Ohm's Law only applies to what are called Ohmic resistors. Some metals are generally Ohmic; others are generally Ohmic but only at particular temperatures. Some substances are not Ohmic at all, such as the YBCO superconductors I worked with as a research aide at the Texas Center for Superconductivity.
For comparison: Ohm's Law generally applies to copper, no matter what the temperature is. Ohm's Law stops applying to aluminum once you cool it to about 4K.
Remember: Ohm's Law is a macro-scale observation, and superconductivity is a quantum-scale event. At the quantum level, all sorts of strange things happen that are totally contrary to our macro-scale observations. The Einstein-Bose Condensate is a great example, as is superfluidity in liquid helium. (Anyone who is not utterly shocked and amazed by superfluidity apparently hasn't seen superfluids before.)
1. A 7.62mm Sov round doesn't have a velocity of 2,000fps. Closer to 2,300fps when fired from an AK.
2. An AK-47 weighs 9.5 pounds empty (a couple of pounds more with a mag), not 15.
3. A G3 is not a new weapon; it's nigh on fifty years old as well. It was the first major post-war German rifle design, heavily influenced by the Fabrique Nationale FAL and the Spanish CETME. If memory serves me right, it was first produced in '59.
4. A 7.62mm NATO cartridge fired from a G3 has a muzzle velocity of around 2,800fps. More in the longer-barreled versions, less in the -K versions.
5. The penetration of a 7.62mm NATO round is insufficient to fully penetrate an automobile (ref: US Army field manuals on urban warfare), to say nothing of "a foot of steel".
6. The G3 is considerably heavier than the AK-47 is; the empty weight is about a pound more, but the loaded weight is considerably more due to the heavy-as-a-bear 7.62mm NATO cartridge.
Informed sources tell me the NSA has been breaking PGP for years, but they'll generally only bother in cases where side-channel attacks are unfeasible, due to the required resources in time and labor.
I'd love to know who those informed sources were, and what the basis for their information is. Out-of-band attacks against systems are almost always cheaper, better and more effective than cryptanalytic attacks; after all, no matter how secure the pipe, it's still designed to leak at both ends.
Saying that "they'll only bother with cryptanalysis where out-of-band attacks are infeasible due to required time and labor" strikes me as highly specious. Out-of-band attacks are cheap, effective and fast. Cryptanalysis isn't.
Farming computer games for new weapons ideas is a splendid idea.
Yep, except that in this case the computer games were farming Defense Department prototypes and SF literature. Railguns have existed for decades; they were even proposed as part of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative back in '84. So this is hardly life imitating art--art imitated life originally.
The US Army should create a department for this purpose. I really think it could reap dividends.
The Defense Department already does have a department for this, called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In a previous incarnation it was simply the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which developed the ARPAnet to connect ARPA research labs... and that, in turn, turned into the Internet.
So your ability to post your opinion on Slashdot is due largely to the very agency that you think doesn't exist yet.:)
No attack against RSA with better-than-factorization results has ever been demonstrated, to the best of my knowledge. Saying that `there are other means' is technically true--for a 4096-bit RSA key, you could conceivably break it by putting a 4096-bit counter through its paces. But that does not fall into the realm of practical cryptanalysis by any means.
Whether or not factorization is NP-complete is definitely still a conjecture, the assumption of which is at the heart of RSA. Remember that all P-space problems exist in the general class of NP problems, but NP-complete problems have no P-space analogs. If factorization does have a P-space solution, that would be catastrophic to RSA.
By the way--how the hell do you define `really hard' without NP-completeness?
Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups. Yes, people put a lot of faith in flimsier assumptions--but that doesn't mean we ought to put blind faith in an assumption. The heart of security is the management of risk; and without a fair and frank assessment of risk, there is no security.
... is kind of interesting. If you look at very early versions of PGP, an algorithm of Phil Z's own design called Bass-o-Matic was used. Turns out that Bass-o-Matic wasn't a particularly good algo, but they learned from the mistake and from there on only used peer-reviewed algos.
Insofar as the likelihood of breaking RSA, history shows that you're exactly right. While RSA is built on a lot of conjecture, it's survived a lot of mathematical attack. Protocol attacks against RSA have historically been far more effective. Check out the Crypto-Gram of a couple of months back for a quick look at RSA protocol attacks over the years.
(I know Schneier covered at least one RSA protocol attack recently; I think he covered more than just the one. But my memory could be mistaken.)
I'm very hesitant to declare RSA to be "one of the best types around". RSA is built on several conjectures, none of which have been proven, namely:
The only way to make a general break of RSA is to factor large composite numbers,
Factorization of large numbers is an NP-complete problem,
P != NP
Remember: none of these have been proven. At all. There is absolutely no evidence of the correctness of any of the three conjectures, except that historically we haven't been able to do it--and that's exceptionally weak evidence.
Compare this against something like elliptical-curve cryptography. ECC is also built on many conjectures, but one of them (the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture) has recently been formally proven (by Wiles, et al). Mathematicians are still reviewing the multiple Taniyama-Shimura proofs to make sure that (a) they are correct singly, and (b) taken together they prove the entirety of Taniyama-Shimura--but last I heard, things were looking promising.
The thing we have to worry about most currently with RSA is whether or not we're all using the same keys over and over again.
Absolutely not. We've got some extremely good ways of generating large random primes. The odds of a collision in the keyspace is probably somewhere on the order of 10^(-150), a really really small chance.
If you want to see this principle in action, connect to a PGP keyserver and type in your key ID (a cryptographic hash of your key). If you get any other keys coming up with your same key ID, then I'll agree that we've got a problem. Otherwise, don't worry about it.:)
Re:Accidents, far more than firearms
on
Clever Girl Bess
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· Score: 2
We blame the criminals and thus seek to prevent them from using the tool to commit crimes in the future.
Bravo. Clear, cogent and bang-on accurate.
Aside from being unconstitutional
Excuse me? Where in the Constitution does it forbid the States the authority to deny criminals the use or possession of firearms? It doesn't, not anywhere. It forbids the government from denying law-abiding citizens the possession or use of firearms; it in no way restricts the ability of the government to deny criminals the same.
The problem with most attempts at gun control is that they use a sledgehammer to try and achieve a result which calls for a scalpel instead. Laws which overwhelmingly target law-abiding gun owners over criminals, the mentally ill, etc., are vigorously opposed by the NRA. Laws which overwhelmingly target criminal use and possession of firearms are vigorously endorsed by the NRA.
(For real world examples... Look at the Clinton Omnibus Crime Bill, which has had an impact on almost every single competitive shooter I know; then look at Virginia's Project Exile, which has had no impact on any law-abiding citizen. The NRA opposes the former, and wholeheartedly endorses the latter.)
The politics of gun control aren't as black and white as people make them out to be.:)
Evolution is not a mostly random process; if it were, we'd be as likely to see animals shift to a less-fit-to-survive state as to see one shift to a better-fit state. This may or may not be true on an individual level (speciation is a hot topic of debate); it is definitely false on a species level.
Why?
Because all the animals unfit for their environment die off, leaving only those better-fit. The better-fit pass on their advantages to their offspring, resulting in a general promulgation of the better-fit over the lesser-fit.
The only reason cigarette companies exist is because they were here a long time ago
The only reason anything exists is because either (a) it was just created or (b) it's been around. What's your point?
If your point is that tobacco would be considered a drug regulated by the FDA were it to be brought to market today, I repeat: what's your point? Aspirin (and other NSAIDs) are surprisingly potent analgesics and have low overdose levels. After I (accidentally) nearly overdosed on acetaminophen, my doc ruminated that, if aspirin and other NSAIDs were introduced to the market today, they'd be considered prescription drugs because of their potency and lethality.
So if we're going to retroactively ban cigarettes because they're harmful, going against centuries of tradition, why don't we also retroactively turn aspirin and NSAIDs into prescription drugs?
The answer is that in a country governed by the people, the people get to decide what's illegal and what's not. The people don't want cigarettes to be illegal, nor do they want aspirin to be a prescription drug.
Thus, it won't happen.
Period.
Is it right to make billions of dollars off of a product that serves no purpose other than pacifying addictions?
Why, let me get this straight. You want to ban the first cup of morning coffee, too? After all, that has "no purpose other than pacifying addictions".
But let's not go there right now, because to go there gives your argument more credibility than it possesses. There is a useful purpose served by tobacco, other than fulfilling an addiction. The purpose is, I like it.
I enjoy a stogie on occasion, once a month or two months, when something happens which is worth commemorating. It could be getting a software release out the door; it could be celebrating a birthday; it could be a stogie after a great baseball game. But for personal reasons, I smoke cigars to commemorate personal milestones.
Am I addicted? Not if I can go six weeks without a Rothschild.
Do I find tobacco useful? Certainly.
So your argument--that there exists no useful purpose for tobacco other than to feed addictions--falls flat on its face. There are a lot, repeat, a lot of people like me. We smoke tobacco because we like it, not becuase we need to. We drink single-malt Scotch because we enjoy the taste of a premium liquor, not because we're alcoholics.
You only have one life. There's no excuse for not living it well.
Until you've found someone suffering from the disease, you haven't found the disease.
How is this relevant to the epidemiology of smoking? Namely, that while the link between lung cancer and smoking is well-established, the link between secondhand smoke and mortality is far less so.
If secondhand smoke kills tens of thousands of people each year, then why is it I don't know anyone who's died from secondhand smoke? How do they come up with these numbers of tens of thousands dying each year from it? Are those actual, clinical diagnoses of "you have lung cancer triggered by high exposure to secondhand smoke", or are those inferred mortality statistics?
If those numbers are culled from aggregate diagnoses throughout the US, what's the criteria for diagnoses? If I live with a smoker and die of a virulent influenza (a respiratory ailment), does that get counted as a "secondhand smoke" death since "everybody knows that were it not for the secondhand smoke you wouldn't have fallen ill"?
What if, instead of living with a smoker, I hang out after work a couple of nights a week in a smoke-filled bar?
What if my only connection to tobacco smoke comes from walking out the side entrance at work and inhaling the fumes from the smokers there?
The link between secondhand smoke and lung damage is far from certain. Most of the numbers on secondhand smoke are inferred numbers, not direct observations; and the criteria which are used to determine secondhand smoke illness are oftentimes arbitrary and shifting.
There's a hell of a lot of politics surrounding tobacco nowadays. Best bet: doubt everything. Don't believe the hype from either side, whether that side be Philip Morris and RJR Nabisco, or whether that side be Truth.
Let's say for sake of argument that you've got a piece of software which, for entirely personal reasons all your own, you place into the public domain. Not only is there no copyright on it, there can be no copyright on it because you've explicitly waived your rights to it.
Can Sun then use it in the next (non-free) version of Solaris? Yep.
Can RMS use it in the next (free) HURD? Yep.
Is it free software? Yep. Even more free than BSD-licensed code, because you aren't even asking for attribution.
RMS would like to see copyright on software done away with altogether, because that means the free software community could disassemble Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and every other UNIX out there. The free software community could investigate how other software works with impunity, not being restricted by those nebulous "anti-reverse-engineering" clauses in software licenses.
While free software would lose a marginal amount if copyright on software were done away with, the community would post a much larger gain.
Do you think Will Shakespeare would have produced plays if it wasn't lucrative[?]
... In a word, YES.
Keep in mind that Shakespeare was dead broke for a lot of his life. If his goal in life was to get rich, he sure picked a lousy profession. In Shakespeare's time, actors couldn't even be buried in the same cemeteries as "decent Christians".
I think we all agree that Kaplan was nothing but a paid lackey for the MPAA.
Kaplan doesn't give a damn about the MPAA. I have yet to meet a Federal judge (and I know well over two dozen of them) who doesn't possess a remarkable degree of intransigence and stubbornness. These are not necessarily bad traits in a judge, by the by; you want a judge who is stubborn enough to stand his ground and decide things according to legal principle and the demands of justice, regardless of public opinion.
Brown v Board of Education was a tremendously unpopular decision in much of America, but the Supreme Court simply didn't care. Ditto with Roe v Wade, which to this day causes Supreme Court justices to get mailbags full of hate mail.
By and large, Federal judges cannot be "paid lackeys". A lackey is the inferior of, and subservient to, the person he serves. Federal judges possess such intransigence (and, some would argue, arrogance) that the only thing they consider themselves inferior of and subservient to are abstract notions like law, social justice, individual liberties and so on.
what happens to him then?
We send him lots of mail at his courthouse accusing him of being an intellectual coward who ought to step down from the bench to spare the Judiciary further humiliation. But guess what? That's our only recourse.
Was his decision wrong? Yes. Poorly reasoned? Yes. Was his decision so horrifically negligient as to rise to the level of an impeachable offense? Nope.
We want judges to possess near-ultimate judicial independence. Look at Judge John Sirica, who (some would argue) used sweeping and unprecedented powers of the judiciary to assist a grand jury in its investigation of the Watergate break-in. Nixon hated Sirica and probably spent every waking moment wishing Maximum John would get hit by a city bus.
Nixon challenged Sirica's legal authority both in Congress and in court. The Judiciary Committee refused to even consider impeaching Maximum John; while what Sirica had done was sweeping, it was far from impeachable. The Supreme Court refused to overrule Maximum John; while the Court agreed that Sirica was going like gangbusters, the Court said that Sirica was acting in accordance with the best traditions of the Federal Judiciary.
Now, if the President of the United States can't get rid of one single Federal judge, a judge who possesses lifetime tenure specifically so he can check abuses in other branches of government, do you really think you have any chance of getting Kaplan off the bench because he made a decision you don't like?
Radioactive material is dangerous, hands down, no matter what
Your light bulb is radioactive. Why, to think of it, it's streaming all those highly energetic photons at you! It's in the electromagnetic spectrum!
Radioactivity is not a bogeyman. If you don't understand this, then you don't understand the issues.
Hey, if you think you might be absorbing radiation leaked from hundreds of miles away, just move somewhere where nobody effects the planet. simple!
I am absorbing radiation leaked from hundreds of miles away. Tens of millions of miles away, actually. It's called "the sun", and it's the big glowing thing you see from time to time in the sky.
I'm also absorbing radiation from the ambient microwave background of the universe. Plus a few stray highly energetic cosmic rays. Plus radon from the house I grew up in. Wow. Guess I should be feeling like I'm near-death, eh?
As soon as you open up a Freshman Physics book and come to an understanding about what radioactivity is, and what it can and cannot do, you're not doing any credit to either side in the nuclear debate.
Gunter of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service
More information on this "NIRS", please. Is it a government agency? (Don't think so; at least, I've never heard of it, but that doesn't prove anything.) Is it an "independent nonpartisan nuclear information group"? (Remember all those "independent" laboratories, funded by tobacco companies, that said tobacco isn't addictive? Remember all those political attack ads last year which were paid for by "independent, nonpartisan" groups like labor unions?)
The lesson of American politics is that it's easy to claim independent and nonpartisan status. That makes it very tempting for entrenched interests, such as pro- and anti-nuclear groups, to put up "independent, nonpartisan" groups as front agencies and do their media spinning behind the veil of "independent and nonpartisan" work.
Next: any civilian reactor--any civilian reactor--which has a containment dome which is evaluated by a government agency as having a 90% chance of failure of containment dome will be shut down by the DOE. (Note that some military reactors, such as those which are found in nuclear-powered ships and submarines, don't have a big concrete containment dome. They do have other mechanisms in place to provide environmental safety in case of catastrophe, but the efficacy of these safeguards is a hotly debated topic.).
These are agencies who fire workers in nuclear plants for leaving a door open (as happened at the nuclear plant in Palo, Iowa a few years ago--a worker propped open an emergency door for a few minutes and was dismissed over it). They won't hesitate for a second to yank the operating license of a plant that can't operate safely, part of which means a properly-maintained containment dome.
Insofar as the "[s]ome [twenty-eight] reactors in this country have substandard containment"... okay, fine. Who gets to decide what is acceptable containment? Greenpeace would have us believe there is no such thing as acceptable containment; rabidly pro-nuclear groups would say there's no need for containment since the likelihood of failure is so low. Which standard is this Gunter fellow using to determine what he considers "acceptable"? DOE standards? FAS standards? Greenpeace standards?
... Be very, very careful whenever you hear an activist say anything. Many activists are so thoroughly convinced of the justness of their cause that they have no compunctions about spinning the truth.
as well as Solar Power which feeds energy back into the electric grid (thereby, eliminating the need for nuclear energy by over 100% if everybody did it, and it was a government funded project).
Unfortunately, solar cells are currently extremely damaging to the environment. Essentially, they're manufactured in a similar way to computer chips--it requires immense amounts of power and large quantities of extremely toxic materials to create them. Yes, they're emission-free once they're in use, but getting them out the factory door involves huge expenditures of both power and toxic chemicals.
The truth is, new technology has not been tested as long as old technology; and in reality, new technology is always new, and never the technology being used everywhere; so it is not possible (in this case) to forgive the use of dangerous technology worldwide with a few examples of some new reactors running in a few small locations.
While your argument is sound, it's also inapplicable. CANDU reactors (and similar negative-coeffecient-of-moderation reactors) are not new technology. They're over fifty years old, if I recall. The RBMK-type (Chernobyl) reactor is actually of a newer type than the CANDU reactor.
Every design, whether it be of a car or a nuke plant, involves tradeoffs. If you want it to do X very well, you have to scale back on Y. The RBMK reactors did not have environmental safety as a design criteria--hell, the Russians cared so little about environmental safety they didn't even bother to put a containment dome on it. The CANDU reactors, and other similar negative-coefficient US reactors, have environmental and human safety as their first design goal.
The very nature of dependance and cost of Nuclear Technology makes it a dangerous thing.
According to whom? Different people have different ideas of what is and is not dangerous. "Danger" is a subjective term, and too often used as a defense for NIMBY and NIMBY's big brother, BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything).
Instead of talking about "danger", try talking about historical risk. Define exactly what such terms as "nuclear meltdown" means--does it mean full-bore China Syndrome? Or is something like Three Mile Island, which has never been demonstrated to have had any environmental impact whatsoever even though there was a nuclear crisis there?
Once you come up with those rigid definitions, then look to history to come up with an assessment of risk. (Some people say to crunch numbers, but I don't--that's how we got to Challenger, after all.) Once you do that, then you'll be on solid ground if you want to claim that nuclear power is dangerous. But be warned, it's a hard thing to back up scientifically; by and large, anti-nuclear activists depend on the fear effect of the nuclear bogeyman to make people's knees jerk in the opposite direction from the nuke plant.
Should a problem be found in new reactor designs, or a problem occurs in the many tiny unique variables that effect nuclear power production at any facility; the technology is still going to be used for a long, long time.
If the design is that badly flawed, they won't be able to run the plant. That's one of the nice fringe benefits of living in a capitalist society; people get to choose who they work for. If someone wanted to hire me to work in an RBMK plant without a reactor dome, I'd say "buddy, I don't care what you're willing to pay me, the answer is no--especially since these other plants, whose designs aren't criminally insane, are willing to offer me an equal wage to work there."
[Y]ou will be very surprised by "Greenpeaces Guide To The Nuclear Age". Chernobyl was only one of many many disasters that have occured worldwide; many have occured in the US and Canada that nobody has even heard of, and they were very serious.
Wow. Let me get this straight. The same news media that hounded Clinton's every move--the same news media which is so effective that the CIA's number one source of intelligence is CNN--the same news media we all love to curse--the same news media which is predominantly left-learning and, thus, inclined to judge nuclear power even more harshly--this same news media is so incompetent they can't cover major nuclear disasters?
There's a disconnect of reality there. Either (a) the news media is so ferociously competent at exposing these things that major world governments can't keep things secret for them, or (b) the news media is so incompetent that when they see buildings glowing blue from Cerenkov radiation, they think it's just a new paint job.
Take your pick and stick with it.
The answer? Because the staff at the plant itself were actually designing, and building the controlling circuitry AT HOME, as it was needed!
Let me get this straight. If they were designing and building the controlling circuitry at the office, that'd be fine, no matter how lousy the design was; but since they worked at home, it doesn't matter how good the design was, it's still lousy?
Very smart people, whose HOBBIES were Electronics were doing this stuff
My hobby is cryptographic engineering. My day job is cryptographic engineering. Does that mean that, if it's between 9-to-5 on a weekday, that what I produce is automatically good because it's "professional work for pay", and anything I do on a weekend is "amateur-quality work"?
I don't trust any industry that has to make commercials saying, "Nuclear Energy is Safe!", but they can't explain why, even in simple terms.
That's because the best way to refute FUD--such as what you're spreading here--is with careful fact and analysis. Careful fact and analysis requires that people think, and I think it's already been established that ninety-five percent of America tries to avoid thinking whenever possible.
Right. Tolerance is for weenies. I must've missed that bit of social wisdom when people were teaching me how civilized human beings act.
We, as a community, should demand source releases be timely.
And the code release is not timely how? The fellow just released the code, and he's told people he doesn't want to release the code in this immature state, not that he will not release the code.
Even RMS allows this sort of coding to go on. Take a look at early Brave GNU Worlds. There are references to RMS receiving binaries of a proto-bash, and the author saying "this is just to look at, there are a couple of bugs I want to fix before I send source".
The basic underpinning of the GPL is the notion that individuals can agree to be friends. The GPL is not a legal contract so much as it is a social one; it is a social contract of openness and consideration.
Now, if three months pass and this fellow still hasn't released source, then there's a need to say "hey, guy, I don't care how bad the source is, just send me the tarball". If he still refuses, then unleash the holy wrath of the GPL.
But until such time as the fellow is no longer acting in good faith with the community, we need to give him full benefit of the doubt and believe that he'll be true to his word, with source forthcoming within a week or two.
This is why, after fifteen years of believing in the ideals of free software, I'm beginning to get disgusted with the free software community. Too many zealots who believe that any transgression against the GPL, no matter how minor, is tantamount to treason against the community.
RMS first wrote the GPL because he thought there was something wrong, something morally offensive, in treating your fellow users like serfs or faceless masses instead of treating other users like human beings, like people, like friends.
While i know that C is a wonderful language, anythign done graphically should probably be done in OOP
Wonderful. Which OOPL do you mean? Notice that you can't "do it in OOP", you have to write it in an OOPL. Objective C? C++? Ada95? Object-oriented C?
Yes, C is an object-oriented programming language, when in the hands of a competent programmer.
I'm sorry, but easy development and expandibility aren't done well in C for graphical programs.
Motif is written in object-oriented C. The kernel is written in object-oriented C. Heck, even C++ is isomorphic to object-oriented C. Back in the early days of C++, we had to run our C++ through AT&T's cfront precompiler. It would take our C++ code and spit out valid object-oriented C code.
People who think that C isn't an object-oriented programming language are correct--but neither is C++. Both are object capable programming languages.
One of my college profs, Leon , is the person who probably taught me the most about CS of anyone.
When I was a freshman I had a major leap on everybody else because I already knew Pascal. (Yes, folks, back in those dark days, that was the language of academic computer science.) I had all the programming coursework done in the first week of class, and all the homework done shortly thereafter.
My first exam, then, I was deeply surprised to see that he docked me three times as many points as the next fellow for a specific programming question, even though our answers were absolutely identical. I was angry and asked him why I was docked more severely--and, for that matter, why I was docked at all.
"Well," Leon said, "you declared this as a global variable, not a local--" I interrupted him at that point and made some rash statement about how Joe over there did the exact same thing and Leon docked him hardly anything at all.
Leon's answer? "I judged you more harshly because you know better than he does."
I walked away from that exam with just a burning rage at how my A was getting eviscerated down to a B+ unfairly. I couldn't drop the course without screwing up my entire degree plan, though, and I couldn't get into a different section, so I was stuck with that petty tyrant, Leon.
Once I realized I was stuck, I went back to all the code I'd hammered out in the first week and removed every single global variable from it. It was bad enough that I got nailed once, but I'd be damned before I'd be nailed twice.
Every time homework came back to us I'd find myself judged more harshly than other students; I'd have points docked off for things other students were able to get away with altogether, or I'd get docked for using the algorithm he supplied instead of researching a better, more oprimal algo, or what-have-you. My ire kept on going up with every returned homework assignment, every exam, every pop quiz.
And after each and every one of these deaths-by-a-thousand-cuts, I went back to my code and fixed it. I went back to my homework file (remember how I did all the homework the first two weeks?) and amended my answers.
By the end of CS 101, my grade had fallen from the A I was Anticipating to a C I was Chagrined at. It especially boiled my noodles that I was head and shoulders the best programmer in that class, and I was getting one of the lowest grades in the class.
When the course was over and I was waiting for final grades, I was dead certain I was going to be filing a complaint with the Administration. I finally got my grade, tore it open, and lo and behold... 100, A. The registrar sent me a note in campus mail congratulating me on the "rare feat" of passing a course without missing a single point. Parents were happy, friends were happy, I was... confused.
I stopped by Leon's office and asked him what was up with the schizophrenic grading. He explained there was nothing schizophrenic about it. "But I had a C," I said. "How did I get an A?"
Leon patiently explained to me a grade is meant to show how well a student has learned the subject he's been taught. "Right," I said, "and my grades were lousy. You kept on nickel-and-diming me everywhere, on stuff that wasn't even important."
No, Leon told me. He was teaching everyone else in the class how to program, and that's what the tests measured. Sure, I was flubbing those tests, but those tests were irrelevant because he wasn't teaching me how to program. Instead, he was teaching me was how to program well, and he measured that on an entirely different scale.
My senior year I had to write a thesis. I chose cryptography as my topic and requested Leon for my advisor. The day before graduation, Leon and I sat down in his office and discussed what the last grade of my last year was going to be. He was complimentary about my work and said that, between the thesis and the research I'd been doing connected with it, I undoubtedly deserved an A, if not an A+, for my efforts. "But I'm only going to give you an A-," he said with a grin. "As a reminder to you that there's always more."
That's the most important CompSci lesson I've ever learned.
First, I work in the encrypted email business. That doesn't mean I'm an authority on the subject (God knows there are a lot of people in the business who are total incompetents), but it does mean I like to keep track of different companies and offerings.
When I need Web-based email, it's Hushmail. Here's my take of Hush's strengths and weaknesses:
STRENGTHS:
Cryptography. Hush stores email in an encrypted form on their servers, and only the user possesses the decryption key. This means that breaks, ala Hotmail, are much harder to pull off--great, even if they get 0wn3d, the crackers still have to social-engineer the decryption key out of you. Maybe. (See WEAKNESSES.) They seem to be moderately clued, cryptowise; 1024-bit El Gamal (I'd prefer 1536-2048, but 1024 isn't shoddy) for signatures and 128-bit Blowfish, passphrase-based encryption, for bulk data.
Physical security. According to Team Hush, their servers are located in legally-friendly countries (Antigua, I think), in facilities which are locked down to all but the sysadmins. Not even the janitors are allowed inside; the sysadmins get to clean the toilets, in other words, I guess. Note that this is just what they claim and I have no way of verifying this, short of hopping on a plane and going to Antigua.
Responsive staff. Every time I've had any need to communicate with Hushmail staff, the response has been quick--less than 48 hours--and personal. No form letters. And if you happen to talk to Genevieve, be nice to her--she's a sweetheart.:)
Reliability. I've never seen the Hush servers down. The site has always been snappy and usable (barring the occasional Net-based lag and whatnot).
No spam. The email addresses I used to set up my Hushmail account have never been spammed. Hey, considering some of the entrants in the Webmail field, this is a big plus.:)
WEAKNESSES:
Cryptography. While it's true that messages can be delivered in an encrypted and signed form, that's only true for messages sent to other Hushmail addresses. If you send from Hushmail to the outside world, don't expect it to be encrypted in transit. Similarly, if you send from the outside world to Hushmail, it may not be stored in encrypted form on the servers. I don't know offhand whether they do or not, which means that, given my natural paranoia, my operating assumption is that they don't. Please note that this isn't a weakness in relation to other webmail services. Very little email anywhere is stored in encrypted form.
Speed. Every time you login to Hush, you have to download a set of Java applets that do crypto functions. Java's performance has never been superb. This doesn't contradict "Reliability" above; the site is snappy for everything but the downloading and initialization of the Java applets.
Platform dependent. If your platform doesn't have a good JVM, you can forget about using Hush. Currently, it works just fine for Windows, MacOS and Linux.
Lack of features. To the best of my knowledge, Hush doesn't render HTML mail properly. Its support for address books, folders, etc., is fairly rudimentary.
... On the whole, I think Hushmail has considerably more strengths than weaknesses. If you need a good, solid email service and normal SMTP mail isn't possible, Hush seems to me to be the best alternative right now.
If you want to reach me there, it's rjhansen@hushmai1.com. Please note that you'll need to change the "1" to an "L" in order to mail me there. It's not much of a spamblock, but it's something.:)
I have to wonder, tho, if the original poster has a grudge against americanwiccan.com? Call me cynical, but I suspect something like that...
No, I'll call you ragingly paranoid--which is good, that's a compliment, I like that.:)
At any rate, I sent off mail to the people over at Americanwicca.com, telling them that they might be the target of malicious attacks as the result of that Slashdot post. So we've given them some warning, which is about all we can do in this situation.
RSA keys are not purely entropic--they possess a great deal of predictability, which is why the keys are so long. For instance, if you're using a 512-bit prime, you can be assured that bits 0 and 511 are set.
If bit 0 is not set, then the number is evenly divisible by two, and it's not prime. If bit 511 is not set, then it's not a 512-bit prime (it's a 511-bit, or what-have-you).
Right there I've predicted two bits, out of 512. With more advanced mathematical techniques you can discover more properties about the binary representation of prime numbers, which helps you winnow out even more possibilities.
It's been widely conjectured that a 1024-bit RSA key is roughly commeasurate to about 128 bits of entropy. Of course, distilling entropic properties of asymmetric keys is more black art than formal science, so I generally err on the side of rampant paranoia and guesstimate a 1024-bit RSA key as roughly equal to an 80-bit key. Still plenty good for most purposes, but if you're worried about major governments, 2048-bit keys are appropriate.
Moral of the story: asymmetric algorithm keys must possess a large degree of entropy to be useful, but the key itself is not one hundred percent random.
The RSA algorithm is not an obscure algorithm; every single detail of the algorithm is in the public domain, and a staggering amount of academic scholarship (the vast majority of which is also in the public domain) is available.
If I pick 17 as one of my RSA primes, that doesn't change the algorithm. Okay, so I'm picking a stupid prime, but the algorithm is unchanged. If I pick a 300-decimal-digit prime, that doesn't change the algorithm, either.
"Security through obscurity" means "as long as I don't tell you how it works, then the system is secure".
Real security is "I'll tell you how it works, I'll tell you about all its known weaknesses, and I'll help you understand it inside and out--and it'll still work within its specified operational parameters."
In the case of RSA, part of its specified operational parameters is that the private part of the keypair is kept secret.
Where's the obscurity?
(Sidebar: cracking RSA does not rely on the private prime being obscure. For a very long time it was conjectured that breaking RSA was dependent upon factoring an extremely large composite number into two primes, but the recent attacks against PKCS1, etc., show that it's possible to stage cryptanalytic attacks against RSA that don't involve factorization.
RSA is based on three conjectures. One, that P!=NP. Two, that factorization is NP-complete. Three, that factorization is the only way to break RSA. Neither of the first two conjectures have been proven, and the third conjecture has been proven false.
That said, RSA is still a well-trusted algorithm. The non-factorization attacks are well-known and fairly easy to avoid.)
Slashdot Mirror
Ohm's Law only applies to what are called Ohmic resistors. Some metals are generally Ohmic; others are generally Ohmic but only at particular temperatures. Some substances are not Ohmic at all, such as the YBCO superconductors I worked with as a research aide at the Texas Center for Superconductivity.
For comparison: Ohm's Law generally applies to copper, no matter what the temperature is. Ohm's Law stops applying to aluminum once you cool it to about 4K.
Remember: Ohm's Law is a macro-scale observation, and superconductivity is a quantum-scale event. At the quantum level, all sorts of strange things happen that are totally contrary to our macro-scale observations. The Einstein-Bose Condensate is a great example, as is superfluidity in liquid helium. (Anyone who is not utterly shocked and amazed by superfluidity apparently hasn't seen superfluids before.)
1. A 7.62mm Sov round doesn't have a velocity of 2,000fps. Closer to 2,300fps when fired from an AK.
2. An AK-47 weighs 9.5 pounds empty (a couple of pounds more with a mag), not 15.
3. A G3 is not a new weapon; it's nigh on fifty years old as well. It was the first major post-war German rifle design, heavily influenced by the Fabrique Nationale FAL and the Spanish CETME. If memory serves me right, it was first produced in '59.
4. A 7.62mm NATO cartridge fired from a G3 has a muzzle velocity of around 2,800fps. More in the longer-barreled versions, less in the -K versions.
5. The penetration of a 7.62mm NATO round is insufficient to fully penetrate an automobile (ref: US Army field manuals on urban warfare), to say nothing of "a foot of steel".
6. The G3 is considerably heavier than the AK-47 is; the empty weight is about a pound more, but the loaded weight is considerably more due to the heavy-as-a-bear 7.62mm NATO cartridge.
Informed sources tell me the NSA has been breaking PGP for years, but they'll generally only bother in cases where side-channel attacks are unfeasible, due to the required resources in time and labor.
I'd love to know who those informed sources were, and what the basis for their information is. Out-of-band attacks against systems are almost always cheaper, better and more effective than cryptanalytic attacks; after all, no matter how secure the pipe, it's still designed to leak at both ends.
Saying that "they'll only bother with cryptanalysis where out-of-band attacks are infeasible due to required time and labor" strikes me as highly specious. Out-of-band attacks are cheap, effective and fast. Cryptanalysis isn't.
Yep, except that in this case the computer games were farming Defense Department prototypes and SF literature. Railguns have existed for decades; they were even proposed as part of Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative back in '84. So this is hardly life imitating art--art imitated life originally.
The Defense Department already does have a department for this, called the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In a previous incarnation it was simply the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which developed the ARPAnet to connect ARPA research labs... and that, in turn, turned into the Internet.
So your ability to post your opinion on Slashdot is due largely to the very agency that you think doesn't exist yet.
By the way--how the hell do you define `really hard' without NP-completeness?
... is kind of interesting. If you look at very early versions of PGP, an algorithm of Phil Z's own design called Bass-o-Matic was used. Turns out that Bass-o-Matic wasn't a particularly good algo, but they learned from the mistake and from there on only used peer-reviewed algos.
Insofar as the likelihood of breaking RSA, history shows that you're exactly right. While RSA is built on a lot of conjecture, it's survived a lot of mathematical attack. Protocol attacks against RSA have historically been far more effective. Check out the Crypto-Gram of a couple of months back for a quick look at RSA protocol attacks over the years.
(I know Schneier covered at least one RSA protocol attack recently; I think he covered more than just the one. But my memory could be mistaken.)
- The only way to make a general break of RSA is to factor large composite numbers,
- Factorization of large numbers is an NP-complete problem,
- P != NP
Remember: none of these have been proven. At all. There is absolutely no evidence of the correctness of any of the three conjectures, except that historically we haven't been able to do it--and that's exceptionally weak evidence.Compare this against something like elliptical-curve cryptography. ECC is also built on many conjectures, but one of them (the Taniyama-Shimura Conjecture) has recently been formally proven (by Wiles, et al). Mathematicians are still reviewing the multiple Taniyama-Shimura proofs to make sure that (a) they are correct singly, and (b) taken together they prove the entirety of Taniyama-Shimura--but last I heard, things were looking promising.
The thing we have to worry about most currently with RSA is whether or not we're all using the same keys over and over again.
Absolutely not. We've got some extremely good ways of generating large random primes. The odds of a collision in the keyspace is probably somewhere on the order of 10^(-150), a really really small chance.
If you want to see this principle in action, connect to a PGP keyserver and type in your key ID (a cryptographic hash of your key). If you get any other keys coming up with your same key ID, then I'll agree that we've got a problem. Otherwise, don't worry about it.
We blame the criminals and thus seek to prevent them from using the tool to commit crimes in the future.
:)
Bravo. Clear, cogent and bang-on accurate.
Aside from being unconstitutional
Excuse me? Where in the Constitution does it forbid the States the authority to deny criminals the use or possession of firearms? It doesn't, not anywhere. It forbids the government from denying law-abiding citizens the possession or use of firearms; it in no way restricts the ability of the government to deny criminals the same.
The problem with most attempts at gun control is that they use a sledgehammer to try and achieve a result which calls for a scalpel instead. Laws which overwhelmingly target law-abiding gun owners over criminals, the mentally ill, etc., are vigorously opposed by the NRA. Laws which overwhelmingly target criminal use and possession of firearms are vigorously endorsed by the NRA.
(For real world examples... Look at the Clinton Omnibus Crime Bill, which has had an impact on almost every single competitive shooter I know; then look at Virginia's Project Exile, which has had no impact on any law-abiding citizen. The NRA opposes the former, and wholeheartedly endorses the latter.)
The politics of gun control aren't as black and white as people make them out to be.
Evolution is not a mostly random process; if it were, we'd be as likely to see animals shift to a less-fit-to-survive state as to see one shift to a better-fit state. This may or may not be true on an individual level (speciation is a hot topic of debate); it is definitely false on a species level.
Why?
Because all the animals unfit for their environment die off, leaving only those better-fit. The better-fit pass on their advantages to their offspring, resulting in a general promulgation of the better-fit over the lesser-fit.
The only reason cigarette companies exist is because they were here a long time ago
The only reason anything exists is because either (a) it was just created or (b) it's been around. What's your point?
If your point is that tobacco would be considered a drug regulated by the FDA were it to be brought to market today, I repeat: what's your point? Aspirin (and other NSAIDs) are surprisingly potent analgesics and have low overdose levels. After I (accidentally) nearly overdosed on acetaminophen, my doc ruminated that, if aspirin and other NSAIDs were introduced to the market today, they'd be considered prescription drugs because of their potency and lethality.
So if we're going to retroactively ban cigarettes because they're harmful, going against centuries of tradition, why don't we also retroactively turn aspirin and NSAIDs into prescription drugs?
The answer is that in a country governed by the people, the people get to decide what's illegal and what's not. The people don't want cigarettes to be illegal, nor do they want aspirin to be a prescription drug.
Thus, it won't happen.
Period.
Is it right to make billions of dollars off of a product that serves no purpose other than pacifying addictions?
Why, let me get this straight. You want to ban the first cup of morning coffee, too? After all, that has "no purpose other than pacifying addictions".
But let's not go there right now, because to go there gives your argument more credibility than it possesses. There is a useful purpose served by tobacco, other than fulfilling an addiction. The purpose is, I like it.
I enjoy a stogie on occasion, once a month or two months, when something happens which is worth commemorating. It could be getting a software release out the door; it could be celebrating a birthday; it could be a stogie after a great baseball game. But for personal reasons, I smoke cigars to commemorate personal milestones.
Am I addicted? Not if I can go six weeks without a Rothschild.
Do I find tobacco useful? Certainly.
So your argument--that there exists no useful purpose for tobacco other than to feed addictions--falls flat on its face. There are a lot, repeat, a lot of people like me. We smoke tobacco because we like it, not becuase we need to. We drink single-malt Scotch because we enjoy the taste of a premium liquor, not because we're alcoholics.
You only have one life. There's no excuse for not living it well.
- Until you've found someone suffering from the disease, you haven't found the disease.
How is this relevant to the epidemiology of smoking? Namely, that while the link between lung cancer and smoking is well-established, the link between secondhand smoke and mortality is far less so.If secondhand smoke kills tens of thousands of people each year, then why is it I don't know anyone who's died from secondhand smoke? How do they come up with these numbers of tens of thousands dying each year from it? Are those actual, clinical diagnoses of "you have lung cancer triggered by high exposure to secondhand smoke", or are those inferred mortality statistics?
If those numbers are culled from aggregate diagnoses throughout the US, what's the criteria for diagnoses? If I live with a smoker and die of a virulent influenza (a respiratory ailment), does that get counted as a "secondhand smoke" death since "everybody knows that were it not for the secondhand smoke you wouldn't have fallen ill"?
What if, instead of living with a smoker, I hang out after work a couple of nights a week in a smoke-filled bar?
What if my only connection to tobacco smoke comes from walking out the side entrance at work and inhaling the fumes from the smokers there?
The link between secondhand smoke and lung damage is far from certain. Most of the numbers on secondhand smoke are inferred numbers, not direct observations; and the criteria which are used to determine secondhand smoke illness are oftentimes arbitrary and shifting.
There's a hell of a lot of politics surrounding tobacco nowadays. Best bet: doubt everything. Don't believe the hype from either side, whether that side be Philip Morris and RJR Nabisco, or whether that side be Truth.
Let's say for sake of argument that you've got a piece of software which, for entirely personal reasons all your own, you place into the public domain. Not only is there no copyright on it, there can be no copyright on it because you've explicitly waived your rights to it.
Can Sun then use it in the next (non-free) version of Solaris? Yep.
Can RMS use it in the next (free) HURD? Yep.
Is it free software? Yep. Even more free than BSD-licensed code, because you aren't even asking for attribution.
RMS would like to see copyright on software done away with altogether, because that means the free software community could disassemble Solaris, AIX, HP-UX and every other UNIX out there. The free software community could investigate how other software works with impunity, not being restricted by those nebulous "anti-reverse-engineering" clauses in software licenses.
While free software would lose a marginal amount if copyright on software were done away with, the community would post a much larger gain.
Do you think Will Shakespeare would have produced plays if it wasn't lucrative[?]
... In a word, YES.
Keep in mind that Shakespeare was dead broke for a lot of his life. If his goal in life was to get rich, he sure picked a lousy profession. In Shakespeare's time, actors couldn't even be buried in the same cemeteries as "decent Christians".
No movie produced since 1910 has entered public domain.
False. Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, that staple of holiday TV fare, is in the public domain.
I think we all agree that Kaplan was nothing but a paid lackey for the MPAA.
Kaplan doesn't give a damn about the MPAA. I have yet to meet a Federal judge (and I know well over two dozen of them) who doesn't possess a remarkable degree of intransigence and stubbornness. These are not necessarily bad traits in a judge, by the by; you want a judge who is stubborn enough to stand his ground and decide things according to legal principle and the demands of justice, regardless of public opinion.
Brown v Board of Education was a tremendously unpopular decision in much of America, but the Supreme Court simply didn't care. Ditto with Roe v Wade, which to this day causes Supreme Court justices to get mailbags full of hate mail.
By and large, Federal judges cannot be "paid lackeys". A lackey is the inferior of, and subservient to, the person he serves. Federal judges possess such intransigence (and, some would argue, arrogance) that the only thing they consider themselves inferior of and subservient to are abstract notions like law, social justice, individual liberties and so on.
what happens to him then?
We send him lots of mail at his courthouse accusing him of being an intellectual coward who ought to step down from the bench to spare the Judiciary further humiliation. But guess what? That's our only recourse.
Was his decision wrong? Yes. Poorly reasoned? Yes. Was his decision so horrifically negligient as to rise to the level of an impeachable offense? Nope.
We want judges to possess near-ultimate judicial independence. Look at Judge John Sirica, who (some would argue) used sweeping and unprecedented powers of the judiciary to assist a grand jury in its investigation of the Watergate break-in. Nixon hated Sirica and probably spent every waking moment wishing Maximum John would get hit by a city bus.
Nixon challenged Sirica's legal authority both in Congress and in court. The Judiciary Committee refused to even consider impeaching Maximum John; while what Sirica had done was sweeping, it was far from impeachable. The Supreme Court refused to overrule Maximum John; while the Court agreed that Sirica was going like gangbusters, the Court said that Sirica was acting in accordance with the best traditions of the Federal Judiciary.
Now, if the President of the United States can't get rid of one single Federal judge, a judge who possesses lifetime tenure specifically so he can check abuses in other branches of government, do you really think you have any chance of getting Kaplan off the bench because he made a decision you don't like?
Radioactive material is dangerous, hands down, no matter what
Your light bulb is radioactive. Why, to think of it, it's streaming all those highly energetic photons at you! It's in the electromagnetic spectrum!
Radioactivity is not a bogeyman. If you don't understand this, then you don't understand the issues.
Hey, if you think you might be absorbing radiation leaked from hundreds of miles away, just move somewhere where nobody effects the planet. simple!
I am absorbing radiation leaked from hundreds of miles away. Tens of millions of miles away, actually. It's called "the sun", and it's the big glowing thing you see from time to time in the sky.
I'm also absorbing radiation from the ambient microwave background of the universe. Plus a few stray highly energetic cosmic rays. Plus radon from the house I grew up in. Wow. Guess I should be feeling like I'm near-death, eh?
As soon as you open up a Freshman Physics book and come to an understanding about what radioactivity is, and what it can and cannot do, you're not doing any credit to either side in the nuclear debate.
Gunter of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service
More information on this "NIRS", please. Is it a government agency? (Don't think so; at least, I've never heard of it, but that doesn't prove anything.) Is it an "independent nonpartisan nuclear information group"? (Remember all those "independent" laboratories, funded by tobacco companies, that said tobacco isn't addictive? Remember all those political attack ads last year which were paid for by "independent, nonpartisan" groups like labor unions?)
The lesson of American politics is that it's easy to claim independent and nonpartisan status. That makes it very tempting for entrenched interests, such as pro- and anti-nuclear groups, to put up "independent, nonpartisan" groups as front agencies and do their media spinning behind the veil of "independent and nonpartisan" work.
Next: any civilian reactor--any civilian reactor--which has a containment dome which is evaluated by a government agency as having a 90% chance of failure of containment dome will be shut down by the DOE. (Note that some military reactors, such as those which are found in nuclear-powered ships and submarines, don't have a big concrete containment dome. They do have other mechanisms in place to provide environmental safety in case of catastrophe, but the efficacy of these safeguards is a hotly debated topic.).
These are agencies who fire workers in nuclear plants for leaving a door open (as happened at the nuclear plant in Palo, Iowa a few years ago--a worker propped open an emergency door for a few minutes and was dismissed over it). They won't hesitate for a second to yank the operating license of a plant that can't operate safely, part of which means a properly-maintained containment dome.
Insofar as the "[s]ome [twenty-eight] reactors in this country have substandard containment"... okay, fine. Who gets to decide what is acceptable containment? Greenpeace would have us believe there is no such thing as acceptable containment; rabidly pro-nuclear groups would say there's no need for containment since the likelihood of failure is so low. Which standard is this Gunter fellow using to determine what he considers "acceptable"? DOE standards? FAS standards? Greenpeace standards?
... Be very, very careful whenever you hear an activist say anything. Many activists are so thoroughly convinced of the justness of their cause that they have no compunctions about spinning the truth.
Suspect everything. Think for yourself.
as well as Solar Power which feeds energy back into the electric grid (thereby, eliminating the need for nuclear energy by over 100% if everybody did it, and it was a government funded project).
Unfortunately, solar cells are currently extremely damaging to the environment. Essentially, they're manufactured in a similar way to computer chips--it requires immense amounts of power and large quantities of extremely toxic materials to create them. Yes, they're emission-free once they're in use, but getting them out the factory door involves huge expenditures of both power and toxic chemicals.
The truth is, new technology has not been tested as long as old technology; and in reality, new technology is always new, and never the technology being used everywhere; so it is not possible (in this case) to forgive the use of dangerous technology worldwide with a few examples of some new reactors running in a few small locations.
While your argument is sound, it's also inapplicable. CANDU reactors (and similar negative-coeffecient-of-moderation reactors) are not new technology. They're over fifty years old, if I recall. The RBMK-type (Chernobyl) reactor is actually of a newer type than the CANDU reactor.
Every design, whether it be of a car or a nuke plant, involves tradeoffs. If you want it to do X very well, you have to scale back on Y. The RBMK reactors did not have environmental safety as a design criteria--hell, the Russians cared so little about environmental safety they didn't even bother to put a containment dome on it. The CANDU reactors, and other similar negative-coefficient US reactors, have environmental and human safety as their first design goal.
The very nature of dependance and cost of Nuclear Technology makes it a dangerous thing.
According to whom? Different people have different ideas of what is and is not dangerous. "Danger" is a subjective term, and too often used as a defense for NIMBY and NIMBY's big brother, BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything).
Instead of talking about "danger", try talking about historical risk. Define exactly what such terms as "nuclear meltdown" means--does it mean full-bore China Syndrome? Or is something like Three Mile Island, which has never been demonstrated to have had any environmental impact whatsoever even though there was a nuclear crisis there?
Once you come up with those rigid definitions, then look to history to come up with an assessment of risk. (Some people say to crunch numbers, but I don't--that's how we got to Challenger, after all.) Once you do that, then you'll be on solid ground if you want to claim that nuclear power is dangerous. But be warned, it's a hard thing to back up scientifically; by and large, anti-nuclear activists depend on the fear effect of the nuclear bogeyman to make people's knees jerk in the opposite direction from the nuke plant.
Should a problem be found in new reactor designs, or a problem occurs in the many tiny unique variables that effect nuclear power production at any facility; the technology is still going to be used for a long, long time.
If the design is that badly flawed, they won't be able to run the plant. That's one of the nice fringe benefits of living in a capitalist society; people get to choose who they work for. If someone wanted to hire me to work in an RBMK plant without a reactor dome, I'd say "buddy, I don't care what you're willing to pay me, the answer is no--especially since these other plants, whose designs aren't criminally insane, are willing to offer me an equal wage to work there."
[Y]ou will be very surprised by "Greenpeaces Guide To The Nuclear Age". Chernobyl was only one of many many disasters that have occured worldwide; many have occured in the US and Canada that nobody has even heard of, and they were very serious.
Wow. Let me get this straight. The same news media that hounded Clinton's every move--the same news media which is so effective that the CIA's number one source of intelligence is CNN--the same news media we all love to curse--the same news media which is predominantly left-learning and, thus, inclined to judge nuclear power even more harshly--this same news media is so incompetent they can't cover major nuclear disasters?
There's a disconnect of reality there. Either (a) the news media is so ferociously competent at exposing these things that major world governments can't keep things secret for them, or (b) the news media is so incompetent that when they see buildings glowing blue from Cerenkov radiation, they think it's just a new paint job.
Take your pick and stick with it.
The answer? Because the staff at the plant itself were actually designing, and building the controlling circuitry AT HOME, as it was needed!
Let me get this straight. If they were designing and building the controlling circuitry at the office, that'd be fine, no matter how lousy the design was; but since they worked at home, it doesn't matter how good the design was, it's still lousy?
Very smart people, whose HOBBIES were Electronics were doing this stuff
My hobby is cryptographic engineering. My day job is cryptographic engineering. Does that mean that, if it's between 9-to-5 on a weekday, that what I produce is automatically good because it's "professional work for pay", and anything I do on a weekend is "amateur-quality work"?
I don't trust any industry that has to make commercials saying, "Nuclear Energy is Safe!", but they can't explain why, even in simple terms.
That's because the best way to refute FUD--such as what you're spreading here--is with careful fact and analysis. Careful fact and analysis requires that people think, and I think it's already been established that ninety-five percent of America tries to avoid thinking whenever possible.
That doesn't mean we should be tolerant.
Right. Tolerance is for weenies. I must've missed that bit of social wisdom when people were teaching me how civilized human beings act.
We, as a community, should demand source releases be timely.
And the code release is not timely how? The fellow just released the code, and he's told people he doesn't want to release the code in this immature state, not that he will not release the code.
Even RMS allows this sort of coding to go on. Take a look at early Brave GNU Worlds. There are references to RMS receiving binaries of a proto-bash, and the author saying "this is just to look at, there are a couple of bugs I want to fix before I send source".
The basic underpinning of the GPL is the notion that individuals can agree to be friends. The GPL is not a legal contract so much as it is a social one; it is a social contract of openness and consideration.
Now, if three months pass and this fellow still hasn't released source, then there's a need to say "hey, guy, I don't care how bad the source is, just send me the tarball". If he still refuses, then unleash the holy wrath of the GPL.
But until such time as the fellow is no longer acting in good faith with the community, we need to give him full benefit of the doubt and believe that he'll be true to his word, with source forthcoming within a week or two.
This is why, after fifteen years of believing in the ideals of free software, I'm beginning to get disgusted with the free software community. Too many zealots who believe that any transgression against the GPL, no matter how minor, is tantamount to treason against the community.
RMS first wrote the GPL because he thought there was something wrong, something morally offensive, in treating your fellow users like serfs or faceless masses instead of treating other users like human beings, like people, like friends.
Are you really living up to the ideal?
While i know that C is a wonderful language, anythign done graphically should probably be done in OOP
Wonderful. Which OOPL do you mean? Notice that you can't "do it in OOP", you have to write it in an OOPL. Objective C? C++? Ada95? Object-oriented C?
Yes, C is an object-oriented programming language, when in the hands of a competent programmer.
I'm sorry, but easy development and expandibility aren't done well in C for graphical programs.
Motif is written in object-oriented C. The kernel is written in object-oriented C. Heck, even C++ is isomorphic to object-oriented C. Back in the early days of C++, we had to run our C++ through AT&T's cfront precompiler. It would take our C++ code and spit out valid object-oriented C code.
People who think that C isn't an object-oriented programming language are correct--but neither is C++. Both are object capable programming languages.
One of my college profs, Leon , is the person who probably taught me the most about CS of anyone.
... confused.
When I was a freshman I had a major leap on everybody else because I already knew Pascal. (Yes, folks, back in those dark days, that was the language of academic computer science.) I had all the programming coursework done in the first week of class, and all the homework done shortly thereafter.
My first exam, then, I was deeply surprised to see that he docked me three times as many points as the next fellow for a specific programming question, even though our answers were absolutely identical. I was angry and asked him why I was docked more severely--and, for that matter, why I was docked at all.
"Well," Leon said, "you declared this as a global variable, not a local--" I interrupted him at that point and made some rash statement about how Joe over there did the exact same thing and Leon docked him hardly anything at all.
Leon's answer? "I judged you more harshly because you know better than he does."
I walked away from that exam with just a burning rage at how my A was getting eviscerated down to a B+ unfairly. I couldn't drop the course without screwing up my entire degree plan, though, and I couldn't get into a different section, so I was stuck with that petty tyrant, Leon.
Once I realized I was stuck, I went back to all the code I'd hammered out in the first week and removed every single global variable from it. It was bad enough that I got nailed once, but I'd be damned before I'd be nailed twice.
Every time homework came back to us I'd find myself judged more harshly than other students; I'd have points docked off for things other students were able to get away with altogether, or I'd get docked for using the algorithm he supplied instead of researching a better, more oprimal algo, or what-have-you. My ire kept on going up with every returned homework assignment, every exam, every pop quiz.
And after each and every one of these deaths-by-a-thousand-cuts, I went back to my code and fixed it. I went back to my homework file (remember how I did all the homework the first two weeks?) and amended my answers.
By the end of CS 101, my grade had fallen from the A I was Anticipating to a C I was Chagrined at. It especially boiled my noodles that I was head and shoulders the best programmer in that class, and I was getting one of the lowest grades in the class.
When the course was over and I was waiting for final grades, I was dead certain I was going to be filing a complaint with the Administration. I finally got my grade, tore it open, and lo and behold... 100, A. The registrar sent me a note in campus mail congratulating me on the "rare feat" of passing a course without missing a single point. Parents were happy, friends were happy, I was
I stopped by Leon's office and asked him what was up with the schizophrenic grading. He explained there was nothing schizophrenic about it. "But I had a C," I said. "How did I get an A?"
Leon patiently explained to me a grade is meant to show how well a student has learned the subject he's been taught. "Right," I said, "and my grades were lousy. You kept on nickel-and-diming me everywhere, on stuff that wasn't even important."
No, Leon told me. He was teaching everyone else in the class how to program, and that's what the tests measured. Sure, I was flubbing those tests, but those tests were irrelevant because he wasn't teaching me how to program. Instead, he was teaching me was how to program well, and he measured that on an entirely different scale.
My senior year I had to write a thesis. I chose cryptography as my topic and requested Leon for my advisor. The day before graduation, Leon and I sat down in his office and discussed what the last grade of my last year was going to be. He was complimentary about my work and said that, between the thesis and the research I'd been doing connected with it, I undoubtedly deserved an A, if not an A+, for my efforts. "But I'm only going to give you an A-," he said with a grin. "As a reminder to you that there's always more."
That's the most important CompSci lesson I've ever learned.
Thanks, Leon. I owe you.
When I need Web-based email, it's Hushmail. Here's my take of Hush's strengths and weaknesses:
STRENGTHS:
WEAKNESSES:
... On the whole, I think Hushmail has considerably more strengths than weaknesses. If you need a good, solid email service and normal SMTP mail isn't possible, Hush seems to me to be the best alternative right now.
If you want to reach me there, it's rjhansen@hushmai1.com. Please note that you'll need to change the "1" to an "L" in order to mail me there. It's not much of a spamblock, but it's something.
Good luck!
I have to wonder, tho, if the original poster has a grudge against americanwiccan.com? Call me cynical, but I suspect something like that...
:)
No, I'll call you ragingly paranoid--which is good, that's a compliment, I like that.
At any rate, I sent off mail to the people over at Americanwicca.com, telling them that they might be the target of malicious attacks as the result of that Slashdot post. So we've given them some warning, which is about all we can do in this situation.
RSA keys are not purely entropic--they possess a great deal of predictability, which is why the keys are so long. For instance, if you're using a 512-bit prime, you can be assured that bits 0 and 511 are set.
If bit 0 is not set, then the number is evenly divisible by two, and it's not prime. If bit 511 is not set, then it's not a 512-bit prime (it's a 511-bit, or what-have-you).
Right there I've predicted two bits, out of 512. With more advanced mathematical techniques you can discover more properties about the binary representation of prime numbers, which helps you winnow out even more possibilities.
It's been widely conjectured that a 1024-bit RSA key is roughly commeasurate to about 128 bits of entropy. Of course, distilling entropic properties of asymmetric keys is more black art than formal science, so I generally err on the side of rampant paranoia and guesstimate a 1024-bit RSA key as roughly equal to an 80-bit key. Still plenty good for most purposes, but if you're worried about major governments, 2048-bit keys are appropriate.
Moral of the story: asymmetric algorithm keys must possess a large degree of entropy to be useful, but the key itself is not one hundred percent random.
The RSA algorithm is not an obscure algorithm; every single detail of the algorithm is in the public domain, and a staggering amount of academic scholarship (the vast majority of which is also in the public domain) is available.
If I pick 17 as one of my RSA primes, that doesn't change the algorithm. Okay, so I'm picking a stupid prime, but the algorithm is unchanged. If I pick a 300-decimal-digit prime, that doesn't change the algorithm, either.
"Security through obscurity" means "as long as I don't tell you how it works, then the system is secure".
Real security is "I'll tell you how it works, I'll tell you about all its known weaknesses, and I'll help you understand it inside and out--and it'll still work within its specified operational parameters."
In the case of RSA, part of its specified operational parameters is that the private part of the keypair is kept secret.
Where's the obscurity?
(Sidebar: cracking RSA does not rely on the private prime being obscure. For a very long time it was conjectured that breaking RSA was dependent upon factoring an extremely large composite number into two primes, but the recent attacks against PKCS1, etc., show that it's possible to stage cryptanalytic attacks against RSA that don't involve factorization.
RSA is based on three conjectures. One, that P!=NP. Two, that factorization is NP-complete. Three, that factorization is the only way to break RSA. Neither of the first two conjectures have been proven, and the third conjecture has been proven false.
That said, RSA is still a well-trusted algorithm. The non-factorization attacks are well-known and fairly easy to avoid.)