Except that doesn't preserve (ratios of) lengths, so it's not so helpful finding the longest route. It also shows at most half the surface (and needs an infinite map to do that). No projection preserves both lengths and angles; the globe and string is a better suggestion.
Yes - the longest _land_ route, which the article is about, does have one end near Sagres, Portugal, but the quoted text is describing the longest sea route.
If you can persuade the court that you really don't have the password or decryption key they asked for, then it's not an offense not to provide it. If you really have forgotten it but the court concludes that on the balance of probabilities you are lying about that, _then_ you are boned. Especially if there really wasn't any child porn on your computer and remembering the password would have let you prove that.
If you are in a game where you are playing/betting against other players, not just the house, and you are better than the other players by more than the house margin, then you can win in the long run. Many of the people who think they are in that situation are idiots, but it is possible.
> copious buttloads of languages that use some sort of bytecode under the hood
But fewer where the bytecode interpreter is written using itself. The historical self-hosting milestone is usually when the compiler written in the language can compile itself (once it's been compiled with another version first), and a Java compiler written in Java is nothing special.
> power your lights with fifty-packs of C-batteries that you have to replace once a week
Or you run a cable to the shed. There are applications where that just isn't practical, like data logging devices miles from the nearest power, but for a typical garden shed, it's much more feasible, even if a solar solution would be simpler (assuming you do a proper job of burying the cable in an appropriate conduit).
That's subverting cc, not gcc. The paper was about subverting the login call and the (singular) C compiler on the (singular) UNIX system.
Subverting enough versions of both gcc and other compilers that recompiling arbitrary versions of gcc and using them to recompile arbitrary versions of Linux or *BSD or OpenSolaris (allowing for crosscompiling as well) was likely to preserve the backdoor would be far harder.
In the case of this exploit, it's because of a failure to check user-supplied data, and giving a negative number as the alleged length of an array causing overflow to a ludicrous amount. If you are mallocing a size you calculated entirely yourself, and it fails, it's likely to be because something is already corrupt, and it will be harder to turn into an exploit, but it's still good practice to check.
Though "my kid is sick, I'll be working from home today" is more productive than "my kid is sick, I can't come into the office so I won't be able to work today".
I knew someone who's PhD involved irradiating cockroaches. It wasn't research on their survival as such - the "liquidize the irradiated cockroaches to extract the DNA for testing" stage took care of that - but it did involve "wind the source out of the lead tube by remote control from behind the shield because it isn't something you would want to expose yourself to".
Yes, they've more recently improved (than some years ago) the search by not totally ignoring "the" when indexing, and ignoring it in a search even when quoted. The point is that just ignoring it isn't the whole answer. And it's still weirdly unreliable, because when I tried it before posting, it didn't work. Trying it again now, it shows "Matt Johnson" as a "related search", which it didn't before (but searching for an album name and then clicking on the artist name did work - maybe doing that boosted the search priority).
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 has been around for years (7), but The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Commencement No. 4) Order 2007 actually came into effect on October 1st. http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2007/09/30/time-to-forget/
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30660 "In 1972, we arrested the members of the A-Team for a crime they swore they didn't commit," Gen. Stephen Lupo said. "They broke out of our maximum-security stockade, and from that moment forth, I thought of nothing but their recapture. However, a recent audit of their file has revealed that the arrest of the Alpha Force members was made in error. The U.S. military deeply regrets the mistake."
> they get a shit-ton of free advertising for doing the "right thing".
Doing the right thing only once they were threatened with a lawsuit isn't entirely positive advertising. If it encourages other comapnies to do the right thing from the start, it's a win for BusyBox (and GPL software generally) too.
It says "from the point of view of an average user, someone who wouldn't want to enter text commands, hunt the Web for drivers and enabling software, or learn a whole new user interface'" right there in the post, you didn't even have to RTFA.
Though one point he does miss is that even non-tech users sometimes have friends or family who are techies, and in that situation Linux might be a better fit. Windows is still generally easier to use out of the box, but when it doesn't work and the help just says "consult your system administrator", Linux can be easier to find fixes for.
> there are profound difficulties involved in scaling quantum computing.
15 was factored with a quantum computer in 2001: http://cryptome.org/shor-nature.htm Now, six years later, we've advanced to the point where we can factor, um, 15. (Maybe this is a method expected to scale better in future or something. But, as you say, not an immediate problem.)
The UK used (and in some local authorities still does) split kids into grammar schools and comprehensives. The downside is that one test result aged 11 doesn't necessarily accurately reflect which type of school you should be in for all subjects for the next seven years.
Yes, but if you are buying a welder to work on cars, you almost certainly are planning on doing sheet metal repairs. Occasionally I wish I had a gas torch for the flexibility you mention, but for just one machine for a hobby, I think it has to be a MIG. Unless TIG costs have gone way down since I was looking.
Lovefilm does offer some downloads as an alternative to DVDs in the mail, but generally unless a download has some sort of "can only be played once" DRM, it's competing with DVD sales, not with rentals. Similarly BBC Radio offers everything as streaming audio under "Listen Again" for a limited time, but only a very few things as savable podcasts (and they sometimes have bits missing, replaced with a voice over saying things like "there was some music here, but out licencing agreement for it doesn't cover the podcast version"). Of course you can record the stream version for later, but it's tedious.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that doesn't preserve (ratios of) lengths, so it's not so helpful finding the longest route. It also shows at most half the surface (and needs an infinite map to do that).
No projection preserves both lengths and angles; the globe and string is a better suggestion.
Yes - the longest _land_ route, which the article is about, does have one end near Sagres, Portugal, but the quoted text is describing the longest sea route.
If you can persuade the court that you really don't have the password or decryption key they asked for, then it's not an offense not to provide it.
If you really have forgotten it but the court concludes that on the balance of probabilities you are lying about that, _then_ you are boned. Especially if there really wasn't any child porn on your computer and remembering the password would have let you prove that.
If you are in a game where you are playing/betting against other players, not just the house, and you are better than the other players by more than the house margin, then you can win in the long run. Many of the people who think they are in that situation are idiots, but it is possible.
> copious buttloads of languages that use some sort of bytecode under the hood
But fewer where the bytecode interpreter is written using itself. The historical self-hosting milestone is usually when the compiler written in the language can compile itself (once it's been compiled with another version first), and a Java compiler written in Java is nothing special.
> Volkswagen will soon have a 1L/100km (240mpg) car
They already have one as a technology demonstrator, they promise a production model soon:
http://www.motorauthority.com/vw-chairman-promises-1l100km-car-in-3-to-4-years.html
http://www.canadiandriver.com/articles/gw/vw1litre.htm
> power your lights with fifty-packs of C-batteries that you have to replace once a week
Or you run a cable to the shed. There are applications where that just isn't practical, like data logging devices miles from the nearest power, but for a typical garden shed, it's much more feasible, even if a solar solution would be simpler (assuming you do a proper job of burying the cable in an appropriate conduit).
> subverting gcc
That's subverting cc, not gcc. The paper was about subverting the login call and the (singular) C compiler on the (singular) UNIX system.
Subverting enough versions of both gcc and other compilers that recompiling arbitrary versions of gcc and using them to recompile arbitrary versions of Linux or *BSD or OpenSolaris (allowing for crosscompiling as well) was likely to preserve the backdoor would be far harder.
In the case of this exploit, it's because of a failure to check user-supplied data, and giving a negative number as the alleged length of an array causing overflow to a ludicrous amount.
If you are mallocing a size you calculated entirely yourself, and it fails, it's likely to be because something is already corrupt, and it will be harder to turn into an exploit, but it's still good practice to check.
Though "my kid is sick, I'll be working from home today" is more productive than "my kid is sick, I can't come into the office so I won't be able to work today".
The Register, with their usual love for all things Wikipedian, sum it up as "Google kicks Wikipedia in the googlies".
Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" was published in 1843 and Scrooge buys a prize turkey for the Cratchit's Christmas. Over 150 years is quite a long "fad".
If one NP-complete problem can be solved in P, they all can, by definition .
I knew someone who's PhD involved irradiating cockroaches. It wasn't research on their survival as such - the "liquidize the irradiated cockroaches to extract the DNA for testing" stage took care of that - but it did involve "wind the source out of the lead tube by remote control from behind the shield because it isn't something you would want to expose yourself to".
Yes, they've more recently improved (than some years ago) the search by not totally ignoring "the" when indexing, and ignoring it in a search even when quoted. The point is that just ignoring it isn't the whole answer. And it's still weirdly unreliable, because when I tried it before posting, it didn't work. Trying it again now, it shows "Matt Johnson" as a "related search", which it didn't before (but searching for an album name and then clicking on the artist name did work - maybe doing that boosted the search priority).
> "Registers that ignore words like "the" and "of" are more efficient than those that doesn't"
There speaks a man who has never tried finding music by The The on Amazon.
The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 has been around for years (7), but The Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (Commencement No. 4) Order 2007 actually came into effect on October 1st.
http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2007/09/30/time-to-forget/
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30660
"In 1972, we arrested the members of the A-Team for a crime they swore they didn't commit," Gen. Stephen Lupo said. "They broke out of our maximum-security stockade, and from that moment forth, I thought of nothing but their recapture. However, a recent audit of their file has revealed that the arrest of the Alpha Force members was made in error. The U.S. military deeply regrets the mistake."
> they get a shit-ton of free advertising for doing the "right thing".
Doing the right thing only once they were threatened with a lawsuit isn't entirely positive advertising. If it encourages other comapnies to do the right thing from the start, it's a win for BusyBox (and GPL software generally) too.
It says "from the point of view of an average user, someone who wouldn't want to enter text commands, hunt the Web for drivers and enabling software, or learn a whole new user interface'" right there in the post, you didn't even have to RTFA.
Though one point he does miss is that even non-tech users sometimes have friends or family who are techies, and in that situation Linux might be a better fit. Windows is still generally easier to use out of the box, but when it doesn't work and the help just says "consult your system administrator", Linux can be easier to find fixes for.
> there are profound difficulties involved in scaling quantum computing.
15 was factored with a quantum computer in 2001: http://cryptome.org/shor-nature.htm
Now, six years later, we've advanced to the point where we can factor, um, 15.
(Maybe this is a method expected to scale better in future or something. But, as you say, not an immediate problem.)
The UK used (and in some local authorities still does) split kids into grammar schools and comprehensives. The downside is that one test result aged 11 doesn't necessarily accurately reflect which type of school you should be in for all subjects for the next seven years.
Yes, but if you are buying a welder to work on cars, you almost certainly are planning on doing sheet metal repairs. Occasionally I wish I had a gas torch for the flexibility you mention, but for just one machine for a hobby, I think it has to be a MIG. Unless TIG costs have gone way down since I was looking.
Lovefilm does offer some downloads as an alternative to DVDs in the mail, but generally unless a download has some sort of "can only be played once" DRM, it's competing with DVD sales, not with rentals.
Similarly BBC Radio offers everything as streaming audio under "Listen Again" for a limited time, but only a very few things as savable podcasts (and they sometimes have bits missing, replaced with a voice over saying things like "there was some music here, but out licencing agreement for it doesn't cover the podcast version"). Of course you can record the stream version for later, but it's tedious.
> btw. it's dependent
It's more usually dependent, especially as an adjective, but dependant is valid too.
http://www.answers.com/dependant