People are comparing this to traditional encryption methods, when it really has nothing to do with them.
What we're really talking about here is not encryption, but a means of establishing a physically secure connection.
By its nature, it will never be a way of communicating over the internet or any other network, though it may very well be used between nodes of a network. If any datum is merely physically read by any node, to be cached, routed or whatever, that is the end of the line for the security afforded by the quantum method.
Incidentally, you need a shared secret to know that you're talking to the right person. Otherwise, it's subject to a man-in-the-middle attack. Furthermore, data from the shared secret is compromised every time a man-in-the-middle attack is foiled, leaving you with a fairly intact key-distribution problem. Also, natural noise is indistinguishable from eavesdropping. --
You can't leverage a small set of secret bits into a large number of secret bits over an insecure line (well... there was that recently suggested method of overwhelming any eavesdropper's storage capacity by sending mostly garbage data, but for most purposes that is even less practical than traditional secure key distribution). There is a class of encryption algorithms that work like this, using a fixed-size key and a carefully designed psuedorandom generator to generate pad data, but they can be broken with sufficient computation; they don't have theoretically perfect secrecy. At best, they are impractical to break, like any fixed-size key encryption.
There is no way to skimp on OTP without breaking it. --
I understand this topic very well...We enjoyed it and couldn't get enough of it. We learned more from ourselves than we did from the instructors...Now I work as a sys analyst/programmer under the very same conditions...People complain because I get to come...
Trust me, someone... with a big toy will be far more productive than some one who does it just for a job.
Does this have something to do with that recent story on people moving from IT to porn? --
What I wonder is why space-robot designers don't practice by sending autonomous probes to mountain tops, into deserts, to the bottom of the sea, etc.
The specifics are all different, but the principle is the same: this thing has to work on its own, outside the lab, for long periods of time with nobody to replace the battery or change the oil. You could easily build 50 earth-exploring robots for every space-explorer.
So much experience to be gained... it just seems a waste to send up these amateurish space probes with millions worth of rocket and fuel. --
No offense, but if you are following "good OOP practices", using lots of classes and virtual functions, and generally taking advantage of the features of C++, you can expect your C++ code to run much more than 10% slower than C code.
C++ OOP wreaks havoc on pipelines and cache (using C++ as "better C" is, of course, just like using C). Expect 50% slowdown and be prepared for worse (when your own code is actually doing the work -- when your own code just tells libraries what to do, it barely matters what you are writing in; you could use Python or TCL and it wouldn't make a big dent in the performance).
Running it through the profiler and looking for bottlenecks won't do you much good when the bottleneck is your general architecture. --
It's clear that the obvious solution is to switch to 33-bit signed ints, thus buying us another 2 billion seconds without losing reverse-compatibility and using a minimum expenditure of bits. That way everybody will be happy. --
There is nothing about hand counting that makes it cost more than ten times as much for ten times as many voters. Whether you use people or machines, you still just end up with a number to be added into the district vote.
The American problem is cheapskate locals who won't shell out for the work; a punch-card reader is cheaper than a bunch of guys counting votes and watching over each others' shoulders. The single most important government function is done on a tight budget. --
The ISS isn't a very good design for a space station.
On the other, the ISS is better than no space station at all.
Regardless of the question of how much better the money-budget could be spent, I doubt there is room in the intelligence-budget of the highest levels of management to recognize a better project.
On the propeller, this is probably a good way to occupy all those bright engineers and scientists who would be very productive if not lured and trapped into just such a bureaucratic mess. It will delay the colonization of space, and political upset to follow. Remember that space colonization means the end of MAD: large-scale war would no longer be a near-guarantee of human extinction and the end of civilization. Avoiding nuclear war sounds awfully tempting to me, though I feel that we should leave the cradle regardless. --
...but Russia's economy could turn around in an instant. The people are quite enthusiastic about capitalism, they just haven't quite worked it out yet, and they have a lot very bright, well-educated people in a huge country with great natural resources.
To paraphrase R.A. Heinlein, they're broke on paper, but they have real wealth, and the latter can always fix the former.
Don't be surprised if this thing goes up in a couple of years. --
There are Forth systems that do triple duty as OS, shell, and programming language, in under 5K.
Take a look at Chuck Moore's work. His attitude is that the right amount of software for pretty much any task is about 1000 words (tokens).
(geez, these spoiled youngsters, with their gigabyte ram and their terabyte hard-drives... no clue about the days when you were happy -- happy! -- to have 16 kb of RAM) --
When questioned about the ruling a juror replied, "Yeah, we wanted to award them Pi-million dollars. It's kind of a pun, since most awards are round numbers (get it? Pi... round?) and we were all really into math. So that's about $300,000 -- right?" --
The entertainment system was belting out "Put 'Em on the Glass" when the phone rang. When Pete answered, his phone turned the sound down by sending a message to all the other local devices that had a volume control. His mistress, Lucy, was on the line from the office: "I think we need to see a specialist and then have a series of physical sessions. Bi or something. I'm going to have my agent set up the appointments." Pete immediately agreed to pay the fees, after confirming that she meant a chick.
At her "advisor"'s office, Lucy instructed her Semantic Web agent through her vibrowser. The agent promptly retrieved information about the "treatment" from her advisor's agent, looked up several lists of providers, and checked for the ones within budget and a 20-mile radius of her home and with a rating of triple-H (Hot, Horny, and Healthy) on trusted rating services. It then began trying to find a match between available appointment times (supplied by the agents of individual providers through their Web sites) and Pete's and Lucy's busy schedules.
In a few minutes the agent presented them with a plan. Pete didn't like it. The university student housing was all the way across town from Lucy's place, and he'd be driving back in the middle of rush hour. He set his own agent to redo the search with stricter preferences about location and time. Lucy's agent, having complete trust in Pete's agent in the context of the present task, automatically assisted by supplying access certificates and shortcuts to the data it had already sorted through.
Almost instantly the new plan was presented: a much closer brothel and earlier times--but there were two warning notes. First, Pete would have to reschedule a couple of his less important appointments. He checked what they were--not a problem. The other was something about his STD checker's list failing to include this provider: "Non-contagiousness securely verified by other means," the agent reassured him. "(Details?)"
Lucy registered her assent at about the same moment Pete was muttering, "Spare me the details," and it was all set. (Of course, Pete couldn't resist the kinky details and later that night had his agent explain how it had found that provider even though it wasn't on the proper list.) --
The human-readable and computer-readable stuff, that is.
How? Lojban, a constructed language designed to be absolutely consistent and logical. You might know it in its earlier incarnation of Loglan, which was mentioned in passing as a language used for conversing with computers in Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."
Certainly, you could structure a valid Lojban statement to be unreadable to computers, but it isn't that way by default. If you state things directly, the computer can extract useful information.
This is why I'm absolutely 100% certain that we'll all learn Lojban soon. Yup, there is no doubt in my mind. None at all...
[rolls eyes,whistles a little tune] --
Slashdot Mirror
People are comparing this to traditional encryption methods, when it really has nothing to do with them.
What we're really talking about here is not encryption, but a means of establishing a physically secure connection.
By its nature, it will never be a way of communicating over the internet or any other network, though it may very well be used between nodes of a network. If any datum is merely physically read by any node, to be cached, routed or whatever, that is the end of the line for the security afforded by the quantum method.
Incidentally, you need a shared secret to know that you're talking to the right person. Otherwise, it's subject to a man-in-the-middle attack. Furthermore, data from the shared secret is compromised every time a man-in-the-middle attack is foiled, leaving you with a fairly intact key-distribution problem. Also, natural noise is indistinguishable from eavesdropping.
--
You can't leverage a small set of secret bits into a large number of secret bits over an insecure line (well... there was that recently suggested method of overwhelming any eavesdropper's storage capacity by sending mostly garbage data, but for most purposes that is even less practical than traditional secure key distribution). There is a class of encryption algorithms that work like this, using a fixed-size key and a carefully designed psuedorandom generator to generate pad data, but they can be broken with sufficient computation; they don't have theoretically perfect secrecy. At best, they are impractical to break, like any fixed-size key encryption.
There is no way to skimp on OTP without breaking it.
--
I understand this topic very well...We enjoyed it and couldn't get enough of it. We learned more from ourselves than we did from the instructors...Now I work as a sys analyst/programmer under the very same conditions...People complain because I get to come... ... with a big toy will be far more productive than some one who does it just for a job.
Trust me, someone
Does this have something to do with that recent story on people moving from IT to porn?
--
Both robots were tethered. They certainly weren't left to operate on their own for months without repair.
--
We idiots make up far more than half the slashdot contributors.
--
What I wonder is why space-robot designers don't practice by sending autonomous probes to mountain tops, into deserts, to the bottom of the sea, etc.
The specifics are all different, but the principle is the same: this thing has to work on its own, outside the lab, for long periods of time with nobody to replace the battery or change the oil. You could easily build 50 earth-exploring robots for every space-explorer.
So much experience to be gained... it just seems a waste to send up these amateurish space probes with millions worth of rocket and fuel.
--
No offense, but if you are following "good OOP practices", using lots of classes and virtual functions, and generally taking advantage of the features of C++, you can expect your C++ code to run much more than 10% slower than C code.
C++ OOP wreaks havoc on pipelines and cache (using C++ as "better C" is, of course, just like using C). Expect 50% slowdown and be prepared for worse (when your own code is actually doing the work -- when your own code just tells libraries what to do, it barely matters what you are writing in; you could use Python or TCL and it wouldn't make a big dent in the performance).
Running it through the profiler and looking for bottlenecks won't do you much good when the bottleneck is your general architecture.
--
Thanks to the recent success of distributed SETI data processing, we can finally move beyond mere ISO standardization to GSO standardization.
The main problem will be translating everything into '''d''k'pogi, as per Galactic Standards Organization regulations.
--
...why am I drooling and breaking out in a cold sweat at the same time?
abstraction -- overhead -- efficiency -- complexity -- standardization -- divergent implementations -- progress -- stagnation
EAAARRGH! [head explodes]
I can honestly say that this fills me with nothing but the purest ambivalence.
--
Monoliths have been directly linked to increases in weapon-making and violent clubbings, through studies on higher primates.
--
Good point. I moved the time() call into the loop test without thinking about it. But all it takes to fix it is to reverse the order:
perl -e 'while(($time=time())<=987654321){print "$time\n";sleep(1)}'
--
Err, I mean, damn slashcode, it must have eaten half of my joke...
--
It was like a million keyboards clacking in unison, suddenly silenced.
--
It's clear that the obvious solution is to switch to 33-bit signed ints, thus buying us another 2 billion seconds without losing reverse-compatibility and using a minimum expenditure of bits. That way everybody will be happy.
--
perl -e 'while(($time=time())<=987654321){sleep(1); print "$time\n"}'
--
What's with these jokers?
Next they'll be making up stories like governments extorting money from their own people under threat of force.
--
There is nothing about hand counting that makes it cost more than ten times as much for ten times as many voters. Whether you use people or machines, you still just end up with a number to be added into the district vote.
The American problem is cheapskate locals who won't shell out for the work; a punch-card reader is cheaper than a bunch of guys counting votes and watching over each others' shoulders. The single most important government function is done on a tight budget.
--
The ISS isn't a very good design for a space station.
On the other, the ISS is better than no space station at all.
Regardless of the question of how much better the money-budget could be spent, I doubt there is room in the intelligence-budget of the highest levels of management to recognize a better project.
On the propeller, this is probably a good way to occupy all those bright engineers and scientists who would be very productive if not lured and trapped into just such a bureaucratic mess. It will delay the colonization of space, and political upset to follow. Remember that space colonization means the end of MAD: large-scale war would no longer be a near-guarantee of human extinction and the end of civilization. Avoiding nuclear war sounds awfully tempting to me, though I feel that we should leave the cradle regardless.
--
...but Russia's economy could turn around in an instant. The people are quite enthusiastic about capitalism, they just haven't quite worked it out yet, and they have a lot very bright, well-educated people in a huge country with great natural resources.
To paraphrase R.A. Heinlein, they're broke on paper, but they have real wealth, and the latter can always fix the former.
Don't be surprised if this thing goes up in a couple of years.
--
...an idealistic group of young Russian engineers continues to develop the "low budget" approach.
When questioned, higher officials were cautiously optimistic, but expressed some doubt that a sufficiently large catapult could be ice-sculpted.
--
There are Forth systems that do triple duty as OS, shell, and programming language, in under 5K.
Take a look at Chuck Moore's work. His attitude is that the right amount of software for pretty much any task is about 1000 words (tokens).
(geez, these spoiled youngsters, with their gigabyte ram and their terabyte hard-drives... no clue about the days when you were happy -- happy! -- to have 16 kb of RAM)
--
When questioned about the ruling a juror replied, "Yeah, we wanted to award them Pi-million dollars. It's kind of a pun, since most awards are round numbers (get it? Pi... round?) and we were all really into math. So that's about $300,000 -- right?"
--
The entertainment system was belting out "Put 'Em on the Glass" when the phone rang. When Pete answered, his phone turned the sound down by sending a message to all the other local devices that had a volume control. His mistress, Lucy, was on the line from the office: "I think we need to see a specialist and then have a series of physical sessions. Bi or something. I'm going to have my agent set up the appointments." Pete immediately agreed to pay the fees, after confirming that she meant a chick.
At her "advisor"'s office, Lucy instructed her Semantic Web agent through her vibrowser. The agent promptly retrieved information about the "treatment" from her advisor's agent, looked up several lists of providers, and checked for the ones within budget and a 20-mile radius of her home and with a rating of triple-H (Hot, Horny, and Healthy) on trusted rating services. It then began trying to find a match between available appointment times (supplied by the agents of individual providers through their Web sites) and Pete's and Lucy's busy schedules.
In a few minutes the agent presented them with a plan. Pete didn't like it. The university student housing was all the way across town from Lucy's place, and he'd be driving back in the middle of rush hour. He set his own agent to redo the search with stricter preferences about location and time. Lucy's agent, having complete trust in Pete's agent in the context of the present task, automatically assisted by supplying access certificates and shortcuts to the data it had already sorted through.
Almost instantly the new plan was presented: a much closer brothel and earlier times--but there were two warning notes. First, Pete would have to reschedule a couple of his less important appointments. He checked what they were--not a problem. The other was something about his STD checker's list failing to include this provider: "Non-contagiousness securely verified by other means," the agent reassured him. "(Details?)"
Lucy registered her assent at about the same moment Pete was muttering, "Spare me the details," and it was all set. (Of course, Pete couldn't resist the kinky details and later that night had his agent explain how it had found that provider even though it wasn't on the proper list.)
--
The human-readable and computer-readable stuff, that is.
How? Lojban, a constructed language designed to be absolutely consistent and logical. You might know it in its earlier incarnation of Loglan, which was mentioned in passing as a language used for conversing with computers in Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress."
Certainly, you could structure a valid Lojban statement to be unreadable to computers, but it isn't that way by default. If you state things directly, the computer can extract useful information.
This is why I'm absolutely 100% certain that we'll all learn Lojban soon. Yup, there is no doubt in my mind. None at all...
[rolls eyes,whistles a little tune]
--
...if Flying Headless Gohan got drywalled up, as long as he kept getting good grades and kept up his training.
--