It doesn't prevent equality tests in a single encrypted domain. But in a single encrypted domain, two ciphertexts for the same plaintext (i.e. including an extra block for obfuscation/resolution is cheating) are the same anyways.
No, they are not. This is what is called randomized encryption, and in fact is the only way to make public key encryption secure. Otherwise you could do as you say, guess the plaintext for a particular ciphertext, encrypt your guess yourself (remember in public key cryptography anyone can encrypt data), and compare it with the ciphertext. Systems which allow such guessing are totally insecure!
So of course this new scheme does not allow guess-encrypt-and-compare attacks. No respectable author would propose such an encryption scheme today. Instead, modern public key encryption is always randomized. It means that there are multiple ciphertexts corresponding to the same plaintext.
In the homomorphic scheme, equality tests are possible but the result is encrypted, and only the person who provided you the encrypted data (or more precisely, the person who holds the private keys under which the data is encrypted) can decrypt the result and learn the answer.
I read the paper and my guess is that a TRILLION is actually an understatement. It looks to me like it might be almost INFINITELY slower. In other words, completely impractical and only of theoretical value.
However, now that the first step has been taken, it's possible that someone will come up with an improvement that makes the idea practical someday.
What are the operations for which this is homomorphic? It has to be quite limited. Otherwise for example, lets suppose I have an integer (encrypted of course) and I have comparison and addition/subtraction and multiply/divide.
I can very easily find the encrypted values of both 0 (a-a for any a) and 1 (a/a)
The article neglected to mention that the underlying encryption system is randomized public key encryption. This means (A) you can easily discover encryptions of 0, encryptions of 1, and encryptions of anything else, because it is a public key system and you can encrypt anything you like.
It also means (B) this won't help you with decryption because every encryption of 0 looks different. So knowing some encryptions of 0 will not let you recognize whether a given encrypted value is an encryption of 0, of 1, or of anything else.
And, I don't see how you can prevent equality tests in the encrypted domain. You might have to calculate a Kernel but surely there is no way to prevent that.
You certainly can do equality tests in the encrypted domain. It's just that the result of the equality test is encrypted; for example, it is an encryption of 0 or an encryption of 1. But you have no idea which it is. Only the client who supplied the encrypted data (and more importantly, the public key encryption system) can decrypt the result of your equality test, or of any other calculations you do on encrypted data.
Nope, absolutely not... assuming the processor at least knows that the encrypted data represents integers, then he could simply do the following, using your values above:-
D32JFS3 / D32JFS3 = XXXXXXX (he has now established the encrypted data for the value 1).
Clever idea but it does not work.
First, it's easy to figure out the encrypted data for the value 1: just encrypt the value 1! This is public key encryption.
Second, there are multiple ways of encrypting the value 1. This is randomized encryption.
So it's easy to learn an encryption of the value 1 (or of any value for that matter), but it won't shed any light on what values are actually encrypted, because even if you guess right (i.e. you try encrypting the value 14 and you are later given an encryption of the value 14), the encryptions won't match because there are too many different ways of encrypting the same value.
I'd like to know what sort of "analysis" can be done without the client's permission. Can they find out how many times the word "and" occurs (without reading the message) for example?
Yes, but the answer would be encrypted, and only the client could decrypt it.
Basically can they do any sort of content analysis? If they're saying they can filter spam, then it's not at all a stretch to assume that they can "read" your data as well. What's the point of encryption then?
They could filter spam, and come up with a score for how likely the message is to be spam. But the score would be encrypted, and only the client could decrypt it.
(This is all only true in theory, I don't think the new system is actually practical for these kinds of purposes. But it is the kind of thing one could theoretically do with a homomorphic encryption system.)
I kind of object to the notion that these bacteria are living inside us as if they are parts of our bodies. As I understand it, the great majority are in our guts; most of the remainder are in skin and mucous membranes that are somewhat exposed to the outside.
The gut is not exactly part of the body. Topologically it has often been noted that the human body is like a tube or torus (a doughnut shape). Yes, there are several sphincters and other openings that can close off the gut, starting with the mouth and ending with the anus. But they open sometimes and they do offer passageway between the outside world and the inside. The gut is more like the skin in terms of how the body distinguishes the external world from its internal environment. It patrols its internals rather vigorously and attempts to destroy bacteria. "Outside" bacteria are tolerated, there is no immune system active outside the body.
So there is still a very significant distinction between those cells which are part of our body, and those cells, including these vast numbers of bacteria, that are outside our body. The gut doesn't really count.
Now another thing that research has shown is that if you spread out your calories across 5 meals in a day you will burn more calories and store less than when eating the same number of calories in 3 or less meals in a day. This technique is used by many to help them lose weight to great effect.
Meal frequency and energy balance Several epidemiological studies have observed an inverse relationship between people's habitual frequency of eating and body weight, leading to the suggestion that a 'nibbling' meal pattern may help in the avoidance of obesity. A review of all pertinent studies shows that, although many fail to find any significant relationship, the relationship is consistently inverse in those that do observe a relationship. However, this finding is highly vulnerable to the probable confounding effects of post hoc changes in dietary patterns as a consequence of weight gain and to dietary under-reporting which undoubtedly invalidates some of the studies. We conclude that the epidemiological evidence is at best very weak, and almost certainly represents an artefact. A detailed review of the possible mechanistic explanations for a metabolic advantage of nibbling meal patterns failed to reveal significant benefits in respect of energy expenditure. Although some short-term studies suggest that the thermic effect of feeding is higher when an isoenergetic test load is divided into multiple small meals, other studies refute this, and most are neutral. More importantly, studies using whole-body calorimetry and doubly-labelled water to assess total 24h energy expenditure find no difference between nibbling and gorging. Finally, with the exception of a single study, there is no evidence that weight loss on hypoenergetic regimens is altered by meal frequency. We conclude that any effects of meal pattern on the regulation of body weight are likely to be mediated through effects on the food intake side of the energy balance equation. [emphasis added]
There are two theories for why the LHC can never work.
The first is because as soon as they turn it on, it does something bad that destroys the earth and possibly the universe. But the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, so the universe constantly splits and we live on in the branches where the LHC fails to operate due to some coincidence or other.
The second theory is that the LHC will generate Higgs particles in quantity, but due to some unusual quantum properties of such particles, they can't exist. Again we invoke the MWI and find that universes where lots of Higgs particles would be created are suppressed, hence we will never see one, hence the LHC will never work.
Both of these theories are outlandish, but with each LHC delay I am reminded that they are out there. If it never works, maybe we will have to consider whether there is some truth to these bizarre predictions.
If your gut is telling you that it is time to go after six years, trust me, you will hate it after eleven. I took a strong counter-offer after trying to quit a job once, in exchange for my promise to stay on for a long period - and I badly regretted it. I ended up leaving early, with a great deal of bad blood and recriminations for breaking my word.
Eleven years at a company is a long time these days. it can lead to stagnation and absence of career growth. You need new challenges, you need to be around new people. Don't get lured by this false hope they are dangling in front of you. Move on, don't look back, and in the long run you'll be glad you made the right decision.
(BTW when I tried to leave that company? The company I almost switched to got acquired by a huge internet firm the next year (during the dot com boom) and all of the employees ended up retiring early, taking trips around the world, and generally living it up. You probably won't be so lucky, but it was salt in the wound for me, grinding away at a dead-end job I'd foolishly trapped myself into.)
So what I'd like to know - is the surface area of all the black holes within the visible universe included in their calculations along with the surface area of the visible universe? No.
If not, are even black holes simply holograms of the visible universe's surface area, thus making the information encoded in the black hole horizons redundant? Yes.
Would including the black hole surface area significantly change the expected frequency of the holographic noise? No, because as you guessed, it is the enclosing event horizon that matters, and ordinary black holes are controlled by holographic physics just like other phenomena.
This is actually the genesis of the holographic hypothesis. Turns out that black holes have the maximum entropy possible for objects of their size. And bizarrely, black hole entropy is a function of the area of the event horizon, not the volume of the black hole. The same thing applies with the event horizon that surrounds us, out at the edge of the visible universe. The entropy of the region within, the whole universe around us, is limited by the area of the event horizon, not the volume. This means that in some sense physics is constrained by two dimensional limitations, despite the fact that we seem to live in a three dimensional universe. Holograms have similar properties, hence the name.
This is a great step towards Augmented Reality, where people can have these kinds of image transforms done in real time, before their very eyes. People would wear special glasses or perhaps someday, contact lenses, with integrated video cameras and processors. So you'd see what the video camera sees, at first. Then image processing systems like this one would kick in and allow your environment to have overlays and popups that you could respond to.
You wouldn't need a big-screen TV if any vertical surface can have a video image mapped to it. You wouldn't need a video phone if whoever you are chatting with can appear right in front of you. New kinds of games can mix real life and synthesized images as you move through the environment. Houses could be painted and decorated virtually, allowing remodeling without changing anything physically. Even people's appearance and clothing could be artificially altered or enhanced.
AR technology is still pretty far in the future, although the individual pieces are starting to appear. This AI image processing technology, once improved to where it can run in real time, is a big step forward.
I would recommend taking a good look at Tahoe, from allmydata.org. This is an open source project that uses a conceptually similar file dispersal system for backup, but it has been designed and reviewed by expert cryptographers. There is also a commercial version available at allmydata.com which has generously sponsored the open source project. Tahoe is working on Windows, Mac, Linux and other Unix style systems.
Tahoe does have a minimal dependency on a central server to first learn about the peer nodes that hold data, but only for the initial callup - once the client is running, it remembers all the peers it is using. And they are working towards eliminating even this dependency with "gossip" introductions, so if you can connect to any peer you can learn of all the others. Everything is cryptographically protected with encryption and signatures to make it effectively impossible for anyone to see the contents of your files without your permission.
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I don't think you know what a "Gravity Tractor" is. It is about 20 tons (min) of rock. We have that.
I'm afraid you are the one who doesn't know what the Gravity Tractor is that this article is talking about. It's not 20 tons of rock, according to TFA it is a one-ton spacecraft, similar to many others which are already scattered about the solar system. And it's a good thing, because contrary to what you say, we certainly don't have "20 tons (min) of rock" that we can cost effectively get into orbit and push all the way out to an asteroid.
A one ton spacecraft may not sound like much against a 500 foot asteroid of solid rock, but as the article says, it only changes velocity by 0.22 microns per second every day. Yet that adds up and over the course of a year or two, you can nudge the asteroid into a safer path.
This reminds me of those plastic, colored transparent clipboards you used to see - they would trap the light internally and it looked like they were glowing around the edges. Sounds like the same technology, ramped up. So if it never pans out for solar cells, these guys could still be positioned to make a killing in the novelty clipboard market! Where do I invest?
That GAO report is for a different kind of testing, so-called "nutrigenetic" tests. These claim to analyze a few parts of your DNA and come up with customized nutritional recommendations. For example mycellf.com. It sounds like these are indeed scams. But sites like 23andMe claim to do something completely different, so this report should not be taken to mean that those kinds of sites are scams too.
Interesting how the comments questioning fair use are generally moderated "1", while the ones insisting that of course making personal backups is fair use get moderated "5".
Anyway here's what the EFF, not exactly a bastion of copyright absolutists, says in their Fair Use FAQ:
Although the legal basis is not completely settled, many lawyers believe that the following (and many other uses) are also fair uses:
Space-shifting or format-shifting - that is, taking content you own in one format and putting it into another format, for personal, non-commercial use. For instance, "ripping" an audio CD (that is, making an MP3-format version of an audio CD that you already own) is considered fair use by many lawyers, based on the 1984 Betamax decision and the 1999 Rio MP3 player decision (RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia, 180 F. 3d 1072, 1079, 9th Circ. 1999.) Making a personal back-up copy of content you own - for instance, burning a copy of an audio CD you own.
"Many lawyers believe" is a far cry from the parent's comment that making personal backups has been "heavily tested". I'd say this better supports the grandparent comment: "Don't bet on it."
The EFF also says:
Courts have previously found that a use was fair where the use of the copyrighted work was socially beneficial. In particular, U.S. courts have recognized the following fair uses: criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, research and parodies.
Note that making personal backups is quite different in flavor than any of these activities, which are all oriented around improving intellectual debate and discussion.
It shows this year's progress, updated daily, plotted against what happened last year, and the multi-year average. Bottom line is we're about where we were last year at this time, after starting the season with more ice than last year. However, last year there was a pretty steep drop over the period corresponding to the next two weeks. It will be interesting to see if we see a similar drop this year. Bookmark this link for daily updates and pop open a cold one.
This is just the first test. At this point, Phoenix is supposed to be testing the soil, not the ice. Later, they are going to dig down into the ice. They have a special drill-like object on the digging tool which will drill into the ice and produce fine shavings. These shavings will then be scooped up and dumped into the oven. But that will come later, first they are testing the soil. This is what has been a problem so far, it's good that they have managed to make progress with it.
They made it so they can shake the screen and hopefully get some material through. They just haven't shaken it yet, everything is done slowly and carefully and checked many times before they take the next step.
As for the ice, the digger has a sort of drill on it that is supposed to grind up the ice into fine shavings, and then those shavings are what will be picked up and dumped in. So when they are ready for ice, that should be in small pieces that can get through the screen. They have a bunch of ovens so even if this one stays clogged they can still use some of the others for the ice samples, which is more important.
If they can't get any dirt into the oven, they might be able to use the ice drill on the dirt to get some finer pieces if they want to try again on that.
These are great questions. I share the perspectives and assumptions so I hope these ideas will be helpful to the original poster.
First let me say that the reason I believe in IP is the same as the reason I believe in P(roperty)! Property rights provide optimal usage of scarce resources, as shown by Coase's Theorem. This is as true in the abstract realm as in the physical realm. That is why abstract property rights such as pollution credits and water draw rights have been so successful in improving management of previously common goods.
So what do we do about IP? I think the central concept should be voluntarism. That is, users of intellectual property should voluntarily agree to the restrictions imposed by the property owner, or else they should forego its use. This is the same principle we apply to other forms of property. If I go onto someone's private land, I must agree to follow the restrictions and rules he specifies, or I should leave. It is the same with physical items; if someone lends me a book under the condition that I not mark it up, I should follow that restriction or not take the book.
The problem with IP is the difficulty of monitoring and enforcing restrictions. This manifests in two ways. The first is catching people who agree to the rules but disobey them anyway; and the second, the other side of the coin, is that people who fully intend to obey the rules have no way to credibly commit to doing so. I believe that the second problem is the more serious one, because I think most people are fundamentally honest and would be willing to follow the rules. Also, if you can solve the second problem, credible commitment, you solve the first, because cheaters will not be able to credibly commit (if they could cheat, their commitment was not credible).
There are two parts to the solution of this problem, one easy and one hard. The easy part, but still it is not being done today, is that agreement to any restrictions and rules associated with a given piece of IP should be voluntary and active. It should not just be implicit. You should be asked to agree explicitly to following the rules in exchange for accessing the IP, and you should take some voluntary, explicit action to indicate your agreement. Ideally, the rules should be expressed in simple language so you know what you are agreeing to, although admittedly in our litigious society this is going to be difficult. Something like the Creative Commons licenses can work here.
Taking this step will remove ammunition from people who want to excuse their cheating by claiming that they should not be bound by restrictions they never agreed to. Once they have voluntarily agreed to restrictions in exchange for access, they have to either follow the rules, or admit that they are cheaters. Since as I said above I believe most people are honest, I think that once faced explicitly with this kind of choice, people will be much less likely to cheat than they are today. I also see this approach as being more consistent with anarchocapitalistic principles of mutual voluntary agreement, versus the government-enforced regulations that are today the primary legal framework for handling IP.
The second part of the solution, then, is providing technical means by which people can voluntarily and credibly commit to following the rules for a given piece of IP. This comes down to DRM, in the end. But because it is being used in a voluntary framework, I believe the usual perspective towards DRM is turned on its head. Instead of being a bludgeon by which one party can impose its will on another, it becomes instead a tool by which two parties can come to a mutually acceptable arrangement. From this perspective, DRM assists both the creator and the user of the IP. It helps the creator by giving him confidence that his IP will not be misused. And it helps the user by allowing him to prove that he honestly intends to follow the rules, proof which would be impossible without DRM.
I believe that in the long run, one of the most useful
According to http://www.openssl.org/support/, openssl-dev is for the developers of openssl itself. To quote the list description: Discussions on development of the OpenSSL library. Not for application development questions!
Right, and further, one of the participants in the discussion was Ulf Moeller, who is one of the main crypto developers in OpenSSL. Unfortunately nobody apparently bothered to check whether the two lines proposed for removal were both involved in this questionable behavior of folding uninitialized data into the random state. Actually, only one of them was being used that way, the other was adding very important data to the random state. The OpenSSL people never caught the fact that the proposed change to the two lines was going to kill the security of the system, even though they had all the information available to do so.
The patch that broke it was checked in by Kurt Roeckx [kroeckx@debian.org]. Don't know if he broke it or if he was just the gatekeeper for checkins. See:
From looking at this patch, I think this is what happened. valgrind complained about a rather unusual coding convention in ssleay_rand_bytes. This is a function that returns random data into a buffer. However, before writing into the buffer, it reads from the buffer and incorporates the old contents into the internal random state. valgrind complained about this use of an output buffer for input. Normally you would never want to use potentially uninitialized data like this, but in this case it is OK as all that is being done is the data is being folded into the random state. In the worst case, this can't hurt, and maybe it will help, if the old data had some randomness.
Anyway, valgrind complained about it, and the maintainer commented out the use of the buffer. That would actually be OK, it is not a big deal. But the implementor made a mistake, and also commented out another similar usage, in a different function, ssleay_rand_add. This was a huge mistake, as the purpose of ssleay_rand_add is to add randomness into the random state. In that function, buf is an INPUT buffer, and adding it into the random state is perfectly legitimate, in fact it is the whole purpose of the function. But apparently because it looked similar to the questionable usage in ssleay_rand_bytes, the maintainer commented out the code in ssleay_rand_add at the same time. (I don't know whether valgrind also complained about this second usage, but if so, it was mistaken. I think it's more likely that the maintainer just got fooled and over-generalized from the valgrind complaint.)
So the whole thing was an attempt to clean up code and remove warnings, but the fix accidentally broke a crucial piece of functionality, rendering ssleay_rand_add completely non-functional. So any attempt to add randomness into the RNG state, such as for seeding purposes, is ineffective. The random state ends up with much less variability, and therefore all the crypto is weak. As Bruce Schneier points out, bad crypto looks much the same as good crypto, so it took this long to notice it.
Hats off to the reviewer who picked up on the problem. Don't know who it was, but the same Kurt Roeckx [kroeckx@debian.org] checked in the fix.
I've had a Sony Reader for about a year, and a Kindle for three weeks. I am trying to decide whether to return the Kindle.
The biggest problem with both is the lack of availability of new books. Half a dozen times in the last two weeks I've read a review of a book and thought that sounded good, gone to Amazon, and found the book available in print, but not in a Kindle edition. The fraction of new books for Kindles seems to be about 10% or less.
With the Sony, it was even worse, but I got in the habit of reading pirated books from Usenet. These have the advantage of being free. However most of them are PDFs and they do not look all that great on the Sony, plus the conversion programs take hours to run on my old PC. I haven't done much with looking at PDF books on the Kindle, I need to try that more.
I'm also frustrated with the Kindle's button layout, it's hard to read with one hand. The Sony is not great either, too few buttons rather than two many. With the Kindle it's hard to handle it without accidentally pushing a button.
The Kindle does serve as a somewhat slow and awkward, but serviceable always-on Internet browser. I wonder if a smart phone wouldn't be just as good though. And I don't know if Amazon will keep Internet access free forever.
I do find that the general idea of the ebook reader is great. I have close to a hundred books in the Sony, both technical and pleasure reading, almost all of them pirated. It's fantastic to carry around this small device and be able to read any of such a huge number of books at will.
As with an iPod, it would be a very different matter if you were to try to fill it up from the Apple store versus using pirated MP3s. I couldn't afford to fill my Kindle with ten dollar books from Amazon. If I do decide to keep it I need to get on the ball with pirating books and see how they work on that gadget.
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It doesn't prevent equality tests in a single encrypted domain. But in a single encrypted domain, two ciphertexts for the same plaintext (i.e. including an extra block for obfuscation/resolution is cheating) are the same anyways.
No, they are not. This is what is called randomized encryption, and in fact is the only way to make public key encryption secure. Otherwise you could do as you say, guess the plaintext for a particular ciphertext, encrypt your guess yourself (remember in public key cryptography anyone can encrypt data), and compare it with the ciphertext. Systems which allow such guessing are totally insecure!
So of course this new scheme does not allow guess-encrypt-and-compare attacks. No respectable author would propose such an encryption scheme today. Instead, modern public key encryption is always randomized. It means that there are multiple ciphertexts corresponding to the same plaintext.
In the homomorphic scheme, equality tests are possible but the result is encrypted, and only the person who provided you the encrypted data (or more precisely, the person who holds the private keys under which the data is encrypted) can decrypt the result and learn the answer.
I read the paper and my guess is that a TRILLION is actually an understatement. It looks to me like it might be almost INFINITELY slower. In other words, completely impractical and only of theoretical value.
However, now that the first step has been taken, it's possible that someone will come up with an improvement that makes the idea practical someday.
What are the operations for which this is homomorphic?
It has to be quite limited. Otherwise for example, lets suppose I have an integer (encrypted of course) and I have comparison and addition/subtraction and multiply/divide.
I can very easily find the encrypted values of both 0 (a-a for any a) and 1 (a/a)
The article neglected to mention that the underlying encryption system is randomized public key encryption. This means (A) you can easily discover encryptions of 0, encryptions of 1, and encryptions of anything else, because it is a public key system and you can encrypt anything you like.
It also means (B) this won't help you with decryption because every encryption of 0 looks different. So knowing some encryptions of 0 will not let you recognize whether a given encrypted value is an encryption of 0, of 1, or of anything else.
And, I don't see how you can prevent equality tests in the encrypted domain. You might have to calculate a Kernel but surely there is no way to prevent that.
You certainly can do equality tests in the encrypted domain. It's just that the result of the equality test is encrypted; for example, it is an encryption of 0 or an encryption of 1. But you have no idea which it is. Only the client who supplied the encrypted data (and more importantly, the public key encryption system) can decrypt the result of your equality test, or of any other calculations you do on encrypted data.
Nope, absolutely not ... assuming the processor at least knows that the encrypted data represents integers, then he could simply do the following, using your values above :-
D32JFS3 / D32JFS3 = XXXXXXX (he has now established the encrypted data for the value 1).
Clever idea but it does not work.
First, it's easy to figure out the encrypted data for the value 1: just encrypt the value 1! This is public key encryption.
Second, there are multiple ways of encrypting the value 1. This is randomized encryption.
So it's easy to learn an encryption of the value 1 (or of any value for that matter), but it won't shed any light on what values are actually encrypted, because even if you guess right (i.e. you try encrypting the value 14 and you are later given an encryption of the value 14), the encryptions won't match because there are too many different ways of encrypting the same value.
I'd like to know what sort of "analysis" can be done without the client's permission. Can they find out how many times the word "and" occurs (without reading the message) for example?
Yes, but the answer would be encrypted, and only the client could decrypt it.
Basically can they do any sort of content analysis? If they're saying they can filter spam, then it's not at all a stretch to assume that they can "read" your data as well. What's the point of encryption then?
They could filter spam, and come up with a score for how likely the message is to be spam. But the score would be encrypted, and only the client could decrypt it.
(This is all only true in theory, I don't think the new system is actually practical for these kinds of purposes. But it is the kind of thing one could theoretically do with a homomorphic encryption system.)
I kind of object to the notion that these bacteria are living inside us as if they are parts of our bodies. As I understand it, the great majority are in our guts; most of the remainder are in skin and mucous membranes that are somewhat exposed to the outside.
The gut is not exactly part of the body. Topologically it has often been noted that the human body is like a tube or torus (a doughnut shape). Yes, there are several sphincters and other openings that can close off the gut, starting with the mouth and ending with the anus. But they open sometimes and they do offer passageway between the outside world and the inside. The gut is more like the skin in terms of how the body distinguishes the external world from its internal environment. It patrols its internals rather vigorously and attempts to destroy bacteria. "Outside" bacteria are tolerated, there is no immune system active outside the body.
So there is still a very significant distinction between those cells which are part of our body, and those cells, including these vast numbers of bacteria, that are outside our body. The gut doesn't really count.
Now another thing that research has shown is that if you spread out your calories across 5 meals in a day you will burn more calories and store less than when eating the same number of calories in 3 or less meals in a day. This technique is used by many to help them lose weight to great effect.
Here is a good academic study from the British Journal of Nutrition that refutes this point:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=879792
Meal frequency and energy balance
Several epidemiological studies have observed an inverse relationship between people's habitual frequency of eating and body weight, leading to the suggestion that a 'nibbling' meal pattern may help in the avoidance of obesity. A review of all pertinent studies shows that, although many fail to find any significant relationship, the relationship is consistently inverse in those that do observe a relationship. However, this finding is highly vulnerable to the probable confounding effects of post hoc changes in dietary patterns as a consequence of weight gain and to dietary under-reporting which undoubtedly invalidates some of the studies. We conclude that the epidemiological evidence is at best very weak, and almost certainly represents an artefact. A detailed review of the possible mechanistic explanations for a metabolic advantage of nibbling meal patterns failed to reveal significant benefits in respect of energy expenditure. Although some short-term studies suggest that the thermic effect of feeding is higher when an isoenergetic test load is divided into multiple small meals, other studies refute this, and most are neutral. More importantly, studies using whole-body calorimetry and doubly-labelled water to assess total 24h energy expenditure find no difference between nibbling and gorging. Finally, with the exception of a single study, there is no evidence that weight loss on hypoenergetic regimens is altered by meal frequency. We conclude that any effects of meal pattern on the regulation of body weight are likely to be mediated through effects on the food intake side of the energy balance equation. [emphasis added]
There are two theories for why the LHC can never work.
The first is because as soon as they turn it on, it does something bad that destroys the earth and possibly the universe. But the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is true, so the universe constantly splits and we live on in the branches where the LHC fails to operate due to some coincidence or other.
The second theory is that the LHC will generate Higgs particles in quantity, but due to some unusual quantum properties of such particles, they can't exist. Again we invoke the MWI and find that universes where lots of Higgs particles would be created are suppressed, hence we will never see one, hence the LHC will never work.
Both of these theories are outlandish, but with each LHC delay I am reminded that they are out there. If it never works, maybe we will have to consider whether there is some truth to these bizarre predictions.
If your gut is telling you that it is time to go after six years, trust me, you will hate it after eleven. I took a strong counter-offer after trying to quit a job once, in exchange for my promise to stay on for a long period - and I badly regretted it. I ended up leaving early, with a great deal of bad blood and recriminations for breaking my word.
Eleven years at a company is a long time these days. it can lead to stagnation and absence of career growth. You need new challenges, you need to be around new people. Don't get lured by this false hope they are dangling in front of you. Move on, don't look back, and in the long run you'll be glad you made the right decision.
(BTW when I tried to leave that company? The company I almost switched to got acquired by a huge internet firm the next year (during the dot com boom) and all of the employees ended up retiring early, taking trips around the world, and generally living it up. You probably won't be so lucky, but it was salt in the wound for me, grinding away at a dead-end job I'd foolishly trapped myself into.)
So what I'd like to know - is the surface area of all the black holes within the visible universe included in their calculations along with the surface area of the visible universe?
No.
If not, are even black holes simply holograms of the visible universe's surface area, thus making the information encoded in the black hole horizons redundant?
Yes.
Would including the black hole surface area significantly change the expected frequency of the holographic noise?
No, because as you guessed, it is the enclosing event horizon that matters, and ordinary black holes are controlled by holographic physics just like other phenomena.
This is actually the genesis of the holographic hypothesis. Turns out that black holes have the maximum entropy possible for objects of their size. And bizarrely, black hole entropy is a function of the area of the event horizon, not the volume of the black hole. The same thing applies with the event horizon that surrounds us, out at the edge of the visible universe. The entropy of the region within, the whole universe around us, is limited by the area of the event horizon, not the volume. This means that in some sense physics is constrained by two dimensional limitations, despite the fact that we seem to live in a three dimensional universe. Holograms have similar properties, hence the name.
Here is a better link to what happened:
http://www.duanek.name/Amtrak/index.htm
This is a great step towards Augmented Reality, where people can have these kinds of image transforms done in real time, before their very eyes. People would wear special glasses or perhaps someday, contact lenses, with integrated video cameras and processors. So you'd see what the video camera sees, at first. Then image processing systems like this one would kick in and allow your environment to have overlays and popups that you could respond to.
You wouldn't need a big-screen TV if any vertical surface can have a video image mapped to it. You wouldn't need a video phone if whoever you are chatting with can appear right in front of you. New kinds of games can mix real life and synthesized images as you move through the environment. Houses could be painted and decorated virtually, allowing remodeling without changing anything physically. Even people's appearance and clothing could be artificially altered or enhanced.
AR technology is still pretty far in the future, although the individual pieces are starting to appear. This AI image processing technology, once improved to where it can run in real time, is a big step forward.
I would recommend taking a good look at Tahoe, from allmydata.org. This is an open source project that uses a conceptually similar file dispersal system for backup, but it has been designed and reviewed by expert cryptographers. There is also a commercial version available at allmydata.com which has generously sponsored the open source project. Tahoe is working on Windows, Mac, Linux and other Unix style systems.
Tahoe does have a minimal dependency on a central server to first learn about the peer nodes that hold data, but only for the initial callup - once the client is running, it remembers all the peers it is using. And they are working towards eliminating even this dependency with "gossip" introductions, so if you can connect to any peer you can learn of all the others. Everything is cryptographically protected with encryption and signatures to make it effectively impossible for anyone to see the contents of your files without your permission.
Google makes it easy to opt out of the doubleclick tracking cookie:
http://www.google.com/privacy_ads.html
"Anyone may opt out of the DoubleClick cookie (for both the Google content network and DoubleClick ad serving) at any time by clicking the button above."
I don't think you know what a "Gravity Tractor" is. It is about 20 tons (min) of rock. We have that.
I'm afraid you are the one who doesn't know what the Gravity Tractor is that this article is talking about. It's not 20 tons of rock, according to TFA it is a one-ton spacecraft, similar to many others which are already scattered about the solar system. And it's a good thing, because contrary to what you say, we certainly don't have "20 tons (min) of rock" that we can cost effectively get into orbit and push all the way out to an asteroid.
A one ton spacecraft may not sound like much against a 500 foot asteroid of solid rock, but as the article says, it only changes velocity by 0.22 microns per second every day. Yet that adds up and over the course of a year or two, you can nudge the asteroid into a safer path.
This reminds me of those plastic, colored transparent clipboards you used to see - they would trap the light internally and it looked like they were glowing around the edges. Sounds like the same technology, ramped up. So if it never pans out for solar cells, these guys could still be positioned to make a killing in the novelty clipboard market! Where do I invest?
That GAO report is for a different kind of testing, so-called "nutrigenetic" tests. These claim to analyze a few parts of your DNA and come up with customized nutritional recommendations. For example mycellf.com. It sounds like these are indeed scams. But sites like 23andMe claim to do something completely different, so this report should not be taken to mean that those kinds of sites are scams too.
Interesting how the comments questioning fair use are generally moderated "1", while the ones insisting that of course making personal backups is fair use get moderated "5".
Anyway here's what the EFF, not exactly a bastion of copyright absolutists, says in their Fair Use FAQ:
"Many lawyers believe" is a far cry from the parent's comment that making personal backups has been "heavily tested". I'd say this better supports the grandparent comment: "Don't bet on it."
The EFF also says:
Note that making personal backups is quite different in flavor than any of these activities, which are all oriented around improving intellectual debate and discussion.
This is the money shot:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_timeseries.png.
It shows this year's progress, updated daily, plotted against what happened last year, and the multi-year average. Bottom line is we're about where we were last year at this time, after starting the season with more ice than last year. However, last year there was a pretty steep drop over the period corresponding to the next two weeks. It will be interesting to see if we see a similar drop this year. Bookmark this link for daily updates and pop open a cold one.
This is just the first test. At this point, Phoenix is supposed to be testing the soil, not the ice. Later, they are going to dig down into the ice. They have a special drill-like object on the digging tool which will drill into the ice and produce fine shavings. These shavings will then be scooped up and dumped into the oven. But that will come later, first they are testing the soil. This is what has been a problem so far, it's good that they have managed to make progress with it.
They made it so they can shake the screen and hopefully get some material through. They just haven't shaken it yet, everything is done slowly and carefully and checked many times before they take the next step.
As for the ice, the digger has a sort of drill on it that is supposed to grind up the ice into fine shavings, and then those shavings are what will be picked up and dumped in. So when they are ready for ice, that should be in small pieces that can get through the screen. They have a bunch of ovens so even if this one stays clogged they can still use some of the others for the ice samples, which is more important.
If they can't get any dirt into the oven, they might be able to use the ice drill on the dirt to get some finer pieces if they want to try again on that.
These are great questions. I share the perspectives and assumptions so I hope these ideas will be helpful to the original poster.
First let me say that the reason I believe in IP is the same as the reason I believe in P(roperty)! Property rights provide optimal usage of scarce resources, as shown by Coase's Theorem. This is as true in the abstract realm as in the physical realm. That is why abstract property rights such as pollution credits and water draw rights have been so successful in improving management of previously common goods.
So what do we do about IP? I think the central concept should be voluntarism. That is, users of intellectual property should voluntarily agree to the restrictions imposed by the property owner, or else they should forego its use. This is the same principle we apply to other forms of property. If I go onto someone's private land, I must agree to follow the restrictions and rules he specifies, or I should leave. It is the same with physical items; if someone lends me a book under the condition that I not mark it up, I should follow that restriction or not take the book.
The problem with IP is the difficulty of monitoring and enforcing restrictions. This manifests in two ways. The first is catching people who agree to the rules but disobey them anyway; and the second, the other side of the coin, is that people who fully intend to obey the rules have no way to credibly commit to doing so. I believe that the second problem is the more serious one, because I think most people are fundamentally honest and would be willing to follow the rules. Also, if you can solve the second problem, credible commitment, you solve the first, because cheaters will not be able to credibly commit (if they could cheat, their commitment was not credible).
There are two parts to the solution of this problem, one easy and one hard. The easy part, but still it is not being done today, is that agreement to any restrictions and rules associated with a given piece of IP should be voluntary and active. It should not just be implicit. You should be asked to agree explicitly to following the rules in exchange for accessing the IP, and you should take some voluntary, explicit action to indicate your agreement. Ideally, the rules should be expressed in simple language so you know what you are agreeing to, although admittedly in our litigious society this is going to be difficult. Something like the Creative Commons licenses can work here.
Taking this step will remove ammunition from people who want to excuse their cheating by claiming that they should not be bound by restrictions they never agreed to. Once they have voluntarily agreed to restrictions in exchange for access, they have to either follow the rules, or admit that they are cheaters. Since as I said above I believe most people are honest, I think that once faced explicitly with this kind of choice, people will be much less likely to cheat than they are today. I also see this approach as being more consistent with anarchocapitalistic principles of mutual voluntary agreement, versus the government-enforced regulations that are today the primary legal framework for handling IP.
The second part of the solution, then, is providing technical means by which people can voluntarily and credibly commit to following the rules for a given piece of IP. This comes down to DRM, in the end. But because it is being used in a voluntary framework, I believe the usual perspective towards DRM is turned on its head. Instead of being a bludgeon by which one party can impose its will on another, it becomes instead a tool by which two parties can come to a mutually acceptable arrangement. From this perspective, DRM assists both the creator and the user of the IP. It helps the creator by giving him confidence that his IP will not be misused. And it helps the user by allowing him to prove that he honestly intends to follow the rules, proof which would be impossible without DRM.
I believe that in the long run, one of the most useful
The patch that broke it was checked in by Kurt Roeckx [kroeckx@debian.org]. Don't know if he broke it or if he was just the gatekeeper for checkins. See:
http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/pkg-openssl/openssl/trunk/rand/md_rand.c?rev=141&view=diff&r1=141&r2=140&p1=openssl/trunk/rand/md_rand.c&p2=/openssl/trunk/rand/md_rand.c which shows the change that introduced the bug; and its parent node:
http://svn.debian.org/viewsvn/pkg-openssl/openssl/trunk/rand/?rev=141#dirlist which shows the maintainer responsible.
From looking at this patch, I think this is what happened. valgrind complained about a rather unusual coding convention in ssleay_rand_bytes. This is a function that returns random data into a buffer. However, before writing into the buffer, it reads from the buffer and incorporates the old contents into the internal random state. valgrind complained about this use of an output buffer for input. Normally you would never want to use potentially uninitialized data like this, but in this case it is OK as all that is being done is the data is being folded into the random state. In the worst case, this can't hurt, and maybe it will help, if the old data had some randomness.
Anyway, valgrind complained about it, and the maintainer commented out the use of the buffer. That would actually be OK, it is not a big deal. But the implementor made a mistake, and also commented out another similar usage, in a different function, ssleay_rand_add. This was a huge mistake, as the purpose of ssleay_rand_add is to add randomness into the random state. In that function, buf is an INPUT buffer, and adding it into the random state is perfectly legitimate, in fact it is the whole purpose of the function. But apparently because it looked similar to the questionable usage in ssleay_rand_bytes, the maintainer commented out the code in ssleay_rand_add at the same time. (I don't know whether valgrind also complained about this second usage, but if so, it was mistaken. I think it's more likely that the maintainer just got fooled and over-generalized from the valgrind complaint.)
So the whole thing was an attempt to clean up code and remove warnings, but the fix accidentally broke a crucial piece of functionality, rendering ssleay_rand_add completely non-functional. So any attempt to add randomness into the RNG state, such as for seeding purposes, is ineffective. The random state ends up with much less variability, and therefore all the crypto is weak. As Bruce Schneier points out, bad crypto looks much the same as good crypto, so it took this long to notice it.
Hats off to the reviewer who picked up on the problem. Don't know who it was, but the same Kurt Roeckx [kroeckx@debian.org] checked in the fix.
I've had a Sony Reader for about a year, and a Kindle for three weeks. I am trying to decide whether to return the Kindle.
The biggest problem with both is the lack of availability of new books. Half a dozen times in the last two weeks I've read a review of a book and thought that sounded good, gone to Amazon, and found the book available in print, but not in a Kindle edition. The fraction of new books for Kindles seems to be about 10% or less.
With the Sony, it was even worse, but I got in the habit of reading pirated books from Usenet. These have the advantage of being free. However most of them are PDFs and they do not look all that great on the Sony, plus the conversion programs take hours to run on my old PC. I haven't done much with looking at PDF books on the Kindle, I need to try that more.
I'm also frustrated with the Kindle's button layout, it's hard to read with one hand. The Sony is not great either, too few buttons rather than two many. With the Kindle it's hard to handle it without accidentally pushing a button.
The Kindle does serve as a somewhat slow and awkward, but serviceable always-on Internet browser. I wonder if a smart phone wouldn't be just as good though. And I don't know if Amazon will keep Internet access free forever.
I do find that the general idea of the ebook reader is great. I have close to a hundred books in the Sony, both technical and pleasure reading, almost all of them pirated. It's fantastic to carry around this small device and be able to read any of such a huge number of books at will.
As with an iPod, it would be a very different matter if you were to try to fill it up from the Apple store versus using pirated MP3s. I couldn't afford to fill my Kindle with ten dollar books from Amazon. If I do decide to keep it I need to get on the ball with pirating books and see how they work on that gadget.