One important part of any solution is the amount of time/cycles it takes to encode the problem for use in your algorithm.
For example, I can't claim that my algorithm can factor a number in O(1) if I require that the input for the algorithm is a vector of the prime factors for the desired number. Yes, my part of the algorithm is O(1), but to take a number and convert it to the format for my algorithm is not O(1), meaning the overall performance can't be considered O(1).
In summary, the time/cycles to set up the problem counts.
The address itself might not help but, if they contact you at that address, you could attach a picture to the response showing that you were actually there.
They are huge and can lift enormous amounts, but it's also clear that they have no stamina and cannot keep up their exercise constantly. They often require breaks of several minutes between sets because their hearts and lungs are, quite simply, too weak to deliver fuel to their massive muscles.
While I agree with you that cardio is an essential part of an exercise program, your comparison is flawed. If you are working with extremely heavy weight, you aren't getting your energy from an aerobic process, but an anaerobic process. We can compare it to long-distance runners and sprinters. A sprinter can keep their pace for only a few seconds, or a few minutes, (depending on the distance), while a marathoner can maintain their pace for hours. It doesn't matter how efficient the cardio-vascular system is for the sprinter because they push themselves past that limit, relying on energy already stored in their cells for the extra bit of performance. Once that reserve is gone, they literally have nothing left, and their performance drops dramatically. The same is true for the bodybuilder lifting that enourmous weight - they are using up their energy reserves to lift the weight, and it takes time for the muscle cells to recover from that. That's why they need the longer rest period. If they worked with a lighter weight, they probably wouldn't need the long rest period, unless they are using it to socialize instead of recover.
That's why there is a hierarchy to the application of force.
It's been a few years, but while in the military I believe it was:
Physical Presence - "Hey you! Stop!"
Physical Confrontation - Grabbing, tackling, etc.
Handcuffs - Gets into the realm of weapons. (Were declared lethal weapons in California at one point. A suspect had one hand cuffed when he spun around and the open bracelet snagged the lip of the officer and tore his cheek open.)
Baton
Pepper Spray
Firearms
Pepper spray was above using your baton since you could stop hitting them if they gave up. Pepper spray is the gift that keeps on giving and is pretty dangerous to use. Anyone with asthma, or other breathing problems, has a pretty good risk of dying. That's why the rules for pepper spray include providing immediate treatment to the victim. (Or at least they used to...) Tasers have the same risks for people with heart conditions. Other less than lethal weapons, such as rubber bullets, can easily kill someone. There are strict rules for the range you can use them, and how to use them, such as bouncing the bullets off the ground and no head shots. Accuracy of the rounds were also pretty bad, with some shots drifitng by a few feet at 10 yards. During our qualification with the weapons we were knocking holes in 1/2 inch plywood at 10 yards. Now imagine something like that to the face/head/neck.
I think the point is that you don't know if it is the 1 time you lose, or the 10 times you win, so you would go for the win since, 10 out of 11 times, you would win. Who cares if you lose that 1 time if you win the other 10 times. That's why you never lay them down since, statistically, you are 10 times more likely to win than lose.
Really, the overhead of this is pretty minimal - a couple of cheap wood kiosks big enough for a single person to sit and take the money, the phone connections so they can take credit cards, and the staff salaries. If each person sells 500 tags a day (at $5 each), then the overhead for salaries is pretty low, and the kiosks shouldn't need a lot of maintenance. It wouldn't surprise me if the overhead is less than 5%.
You are exactly right about the emotional difficulty in killing someone at close range. When I was at Advanced Infantry School while in the U.S. Marine Corps we had classes in Killology, (yes, the study of killing people), that discussed this phenomenon and how to address it while in combat. It turns out that very few people, (estimated at less than 2% of the population - and some of those are psychotic), can accept killing someone at very close range, even to save their own life and need some sort of discussion or therapy to deal with the experience. This is why there were fewer cases of PTSD after WW II than Vietnam. Coming home from WW II, there was time to discuss your experiences with your fellow soldiers while you took a slow boat home. During Vietnam, your tour was done, you caught a flight, and were on the street 2 days later. No time to discuss and deal with what happened.
Since I doubt many people will want to join the Marines just to take this class, a great book on this topic is: On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Killing in War and Society by Dave Grossman. Available here.
All they would have to do is buy a few cans of spraypaint or a paintball gun and the cameras can be rendered useless. It is far harder to clean, replace and repair the cameras than it is to render them useless. Think about it... It is far easier to come out of an alley, shoot 25 paintballs at a camera until it is covered and go back into the alley than it is for the city to send a crew down to the camera location, put up a ladder or lift, clean the lens/cover, get down and drive to the next camera.
If you get someone nasty, they could replace the normal paint with something more permanent.
I don't really think that they can "only" produce a handful of them
Well, according to vgchartz.com, Nintendo is currently selling between 217,000 and 225,000 each week. At 217,000 a week, they have to produce over 30,000 a day or over 1,200 an hour (assuming around-the-clock production) to meet that demand. That's quite a few consoles. In addition, they can't just add capacity because they need it for a few months to catch up with demand. Adding addional capacity takes a lot of time, and a lot of money - and you don't spend that much time and money unless you have a sustained need for it - adding capacity eats into your profits over the short term.
At Iowa State University, one of the professors in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department is working on robotic combines. The project is still in the early stages, and probably won't affect most of the jobs that migrant workers are used for, but is still an interesting development. Details can be found here.
Actually, it doesn't matter that a weed is a flower no one likes. In a farmer's field, if it isn't the crop that is supposed to be there, it goes. It doesn't matter if it is a desirable flower, or a flower no one likes - if it isn't corn, soybeans, wheat, etc. get rid of it because it can impact the yield of the crop you want. So you don't have to teach it how to distinguish between flowers, or whatever other plant, it just has to identify that it isn't the desired crop.
You can eliminate the likely from your post. We used to use simunition quite a bit when traiing in CQB and I can tell you they will cause bruises and break the skin. The people playing the role of hostage taker or terrorist would wear two sweatshirts and a jacket and still get bruises.
You could also create a robust test suite that would try to break the program in an intelligent and repeatable way. Can you do far more random tests than well-thought out tests? Yes. However, random tests, (even a lot of them), don't guarantee that you have good code coverage.
Even better, you take time to make your parser better at error handling. It can take a lot longer but is probably worth it in the long run. It won't eliminate the need for testing, but thinking through all the things that can go wrong is never a waste of time.
We don't usually discuss the number of CPU ticks since it can vary greatly depending on the type of CPU, so we usually pick a ballpark number of the number of keys that can be tried in a second and do our calculations from that.
Brute-forcing a key is very easy to do in parallel, so the more machines/CPUs you have, the better. Unfortunately, this generally doesn't help as much as you would think. For example, in my previous example, imagining we could try 2^64 keys a second is way too high. If we assume perfect performance from a modern processor, where each cycle could try a key, we only have 2^32 attempts per second (assuming a 4GHz processor). If we assume every machine is a quad core, quad processor, we have 1 machine capable of 2^36 attempts per second. We would need about 250 million machines to reach 2^64 keys per second.
While it is also possible to custom design chips that would be able to attempt multiple keys at the same time, we now have custom hardware, and would hav to make millions of these custom chips that can only be used for this one purpose. it just isn't practical.
In fact, the general term used when discussing the strength of an encryption scheme is that brute-forcing the scheme is "computationally infeasible". Basically, if you used all the computing power on Earth and the heat-death of the universe would occur before you would be finished, it is computationally infeasible to crack. Some people use different measurements, but that is the one I like to use as my rule of infeasible.
This is breakable with enough time (it's only AES-128)
Ummm... While AES-128 is indeed breakable with "enough time", (as are all encryption schemes other than a one-time pad), I don't think you will be around long enough to really care. Even at 2^64 operations a second, It would still take an average of 2^63 seconds to crack, or about 200 billion years.
I would worry more about someone infecting your machine with a key-logger (hardware logger since you use Knoppix) or torturing you until you give it up.
The question is, are the phones in the comparison chart displayed at the same size ratio? If they are all displayed at 6:1 (or whatever) then you can do a visual comparison of the size (length and width) of the phone, but not really a depth comparison, so they include it. I don't have any of the phones listed, so I have no idea if they are displayed with the same size ratio or not. Does anyone on Slashdot have access to some of the phones displayed so they can verify, (or falsify), this idea?
Also, does anyone know what kind of battery is in the iPhone? It seems like it gets a lot of battery life, even compared to specific-use devices designed to do 1 thing efficiently, so I was wondering what, if any, advancements in battery technology they used.
I think this could work quite well if, (and that may be a big IF), Marvel sticks to its strengths and brings in Hollywood talent to do the rest.
For example, if they have the artists and writers for the comic books create the storyboards for the movie, and have a good director actually use that as a base for the actual movie, they could create something pretty good.
The comic writers don't understand the difficulties of working with different camera angles or special effects, but the directors do. Of course, the directors probably don't understand the characters and would have a hard time getting the "comic book feel" right. Together, they could do both, which would make one hell of a movie. Maybe an iterative approach to the movie/story like they do at Pixar would work. Marvel puts together some storyboards, the directors go over them talking about what can be done, and what doesn't work technically and cinematically, and Marvel updates things. Repeat until both sides are happy. Schedule a blockbuster release date and collect your money.
For certification purposes, it really doesn't matter how secure the system is, but how secure you can show the system is.
I attended a presentation regarding these certifications from a manager at IBM, (I forget his name), that had taken several products through the certification process and he said that it is all about the documentation. For example, how many people working on BSD have the architecture, design and user documentation to prove that something has been designed securely? It might be secure and a lot of people may have reviewed it and declared it secure, (even the auditors), but without the corresponding documentation it can't pass certification. Why not? Well, without a design document, I can't verify the implementation actually does what it is supposed to. Also, without the user documentation, how do I know that I have to have certain services running for the behavior to be valid? The auditors are allowed to do anything they want to the system that isn't forbidden in the documentation. So, if it isn't documented that you can't turn off some security service, it is fair game. That's why the product, in a certain configuration, is certified and not any system that happens to run the OS.
I think this is why we will only see high levels of certification going to corporate sponsored OSes. Let's face it, most open source developers don't want to spend most of their time documenting their work - they want to actually do it. It is only when you have management that focuses on the certification process, and holds everyone accountable for proper documentation, that the requirements can be met.
I'm guessing that WGA is set to return "genuine" if it is unable to retrieve the appropriate information. For example, it might try 5 times to get the product key, but the system always gives it an error since it doesn't actually have a product key. Since they can't get enough information to determine if you are genuine or not, they err on the side of caution and say you are genuine, even though they can't tell.
The problem isn't amendments. For example, you might introduce a bill that addresses repairs of Interstate 80 from Chicago to Nebraska. After you introduce the bills, a Senator from Iowa points out that a part of it dealing with repairs around Des Moines doesn't work for some reason. (Maybe emergency repairs on I-35 would interfere.) The bill gets amended to deal with that problem.
Without the amendment, the entire bill would have to be redrafted, go back into committee and be debated (again) on the floor. Plus, it would open the door for more shenanigans as the entire text would have to be reexamined to make sure someone didn't add something.
I feel the problem is with the people who are trying to manipulate the system for personal or political game, and not with the rules that govern the system.
Amendments are reuired to meet germaneness rules. However, if you try hard enough, you can make almost anything sound germane to a specific bill. For example, if you are working on the state budget, you could attach almost anything since the costs associated with it affect the budget. Highway bill - anything related to oil and gas and automotive industry. Heck, even air travel since widespread construction may change the number of people flying. If you are changing the deadline for election paperwork, almost anything regarding elections. Oh, elections might be electronic? Then software laws may be germane. See how easy it is?
You just pay someone like a lawyer or lobbyist to come up with a plausible connection to some bill that is about to be voted on and attach it.
I think the moral of this story is that archiving anything, even if it seems durable, is hard. Now, how confident do you feel about those backup tapes that are in the closet down the hall? How much moisture is getting to them just from the humidity in the air?
Slashdot Mirror
One important part of any solution is the amount of time/cycles it takes to encode the problem for use in your algorithm.
For example, I can't claim that my algorithm can factor a number in O(1) if I require that the input for the algorithm is a vector of the prime factors for the desired number. Yes, my part of the algorithm is O(1), but to take a number and convert it to the format for my algorithm is not O(1), meaning the overall performance can't be considered O(1).
In summary, the time/cycles to set up the problem counts.
The address itself might not help but, if they contact you at that address, you could attach a picture to the response showing that you were actually there.
They are huge and can lift enormous amounts, but it's also clear that they have no stamina and cannot keep up their exercise constantly. They often require breaks of several minutes between sets because their hearts and lungs are, quite simply, too weak to deliver fuel to their massive muscles.
While I agree with you that cardio is an essential part of an exercise program, your comparison is flawed. If you are working with extremely heavy weight, you aren't getting your energy from an aerobic process, but an anaerobic process. We can compare it to long-distance runners and sprinters. A sprinter can keep their pace for only a few seconds, or a few minutes, (depending on the distance), while a marathoner can maintain their pace for hours. It doesn't matter how efficient the cardio-vascular system is for the sprinter because they push themselves past that limit, relying on energy already stored in their cells for the extra bit of performance. Once that reserve is gone, they literally have nothing left, and their performance drops dramatically. The same is true for the bodybuilder lifting that enourmous weight - they are using up their energy reserves to lift the weight, and it takes time for the muscle cells to recover from that. That's why they need the longer rest period. If they worked with a lighter weight, they probably wouldn't need the long rest period, unless they are using it to socialize instead of recover.
Privacy (Anonymity), Accountability, Connected.
Pick 2.
Does this mean that paper beats rock AND scissors now?
That's why there is a hierarchy to the application of force.
It's been a few years, but while in the military I believe it was:
Pepper spray was above using your baton since you could stop hitting them if they gave up. Pepper spray is the gift that keeps on giving and is pretty dangerous to use. Anyone with asthma, or other breathing problems, has a pretty good risk of dying. That's why the rules for pepper spray include providing immediate treatment to the victim. (Or at least they used to...) Tasers have the same risks for people with heart conditions. Other less than lethal weapons, such as rubber bullets, can easily kill someone. There are strict rules for the range you can use them, and how to use them, such as bouncing the bullets off the ground and no head shots. Accuracy of the rounds were also pretty bad, with some shots drifitng by a few feet at 10 yards. During our qualification with the weapons we were knocking holes in 1/2 inch plywood at 10 yards. Now imagine something like that to the face/head/neck.
I think the point is that you don't know if it is the 1 time you lose, or the 10 times you win, so you would go for the win since, 10 out of 11 times, you would win. Who cares if you lose that 1 time if you win the other 10 times. That's why you never lay them down since, statistically, you are 10 times more likely to win than lose.
Really, the overhead of this is pretty minimal - a couple of cheap wood kiosks big enough for a single person to sit and take the money, the phone connections so they can take credit cards, and the staff salaries. If each person sells 500 tags a day (at $5 each), then the overhead for salaries is pretty low, and the kiosks shouldn't need a lot of maintenance. It wouldn't surprise me if the overhead is less than 5%.
You are exactly right about the emotional difficulty in killing someone at close range. When I was at Advanced Infantry School while in the U.S. Marine Corps we had classes in Killology, (yes, the study of killing people), that discussed this phenomenon and how to address it while in combat. It turns out that very few people, (estimated at less than 2% of the population - and some of those are psychotic), can accept killing someone at very close range, even to save their own life and need some sort of discussion or therapy to deal with the experience. This is why there were fewer cases of PTSD after WW II than Vietnam. Coming home from WW II, there was time to discuss your experiences with your fellow soldiers while you took a slow boat home. During Vietnam, your tour was done, you caught a flight, and were on the street 2 days later. No time to discuss and deal with what happened.
Since I doubt many people will want to join the Marines just to take this class, a great book on this topic is: On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Killing in War and Society by Dave Grossman. Available here.
All they would have to do is buy a few cans of spraypaint or a paintball gun and the cameras can be rendered useless. It is far harder to clean, replace and repair the cameras than it is to render them useless. Think about it... It is far easier to come out of an alley, shoot 25 paintballs at a camera until it is covered and go back into the alley than it is for the city to send a crew down to the camera location, put up a ladder or lift, clean the lens/cover, get down and drive to the next camera.
If you get someone nasty, they could replace the normal paint with something more permanent.
I don't really think that they can "only" produce a handful of them
Well, according to vgchartz.com, Nintendo is currently selling between 217,000 and 225,000 each week. At 217,000 a week, they have to produce over 30,000 a day or over 1,200 an hour (assuming around-the-clock production) to meet that demand. That's quite a few consoles. In addition, they can't just add capacity because they need it for a few months to catch up with demand. Adding addional capacity takes a lot of time, and a lot of money - and you don't spend that much time and money unless you have a sustained need for it - adding capacity eats into your profits over the short term.
At Iowa State University, one of the professors in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department is working on robotic combines. The project is still in the early stages, and probably won't affect most of the jobs that migrant workers are used for, but is still an interesting development. Details can be found here.
Actually, it doesn't matter that a weed is a flower no one likes. In a farmer's field, if it isn't the crop that is supposed to be there, it goes. It doesn't matter if it is a desirable flower, or a flower no one likes - if it isn't corn, soybeans, wheat, etc. get rid of it because it can impact the yield of the crop you want. So you don't have to teach it how to distinguish between flowers, or whatever other plant, it just has to identify that it isn't the desired crop.
You can eliminate the likely from your post. We used to use simunition quite a bit when traiing in CQB and I can tell you they will cause bruises and break the skin. The people playing the role of hostage taker or terrorist would wear two sweatshirts and a jacket and still get bruises.
You could also create a robust test suite that would try to break the program in an intelligent and repeatable way. Can you do far more random tests than well-thought out tests? Yes. However, random tests, (even a lot of them), don't guarantee that you have good code coverage.
Even better, you take time to make your parser better at error handling. It can take a lot longer but is probably worth it in the long run. It won't eliminate the need for testing, but thinking through all the things that can go wrong is never a waste of time.
We don't usually discuss the number of CPU ticks since it can vary greatly depending on the type of CPU, so we usually pick a ballpark number of the number of keys that can be tried in a second and do our calculations from that.
Brute-forcing a key is very easy to do in parallel, so the more machines/CPUs you have, the better. Unfortunately, this generally doesn't help as much as you would think. For example, in my previous example, imagining we could try 2^64 keys a second is way too high. If we assume perfect performance from a modern processor, where each cycle could try a key, we only have 2^32 attempts per second (assuming a 4GHz processor). If we assume every machine is a quad core, quad processor, we have 1 machine capable of 2^36 attempts per second. We would need about 250 million machines to reach 2^64 keys per second.
While it is also possible to custom design chips that would be able to attempt multiple keys at the same time, we now have custom hardware, and would hav to make millions of these custom chips that can only be used for this one purpose. it just isn't practical.
In fact, the general term used when discussing the strength of an encryption scheme is that brute-forcing the scheme is "computationally infeasible". Basically, if you used all the computing power on Earth and the heat-death of the universe would occur before you would be finished, it is computationally infeasible to crack. Some people use different measurements, but that is the one I like to use as my rule of infeasible.
Hope that helps.
This is breakable with enough time (it's only AES-128)
Ummm... While AES-128 is indeed breakable with "enough time", (as are all encryption schemes other than a one-time pad), I don't think you will be around long enough to really care. Even at 2^64 operations a second, It would still take an average of 2^63 seconds to crack, or about 200 billion years.
I would worry more about someone infecting your machine with a key-logger (hardware logger since you use Knoppix) or torturing you until you give it up.
I bet the next time they will demand the payments be made in advance of the work being performed or the goods being delivered.
The question is, are the phones in the comparison chart displayed at the same size ratio? If they are all displayed at 6:1 (or whatever) then you can do a visual comparison of the size (length and width) of the phone, but not really a depth comparison, so they include it. I don't have any of the phones listed, so I have no idea if they are displayed with the same size ratio or not. Does anyone on Slashdot have access to some of the phones displayed so they can verify, (or falsify), this idea?
Also, does anyone know what kind of battery is in the iPhone? It seems like it gets a lot of battery life, even compared to specific-use devices designed to do 1 thing efficiently, so I was wondering what, if any, advancements in battery technology they used.
I think this could work quite well if, (and that may be a big IF), Marvel sticks to its strengths and brings in Hollywood talent to do the rest.
For example, if they have the artists and writers for the comic books create the storyboards for the movie, and have a good director actually use that as a base for the actual movie, they could create something pretty good.
The comic writers don't understand the difficulties of working with different camera angles or special effects, but the directors do. Of course, the directors probably don't understand the characters and would have a hard time getting the "comic book feel" right. Together, they could do both, which would make one hell of a movie. Maybe an iterative approach to the movie/story like they do at Pixar would work. Marvel puts together some storyboards, the directors go over them talking about what can be done, and what doesn't work technically and cinematically, and Marvel updates things. Repeat until both sides are happy. Schedule a blockbuster release date and collect your money.
For certification purposes, it really doesn't matter how secure the system is, but how secure you can show the system is.
I attended a presentation regarding these certifications from a manager at IBM, (I forget his name), that had taken several products through the certification process and he said that it is all about the documentation. For example, how many people working on BSD have the architecture, design and user documentation to prove that something has been designed securely? It might be secure and a lot of people may have reviewed it and declared it secure, (even the auditors), but without the corresponding documentation it can't pass certification. Why not? Well, without a design document, I can't verify the implementation actually does what it is supposed to. Also, without the user documentation, how do I know that I have to have certain services running for the behavior to be valid? The auditors are allowed to do anything they want to the system that isn't forbidden in the documentation. So, if it isn't documented that you can't turn off some security service, it is fair game. That's why the product, in a certain configuration, is certified and not any system that happens to run the OS.
I think this is why we will only see high levels of certification going to corporate sponsored OSes. Let's face it, most open source developers don't want to spend most of their time documenting their work - they want to actually do it. It is only when you have management that focuses on the certification process, and holds everyone accountable for proper documentation, that the requirements can be met.
I'm guessing that WGA is set to return "genuine" if it is unable to retrieve the appropriate information. For example, it might try 5 times to get the product key, but the system always gives it an error since it doesn't actually have a product key. Since they can't get enough information to determine if you are genuine or not, they err on the side of caution and say you are genuine, even though they can't tell.
The problem isn't amendments. For example, you might introduce a bill that addresses repairs of Interstate 80 from Chicago to Nebraska. After you introduce the bills, a Senator from Iowa points out that a part of it dealing with repairs around Des Moines doesn't work for some reason. (Maybe emergency repairs on I-35 would interfere.) The bill gets amended to deal with that problem.
Without the amendment, the entire bill would have to be redrafted, go back into committee and be debated (again) on the floor. Plus, it would open the door for more shenanigans as the entire text would have to be reexamined to make sure someone didn't add something.
I feel the problem is with the people who are trying to manipulate the system for personal or political game, and not with the rules that govern the system.
Amendments are reuired to meet germaneness rules. However, if you try hard enough, you can make almost anything sound germane to a specific bill. For example, if you are working on the state budget, you could attach almost anything since the costs associated with it affect the budget. Highway bill - anything related to oil and gas and automotive industry. Heck, even air travel since widespread construction may change the number of people flying. If you are changing the deadline for election paperwork, almost anything regarding elections. Oh, elections might be electronic? Then software laws may be germane. See how easy it is?
You just pay someone like a lawyer or lobbyist to come up with a plausible connection to some bill that is about to be voted on and attach it.
I think the moral of this story is that archiving anything, even if it seems durable, is hard. Now, how confident do you feel about those backup tapes that are in the closet down the hall? How much moisture is getting to them just from the humidity in the air?