However, it does say "limited times". Now, I'm a mathematician, and so I tend to think of this as "a finite time", which worries me a lot because 1,000,000,000,000 years is still a finite number of years. Consequently, I would argue that you have to take "limited times" to mean "a short period of time". Obviously, this has to be interpreted, but I think that most people would consider 14 years to be rather long anyway, so this 14-year thing seems generous.
Apparently nobody is reading the story. It says that the govt can give ISPs a list of websites to block, not that the ISPs have to proactively decide who to block. This definitely stinks of bark-and-no-bite; if the govt is going to come up with a list of things to block, why not just shut the sites down right afterward instead of asking ISPs to block them? It seems to me that the approach legislated treats the symptoms. OTOH, I can understand the case of sites hosted in other countries that are unwilling or unable to stop them. More than likely, it's a way for lawmakers to look good to their constituents, not a real (read: effective) way to stop child porn.
The entire Sony booth is 2000 square meters, only 100 square meters where dedicated to the PS2.
That's it?!? I was under the impression that the PS2 generated a fairly large chunk of Sony's cash (maybe even over half). Anyone have exact numbers on this?
In theory, sure, you can attack encryption that's based on the difficulty of factoring. The researchers used the DNA computer to solve a 3-SAT instance. You can reduce factorization to a SAT instance pretty easily; I've actually written code to do this before. It basically works like this:
1. Take a multiplier circuit with 2n bits of output (where 2n is slightly greater than the size of the product of primes you're trying to factor, eg, in RSA).
2. Turn the circuit into a CIRCUIT-SAT instance (nontrivial, but doable, I have code that does it for 2 types of multiplier circuits, array and Wallace tree). The SAT variables are the input bits of the multiplier.
3. Add a couple of clauses to guarantee that neither of the inputs can be "000...001", i.e., that you won't end up factoring the 2n bit product-of-primes as 1 and itself. This is not strictly necessary if the product of primes doesn't fit in n bits, I don't think.
4. Reduce to 3-SAT.
5. Feed to DNA computer.
6. Wait.
The thing to note here is that even though the researchers solved a nontrivial 3-SAT instance (i.e., it had only one solution, like a factorization problem involving the product of 2 primes), it was still relatively small scale. You can't really solve the problem "on paper", but your computer can do it with a good SAT solver like CHAFF in a reasonable amount of time (i.e., much less than the life of the universe). Tough factorization problems involve many more clauses and variables, so I don't think this is a threat to the security of your 2048-bit RSA key just yet.
It was 3-SAT. 2-SAT is not in NP. See the (fantastic) algorithms book by Cormen, Leiserson and Rivest for proofs. IIRC any SAT problem can be reduced to 3-SAT.
You seem to be completely ignoring the fact that consumers pay for things like music and movies if and only if they meet certain basic convenience criteria. I'm not saying that it's not possible to invent a system which makes copying music so annoying that it's nigh on impossible; I'm saying that nobody ever would. Again, convenience is the key issue. For example, I don't have to douse myself in gasoline and set myself on fire in order to get Sam Goody to sell me a CD; that would be absurd. It should not be too much of a stretch to see how "Tim" is (almost) equally inconvenient, and thus would never work as a music delivery system. It goes something like this:
1. Record companies invent Tim (or something equivalent to Tim, in the abstract, annoying-to-use sense)
2. People don't buy/use Tim because Tim sucks
3. Record companies go back to making CDs or go bankrupt
Studies have shown that the brains of teenagers go through changes more drastic than those of any other age group. This is one of the reasons why alcohol consumption in teens is believed to be more dangerous than in adults.)
You're confusing correlation with causation. Just because adolescent brains change, this doesn't mean that kids lose all thinking abilities when the hormones hit and are suddenly open to any suggestion that violence is okay. Thousands of counterexamples to this, as you note. No, we can't rule out that they were influenced. But what the judge *can* do is say that even if they were influenced, it doesn't make them unaccountable for their actions. American society needs to decide once and for all whether it likes the idea of people being responsible for their actions. If so, fantastic, these kids were at fault. If not, I'm getting the hell out of dodge.
Come, now. This is the same idea behind the US embargo on Cuba. And what that's done there is make the poor people (i.e., the masses) in Cuba less capable of doing anything about Castro, while not hurting Castro in the least. What would help Cuba out of their problems is more money; I think a more open society follows the bourgeosie. Just my opinion, perhaps. OTOH, China is a different animal in the whole SPAM (tm) debate. I'm not saying they shouldn't be blocked, I'm just saying that your rationale for blocking them has a bit of a flaw.
For example, generalities (like "Windows is more secure than Linux") are barely defensible.[...] What I am trying to say is that Linux is not more secure than Windows.
So windows is not more secure than linux, and linux is not more secure than windows. They're exactly equal in security? Huh?
I would encourage you also to look into some of the literature regarding cheat proofing methods. Having an authoritative game server (or server farm) is useful, but it doesn't solve every problem. If people are actually going to play the game, then people are going to try to gain an unfair advantage in the process. It's the nature of the beast (er, man).
There are quite a few good papers (Yes, academic! Don't you wish you could do research about games?) out there on the subject. You may particularly want to look into some kind of lockstep protocol, as time cheats (i.e., when a player waits for other nearby players to "make a move" -- whatever that means in your game -- before entering their own in response) can be reduced/stopped with something like this. That's just the tip of the iceberg, though...
It seems to me that Alan Cox's problem with working for RH after AOL/TW buys it isn't so much that RH itself would suddenly change drastically. His problem is that while RH is merrily working on its newest products, some other part of the AOL/TW empire is lobbying Washington about the DMCA, or SSSCA, or whatever. Alan doesn't want to be a part of that, even in the most remote of ways. And he can afford to bail on RH, so why not do it?
I'm all for bugging people under criminal investigation with the proper warrants. I'm not, however, in favor of systems that (potentially) scan thousands of electronic transmissions, even if they swear that they only use it with proper court orders. "Honest." You can call me overly paranoid if you like, but there are a lot of other people who have lost this trust. The loss of trust is itself an indication of some slippage down the slope.
You may very well be right. But nevertheless, people of my age group aren't merely indifferent to the ad, but often react quite negatively. I wonder whether they anticipated that kind of reaction. Admittedly, a lot of (poor) college kids don't buy new cars, but the Focus is modestly priced. At any rate, it seems like your ad should try not to alienate any potential buyers. And I'd maintain that even if the ad was aimed at the late-twenties to mid-thirties crowd, many of them would not be too attracted to the ad, for many of the same reasons people my age aren't.
Speaking of terrible ads/slogans, does anyone from the Metro Detroit area remember the Ford Focus ads they used to run (before they ran out of money and can't afford to advertise anymore..)? They had one (extremely insulting) ad with kids (roughly college age) saying stuff in response to the Focus like "Bumpin' system!" and "Phat!" or some crap like that. Not that those words are never spoken by people in roughly the generation represented in the ad, but it was really fakey. But that's not the insulting part; they had some kind of faux reporter-lady interpreting what they were saying:
Hip Youngster: "Bumpin' tunes!"
Lady: "He means, 'great sound system'!"
I could never figure out why... obviously they were trying to target the Focus at a younger demographic, who can presumably decipher the "hip lingo" in the ad. Is the lady just there so as not to confuse Grandpa? As if he'd trade in his Lincoln Bigass(tm) for a Focus. And of course, the ad ends with a screen displaying the slogan "Detroit Techno". Yeah, I'd love to know what the hell the Focus has to do with techno. Another company trying to cash in on electronic music's association with cool.
Read the article. It says that there are about 1700 people between the two courses. That's (on average) 850 people per course. That's huge, agreed, but even if you only have 60 people (hence 60 projects) in a class, and if they're of significant difficulty (e.g., more than just binary trees or mergesort or something like that), you can't correct them all in a reasonable amount of time. Which means splitting up the work among TAs and the prof, so cheaters slip through when the two identical programs are split between two graders.
This is news? My school (Michigan) has been using programs like this for quite a while (at least a couple of years). Written here, not bought, AFAIK. And yes, they do catch a lot of cheaters, which I think is fantastic. They're still imperfect, though... I've heard of a case or two where the software was tricked when no cheating actually occurred.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought you had to know Morse code to get a ham license. That seems like a rather nontrivial thing to learn. Am I mistaken here, or what?
However, it does say "limited times". Now, I'm a mathematician, and so I tend to think of this as "a finite time", which worries me a lot because 1,000,000,000,000 years is still a finite number of years. Consequently, I would argue that you have to take "limited times" to mean "a short period of time". Obviously, this has to be interpreted, but I think that most people would consider 14 years to be rather long anyway, so this 14-year thing seems generous.
You think these people are going to respect what got them where they are? Please. Michael Eisner would sell his own mother.
BGP's routing algorithm and those of its its cousins and ancestors. Without this routing algorithm, you couldn't read /.
Imagine being able to IRC someone to pass the popcorn!
Imagine being so lazy as to be unwilling to turn and ask them to pass the popcorn!
Apparently nobody is reading the story. It says that the govt can give ISPs a list of websites to block, not that the ISPs have to proactively decide who to block. This definitely stinks of bark-and-no-bite; if the govt is going to come up with a list of things to block, why not just shut the sites down right afterward instead of asking ISPs to block them? It seems to me that the approach legislated treats the symptoms. OTOH, I can understand the case of sites hosted in other countries that are unwilling or unable to stop them. More than likely, it's a way for lawmakers to look good to their constituents, not a real (read: effective) way to stop child porn.
The entire Sony booth is 2000 square meters, only 100 square meters where dedicated to the PS2.
That's it?!? I was under the impression that the PS2 generated a fairly large chunk of Sony's cash (maybe even over half). Anyone have exact numbers on this?
Since when was looking at pr0n considered "getting serious"? More like "getting busy".
But the XML still says "posthomous".
In theory, sure, you can attack encryption that's based on the difficulty of factoring. The researchers used the DNA computer to solve a 3-SAT instance. You can reduce factorization to a SAT instance pretty easily; I've actually written code to do this before. It basically works like this:
1. Take a multiplier circuit with 2n bits of output (where 2n is slightly greater than the size of the product of primes you're trying to factor, eg, in RSA).
2. Turn the circuit into a CIRCUIT-SAT instance (nontrivial, but doable, I have code that does it for 2 types of multiplier circuits, array and Wallace tree). The SAT variables are the input bits of the multiplier.
3. Add a couple of clauses to guarantee that neither of the inputs can be "000...001", i.e., that you won't end up factoring the 2n bit product-of-primes as 1 and itself. This is not strictly necessary if the product of primes doesn't fit in n bits, I don't think.
4. Reduce to 3-SAT.
5. Feed to DNA computer.
6. Wait.
The thing to note here is that even though the researchers solved a nontrivial 3-SAT instance (i.e., it had only one solution, like a factorization problem involving the product of 2 primes), it was still relatively small scale. You can't really solve the problem "on paper", but your computer can do it with a good SAT solver like CHAFF in a reasonable amount of time (i.e., much less than the life of the universe). Tough factorization problems involve many more clauses and variables, so I don't think this is a threat to the security of your 2048-bit RSA key just yet.
It was 3-SAT. 2-SAT is not in NP. See the (fantastic) algorithms book by Cormen, Leiserson and Rivest for proofs. IIRC any SAT problem can be reduced to 3-SAT.
You seem to be completely ignoring the fact that consumers pay for things like music and movies if and only if they meet certain basic convenience criteria. I'm not saying that it's not possible to invent a system which makes copying music so annoying that it's nigh on impossible; I'm saying that nobody ever would. Again, convenience is the key issue. For example, I don't have to douse myself in gasoline and set myself on fire in order to get Sam Goody to sell me a CD; that would be absurd. It should not be too much of a stretch to see how "Tim" is (almost) equally inconvenient, and thus would never work as a music delivery system. It goes something like this:
1. Record companies invent Tim (or something equivalent to Tim, in the abstract, annoying-to-use sense)
2. People don't buy/use Tim because Tim sucks
3. Record companies go back to making CDs or go bankrupt
Quod erat demonstrandum.
Studies have shown that the brains of teenagers go through changes more drastic than those of any other age group. This is one of the reasons why alcohol consumption in teens is believed to be more dangerous than in adults.)
You're confusing correlation with causation. Just because adolescent brains change, this doesn't mean that kids lose all thinking abilities when the hormones hit and are suddenly open to any suggestion that violence is okay. Thousands of counterexamples to this, as you note. No, we can't rule out that they were influenced. But what the judge *can* do is say that even if they were influenced, it doesn't make them unaccountable for their actions. American society needs to decide once and for all whether it likes the idea of people being responsible for their actions. If so, fantastic, these kids were at fault. If not, I'm getting the hell out of dodge.
Come, now. This is the same idea behind the US embargo on Cuba. And what that's done there is make the poor people (i.e., the masses) in Cuba less capable of doing anything about Castro, while not hurting Castro in the least. What would help Cuba out of their problems is more money; I think a more open society follows the bourgeosie. Just my opinion, perhaps. OTOH, China is a different animal in the whole SPAM (tm) debate. I'm not saying they shouldn't be blocked, I'm just saying that your rationale for blocking them has a bit of a flaw.
There should be an automatic mod up for Monty Python quotes. Is somebody working on that???
Maybe we could get some college students to do it (from start to finish, even) and then open source it.
...and I quote:
For example, generalities (like "Windows is more secure than Linux") are barely defensible.[...] What I am trying to say is that Linux is not more secure than Windows.
So windows is not more secure than linux, and linux is not more secure than windows. They're exactly equal in security? Huh?
"camaraderie"
Hey, you asked.
I would encourage you also to look into some of the literature regarding cheat proofing methods. Having an authoritative game server (or server farm) is useful, but it doesn't solve every problem. If people are actually going to play the game, then people are going to try to gain an unfair advantage in the process. It's the nature of the beast (er, man).
There are quite a few good papers (Yes, academic! Don't you wish you could do research about games?) out there on the subject. You may particularly want to look into some kind of lockstep protocol, as time cheats (i.e., when a player waits for other nearby players to "make a move" -- whatever that means in your game -- before entering their own in response) can be reduced/stopped with something like this. That's just the tip of the iceberg, though...
It seems to me that Alan Cox's problem with working for RH after AOL/TW buys it isn't so much that RH itself would suddenly change drastically. His problem is that while RH is merrily working on its newest products, some other part of the AOL/TW empire is lobbying Washington about the DMCA, or SSSCA, or whatever. Alan doesn't want to be a part of that, even in the most remote of ways. And he can afford to bail on RH, so why not do it?
I'm all for bugging people under criminal investigation with the proper warrants. I'm not, however, in favor of systems that (potentially) scan thousands of electronic transmissions, even if they swear that they only use it with proper court orders. "Honest." You can call me overly paranoid if you like, but there are a lot of other people who have lost this trust. The loss of trust is itself an indication of some slippage down the slope.
You may very well be right. But nevertheless, people of my age group aren't merely indifferent to the ad, but often react quite negatively. I wonder whether they anticipated that kind of reaction. Admittedly, a lot of (poor) college kids don't buy new cars, but the Focus is modestly priced. At any rate, it seems like your ad should try not to alienate any potential buyers. And I'd maintain that even if the ad was aimed at the late-twenties to mid-thirties crowd, many of them would not be too attracted to the ad, for many of the same reasons people my age aren't.
Speaking of terrible ads/slogans, does anyone from the Metro Detroit area remember the Ford Focus ads they used to run (before they ran out of money and can't afford to advertise anymore..)? They had one (extremely insulting) ad with kids (roughly college age) saying stuff in response to the Focus like "Bumpin' system!" and "Phat!" or some crap like that. Not that those words are never spoken by people in roughly the generation represented in the ad, but it was really fakey. But that's not the insulting part; they had some kind of faux reporter-lady interpreting what they were saying:
Hip Youngster: "Bumpin' tunes!"
Lady: "He means, 'great sound system'!"
I could never figure out why... obviously they were trying to target the Focus at a younger demographic, who can presumably decipher the "hip lingo" in the ad. Is the lady just there so as not to confuse Grandpa? As if he'd trade in his Lincoln Bigass(tm) for a Focus. And of course, the ad ends with a screen displaying the slogan "Detroit Techno". Yeah, I'd love to know what the hell the Focus has to do with techno. Another company trying to cash in on electronic music's association with cool.
End rant.
Read the article. It says that there are about 1700 people between the two courses. That's (on average) 850 people per course. That's huge, agreed, but even if you only have 60 people (hence 60 projects) in a class, and if they're of significant difficulty (e.g., more than just binary trees or mergesort or something like that), you can't correct them all in a reasonable amount of time. Which means splitting up the work among TAs and the prof, so cheaters slip through when the two identical programs are split between two graders.
This is news? My school (Michigan) has been using programs like this for quite a while (at least a couple of years). Written here, not bought, AFAIK. And yes, they do catch a lot of cheaters, which I think is fantastic. They're still imperfect, though... I've heard of a case or two where the software was tricked when no cheating actually occurred.
Presumably, SGI sold the rights to the THREE-DIMENSIONAL cube logo as well, so they'd have to go to a square to avoid legal trouble...