1) Talk to a lawyer. Asking/. for legal advice is kind of like asking random people on a major street about it. You might get a few sane answers and maybe even someone who knows what they are talking about, but it'll be hard to know for sure until you talk to an actual expert.
That would require an unbelievable degree of denial and deception.
Top Secret is defined as information that would seriously damage the US if released. They would not trust encrypting such secrets in it if, at the time they made that decision, they had discovered a weakness that would allow them to break it. Thus, the only way this would happen if they are behaving rationally is if they were lying. For them to do that successfully it would require having something classified at a level no higher than Confidential that this was not the real algorithm.
The complexity of such a scheme given how they would then have to communicate the correct algorithm, the need to classify all software that encrypted or decrypted classified information to the level of data being classified, combined with the hit to productivity and the risk of a leak...
Not likely. Much more likely that they do not have a way around it that concerns them--or at least did not when they made that announcement.
Everything you hear on it right now is speculation.
I would also imagine that the SDK will work like all of Apple's other tools--it will probably be available for free to ADC members (at the free membership level). What is not known is what will be required to get an app made with the SDK onto the iPhone.
The NSA has approved AES for encrypting secret data (128+ bits) and top secret data (192+ bits). Unless they are playing a very deep denial and deception game, it stands to reason that they can't find a way through it either.
It is worth emphasizing that the NSA has said that AES 128/192/256 can be used to protect information up to the secret level, and that top secret information can be secured with AES 192 or 256. That's a pretty strong statement coming from the NSA, which if acting rationally they would not want to leave weaknesses in something that is used to secure information that would be, by definition, "very damaging to the US and its interests if released."
Now, it is possible that such statements are just for show, but it takes a belief that they are playing an incredulously deep game that they would make those statements as a denial and deception practice.
I believe that it would be wasteful of valuable resources to continue to look for proof. No one who has examined all of the data across laboratories, taken as a collective whole, has been able to suggest methodological or statistical problems to explain the ever-increasing and consistent results to date. Resources should be directed to the pertinent questions about how this ability works. I am confident that the questions are no more elusive than any other questions in science dealing with small to medium sized effects, and that if appropriate resources are targeted to appropriate questions, we can have answers within the next decade.
Quoting parapsychologist Dean Radin (who's book, Conscious Universe, gives a reasonable layman's overview of results to date):
Most of the commonly repeated skeptical reactions to psi research are extreme views, driven by the belief that psi is impossible. The effect of repeatedly seeing skeptical dismissals of the research, in college textbooks and in prominent scientific journals, has diminished mainstream academic interest in this topic. However, informed opinions, even among skeptics, shows that virtually all of the past skeptical arguments against psi have dissolved in the face of overwhelming positive evidence, or they are based on incredibly distorted versions of the actual research.
Quoting Deborah L. Delanoy, of the department of psychology in the University of Edinburgh:
In conclusion, the findings from these meta-analyses suggest that consistent trends and patterns are to be found in the database. The consistency of outcomes found in the ganzfeld research, the robust PK effects, the modifying variables revealed by the precognition database, the variety of target systems displaying DMILS effects and the correlations found with personality traits are all indicative of lawful relationships. Given these relationships it is difficult to dismiss the findings as ``merely an unexplained departure from a theoretical chance baseline'' p. 301 [23]. Whether these effects will prove to represent some combination of currently unrecognised statistical problems, undetected methodological artefacts, or, as seems increasingly likely, a genuinely new, hitherto unrecognised characteristic of mind or consciousness remains to be seen.
That's true for the normal delete, but I don't know about "secure delete." Secure delete could very well go back through your entire backup set and delete the file utterly.
We won't know for sure until it comes out and someone tests it.
Another poster has addressed the core issues (secure delete, etc), but one other thing needs to be pointed out: At least anecdotally, I suffer data loss far more often than I have hackers breaking into my system (at least that I know of) or having to deal with the compromise of sensitive information from my hard drive.
There is a greater risk for many people in lack of backups vs. outside threats who have sufficient access to the machine to see data we've deleted without bothering to secure delete it or delete the backups.
There are jobs that demand that level of security, but there you are dealing with taking every hard drive that touches the system out and locking it in a safe at the end of the day. Backups, in and of themselves, are not the issue.
Comparing Approval Voting to IRV is disingenuous. The problems with AV aren't even in the same league as those with IRV, which has similar problems to plurality.
Condorcet is more complex, frequently requires software to count properly, and would require substantial changes to the voting infrastructure. Approval voting can be done with minor modifications to existing ballots, can be counted by hand, and is easy to explain to laypeople.
The page you cite has some issues. Taking the second example, which is artificial in nature since it assumes everyone in a limited pool uses the exact same voting strategy (why would I only specify my top choice if I find others acceptable?). Let's say, for example, that the people who ranked C first by and large considered both A and B to honestly be both roughly equivalently unacceptable (which could very well happen if their policies are similar, which the page suggests). Now 71% of the voters consider consider A unacceptable, 69% of the voters consider B unacceptable, and 60% of the voters consider C unacceptable.
C is clearly the best of the bad options.
His continuation of "well this could happen if A and B compromised" is completely artificial in nature. It also changes the above numbers: 71% consider A unacceptable. 60% consider C unacceptable. 40% consider B unacceptable.
Clearly B is the best option here. If the people voting for A do not consider B acceptable, then we get the prior circumstance and clearly the most acceptable choice to the most people (or least unacceptable) choice is still winning.
Best would be to change the system of voting entirely. Approval voting would mean that you could do a "protest vote" and vote for *every candidate but those two yahoos*.
Though that doesn't mean I wouldn't also like to see how many found "none of the above" to be any good .
Actually there are "war rooms" that were/are in use by the military where people who were trained to write backwards would write on basically a glass plate for the decision makers... They've been doing that for decades.
Minor Point: What "builds" on what in math gets really, really fuzzy the more advanced the math gets. Similar to with English: if you don't get "Death of a Salesman" you may still get "Moby Dick," but if you cannot get through "Bridge to Terabithia" you probably will not get through either of the aforementioned books.
If you don't "get" Linear Vector Spaces you may still "get" Stochastic Modeling. That said, what you work with in Linear Vector Spaces may apply to Stochastic Modeling, and vice-versa. You may not get a concept that was presented in Linear Algebra until after you have seen an application that made particular sense when you later saw it again in a different form in Stochastic Modeling or Multivariate Statistics. When this happens, you basically learn it as part of the class, and previous exposure may only arguably help.
Finally, if you don't get fractions and decimals, depending on why you don't get it, you may still do just fine with everything past algebra. We joke frequently that after Calculus you lose the ability to add, subtract, multiply, and divide.
Re:why check everything
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Technically speaking, solving go for the standard 19x19 board, or any fixed board size, is a constant-time operation, hence far short of NP-complete.
Not any more than solving 128-bit cipher is a constant-time problem.
Using the Japanese rules Go has been proven to be EXPTIME-complete.
Re:why check everything
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Go is not NPC. The Japanese Rules are EXPTIME-complete. Go Endgames are PSPACE-hard, and ladders are PSPACE-complete. Under the Chinese rules it is thought that the game might be EXPSPACE-complete, but this has not yet been proven.
We also have yet to develop heuristics that even evaluate one position very well, especially during the opening or middle game. Machine learning is not a cure-all here: there's a combinatoric explosion that happens very quickly with this game which makes most of the techniques difficult to train even under the best of circumstances.
Not to say that such won't eventually be possible, but it's handwaving.
XML is not the answer with Python. Almost never. The only reasons I've ever found for XML are compatibility with other apps that use XML--otherwise there's generally a more elegant solution that doesn't use it.
If you *must* use XML, ElementTree is built into Python 2.5.
Second: About the only item that Eve doesn't have on that list is "natural disaster." Social Upheaval? Alliances falling apart. Technological Breakthrough? Release of new tech (e.g., not that long ago when rigs or thermodynamics came out). War? A fundamental factor in Eve.
Sure, its not a perfect "true-to-life" model, but I can see why an economist--most economists focusing on theory instead of application or simulation anyways--would be thrilled at the prospect of a testbed that is basically a perfectly efficient economy, even if it is a reduced subset of the "real world."
Well, to be technical, you can't "close it completely." The original code is still BSD licensed--and people must abide by the terms of that license--but you can close any changes you make to it.
That is the point *to you*. Kindly note that the article I linked to predates SL by over a decade.
I played in a MUD for years that had a strong combat focus. The entire game revolved around going zoning and getting to the point where you could do so. Equipment, gear, weapons, killing stuff. This was the meat and milk of the game.
Still, we had people who got their fun out of the game by hanging around the water fountain. Some who's fun came from exploring new areas as they came in or from going into areas that were rarely ever seen. Some who hung around the main fountain in a major city all day and just chatted with whoever was around. Some who were in it for more of the equipment, experience, and whatever. Most who fell into the first two groups would only do the latter to help them with their other activities.
I knew people who played rangers and refused to kill rabbits and squirrels for experience simply for roleplay reasons. This all in spite of that it was the easiest way to go up in level.
If this is how they have fun, who the hell are you to judge what makes the game fun to them? It may not be the original purpose of the game, but who cares? The mark of many good games is that they can be used in ways the creators never intended.
Slashdot Mirror
1) Talk to a lawyer. Asking /. for legal advice is kind of like asking random people on a major street about it. You might get a few sane answers and maybe even someone who knows what they are talking about, but it'll be hard to know for sure until you talk to an actual expert.
2) Good luck in your job search in the meantime.
That would require an unbelievable degree of denial and deception.
Top Secret is defined as information that would seriously damage the US if released. They would not trust encrypting such secrets in it if, at the time they made that decision, they had discovered a weakness that would allow them to break it. Thus, the only way this would happen if they are behaving rationally is if they were lying. For them to do that successfully it would require having something classified at a level no higher than Confidential that this was not the real algorithm.
The complexity of such a scheme given how they would then have to communicate the correct algorithm, the need to classify all software that encrypted or decrypted classified information to the level of data being classified, combined with the hit to productivity and the risk of a leak...
Not likely. Much more likely that they do not have a way around it that concerns them--or at least did not when they made that announcement.
Everything you hear on it right now is speculation.
I would also imagine that the SDK will work like all of Apple's other tools--it will probably be available for free to ADC members (at the free membership level). What is not known is what will be required to get an app made with the SDK onto the iPhone.
The NSA has approved AES for encrypting secret data (128+ bits) and top secret data (192+ bits). Unless they are playing a very deep denial and deception game, it stands to reason that they can't find a way through it either.
It is worth emphasizing that the NSA has said that AES 128/192/256 can be used to protect information up to the secret level, and that top secret information can be secured with AES 192 or 256. That's a pretty strong statement coming from the NSA, which if acting rationally they would not want to leave weaknesses in something that is used to secure information that would be, by definition, "very damaging to the US and its interests if released."
Now, it is possible that such statements are just for show, but it takes a belief that they are playing an incredulously deep game that they would make those statements as a denial and deception practice.
Apple is releasing a SDK in February. It remains to be seen exactly how locked down it will be after the SDK comes out.
The mode is meaningless?
Does the installer launch automatically when the DMG is mounted? If not then all that is removed is step 4.
If you have open safe files, it mounts the disk image and then you have to run the installer.
If you do not have open safe files, you have to double click the disk image before you can run the installer.
If you have been so thoroughly tricked that you will run the installer, whether "open safe files" is checked is irrelevant.
This is a troll, right?
What exactly on this list is "not of interest to geeks"?
Have you actually researched it, or are you just asserting such to be the case?
Quoting statistician Jessica Utts:
Quoting parapsychologist Dean Radin (who's book, Conscious Universe, gives a reasonable layman's overview of results to date):
Quoting Deborah L. Delanoy, of the department of psychology in the University of Edinburgh:
That's true for the normal delete, but I don't know about "secure delete." Secure delete could very well go back through your entire backup set and delete the file utterly.
We won't know for sure until it comes out and someone tests it.
Another poster has addressed the core issues (secure delete, etc), but one other thing needs to be pointed out: At least anecdotally, I suffer data loss far more often than I have hackers breaking into my system (at least that I know of) or having to deal with the compromise of sensitive information from my hard drive.
There is a greater risk for many people in lack of backups vs. outside threats who have sufficient access to the machine to see data we've deleted without bothering to secure delete it or delete the backups.
There are jobs that demand that level of security, but there you are dealing with taking every hard drive that touches the system out and locking it in a safe at the end of the day. Backups, in and of themselves, are not the issue.
Comparing Approval Voting to IRV is disingenuous. The problems with AV aren't even in the same league as those with IRV, which has similar problems to plurality.
Condorcet is more complex, frequently requires software to count properly, and would require substantial changes to the voting infrastructure. Approval voting can be done with minor modifications to existing ballots, can be counted by hand, and is easy to explain to laypeople.
The page you cite has some issues. Taking the second example, which is artificial in nature since it assumes everyone in a limited pool uses the exact same voting strategy (why would I only specify my top choice if I find others acceptable?). Let's say, for example, that the people who ranked C first by and large considered both A and B to honestly be both roughly equivalently unacceptable (which could very well happen if their policies are similar, which the page suggests). Now 71% of the voters consider consider A unacceptable, 69% of the voters consider B unacceptable, and 60% of the voters consider C unacceptable.
C is clearly the best of the bad options.
His continuation of "well this could happen if A and B compromised" is completely artificial in nature. It also changes the above numbers:
71% consider A unacceptable.
60% consider C unacceptable.
40% consider B unacceptable.
Clearly B is the best option here. If the people voting for A do not consider B acceptable, then we get the prior circumstance and clearly the most acceptable choice to the most people (or least unacceptable) choice is still winning.
Best would be to change the system of voting entirely. Approval voting would mean that you could do a "protest vote" and vote for *every candidate but those two yahoos*.
Though that doesn't mean I wouldn't also like to see how many found "none of the above" to be any good .
Actually there are "war rooms" that were/are in use by the military where people who were trained to write backwards would write on basically a glass plate for the decision makers... They've been doing that for decades.
How much RAM do you have and how much free space is on your HD?
Minor Point: What "builds" on what in math gets really, really fuzzy the more advanced the math gets. Similar to with English: if you don't get "Death of a Salesman" you may still get "Moby Dick," but if you cannot get through "Bridge to Terabithia" you probably will not get through either of the aforementioned books.
If you don't "get" Linear Vector Spaces you may still "get" Stochastic Modeling. That said, what you work with in Linear Vector Spaces may apply to Stochastic Modeling, and vice-versa. You may not get a concept that was presented in Linear Algebra until after you have seen an application that made particular sense when you later saw it again in a different form in Stochastic Modeling or Multivariate Statistics. When this happens, you basically learn it as part of the class, and previous exposure may only arguably help.
Finally, if you don't get fractions and decimals, depending on why you don't get it, you may still do just fine with everything past algebra. We joke frequently that after Calculus you lose the ability to add, subtract, multiply, and divide.
Not any more than solving 128-bit cipher is a constant-time problem.
Using the Japanese rules Go has been proven to be EXPTIME-complete.
Go is not NPC. The Japanese Rules are EXPTIME-complete. Go Endgames are PSPACE-hard, and ladders are PSPACE-complete. Under the Chinese rules it is thought that the game might be EXPSPACE-complete, but this has not yet been proven.
We also have yet to develop heuristics that even evaluate one position very well, especially during the opening or middle game. Machine learning is not a cure-all here: there's a combinatoric explosion that happens very quickly with this game which makes most of the techniques difficult to train even under the best of circumstances.
Not to say that such won't eventually be possible, but it's handwaving.
Oh please.
First, how do you explain Second Life? Sure, not everyone there roleplays, but it does have more than an "ounce" of it. Particularly in certain zones.
Second, roleplay is prevalent in many of these games. Just because you don't do it or that it is optional doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
XML is not the answer with Python. Almost never. The only reasons I've ever found for XML are compatibility with other apps that use XML--otherwise there's generally a more elegant solution that doesn't use it.
If you *must* use XML, ElementTree is built into Python 2.5.
First: all models are wrong, some are useful.
Second: About the only item that Eve doesn't have on that list is "natural disaster." Social Upheaval? Alliances falling apart. Technological Breakthrough? Release of new tech (e.g., not that long ago when rigs or thermodynamics came out). War? A fundamental factor in Eve.
Sure, its not a perfect "true-to-life" model, but I can see why an economist--most economists focusing on theory instead of application or simulation anyways--would be thrilled at the prospect of a testbed that is basically a perfectly efficient economy, even if it is a reduced subset of the "real world."
Well, to be technical, you can't "close it completely." The original code is still BSD licensed--and people must abide by the terms of that license--but you can close any changes you make to it.
That is the point *to you*. Kindly note that the article I linked to predates SL by over a decade.
I played in a MUD for years that had a strong combat focus. The entire game revolved around going zoning and getting to the point where you could do so. Equipment, gear, weapons, killing stuff. This was the meat and milk of the game.
Still, we had people who got their fun out of the game by hanging around the water fountain. Some who's fun came from exploring new areas as they came in or from going into areas that were rarely ever seen. Some who hung around the main fountain in a major city all day and just chatted with whoever was around. Some who were in it for more of the equipment, experience, and whatever. Most who fell into the first two groups would only do the latter to help them with their other activities.
I knew people who played rangers and refused to kill rabbits and squirrels for experience simply for roleplay reasons. This all in spite of that it was the easiest way to go up in level.
If this is how they have fun, who the hell are you to judge what makes the game fun to them? It may not be the original purpose of the game, but who cares? The mark of many good games is that they can be used in ways the creators never intended.