30char password? Whats the point? I mean you can still brute force it...
Let's assume that your password can only be made of the letters a-z, the numbers 0-9, and their corresponding uppercase or shift-keyboard eqivalents. Simple math would indicate that there would be roughtly 72^30 possible combinations of passwords. The Windows calculator program eats this as 5.2477712140573920113791072551143e+55 possible passwords.
Assuming that you could process a billion (10e+9) passwords per second, that would mean it could take approximately 5.24e+46 seconds to attain the password. Good luck waiting that long. Then again, you may get lucky within the first 24 billion years.
The moral of the story: long passwords can be a good thing.
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One thing I have noticed over the years, is that when anyone says something "controversial" people get in an uproar.
I have seen the use of the word "controversial" as being more subjective and indicative towards a certain person's or group's bias. Take this case for example. There may be many people who say, "Huh. You know what? This guy is dead-on right about how women do not do as well as men in math and science." But since the presenter of the information does not necessarily agree with the news, that presenter immediately labels it as being "controversial".
Is it truly controversial? Well, to the presenter it is, so that makes their statement true to an extent. But does it spur controversy amongst the masses? Not necessarily. I belive that this was covered in depth in a book called Bias.
My director recently revealed to me, following his two-week vacation to Disneyworld, that he had been suffering from terrible, terrible headaches. But just a few days into his vacation, they were totally gone. However, the moment he came back and picked up his work laptop again, he started feeling a stabbing pain between his eyes. He has been trying multiple means to relax, from meditation to gardening, without luck. "Why," he asked, "do I keep feeling this way?"
I shared with him my take on stress and relaxation. For thousands of years, man has felt stress. But this stress was geared around a necessity to survive--life or death. The stress back then was from the prosperity of crops, from hunting the beast, and in some unlucky cases, running from the beast. The stress was there to keep man from dying. More importantly, it tended to come in short bursts.
In the past hundred years, we have gotten to the point (at least in the US), where no one has to starve, no one has to hunt or run from the beast. If someone was fired from his job, the probability of starving is nearly gone (NOTE: I realize that there are people who do starve in the US, and that sickens me, but the scope of my rant is applicable primarily to the more affluent workers who have this "stress".) Instead, we have now substituted the natural stress with the unnatural stress many people feel today; the long, drawn-out, lingering stress, living in fear of if a paper winds up on someone's desk on time.
The issue goes even more deep than this with "natural" versus "unnatural" things, with people having dozens of kids less than 100 years ago to less than 1 in some areas. In short, within the past 100 years we have changed the way our kind has operated for thousands of years. On a primal and almost genetic level, we are acting counterintuitively to our nature.
After I shared this with him, he started understanding that a TPS report is not the same as a well-thrown spear or laying a fish on a few kernels of corn at the right time of the season. Hopefully, his headache will soon fade.
My wife and I went to Japan for our honeymoon. Naturally, we went to Akihabara twice during our visit. I was so amazed at the gear that they had there three years ago that is still barely showing up here. They already had full-blown DVD camcorders for fairly reasonable prices. We tried on a pair of goggles that gave the person wearing them a virtual cinema, projecting what appeared to be a 80" screen for TV, movies, and computer systems (!) in front of the user, complete with stereo sound. The cost? About $400. Hell, they even had cellphones playing some sort of Dreamcast game (I believe it was Space Channel 5). We both left the "Electric Town" wondering why we hadn't seen any of this in the US; now this article makes a little more sense of it.
Incidentally, I found that my brother, who is a freshman in high school, learned multiplication several years ago in one messed-up way (I'm 13 years older than him). While we would simply write this:
137
x23
...he was taught to break it down into:
137 x 20 + 137 x 3
While I have no problem with distributed equations in, say, algebra, this was a bad way of explaining it to someone new, I think. Hooray for public education.
I like how passive and below-the-radar Linus is in these types of interviews. The interviewers try to get him rialed up by mentioning topics in an almost antagonistic manner, and he just brushes them off. It reminds me of John Stewart on Crossfire:
So what do you think of the Bill Gates vibrator story?
"I don't"
So you give away this software totally for free? Yecch! I'd hate to have dinner at your house!
"I know, and you won't."
"Scientists were able to ascertain that at least one individual was able to teleport within line-of-sight, but left an odd odor in the room upon doing so, accompanied by an odd noise. One scientist said that, 'It sounded like a BAMF!'"
Mario and Luigi: While they are independent contractors and likely own their own LLC for their plumbing business, they would side heavily with the unions. Besides, their gratuitous use of "mushrooms" would tend to look for a party with some liberal laws. My guess? Democratic
Link: Heavily independent, but believes in the maxim that there is always a damsel in distress. Tends to alter the time-space continuum. Republican
Lara Croft: Big on guns, big elsewhere, too. Values the ability to use her body any way she pleases and keep her prized possessions to herself. Libertarian
Donkey Kong: Takes a stand that no one should be in his jungles, going so far as to take hostages and have rescue parties sent in. If you ignore the fact that he is a monkey, he has some decent environmental goals. Green
I've been listening to local radio where they have been talking about this issue for the past couple of days. Apparently, according to the talk show hosts and call-in experts, the real issue is in the system that transfers the licenses to a company in Oregon for print out. Up until a few years ago, Colorado was one of those states that would laminate driver's licenses on the spot, much like a high school ID. Somewhere along the line they decided that these cards could easily be faked, so they started sending them to a company in another part of the country to be produced a la credit cards with "more robust security". Data currently cannot make it to this production company, so the production of cards has been backlogged by as much as 30 days in some cases. Local law enforcement has been told to be lenient on people with expired licenses in recent days due to these problems.
Me? I'm just happy seeing my Colorado tax dollars at work.
Here is the odd thing: with today's news, shares of CA have shot up nearly a dollar a share, roughly 3% of the share price. The same thing happened with other companies such as Enron when their executives were indicted. I even heard some stock guys on the radio say, "Boy, I hope they indict another executive from CA; their stock might even double!"
I find it so odd that when bad news happens stocks go up. Job cuts at a company? Stock goes up. Executives indicted? Stock goes up. Company does better than it ever has before, earining more money than it ever has, even for less expenses, but does not meet someone's expectations in New York? Stock goes down. I understand the reasons why this happens economically, but ethically I loathe this action/reaction pattern. Since it's becoming obvious that regular IT folks cannot win in this rat race situation, maybe it's time to step over to the dark side and profit from doom... who knows...
I can say that this is actually quite a handy thing for the school to have deployed on campus, with all of the thunderstorms that pop up in the late summer and fall. I remember one day back in 1996 when I was walking near the library on a semi-cloudy day when a bolt of lightning hit something on campus out of the blue. It had such a loud thunderclap, too, that caused me to hit the ground. The reverberation was awesome, too, bouncing off of some of the foothills. There are still people today who remember this anomaly and where they were because it was so odd. One of these devices could have been handy in that situation.
Actually, both you and the parent are correct. If someone was "eavesdropping" on the quantum network, yes, it would be impossible for them to do it or to do it without being noticed. But the parent is correct in that if the data being accessed on the remote network only requires a simple password, there would be a substantial weak point. Think of it this way: if someone were running a brute force attack on a password, it wouldn't matter if there was integrity on the network being used. The trick is to come up with a quantum "key" on each system that can do the purpose of authentication such that if someone tried looking at the key the other party would be alerted.
I recall reading a sci-fi story wherein someone effectively stopped satellites, space exploration, and any other spacebound equipment by launching some sand or ball bearings into orbit. As this stuff was travelling around the earth at about 40,000 mph, anything in its path would suffer damage at a minimum or be shredded at worst (think about the paint chips that were found embedded in the Space Shuttle's window an inch or two deep). The damaged stuff, in turn, would further wreck other objects, in perpetuity. Out of morbid curiosity, can any rocket or space scientists estimate what would happen if one of those little tubes was filled with some abrasive agent? I realize, of course, that some would fall back to the earth and some would escape orbit, but how plausible is that sci-fi idea?
I like this video of the authoritative robotic bitchslap, laying the little guy low. Seriously, this is some amazing robotics, even on a small scale. But then again, small robots fighting is always cool...in Japan!
While I do not want to be an apologist for the parent poster, as I believe that those actions are indicative of a ripe rat bastard, I would have to agree that there is a sufficient amount of bloat at IBM where people get recycled waaay to often.
During my stint at IBM for four years, I saw many people get laid off from one position only to have another position mysteriously open for them to fill. Nine times out of ten this position would simply be labeled as a ubiquitous "project manager" role, where the person would simply get in the way of progress, fill out mindless forms, and be a thorn in the sides of many people. I recall on one occasion a young woman who joined my team as a "project manager" solely for the fact that she was young, relatively attractive, and had some connections with her sisters, also employees of IBM. On one occasion I berated her in an e-mail because it was obvious that she had no qualifications for the position and she was asking for information that was completely irrelevant. My manager asked me why I took such a tone, since, "she needs time to get familiar with the position and gain those skills." Funny, I thought that someone actually had to have the knowledge to get the new job...
Anyway, my tirade aside, IBM suffers a great deal of bloat just due to its sheer size. I was glad to have other opportunities appear.
"Hi! Like, we're Google, and we have totally told the SEC that we want to be on the stock market! Ohmygosh! Totally! We're not doing it yet, just like Marsha Mrady, but we will soon! Now, we're not like telling you to buy our stock, but if you really want to, you can totally do it soon! For sure! We're gonna sell, like, 14 million shares, and our totally groovy people who already have, like, 10 million shares, are going to put it all up! This is so cool!
Someone recently sent a model plane over the Atlantic much in the same manner as these kids. I wonder if terrorists would develop something like this. Imagine, some guy in the Middle East builds forty or fifty of these aircraft, programs them with waypoints, and lets 'em loose. They recharge by day through solar energy and run off of batteries at night. A few days later, Washington DC is surrounded by these planes flying circles over the city en masse, at which point they do something nasty.
Hey, Congressmen: No amount of legislation would stop this.
Well, it is DDR2-667, which means that you will be dancing on twice as many arrows with the Neighbor of the Beast. In short, nothing but songs by Aqua.
"Good morning, kind sir."
"Could you please direct me to Ramallah?"
"Into the van? If you insist."
"I triple guarantee you, I am not a member of the CIA."
"No, thanks. I've grown rather attached to my head."
From the government's perspective, anyone who engages in model rocketry could be capable of doing something more dangerous. Then again, this logic is so logically flawed, it's kind of like saying, "Citizens should not have water, as it could lead to drowning deaths".
Slashdot Mirror
Let's assume that your password can only be made of the letters a-z, the numbers 0-9, and their corresponding uppercase or shift-keyboard eqivalents. Simple math would indicate that there would be roughtly 72^30 possible combinations of passwords. The Windows calculator program eats this as 5.2477712140573920113791072551143e+55 possible passwords.
Assuming that you could process a billion (10e+9) passwords per second, that would mean it could take approximately 5.24e+46 seconds to attain the password. Good luck waiting that long. Then again, you may get lucky within the first 24 billion years.
The moral of the story: long passwords can be a good thing.
Fax-A-Heart 9000! That's right, with the Fax-A-Heart 9000 you can truly give your person a direct copy of the organ used to express emotion for thousands of years--your heart! Imagine the look on her face when she hears the phone ringing on her fax! Order right now and we'll include the Print-A-Spleen absolutely free!
I have seen the use of the word "controversial" as being more subjective and indicative towards a certain person's or group's bias. Take this case for example. There may be many people who say, "Huh. You know what? This guy is dead-on right about how women do not do as well as men in math and science." But since the presenter of the information does not necessarily agree with the news, that presenter immediately labels it as being "controversial".
Is it truly controversial? Well, to the presenter it is, so that makes their statement true to an extent. But does it spur controversy amongst the masses? Not necessarily. I belive that this was covered in depth in a book called Bias.
I shared with him my take on stress and relaxation. For thousands of years, man has felt stress. But this stress was geared around a necessity to survive--life or death. The stress back then was from the prosperity of crops, from hunting the beast, and in some unlucky cases, running from the beast. The stress was there to keep man from dying. More importantly, it tended to come in short bursts.
In the past hundred years, we have gotten to the point (at least in the US), where no one has to starve, no one has to hunt or run from the beast. If someone was fired from his job, the probability of starving is nearly gone (NOTE: I realize that there are people who do starve in the US, and that sickens me, but the scope of my rant is applicable primarily to the more affluent workers who have this "stress".) Instead, we have now substituted the natural stress with the unnatural stress many people feel today; the long, drawn-out, lingering stress, living in fear of if a paper winds up on someone's desk on time.
The issue goes even more deep than this with "natural" versus "unnatural" things, with people having dozens of kids less than 100 years ago to less than 1 in some areas. In short, within the past 100 years we have changed the way our kind has operated for thousands of years. On a primal and almost genetic level, we are acting counterintuitively to our nature.
After I shared this with him, he started understanding that a TPS report is not the same as a well-thrown spear or laying a fish on a few kernels of corn at the right time of the season. Hopefully, his headache will soon fade.
Then again, everything is cooler... in Japan!!!
Incidentally, I found that my brother, who is a freshman in high school, learned multiplication several years ago in one messed-up way (I'm 13 years older than him). While we would simply write this:
137
x23
137 x 20 + 137 x 3
While I have no problem with distributed equations in, say, algebra, this was a bad way of explaining it to someone new, I think. Hooray for public education.
So what do you think of the Bill Gates vibrator story?
"I don't"
So you give away this software totally for free? Yecch! I'd hate to have dinner at your house!
"I know, and you won't."
No, but welcome your new office in sunny Bangalore, where the temps often exceed 100F and humidity reigns!
Mario and Luigi: While they are independent contractors and likely own their own LLC for their plumbing business, they would side heavily with the unions. Besides, their gratuitous use of "mushrooms" would tend to look for a party with some liberal laws. My guess? Democratic
Link: Heavily independent, but believes in the maxim that there is always a damsel in distress. Tends to alter the time-space continuum. Republican
Lara Croft: Big on guns, big elsewhere, too. Values the ability to use her body any way she pleases and keep her prized possessions to herself. Libertarian
Donkey Kong: Takes a stand that no one should be in his jungles, going so far as to take hostages and have rescue parties sent in. If you ignore the fact that he is a monkey, he has some decent environmental goals. Green
Me? I'm just happy seeing my Colorado tax dollars at work.
I find it so odd that when bad news happens stocks go up. Job cuts at a company? Stock goes up. Executives indicted? Stock goes up. Company does better than it ever has before, earining more money than it ever has, even for less expenses, but does not meet someone's expectations in New York? Stock goes down. I understand the reasons why this happens economically, but ethically I loathe this action/reaction pattern. Since it's becoming obvious that regular IT folks cannot win in this rat race situation, maybe it's time to step over to the dark side and profit from doom... who knows...
Kind of like pork ice cream.
During my stint at IBM for four years, I saw many people get laid off from one position only to have another position mysteriously open for them to fill. Nine times out of ten this position would simply be labeled as a ubiquitous "project manager" role, where the person would simply get in the way of progress, fill out mindless forms, and be a thorn in the sides of many people. I recall on one occasion a young woman who joined my team as a "project manager" solely for the fact that she was young, relatively attractive, and had some connections with her sisters, also employees of IBM. On one occasion I berated her in an e-mail because it was obvious that she had no qualifications for the position and she was asking for information that was completely irrelevant. My manager asked me why I took such a tone, since, "she needs time to get familiar with the position and gain those skills." Funny, I thought that someone actually had to have the knowledge to get the new job...
Anyway, my tirade aside, IBM suffers a great deal of bloat just due to its sheer size. I was glad to have other opportunities appear.
Hey, Congressmen: No amount of legislation would stop this.
"Could you please direct me to Ramallah?"
"Into the van? If you insist."
"I triple guarantee you, I am not a member of the CIA."
"No, thanks. I've grown rather attached to my head."