the "danger" stigmatism that is attached to it is ridiculous.
Granted. However, when Americans think of nuclear reactor they think of the high pressure water reactors with the massive cooling towers that are in infrequent use here in the United States. These types of reactor are of course perfectly safe as long as safety procedures are STRICTLY observed and adhered to, but they are none the less more dangerous than the new pebble bed designs. You are correct about the pebble beds though, they make the safety argument essentially a moot point. On the issue of disposing of nuclear waste by dumping it into the Sun...it is EXTREMELY expensive on a per pound basis ($10,000 / pound for low earth orbit...more for escape velocity into solar orbit) to insert an object into a trajectory that entirely escapes the Earths gravitational influence and falls into the Sun. Spent fuel rods are not exactly lightweight and they must be launched in such a way that they don't contaminate the atmosphere or irradiate the ground crews. Also keep in mind that current rocket launch success rates (at least here in the US) practically guarantee an accident during launch over the next 20 years ala dirty bomb. Solar disposal of nuclear waste, with the current launch methods, is not feasible economically or safety wise.
It's unfortunate, alot of people would never go that route to get a dollar ringtone into their phone.
The telcos and their investors are COUNTING on that. You are the rare and statistically insignificant slashdotter who actually figures out how the technology works. 99.9% of the people out their will simply pay the $1. The whole cell phone business is based upon hassling people so that they make a small payment in exchange for not being hassled. Since all providers are nearly equally bad you are not as likely to switch in response to poor service, crippled features, and $1 ringtones.
I use my Sprint Data service heavily with my data cable and laptop. If they want to cut me off because of that then F them...I will switch and they know it which is why they dont enforce that part of the agreement. They are just trying to make doing this as hard as possible so that every Joe Sixpack out there doesn't start using his cell data service as his primary laptop network connection. With WindowsXP and bluetooth builtin on many laptops the laptop would set it (the network connection) up automatically and start using it as soon as the bluetooth phone was placed within range and that REALLY scares the bean counters at Verizon.
kind of ironic when ActiveX is required to use the site
Microsoft does not tell developers that they cannot use ActiveX for whatever they want. Nothing is stopping anyone from downloading the windows platform sdks, tools, and libraries for free and writing as many ActiveX controls as they want without paying a single royalty to Microsoft. Not disclosing the source code to a properietary library and not allowing any use of the library whatsoever are two different things. Everyone always knocks Microsoft for not having open products but nobody ever mentions that Apple and Steve Jobs have some of the most restrictive, anti-competetive, and non-open licensing on the face of the earth. They (Apple) are even persuing a legal action against Real Networks for reverse engineering one of their proprietary technologies to acheive interoperability. The open source people have a more legitimate beef with Microsoft than the iPod Apple zealots do. They should take the board out of their own eye before they reach for the splinter in Microsoft's.
Re:Example of conjectured non LOGSPACE transform?
on
The End of Encryption?
·
· Score: 1
I dont know, however if you are interested in the details then I would start with a search of the ACM transactions papers on the subject. They contain many of the recent research results in these areas:
Re:Nope, wrong, invalid.. nothing to see here.
on
The End of Encryption?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Granted, but please understand that it has been several years since I last looked at this material in a university course on Algorithm Design and Complexity Analysis. That having been said, what I meant (and should have said) was the NP-C or NP Complete problems. It follows from the formal definition that:
A decision problem C is NP-complete if:
1) it is in NP and
2) every other problem in NP is reducible to it. Where reduction means that for every problem L, there is a polynomial-time many-one reduction, a deterministic algorithm which transforms L into instances of C, such that the answer to C is yes if and only if the answer to L is yes.
Sigh...formalisms are so tedious, but some people live for this sort of thing. Anyway, since NP-C is a subset of NP and NP overlaps P it follows that IF someone proves that P = NP then the problems in NP-C can be reduced so that they are equivalent to solving a problem in P which is bad for current cryptography methods for obvious reasons. My previous post was an honest mistake and I stand corrected.
The set of NP problems refers to the set of problems which cannot be solved in time polynomial in the size of the input. However it has been proved that any problem in NP can be reduced to any other problem in NP. For example it is possible to reduce the all pairs shortest path problem to the satisfiability problem by some reduction function. Therefore, if P WAS equal to NP then any problem in NP could be reduced to a problem in P and solved in polynomial time. Thus if P = NP then it does not make sense to look at 'harder' problems since they could always be reduced to P. In effect there would be no 'harder' problems.
Re:Nope, wrong, invalid.. nothing to see here.
on
The End of Encryption?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
While we are on the subject of P = NP here, there remains no proof either way that P = NP or that P != NP. However, a very large body of experimental evidence and related proofs tends to suggest that it is almost certain that P != NP. Many computer scientists are prepared to bet heavily on this outcome considering its near certainty. The threat to cryptography from quantum computing does not, as mentioned by Ckwop, have anything whatsoever to do with the computational complexity of the problem, but rather with the ability of quantum computers to try many solutions simultaneously, thus resulting in a much higher computational throughput. In effect the brute force attack is sped up by orders of magnitude and becomes feasible with today's algorithms and key sizes. However, the paranoid among us need not fear the death of encryption since quantum computing also makes possible new types of cryptography which are not based upon the asymptotic complexity of finding the solution to a problem. Even if all else fails we will always have the one time pad which is completely unbreakable (when proper pad discipline is observed) albeit somewhat cumbersome in practice.
The problems faced in game development are very similar those seen in compiler development. There are a relatively small number of people in the industry who have practical experience in developing code generators and game engines, both of which are still somewhat of a black art. If you want to learn what it is that they know, their trade secrets if you will, then you must presumably spend at least as much time as they did learning (there are millions of man hours of development experience collectively in the top echelons of the game industry) or be lucky enough to serve as apprentice to one of the great developers (sort of like the Jedi training in Star Wars). The end result of all of this is that the game industry, or at least the part that actually makes money, has a very high barrier to entry and the firms that occupy that space have no interest in helping their potential competitors, even open source projects, seriously compete with their products. I decided not to go into the game industry for this and other reasons when I completed my computer science degree, although some of my friends did. A couple of them succeeded, but from what I have heard of their experience the life of a grunt game developer is difficult at best. The competition is incredibly fierce, the pay is not spectacular (especially for junior developers), and nobody cares that your last game was the biggest seller of all time; they want to know (the publisher) what have you done for me lately? The point of all of this is that open source projects will probably have to go the re-learn the secret knowledge route much as they had to do with cryptography. In the long run the open source people may make some valuable contributions, but in the short run there is nothing that the open source community can do with game development that the industry gurus cannot do ten times better. If you enjoy game development then by all means make it your hobby and go open source with your projects, you will probably be having more fun than most people who do it for a living anyway.
Now that the courts have validated, at least for the time being, that peer-to-peer networks have significant non infringing uses then it will not be long before all P2P services employ encryption to foil the packet filtering/shapping systems and engage in circuitous routing of traffic to make it extremely difficult to determine the true source and destination of packets. Such a protocol might be vulnerable howerver to the classic "man in the middle" attack on cryptographic key exchange.
A lot of university professors these days are borderline socialists so of course they wouldn't care. Some of them may even genuinely believe that private property is theft (the communists), but you were absolutely right about the international students. I once watched as three vietnamese students passed final exams between themselves and text messaged solutions on their cell phones while the exam was taking place in the lecture hall. Some of these foreign students are so amoral that it completely blows my mind. They need to crack down on people who break the law or breach the academic code of conduct. If they think that stealing/copying a textbook is ok then they probably do not have much of a problem with cheating either. People like this cheapen higher learning for all of us that worked hard for our education and degrees.
It's also (at least morally) wrong to charge > 80 dollars for a textbook that will only be used for half a semester, yet that's exactly what I found when in the university bookstore today (and not just for one of the books)
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. You are not being denied a life saving drug because you cannot afford it...its a textbook not medicine, food, shelter, or clothing. If 80 dollars is the market price then that is what you must pay. If you dont want to pay that much then you will have to do without or find a substitute, but you cannot justify theft because you dont like the price. If you dont like the way our system works here then join the communist party and move to Cuba.
Fortunately, the library is pretty good and doesn't object to photocopying parts of a book. Nor should they, since they pay copyright taxes on photocopiers.
They do not object to students copying portions of copyrighted works because this is completely legal under the doctrine of fair use. There are some caveats on this and common sense should apply (copying the entire book except for the title page, for example, would NOT be fair use), but generally copying a portion of the work for criticism, creating derivative works, and the like is perfectly legal.
Its not stupid its just mathematics. As for Al Queda recruiting a few light skinned friends, if they could have done that then they would have already. Their base of support is mainly in the middle east with some supporters in eastern europe and southeast asia. Thats fine we can add eastern eurpoean and southeast asian profiles to the database too, albiet at a lower level of probability. The ability to quantify risks with statistics is a well know field and it works, just ask any actuary or insurance company. They dont crunch the numbers because they think its fun.
You're far more likely to be blown up by a baggage handler or ground crew than your fellow passenger.
I am not convinced of that. Baggage handlers must undergo a federal background check, but anyone can walk into an airport, at least through the first door and into the ticket area, as a passenger and tens of thousands do each day. No, I think that passengers are more likely to be terrorists than baggage handlers.
And what's more, your far more likely to be killed by a mugger or the guy living down the road than a terrorist
I live in a rural area, so the nearest guy living down the road is several miles away. As for the muggers you can guess how common they are out here.
Statisically speaking McVeigh was an anomoly and including his case in the database would not significantly alter the fact that most known terrorists are middle eastern.
They should continue to screen suspicious passengers. The enemy will always attack you excatly where you think that you are safe. The terrorists would not hesitate if they were allowed the opportunity to take advantage of a security lapse.
not really, do you really think that Microsoft is going to waste time and money going after people with all of these patents? of course not. However, they do have a billion dollar cash hoard to protect from every small time company lawyer out there that wants to roll the dice on patent litigation to steal a piece of that pie. IBM does the same thing. These patents are defensive in nature, they are supposed to protect Microsoft from submarine patents and their unscrupulous holders.
or do you propose that the MASSIVE global warming at the end of the last ice age was caused by mammoths driving around in CFC leaving 25 litre V16 cars?
no, but all of those mammoth farts surely added to the mix:P
It takes energy to produce hydrogen. Currently more energy goes into making hydrogen than is produced.
thats not true, it is possible to set up a sun tracking solar panel array to produce hydrogen from water via electrolysis. The only problem with this approach is that it is SPACE inefficient (massive fields would be required to produce hydrogen in the quantities that would be needed), but it isn't energy inefficient since the solar energy is free anyway.
Now if you were talking about why people need to drive their urban assualt humvee 2 gallons per mile SUVs around instead of something that gets sensible fuel economy, that I'd support.:)
Do you also support the right of any American to drive any vehicle that he wants to pay to operate? If I like to drive my Hummer urban assualt SUV around and get 8 miles per gallon then that is my right. Its my money and therefore my decision. The best way to limit consumption that introduces a negative externality on the rest of the public, me driving my urban assualt humvee for instance, is to introduce a tax which compensates society and properly reflects the TRUE cost of me driving my SUV around. If I still want to pay at that point, then it is still my right to drive the urban assualt humvee.
Our parents and grandparents made that choice for us 50 years ago and there is so much momentum in that direction now that it would be nearly impossible to reverse. You also forget that the United States is a MUCH larger place than Europe and that many of the western states, especially Texas, California, and Nevada have distances which are too great to be rectified with a bus system. You might reply that we could have built up a bullet train infrastructure as they did in Europe and Japan, and yes that was a possibility perhaps 50 years ago, but like I said our grandparents have already made that decision for us so automobiles, superhighways, and suberbia are what defines the United States. The best route for us now is to look into alternative fuels not to scrap 50 years of infrastructure and momentum to adopt the European model...
Crony Capitalism, as it is often termed, has at one time or another, and with varying degrees of severity been part of all modern free market economies. It is natural for those in power to limit access to finance and wherever possible to restrict membership in the elite group which receives generous discounts on hot IPO stock options. The way to break the power of the investor elites is by doing precisely what Google is doing, using the power of the free market to directly open up the bidding to the entire world pool of investors and capital. The elites hate competition because it makes them work harder for less profit but the rest of us, including the small investors, are all better off for it. This is an excellent example of the power of free markets at work.
Slashdot Mirror
the "danger" stigmatism that is attached to it is ridiculous.
Granted. However, when Americans think of nuclear reactor they think of the high pressure water reactors with the massive cooling towers that are in infrequent use here in the United States. These types of reactor are of course perfectly safe as long as safety procedures are STRICTLY observed and adhered to, but they are none the less more dangerous than the new pebble bed designs. You are correct about the pebble beds though, they make the safety argument essentially a moot point. On the issue of disposing of nuclear waste by dumping it into the Sun...it is EXTREMELY expensive on a per pound basis ($10,000 / pound for low earth orbit...more for escape velocity into solar orbit) to insert an object into a trajectory that entirely escapes the Earths gravitational influence and falls into the Sun. Spent fuel rods are not exactly lightweight and they must be launched in such a way that they don't contaminate the atmosphere or irradiate the ground crews. Also keep in mind that current rocket launch success rates (at least here in the US) practically guarantee an accident during launch over the next 20 years ala dirty bomb. Solar disposal of nuclear waste, with the current launch methods, is not feasible economically or safety wise.
It's unfortunate, alot of people would never go that route to get a dollar ringtone into their phone.
The telcos and their investors are COUNTING on that. You are the rare and statistically insignificant slashdotter who actually figures out how the technology works. 99.9% of the people out their will simply pay the $1. The whole cell phone business is based upon hassling people so that they make a small payment in exchange for not being hassled. Since all providers are nearly equally bad you are not as likely to switch in response to poor service, crippled features, and $1 ringtones.
I use my Sprint Data service heavily with my data cable and laptop. If they want to cut me off because of that then F them...I will switch and they know it which is why they dont enforce that part of the agreement. They are just trying to make doing this as hard as possible so that every Joe Sixpack out there doesn't start using his cell data service as his primary laptop network connection. With WindowsXP and bluetooth builtin on many laptops the laptop would set it (the network connection) up automatically and start using it as soon as the bluetooth phone was placed within range and that REALLY scares the bean counters at Verizon.
kind of ironic when ActiveX is required to use the site
Microsoft does not tell developers that they cannot use ActiveX for whatever they want. Nothing is stopping anyone from downloading the windows platform sdks, tools, and libraries for free and writing as many ActiveX controls as they want without paying a single royalty to Microsoft. Not disclosing the source code to a properietary library and not allowing any use of the library whatsoever are two different things. Everyone always knocks Microsoft for not having open products but nobody ever mentions that Apple and Steve Jobs have some of the most restrictive, anti-competetive, and non-open licensing on the face of the earth. They (Apple) are even persuing a legal action against Real Networks for reverse engineering one of their proprietary technologies to acheive interoperability. The open source people have a more legitimate beef with Microsoft than the iPod Apple zealots do. They should take the board out of their own eye before they reach for the splinter in Microsoft's.
I dont know, however if you are interested in the details then I would start with a search of the ACM transactions papers on the subject. They contain many of the recent research results in these areas:
ACM
Granted, but please understand that it has been several years since I last looked at this material in a university course on Algorithm Design and Complexity Analysis. That having been said, what I meant (and should have said) was the NP-C or NP Complete problems. It follows from the formal definition that:
A decision problem C is NP-complete if:
1) it is in NP and
2) every other problem in NP is reducible to it. Where reduction means that for every problem L, there is a polynomial-time many-one reduction, a deterministic algorithm which transforms L into instances of C, such that the answer to C is yes if and only if the answer to L is yes.
Sigh...formalisms are so tedious, but some people live for this sort of thing. Anyway, since NP-C is a subset of NP and NP overlaps P it follows that IF someone proves that P = NP then the problems in NP-C can be reduced so that they are equivalent to solving a problem in P which is bad for current cryptography methods for obvious reasons. My previous post was an honest mistake and I stand corrected.
Isn't the P = NP proof one of the Million Dollar problems over there at Wolfram Research?
The set of NP problems refers to the set of problems which cannot be solved in time polynomial in the size of the input. However it has been proved that any problem in NP can be reduced to any other problem in NP. For example it is possible to reduce the all pairs shortest path problem to the satisfiability problem by some reduction function. Therefore, if P WAS equal to NP then any problem in NP could be reduced to a problem in P and solved in polynomial time. Thus if P = NP then it does not make sense to look at 'harder' problems since they could always be reduced to P. In effect there would be no 'harder' problems.
While we are on the subject of P = NP here, there remains no proof either way that P = NP or that P != NP. However, a very large body of experimental evidence and related proofs tends to suggest that it is almost certain that P != NP. Many computer scientists are prepared to bet heavily on this outcome considering its near certainty. The threat to cryptography from quantum computing does not, as mentioned by Ckwop, have anything whatsoever to do with the computational complexity of the problem, but rather with the ability of quantum computers to try many solutions simultaneously, thus resulting in a much higher computational throughput. In effect the brute force attack is sped up by orders of magnitude and becomes feasible with today's algorithms and key sizes. However, the paranoid among us need not fear the death of encryption since quantum computing also makes possible new types of cryptography which are not based upon the asymptotic complexity of finding the solution to a problem. Even if all else fails we will always have the one time pad which is completely unbreakable (when proper pad discipline is observed) albeit somewhat cumbersome in practice.
The problems faced in game development are very similar those seen in compiler development. There are a relatively small number of people in the industry who have practical experience in developing code generators and game engines, both of which are still somewhat of a black art. If you want to learn what it is that they know, their trade secrets if you will, then you must presumably spend at least as much time as they did learning (there are millions of man hours of development experience collectively in the top echelons of the game industry) or be lucky enough to serve as apprentice to one of the great developers (sort of like the Jedi training in Star Wars). The end result of all of this is that the game industry, or at least the part that actually makes money, has a very high barrier to entry and the firms that occupy that space have no interest in helping their potential competitors, even open source projects, seriously compete with their products. I decided not to go into the game industry for this and other reasons when I completed my computer science degree, although some of my friends did. A couple of them succeeded, but from what I have heard of their experience the life of a grunt game developer is difficult at best. The competition is incredibly fierce, the pay is not spectacular (especially for junior developers), and nobody cares that your last game was the biggest seller of all time; they want to know (the publisher) what have you done for me lately? The point of all of this is that open source projects will probably have to go the re-learn the secret knowledge route much as they had to do with cryptography. In the long run the open source people may make some valuable contributions, but in the short run there is nothing that the open source community can do with game development that the industry gurus cannot do ten times better. If you enjoy game development then by all means make it your hobby and go open source with your projects, you will probably be having more fun than most people who do it for a living anyway.
Now that the courts have validated, at least for the time being, that peer-to-peer networks have significant non infringing uses then it will not be long before all P2P services employ encryption to foil the packet filtering/shapping systems and engage in circuitous routing of traffic to make it extremely difficult to determine the true source and destination of packets. Such a protocol might be vulnerable howerver to the classic "man in the middle" attack on cryptographic key exchange.
its true what they say then, "Its worse than you think and they are out to get you."
A lot of university professors these days are borderline socialists so of course they wouldn't care. Some of them may even genuinely believe that private property is theft (the communists), but you were absolutely right about the international students. I once watched as three vietnamese students passed final exams between themselves and text messaged solutions on their cell phones while the exam was taking place in the lecture hall. Some of these foreign students are so amoral that it completely blows my mind. They need to crack down on people who break the law or breach the academic code of conduct. If they think that stealing/copying a textbook is ok then they probably do not have much of a problem with cheating either. People like this cheapen higher learning for all of us that worked hard for our education and degrees.
It's also (at least morally) wrong to charge > 80 dollars for a textbook that will only be used for half a semester, yet that's exactly what I found when in the university bookstore today (and not just for one of the books)
There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. You are not being denied a life saving drug because you cannot afford it...its a textbook not medicine, food, shelter, or clothing. If 80 dollars is the market price then that is what you must pay. If you dont want to pay that much then you will have to do without or find a substitute, but you cannot justify theft because you dont like the price. If you dont like the way our system works here then join the communist party and move to Cuba.
Fortunately, the library is pretty good and doesn't object to photocopying parts of a book. Nor should they, since they pay copyright taxes on photocopiers.
They do not object to students copying portions of copyrighted works because this is completely legal under the doctrine of fair use. There are some caveats on this and common sense should apply (copying the entire book except for the title page, for example, would NOT be fair use), but generally copying a portion of the work for criticism, creating derivative works, and the like is perfectly legal.
Its not stupid its just mathematics. As for Al Queda recruiting a few light skinned friends, if they could have done that then they would have already. Their base of support is mainly in the middle east with some supporters in eastern europe and southeast asia. Thats fine we can add eastern eurpoean and southeast asian profiles to the database too, albiet at a lower level of probability. The ability to quantify risks with statistics is a well know field and it works, just ask any actuary or insurance company. They dont crunch the numbers because they think its fun.
You're far more likely to be blown up by a baggage handler or ground crew than your fellow passenger.
I am not convinced of that. Baggage handlers must undergo a federal background check, but anyone can walk into an airport, at least through the first door and into the ticket area, as a passenger and tens of thousands do each day. No, I think that passengers are more likely to be terrorists than baggage handlers.
And what's more, your far more likely to be killed by a mugger or the guy living down the road than a terrorist
I live in a rural area, so the nearest guy living down the road is several miles away. As for the muggers you can guess how common they are out here.
Statisically speaking McVeigh was an anomoly and including his case in the database would not significantly alter the fact that most known terrorists are middle eastern.
They should continue to screen suspicious passengers. The enemy will always attack you excatly where you think that you are safe. The terrorists would not hesitate if they were allowed the opportunity to take advantage of a security lapse.
not really, do you really think that Microsoft is going to waste time and money going after people with all of these patents? of course not. However, they do have a billion dollar cash hoard to protect from every small time company lawyer out there that wants to roll the dice on patent litigation to steal a piece of that pie. IBM does the same thing. These patents are defensive in nature, they are supposed to protect Microsoft from submarine patents and their unscrupulous holders.
or do you propose that the MASSIVE global warming at the end of the last ice age was caused by mammoths driving around in CFC leaving 25 litre V16 cars?
:P
no, but all of those mammoth farts surely added to the mix
It takes energy to produce hydrogen. Currently more energy goes into making hydrogen than is produced.
thats not true, it is possible to set up a sun tracking solar panel array to produce hydrogen from water via electrolysis. The only problem with this approach is that it is SPACE inefficient (massive fields would be required to produce hydrogen in the quantities that would be needed), but it isn't energy inefficient since the solar energy is free anyway.
Now if you were talking about why people need to drive their urban assualt humvee 2 gallons per mile SUVs around instead of something that gets sensible fuel economy, that I'd support. :)
Do you also support the right of any American to drive any vehicle that he wants to pay to operate? If I like to drive my Hummer urban assualt SUV around and get 8 miles per gallon then that is my right. Its my money and therefore my decision. The best way to limit consumption that introduces a negative externality on the rest of the public, me driving my urban assualt humvee for instance, is to introduce a tax which compensates society and properly reflects the TRUE cost of me driving my SUV around. If I still want to pay at that point, then it is still my right to drive the urban assualt humvee.
Our parents and grandparents made that choice for us 50 years ago and there is so much momentum in that direction now that it would be nearly impossible to reverse. You also forget that the United States is a MUCH larger place than Europe and that many of the western states, especially Texas, California, and Nevada have distances which are too great to be rectified with a bus system. You might reply that we could have built up a bullet train infrastructure as they did in Europe and Japan, and yes that was a possibility perhaps 50 years ago, but like I said our grandparents have already made that decision for us so automobiles, superhighways, and suberbia are what defines the United States. The best route for us now is to look into alternative fuels not to scrap 50 years of infrastructure and momentum to adopt the European model...
Obligatory Winston Churchill quote: "They sowed the wind...and now they will reap the whirlwind..."
Crony Capitalism, as it is often termed, has at one time or another, and with varying degrees of severity been part of all modern free market economies. It is natural for those in power to limit access to finance and wherever possible to restrict membership in the elite group which receives generous discounts on hot IPO stock options. The way to break the power of the investor elites is by doing precisely what Google is doing, using the power of the free market to directly open up the bidding to the entire world pool of investors and capital. The elites hate competition because it makes them work harder for less profit but the rest of us, including the small investors, are all better off for it. This is an excellent example of the power of free markets at work.