Whatever happened to Nurse Christine Chapel between TOS and the films then? Yes, yes I know her actress married Mr Roddenberry and later directed some of the Treks, but what happened to her character? Did she go to pieces and quit her job when she finally accepted she couldn't get it on with Spock?
Oh yeah, and what about Kirk dying in Stark Trek Generations? Methinks he won't be returning. *teardrop*;)
Anyone considered the fact that unless the inner parts of the probe were built in clean room conditions there's probably some human skin cells in there that might make it to the alien world? Then they'd have a real sample of our DNA to work with.
I found this article on riscos.com a while back saying they had a project ongoing to get RISC OS working on the Psion netBook PDA. "The SA1100 processor used in the netBook offers 26 bit operational modes that will allow the use of all the current Acorn / RISC OS software".
It looks here like Psion are still making the netbook.
Haven't you noticed how much the BBC have increased advertising of their own program(me)s in recent years? Fair enough, these adverts don't interrupt our viewing pleasure in the middle of a program but they often seem to drag out for ages in between them. The British public should have the choice whether they want to have to pay annually to watch the BBC when they could just watch the other 4 terrestrial channels for free. It's an unfair monopoly IMHO. (Although I do have to hand it to them some of their comedies and documentaries are unusually good - just not worth £100 a year..)
Hmm I'm not so sure about that - I know you could do what you're saying if it was just a cipher where you offset each byte by the same value, but that's not the One-Time Pad method. If you generate a random string that's as long as your message as your key and add all the bytes values in the random string to the byte values in the message then you'll get another random string that's got no patterns at all - i.e. random_number + some_constant = another_random_number, or have I got this wrong? Either way, it's still gonna be harder to crack than say public key encryption.
The terrorists could just use the one-time pad method which a seven year old could probably even understand - it's just simple addition of random (pre-generated) digits to each character code.
If I was a terrorist I sure wouldn't bother relying on commercially written code to keep my messages secure. Add the use of a simple steganography algorithm to hide the message in the LSBs of a noisy image or WAV and you're all sorted! Meanwhile Joe Public's e-mail gets scanned by Big Brother 'cause he uses commercial US software.
That's a very sweet demo : ) makes my game I'm writing look very lame.
Loads of people have been raising this point about re-generating complex content from very simple initial conditions as a form of extremely high compression but none of the sceptics seem to want to respond to it - they respond to the ideas that are obviously wrong as if no-one's ideas are worth thinking about. Sorry bit of a rant, I feel better now.
OK imagine it's thousands of years in the future and humans can do funky things with space and time.
1. You have the file you wish to compress on your hard drive.
2. With your ultra-hi-tech science you open a wormhole to connect this point in space-time with say, a point 2 months in the future.
3. You delete the file from your hard drive. It was the only copy in existance so you've effectively compressed it to 0 bytes and you can use this disk space for 2 months.
4. 2 months later you need the file again so you fetch it via the wormhole.
OK so this is kind of like just backing up the file to a tape drive or something and then copying it back when you need it, maybe it's not really compression - but the difference is, *after* you delete it, it really doesn't occupy any *space* at all until you need it again 2 months later.
Now we just need to work out how to make a wormhole, hmmm...
If (that's a very big if) the universe is completely deterministic then, in theory, everything in it could be calculated by knowing the initial conditions of the Big Bang and all the physical laws that acted to change those conditions. In that case, nothing in the universe would be truly random and provided you knew a thing's position in spacetime you could calculate its data (except that something tells me your simulator would have to be more larger than the universe itself to run the code).
On a more realistic scale, if you knew exactly the conditions under which your data to be compressed was obtained, you could run a simulation of the process again to regenerate the data.
E.g. a script for a raytracing program will be many times smaller than any algorithm such as jpeg could ever make the resultant image.
Basically what I'm saying, is IF there's no such thing as truly random numbers, and you know how the random data was generated in the first place, you can run the generation process again to get the data again. Hopefully the data you would need about the initial conditions would be less than the data the process generated.
Slashdot Mirror
Whatever happened to Nurse Christine Chapel between TOS and the films then? Yes, yes I know her actress married Mr Roddenberry and later directed some of the Treks, but what happened to her character? Did she go to pieces and quit her job when she finally accepted she couldn't get it on with Spock? Oh yeah, and what about Kirk dying in Stark Trek Generations? Methinks he won't be returning. *teardrop* ;)
I think you'll find it's also "Q" that gives James Bond his technical solutions to save him from impossible situations hee hee
Anyone considered the fact that unless the inner parts of the probe were built in clean room conditions there's probably some human skin cells in there that might make it to the alien world? Then they'd have a real sample of our DNA to work with.
I found this article on riscos.com a while back saying they had a project ongoing to get RISC OS working on the Psion netBook PDA. "The SA1100 processor used in the netBook offers 26 bit operational modes that will allow the use of all the current Acorn / RISC OS software". It looks here like Psion are still making the netbook.
had the drag and drop saving like RISCOS - I miss that every time I have to click Browse
Haven't you noticed how much the BBC have increased advertising of their own program(me)s in recent years? Fair enough, these adverts don't interrupt our viewing pleasure in the middle of a program but they often seem to drag out for ages in between them. The British public should have the choice whether they want to have to pay annually to watch the BBC when they could just watch the other 4 terrestrial channels for free. It's an unfair monopoly IMHO. (Although I do have to hand it to them some of their comedies and documentaries are unusually good - just not worth £100 a year..)
Close, but not close enough : (
yippee yippee i'm filled with glee
first fuckin' post was got by me
ha ha, ha ha, hee hee, hee hee
Lucky old me and my sweet fp!
Here's some info on the One-Time Pad method in case anyone's interested.
Hmm I'm not so sure about that - I know you could do what you're saying if it was just a cipher where you offset each byte by the same value, but that's not the One-Time Pad method. If you generate a random string that's as long as your message as your key and add all the bytes values in the random string to the byte values in the message then you'll get another random string that's got no patterns at all - i.e. random_number + some_constant = another_random_number, or have I got this wrong? Either way, it's still gonna be harder to crack than say public key encryption.
The terrorists could just use the one-time pad method which a seven year old could probably even understand - it's just simple addition of random (pre-generated) digits to each character code.
If I was a terrorist I sure wouldn't bother relying on commercially written code to keep my messages secure. Add the use of a simple steganography algorithm to hide the message in the LSBs of a noisy image or WAV and you're all sorted! Meanwhile Joe Public's e-mail gets scanned by Big Brother 'cause he uses commercial US software.
That's a very sweet demo : ) makes my game I'm writing look very lame.
Loads of people have been raising this point about re-generating complex content from very simple initial conditions as a form of extremely high compression but none of the sceptics seem to want to respond to it - they respond to the ideas that are obviously wrong as if no-one's ideas are worth thinking about. Sorry bit of a rant, I feel better now.
OK imagine it's thousands of years in the future and humans can do funky things with space and time.
1. You have the file you wish to compress on your hard drive.
2. With your ultra-hi-tech science you open a wormhole to connect this point in space-time with say, a point 2 months in the future.
3. You delete the file from your hard drive. It was the only copy in existance so you've effectively compressed it to 0 bytes and you can use this disk space for 2 months.
4. 2 months later you need the file again so you fetch it via the wormhole.
OK so this is kind of like just backing up the file to a tape drive or something and then copying it back when you need it, maybe it's not really compression - but the difference is, *after* you delete it, it really doesn't occupy any *space* at all until you need it again 2 months later.
Now we just need to work out how to make a wormhole, hmmm...
I thought of this too and posted this comment. Anyone got any thoughts on the matter?
If (that's a very big if) the universe is completely deterministic then, in theory, everything in it could be calculated by knowing the initial conditions of the Big Bang and all the physical laws that acted to change those conditions. In that case, nothing in the universe would be truly random and provided you knew a thing's position in spacetime you could calculate its data (except that something tells me your simulator would have to be more larger than the universe itself to run the code). On a more realistic scale, if you knew exactly the conditions under which your data to be compressed was obtained, you could run a simulation of the process again to regenerate the data. E.g. a script for a raytracing program will be many times smaller than any algorithm such as jpeg could ever make the resultant image. Basically what I'm saying, is IF there's no such thing as truly random numbers, and you know how the random data was generated in the first place, you can run the generation process again to get the data again. Hopefully the data you would need about the initial conditions would be less than the data the process generated.