You do need a progression in sentences to discourage criminals from progressing to more serious crimes.
Prime example: when I lived in Florida in the early 80s a "get tough" legislature passed a law that anyone convicted of using a gun during the commission of a felony had a mandatory 10-year, no parole, extension added to his sentence.
This was immediately followed by the slaughter of convenience store clerks and patrons.
The logic was brutal but unambiguous. Do a simple holdup and your 10 year robbery conviction (possibly 5 with good behavior) was now a hard 20 years. Since it was "only" robbery you might see your public defender for the first time when you entered your plea bargain - you were seriously hosed.
But if you force everyone into the back room and kill them in cold blood you were in pretty good shape. There are no surviving witnesses to testify against you, and even if caught murder defendants are guaranteed better representation. Finally the average murderer (excluding capital cases) would get out in 15 years anyway under the old system.
It's a no brainer - you kill everyone.
The legislature had tied its own hands - how do you demotivate somebody who's already risking the death penalty? But it couldn't ease the tougher sentences without being accused of going "soft on crime."
The cops figured out a solution. Soon every convenience store had a sign from the local sheriff saying that you would be killed on the spot if you had a gun and didn't immediately freeze when a cop appeared. Or maybe they would shoot you anyway, it's been 20-odd years.
the rapist is kind of special. One could just remove the offending body parts.
Not true. Rape is a crime of violence, control and degradation, not sex. Snip them and they'll use toilet plungers.
The same thing applies to gun control. Take away guns and I (as a 6'2" male) can still inflict a lot of pain on anyone who attacks me. Take away guns and my 70 year old mother is helpless. (Not that she runs around armed, but you get the idea.)
I'm not suggesting that we just lock them up. Drug and alcohol treatment programs should be fully funded (they are not), anger management classes encouraged (they are not), etc. But you don't just need to treat the people inside the prison, in many cases you also need to treat the people in the community... and that brings in some pretty deep social justice issues. E.g., there's a staggering unemployment rate among inner city youth... but there's also staggeringly few employment opportunities available. We take the early job training we get at McDonalds or stocking the local grocery store for granted, but many prisoners come from an environment where even these jobs are several subway or bus transfers away.
But was that for a serious offense, remembering that their laws were very different from our own? E.g., killing another citizen's slave would be a far lesser crime than killing another citizen.
After I posted my original comments I remembered there were two other options. The first was exile, the second was dismemberment (e.g., thieves having their hands cut off).
But that doesn't change the main point - prisons have only been around for around for a few hundred years or so. You'll find dungeons earlier, but they were for political prisoners (pesky noblemen, bishops, etc.) instead of common criminals.
Bullshit. Prison as "rehabilitation" is a relatively recent concept and still unproven. For that matter prison itself is a relatively recent concept - through most of human history somebody who commited a serious crime was either executed or enslaved. There was no third choice.
Historically, punishment has been done for two reasons simultaneously. The first is to end the cycle of revenge - if you kill my brother I'll kill you and your cousin will kill me and.... The state comes in and says it, alone, can revenge serious crimes. It sounds brutal but it's actually a stablizing factor as long as the criminal justice system is trusted.
The second reason is to act as a big cautionary tale to others thinking of doing the same thing. Money (fines) is just money and suitable for small crimes (misdemeanors), but serious prison time will make others think twice about what they're doing.
Is spamming really a serious crime? I haven't RTFA but I haven't seen spam from a legitimate but clueless company in years. Everything I see is a form of fraud. Some of it is just this side of legal (a "genuinue faux imitation Rolex" is not advertised as a real Rolex), most of it is not. We lock up the guy who hustles hundreds of people on the street corner, so damn straight we can lock up the guy who's hustling millions of people online.
You overlooked another key optimization - no number can have prime factors larger than sqrt(N). You don't need to bother computing any of the intermediate primes. With a 210-into-48 encoding you can quickly determine primality of any 32-bit number with a precomputed block of only 2k! This is such a small buffer that you could easily bootstrap it the first time the function is called - you can bootstrap the process by hardcoding nothing more than the first 6 bytes.
This raises an interesting question - is it faster to load precomputed blocks from disk or to regenerate it in the L1 cache? One buffer would hold the first block, a second buffer would hold the 2nd-Nth block computed on demand, and a third buffer would hold the target block that's being updated by each successive block.
Whoever first thought anyone should be taught bubble sorts should be taken out and shot. If they're already dead they should be dug up, shot, and reburied.
Bubble shorts give you absolutely no asymptotic benefit over insertion sort. The instructors do a song and dance about how values tend to migrate into the right position, but you still have to check every remaining value every single time. So you only get modest benefit if you stop the sort early - who could possibly consider this a useful property?
Even among the O(n^2) algorithms they're outperformed in practice by every other algorithm. They're more costly than unidirectional insertion sort (because of all of the swapping), and far slower than bidirectional insertion sort. (Scan the records and find the smallest _and_ largest values. Swap with first and last positions. Repeat on remaining elements.)
H***, even the bidirectional bubble sort (which is like a bubble sort but again you run it one way and percolate the largest value to the top and then run it the other way to percolate the smallest value to the bottom) is faster than that stupid sort. E.g., while percolating the largest value you can also take note of the smallest value seen. Immediately swap it, then run the bubble sort the other direction and take note of the largest value seen. This gives you two values per pass.
The bubble sort is important... but only as an example of a seemingly good but in reality really brain-dead algorithm that's studied as a cautionary tale in graduate algorithm classes.
Elections are handled by the states and federalizing them is out of the question due to constitutional issues. There are no true national elections - all Congressional seats are selected by state votes, and technically the presidency is determined by the Electoral College whose members are also selected by each state. In the past Senators and Electors(iirc) were selected by the respective state legislatures, not a direct vote by the people.
Even establishing uniform standards is problematic. That's why it was necessary to pass a constitutional amendment to establish a national voting age. There are still different residency requirements, etc. Sometimes it's not even clear which state somebody should vote in, e.g., do college students vote where they go to school or where they go over Thanksgiving? Sometimes a person can vote in multiple states, e.g., in special elections based on property ownership instead of residency.
As if that's not enough elections have usually been handled by each county, with coordination (but not support) by the state's secretary of state or the equivalent. They manage elections for multiple independent jurisdictions, e.g., off the top of my head I'll usually vote in national, state (legislature), state (board of regents), county, city, special taxing district for regional bus service, special taxing district for cultural facilities, special taxing district for sports facilities, etc. races.
But wait, it gets even better! Sometimes the city or county needs an "off-year" election. It can use its own rules, e.g., a few years ago there was a proposal to let non-resident students vote in city elections. There was even talk of letting foreign students vote, the logic being that they should have a voice since they pay local sales and (indirectly) property taxes.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the other two cities were not relatively untouched by bombing because they had no military value, they were relatively untouched because the strategic planners knew the atomic bomb was in the pipe and the long-term military value of learning the effects of an atomic bomb outweighed the short-term value of bombing the cities immediately.
Atomic bombs have a number of surprising nuances. E.g., shortly after the war much of the surviving Japanese fleet and some old US warships were anchored at sea, an atomic bomb was dropped on them. I think one or two ships sank, much to the surprise and dismay of the planners. In more of a PR stunt than a real test a second bomb was dropped 1500 or so feet down a cable. The resulting column of water is very impressive and that footage is widely used. All of the ships were sunk but with surprisingly little damage, e.g., I believe survey subs found galleys full of unbroken china, etc.
US planners knew we would win the war, but the question was at what cost (to both US and the Japanese) and how the Soviets would get involved. They were also war-weary but unlikely to pass up a chance at getting a warm water port in a partitioned Japan. That would have caused a lot of problems for the US later.
There was a military coup after the Emperor taped an unconditional surrender message after Nagasaki was bombed. It came very close to succeeding.
Wouldn't the real targeting information be highly classified? Aren't you making a lot of assumptions about what was targeted during the cold war?
We must put Hiroshima and Nagasaki in context. They were cities in a militarized country, their entire economy was directed towards the war effort. The scale of nuclear weapons is such that any attack on any military base would necessarily involve substantial civilian deaths so the situation is hardly black and white.
Finally if we use "attacks on civilians" as our yardstick then nuclear weapons are far better than conventional weapons. Or have you forgotten about Tokyo, Dresden, Rottendam, Coventry and other cities with far greater death tolls (at least in some cases) with conventional weapons.
(Many people would also contrast these attacks with the countless Japanese atrocities in Korea, China and the rest of the occupied lands. But I guess raping nuns and catching babies on the point of bayonets don't count since those deaths come one by one.)
As for neutron bombs, the issue was concern that the Warsaw Pact nations had so many good tanks that NATO had to be prepared for Germany to be entirely overrun by the time NATO could respond. The only realistic responses were capitulation (in which case why not surrender now?) or escalating to unlimited nuclear war. You couldn't use regular nuclear weapons against the invading tanks without destroying the country you're trying to defend.
"Enhanced radiation" weapons provided another option - blow them over invading forces and you would knock them out while sparing most of the nearby towns. It sounds harsh, but it provided a sufficiently credible threat to discourage anyone who thought (perhaps correctly) that the US wouldn't sacrifice New York to save Bonn.
The military and state departments have to have plans for things which are possible even if utterly unlikely. Somewhere deep in the vaults is probably a scenario for dealing with Quebec after it declares independence, becomes a Stalinist state, and then attacks the remainder of Canada and the northern US. (I didn't say these plans were always kept up to date.)
In this case what matters isn't that such weapons are impractical at this time, just that they're possible. How would they be used? What countermeasures, if any, could be used? What does this tell us about other weapon systems?
For example, even this discussion by uninformed civilians makes it clear that antimatter weapons would probably be low-yield intense radiation sources, not nuclear weapon scale explosives. What could you do with a milligram of antimatter? That's about 40T of energy - more than most bombs other than MOAB (maybe) - all delivered as hard radiation from a point source. How would you store it? Deliver it?
For that matter, how much antimatter could you put out as a particle beam? What would be the range before you lose half of the particles to the air? What would be the effects in the vincinity of the weapon? This may sound like a lot of work, but positron beams can be easily redirected so a single weapon could take out hundreds or even thousands of targets in a matter of seconds.
If the military needs a 10MT bomb they're use a nuke. It's known, reliable technology. It's even safe... at least for us.
But if the military wants to hit a target with, oh, 100T to 2000T - that's tons, not kilotons - it doesn't have a lot of options. Conventional cruise missiles can carry a few tons (actually far less but modern chemical explosives are far more powerful than TNT). Aircraft can drop heavier bombs, up to MOAB, but that requires you to actually get a heavy bomber into the area. That can take hours, it has to get past air defenses, etc. You can't just launch a bunch of cruise missiles from a submarine or destroyer and be done with it.
This is why the military was looking at "mini-nukes"... but there's a lower limit on the size of nuclear weapons and actually testing one will cause a lot of problems on the world stage. Not that this administration gives a damn about that but it is a consideration.
An antimatter bomb can be as small as you need to disable the target while minimizing the collateral damage. It doesn't even have to be explosive - an intense "sizzling" gamma ray source may even be better than an explosion. It'll kill personnel, disable electronics, wipe magnetic media, etc. without causing the infrastructure to collapse beyond any damage caused by the initial penetration.
You also have the right to refuse to complete the sale at any time (modulo any product already consumed, service already performed, etc.) I've done it when "sales" had hidden gotchas, when managers insisted on information I felt they had no right to (and I agree that phone orders for food are an exception), etc.
The problem with this theory (that gravity doesn't fall off with 1/r^2) is that it breaks a number of deeper laws of physics. In a nutshell what it means is that a full circle isn't quite 360 degrees. For an anomolous acceleration towards the sun a full circle would be slightly less than 360 degrees. Furthermore this effect increases with distance (before presumably dropping off again) since we don't see this anomoly in planetary orbits. It's extremely hard to explain an effect that only occurs at some distance, but not closer or further away.
This concept isn't entirely unprecedented - general relatively predicts "frame dragging" around rotating masses. In fact we recently launched a satellite to test for frame dragging around the earth. But we know this can't explain this anomoly since the effect drops off with distance from the mass.
That's right, I now remember that Ethel Merman did a disco album. I was in high school when Star Wars came out and disco was big so I'm very senile now...
Unsolicited but legal mail from a legitimate mail server
Unsolicited mail (legal or not) from hijacked systems, open mail relays, etc.
Viruses
Fradulent mail
SPF can be circumvented in the ways we're already seeing for the first category, but it should knock out the second two (and probably related) problems.
As for the final one... law enforcement may still not take phishing seriously. But I bet Citibank, US Bank, et al do. They're probably losing millions of dollars cleaning up the mess left by phishers, and that money would go a long way towards making phisher's lives miserable and cautionary tales for others. These organizations are large enough that phishers can't even hide behind international borders - piss of Citibank by protecting phishers and that bank may decide that it's not worth doing any business in your country.
If you think about it (and legal scholars have), your freedom of speech requires the state (acting on your behalf) to have the power to selectively silence others.
Take the proverbial soapbox in the park. Your "freedom of speech" is meaningless if you can't stop somebody else from standing next to you with a bullhorn shouting their own rhetoric. In this case it's appropriate to use the power of the state to say "here and now only one person may speak at a time." This is only censorship when the state decides to give preference to some speakers... or to fail to protect others from unnecessary disruption.
An online analogy is sci.religion.scientology. There may be some good posts there, but few people would see them when the newsgroup was (is?) flooded by thousands of posts serving no purpose other than to make it difficult to find the legitimate discussion.
I tossed most of my back issues years ago, but kept the earliest year because of the ads. 8" floppies costing over a kilobuck (at a time when new cars ran $4-5k), memory sold in kilobits, CPU clocks measured in single-digit megahertz....
But I need the storage space... the staff at the library will probably scratch their head when they see the issues in the donation pile.
One time key protocols require that the second party communicate a sequence number or nonce or the like to the first party, something that's not possible in this model.
Before you suggest that one of the ports could respond with the sequence number that determines subsequent ports... if you're responding you might as well make it a genie (as in "open sesame") that handles the authentication directly - if you can respond with the right value the other port is immediately opened without further knocking. But that's a different model....
I think you (and the introductory article) have this backwards - you can only knock on unused ports < 1024. Ports higher than that might be legitimately used by the system by network clients and unavailable for "knocking." But it all comes down to the implementation details.
I notice you don't mention where you are located, what your general experience level is, etc.
This has been a *very* weird recession. Historically developers could go down a notch or two and companies were grateful to get a senior developer for mid-level developer wages, etc.
But not this time - it seems that local companies (at least) either want impossible experience (10 years of java, 5 years of WXP, etc.) or they have explicitly reject anyone with more than 2 years or so of experience. And there's absolutely no lateral movement - if you've been working with C then you won't be considered for Java positions regardless of your qualifications in the second language. (There was even one particularly clueless company that advertised for a C programmer - but only C programmers who didn't know either C++ or Java.)
I think a friend sums it up best. It's like somebody has advanced cancer and angrily refuses to see the expert who has successfully treated thousands of patients with similarly advanced cancer. Nosiree Bob! He wants the guy who's only been out of med school for a year or two - he's perceived to be cheaper (without even checking the expert's bottom line) and hey everyone has the same medical degree, right?!
It took me a while to figure out what you're talking about... and you're wrong. It's not that hard to write your own library (or simply buy one) that allow you to access a file in a ZIP file as easily as with fopen(). It's even part of the standard Java libraries - see the java.util.zip package. There's no need to unpack the archive first.
At a prior job I even pulled this trick on an embedded system without any filesystem at all. (Before you ask, the network layer worked a lot like mmap() - we told it what URL we wanted and some seconds later would get a notify event with a pointer. No real or virtual filesystems anywhere.)
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You do need a progression in sentences to discourage criminals from progressing to more serious crimes.
Prime example: when I lived in Florida in the early 80s a "get tough" legislature passed a law that anyone convicted of using a gun during the commission of a felony had a mandatory 10-year, no parole, extension added to his sentence.
This was immediately followed by the slaughter of convenience store clerks and patrons.
The logic was brutal but unambiguous. Do a simple holdup and your 10 year robbery conviction (possibly 5 with good behavior) was now a hard 20 years. Since it was "only" robbery you might see your public defender for the first time when you entered your plea bargain - you were seriously hosed.
But if you force everyone into the back room and kill them in cold blood you were in pretty good shape. There are no surviving witnesses to testify against you, and even if caught murder defendants are guaranteed better representation. Finally the average murderer (excluding capital cases) would get out in 15 years anyway under the old system.
It's a no brainer - you kill everyone.
The legislature had tied its own hands - how do you demotivate somebody who's already risking the death penalty? But it couldn't ease the tougher sentences without being accused of going "soft on crime."
The cops figured out a solution. Soon every convenience store had a sign from the local sheriff saying that you would be killed on the spot if you had a gun and didn't immediately freeze when a cop appeared. Or maybe they would shoot you anyway, it's been 20-odd years.
Not true. Rape is a crime of violence, control and degradation, not sex. Snip them and they'll use toilet plungers.
The same thing applies to gun control. Take away guns and I (as a 6'2" male) can still inflict a lot of pain on anyone who attacks me. Take away guns and my 70 year old mother is helpless. (Not that she runs around armed, but you get the idea.)
Why do you think rehab works?
I'm not suggesting that we just lock them up. Drug and alcohol treatment programs should be fully funded (they are not), anger management classes encouraged (they are not), etc. But you don't just need to treat the people inside the prison, in many cases you also need to treat the people in the community... and that brings in some pretty deep social justice issues. E.g., there's a staggering unemployment rate among inner city youth... but there's also staggeringly few employment opportunities available. We take the early job training we get at McDonalds or stocking the local grocery store for granted, but many prisoners come from an environment where even these jobs are several subway or bus transfers away.
But was that for a serious offense, remembering that their laws were very different from our own? E.g., killing another citizen's slave would be a far lesser crime than killing another citizen.
After I posted my original comments I remembered there were two other options. The first was exile, the second was dismemberment (e.g., thieves having their hands cut off).
But that doesn't change the main point - prisons have only been around for around for a few hundred years or so. You'll find dungeons earlier, but they were for political prisoners (pesky noblemen, bishops, etc.) instead of common criminals.
Bullshit. Prison as "rehabilitation" is a relatively recent concept and still unproven. For that matter prison itself is a relatively recent concept - through most of human history somebody who commited a serious crime was either executed or enslaved. There was no third choice.
.... The state comes in and says it, alone, can revenge serious crimes. It sounds brutal but it's actually a stablizing factor as long as the criminal justice system is trusted.
Historically, punishment has been done for two reasons simultaneously. The first is to end the cycle of revenge - if you kill my brother I'll kill you and your cousin will kill me and
The second reason is to act as a big cautionary tale to others thinking of doing the same thing. Money (fines) is just money and suitable for small crimes (misdemeanors), but serious prison time will make others think twice about what they're doing.
Is spamming really a serious crime? I haven't RTFA but I haven't seen spam from a legitimate but clueless company in years. Everything I see is a form of fraud. Some of it is just this side of legal (a "genuinue faux imitation Rolex" is not advertised as a real Rolex), most of it is not. We lock up the guy who hustles hundreds of people on the street corner, so damn straight we can lock up the guy who's hustling millions of people online.
You overlooked another key optimization - no number can have prime factors larger than sqrt(N). You don't need to bother computing any of the intermediate primes. With a 210-into-48 encoding you can quickly determine primality of any 32-bit number with a precomputed block of only 2k! This is such a small buffer that you could easily bootstrap it the first time the function is called - you can bootstrap the process by hardcoding nothing more than the first 6 bytes.
This raises an interesting question - is it faster to load precomputed blocks from disk or to regenerate it in the L1 cache? One buffer would hold the first block, a second buffer would hold the 2nd-Nth block computed on demand, and a third buffer would hold the target block that's being updated by each successive block.
Whoever first thought anyone should be taught bubble sorts should be taken out and shot. If they're already dead they should be dug up, shot, and reburied.
Bubble shorts give you absolutely no asymptotic benefit over insertion sort. The instructors do a song and dance about how values tend to migrate into the right position, but you still have to check every remaining value every single time. So you only get modest benefit if you stop the sort early - who could possibly consider this a useful property?
Even among the O(n^2) algorithms they're outperformed in practice by every other algorithm. They're more costly than unidirectional insertion sort (because of all of the swapping), and far slower than bidirectional insertion sort. (Scan the records and find the smallest _and_ largest values. Swap with first and last positions. Repeat on remaining elements.)
H***, even the bidirectional bubble sort (which is like a bubble sort but again you run it one way and percolate the largest value to the top and then run it the other way to percolate the smallest value to the bottom) is faster than that stupid sort. E.g., while percolating the largest value you can also take note of the smallest value seen. Immediately swap it, then run the bubble sort the other direction and take note of the largest value seen. This gives you two values per pass.
The bubble sort is important... but only as an example of a seemingly good but in reality really brain-dead algorithm that's studied as a cautionary tale in graduate algorithm classes.
Elections are handled by the states and federalizing them is out of the question due to constitutional issues. There are no true national elections - all Congressional seats are selected by state votes, and technically the presidency is determined by the Electoral College whose members are also selected by each state. In the past Senators and Electors(iirc) were selected by the respective state legislatures, not a direct vote by the people.
Even establishing uniform standards is problematic. That's why it was necessary to pass a constitutional amendment to establish a national voting age. There are still different residency requirements, etc. Sometimes it's not even clear which state somebody should vote in, e.g., do college students vote where they go to school or where they go over Thanksgiving? Sometimes a person can vote in multiple states, e.g., in special elections based on property ownership instead of residency.
As if that's not enough elections have usually been handled by each county, with coordination (but not support) by the state's secretary of state or the equivalent. They manage elections for multiple independent jurisdictions, e.g., off the top of my head I'll usually vote in national, state (legislature), state (board of regents), county, city, special taxing district for regional bus service, special taxing district for cultural facilities, special taxing district for sports facilities, etc. races.
But wait, it gets even better! Sometimes the city or county needs an "off-year" election. It can use its own rules, e.g., a few years ago there was a proposal to let non-resident students vote in city elections. There was even talk of letting foreign students vote, the logic being that they should have a voice since they pay local sales and (indirectly) property taxes.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki and the other two cities were not relatively untouched by bombing because they had no military value, they were relatively untouched because the strategic planners knew the atomic bomb was in the pipe and the long-term military value of learning the effects of an atomic bomb outweighed the short-term value of bombing the cities immediately.
Atomic bombs have a number of surprising nuances. E.g., shortly after the war much of the surviving Japanese fleet and some old US warships were anchored at sea, an atomic bomb was dropped on them. I think one or two ships sank, much to the surprise and dismay of the planners. In more of a PR stunt than a real test a second bomb was dropped 1500 or so feet down a cable. The resulting column of water is very impressive and that footage is widely used. All of the ships were sunk but with surprisingly little damage, e.g., I believe survey subs found galleys full of unbroken china, etc.
US planners knew we would win the war, but the question was at what cost (to both US and the Japanese) and how the Soviets would get involved. They were also war-weary but unlikely to pass up a chance at getting a warm water port in a partitioned Japan. That would have caused a lot of problems for the US later.
There was a military coup after the Emperor taped an unconditional surrender message after Nagasaki was bombed. It came very close to succeeding.
Wouldn't the real targeting information be highly classified? Aren't you making a lot of assumptions about what was targeted during the cold war?
We must put Hiroshima and Nagasaki in context. They were cities in a militarized country, their entire economy was directed towards the war effort. The scale of nuclear weapons is such that any attack on any military base would necessarily involve substantial civilian deaths so the situation is hardly black and white.
Finally if we use "attacks on civilians" as our yardstick then nuclear weapons are far better than conventional weapons. Or have you forgotten about Tokyo, Dresden, Rottendam, Coventry and other cities with far greater death tolls (at least in some cases) with conventional weapons.
(Many people would also contrast these attacks with the countless Japanese atrocities in Korea, China and the rest of the occupied lands. But I guess raping nuns and catching babies on the point of bayonets don't count since those deaths come one by one.)
As for neutron bombs, the issue was concern that the Warsaw Pact nations had so many good tanks that NATO had to be prepared for Germany to be entirely overrun by the time NATO could respond. The only realistic responses were capitulation (in which case why not surrender now?) or escalating to unlimited nuclear war. You couldn't use regular nuclear weapons against the invading tanks without destroying the country you're trying to defend.
"Enhanced radiation" weapons provided another option - blow them over invading forces and you would knock them out while sparing most of the nearby towns. It sounds harsh, but it provided a sufficiently credible threat to discourage anyone who thought (perhaps correctly) that the US wouldn't sacrifice New York to save Bonn.
The military and state departments have to have plans for things which are possible even if utterly unlikely. Somewhere deep in the vaults is probably a scenario for dealing with Quebec after it declares independence, becomes a Stalinist state, and then attacks the remainder of Canada and the northern US. (I didn't say these plans were always kept up to date.)
In this case what matters isn't that such weapons are impractical at this time, just that they're possible. How would they be used? What countermeasures, if any, could be used? What does this tell us about other weapon systems?
For example, even this discussion by uninformed civilians makes it clear that antimatter weapons would probably be low-yield intense radiation sources, not nuclear weapon scale explosives. What could you do with a milligram of antimatter? That's about 40T of energy - more than most bombs other than MOAB (maybe) - all delivered as hard radiation from a point source. How would you store it? Deliver it?
For that matter, how much antimatter could you put out as a particle beam? What would be the range before you lose half of the particles to the air? What would be the effects in the vincinity of the weapon? This may sound like a lot of work, but positron beams can be easily redirected so a single weapon could take out hundreds or even thousands of targets in a matter of seconds.
I might have misunderstood your last sentence - are you saying electrons can annihilate with anti-protons etc?
If so you're wrong - particles can only annihilate with their antimatter counterparts. Other interactions follow the usual rules.
If the military needs a 10MT bomb they're use a nuke. It's known, reliable technology. It's even safe... at least for us.
But if the military wants to hit a target with, oh, 100T to 2000T - that's tons, not kilotons - it doesn't have a lot of options. Conventional cruise missiles can carry a few tons (actually far less but modern chemical explosives are far more powerful than TNT). Aircraft can drop heavier bombs, up to MOAB, but that requires you to actually get a heavy bomber into the area. That can take hours, it has to get past air defenses, etc. You can't just launch a bunch of cruise missiles from a submarine or destroyer and be done with it.
This is why the military was looking at "mini-nukes"... but there's a lower limit on the size of nuclear weapons and actually testing one will cause a lot of problems on the world stage. Not that this administration gives a damn about that but it is a consideration.
An antimatter bomb can be as small as you need to disable the target while minimizing the collateral damage. It doesn't even have to be explosive - an intense "sizzling" gamma ray source may even be better than an explosion. It'll kill personnel, disable electronics, wipe magnetic media, etc. without causing the infrastructure to collapse beyond any damage caused by the initial penetration.
You also have the right to refuse to complete the sale at any time (modulo any product already consumed, service already performed, etc.) I've done it when "sales" had hidden gotchas, when managers insisted on information I felt they had no right to (and I agree that phone orders for food are an exception), etc.
The problem with this theory (that gravity doesn't fall off with 1/r^2) is that it breaks a number of deeper laws of physics. In a nutshell what it means is that a full circle isn't quite 360 degrees. For an anomolous acceleration towards the sun a full circle would be slightly less than 360 degrees. Furthermore this effect increases with distance (before presumably dropping off again) since we don't see this anomoly in planetary orbits. It's extremely hard to explain an effect that only occurs at some distance, but not closer or further away.
This concept isn't entirely unprecedented - general relatively predicts "frame dragging" around rotating masses. In fact we recently launched a satellite to test for frame dragging around the earth. But we know this can't explain this anomoly since the effect drops off with distance from the mass.
That's right, I now remember that Ethel Merman did a disco album. I was in high school when Star Wars came out and disco was big so I'm very senile now...
I thought it was Ethel Merman. I wish I was making this up.
SPF can be circumvented in the ways we're already seeing for the first category, but it should knock out the second two (and probably related) problems.
As for the final one... law enforcement may still not take phishing seriously. But I bet Citibank, US Bank, et al do. They're probably losing millions of dollars cleaning up the mess left by phishers, and that money would go a long way towards making phisher's lives miserable and cautionary tales for others. These organizations are large enough that phishers can't even hide behind international borders - piss of Citibank by protecting phishers and that bank may decide that it's not worth doing any business in your country.
If you think about it (and legal scholars have), your freedom of speech requires the state (acting on your behalf) to have the power to selectively silence others.
Take the proverbial soapbox in the park. Your "freedom of speech" is meaningless if you can't stop somebody else from standing next to you with a bullhorn shouting their own rhetoric. In this case it's appropriate to use the power of the state to say "here and now only one person may speak at a time." This is only censorship when the state decides to give preference to some speakers... or to fail to protect others from unnecessary disruption.
An online analogy is sci.religion.scientology. There may be some good posts there, but few people would see them when the newsgroup was (is?) flooded by thousands of posts serving no purpose other than to make it difficult to find the legitimate discussion.
I tossed most of my back issues years ago, but kept the earliest year because of the ads. 8" floppies costing over a kilobuck (at a time when new cars ran $4-5k), memory sold in kilobits, CPU clocks measured in single-digit megahertz....
But I need the storage space... the staff at the library will probably scratch their head when they see the issues in the donation pile.
One time key protocols require that the second party communicate a sequence number or nonce or the like to the first party, something that's not possible in this model.
Before you suggest that one of the ports could respond with the sequence number that determines subsequent ports... if you're responding you might as well make it a genie (as in "open sesame") that handles the authentication directly - if you can respond with the right value the other port is immediately opened without further knocking. But that's a different model....
I think you (and the introductory article) have this backwards - you can only knock on unused ports < 1024. Ports higher than that might be legitimately used by the system by network clients and unavailable for "knocking." But it all comes down to the implementation details.
I notice you don't mention where you are located, what your general experience level is, etc.
This has been a *very* weird recession. Historically developers could go down a notch or two and companies were grateful to get a senior developer for mid-level developer wages, etc.
But not this time - it seems that local companies (at least) either want impossible experience (10 years of java, 5 years of WXP, etc.) or they have explicitly reject anyone with more than 2 years or so of experience. And there's absolutely no lateral movement - if you've been working with C then you won't be considered for Java positions regardless of your qualifications in the second language. (There was even one particularly clueless company that advertised for a C programmer - but only C programmers who didn't know either C++ or Java.)
I think a friend sums it up best. It's like somebody has advanced cancer and angrily refuses to see the expert who has successfully treated thousands of patients with similarly advanced cancer. Nosiree Bob! He wants the guy who's only been out of med school for a year or two - he's perceived to be cheaper (without even checking the expert's bottom line) and hey everyone has the same medical degree, right?!
Just how many people do you expect to have access to the encrypted files?
In any case, you can specify multiple recipients. The encrypted session key is provided for each recipient's public key.
It took me a while to figure out what you're talking about... and you're wrong. It's not that hard to write your own library (or simply buy one) that allow you to access a file in a ZIP file as easily as with fopen(). It's even part of the standard Java libraries - see the java.util.zip package. There's no need to unpack the archive first.
At a prior job I even pulled this trick on an embedded system without any filesystem at all. (Before you ask, the network layer worked a lot like mmap() - we told it what URL we wanted and some seconds later would get a notify event with a pointer. No real or virtual filesystems anywhere.)