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User: Nebu

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  1. Re:Manufacturers on AACS Specifications Released · · Score: 1

    why would any manufacturer in their right mind produce anything under such terms?

    I detail why on my blog, but Zagar phrases it better than I did. He says:

    This is an excellent method for stimulating sales, because once they revoke that media key you won't be able to watch the latest releases on your old HD-DVD player. Now you'll have to go buy a new HD-DVD player. Just remember, don't go buying it on eBay... You'll have to buy a brand-new one because ALL the old players on eBay will have the same revoked keys that yours does.

  2. Re:Nonvisible wavelenghts? on Ophthalmologists, Physicists Design Bionic Eye · · Score: 1

    in the long run that the chip would indeed have to translate to a "false color spectrum" in order for the brain to correctly interpret the input.

    I don't think that would be the case. Imagine someone who used to only be able to see green and blue (for whatever reason, the nerves for detecting red were damaged). If we were to try to describe red to that person, he might think we simply saw what he sees, except mapped onto the blue-green spectrum (i.e. the false color spectrum concept), however, we truly do see red as being outside the blue-green region of the spectrum.

    If one day, we invent a chip that allows that person to perceive colors in the red region of the spectrum, he might at first marvel that there was a whole new region of the spectrum he was unable to see, and which was simply undescribable: you just had to experience it for yourself.

    I think if one day we invent a chip that will translate infrared signals into signals directly into our brain, so too will our brain "learn to perceive" a whole new region of the spectrum, without nescessarily mapping it onto our existing red-green-blue spectrum.

  3. Re:Nonvisible wavelenghts? on Ophthalmologists, Physicists Design Bionic Eye · · Score: 1

    I had initially assumed that the chip sends signals "directly" to the brain, because there was a lot of throwing around of terms like "learning to see" and such, in which case, the brain would interpret the electrical signals from the chip receiving a photon in the infrared spectrum just as easily as it would interpret the electrical signals from the chip receiving a photon in the blue spectrum, for example.

    However, I admit that was an assumption on my part, because as far as I can see, the article doesn't really go into specifics into how this chip is connected to your brain. If the chip is merely connected to nerves in the retina as you say, then you are right that your brain is merely receiving "normal" RGB signals.

  4. Re:Nonvisible wavelenghts? on Ophthalmologists, Physicists Design Bionic Eye · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There's no need for it to be translated into "false color". The brain would interpret infrared exactly as it would interpret any other color. What would infrared look like to someone using this chip? Well, that would be like describing what red looks like to someone who is blind.

  5. Re:I'll take the survey in a bit, but... on How Long Do You Want Digital Media To Last? · · Score: 1

    That was address under "label". Like I said, sometimes it ruins the look of the CD, especially if I'm printing custom labels for them.

  6. Re:I'll take the survey in a bit, but... on How Long Do You Want Digital Media To Last? · · Score: 1

    Label: Sometimes there isn't enough room to place an extra timestamp, sometimes it would just make the label look uglier by putting a timestamp on there.

    File timestamps: If I have a collection of several thousand or tens of thousands of DVD, I'd like to avoid loading them into my computer, one by one, to check the file timestamps. Furthermore, the file timestamps indicate when the file was created on my harddisk, not when the files were burnt to the CD, so this information may very well be useless for determining the age of the DVD itself.

    Scratches: Again, I don't want to actually take tens of thousands of DVDs out of their pouches, one by one, inspecting them for scratches.

    Dust: Since I keep the DVDs in pouches, dust hasn't been an issue for me.

    Metainfo: I don't understand. Metainfo about what? Stored where?

  7. Re:I'll take the survey in a bit, but... on How Long Do You Want Digital Media To Last? · · Score: 1

    Say your DVD's have a life of 20years, well, in 15 years you can copy a bunch DVD's into the new media and keep upgrading constantly.

    But what if I have a collection of DVDs I've gathered over time, and I don't know which ones are brand new and whichs ones are "nearing death"? How do I know which ones I should copy to the new media?
  8. Re:The real limitation here on How Long Do You Want Digital Media To Last? · · Score: 1

    Isn't my DVD drive a WORM reader? WORM stands for Write Once Read Many, right?

  9. Re:More power to them on Brazil: Free Software's Biggest and Best Friend · · Score: 2, Informative

    Try installing Windows or Office on a machine and ignoring any text written in English. Even after you have got the OS on, when you try to install Office, if you have set the machine to Chinese (or whichever) it pops up windows in English to ask you questions

    If I install the English version of Windows XP, and the English version of Office XP, and set the localization to Japanese, then yes, what you say happens.

    But if I purchase the Japanese version of Windows XP, and the Japanese version of Office XP, all the dialog pop ups and everything is in Japanese.

    When you install English Windows XP, and set the localization to Japanese, the start button still says "start" (in English). With the Japanese version of Windows XP, no matter what localization you use, the start button has sta-to written in Katakana.

  10. Re:I wonder on OmniTread: A serpentine robot · · Score: 2, Informative

    How modular the design is. It is obviously made of 5 (reasonably) identical parts, but I wonder if you can (in theory) make a robot of this type as longs as you want just by `tacking' on a new section

    If you go into the slideshow on the site, there's an image of the robot composed of 7 sections instead of 5.

  11. Re:Is this really a big deal? on New Virus Attacks Via RAR Files · · Score: 1

    I'd just be impressed at the odds of that actually occuring.

    Ever heard of the "one time pad" used in encryption? The basic idea is you have a password, and that password tells you which bits to flip in the encoded message to get the decoded message (this implies that the encoded message, decoded message and password all have to be the same length).

    A "sufficiently cautious" e-mail filter program could take any message you send, and claim that if you flip these particular bits, you'd end up with an executable program, and executable programs are blocked. It doesn't matter what the original message you send is, there exists a "password" that will flip the correct bits to turn it into an executable program.

    The only way to get around this is to make sure the length of your message does not match the length of any program that exists. http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/tiny/ teensy.html has an article showing how to make a linux executable in only 45 bytes, and if your message is any longer, it can just be that same 45-byte program padded with "noop" instructions. So as long as your message is more than 45 bytes, it can be decoded into a program, and thus should be blocked.

    Even if it were less than 45 bytes, the "sufficiently cautious" e-mail filter might assume you're using some sort of compression scheme, and then expand it until it is longer than 45 bytes, and then apply the argument above.

  12. Re:I solved this problem back in July, 2004... on New Virus Attacks Via RAR Files · · Score: 1

    My approach simply tacks on '.txt' on the end of ALL email file attachments filenames. As a result, system compromise is IMPOSSIBLE this way provided Windows still associates .txt files with Notepad/Wordpad and those programs haven't been compromised.

    You never know, Wordpad might have a as-of-yet undiscovered buffer overflow vulnerability in there somewhere.

    Notepad is probably safer, since it doesn't "parse" the data it loads, and if you try to open a file above a certain size, it'll actually give you an error message (and advises you to try opening the file with Wordpad).

  13. Re:RAR is very popular on New Virus Attacks Via RAR Files · · Score: 1

    Just throwing around numbers doesn't mean much. I can compress a text file that has the character "a" repeated enough times to fill in 60 terabytes into a 50 byte file using general-purpose compression algorithms like arithmetic encoding. If you tailor your compression algorithm around the data you're compressing (or equivalently, tailor the data around the compression algorithm you're using), any data can be compressed to 1 bit in practice, and less than 1 bit in practice.

  14. Re:Is this really a big deal? on New Virus Attacks Via RAR Files · · Score: 3, Funny

    You would be surprised how few email filters detect an attachment which is simply sent as Base64 or UUEncoded text, in the body. As it's not an attachment, it frequently gets ignored.

    Why would we be surprised? People who write e-mail filters have to balance between security and convenience of the user.

    I mean, imagine a super complex e-mail filter program that blocked every conceivable way of sending an attachment. If I sent a letter to my mom asking her how her stay was in the hospital, and got something back like:

    "Your email was blocked because if you take the lower 4th bits of every word whose position is a prime number and reverse the endianess, you get a executable that runs on the 8-bit Gameboy platform, which could then be run by the recipient using an emulator. This executable has been blocked for your protection. Have a nice day."

    I'd be pretty annoyed.

  15. Re:Is this really a big deal? on New Virus Attacks Via RAR Files · · Score: 1

    Using different salts while using the same algorithm probably won't help very much. The decrypting algorithm is the same in all cases, and so that decryption code will serve as the virus' signature. The virus scanner knows if it sees this pattern of bits, then this must be some sort of self-decrypting program, it'll know where to look for for the salt, it'll read the salt, manually decrypt the contents, and scan the contents.

    For using different algorithms, the algorithms themselves would have to be hidden somewhere in the original virus so that it could actually perform the mutations, and so once one such instance of the virus is discovered, the anti-virus-writers can include all algorithms as "variants".

    Now if the virus were NOT automagically-self-extracting, but required user input (such as asking for a password, which the victim might find out via the subject line of the e-mail message it was sent in), things would be trickier for the virus scanner. Assuming that the password were either short (e.g. 4 characters long) or a dictionary word, the virus scanner could try to brute force a decryption. This may be a safe assumption because the virus writer will want the user to actually bother entering in the password, and making the password too long will deter lazy users.

  16. Re:Is this really a big deal? on New Virus Attacks Via RAR Files · · Score: 1

    RAR files don't have executable content. The "exploit" is just to infect an program, and then compress it in a RAR file so that Virus Scanners don't bother to scan the executable.

  17. Re:PDF of the Bill on Municipal Wi-Fi Battle Moves to Texas · · Score: 5, Funny

    If I didn't read TFA, what makes you think I'm gonna read some governmental bill?

  18. Re:So on Where Have All The Cycles Gone? · · Score: 1

    But people AREN'T demanding it. It's being foisted upon them. Nobody is DEMANDING that windows-xp is to be delivered on all new peecees except Microsoft.

    I'm "demanding" it. I like WinXP more than Win3.1. I like the task bar. I like the search system. I like antialiased font. I like dual monitor support. I like plug and play. I like DirectX. I like the Start Button. I like NTFS. I like support for multiple processors. I like the new Task Manager. I like being able to adjust the priorities of my processes. I like a whole lot more of the features that WinXP gives me that Win3.1 doesn't.

    And I still want more features. I was very disapointed when I found out that the databased filesystem was removed from Longhorn. That was something I was really looking forward to.

  19. Re:Exact phrase searches .. on Bill Gates Interview w/ Spiegel · · Score: 1

    If you surround your query with quotation marks, then Google will assume you want that exact phrase, with the specified punctuation.

    If you don't surround your query with quotation marks, then google will not require the words in the query to be adjacent to each other, and so if the two keywords should be seperated by some punctuation on a page, Google may still return that page.

  20. Re:How is this legal? on Human Animal Hybrid Created in Lab · · Score: 1

    You say that you are merely bringing up the argument AGAINST using the research. Do you actually take this stance or did you just wish to illicit a longer response from me?

    None of the above. The way you phrase your argument ("Let's not let the torture happen for nothing", etc.) makes it sound like you genuinely could not think of any reason not to use the research, and so I gave you a reason.

    I personally can see both sides of the arguments, and so I abstain from voting either way. I just wanted to make sure you knew and understood both sides of the issue as well.

  21. Re:How is this legal? on Human Animal Hybrid Created in Lab · · Score: 1

    but if you don't use the research then didn't all of this happen for nothing?

    That argument has already been brought up in this thread, and that's the argument FOR using the research. I was merely bringing up the argument AGAINST using the research. Repeating the argument doesn't make that argument any stronger.

  22. Re:How is this legal? on Human Animal Hybrid Created in Lab · · Score: 1

    But, by not using the research the people who were tortured went through it for nothing. We can all agree(I hope) that the torture was a horrible act and shouldn't be something that happens in the future, but since it did we should try to at least make some good of it.

    The argument against this is as follows: Let's say I'm a mad scientist. I decide that the world really oughta know the psychological effects of having children watch their siblings raped and killed. If you use the research that was obtained via torture, I'll think "Well, I'll get arrested, and perhaps executed, but I'm willing to make that sacrifice for the better of science." If you don't use the research, I'll think "There's no point in actually carrying out the experiment, since the scientific community will refuse to use my results anyway."

  23. Re:Listen here on Cell Architecture Explained · · Score: 1

    Sure they may have vecotr processing in the form of SSE etc but vector processing is of no use tfor word processing period!

    Word processing doesn't need acceleration. Games do.

  24. Re:Uhh... on Scientific American on Quantum Encryption · · Score: 1

    One of these modes renders 3des's 168 bit key actually no stronger than 56 bits in regular des.

    That's the "backwards compatibility mode". Triple DES works by taking 3 keys, performing a "forward transformation" with the first key, a "backward transformation" with the second key, and a "forward transformation" with the third key. If all 3 keys are different 56 bit keys, then this is equivalent to using a 168 bit key (56 X 3). However, if the 3 keys are the same, then this is equivalent to encrypting the plaintext, decrypting the resulting cyphertext back into plaintext, and the encrypting that plaintext back to cyphertext, with a 56 bit key.

    This mode as provided so that hardware encryption devices could be sold, that would both be backwards compatible with DES (by simply having the user use the same 56 bit key 3 times) to ease the transition to a 168 bit key system.

  25. I believe... on What Do You Believe Even If You Can't Prove It? · · Score: 1

    I believe, but I can't prove (to you) that I exist.