To many foreigners - and to some Americans - the tolerance of guns in everyday American life is simply inexplicable.
As a New York Times columnist put it recently:
"The nation is saturated with violence. Thousands upon thousands of murders are committed each year. There are more than 200 million guns in circulation."
[...]
Why is it then that so many Americans - and foreigners who come here - feel that the place is so, well, safe?
A British man I met in Colorado recently told me he used to live in Kent but he moved to the American state of New Jersey and will not go home because it is, as he put it, "a gentler environment for bringing the kids up."
This is New Jersey. Home of the Sopranos.
Brits arriving in New York, hoping to avoid being slaughtered on day one of their shopping mission to Manhattan are, by day two, beginning to wonder what all the fuss was about. By day three they have had had the scales lifted from their eyes.
I have met incredulous British tourists who have been shocked to the core by the peacefulness of the place, the lack of the violent undercurrent so ubiquitous in British cities, even British market towns.
"It seems so nice here," they quaver.
Well, it is!
Ten or 20 years ago, it was a different story, but things have changed.
And this is Manhattan.
Wait till you get to London Texas, or Glasgow Montana, or Oxford Mississippi or Virgin Utah, for that matter, where every household is required by local ordinance to possess a gun.
Folks will have guns in all of these places and if you break into their homes they will probably kill you.
They will occasionally kill each other in anger or by mistake, but you never feel as unsafe as you can feel in south London.
It is a paradox. Along with the guns there is a tranquillity and civility about American life of which most British people can only dream.
What surprises the British tourists is that, in areas of the US that look and feel like suburban Britain, there is simply less crime and much less violent crime.
Doors are left unlocked, public telephones unbroken.
One reason - perhaps the overriding reason - is that there is no public drunkenness in polite America, simply none.
I have never seen a group of drunk young people in the entire six years I have lived here. I travel a lot and not always to the better parts of town.
It is an odd fact that a nation we associate - quite properly - with violence is also so serene, so unscarred by petty crime, so innocent of brawling.
Virginia Tech had the headlines in the last few days and reminded us of the violence for which the US is well known.
But most American lives were as peaceful on this anniversary as they are every day.
How many different proteins are made by the human body as a whole, if over 1,000 are in saliva? Do current DNA maps tell all the proteins? What are the current esimates?
Please mod parent up. He makes two excellent points: 1st that Schneier did not write the essay and basically has nothing to do with it. And 2nd, that the essay is completely wrong, as pointed out by the 1st comment replying on the essay page. Shor's algorithm will not take 72*k^3 qubits or gates, it takes about k qubits and then goes through O(k^3) steps to get the answer. Everything about the posting is wrong.
I would suggest that it will work out a little differently. Once battlebots become superior to human soldiers in warfighting ability, most battles will be between bots, with relatively few humans involved. This is simply because the bots will be the superior fighting force, and deployed preferentially by both sides. Only once one side's bot army is defeated would the war become bots against humans, and in that case the losing side would typically surrender rather than face a massacre of its population.
I left the theater wondering what happens next? Does the monster win, or are they able to destroy it? What did that mean about "dropping the hammer" on NYC? Were they going to nuke it, or just use a lot of bombs? The bombs they showed were not effective.
And I assume that the little monsters are baby versions of the big one, and that they bite people and implant eggs, which they grow very quickly into new monsters and burst out of people? Doesn't that seem like what they were implying? So there might be a danger of infections spreading elsewhere.
They had two theories for where the monster came from: the ocean, or space. Sea creatures generally would not evolve to function on land, both because of the whole air breathing thing, and more importantly because there is no buoyancy on land so their bones would not be strong enough to carry them. However if we are talking about something that can fly between stars, maybe engineered to cause destruction, that opens up a lot more possibilities, and makes the super-tough hide that much more plausible.
Also, is the monster intelligent? We didn't see much sign of it but the little ones seemed to understand the benefits of stealth, and the big one could have had an enormous brain.
Why did it attack the Statue of Liberty and tear off the head? Just general trouble-making, part of the overall destruction program as it moved up onto Manhattan?
Anyway I left the theater with a questions like these, which I suppose was the point. But I wouldn't have minded a few more answers. Maybe there will be a future version, Cloverfields, related to this movie as Aliens was to Alien, with lots of monsters attacking lots of cities and the human race being faced with extinction.
I thought the hand-held camera effect was especially inappropriate in I Am Legend because the whole point was that this guy was the last human on earth (or so we thought). But when I saw the hand-held camera I thought, who's holding the camera? With a traditional steady camera there is a sense of the omniscient view, like we are hearing a story and picturing it in our minds.
After seeing Cloverfield yesterday I watched Bourne Ultimatum on video with my family last night, and the camera work there was even more annoying. They kept showing these two-person conversations shot from over one person's shoulder, with the camera not only shaking but frequently drifting so that the out-of-focus back of the closer guy's head kept obscuring the face of the person we were looking at! It drove me crazy. I guess we were supposed to imagine that we were eavesdropping on a private conversation but again it didn't work for me, it just reminded me that there was a camera operator in the scene.
But in the end I think it's a generational thing. I'm a boomer and this is not the style I grew up with. Young people today are going to embrace it, so we all better get used to it.
It doesn't make sense to me: first you burn coal, which basically creates energy by oxidizing carbon and creating CO2; then you use solar energy to undo that and turn the CO2 back into CO. Wouldn't it make more sense to make electricity directly from the solar energy and not involve the coal at all? Besides which, if the CO is later used as fuel as they say, then eventually you're going to oxidize that anyway and create the same CO2 you would have in the first place. It seems like a very roundabout way to add solar energy into the mix.
Could someone explain this phrase, "social graph"? I haven't run into this before. And what is "your social graph" versus someone else's? Is it just your set of friends? What would it mean to move your social graph to another service, if the friends there are different or have different names?
I'd like to see an "infinite desktop" with a head mounted display and orientation sensor. I can turn my head and see many virtual feet of documents in every direction. I can use my mouse to slide my point of view right or left. To me this would be a useful model and could eventually be adapted to portable use on planes and such.
John Q. Programmer (internet handle: glorb the barbarian) 123 Main Street Anytown, USA
Unless he's a real straight-laced and old-fashioned hiring manager I don't think this would hurt you, and it might help by making you stand out. Plus he's more likely to Google you out of curiosity if nothing else.
Here's a peer reviewed article looking at what people eat and comparing how healthy their diets are and how much they weigh, for different kinds of diets. This IMO is the best evidence available for whether low fat or low carb is better. Bottom line is what they say at the end, comparing the Body Mass Index (BMI), a measure of fatness: "The BMIs were significantly lower for men and women on the high carbohydrate diet; the highest BMIs were noted for those on a low carbohydrate diet." In short the conventional wisdom is not so dumb after all.
Objective To examine the association between a range of health and nutrition indicators and popular diets.
Design The Continuing Survey of Food Intake by Individuals (CSFII) 1994-1996 data were used to examine the relationship between prototype popular diets and diet quality as measured by the healthy eating index (HEI), consumption patterns, and body mass index (BMI). The prototype diets included vegetarian (no meat, poultry, or fish on day of survey) and non-vegetarian. The nonvegetarian group was further subdivided into low carbohydrate (less than 30% of energy from carbohydrate), medium (30% to 55%), and high (greater than 55% of energy). Within the high carbohydrate group, participants were classified as having Pyramid or non-Pyramid eating patterns. The Pyramid group was defined as 30% or less of energy from fat and at least one serving from the five major food groups in the USDA Food Guide Pyramid. Finally, the non-Pyramid group was further subdivided into low fat (less than 15% of energy from fat) and moderate fat (15% to 30% of energy from fat). In addition, a review of the published scientific literature was conducted; all studies identified were included in the review.
Subjects 10,014 adults, aged 19 years and older, from the 1994-1996 CSFII were included in the analyses of extant data. More than 200 individual studies were included in the review of the literature.
Results Analyses of the CSFII indicate that diet quality as measured by HEI was highest for the high carbohydrate Pyramid group (82.9) and lowest for the low carbohydrate group (44.6). Energy intakes were low for the vegetarians (1,606 kcals) and high carbohydrate/low fat group (1360 kcals). BMIs were lowest for women in the vegetarian group (24.6) and the high carbohydrate/low fat group (24.4); for men, the lowest BMIs were observed for vegetarians (25.2) and the high carbohydrate Pyramid group (25.2). Review of the literature suggests that weight loss is independent of diet composition. Energy restriction is the key variable associated with weight reduction in the short term.
Conclusions Diets that are high in carbohydrate and low to moderate in fat tend to be lower in energy. The lowest energy intakes were observed for those on a vegetarian diet. The diet quality as measured by HEI was highest for the high carbohydrate groups and lowest for the low carbohydrate groups. The BMIs were significantly lower for men and women on the high carbohydrate diet; the highest BMIs were noted for those on a low carbohydrate diet.
I can't see any way for an attacker to utilize a math error in a decryption function
Actually this is a common attack scenario in security protocol analysis. While it does not always happen in real life there are ways it can occur. For example, you try to decrypt the message and get garbage. So what do you do? You send the garbage back to the guy, saying, I couldn't read your message, all I got was this junk. Now you have been tricked into acting as what is called an "oracle" for the decryption function. This opens up a number of attacks which is why the best cryptosystems are immune to such problems.
IMO the attack is not so severe as they make it sound. While this is a nice piece of reverse engineering and cryptanalysis, in practice the security implications are small.
The bottom line is that every process has its own copy of the RNG state. That means that breaking into one process will not help you deduce the random numbers being used by another. (The authors comment that there may be similarities between the two states, but they don't have any way to turn that into a practical attack.) So the only thing this does is it lets an attacker who compromises a certain process or program, such as IE, be able to learn the random number state. From that he can deduce old random numbers that were used, as well as deduce new random numbers that will be created in the future.
That second part is hard to avoid, but the first part, running the state backward (confusingly called forward security by cryptographers), is a sign of bad design of the RNG. Okay, Microsoft messed that up. But what are the security implications?
The implication is that if someone breaks into your computer, here is something more he can do. Not only can he take over going forward, he can learn a certain amount of data about the past. If you had an SSL protected session in the past, then he could go back and figure out what they keys were back then and decrypt the data.
But how bad is this, really? Compared to the harm he can already do by breaking into your computer? Given that he's there, he can learn all of your future SSL keys anyway. Anywhere you go in the future, your bank, paypal, ebay, any site he can learn all of your passwords and account numbers. He doesn't need to compromise the RNG for this, he can just watch your keystrokes. Basically, you are totally screwed if this happens.
Given the enormous magnitude of the security lost, the additional harm from being able to decrypt a few old requests is quite small. You are basically owned from then on. If you have insecure software that is vulnerable to such attacks, you're screwed anyway. A weakness in the RNG state means you are slightly more screwed, that's all. It's not a major change in the security equation.
The bottom line is that most of the damage comes from the break-in. Again, not to take anything away from these guys' work, but the attack they describe is at worst just the icing on a very nasty cake. Microsoft should fix it, and it sounds like they probably have in Vista, but nobody needs to change their security practices because of this flaw.
What would happen if you wrote a program to randomly create algorithms?
This brings up a few interesting facts. The vast majority of random functions (restricting to ones with the right input and output sizes) would make 100% perfect hash functions. In fact this is true virtually by definition. So in a way, finding a new hash function is easy - just pick one at random. (The same is true for encryption functions.)
However, there are two small problems. First, the vast majority of random functions take more room to implement than there are atoms in the universe. And they will take longer to execute than there have been nanoseconds since the beginning of time.
So the pick-a-random-function idea has a problem. This leads to plan B: pick a random function from among those that can be specified concisely, and which have reasonable running times. How well would that work?
That's an interesting question that I don't think anyone has an answer to. It's possible that this would work pretty well, and that virtually all of the resulting functions would be so clumpy and irregular and messy that (a) they could never be proven secure, but (b) they could never be found insecure via analytic attack. In other words, the sheer messiness of the functions might actually be a strength.
However it's also possible that this method would not work well and that most such random functions would be weak. It's well known that amateur-designed ciphers do not have a good track record, and they sometimes seem to use a similar methodology.;-)
But even if it does work, it faces another problem. Hand-crafted hash functions from the experts have another desirable property: performance. They are fine-tuned to provide the best speed possible with the greatest strength possible. They are, in effect, works of art that balance two competing goals and attempt to find the perfect harmony between them. Random, kludgy, messy hash functions might work, they might even be reasonably fast, but the chances are very low that they will ever offer the exquisite combination of speed and strength that will be exhibited by the best of the candidate algorithms in this competition.
I thought the second half of the footage was better, where the probe flies over the terminator into the dark side of the moon. The funny thing was at first in that segment I had the illusion of inverted relief, as though the craters were bumps. I kept telling myself that the sun was shining from over my right shoulder but I couldn't see it. Then suddenly as we get very close to the terminator and things were quite dark below, the terrain "popped" into correct relief and craters looked like craters again. An amusing optical illusion which often shows up when viewing alien landscapes, rather rare to see it disappear spontaneously like that.
We read just the opposite last week in the big study that was released, dietandcancerreport.org. Here's what U.S. News said about it:
Be as lean as possible. Normal is OK, but you actually want to be on the lower end of the normal range of the body mass index, a number that relates your weight to your height. Aim for a BMI of 21 to 23--for a man 6-feet tall, that's about 162 pounds. And yet today we read that being low normal is probably worse than normal, and normal is worse than overweight. Even for cancer, overweight is better than normal.
It's no wonder people are confused when widely publicized studies give contradictory advice, especially when they come out only a week apart. I can't wait to see the doubletalk from medical advice sites as they try to reconcile these conflicting results.
There have been a number of studies over the years that show the lowest death rates for people who are "fit but fat". Increasing your aerobic and muscle fitness will hopefully have real benefits for you.
Now in your case you do have a serious diabetes risk. From what I've read, weight loss is an important part of risk reduction for that specific problem. You'll probably have to diet to lose weight, exercise by itself generally does not work as you have seen. Low carb diets are not a bad way to go, most people find them easy to follow for several months although in the end the carb cravings are tough to deal with. But it could jump start your weight loss and eventually you can add in more healthy carbs like fruits and vegetables. If you can keep from going back to the junk food you'll be way ahead of the game.
It's like saying everybody must fly coach, and nobody should be able to offer first-class or business-class seating.
No,
Net neutrality is like saying that the airline can't sell you a first-class ticket, and then bump you down to coach unless you win a bidding war with another guy in first-class after you're on the airplane.
No,
Net neutrality is like using a vacuum cleaner to pick up lawn clippings, while a dwarf follows behind you with a rake.
Aren't analogies helpful? Everyone always tries to come up with analogies to deal with things, but most of the time they are misleading and even manipulative. Everyone tries to find an analogy which makes their position look best.
I would say, instead, that issues should be analyzed from first principles. If net neutrality is good or bad, just say so, and say why. Don't say it's like a chicken with eyeglasses or a frog jumping out of a pot. That doesn't help.
I don't think you can neatly separate out "good" and "bad" behaviors like this.
What if one customer "requests" that another customer's internet performance be hindered? Is that OK or not? Suppose the request comes about by the first customer hogging more than his share of bandwidth? Is that OK or not? Suppose an ISP provides special low latency connections optimized for VOIP? Is that OK or not? Suppose they slow down large downloads? Is that OK or not?
There are a million gray areas and it's only going to get worse as the net becomes more complex and more integrated into our lives. When the world is covered with a grid of network nodes every meter, when we are online 100% of the time everywhere we go, we are going to need a network infrastructure which is flexible and smart. It's absurd to imagine a bunch of graybeard holdovers from the 1980s delivering rulings saying that somebody violated the rules because he gave this packet priority over that one.
Luckily I doubt this effort is going to go anywhere. Nobody cares what these guys think. The net has moved beyond them.
It's interesting and surprising to me that you do not even consider the possibility that a rebuttal may change your mind. You seem to assume that the only thing that will happen is that you will change or improve your argument in order to strengthen it. Apparently if you have some reason for your belief, and you find that there is a very effective rebuttal, you will simply avoid citing that reason in your future arguments; but knowing that one of the reasons for your belief was wrong will not make you less likely to hold it.
It's a pretty sad commentary on the state of our reasoning process and makes one wonder why people even try to come up with arguments. I guess they can be seen as tools for closed-minded people like the OP to persuade the open-minded (which the arguers apparently consider weak-minded).
His analogy is interesting but I'm not sure he is exactly right in describing the nature of the proof.
My understanding is that the proof shows how to set up the machine so that it will execute any calculation - it will be "universal". However the question mark is that in order to do the set up, you have to prepare an infinite sequence in memory just a certain way. The question is whether that set up operation is universal itself, in which case the fact that the whole operation is universal wouldn't count - because you would have used a universal step as part of the construction.
The proof shows that the set up operation is not universal, so that removes the loophole. Therefore since the set up can be done without the power of universal computation, there is no more obstacle to the conclusion that the final computational step is universal.
That's how I thought the proof worked. It's not exactly that the whole machine is universal, and the setup is non-universal, therefore the calculation is universal. Rather, it's that this is a way of doing a universal calculation, and we just had to make sure the set up was kosher. If my understanding is correct then the objection does not apply and the proof still works.
The last flu pandemic was the Hong Kong flu 1969. It didn't exactly bring the end of the world. There were no effects like what are described here.
Everyone hears "flu pandemic" and they think 1918, which was the worst in history. But there have been pandemics since then and they haven't been that bad. Just cause it's a pandemic doesn't mean it's the worst pandemic in history. That's like thinking that every recession is going to be the Great Depression.
Detecting that software has been infected is not different in principle from existing systems like Tripwire. The publisher can publish a hash of the clean version of the software and that can be compared with the software that is running.
What is new in Open Trusted Computing is that remote servers can verify what the hash is of the software that is running, and it can't be spoofed. That means for example you could have a voting client that connects to the voting server, and the server can make sure the client is still clean before it lets you go ahead and vote. Otherwise malware could change your vote.
As far as giving the keys to the owner, the EFF was always pretty vague about how that would work. The problem is that if the owner can fake attestations, chances are malware can too, and as you said you give up all the benefits. You are left with no change at all from the status quo (which maybe is what the EFF wanted).
But seriously, if someone wanted to make their own version of a TPM that let you get at the internal keys and fake it out, that'd be fine with me. It would be distinguishable from a regular TPM because its certifying key would be different (similar to getting an SSL key from Verisign vs OpenCA). Frankly I don't think anyone would be interested in such a hackable TPM, it wouldn't do anything for anybody that I can see. So I was always afraid that EFF's real agenda was not to encourage the production of hackable TPMs, but rather to forbid unhackable TPMs, taking away choice from people in the guise of protecting them. That was the only way their idea made sense, as a sneaky step towards criminalizing TPMs.
Slashdot Mirror
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/7359513.stm
How many different proteins are made by the human body as a whole, if over 1,000 are in saliva? Do current DNA maps tell all the proteins? What are the current esimates?
Please mod parent up. He makes two excellent points: 1st that Schneier did not write the essay and basically has nothing to do with it. And 2nd, that the essay is completely wrong, as pointed out by the 1st comment replying on the essay page. Shor's algorithm will not take 72*k^3 qubits or gates, it takes about k qubits and then goes through O(k^3) steps to get the answer. Everything about the posting is wrong.
I would suggest that it will work out a little differently. Once battlebots become superior to human soldiers in warfighting ability, most battles will be between bots, with relatively few humans involved. This is simply because the bots will be the superior fighting force, and deployed preferentially by both sides. Only once one side's bot army is defeated would the war become bots against humans, and in that case the losing side would typically surrender rather than face a massacre of its population.
I left the theater wondering what happens next? Does the monster win, or are they able to destroy it? What did that mean about "dropping the hammer" on NYC? Were they going to nuke it, or just use a lot of bombs? The bombs they showed were not effective.
And I assume that the little monsters are baby versions of the big one, and that they bite people and implant eggs, which they grow very quickly into new monsters and burst out of people? Doesn't that seem like what they were implying? So there might be a danger of infections spreading elsewhere.
They had two theories for where the monster came from: the ocean, or space. Sea creatures generally would not evolve to function on land, both because of the whole air breathing thing, and more importantly because there is no buoyancy on land so their bones would not be strong enough to carry them. However if we are talking about something that can fly between stars, maybe engineered to cause destruction, that opens up a lot more possibilities, and makes the super-tough hide that much more plausible.
Also, is the monster intelligent? We didn't see much sign of it but the little ones seemed to understand the benefits of stealth, and the big one could have had an enormous brain.
Why did it attack the Statue of Liberty and tear off the head? Just general trouble-making, part of the overall destruction program as it moved up onto Manhattan?
Anyway I left the theater with a questions like these, which I suppose was the point. But I wouldn't have minded a few more answers. Maybe there will be a future version, Cloverfields, related to this movie as Aliens was to Alien, with lots of monsters attacking lots of cities and the human race being faced with extinction.
I thought the hand-held camera effect was especially inappropriate in I Am Legend because the whole point was that this guy was the last human on earth (or so we thought). But when I saw the hand-held camera I thought, who's holding the camera? With a traditional steady camera there is a sense of the omniscient view, like we are hearing a story and picturing it in our minds.
After seeing Cloverfield yesterday I watched Bourne Ultimatum on video with my family last night, and the camera work there was even more annoying. They kept showing these two-person conversations shot from over one person's shoulder, with the camera not only shaking but frequently drifting so that the out-of-focus back of the closer guy's head kept obscuring the face of the person we were looking at! It drove me crazy. I guess we were supposed to imagine that we were eavesdropping on a private conversation but again it didn't work for me, it just reminded me that there was a camera operator in the scene.
But in the end I think it's a generational thing. I'm a boomer and this is not the style I grew up with. Young people today are going to embrace it, so we all better get used to it.
It doesn't make sense to me: first you burn coal, which basically creates energy by oxidizing carbon and creating CO2; then you use solar energy to undo that and turn the CO2 back into CO. Wouldn't it make more sense to make electricity directly from the solar energy and not involve the coal at all? Besides which, if the CO is later used as fuel as they say, then eventually you're going to oxidize that anyway and create the same CO2 you would have in the first place. It seems like a very roundabout way to add solar energy into the mix.
Could someone explain this phrase, "social graph"? I haven't run into this before. And what is "your social graph" versus someone else's? Is it just your set of friends? What would it mean to move your social graph to another service, if the friends there are different or have different names?
I'd like to see an "infinite desktop" with a head mounted display and orientation sensor. I can turn my head and see many virtual feet of documents in every direction. I can use my mouse to slide my point of view right or left. To me this would be a useful model and could eventually be adapted to portable use on planes and such.
That picture is not actually from the new research, it is from old work at Carnegie-Mellon. Here is a bigger version:
http://nanolab.me.cmu.edu/projects/waterstrider/STRIDE_water_strider_big.jpg
It is part of the work of the NanoRobotics Labaratory at CMU.
At the top of the resume:
John Q. Programmer
(internet handle: glorb the barbarian)
123 Main Street
Anytown, USA
Unless he's a real straight-laced and old-fashioned hiring manager I don't think this would hurt you, and it might help by making you stand out. Plus he's more likely to Google you out of curiosity if nothing else.
Journal of the American Dietetic Association Volume 101, Issue 4, April 2001, Pages 411-420: Abstract
Objective To examine the association between a range of health and nutrition indicators and popular diets.
Design The Continuing Survey of Food Intake by Individuals (CSFII) 1994-1996 data were used to examine the relationship between prototype popular diets and diet quality as measured by the healthy eating index (HEI), consumption patterns, and body mass index (BMI). The prototype diets included vegetarian (no meat, poultry, or fish on day of survey) and non-vegetarian. The nonvegetarian group was further subdivided into low carbohydrate (less than 30% of energy from carbohydrate), medium (30% to 55%), and high (greater than 55% of energy). Within the high carbohydrate group, participants were classified as having Pyramid or non-Pyramid eating patterns. The Pyramid group was defined as 30% or less of energy from fat and at least one serving from the five major food groups in the USDA Food Guide Pyramid. Finally, the non-Pyramid group was further subdivided into low fat (less than 15% of energy from fat) and moderate fat (15% to 30% of energy from fat). In addition, a review of the published scientific literature was conducted; all studies identified were included in the review.
Subjects 10,014 adults, aged 19 years and older, from the 1994-1996 CSFII were included in the analyses of extant data. More than 200 individual studies were included in the review of the literature.
Results Analyses of the CSFII indicate that diet quality as measured by HEI was highest for the high carbohydrate Pyramid group (82.9) and lowest for the low carbohydrate group (44.6). Energy intakes were low for the vegetarians (1,606 kcals) and high carbohydrate/low fat group (1360 kcals). BMIs were lowest for women in the vegetarian group (24.6) and the high carbohydrate/low fat group (24.4); for men, the lowest BMIs were observed for vegetarians (25.2) and the high carbohydrate Pyramid group (25.2). Review of the literature suggests that weight loss is independent of diet composition. Energy restriction is the key variable associated with weight reduction in the short term.
Conclusions Diets that are high in carbohydrate and low to moderate in fat tend to be lower in energy. The lowest energy intakes were observed for those on a vegetarian diet. The diet quality as measured by HEI was highest for the high carbohydrate groups and lowest for the low carbohydrate groups. The BMIs were significantly lower for men and women on the high carbohydrate diet; the highest BMIs were noted for those on a low carbohydrate diet.
I can't see any way for an attacker to utilize a math error in a decryption function
Actually this is a common attack scenario in security protocol analysis. While it does not always happen in real life there are ways it can occur. For example, you try to decrypt the message and get garbage. So what do you do? You send the garbage back to the guy, saying, I couldn't read your message, all I got was this junk. Now you have been tricked into acting as what is called an "oracle" for the decryption function. This opens up a number of attacks which is why the best cryptosystems are immune to such problems.
IMO the attack is not so severe as they make it sound. While this is a nice piece of reverse engineering and cryptanalysis, in practice the security implications are small.
The bottom line is that every process has its own copy of the RNG state. That means that breaking into one process will not help you deduce the random numbers being used by another. (The authors comment that there may be similarities between the two states, but they don't have any way to turn that into a practical attack.) So the only thing this does is it lets an attacker who compromises a certain process or program, such as IE, be able to learn the random number state. From that he can deduce old random numbers that were used, as well as deduce new random numbers that will be created in the future.
That second part is hard to avoid, but the first part, running the state backward (confusingly called forward security by cryptographers), is a sign of bad design of the RNG. Okay, Microsoft messed that up. But what are the security implications?
The implication is that if someone breaks into your computer, here is something more he can do. Not only can he take over going forward, he can learn a certain amount of data about the past. If you had an SSL protected session in the past, then he could go back and figure out what they keys were back then and decrypt the data.
But how bad is this, really? Compared to the harm he can already do by breaking into your computer? Given that he's there, he can learn all of your future SSL keys anyway. Anywhere you go in the future, your bank, paypal, ebay, any site he can learn all of your passwords and account numbers. He doesn't need to compromise the RNG for this, he can just watch your keystrokes. Basically, you are totally screwed if this happens.
Given the enormous magnitude of the security lost, the additional harm from being able to decrypt a few old requests is quite small. You are basically owned from then on. If you have insecure software that is vulnerable to such attacks, you're screwed anyway. A weakness in the RNG state means you are slightly more screwed, that's all. It's not a major change in the security equation.
The bottom line is that most of the damage comes from the break-in. Again, not to take anything away from these guys' work, but the attack they describe is at worst just the icing on a very nasty cake. Microsoft should fix it, and it sounds like they probably have in Vista, but nobody needs to change their security practices because of this flaw.
What would happen if you wrote a program to randomly create algorithms?
;-)
This brings up a few interesting facts. The vast majority of random functions (restricting to ones with the right input and output sizes) would make 100% perfect hash functions. In fact this is true virtually by definition. So in a way, finding a new hash function is easy - just pick one at random. (The same is true for encryption functions.)
However, there are two small problems. First, the vast majority of random functions take more room to implement than there are atoms in the universe. And they will take longer to execute than there have been nanoseconds since the beginning of time.
So the pick-a-random-function idea has a problem. This leads to plan B: pick a random function from among those that can be specified concisely, and which have reasonable running times. How well would that work?
That's an interesting question that I don't think anyone has an answer to. It's possible that this would work pretty well, and that virtually all of the resulting functions would be so clumpy and irregular and messy that (a) they could never be proven secure, but (b) they could never be found insecure via analytic attack. In other words, the sheer messiness of the functions might actually be a strength.
However it's also possible that this method would not work well and that most such random functions would be weak. It's well known that amateur-designed ciphers do not have a good track record, and they sometimes seem to use a similar methodology.
But even if it does work, it faces another problem. Hand-crafted hash functions from the experts have another desirable property: performance. They are fine-tuned to provide the best speed possible with the greatest strength possible. They are, in effect, works of art that balance two competing goals and attempt to find the perfect harmony between them. Random, kludgy, messy hash functions might work, they might even be reasonably fast, but the chances are very low that they will ever offer the exquisite combination of speed and strength that will be exhibited by the best of the candidate algorithms in this competition.
I thought the second half of the footage was better, where the probe flies over the terminator into the dark side of the moon. The funny thing was at first in that segment I had the illusion of inverted relief, as though the craters were bumps. I kept telling myself that the sun was shining from over my right shoulder but I couldn't see it. Then suddenly as we get very close to the terminator and things were quite dark below, the terrain "popped" into correct relief and craters looked like craters again. An amusing optical illusion which often shows up when viewing alien landscapes, rather rare to see it disappear spontaneously like that.
It's no wonder people are confused when widely publicized studies give contradictory advice, especially when they come out only a week apart. I can't wait to see the doubletalk from medical advice sites as they try to reconcile these conflicting results.
There have been a number of studies over the years that show the lowest death rates for people who are "fit but fat". Increasing your aerobic and muscle fitness will hopefully have real benefits for you.
Now in your case you do have a serious diabetes risk. From what I've read, weight loss is an important part of risk reduction for that specific problem. You'll probably have to diet to lose weight, exercise by itself generally does not work as you have seen. Low carb diets are not a bad way to go, most people find them easy to follow for several months although in the end the carb cravings are tough to deal with. But it could jump start your weight loss and eventually you can add in more healthy carbs like fruits and vegetables. If you can keep from going back to the junk food you'll be way ahead of the game.
It's like saying everybody must fly coach, and nobody should be able to offer first-class or business-class seating.
No,
Net neutrality is like saying that the airline can't sell you a first-class ticket, and then bump you down to coach unless you win a bidding war with another guy in first-class after you're on the airplane.
No,
Net neutrality is like using a vacuum cleaner to pick up lawn clippings, while a dwarf follows behind you with a rake.
Aren't analogies helpful? Everyone always tries to come up with analogies to deal with things, but most of the time they are misleading and even manipulative. Everyone tries to find an analogy which makes their position look best.
I would say, instead, that issues should be analyzed from first principles. If net neutrality is good or bad, just say so, and say why. Don't say it's like a chicken with eyeglasses or a frog jumping out of a pot. That doesn't help.
I don't think you can neatly separate out "good" and "bad" behaviors like this.
What if one customer "requests" that another customer's internet performance be hindered? Is that OK or not? Suppose the request comes about by the first customer hogging more than his share of bandwidth? Is that OK or not? Suppose an ISP provides special low latency connections optimized for VOIP? Is that OK or not? Suppose they slow down large downloads? Is that OK or not?
There are a million gray areas and it's only going to get worse as the net becomes more complex and more integrated into our lives. When the world is covered with a grid of network nodes every meter, when we are online 100% of the time everywhere we go, we are going to need a network infrastructure which is flexible and smart. It's absurd to imagine a bunch of graybeard holdovers from the 1980s delivering rulings saying that somebody violated the rules because he gave this packet priority over that one.
Luckily I doubt this effort is going to go anywhere. Nobody cares what these guys think. The net has moved beyond them.
It's interesting and surprising to me that you do not even consider the possibility that a rebuttal may change your mind. You seem to assume that the only thing that will happen is that you will change or improve your argument in order to strengthen it. Apparently if you have some reason for your belief, and you find that there is a very effective rebuttal, you will simply avoid citing that reason in your future arguments; but knowing that one of the reasons for your belief was wrong will not make you less likely to hold it.
It's a pretty sad commentary on the state of our reasoning process and makes one wonder why people even try to come up with arguments. I guess they can be seen as tools for closed-minded people like the OP to persuade the open-minded (which the arguers apparently consider weak-minded).
His analogy is interesting but I'm not sure he is exactly right in describing the nature of the proof.
My understanding is that the proof shows how to set up the machine so that it will execute any calculation - it will be "universal". However the question mark is that in order to do the set up, you have to prepare an infinite sequence in memory just a certain way. The question is whether that set up operation is universal itself, in which case the fact that the whole operation is universal wouldn't count - because you would have used a universal step as part of the construction.
The proof shows that the set up operation is not universal, so that removes the loophole. Therefore since the set up can be done without the power of universal computation, there is no more obstacle to the conclusion that the final computational step is universal.
That's how I thought the proof worked. It's not exactly that the whole machine is universal, and the setup is non-universal, therefore the calculation is universal. Rather, it's that this is a way of doing a universal calculation, and we just had to make sure the set up was kosher. If my understanding is correct then the objection does not apply and the proof still works.
The last flu pandemic was the Hong Kong flu 1969. It didn't exactly bring the end of the world. There were no effects like what are described here.
Everyone hears "flu pandemic" and they think 1918, which was the worst in history. But there have been pandemics since then and they haven't been that bad. Just cause it's a pandemic doesn't mean it's the worst pandemic in history. That's like thinking that every recession is going to be the Great Depression.
Detecting that software has been infected is not different in principle from existing systems like Tripwire. The publisher can publish a hash of the clean version of the software and that can be compared with the software that is running.
What is new in Open Trusted Computing is that remote servers can verify what the hash is of the software that is running, and it can't be spoofed. That means for example you could have a voting client that connects to the voting server, and the server can make sure the client is still clean before it lets you go ahead and vote. Otherwise malware could change your vote.
As far as giving the keys to the owner, the EFF was always pretty vague about how that would work. The problem is that if the owner can fake attestations, chances are malware can too, and as you said you give up all the benefits. You are left with no change at all from the status quo (which maybe is what the EFF wanted).
But seriously, if someone wanted to make their own version of a TPM that let you get at the internal keys and fake it out, that'd be fine with me. It would be distinguishable from a regular TPM because its certifying key would be different (similar to getting an SSL key from Verisign vs OpenCA). Frankly I don't think anyone would be interested in such a hackable TPM, it wouldn't do anything for anybody that I can see. So I was always afraid that EFF's real agenda was not to encourage the production of hackable TPMs, but rather to forbid unhackable TPMs, taking away choice from people in the guise of protecting them. That was the only way their idea made sense, as a sneaky step towards criminalizing TPMs.