An good example is the story of young Carl Gauss. As the story goes, his elementary school teacher gave the children this arithmetic assignment in an attempt to keep them busy: sum the integers from 1 to 100.
But that isn't an SAT math question. That's why I say I've taken better tests of general ability.
Additionally, Gauss was MUCH younger at that time, than the age at which one takes the SATs. It is very reasonable to expect someone like him to have learned more by that age at which one takes the SATs.
This doesn't mean that i'm "smarter" than most others (my spelling is horrible and degrading rapidly), but I must point out that it is always people who test average or below (or, in general, are unsatisfied with the results of thier own tests) who make these statements, or say that it only tests "test taking" ability, or "book smarts".
Nope, not true. I scored a 1450. I think I'm in the top (some low number) percent of the population as far as intelligence and knowledge goes. I do not believe that the general SAT is valid test of anything other than SAT-taking ability.
I think I'm pretty qualified to say that too, given that I'm 2 weeks after from my degree.
I don't think the test is properly designed. I think I've taken much better tests that guaged general ablities, especially math.
The SAT only tests really basic math skills. I don't think this is a valid measure of someone's abilities.
Put simply, I don't think the spread between the easy and the hard questions is wide enough. I took the test as a junior, and I still hadn't been in any of the courses it is designed to test in two years. Yeah, I did fine, but how are those who are truly ahead of the curve supposed to show their abilities?
This isn't a problem limited to just the SATs either. In NYS we have state-wide Regents test for various subjects. I got a perfect score on all three tests. (I'm not saying this to brag, but I need to prove a point.) I used to think this was cool. Know what I realize now? That those tests were a waste. I should have been taking harder tests and harder courses.
Looking back now, I bet I could've taken my first two collesge math courses in high school and done allright. I'm not counting the AP Calc I did take in HS, either.
There is something wrong with putting everyone in the same class, or having them take the same test. People have different levels of abilities at different things. They should be taking a test which recognizes that. We should have been taking a different test. The number or questions that seperates a 1500 from a 1600 is just not statisically significant. When you start talking about this guy missing 2 questions out of several hundred and that guy missing 1, it's idiotic to separate those two people's scores by 1/14th of the total availible score range. Then admissions people go ahead and treat the 1600 as if it was a much better score than the 1500, even though scores that far off the norm aren't well enough determined for them to have that information. (And you can't call this bitterness either, I got into every school I applied to, and I'm about to graduate from a top school in my field.)
The questions I had to answer on the SAT just didn't really relate to anything I did in college. Yeah, they tested some basic skills that I needed in college, but they we not testing my potential. They weren't even testing if I had the skillset necessary to succeed.
If I had gone to college with only the math skills tested by the SAT I, I would have been fucked. No doubt about it. If it had really taken those extra years to learn those basic skills, and been that far behind, there's no way I could have kept up with the pace of my college courses.
(*)Sorry as in, sorry that nature and evolution are cruel. I, however, am not cruel, so don't get too upset by this post. =)
That's a pretty messed up thing to say. "Evolution" is not the reason most people do poorly on tests. There are plently of people out there with the same or greater potential than you, who never get a chance to fullfill it, through no fault of their own. Maybe their school was shitty. Maybe their homelife was shitty. Maybe they were just flat out homeless.
I friend of mine dropped out of school in 10th grade. He was living on his own, supporting himself completely at age 16. He scored a 1400 on his SAT. He's a smart guy, Imagine how well he would have done given a better
The EMP will fry the anti-lock brakes. ABS systems are designed to lock the wheels in case of system failure. (Ironic in a way...)
Bullshit. It would be totally stupid to design the system that way. If it fails while you were going down the road at 70MPH you'd have a very good chance of dying. I can't even imagine what would make you think it works this way.
What if the ABS fails? Anti-lock brake systems are designed to be fail-safe. Nevertheless, they are equipped with a diagnostic feature that automatically activates and tests the major components each time the car is started and monitors them throughout the journey.
In the rare event of a failure, the ABS would be deactivated by its own safety circuit. A warning light goes on indicating to the driver that the vehicle is now in conventional base-brake mode.
So your plan is to stall his car while it's going down the highway RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU? I hope you have good brakes.:)
What dumbass modded this as insightful? Stalled engine != Instant stop. The car will continue to coast forward, slowly deccelerating. Even if the guy in the stalled car hits the brakes, it's not like having a stalled engine just gave him better braking ability than he had before.
Except that processors don't just give up the ship randomly(well, except in VERY rare circumstanecs)- drives do it all the time; it's almost expected. I don't give a crap about another 20GB or $20 off, I want a hard drive that won't turn itself into a paperweight after a year or two. If I'm going to own the drive for 5 years, what's another $20?
I suggest you do what I did, setup RAID. I have to 40GB drives RAID0'ed. Yeah, HDDs aren't super reliable, but the odds of both drives failing at once are very small (unless you put a bullet through your case, hit it with a hammer, etc). RAID is nice anyways, because it gives you a boost in speed under some circumstances.
More specfically, I have one 40GB normal drive for my OS, apps, and swap (stuff which I can always get off the net), and two 40GB drives RAID0'ed for my/home. I think this is an optimal set-up for a desktop computer.
Even if you could get a HDD with a 10 year MTBF, you're more likely to loose data than if you used two RAID0'ed HDDs with 2 year MTBF's. With the single drive, if it fails, your data is gone. With two drives, even if one fails you can just plug another drive in. In order to loose you data the first drive has to fail, and then you have to not fix the problem, and then the other drive has to fail.
RAID is practically unheard of among the jane-and-bob computer users,
True, but this doesn't mean it wouldn't be a good solution to their problems.
Most home users don't have any of their data backed up
Then they will learn the value of backup the same way I did. Sometimes people just have to make their own mistakes. Once this happens to enough people, we can expect to start seeing more redundant storage in PCs. Once enough jane-or-bobs learn their lesson, there will be money to be made by offering desktop machines with preconfigured RAID system. The don't need to know what RAID is. They just need to read:
"Our special dual-disk(tm) system protects your valuable data. Don't want to loose all your data next time your computer dies? You don't have to. Your data is safe with the Dell foobar9500."
Once enough people start keeping their photo albums, etc on their PC, there will be a real market for this sort of thing.
In general the problem is that while capacities have lept up, the rate at which we can read/write to those drives has not kept pace.
No, not really. The sustained transfer rate of HDDs has been steadily improving. It's obvious if you think about it. The drive stays the same size. The density goes up. The disc spins at the same rate or faster. Therefore, more data goes by the heads per unit time. This means trasfer rate will also increase. Specifically, this means that the transfer rate will scale linearly with the density of the disk.
What hasn't improved at the same rate as density is seek times. Seek times have always been the killer for mechanical storage mechanisms. They have to move something around and they have to obey Newton's laws.
In order for seek times to improve at the same rate as the rest of the drive impoves, we would need improvements in materials science and motor design which far exceeded those that increased density.
The other neat thing to think about is the spinning discs inside the HDD. Both those impovements I just mentioned might also allow you to spin the platters faster. This means that you could actually increase the transfer rate of your drive as well.
The immediate problem I can see is that moving something back and forth doesn't scale as nicely as storage density. Here's an example:
Say you've got something that you need to get from point A to B. Say you can do it in 1 microsecond. If you want to be able to do it in 1/2 microsecond, you need 4x more force. This means you need a motor with 4x more force, and a material that's 4x stiffer and 4x stronger.
Even if materials science, and motor designs were improving at a rate comparable to "Moore's Law", seek times wouldn't. Some things just don't scale the way we would like them to. Batteries are a good example.
Correction: You need a material that has 4x better strength to weight and stiffness to weight ratios.
It's also worth considering that you have to burn 4x more energy to move something from A to B twice as fast. Power dissipation in CPUs scales linearly with clock speed.
What interference? I don't think a digital signal can suffer from interference like analog signals do.
Yes it can, it just takes more interference for it to actually happen. A "digital" connection is still really analog. It's not like there are ones and zeros traveling do the cable, what's being communicated are voltages. These voltages are treated as ones or zeros depending on where they fall in realation to certain cutoffs..
I have wifi in my apt and I use it, but there's no way in hell I would ever think about making my AV setup wireless using current technology.
Do you have any idea how the reliability of a wire compares to that of a WLAN? There's a reason every PC doesn't ship with a wireless keyboard, and it's not cost...
It's reliability. My keyboard sits in the same place all day and so does my computer. If I never move them or unplug them, I could basically expect that connection to outlast the keyboard. No batteries to mess with, no interference (unless you have some seriously illegal RF equipment), complete immunity from casual snoping.
Guess what? My TV sits in the same place all day too. Besides, show me one piece of wireless eqipment that transmits video as well as a set of 75ohm component video cables.
Go with wires. For everything. Use wifi for your laptop.
The real decision is what wires to run.
As far as: RG6 vs. CAT5e, digital vs. analog, line level vs. speaker level (for audio)
Run all of them. You need coax for video, cat5e for networking, digital (AES/EBU whatever) for long distance audio transmission, and speaker cable for your speakers. Run extra. Especially cat5. Consider running fiber too. You can get 1 cable that has everything I just mentioned inside it and run that.
I think the best suggestion I can make is to buy pro-audio gear. It's designed to work well with long distance interconnects (everything is typically balanced).
For video, get decent coax (well shielded) and possibly a decent amplifier as well.
Or maybe that's just my arrogant elitist opinion. Mod down if you really want to, I suppose.
It is. "The Truman Show" is Plato's allegory of the cave. "The Matrix" is a different concept.
But if by philosophy you mean anything vaguely legitimate on an academic level (I'm talking about old dead Greek and European guys here), then you're sorely mistaken.
Wow. I wasn't aware that you had to be a dead greek or european to have "legitimate" ideas about philosophy. Holy ethnocentrism batman! I suppose you're willing to just ignore any sort of eastern philosophy? Or is it just that you have to be dead before your ideas are worth anything?
While "The Matrix" wasn't an old, dusty book, it sure was a legitimate discussion of certain philosophical ideas. Maybe you're just too easily distracted by action sequences.
It didn't contain any truly revolutionay ideas, but I don't think Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" did either. Both were a good story, that people can actually grasp. Who do you think they're both so popular?
I suppose you're so eager to belittle "The Matrix" since it means people can get access to certain ideas that you had to learn in a more painful manner. No one could ever learn anything worthwhile except from a book that was written by a dead white guy. Geez. Who educated you?
True, but this agreement is not presented to you BEFORE you buy WinXP at Best Buy. This some lawyers say, make the entire EULA invalid, since all the rights necessary to run the software are guaranteed by the doctrine of first sale.
Looks at it this way....
Say I buy a house. After the closing I get to my house, and there's a HUGE sticker across my front door that says, by breaking this seal, I'm agreeing that I'm only really leasing the house from them, that they can't be sued for lying to me about the state of the house, that I can't have more than 5 people in it at once, etc.
See? Since I've already bought the house, the sticker is meaningless, I don't think there's a judge in the world that would conside me removing that sticker an agreement to the terms on it.
With OSS, nothing is sold (or at least the right to use the software isn't sold), so I doubt there are any implied warranties which need to be disclaimed, anyways. Besides the GPL is not a EULA. One doesn't not need to agree to its terms to USE GPL'ed software, only to distribute it.
To borrow the Ford Pinto analogy from previous posts, it seems somewhat like somebody cutting your brake lines and then you suing Ford for making the lines so easily accessible. I think the person who cut the lines is truely responsible.
No it's not. You are clearly unaware of the facts of the situation. Yes, MS had a patch out before the worm hit, but:
The bug was downplayed as minor.
The patch was not a service pack, nor was it scriptable, and it required you to shut down the server.
Even if you installed all the MS patches in the order they came out, you would have still been vulnerable. A later patch re-opened the flaw.
A more fair analogy would be:
A car manufacturer knows their brakelines have a very high likelyhood of catastrophic failure. They issue a recall, but not in their usual manner and make it very difficult and time consuming to get your car repaired. They also state that the likelihood of failure is low. Later on they find another flaw in their vehicle, and issue another recall. When a vehicle is taken in for the second recall, the crappy brakelines are put back on (without informing the owner), and if you want the better ones you have to have the car recalled one more time.
See the point? Yeah they fixed things, but they made it unnecessarily difficult to implement the fixed. And later on another "fix" reopened the system.
As far as the author of slammer being liable, I don't think they should be. The person who released it onto the net should be. Some don't see this distinction as important, but I see it as very important. I should be able to play around wth viruses/worms on my home network all I want, but if I let them get onto the net I should be held responsible. I find viruses to be really interesting programs. They're almost like the software equivalent of battlebots. Besides, knowing how viruses work is very important if you want to write anti-virus software.
As long as we're living in fantasyland, why not just say "the proposal is for all MTAs to disable anonymous relaying"? Isn't that a hell of a lot simpler?
True, but I don't think it would be better. This way you can still send mail, even if no one trusts you.
Standards get firmly entrenched and are infamously hard to get people away from.
I agree. But standards do eventually get changed. All it takes is a compelling enough reason to do so.
Ex: There are good odds the computer you're sitting at doesn't have ISA slots.
There are plently of people who feel a complete solution to the spam problem would be a good reason.
I think IPv6 hasn't taken off beacuse, as of now, there isn't a good enough reason for people to upgrade. Once the availible space in the currect verison is used up, there will be. It good to have the standard designed and in place before people need to switch to it.
What's hard is coming up with an algorithm that nobody can break.
I'll agree with this too. Maybe SHA1 isn't the way to go, I don't honestly know. I'm not saying you should independently design your own hash. Whatever has been out there for years, and has been peer reviewed to death can be used. Your idea doesn't require that the hash be SHA1, it could be something else. IF you're saying there now point in using a hash at all because it's to hard to come up with a good one, then I have to disagree. It's like saying that there is no point to cryptography, which I'm sure Schneier would disagree with.
You really want to rethink this one. You get literally one bit of extra information: "did the originating MTA correctly fill out the X-SHA1-HASH field?" For this one bit of information, you have to compute a message hash.
True, but this one bit of information, doesn't HAVE to be used. It would be possible to send messages from the "New Style V.XP whatever" mailserver, because the old servers could just ignore this field. It just wouldn't be possible to send messages from the old network to the new one. This could be fixed, by allowing messages to be sent the old way, but with the consideration that they are much more likely to be spam.
My belief is that there is a tecnological solution to spam. I think laws might be useful, but most likely will be ill concieved, and that is impossible for laws to make a real dent in the spam problem.
BTW, I think an actualy standard using this idea would need to make provisions for upgrades to the hashing algorithm over time.
Joe Spammer finds an open relay. He sends a million emails out through it, thus bringing the open relay to its knees for a while as it computes SHA-1 hashes.
The proposal would be for all MTAs too reject any messages without a proper hash. Any ip sending to many bad emails would be blacklisted. Any messages without a valid hash would be dropped. Backward compatibility of the system could not be maintained, because it would make the whole idea pointless.
Joe Spammer finds an open relay, but one which won't do the X-SHA1-Hash field, instead replying with MTA code 666 SPAMMERS MUST DO IT THEMSELVES. Great. Joe Spammer creates a dummy X-SHA1-Hash field and sends a million spams. The MTA then blindly passes this mail on, since it has a dummy field.
Two ideas here:
1.So what? That's nothing worse than what happens today, except that when a server finally did check the hash, it would get dropped.
2. The hash could be checked at each step in the chain. I guess this could amount to a lot of CPU overhead. Maybe the solution to this would be to have a list of trusted servers, and a simple anti-IP spoofing mechanism.
Opens the door for DDoS attacks.
It doesn't open the door anymore for DDoS attacks anymore than it currently is. It actually improves the situation slightly since you have more information to use to decide if a message is legitimate. I acknowledge that if all the zombies were computing valid hashes, they could overload the server, but right now the zombies don't even need to compute hashes, just to have bandwidth. But if you have a fleet of zombies, you already have the bandwidth. You probably would also have the CPU power too, but I don't really see it making you much worse off than before. I think processing is cheaper than bandwidth anyways, so you might actually want to make this trade-off.
I really think you have a better idea than you think.
Where do you get the idea PGP incorporates the subject line into a signature? It doesn't. Only the message body is incorporated, and the message body remains constant across a huge number of emails.
You can use PGP to sign whatever you want. We're talking about a proposed implementation, not a current one.
The entire subject-line-alteration is a giant non sequitur.
No it's not. The subjevt line is part of the message, and it get's changed.
Hey!
You can easily run X on a 333 Mhz machine.
I use a PII 333 as my server and desktop, and I have very little incentive to upgrade.
If you want to give an example of a bitty box you can't run X on, pick something lower down in the pecking order.
I run X on my Sharp Zaurus. It has a 200MHz ARM and 32MB of RAM. It is also a very small box:). Really, you can run X on any reasonable computer. Sure, it won't run on a Commodore 64, but neither can this twin program.
This is like ASCII porn. Funny, but never in any danger of replacing real porn.
Free hint: require a mailer field, X-SHA1-Hash, which is a 20-byte hash of (a) the message, (b) the timestamp, (c) the sender, (d) the original mailserver, and (e) the receiver. Anything which doesn't have an accurate X-SHA1-Hash gets discarded at the destination MTA. Presto. You achieve your CPU tax, but you don't subvert an IETF standard in order to do it.
I leave finding all the flaws in the above idea as an exercise for the reader.
This is a very good idea! The only major flaw I see is for large mailing lists, any ideas on how to solve it?
Damn. Extra flaw. The MTA has to compute the hash too. Still, I wonder if this idea is salvageable. Maybe auto blacklist severs who retransmit X invalid messages for Y hours. This would make it harder to exploit your idea for a DOS attack.
Ah...idea on the malinglist problem. Create a BULK:yes/no field. For bulk mail the SHA1 does not use the TO: field. The end user could then maintain a whitelist of bulk email lists he's signed up for.
Spam is one email being sent out a million times. Identical copies of messages flood a network. (If you don't believe this, I'll show you a spam I recently received which had over a thousand entries in the CC field.
Only the stupidest spammers send out 1,000 of th same message. Ever get a spam the had some seemingly random characters in the subject line? Here's why.....
Say you're bigISP. You want to stop spammers. Some cable modem sends 10,000 identical messages to you (or CC'ed or Bcc'ed to 10,000). Hello, spam alert! Blackhole/bounce all the messages. 10,000 spam emails blocked.
The fact that you got a message with 1,000 entries in the CC field, shows that your ISP does basically no spam filtering at all. If all spam was really do this way, we would have a spam problem. It would be trivial to block it.
I have been using windows based PCs since DOS first hit the scene (I still have the original box somewhere) and then over Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Windows M.E.
In like 14 years since I got my first 286-- till today running windows 2000 on a celeron, I have not had one virus!
What's your email address?:)
I use Mac OS X now,
Damn.
We all make mistakes from time to time, but there is no reason to have viruses on your computer, and no reason to blame it on anyone but yourself.
Not true. Ever hear of Outlook? Every N months someone find a vulnerability in it so you don't even have to run the virus yourself. It just auto-installs!
Besides, I have a few hundred viruses on my computer. They're a very cool way to learn neat assembly tricks (I know this isn't what you meant).
I was expecting different answers from some whom so many on/. mistrust (myself included).
While I don't agree with everything Robertson has said, I do find the reasoning behind all his answers to be respectable.
He seems a lot more "in touch" with what's going on than I would have expected and I think his comment on Linux shipping with PCs is a very good point. Basically this is the best slashdot interview I've seen in a long time. Rational, well thought out, answers to important questions, and well worded too. Nothing like that prick Shatner.
I'm not trying to kiss this guy's ass, and I still don't trust him, but I think he just demonstrated a pretty good understanding of the whole Linux on the desktop issue/situation. (Despite some of his comments showing his knowledge of what's out there to be a little out of date.)
Please explain to me how RIAA's methodical and careful sobotage of download attempts on N'Sync's latest mp3 on P2P matching a specific hash is a violation of your rights, your privacy, or of criminal or civil law.
It's an illegal denial of service attack. If I put your copyrighted content on my webpage, it's not legal for you to DOS my webserver (or anyone visiting the site). Duh. You could call it self defense if you wanted to, but you would still go to jail.
You really are a sucker if you think they would be careful and methodical. They legal threats they bulk email people with certainly aren't. And they have historically shown no respect for any legitimate use of P2P networks.
Haha! The irony. It's bad if RIAA takes vigilante action, but it's fine if users do take their own form of vigilante action by pirating because RIAA = BAD. Is that your argument?
It's not vigilante action, it's civil disobedience. I don't think you know what a vigilate actually does.
I thought you said that you don't support piracy. If you don't, then why take such an aggressive stance against actions that would almost entirely be RIAA's and for their own IP? It does not compute
First, vigilanteism is bad. Second, I hope the RIAA disappears from the face of this planet. Pirating their content is fine by me. I just refuse to argue this point with most people, as for many illegal==amoral, and it's not really my point right now.
That said, I know that many clients are using one-way hashes to identify and check the integrity of files. However, they cannot be used to check the download incrementally.
It can easily be used to check downloads incrementally. Just break the file up into X KB blocks and check them against value provided by other hosts.
If you depend on just your buddy list and such a web of trust to start a simple file transfer, then you will reduce your download pool by a factor of 1000.
Possibly. (Depending on implementation) This really doesn't matter very much because you are increaseing the quality of your pool.
Well installing applications on Windows is never a sure thing.
People manage to install apps on windows somehow, so this issue can be handled.
Umm, if you forward data through hosts, then you INCREASE the exposure to RIAA's corrupting agents.
Nope, not with a properly encrypted connection.
Not to mention the fact that this would result in a dramatic increase on the burden on these networks.
Very true. This is the biggest problem with my idea. It think it may be offset by the resulting quality, and relevancy increases in the availible data.
You might try scanning for "bad" content, but this would be hard to do even with a limited subset of data and RIAA could always stay ahead of that game.
True, the will be ways to defeat automated scanning, which is why I suggest checking to see if the user deletes the file within 5 minutes of accessing it.
To make a long story short, P2P works because it is SIMPLE,
Current P2P networks are not simple. They do all kind of non-simple things, like creating ultrapeers. The original version of gnutella was simple, but it did not scale well enough, so it has been made more and more complex to deal with various issues.
If you develop or use this software, then you are practically admitting to being a pirate, since your alleged non-infringing uses would give you little reason to go to such lengths (given that these attacks would be targeted against RIAA's IP--not your allegedly unknown garage band)
Bullshit. This reasoning is stupid. There is no good reason to allow the RIAA to DOS a network, and protecting yourself from attacks and invasions of privacy does not make you a criminal. Do you think encrypting your email makes you a terrorist too? Do you really think the RIAA will only inconvenince those who it can be proved beyond a doubt that they are infringing? You're a real sucker if you do.
to break the O(N log N) barrier (yes, this is possible, CS101 kiddies).
No, it isn't. If you have an algorithm that does you should publish it because I know of NONE. You can have a sort algorithm that does better than O(N log N) SOMETIMES, but the O(f(N)) notation refers to the upper bound on the algorithm.
There are some limits that just can't be broken. It is mathematically provable that you can't do better than O(log N) for N-bit hardware addition or multiplication. I wouldn't be suprised if someone out there has actually proved O(N log N) to be the lower bound for sorting. Just looking at all the values in the sequence is going to be O(N).
(yes, this is possible, CS101 kiddies)
No, it's not. You really shouldn't be both insulting and wrong. If you have special information about the data you're sorting, you can do better, but those are special cases. It is incorrect to state that a special purpose algorithm solves the general case. Being old and biased against younger people doesn't make you right. You weren't born knowing anything about sorting, and there's nothing wrong with being in CS101.
By the time I finished writing this someone has pointed you to a proof that you can't do better. I suggest you read it. You're never too old to learn:)
Try to make better P2P networks? They probably will, but the delicious irony is that the hackers/developers are now in a much tougher position because of the decentralization of P2P. How do you penalize a client that methodically sets out to corrupt swarmed downloads (each additional download source increases the risk of corruption--since it only takes a few bytes to throw the whole thing off) of RIAA's music?
Easily. Use SHA1 sums for all files. The gnutella client I use already deals with this. (At least mostly.) I don't know if it computes SHA sums for individual blocks, but it should be possible to make the necessary changes in a day of two if it doesn't.
There are cool technical means that can make DOSing a gnutella network very difficult. I personally would like to see public/private key encryption & signitures adopted for all inter-node transfers. Besides making it hard to spam nodes, it would allow for the implementation of a "web of trust".
Imagine this: The software autogenerates a public/private key pair for me when I install it. It then hooks into my AIM buddy list, downloading all my buddies keys and giving them a rank of 1. It also makes sure each of my buddies gets the keys of the others, signed by me. Blah, blah blah. I would then have a network where I have a trustworthiness value for every peer. The same strategy could be applied to blacklisting nodes as well.
The beauty of this is that if a rank 10 person tries to mess up my download, it can compare the SHA1 sum with that of someone with higher rank and kick the appropriate person. This kick could be signed by me and auto-propagated to all my buddies.
And so far, all of this has required no more user-intervention than current p2p networks.
Furtermore, the mere threat of such viruses or trojan horses being on the network can serve as a detterant for a good number of people.
Yeah, it sure scared everyone away from email. Seriously, nobody cares about viruses. (Most) People just don't give a crap about security.
Even if they do find ways to adapt, the constant upgrading of software, switching of networks, and so on will in and of itself be a large barrier to entry for most piraters.
It's not like software can't just download and install a new version of itself once a week. (Checking the GPG sig of course.)
Basically, my point is that it will be easy to update P2P networks to counteract anything the RIAA tries to do.
The final trick I'd like to see is random hops for data. Every connection has a probability of being forwarded through an extra host.(And every host doesn't know how many times the connection has been forwarded.) This, combined with encryption would lend some serious deniability to P2P networks. One could even tweak this probability based on the "trust factor" of the destination node plus/minus some random value.
These are only a few of the things that could be done, too. One could create a moderation system for individual files and/or nodes (This could even be done automatically just by checking to see if a file gets deleted within it's first five minutes of being accessed). One could add automatic virus detection, automatic garbage/silence/pop detection for mp3s, automatic filters for movies/PDfs/etc could be devised too.
It will always be possible for a malicous node(s) to mess things up a bit, but it should be possible to automatically recognize and block any of the attacks I've heard considered, and with a minumum of damage to the network.
The FSF can't sue SCO, they don't hold copyright over any of the code in the Linux kernel (if FSF held copyright over Linux, RMS would probably want distributions to just call themselves GNU, not GNU/Linux).
I think you can sue someone for violating the GPL even if you don't own the copyright. You might not be able to win damages, but you could probably have the terms of the GPL enforced. I think this has already happened, but I can't remember the case. It was considered an important test of the GPL.
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An good example is the story of young Carl Gauss. As the story goes, his elementary school teacher gave the children this arithmetic assignment in an attempt to keep them busy: sum the integers from 1 to 100.
But that isn't an SAT math question. That's why I say I've taken better tests of general ability.
Additionally, Gauss was MUCH younger at that time, than the age at which one takes the SATs. It is very reasonable to expect someone like him to have learned more by that age at which one takes the SATs.
This doesn't mean that i'm "smarter" than most others (my spelling is horrible and degrading rapidly), but I must point out that it is always people who test average or below (or, in general, are unsatisfied with the results of thier own tests) who make these statements, or say that it only tests "test taking" ability, or "book smarts".
Nope, not true. I scored a 1450. I think I'm in the top (some low number) percent of the population as far as intelligence and knowledge goes. I do not believe that the general SAT is valid test of anything other than SAT-taking ability.
I think I'm pretty qualified to say that too, given that I'm 2 weeks after from my degree.
I don't think the test is properly designed. I think I've taken much better tests that guaged general ablities, especially math.
The SAT only tests really basic math skills. I don't think this is a valid measure of someone's abilities.
Put simply, I don't think the spread between the easy and the hard questions is wide enough. I took the test as a junior, and I still hadn't been in any of the courses it is designed to test in two years. Yeah, I did fine, but how are those who are truly ahead of the curve supposed to show their abilities?
This isn't a problem limited to just the SATs either. In NYS we have state-wide Regents test for various subjects. I got a perfect score on all three tests. (I'm not saying this to brag, but I need to prove a point.) I used to think this was cool. Know what I realize now? That those tests were a waste. I should have been taking harder tests and harder courses.
Looking back now, I bet I could've taken my first two collesge math courses in high school and done allright. I'm not counting the AP Calc I did take in HS, either.
There is something wrong with putting everyone in the same class, or having them take the same test. People have different levels of abilities at different things. They should be taking a test which recognizes that. We should have been taking a different test. The number or questions that seperates a 1500 from a 1600 is just not statisically significant. When you start talking about this guy missing 2 questions out of several hundred and that guy missing 1, it's idiotic to separate those two people's scores by 1/14th of the total availible score range. Then admissions people go ahead and treat the 1600 as if it was a much better score than the 1500, even though scores that far off the norm aren't well enough determined for them to have that information. (And you can't call this bitterness either, I got into every school I applied to, and I'm about to graduate from a top school in my field.)
The questions I had to answer on the SAT just didn't really relate to anything I did in college. Yeah, they tested some basic skills that I needed in college, but they we not testing my potential. They weren't even testing if I had the skillset necessary to succeed.
If I had gone to college with only the math skills tested by the SAT I, I would have been fucked. No doubt about it. If it had really taken those extra years to learn those basic skills, and been that far behind, there's no way I could have kept up with the pace of my college courses.
(*)Sorry as in, sorry that nature and evolution are cruel. I, however, am not cruel, so don't get too upset by this post. =)
That's a pretty messed up thing to say. "Evolution" is not the reason most people do poorly on tests. There are plently of people out there with the same or greater potential than you, who never get a chance to fullfill it, through no fault of their own. Maybe their school was shitty. Maybe their homelife was shitty. Maybe they were just flat out homeless.
I friend of mine dropped out of school in 10th grade. He was living on his own, supporting himself completely at age 16. He scored a 1400 on his SAT. He's a smart guy, Imagine how well he would have done given a better
The EMP will fry the anti-lock brakes. ABS systems are designed to lock the wheels in case of system failure. (Ironic in a way...)
Bullshit. It would be totally stupid to design the system that way. If it fails while you were going down the road at 70MPH you'd have a very good chance of dying. I can't even imagine what would make you think it works this way.
From http://www.abs-education.org/faqs/faqindex.htm:
What if the ABS fails? Anti-lock brake systems are designed to be fail-safe. Nevertheless, they are equipped with a diagnostic feature that automatically activates and tests the major components each time the car is started and monitors them throughout the journey.
In the rare event of a failure, the ABS would be deactivated by its own safety circuit. A warning light goes on indicating to the driver that the vehicle is now in conventional base-brake mode.
So your plan is to stall his car while it's going down the highway RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU? I hope you have good brakes. :)
What dumbass modded this as insightful? Stalled engine != Instant stop. The car will continue to coast forward, slowly deccelerating. Even if the guy in the stalled car hits the brakes, it's not like having a stalled engine just gave him better braking ability than he had before.
Yeah, that was a mistake. I meant RAID1.
RAID0 would have been stupid.
Except that processors don't just give up the ship randomly(well, except in VERY rare circumstanecs)- drives do it all the time; it's almost expected. I don't give a crap about another 20GB or $20 off, I want a hard drive that won't turn itself into a paperweight after a year or two. If I'm going to own the drive for 5 years, what's another $20?
/home. I think this is an optimal set-up for a desktop computer.
I suggest you do what I did, setup RAID. I have to 40GB drives RAID0'ed. Yeah, HDDs aren't super reliable, but the odds of both drives failing at once are very small (unless you put a bullet through your case, hit it with a hammer, etc). RAID is nice anyways, because it gives you a boost in speed under some circumstances.
More specfically, I have one 40GB normal drive for my OS, apps, and swap (stuff which I can always get off the net), and two 40GB drives RAID0'ed for my
Even if you could get a HDD with a 10 year MTBF, you're more likely to loose data than if you used two RAID0'ed HDDs with 2 year MTBF's. With the single drive, if it fails, your data is gone. With two drives, even if one fails you can just plug another drive in. In order to loose you data the first drive has to fail, and then you have to not fix the problem, and then the other drive has to fail.
RAID is practically unheard of among the jane-and-bob computer users,
True, but this doesn't mean it wouldn't be a good solution to their problems.
Most home users don't have any of their data backed up
Then they will learn the value of backup the same way I did. Sometimes people just have to make their own mistakes. Once this happens to enough people, we can expect to start seeing more redundant storage in PCs. Once enough jane-or-bobs learn their lesson, there will be money to be made by offering desktop machines with preconfigured RAID system. The don't need to know what RAID is. They just need to read:
"Our special dual-disk(tm) system protects your valuable data. Don't want to loose all your data next time your computer dies? You don't have to. Your data is safe with the Dell foobar9500."
Once enough people start keeping their photo albums, etc on their PC, there will be a real market for this sort of thing.
In general the problem is that while capacities have lept up, the rate at which we can read/write to those drives has not kept pace.
No, not really. The sustained transfer rate of HDDs has been steadily improving. It's obvious if you think about it. The drive stays the same size. The density goes up. The disc spins at the same rate or faster. Therefore, more data goes by the heads per unit time. This means trasfer rate will also increase. Specifically, this means that the transfer rate will scale linearly with the density of the disk.
What hasn't improved at the same rate as density is seek times. Seek times have always been the killer for mechanical storage mechanisms. They have to move something around and they have to obey Newton's laws.
In order for seek times to improve at the same rate as the rest of the drive impoves, we would need improvements in materials science and motor design which far exceeded those that increased density.
The other neat thing to think about is the spinning discs inside the HDD. Both those impovements I just mentioned might also allow you to spin the platters faster. This means that you could actually increase the transfer rate of your drive as well.
The immediate problem I can see is that moving something back and forth doesn't scale as nicely as storage density. Here's an example:
Say you've got something that you need to get from point A to B. Say you can do it in 1 microsecond. If you want to be able to do it in 1/2 microsecond, you need 4x more force. This means you need a motor with 4x more force, and a material that's 4x stiffer and 4x stronger.
Even if materials science, and motor designs were improving at a rate comparable to "Moore's Law", seek times wouldn't. Some things just don't scale the way we would like them to. Batteries are a good example.
Correction: You need a material that has 4x better strength to weight and stiffness to weight ratios.
It's also worth considering that you have to burn 4x more energy to move something from A to B twice as fast. Power dissipation in CPUs scales linearly with clock speed.
What interference? I don't think a digital signal can suffer from interference like analog signals do.
Yes it can, it just takes more interference for it to actually happen. A "digital" connection is still really analog. It's not like there are ones and zeros traveling do the cable, what's being communicated are voltages. These voltages are treated as ones or zeros depending on where they fall in realation to certain cutoffs..
Come on that's like a joke.
I have wifi in my apt and I use it, but there's no way in hell I would ever think about making my AV setup wireless using current technology.
Do you have any idea how the reliability of a wire compares to that of a WLAN? There's a reason every PC doesn't ship with a wireless keyboard, and it's not cost...
It's reliability. My keyboard sits in the same place all day and so does my computer. If I never move them or unplug them, I could basically expect that connection to outlast the keyboard. No batteries to mess with, no interference (unless you have some seriously illegal RF equipment), complete immunity from casual snoping.
Guess what? My TV sits in the same place all day too. Besides, show me one piece of wireless eqipment that transmits video as well as a set of 75ohm component video cables.
Go with wires. For everything. Use wifi for your laptop.
The real decision is what wires to run.
As far as:
RG6 vs. CAT5e, digital vs. analog, line level vs. speaker level (for audio)
Run all of them. You need coax for video, cat5e for networking, digital (AES/EBU whatever) for long distance audio transmission, and speaker cable for your speakers. Run extra. Especially cat5. Consider running fiber too. You can get 1 cable that has everything I just mentioned inside it and run that.
I think the best suggestion I can make is to buy pro-audio gear. It's designed to work well with long distance interconnects (everything is typically balanced).
For video, get decent coax (well shielded) and possibly a decent amplifier as well.
Or maybe that's just my arrogant elitist opinion. Mod down if you really want to, I suppose.
It is. "The Truman Show" is Plato's allegory of the cave. "The Matrix" is a different concept.
But if by philosophy you mean anything vaguely legitimate on an academic level (I'm talking about old dead Greek and European guys here), then you're sorely mistaken.
Wow. I wasn't aware that you had to be a dead greek or european to have "legitimate" ideas about philosophy. Holy ethnocentrism batman! I suppose you're willing to just ignore any sort of eastern philosophy? Or is it just that you have to be dead before your ideas are worth anything?
While "The Matrix" wasn't an old, dusty book, it sure was a legitimate discussion of certain philosophical ideas. Maybe you're just too easily distracted by action sequences.
It didn't contain any truly revolutionay ideas, but I don't think Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" did either. Both were a good story, that people can actually grasp. Who do you think they're both so popular?
I suppose you're so eager to belittle "The Matrix" since it means people can get access to certain ideas that you had to learn in a more painful manner. No one could ever learn anything worthwhile except from a book that was written by a dead white guy. Geez. Who educated you?
Except MS has the same wording in their license.
True, but this agreement is not presented to you BEFORE you buy WinXP at Best Buy. This some lawyers say, make the entire EULA invalid, since all the rights necessary to run the software are guaranteed by the doctrine of first sale.
Looks at it this way....
Say I buy a house. After the closing I get to my house, and there's a HUGE sticker across my front door that says, by breaking this seal, I'm agreeing that I'm only really leasing the house from them, that they can't be sued for lying to me about the state of the house, that I can't have more than 5 people in it at once, etc.
See? Since I've already bought the house, the sticker is meaningless, I don't think there's a judge in the world that would conside me removing that sticker an agreement to the terms on it.
With OSS, nothing is sold (or at least the right to use the software isn't sold), so I doubt there are any implied warranties which need to be disclaimed, anyways. Besides the GPL is not a EULA. One doesn't not need to agree to its terms to USE GPL'ed software, only to distribute it.
No it's not. You are clearly unaware of the facts of the situation. Yes, MS had a patch out before the worm hit, but:
A more fair analogy would be:
A car manufacturer knows their brakelines have a very high likelyhood of catastrophic failure. They issue a recall, but not in their usual manner and make it very difficult and time consuming to get your car repaired. They also state that the likelihood of failure is low. Later on they find another flaw in their vehicle, and issue another recall. When a vehicle is taken in for the second recall, the crappy brakelines are put back on (without informing the owner), and if you want the better ones you have to have the car recalled one more time.
See the point? Yeah they fixed things, but they made it unnecessarily difficult to implement the fixed. And later on another "fix" reopened the system.
As far as the author of slammer being liable, I don't think they should be. The person who released it onto the net should be. Some don't see this distinction as important, but I see it as very important. I should be able to play around wth viruses/worms on my home network all I want, but if I let them get onto the net I should be held responsible. I find viruses to be really interesting programs. They're almost like the software equivalent of battlebots. Besides, knowing how viruses work is very important if you want to write anti-virus software.
Is it really illegal to write a virus these days?
As long as we're living in fantasyland, why not just say "the proposal is for all MTAs to disable anonymous relaying"? Isn't that a hell of a lot simpler?
True, but I don't think it would be better. This way you can still send mail, even if no one trusts you.
Standards get firmly entrenched and are infamously hard to get people away from.
I agree. But standards do eventually get changed. All it takes is a compelling enough reason to do so.
Ex: There are good odds the computer you're sitting at doesn't have ISA slots.
There are plently of people who feel a complete solution to the spam problem would be a good reason.
I think IPv6 hasn't taken off beacuse, as of now, there isn't a good enough reason for people to upgrade. Once the availible space in the currect verison is used up, there will be. It good to have the standard designed and in place before people need to switch to it.
What's hard is coming up with an algorithm that nobody can break.
I'll agree with this too. Maybe SHA1 isn't the way to go, I don't honestly know. I'm not saying you should independently design your own hash. Whatever has been out there for years, and has been peer reviewed to death can be used. Your idea doesn't require that the hash be SHA1, it could be something else. IF you're saying there now point in using a hash at all because it's to hard to come up with a good one, then I have to disagree. It's like saying that there is no point to cryptography, which I'm sure Schneier would disagree with.
You really want to rethink this one. You get literally one bit of extra information: "did the originating MTA correctly fill out the X-SHA1-HASH field?" For this one bit of information, you have to compute a message hash.
True, but this one bit of information, doesn't HAVE to be used. It would be possible to send messages from the "New Style V.XP whatever" mailserver, because the old servers could just ignore this field. It just wouldn't be possible to send messages from the old network to the new one. This could be fixed, by allowing messages to be sent the old way, but with the consideration that they are much more likely to be spam.
My belief is that there is a tecnological solution to spam. I think laws might be useful, but most likely will be ill concieved, and that is impossible for laws to make a real dent in the spam problem.
BTW, I think an actualy standard using this idea would need to make provisions for upgrades to the hashing algorithm over time.
Joe Spammer finds an open relay. He sends a million emails out through it, thus bringing the open relay to its knees for a while as it computes SHA-1 hashes.
The proposal would be for all MTAs too reject any messages without a proper hash. Any ip sending to many bad emails would be blacklisted. Any messages without a valid hash would be dropped. Backward compatibility of the system could not be maintained, because it would make the whole idea pointless.
Joe Spammer finds an open relay, but one which won't do the X-SHA1-Hash field, instead replying with MTA code 666 SPAMMERS MUST DO IT THEMSELVES. Great. Joe Spammer creates a dummy X-SHA1-Hash field and sends a million spams. The MTA then blindly passes this mail on, since it has a dummy field.
Two ideas here:
1.So what? That's nothing worse than what happens today, except that when a server finally did check the hash, it would get dropped.
2. The hash could be checked at each step in the chain. I guess this could amount to a lot of CPU overhead. Maybe the solution to this would be to have a list of trusted servers, and a simple anti-IP spoofing mechanism.
Opens the door for DDoS attacks.
It doesn't open the door anymore for DDoS attacks anymore than it currently is. It actually improves the situation slightly since you have more information to use to decide if a message is legitimate. I acknowledge that if all the zombies were computing valid hashes, they could overload the server, but right now the zombies don't even need to compute hashes, just to have bandwidth. But if you have a fleet of zombies, you already have the bandwidth. You probably would also have the CPU power too, but I don't really see it making you much worse off than before. I think processing is cheaper than bandwidth anyways, so you might actually want to make this trade-off.
I really think you have a better idea than you think.
Where do you get the idea PGP incorporates the subject line into a signature? It doesn't. Only the message body is incorporated, and the message body remains constant across a huge number of emails.
You can use PGP to sign whatever you want. We're talking about a proposed implementation, not a current one.
The entire subject-line-alteration is a giant non sequitur.
No it's not. The subjevt line is part of the message, and it get's changed.
Hey! You can easily run X on a 333 Mhz machine. I use a PII 333 as my server and desktop, and I have very little incentive to upgrade. If you want to give an example of a bitty box you can't run X on, pick something lower down in the pecking order.
:). Really, you can run X on any reasonable computer. Sure, it won't run on a Commodore 64, but neither can this twin program.
I run X on my Sharp Zaurus. It has a 200MHz ARM and 32MB of RAM. It is also a very small box
This is like ASCII porn. Funny, but never in any danger of replacing real porn.
Free hint: require a mailer field, X-SHA1-Hash, which is a 20-byte hash of (a) the message, (b) the timestamp, (c) the sender, (d) the original mailserver, and (e) the receiver. Anything which doesn't have an accurate X-SHA1-Hash gets discarded at the destination MTA. Presto. You achieve your CPU tax, but you don't subvert an IETF standard in order to do it. I leave finding all the flaws in the above idea as an exercise for the reader.
This is a very good idea! The only major flaw I see is for large mailing lists, any ideas on how to solve it?
Damn. Extra flaw. The MTA has to compute the hash too. Still, I wonder if this idea is salvageable. Maybe auto blacklist severs who retransmit X invalid messages for Y hours. This would make it harder to exploit your idea for a DOS attack.
Ah...idea on the malinglist problem. Create a BULK:yes/no field. For bulk mail the SHA1 does not use the TO: field. The end user could then maintain a whitelist of bulk email lists he's signed up for.
Any other flaws I'm missing?
Spam is one email being sent out a million times. Identical copies of messages flood a network. (If you don't believe this, I'll show you a spam I recently received which had over a thousand entries in the CC field.
Only the stupidest spammers send out 1,000 of th same message. Ever get a spam the had some seemingly random characters in the subject line? Here's why.....
Say you're bigISP. You want to stop spammers. Some cable modem sends 10,000 identical messages to you (or CC'ed or Bcc'ed to 10,000). Hello, spam alert! Blackhole/bounce all the messages. 10,000 spam emails blocked.
The fact that you got a message with 1,000 entries in the CC field, shows that your ISP does basically no spam filtering at all. If all spam was really do this way, we would have a spam problem. It would be trivial to block it.
I have been using windows based PCs since DOS first hit the scene (I still have the original box somewhere) and then over Windows 3.1, Windows 95, and Windows M.E. In like 14 years since I got my first 286-- till today running windows 2000 on a celeron, I have not had one virus!
:)
What's your email address?
I use Mac OS X now,
Damn.
We all make mistakes from time to time, but there is no reason to have viruses on your computer, and no reason to blame it on anyone but yourself.
Not true. Ever hear of Outlook? Every N months someone find a vulnerability in it so you don't even have to run the virus yourself. It just auto-installs!
Besides, I have a few hundred viruses on my computer. They're a very cool way to learn neat assembly tricks (I know this isn't what you meant).
unless it's a picture or a word document from
Word macrovirus anyone?
I was expecting different answers from some whom so many on /. mistrust (myself included).
While I don't agree with everything Robertson has said, I do find the reasoning behind all his answers to be respectable.
He seems a lot more "in touch" with what's going on than I would have expected and I think his comment on Linux shipping with PCs is a very good point. Basically this is the best slashdot interview I've seen in a long time. Rational, well thought out, answers to important questions, and well worded too. Nothing like that prick Shatner.
I'm not trying to kiss this guy's ass, and I still don't trust him, but I think he just demonstrated a pretty good understanding of the whole Linux on the desktop issue/situation. (Despite some of his comments showing his knowledge of what's out there to be a little out of date.)
Please explain to me how RIAA's methodical and careful sobotage of download attempts on N'Sync's latest mp3 on P2P matching a specific hash is a violation of your rights, your privacy, or of criminal or civil law.
It's an illegal denial of service attack. If I put your copyrighted content on my webpage, it's not legal for you to DOS my webserver (or anyone visiting the site). Duh. You could call it self defense if you wanted to, but you would still go to jail.
You really are a sucker if you think they would be careful and methodical. They legal threats they bulk email people with certainly aren't. And they have historically shown no respect for any legitimate use of P2P networks.
Haha! The irony. It's bad if RIAA takes vigilante action, but it's fine if users do take their own form of vigilante action by pirating because RIAA = BAD. Is that your argument?
It's not vigilante action, it's civil disobedience. I don't think you know what a vigilate actually does.
I thought you said that you don't support piracy. If you don't, then why take such an aggressive stance against actions that would almost entirely be RIAA's and for their own IP? It does not compute
First, vigilanteism is bad. Second, I hope the RIAA disappears from the face of this planet. Pirating their content is fine by me. I just refuse to argue this point with most people, as for many illegal==amoral, and it's not really my point right now.
That said, I know that many clients are using one-way hashes to identify and check the integrity of files. However, they cannot be used to check the download incrementally.
It can easily be used to check downloads incrementally. Just break the file up into X KB blocks and check them against value provided by other hosts.
If you depend on just your buddy list and such a web of trust to start a simple file transfer, then you will reduce your download pool by a factor of 1000.
Possibly. (Depending on implementation) This really doesn't matter very much because you are increaseing the quality of your pool.
Well installing applications on Windows is never a sure thing.
People manage to install apps on windows somehow, so this issue can be handled.
Umm, if you forward data through hosts, then you INCREASE the exposure to RIAA's corrupting agents.
Nope, not with a properly encrypted connection.
Not to mention the fact that this would result in a dramatic increase on the burden on these networks.
Very true. This is the biggest problem with my idea. It think it may be offset by the resulting quality, and relevancy increases in the availible data.
You might try scanning for "bad" content, but this would be hard to do even with a limited subset of data and RIAA could always stay ahead of that game.
True, the will be ways to defeat automated scanning, which is why I suggest checking to see if the user deletes the file within 5 minutes of accessing it. To make a long story short, P2P works because it is SIMPLE,
Current P2P networks are not simple. They do all kind of non-simple things, like creating ultrapeers. The original version of gnutella was simple, but it did not scale well enough, so it has been made more and more complex to deal with various issues.
If you develop or use this software, then you are practically admitting to being a pirate, since your alleged non-infringing uses would give you little reason to go to such lengths (given that these attacks would be targeted against RIAA's IP--not your allegedly unknown garage band)
Bullshit. This reasoning is stupid. There is no good reason to allow the RIAA to DOS a network, and protecting yourself from attacks and invasions of privacy does not make you a criminal. Do you think encrypting your email makes you a terrorist too? Do you really think the RIAA will only inconvenince those who it can be proved beyond a doubt that they are infringing? You're a real sucker if you do.
to break the O(N log N) barrier (yes, this is possible, CS101 kiddies).
:)
No, it isn't. If you have an algorithm that does you should publish it because I know of NONE. You can have a sort algorithm that does better than O(N log N) SOMETIMES, but the O(f(N)) notation refers to the upper bound on the algorithm.
There are some limits that just can't be broken. It is mathematically provable that you can't do better than O(log N) for N-bit hardware addition or multiplication. I wouldn't be suprised if someone out there has actually proved O(N log N) to be the lower bound for sorting. Just looking at all the values in the sequence is going to be O(N).
(yes, this is possible, CS101 kiddies)
No, it's not. You really shouldn't be both insulting and wrong. If you have special information about the data you're sorting, you can do better, but those are special cases. It is incorrect to state that a special purpose algorithm solves the general case. Being old and biased against younger people doesn't make you right. You weren't born knowing anything about sorting, and there's nothing wrong with being in CS101.
By the time I finished writing this someone has pointed you to a proof that you can't do better. I suggest you read it. You're never too old to learn
Try to make better P2P networks? They probably will, but the delicious irony is that the hackers/developers are now in a much tougher position because of the decentralization of P2P. How do you penalize a client that methodically sets out to corrupt swarmed downloads (each additional download source increases the risk of corruption--since it only takes a few bytes to throw the whole thing off) of RIAA's music?
Easily. Use SHA1 sums for all files. The gnutella client I use already deals with this. (At least mostly.) I don't know if it computes SHA sums for individual blocks, but it should be possible to make the necessary changes in a day of two if it doesn't.
There are cool technical means that can make DOSing a gnutella network very difficult. I personally would like to see public/private key encryption & signitures adopted for all inter-node transfers. Besides making it hard to spam nodes, it would allow for the implementation of a "web of trust".
Imagine this: The software autogenerates a public/private key pair for me when I install it. It then hooks into my AIM buddy list, downloading all my buddies keys and giving them a rank of 1. It also makes sure each of my buddies gets the keys of the others, signed by me. Blah, blah blah. I would then have a network where I have a trustworthiness value for every peer. The same strategy could be applied to blacklisting nodes as well.
The beauty of this is that if a rank 10 person tries to mess up my download, it can compare the SHA1 sum with that of someone with higher rank and kick the appropriate person. This kick could be signed by me and auto-propagated to all my buddies.
And so far, all of this has required no more user-intervention than current p2p networks.
Furtermore, the mere threat of such viruses or trojan horses being on the network can serve as a detterant for a good number of people.
Yeah, it sure scared everyone away from email. Seriously, nobody cares about viruses. (Most) People just don't give a crap about security.
Even if they do find ways to adapt, the constant upgrading of software, switching of networks, and so on will in and of itself be a large barrier to entry for most piraters.
It's not like software can't just download and install a new version of itself once a week. (Checking the GPG sig of course.)
Basically, my point is that it will be easy to update P2P networks to counteract anything the RIAA tries to do.
The final trick I'd like to see is random hops for data. Every connection has a probability of being forwarded through an extra host.(And every host doesn't know how many times the connection has been forwarded.) This, combined with encryption would lend some serious deniability to P2P networks. One could even tweak this probability based on the "trust factor" of the destination node plus/minus some random value.
These are only a few of the things that could be done, too. One could create a moderation system for individual files and/or nodes (This could even be done automatically just by checking to see if a file gets deleted within it's first five minutes of being accessed). One could add automatic virus detection, automatic garbage/silence/pop detection for mp3s, automatic filters for movies/PDfs/etc could be devised too.
It will always be possible for a malicous node(s) to mess things up a bit, but it should be possible to automatically recognize and block any of the attacks I've heard considered, and with a minumum of damage to the network.
The FSF can't sue SCO, they don't hold copyright over any of the code in the Linux kernel (if FSF held copyright over Linux, RMS would probably want distributions to just call themselves GNU, not GNU/Linux).
I think you can sue someone for violating the GPL even if you don't own the copyright. You might not be able to win damages, but you could probably have the terms of the GPL enforced. I think this has already happened, but I can't remember the case. It was considered an important test of the GPL.