft thin copper wires in between.
I wish I wasn't dyslexic so I could make my own cables. Every time I try, I end up soldering half the wires backwards...
What? I have Blue Sub No 6. all on one disc. I've never seen it sold any other way.
Are you talking about the movie or the series? How much did you pay for that disc? Can you look up the publisher? Was this before or after Toonami paid to have the translation redone
A quick search on Amazon shows the four discs, each one episode, currently on sale for $17.95, and "Blue Submarine No. 6: The Movie (Edited Version)" on sale for the same amount.
I don't think we'll ever see a 10-album-on-one-disc release.
Why? Cause I currently see companies that try to make as many discs as possible for a series, because customers equate discs to value.
Example 1: Blue Sub No. 6. 4 22-minute episodes. It could've easily fit on 1 disc. But it was released as 4 discs, each only 22 minutes long. At $30/disc (I know you can get it cheaper; I was satisfying my impulse-shopping drive at the time) it was not cheap. As a matter of fact, I can't remember the last time I spent more than $1 / minute for any for of entertainment. Possible exception being on the phone last night. (j/k)
You see this kind of thing all the time in anime; a series that could be compressed and sold on less discs is instead spaced out as much as possible in order to increase revenue. While, for instance, all the star treks or all the Aliens on one disc (or even an entire season of B5) would be awesome, I don't think we'll see it...
I do not know why noone considers Java as performant.
.NET is language-independent, supposedly platform-independent, being an open standard and all, and performant, as its compiled and not runtimed.
I have a few words / acronyms...
1. JIT. As in Just-In-Time compilation. Meaning Java software approaches native speed as time goes on.
2. JNI. As in Java Native Interface. Ok, so you have a couple C++ libraries that really have to be as fast as they possibly can be, without necessarily incurring the wrath of the platform demon by being written in assembly. That doesn't mean that the 90% of your code that doesn't vastly effect the performance of your system ALSO has to be written in C++.
3. Silicon. As in what chips are made of. Including chips that run Java. Though these are really targetted at the embedded market, to have your coffee machine run Java or whatever, a high-performance version is available. It plugs into your PCI bus. And runs Java there instead of in the main processor.
Oh, not exactly on-topic, but insert obligatory note of how
About 40 times about 5 equals about 250.
It comes out a little closer for extremely large values of 5.
Or extremely small values of 250.