Roughly considered you only need to vaporize a small porttion of the traffic Jam to unleash the remaining partticles... I mean cars . Let us consider this : a mirror roughly 6000 meters squared ( cross section to the sun and not hte actual surface area of the mirror without accounting for angle of incidence , of course ) would bring enough energy in one second to vaporize approximately 28 tons of iron . ballpark estimate ; 1 ton per vehicle ( for simplicities sake we will assume that the majority of the mass is an iron derivative and discount aluminum engines --- not to mention fieros ) that would remove a traffic jam in Chicago's loop every hour . I will be fine as I have several layers of mylar lying around here somewhere and can get up to a 95% reflectance . It should , at the worst cook the Mylar and let me scramble out of the new oven that I was driving... your Squire suqireson
Shutting down a Nuclear power plant isn't like shutting off your car . The process is something that can take anywhere between 24 and 48 hours on a fast shutdown . And yes , computers do control the flow of liquid cooling agents through the core even though there is always a manual control for the smae mechanisms . I hope they actually run a little cooler than normal when Y2k comes around .
One mole of a substance has 6.something *10^24 ( 23 ? ) molecules to it ( Avogodros number ) . IPv6 has 1 billion squared addresses : 1 billion squared = 1*10^18 That means that less than a gram of anything will have more particles that IPv6 has addresses . You may know your computers but your Physics / Chemistry needs some work . " Every complex problem has an answer that is simple , clear and wrong . "
More efficient routing ( ever hear of a router ? )
on
IANA Deploying IPv6
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· Score: 1
The excess of IP addresses may radically improve routers performance ( as well as make them generally simpler ) . No longer will the router have to deal with subnetting !! Although , this really isn't an issue for anyone using am old 386 running linux for a router.... They are already dirt cheap ( got mine for $40 ) and the instructions on how to build one can be found here : www.linuxrouter.org You can also do secondary DNS , firewalls , wireless T1 bridge , DS1 Wan routers W/DSU , 10/100 routing switches , etc... All on a p166 with 64M . that is about $10,000 worth of "Network appliances" otherwise .
People have been working toward this kind o fthing for a long time , with slow and painful successes . They are still no where near having a reliable solution . A friend ( and member of our LUG ) is a Mathematical Linguist and works on Automated Machine Translation software . His comments over the last year give me good reason to be skeptical .
I am betting that this turns out to be the kind of thing that voice to text did . Wonderful idea , almost worked first time out . Almost worked two years later . Almost works five years later . Still wouldn't waste my time with it now .
Besides , who wants to wisper sweet nothings through a throat box... Your squire Squireson
Patents on things that are not manufactured ( ie: words , algorithms , software , music etc... )are strictly prohibited by the Act that created the Patent office ( all of these may be copyrighted , not patented ) . The Patent office has WIDELY interpreted a ruling by a court that judged that just because a company was using a computer to control the process of rubber manufacture did not mean that the patent on the PROCESS was invalid .
If you can find it at MIT ( I lost the URL and am trying to retriev it ) there is an arguement that software patents are already strictly illegal ( arguements for the removal of software patents in general ) and they go on to point out some of the unbelievably simple algorithms ( like using an XOR operation to change the color of graphics that move over one another ) have already been patented and some have even held up in court . The Patent Office is simply not staffed to recognize these algorithms for what they are .
Many of these techniques are considered by the people who program them to be so fundamental that they are not even worth documenting in publications . MIT Xfree86 is one who did not publish anything on their use of window buffering until a bit of documentation was needed at a later date . By then someone had already patented the idea of keeping , in memory , the window that was now hidden . MIT lost that one , their failure to publish those details in the documentation resulted in that method not being considered "prior art" .
The upshot of this is that big companies may be able to cross license the patents that they already own with other companies but little guys have nothing to trade , that is they have no way to use rudimentary programming techniques . This is an unbelievably unAmerican practicce that benefits NO ONE but the Lawyers . Big surprise that legal experts are hailing this , huh ? I think that we need a supreme court ruling to restore the original Patent Laws to their original state ( covering only manufacturing methods of physicall objects ) .
I wonder , If I got to it fast enough , could I patent certain brush strokes and sue artisits ? Brush types are manufactured . Your Squire Squireson
already have samples.... a probe that fluing itslef through the tail of some comet recently had a little bit of aerogel in it ( 2% the density of air ) . It captured particles that contained carbon compounds .
My problem here is that they ( may have ) invited Packet Storm onto their computers and somehow gained intellectual rights to their data . Whether the data was in part copyrighted material is another matter altogether . Harvard could have simply kicked him off . Destroying the backups was totally unneeded if they were covering their butts . Furthermore , Antionline made it very difficult for me to access their site to see what was going on . I had to disable cookies and clear my cache before I could get ot www.antionline.com . I had already tried to reconnect ( figuring that I could get a new IP address from my provider that way.... just incase the site was using RDNS lookups ) . I don't know . The tactics involved were a little reminiscent of Scientology . And remember : Slander is the promotion of PROVABLY untrue statements . Your squire Squireson squireson@bigfoot.com
Hey , anyone remeber long long ago... before calculators ? There were room fulls of accountants and all they really did was fill in ledgers all day and cross check each others work. I know there are still rooms full of accountants but they generally serve a much larger function . Spreadsheets , if nothing else , have drasticalluy reduced the amount of work keeping track of large volumes of numbers . The volume of information that is kept in motion around a company like caterpillar could NOT have been handled by ANY large room full of people . NOw , of course , Kumatsu also has used computers . SO where is the advantage ? It get's passed stragiht onto the buyer ( slowly to be sure but it does get there ) The average home being lived in is nearly 1.23 times the size of the homes lived in not more than 30 years ago . Anyway th eincrease in efficency is well known . If these studies actually reflected the truth then any company could turn of their computers and stay competitive . Of course THEY realize thast they can't possibly do this , so oyu tell me : Hav ecomputers made them more productive . Big business says a resounding YES . I think it may still be a few years before the personal computer makes anyone significantly more productive . It takes time to learn how to make the most out what you have . Your Squire, squireson
There , im My opinion , no definitive studies of anything . I remember an article of a grad student at MIT that did a study of studies . He more or less summed up the stats of several different studies that used dimilar methods . According to their cumulative claims there should have been nearly 15 % more people dead than actually were . I think this conclusively shows a problem with those methods . Yes , there probably is some danger to hanging around sources of radiation that our bodies did not evolve in the presence of . What the danger level is... well , who knows ? Your Squire, Squireson squireson@bigfoot.com
You know,it seems to be Logitech and Saitk both are a little snobbish about the whole Linux OS . I love their products but getting them to work with Linux has been far too much work . ( logitechs mouseman being the exception )
Caterpillar intentionally withholds it's earninga until the end of the year ( for tax purposes ) . Cat Always loses for three quarters and then shows a profit ( well , usually shows a profit ) int eh last quarter . Remember that the US and Germany have totally different ways of collecting and regulating taxes . This could explain why Redhat showed a loss while SuSe showed a profit this quarter . look at RedHat's spending on Research as well !! 20 % of their income to that alone !! Impressive... SuSe 6.0 is a very nice system , by the way . I am not bashing it in any way . I am bashing the arguement that is based on the revenue of a quarter ( not a year ) . Success is not measured in Dollars but in usage ( at least in the open source community ) . Your Squire, Squireson " For every complex problem there is an answer that is simple , clear and wrong . " ( Menkle ? )
They may have calculated that if they lose sales that the adspace they sell could make up for the difference . If they charge enough they could even show a healthy profit in the light of a strong backlash . If they stick it out long enough they almost certainly will be OK as people get used to it and the backlash dies down . What I want to know is how do I determine if the motherboard that I am buying has this technology in it . Can I do so easily or is this sort of thing just going to work it's way into my computer no matter what I do ?
"OK, next I need a nano-train that speeds up the flow of my neuropeptides across the synaptic cleft. Then I'm set-or starting on a whole new set of things... " Or your an epileptic . acceleration of brain functions generally has a price . People have actually tried things along these lines ( most were pretty silly ) . Nature has been working on it for a few billion years... All I really want is a simple Floating point processor and maybe a few registers to play with installed in my frontal lobe . I would be happy .
I have used the free version of kaffee and found that it does NOT run things quite the same way that Sun's JVM does . Small differences could be attributed to a process of reverse engineering the API's incorrectly . Still , I get the sense that there is a fundamentally different engine involved . I will say this . Kafee ( as shipped with RedHat ) does run things quickly . Is the pay-for version closer to Sun's implementation ? Is there a significant difference ? P.S. Many people who do go to the site simply do not post after finding out that the hype was somewhat incorrect . This may not be in the best interests of the community but it seems a little boring to post something when there is literally nothing to post ( nothing exciting about the evil empire so to speak ) . squireson@bigfoot.com
Whoooo Hooooooo !!! Allright , it's not much of a reply... but what the hell , you can't sue me . ( Virginia residents must take a deep breath and consider that this is not a defamating statement )
The problem with a geek strike is that geeks tend to rely on consensus . They think , reason , argue ( as opposed to being just generally contrary ) and generally don't wind up agreeing on many things . All that power is divided into many many individuals . Organizing a strike is beyon the capacity of any one person . Trust me , Ghandi would have balked .
The Carbon Nitrogen Cycle ( carbon being used as a catalyst , in essence ) doesn't occur until 14 million degrees . Our sun , I think , is at 10 million ( at core ) . The catalytic effect of Carbon in our sun is probably insignificant . At least that is the consensu as of 10 years ago . I have not heard of any changes to that set of stellar theories . mailto:squireson@bigfoot.com
I would also like to point out that researchers have never seen a certain class of Neutrinos from the sun . I am fairly sure that fusion is going on in that ball of gas so I would have to point out that our current theories on fusion ( and QCD in general ) aren't quite up to snuff . The missing neutrnos may be strongly coupled under certain circumstances . And son't give me any of that " our current theory says " because the point I am trying to make is that 'our current theory ' on nuclear physics doesn't cut the mustard in a host of ways .
Well , about the mass media . Is it really a surprise that the Mass Media is more interested in talking about the dangers of the interntet ( in general ) if you look at it from this perspective : The internet is competing with Mass Media for it's role as an information source . I would think that it would be more common for them to talk about the dangers of the internet than for them to discuss the dangers of the Mass Media for obvious reasons . Also , The internet , by it's nature , has no sole authority to defend it .
Guys , IT DOES MATTER how long your message is
on
RSA slightly broken
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· Score: 1
Just because yu have encrypted your regular key with 1024 bit RSA doesn't mean that your regular ( that is symmetric key ) key is safe . If you use a long enough plaintext the symmetric key becomes vulnerable . The RSA part is just a way to share symmetric keys without letting anyone else see them . It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to use a 4000 + bit RSA key to disguise a 56 bit symmetric key for the encryption of the library of congress . For passing mail to and from this is alost never a concern but when companies start talking about streaming megabytes of data...
Re:What does this mean for Diffie-Hellman/DSS?
on
RSA slightly broken
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· Score: 1
Anything that is dependent on the difficulty of cracking ( factoring ) primes is going to suffer form these new techniques . The fate of quite a few encryption schemes are tied to RSA because of the general dependence on the conjecture that factoring primes is difficult ( given that it has been a bitch so far , it still hasn't been proven to be difficult ) . I don't even remember if factoring primes has been proven to be NP complete . P.S. I believe the NSA is the single largest employer of Mathematicians in the world . Does that scare anyone ? I'm not frightened about the potential abuses... I am bothered by the idea of that may Matmats in one place...
Crack smokers and Popular Science readers
on
RSA slightly broken
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· Score: 1
I am a Physics major at ISU ( occassionally ) and would like to point out that quantum computing is a field that is still considered 'pure research' . It is thought of as pure because of the remoteness of it's application . Using a quantum computer in the laboratory may help you simultaneously solve a two bit problem but the more possible states you need to represent the larger the molecule that contains the representative atoms has to be . DNA molecules may one day solve this ( if they can get a similarly extensible molecule to carry out the computations ) but I am much more encouraged by the use of DNA strands to solve the NP complete problems in reasonable time frames . Traveling salesmen , smallest network and factoring primes are all problems that can be converted into one another in a linear ( or is it quadratic ? ) amount of time . Hence ; you solve one , you solve em all . No one has proven NP complete problems to be hard to solve . It is a conjecture that any of these things is difficult ( Given , it is a conjecture that has held up for a darned long time under intense scrutiny ). RSA and anything dependent on factoring primes or other NP complete problems may be trivially easy to break . If they are , we just haven't figured out the method yet . If they aren't , it is entirely possible that we will never be able to prove that they aren't . One way or the other I wouldn't hold my breath for quantum computing to make these things suddenly open up. See also ( before the NSA bans publication ) : Bruce Schnier's book : Applied Cryptography 2nd edition Your Squire
Slashdot Mirror
Roughly considered you only need to vaporize a small porttion of the traffic Jam to unleash the remaining partticles ... I mean cars . ...
Let us consider this :
a mirror roughly 6000 meters squared ( cross section to the sun and not hte actual surface area of the mirror without accounting for angle of incidence , of course ) would bring enough energy in one second to vaporize approximately 28 tons of iron . ballpark estimate ; 1 ton per vehicle ( for simplicities sake we will assume that the majority of the mass is an iron derivative and discount aluminum engines --- not to mention fieros ) that would remove a traffic jam in Chicago's loop every hour .
I will be fine as I have several layers of mylar lying around here somewhere and can get up to a 95% reflectance . It should , at the worst cook the Mylar and let me scramble out of the new oven that I was driving
your Squire
suqireson
Shutting down a Nuclear power plant isn't like shutting off your car . The process is something that can take anywhere between 24 and 48 hours on a fast shutdown . And yes , computers do control the flow of liquid cooling agents through the core even though there is always a manual control for the smae mechanisms . I hope they actually run a little cooler than normal when Y2k comes around .
One mole of a substance has 6.something *10^24 ( 23 ? ) molecules to it ( Avogodros number ) .
IPv6 has 1 billion squared addresses :
1 billion squared = 1*10^18
That means that less than a gram of anything will have more particles that IPv6 has addresses . You may know your computers but your Physics / Chemistry needs some work .
" Every complex problem has an answer that is simple , clear and wrong . "
The excess of IP addresses may radically improve .... ...
routers performance ( as well as make them generally simpler ) .
No longer will the router have to deal with subnetting !!
Although , this really isn't an issue for anyone using am old 386 running linux for a router
They are already dirt cheap ( got mine for $40 )
and the instructions on how to build one can be found here :
www.linuxrouter.org
You can also do secondary DNS , firewalls , wireless T1 bridge , DS1 Wan routers W/DSU , 10/100 routing switches , etc
All on a p166 with 64M . that is about $10,000
worth of "Network appliances" otherwise .
People have been working toward this kind o fthing for a long time , with slow and painful successes . They are still no where near having a reliable solution . A friend ( and member of our LUG ) is a Mathematical Linguist and works on Automated Machine Translation software . His comments over the last year give me good reason to be skeptical .
...
I am betting that this turns out to be the kind of thing that voice to text did . Wonderful idea , almost worked first time out . Almost worked two years later . Almost works five years later . Still wouldn't waste my time with it now .
Besides , who wants to wisper sweet nothings through a throat box
Your squire
Squireson
You know , it has been a long time since I have heard someone say something like that about IBM .
These are heady times , my friends .
Here is one link that may be of economic and societal interest with regards to Patents on Software :
http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/History/history.html.old
I still have to find the MIT link , I am working on it .
Patents on things that are not manufactured ( ie: words , algorithms , software , music etc ... )are strictly prohibited by the Act that created the Patent office ( all of these may be copyrighted , not patented ) . The Patent office has WIDELY interpreted a ruling by a court that judged that just because a company was using a computer to control the process of rubber manufacture did not mean that the patent on the PROCESS was invalid .
If you can find it at MIT ( I lost the URL and am trying to retriev it ) there is an arguement that software patents are already strictly illegal ( arguements for the removal of software patents in general ) and they go on to point out some of the unbelievably simple algorithms ( like using an XOR operation to change the color of graphics that move over one another )
have already been patented and some have even held up in court . The Patent Office is simply not staffed to recognize these algorithms for what they are .
Many of these techniques are considered by the people who program them to be so fundamental that they are not even worth documenting in publications . MIT Xfree86 is one who did not publish anything on their use of window buffering until a bit of documentation was needed at a later date . By then someone had already patented the idea of keeping , in memory , the window that was now hidden . MIT lost that one , their failure to publish those details in the documentation resulted in that method not being considered "prior art" .
The upshot of this is that big companies may be able to cross license the patents that they already own with other companies but little guys have nothing to trade , that is they have no way to use rudimentary programming techniques . This is an unbelievably unAmerican practicce that benefits NO ONE but the Lawyers . Big surprise that legal experts are hailing this , huh ?
I think that we need a supreme court ruling to restore the original Patent Laws to their original state ( covering only manufacturing methods of physicall objects ) .
I wonder , If I got to it fast enough , could I patent certain brush strokes and sue artisits ?
Brush types are manufactured .
Your Squire
Squireson
already have samples ....
a probe that fluing itslef through the tail of some comet recently had a little bit of aerogel in it ( 2% the density of air ) . It captured particles that contained carbon compounds .
My problem here is that they ( may have ) invited Packet Storm onto their computers and somehow gained intellectual rights to their data . Whether the data was in part copyrighted material is another matter altogether . Harvard could have simply kicked him off . Destroying the backups .... just incase the site was using RDNS lookups ) .
was totally unneeded if they were covering their butts . Furthermore , Antionline made it very difficult for me to access their site to see what was going on .
I had to disable cookies and clear my cache before I could get ot www.antionline.com .
I had already tried to reconnect ( figuring that I could get a new IP address from my provider that way
I don't know . The tactics involved were a little
reminiscent of Scientology .
And remember :
Slander is the promotion of PROVABLY untrue statements .
Your squire
Squireson
squireson@bigfoot.com
Hey , anyone remeber long long ago ... before calculators ? There were room fulls of accountants and all they really did was fill in ledgers all day and cross check each others work. I know there are still rooms full of accountants but they generally serve a much larger function . Spreadsheets , if nothing else , have drasticalluy reduced the amount of work keeping track of large volumes of numbers . The volume of information that is kept in motion around a company like caterpillar could NOT have been handled by ANY large room full of people .
NOw , of course , Kumatsu also has used computers . SO where is the advantage ? It get's passed stragiht onto the buyer ( slowly to be sure but it does get there ) The average home being lived in is nearly 1.23 times the size of the homes lived in not more than 30 years ago .
Anyway th eincrease in efficency is well known . If these studies actually reflected the truth then any company could turn of their computers and stay competitive . Of course THEY realize thast they can't possibly do this , so oyu tell me : Hav ecomputers made them more productive . Big business says a resounding YES .
I think it may still be a few years before the personal computer makes anyone significantly more productive . It takes time to learn how to make the most out what you have .
Your Squire,
squireson
There , im My opinion , no definitive studies of anything . I remember an article of a grad student at MIT that did a study of studies . He more or less summed up the stats of several different studies that used dimilar methods . According to their cumulative claims there should have been nearly 15 % more people dead than actually were . ... well , who knows ?
I think this conclusively shows a problem with those methods .
Yes , there probably is some danger to hanging around sources of radiation that our bodies did not evolve in the presence of . What the danger level is
Your Squire,
Squireson
squireson@bigfoot.com
You know ,it seems to be Logitech and Saitk both are a little snobbish about the whole Linux OS .
I love their products but getting them to work with Linux has been far too much work . ( logitechs mouseman being the exception )
Caterpillar intentionally withholds it's earninga until the end of the year ( for tax purposes ) . ...
Cat Always loses for three quarters and then shows a profit ( well , usually shows a profit ) int eh last quarter .
Remember that the US and Germany have totally different ways of collecting and regulating taxes . This could explain why Redhat showed a loss while SuSe showed a profit this quarter .
look at RedHat's spending on Research as well !!
20 % of their income to that alone !!
Impressive
SuSe 6.0 is a very nice system , by the way . I am not bashing it in any way . I am bashing the arguement that is based on the revenue of a quarter ( not a year ) . Success is not measured in Dollars but in usage ( at least in the open source community ) .
Your Squire,
Squireson
" For every complex problem there is an answer that is simple , clear and wrong . " ( Menkle ? )
They may have calculated that if they lose sales that the adspace they sell could make up for the difference .
If they charge enough they could even show a healthy profit in the light of a strong backlash .
If they stick it out long enough they almost certainly will be OK as people get used to it and the backlash dies down .
What I want to know is how do I determine if the motherboard that I am buying has this technology in it . Can I do so easily or is this sort of thing just going to work it's way into my computer no matter what I do ?
"OK, next I need a nano-train that speeds up the flow of my neuropeptides across the synaptic cleft. Then I'm set-or starting on a whole new set of things ... " ...
Or your an epileptic . acceleration of brain functions generally has a price . People have actually tried things along these lines ( most were pretty silly ) . Nature has been working on it for a few billion years
All I really want is a simple Floating point processor and maybe a few registers to play with installed in my frontal lobe . I would be happy .
I have used the free version of kaffee and found that it does NOT run things quite the same way that Sun's JVM does . Small differences could be attributed to a process of reverse engineering the API's incorrectly . Still , I get the sense that there is a fundamentally different engine involved . I will say this . Kafee ( as shipped with RedHat ) does run things quickly .
Is the pay-for version closer to Sun's implementation ? Is there a significant difference ?
P.S. Many people who do go to the site simply do not post after finding out that the hype was somewhat incorrect . This may not be in the best interests of the community but it seems a little boring to post something when there is literally nothing to post ( nothing exciting about the evil empire so to speak ) .
squireson@bigfoot.com
Whoooo Hooooooo !!! ... but what the hell , you can't sue me . ( Virginia residents must take a deep breath and consider that this is not a defamating statement )
Allright , it's not much of a reply
The problem with a geek strike is that geeks tend to rely on consensus . They think , reason , argue ( as opposed to being just generally contrary ) and generally don't wind up agreeing on many things . All that power is divided into many many individuals . Organizing a strike is beyon the capacity of any one person .
Trust me , Ghandi would have balked .
The Carbon Nitrogen Cycle ( carbon being used as a catalyst , in essence ) doesn't occur until 14 million degrees . Our sun , I think , is at 10 million ( at core ) . The catalytic effect of Carbon in our sun is probably insignificant .
At least that is the consensu as of 10 years ago . I have not heard of any changes to that set of stellar theories .
mailto:squireson@bigfoot.com
I would also like to point out that researchers have never seen a certain class of Neutrinos from the sun . I am fairly sure that fusion is going on in that ball of gas so I would have to point out that our current theories on fusion ( and QCD in general ) aren't quite up to snuff . The missing neutrnos may be strongly coupled under certain circumstances . And son't give me any of that " our current theory says " because the point I am trying to make is that 'our current theory ' on nuclear physics doesn't cut the mustard in a host of ways .
Well , about the mass media . Is it really a surprise that the Mass Media is more interested in talking about the dangers of the interntet ( in general ) if you look at it from this perspective :
The internet is competing with Mass Media for it's role as an information source .
I would think that it would be more common for them to talk about the dangers of the internet than for them to discuss the dangers of the Mass Media for obvious reasons . Also , The internet , by it's nature , has no sole authority to defend it .
Just because yu have encrypted your regular key with 1024 bit RSA doesn't mean that your regular ( that is symmetric key ) key is safe . If you use a long enough plaintext the symmetric key becomes vulnerable . The RSA part is just a way to share symmetric keys without letting anyone else see them . It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to use a 4000 + bit RSA key to disguise a 56 bit symmetric key for the encryption of the library of congress . For passing mail to and from this is alost never a concern but when companies start talking about streaming megabytes of data ...
Anything that is dependent on the difficulty of cracking ( factoring ) primes is going to suffer form these new techniques . The fate of quite a few encryption schemes are tied to RSA because of the general dependence on the conjecture that factoring primes is difficult ( given that it has been a bitch so far , it still hasn't been proven to be difficult ) . I don't even remember if factoring primes has been proven to be NP complete . ... I am bothered by the idea of that may Matmats in one place ...
P.S. I believe the NSA is the single largest employer of Mathematicians in the world . Does that scare anyone ? I'm not frightened about the potential abuses
I am a Physics major at ISU ( occassionally ) and would like to point out that quantum computing is a field that is still considered 'pure research' . It is thought of as pure because of the remoteness of it's application . Using a quantum computer in the laboratory may help you simultaneously solve a two bit problem but the more possible states you need to represent the larger the molecule that contains the representative atoms has to be . DNA molecules may one day solve this ( if they can get a similarly extensible molecule to carry out the computations ) but I am much more encouraged by the use of DNA strands to solve the NP complete problems in reasonable time frames .
Traveling salesmen , smallest network and factoring primes are all problems that can be converted into one another in a linear ( or is it quadratic ? ) amount of time . Hence ; you solve one , you solve em all . No one has proven NP complete problems to be hard to solve . It is a conjecture that any of these things is difficult ( Given , it is a conjecture that has held up for a darned long time under intense scrutiny ). RSA and anything dependent on factoring primes or other NP complete problems may be trivially easy to break . If they are , we just haven't figured out the method yet .
If they aren't , it is entirely possible that we will never be able to prove that they aren't . One way or the other I wouldn't hold my breath for quantum computing to make these things suddenly open up.
See also ( before the NSA bans publication ) :
Bruce Schnier's book : Applied Cryptography
2nd edition
Your Squire