The mainland word for hacker is "heike". "hei" meaning dark/hidden and "ke" meaning guest - the word literally translates as "hidden guest".
Anyone know if they use this in Taiwan?
Re:Why China wants stake in Taiwan so bad
on
Upcoming Cyberwars
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Taiwan is a major source of investment capital for China, and only seems likely to increase in importance as one in the future. Taiwan recently eliminated an official requirement that investment in the mainland had to be chunneled through third parties, and removed its cap on mainland investment of $50 million last year.
Considering that the single largest threat to the CCP is probably the economic instability and mass urban unemployment that comes with state-owned enterprise reform, market liberalization and WTO accession, it seems exceedingly unlikely that the CCP will take any steps whose immediate consequence will inevitably be a sharp reduction in foreign capital inflows -- inflows the top leadership (or at least Zhu Rongji) seems to recognize is absolutely vital to maintain rapid growth in the country and prevent the financial sector from choking under the weight of insolvency.
THAT being said, if Taiwan actually makes a move towards independence, as seems increasingly likely, it's anyone's guess what might happen, since much of the political legitimacy of the CCP also seems based on catering to Chinese nationalism. Could they afford not to react?
All this being said, having actually read "Unrestricted Warfare" (in English), I think the threat of China as a digital renegade is completely overblown, if it is politically convenient for those with other reasons to dislike/distrust the country. There is nothing in the report that any other military institution isn't already considering. And lest we forget, the US itself targeted civilian communications infrastructure in Serbia during the Kosovo War. In any event -- its likely that air superiority will continue to be the decisive factor in contemporary military conflict -- and China doesn't have remarkably good aerospace airforce and knows it.
Strange Game
on
Awari Solved
·
· Score: 1, Redundant
If the FBI is concerned with the unauthorized use of wireless networks, they'd be better off cracking down on Starbucks, airport coffee bars, or even Bryant Park, NY.
Frankly, I'm surprised people still bother to hack from home. If I was looking to break into a guarded system, the FIRST thing I'd do would be to on a casual jaunt for a warhacking hotspot. The explosion of public 802.11 spaces opens up completely unprecedented possibilities for physical and network anonymity. The REAL question becomes what happens when someone actually uses this type of vulnerability to cause real and substantive damage to someone. Is Starbucks criminally negligant when one of their network users DOSes the DOD?
If the FBI wants to get companies to lock-down 802.11 services, all they need to do is remind firms of their legal liability for "unauthorized" uses of unguarded 802.11 networks.
Re:Photos of M$ booth...
on
LWCE Wrapup
·
· Score: 1
Yeah. I asked one of the guys at the AMD booth what was IN one of the rack servers they were demoing. I was curious about memory, hardware specs, etc.
They stared blankly at me for a moment before telling me it was running the Opteron.
Saw their booth this afternoon. From my experience, "Please don't ignore us" seems to translate into "Please come to our booth so we can hawk our Unix-on-Windows shillware".
I'm personally waiting for Linuxworld to get "0wned". I checked my email at a public terminal there this afternoon and couldn't help but notice that most of the boxen were running as root.
The Fool's Errand is a classic Mac game the author (Cliff Johnson) has made available free of charge. He even has a FreeBSD port.
This is one of the most ingenious and difficult puzzle games ever made. Interestingly, perhaps because it plays out at times like an illustrated story, the game has also aged very well. A classic - but many people haven't heard of it since it was a Mac-only game.
IANAL and all, but I believe the United States already lets educators screen films and television shows for students without paying a cent in royality fees. It's worth noting that this isn't a universal right. Film professors in some countries can get jailed for showing films in class without arranging royalty payments....
The thorny distinction might be "learning from" and "learning with" though. After all, the US doesn't legislate free cameras for film students and photographers....
You don't suppose they'd alter their numbers a bit, do you?
The official statistics are probably 1-2 percent too high. This accounts for overstated growth in the State-Owned Sector. Even so, this figure implies that economic growth in China is ONLY about 6 percent per year.
SIX PERCENT PER YEAR!!! What country in the world, US included, is pulling a better AVERAGE? And what country has a better average growth rate in the 24 odd years since 1978???
As far as political economy goes, this above post is FUD fully and completely.
Wake up, pancho.... Metropolis is one of the films Lucas repeatedly alludes to in his Star Wars trilogy, and if haven't picked up on it you should take a course or two in film analysis and quit bashing Lucas as a filmmaker.
Besides the direct visual allusions he gives us to Metropolis in AOTC, here are some of the more striking commonalities between the two films:
(1) An emphasis on clones. The heroine, Maria (who advocates peace) is replaced by a robotic Maria who looks just like her and who advocates war in an evil attempt to cause the workers to destroy themselves so as to enrich the corporate ruler of the city. Likewise the prequels show us individuals who abandon pacifism to advocate war.
(2) Overarching theme that violence/war is self-destructive. Identical to theme in AOTC, where aggressors ALWAYS lose.
(3) The hero of Metropolis is a mediator between "the brain" and "the muscle" of the city -- not a direct parallel to AOTC, but think about balance in the Force, and wisdom versus emotional action. Close enough....
(4) The hero of Metropolis is a SON! In other words, a father-son relationship is at the heart of the movie, and the son is a saviour figure. Just like Star Wars.
(5) The wicked inventor of the robotic Maria has a mechanical hand.
Translation: if you can't pick up on the more obvious of visual allusions Lucas provides in ttack of the Clones, it really isn't your duty to bash the film, or its directory for his lack of sophistication as a filmmaker....
There's a really fun essay called "Not Exactly A Knight" written by Susan Aronstein. I got my copy online a while ago, but since it doesn't seem to be posted anymore, here's the hard-copy reference instead. [Aronstein, Susan. (Summer 1995). "'Not Exactly a Knight': Arthurian Narrative and Recuperative Politics in the Indiana Jones Trilogy." Cinema Journal].
A couple of interesting quotes to give the flavor of the piece:
Temple of Doom
In Temple, Indiana appears as an individual, a knight without a court, whose services are for sale in two currencies, the monetary currency offered by Lao Che and that of "fortune and glory" found in the quest for the Ankara stones. This Indiana, far from being the ideal subject, is adamantly nonconstructed, dangerously individual. His sole ideology seems to be the one he reminds Lao Che of as he presses his knife into Willie's side: "anything goes," a code that leads to the chaos of the opening vignette. This vignette shows Indiana for what he is -- a mercenary out for his own gain, uninterested in "right" and uncontrolled by any sort of chivalric or cultural code, as evidenced by his treatment of Willie. The Temple of Doom is an Arthurian romance without Arthur and without a court; the story of an uncontrolled knight, like the Red Knight of Chretien's Perceval, bashing other knights, of a knight, like Perceval, in need of a court.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Yet, as the film explicitly identifies Marian with the various "objects" that Indiana must acquire, the two plots merge in the film's exposition of its thematic center: the need for Indiana to change his attitude toward the "objects" he seeks and accept his cultural responsibility as a citizen of a vindicated and privileged moral authority. In the beginning of the film, his attitude toward both the ark and Marian is that of a plunderer, a careless acquirer of objects who is unwilling to accept any responsibility for them. While Marcus and the American Army Intelligence recognize the ark as a symbol of both privilege and responsibility (the quest for the ark is the quest "to get a hold of [it] before the Nazis do" and to defeat Hitler and keep the world safe for democracy), Indiana sees things quite differently. His values are still the values of the Indiana Jones who set out to possess the South American idol. His motivation stems neither from dreams of America's glory nor nightmares of Nazi victory but from the simple assurance that the museum will get the Ark, an object that he defines as "a find of incredible historical significance," scoffing at Marcus's tales of the "bogey man." Similarly, his attitude toward Marian, as delineated by her own accusations when they are reunited and his initial reasons for taking her on, illustrates his code of take-as-take-can-and-consequences-be-damned: anything goes.
Quest for the Holy Grail
As the film progresses, the need for books, old wisdom, and careful thought becomes increasingly apparent as the Nazis' book-burning party explicitly identifies "evil" with the destruction of old traditions. The knowledge of those same traditions saves the two Joneses' hides more than once and, finally, allows Indiana to achieve the Grail. The first instance of the power of books occurs when it looks as though the villains in the plane are going to succeed in running them down. Indiana is at a loss; Dad, however, comes to the rescue, using his umbrella to shoo the seagulls up into the propellers, thus bringing down the plane and destroying the enemy. His explanation: I suddenly remembered my Charlemagne, 'Let my army be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky.' " In this case, reading and knowledge yield answers when wit and strength have none. As Jones, Sr., replies when the Nazis demand of the Grail diary, "What does this tell you that it doesn't tell us?" "It tells me that goosestepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them." And when he uses his fountain pen to stave off the German army, Marcus quips, "The pen, the pen, you see, is mightier than the sword."
I actually don't think the author succeeds in her point: arguing that the Indiana Jones trilogy stands as Arthurian legend: most of the themes she identified (correctly) can be attributed mostly to character development, etc. without invoking the Grail legend, etc.
That being said, to the extent that there IS any substance of this sort to the films, it seem much more likely to have been due to Lucas than Spielberg. As much as Slashdotters may enjoy trashing AOTC, it is one probably one of the most interesting intellectual films to be released in the last year for those familiar with film symbolism, etc. Spielberg has never even come close to the kind of stuff Lucas pulls off there - not even in AI.
lolol. Funny post, but the REALLY funny thing is that it is exactly the same people who gripe about the complexity of Linux, etc., who can't figure out how to copy and paste in Windows.
Imagine if the car was developed in a similar process:
Henry Ford: We can't have a stickshift, people won't understand what it does. These lights on the dashboard are also confusing.... Why not replace them with a single button saying "Start"???
Ironically, it may be one of the quieter victories of computer science that most people expect modern technology to be far easier to learn than any other developed to date.....
Keyboard error - sorry. I meant to add to that last post that his entire book is horribly incomplete as symbolism.
Admittedly, I've only read the first one (saw no reason to continue), and will admit it was an entertaining read (I can see why it is so popular), but it just doesn't work on any higher level and the comparison to Lewis is foolhardy. Case in point, why on earth does Rowling make the kids play "black" in the final chess game? The rest of her "symbolism" is equally muddled.
That being said, I'd love to hear this Dursley-Proust connection. I personally missed the chapter where Harry stalked the headmaster's wife, or Rowling's lengthy digressions on music, love and the power of memory. The comparison to Derrida and Foucault makes more sense, but only because post-modernism is itself insensible.
... that this book is poorly written. Direct translations from any language usually sound horrible. Chinese-English translations are particularly difficult because many language constructions in Chinese just don't have English equivalents. The same goes for English text simply translated into Chinese.
So while the article linked above mocks the book on the basis of its first sentence. I'd be curious to know if the author (who is seemingly a native English-speaker) has read the original Harry Potter books in their Chinese translation. Is this one really worse???
Frankly, I'd imagine that if this thing is selling as many copies as the author claims, it's either because it's well written, or because it's fooling a lot of people. And if it's fooling a lot of people, that probably means it's well written. Either that or Rowling needs to get some better English-Chinese translators....
It's a very effective way to get something which isn't very secure. Since the process may modify how the program works.
I'm not sure what this means.... I'd always through good crypto didn't distort the data. What I meant was as follows....
Any scrambling "algorithm" reducable to an additive equation (ax+by=c, etc.) introduces additional complexity to brute force attacks of at most n! (actually be much less since equations where the gcd (a,b) is greater than 1 will have multiple solutions). Incidentally, this is the reason people use relative primes to generate public and private keys in RSA, etc.
Adding a single bit to your key length already doubles the key-space to be searched. And so why bother to go through the complicated process of screwing around with the algorithm when you can achieve the same security by just pushing up the size of your key-length?
Yeah. I'm also confused why anyone would want a "personalized" crypto algorithm in the first place.
Scrambling your algorithm to prevent brute force attacks is just stupid -- you could get far more security against brute force attacks by simply adding a single bit to your key-length. And unless all of the variables were relatively prime in any case you couldn't guarantee a single solution.
I think his "unconditional cryptography" translates in this case as "I still need to read Schneier and Koblitz and study number theory".
This is a really interesting point, because this vulnerability wouldn't be so problematic with a partially digital system. Yes, a DOS attack on emergency services would be horrible, but would also be fairly easy to find the offending/trojaned machines and shut them down. If the boxes were outside the US, the government could even order all international network connections cut in a worse case scenario.
And I suspect THAT possibility would create a strong incentive for certain states to be more cooperating in combating cyber-terrorism.
I'm not sure what is more alarming, that it took this guy 6 months to crank out his piece for the Cato Institute or that someone at Salon actually imagined that anything coming out of there constitutes serious research.
This guy is not worth this attention. His essay on QWERTY hardly constitutes the rebuttal of path dependence he thinks it does. All it convinced me is that QWERTY isn't as inefficient as everyone claims. The logical gap between stating that and claiming that "lock-in" effects are trivial is enormous.
But he gets press for ideological reasons. Once you admit to certain kinds of inefficiencies you invite the kind of public debates the Cato Institute hates: the merits of price-caps, or quality controls, or "open access" requirements on things like source code or cable lines.
It all leads to a ridiculous faith in the efficiency of markets. Getting screwed by your local telephone company? It's not a monopoly! ANYONE could compete with them, so let 'em charge what they will.... i386 a standard? Microsoft?
I'm personally waiting for this crowd to produce a piece of "serious research" teling us all that Enron really was perfectly efficient after all.... What were we thinking?
The vast savings digital technologies bring to music production and sales should more than make up for any drop in sales. Music studios not RACING to take advantage of these technologies have only themselves to blame for falling revenues.
I personally look forward to the day when someone can press an album for little more than the cost of their musical instruments, and do the sound engineering/cd burning/mp3 streaming from their home PC. Ditto for film, as digital filmmaking makes visual storytelling cheap, cheap, cheap.
It's completely misleading to call Galbraith a socialist. He was a Keynesian in a time when that school had yet to confront the stagflation of the 1970s. And it certainly isn't erroneous in its most general belief that it there is some role for the government in manipulating aggregate demand. The sea change has been from fiscal to monetary policy.
Galbraith gets a lot of slack because - like Krugman - he is a great economist with clear partisan preferences (Galbraith worked closely with Kennedy).
His argument was really just intended as a critique of Schumpeter's theory of "Creative Destruction". If innovation is dominated by those with access to large pools of resources, then it IS foolish to expect the market to produce the most socially optimal outcome. Galbraith was justifying SOME role for government intervention in the market - not calling for a command economy, despite what his detractors have convinced themselves.
thence came forth Maul, a giant. This Maul did use to spoil young pilgrims with sophistry, [asking] how many times have you been forbidden to do these things?"
Slashdot Mirror
The mainland word for hacker is "heike". "hei" meaning dark/hidden and "ke" meaning guest - the word literally translates as "hidden guest".
Anyone know if they use this in Taiwan?
Taiwan is a major source of investment capital for China, and only seems likely to increase in importance as one in the future. Taiwan recently eliminated an official requirement that investment in the mainland had to be chunneled through third parties, and removed its cap on mainland investment of $50 million last year.
Considering that the single largest threat to the CCP is probably the economic instability and mass urban unemployment that comes with state-owned enterprise reform, market liberalization and WTO accession, it seems exceedingly unlikely that the CCP will take any steps whose immediate consequence will inevitably be a sharp reduction in foreign capital inflows -- inflows the top leadership (or at least Zhu Rongji) seems to recognize is absolutely vital to maintain rapid growth in the country and prevent the financial sector from choking under the weight of insolvency.
THAT being said, if Taiwan actually makes a move towards independence, as seems increasingly likely, it's anyone's guess what might happen, since much of the political legitimacy of the CCP also seems based on catering to Chinese nationalism. Could they afford not to react?
All this being said, having actually read "Unrestricted Warfare" (in English), I think the threat of China as a digital renegade is completely overblown, if it is politically convenient for those with other reasons to dislike/distrust the country. There is nothing in the report that any other military institution isn't already considering. And lest we forget, the US itself targeted civilian communications infrastructure in Serbia during the Kosovo War. In any event -- its likely that air superiority will continue to be the decisive factor in contemporary military conflict -- and China doesn't have remarkably good aerospace airforce and knows it.
... the only winning move is not to play.
Realistically, why bother?
If the FBI is concerned with the unauthorized use of wireless networks, they'd be better off cracking down on Starbucks, airport coffee bars, or even Bryant Park, NY.
Frankly, I'm surprised people still bother to hack from home. If I was looking to break into a guarded system, the FIRST thing I'd do would be to on a casual jaunt for a warhacking hotspot. The explosion of public 802.11 spaces opens up completely unprecedented possibilities for physical and network anonymity. The REAL question becomes what happens when someone actually uses this type of vulnerability to cause real and substantive damage to someone. Is Starbucks criminally negligant when one of their network users DOSes the DOD?
If the FBI wants to get companies to lock-down 802.11 services, all they need to do is remind firms of their legal liability for "unauthorized" uses of unguarded 802.11 networks.
Yeah. I asked one of the guys at the AMD booth what was IN one of the rack servers they were demoing. I was curious about memory, hardware specs, etc.
They stared blankly at me for a moment before telling me it was running the Opteron.
Saw their booth this afternoon. From my experience, "Please don't ignore us" seems to translate into "Please come to our booth so we can hawk our Unix-on-Windows shillware".
I'm personally waiting for Linuxworld to get "0wned". I checked my email at a public terminal there this afternoon and couldn't help but notice that most of the boxen were running as root.
The Fool's Errand is a classic Mac game the author (Cliff Johnson) has made available free of charge. He even has a FreeBSD port.
This is one of the most ingenious and difficult puzzle games ever made. Interestingly, perhaps because it plays out at times like an illustrated story, the game has also aged very well. A classic - but many people haven't heard of it since it was a Mac-only game.
IANAL and all, but I believe the United States already lets educators screen films and television shows for students without paying a cent in royality fees. It's worth noting that this isn't a universal right. Film professors in some countries can get jailed for showing films in class without arranging royalty payments....
The thorny distinction might be "learning from" and "learning with" though. After all, the US doesn't legislate free cameras for film students and photographers....
You don't suppose they'd alter their numbers a bit, do you?
The official statistics are probably 1-2 percent too high. This accounts for overstated growth in the State-Owned Sector. Even so, this figure implies that economic growth in China is ONLY about 6 percent per year.
SIX PERCENT PER YEAR!!! What country in the world, US included, is pulling a better AVERAGE? And what country has a better average growth rate in the 24 odd years since 1978???
As far as political economy goes, this above post is FUD fully and completely.
Wake up, pancho.... Metropolis is one of the films Lucas repeatedly alludes to in his Star Wars trilogy, and if haven't picked up on it you should take a course or two in film analysis and quit bashing Lucas as a filmmaker.
Besides the direct visual allusions he gives us to Metropolis in AOTC, here are some of the more striking commonalities between the two films:
(1) An emphasis on clones. The heroine, Maria (who advocates peace) is replaced by a robotic Maria who looks just like her and who advocates war in an evil attempt to cause the workers to destroy themselves so as to enrich the corporate ruler of the city. Likewise the prequels show us individuals who abandon pacifism to advocate war.
(2) Overarching theme that violence/war is self-destructive. Identical to theme in AOTC, where aggressors ALWAYS lose.
(3) The hero of Metropolis is a mediator between "the brain" and "the muscle" of the city -- not a direct parallel to AOTC, but think about balance in the Force, and wisdom versus emotional action. Close enough....
(4) The hero of Metropolis is a SON! In other words, a father-son relationship is at the heart of the movie, and the son is a saviour figure. Just like Star Wars.
(5) The wicked inventor of the robotic Maria has a mechanical hand.
Translation: if you can't pick up on the more obvious of visual allusions Lucas provides in ttack of the Clones, it really isn't your duty to bash the film, or its directory for his lack of sophistication as a filmmaker....
There's a really fun essay called "Not Exactly A Knight" written by Susan Aronstein. I got my copy online a while ago, but since it doesn't seem to be posted anymore, here's the hard-copy reference instead. [Aronstein, Susan. (Summer 1995). "'Not Exactly a Knight': Arthurian Narrative and Recuperative Politics in the Indiana Jones Trilogy." Cinema Journal].
A couple of interesting quotes to give the flavor of the piece:
Temple of Doom
In Temple, Indiana appears as an individual, a knight without a court, whose services are for sale in two currencies, the monetary currency offered by Lao Che and that of "fortune and glory" found in the quest for the Ankara stones. This Indiana, far from being the ideal subject, is adamantly nonconstructed, dangerously individual. His sole ideology seems to be the one he reminds Lao Che of as he presses his knife into Willie's side: "anything goes," a code that leads to the chaos of the opening vignette. This vignette shows Indiana for what he is -- a mercenary out for his own gain, uninterested in "right" and uncontrolled by any sort of chivalric or cultural code, as evidenced by his treatment of Willie. The Temple of Doom is an Arthurian romance without Arthur and without a court; the story of an uncontrolled knight, like the Red Knight of Chretien's Perceval, bashing other knights, of a knight, like Perceval, in need of a court.
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Yet, as the film explicitly identifies Marian with the various "objects" that Indiana must acquire, the two plots merge in the film's exposition of its thematic center: the need for Indiana to change his attitude toward the "objects" he seeks and accept his cultural responsibility as a citizen of a vindicated and privileged moral authority. In the beginning of the film, his attitude toward both the ark and Marian is that of a plunderer, a careless acquirer of objects who is unwilling to accept any responsibility for them. While Marcus and the American Army Intelligence recognize the ark as a symbol of both privilege and responsibility (the quest for the ark is the quest "to get a hold of [it] before the Nazis do" and to defeat Hitler and keep the world safe for democracy), Indiana sees things quite differently. His values are still the values of the Indiana Jones who set out to possess the South American idol. His motivation stems neither from dreams of America's glory nor nightmares of Nazi victory but from the simple assurance that the museum will get the Ark, an object that he defines as "a find of incredible historical significance," scoffing at Marcus's tales of the "bogey man." Similarly, his attitude toward Marian, as delineated by her own accusations when they are reunited and his initial reasons for taking her on, illustrates his code of take-as-take-can-and-consequences-be-damned: anything goes.
Quest for the Holy Grail
As the film progresses, the need for books, old wisdom, and careful thought becomes increasingly apparent as the Nazis' book-burning party explicitly identifies "evil" with the destruction of old traditions. The knowledge of those same traditions saves the two Joneses' hides more than once and, finally, allows Indiana to achieve the Grail. The first instance of the power of books occurs when it looks as though the villains in the plane are going to succeed in running them down. Indiana is at a loss; Dad, however, comes to the rescue, using his umbrella to shoo the seagulls up into the propellers, thus bringing down the plane and destroying the enemy. His explanation: I suddenly remembered my Charlemagne, 'Let my army be the rocks and the trees and the birds in the sky.' " In this case, reading and knowledge yield answers when wit and strength have none. As Jones, Sr., replies when the Nazis demand of the Grail diary, "What does this tell you that it doesn't tell us?" "It tells me that goosestepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them." And when he uses his fountain pen to stave off the German army, Marcus quips, "The pen, the pen, you see, is mightier than the sword."
I actually don't think the author succeeds in her point: arguing that the Indiana Jones trilogy stands as Arthurian legend: most of the themes she identified (correctly) can be attributed mostly to character development, etc. without invoking the Grail legend, etc.
That being said, to the extent that there IS any substance of this sort to the films, it seem much more likely to have been due to Lucas than Spielberg. As much as Slashdotters may enjoy trashing AOTC, it is one probably one of the most interesting intellectual films to be released in the last year for those familiar with film symbolism, etc. Spielberg has never even come close to the kind of stuff Lucas pulls off there - not even in AI.
lolol. Funny post, but the REALLY funny thing is that it is exactly the same people who gripe about the complexity of Linux, etc., who can't figure out how to copy and paste in Windows.
Imagine if the car was developed in a similar process:
Henry Ford: We can't have a stickshift, people won't understand what it does. These lights on the dashboard are also confusing.... Why not replace them with a single button saying "Start"???
Ironically, it may be one of the quieter victories of computer science that most people expect modern technology to be far easier to learn than any other developed to date.....
Keyboard error - sorry. I meant to add to that last post that his entire book is horribly incomplete as symbolism.
Admittedly, I've only read the first one (saw no reason to continue), and will admit it was an entertaining read (I can see why it is so popular), but it just doesn't work on any higher level and the comparison to Lewis is foolhardy. Case in point, why on earth does Rowling make the kids play "black" in the final chess game? The rest of her "symbolism" is equally muddled.
That being said, I'd love to hear this Dursley-Proust connection. I personally missed the chapter where Harry stalked the headmaster's wife, or Rowling's lengthy digressions on music, love and the power of memory. The comparison to Derrida and Foucault makes more sense, but only because post-modernism is itself insensible.
Comparing Rowling to Lewis is embarassing.
... that this book is poorly written. Direct translations from any language usually sound horrible. Chinese-English translations are particularly difficult because many language constructions in Chinese just don't have English equivalents. The same goes for English text simply translated into Chinese.
So while the article linked above mocks the book on the basis of its first sentence. I'd be curious to know if the author (who is seemingly a native English-speaker) has read the original Harry Potter books in their Chinese translation. Is this one really worse???
Frankly, I'd imagine that if this thing is selling as many copies as the author claims, it's either because it's well written, or because it's fooling a lot of people. And if it's fooling a lot of people, that probably means it's well written. Either that or Rowling needs to get some better English-Chinese translators....
It's a very effective way to get something which isn't very secure. Since the process may modify how the program works.
I'm not sure what this means.... I'd always through good crypto didn't distort the data. What I meant was as follows....
Any scrambling "algorithm" reducable to an additive equation (ax+by=c, etc.) introduces additional complexity to brute force attacks of at most n! (actually be much less since equations where the gcd (a,b) is greater than 1 will have multiple solutions). Incidentally, this is the reason people use relative primes to generate public and private keys in RSA, etc.
Adding a single bit to your key length already doubles the key-space to be searched. And so why bother to go through the complicated process of screwing around with the algorithm when you can achieve the same security by just pushing up the size of your key-length?
Yeah. I'm also confused why anyone would want a "personalized" crypto algorithm in the first place.
Scrambling your algorithm to prevent brute force attacks is just stupid -- you could get far more security against brute force attacks by simply adding a single bit to your key-length. And unless all of the variables were relatively prime in any case you couldn't guarantee a single solution.
I think his "unconditional cryptography" translates in this case as "I still need to read Schneier and Koblitz and study number theory".
This is a really interesting point, because this vulnerability wouldn't be so problematic with a partially digital system. Yes, a DOS attack on emergency services would be horrible, but would also be fairly easy to find the offending/trojaned machines and shut them down. If the boxes were outside the US, the government could even order all international network connections cut in a worse case scenario.
And I suspect THAT possibility would create a strong incentive for certain states to be more cooperating in combating cyber-terrorism.
Do you need three eyes?
Really interesting link! Thanks for posting.
I'm not sure what is more alarming, that it took this guy 6 months to crank out his piece for the Cato Institute or that someone at Salon actually imagined that anything coming out of there constitutes serious research.
This guy is not worth this attention. His essay on QWERTY hardly constitutes the rebuttal of path dependence he thinks it does. All it convinced me is that QWERTY isn't as inefficient as everyone claims. The logical gap between stating that and claiming that "lock-in" effects are trivial is enormous.
But he gets press for ideological reasons. Once you admit to certain kinds of inefficiencies you invite the kind of public debates the Cato Institute hates: the merits of price-caps, or quality controls, or "open access" requirements on things like source code or cable lines.
It all leads to a ridiculous faith in the efficiency of markets. Getting screwed by your local telephone company? It's not a monopoly! ANYONE could compete with them, so let 'em charge what they will.... i386 a standard? Microsoft?
I'm personally waiting for this crowd to produce a piece of "serious research" teling us all that Enron really was perfectly efficient after all.... What were we thinking?
The vast savings digital technologies bring to music production and sales should more than make up for any drop in sales. Music studios not RACING to take advantage of these technologies have only themselves to blame for falling revenues.
I personally look forward to the day when someone can press an album for little more than the cost of their musical instruments, and do the sound engineering/cd burning/mp3 streaming from their home PC. Ditto for film, as digital filmmaking makes visual storytelling cheap, cheap, cheap.
The change was made to make the scene consistent with the rest of the saga. Attackers always lose. Always.
And Greedo lost big time.
It's completely misleading to call Galbraith a socialist. He was a Keynesian in a time when that school had yet to confront the stagflation of the 1970s. And it certainly isn't erroneous in its most general belief that it there is some role for the government in manipulating aggregate demand. The sea change has been from fiscal to monetary policy.
Galbraith gets a lot of slack because - like Krugman - he is a great economist with clear partisan preferences (Galbraith worked closely with Kennedy).
His argument was really just intended as a critique of Schumpeter's theory of "Creative Destruction". If innovation is dominated by those with access to large pools of resources, then it IS foolish to expect the market to produce the most socially optimal outcome. Galbraith was justifying SOME role for government intervention in the market - not calling for a command economy, despite what his detractors have convinced themselves.
Ditto for Keynes....
Maul comes from Pilgrim's Progress
thence came forth Maul, a giant. This Maul did use to spoil young pilgrims with sophistry, [asking] how many times have you been forbidden to do these things?"