I guess I don't understand why companies putting a lot of money into something will automatically translate into the public plunking down money and buying it. Iridium sunk TONS of money into satelite based cell phones, but yet they went bankrupt. Sony sunk a ton of cash into betamax, but it tanked.
I also don't buy into the content availability argument. It's just not true that "if you make it available, people will buy it". That's a terrible terrible mistake for any company to assume. Minidiscs had quite a bit of content available, but they sunk. 8-track tapes had an enormous amount of content, but when was the last time you saw one of those?
The majority of people will only adopt a new technology if they see a real benefit from it over the old technology, or if there's a minimal price difference. The former isn't really true in my estimation, and the latter isn't going to happen for years to come.
I guess I don't understand your criticism and how it relates to the article. It seems to me that the article is talking about the same critcisms I've heard about ST that've existed for years. That is namely that ST doesn't have testable predictions, and isn't falsifiable. I don't know anything about ST beyond the simple descriptions I've read (vibrating strings, extra dimensions, etc), buy I fail to see how a deeper understanding of ST would address these criticisms. The criticisms are about whether ST is even science, not taking on ST directly.
Having no predictions is fine, maybe it still needs work and maybe someone will be smart enough to coax some testable predictions from it. But the effect of this is too many resources are devoted to something that's extremely speculative. The articles you linked to seem to only be saying "listen, ignore all the problems of whether it's science or not, it's the best thing we've got". I guess my response to that is, is it better than nothing? That is, in the abscence of ST would work be directed to finding other, better theories rather than concentrating on ST, which from what I've heard is so difficult that few people really even understand it.
I think it's very premature to say String Theory will never make any predictions.
Well, it's been more than 20 years, and still no testable predictions. When will ST be mature and it's clear it's time to throw in the towel and abandon ST? It seems to me if ST is so hard that we haven't made any headway to even theorize a way to prove/disprove it in 20+ years time, it's really time to treat it like a red herring and find a theory that's easier for us humans to deal with. This is really the main point of the article. It kind of reminds me of alchemy. 400 years ago there were a lot of people working on turning lead into gold, and no one was making any progress. Perhaps it's best to pursue other interests because it's just too hard. Actually in many ways it's worse than alchemy, since alchemists actually learned things about chemistry. I've yet to hear anything that ST has produced of scientific value. Long after alchemy was abandoned we discovered atomic theory, and the structure of the atom. In 1980 someone actually succeeded in turning lead into gold through atomic decay, though it was microscopic quantities and I believe the radioactive gold turned back into lead.
I suppose at some point someone will come up with a better way to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity, and ST will go the way of luminiferous aether
Huh. I had assumed the unreliability came from increased impurities in the plutonium do to natural decay and spontaneus fision, not radiation affecting the surrounding electronics, explosives, tamper, etc.
OTA TV broadcasts, cable and satellite have decided that SD is not good enough. WM9 and Quicktime have decided that SD is not good enough.
But have consumers decided that SDTV isn't good enough? I don't see many people buying HDTVs. There's some, but really SDTV is fine for the price HDTVs are going for. DVD is even better resolution than SDTV, so people are really settling for less quality than DVD can offer. There's so much HD content available already that eventually, >50% of people will buy an HDTV.
It hasn't happened yet, and really I don't see many average consumers clamoring for HDTV. Hell, I know a lot of people that put up with crappy reception on normal old analog sets that don't even bother to buy a $20 antenna. Believe it or not people aren't as quality conscious as you are. It's hard enough to get people to realize that pan-and-scan movies lose a lot from letterboxed movies. Expecting them to care about HDTV over SDTV when they don't care about pan-and-scan is a huge leap.
I would agree if you're talking about posting the video online while still at camp. But it's the parents responsibility to control the little terrors at home, and that's the FAR more likely place where the posting to MySpace will happen.
Right now I'm sure there's a lot of parents that would never suspect their perfect little terror would do such a thing. But I think that kind of thing will change when the first a million dollar lawsuit is upheld against a negligent parent whose kid posted a harassing video/picture of another kid online. Basically if you send your kid away with a video or still camera it's your responsibility as a parent to make sure the kid doesn't use it to harass some other kid. The only difference now is that the internet multiplies the potential power of one kids harassment by a few million.
Camps trying to control this kind of thing through legal means and trademark will never work.
That's certainly a solution, but there's a lot of small businesses that're using Exchange or similar on-site email. IMAP/pop/SMTP doesn't provide the same functionality as Exchange. Even if it did, transitioning isn't free and certainly wouldn't be warranted just to solve the non-problem of employees changing the from: header on their home computer.
So in other words, summer camps don't want parents to look at some kids account of his camp experience on myspace about making out with a girl, and then freaking out that it's all one big den of sexual experimentation.
The whole thing sounds ridiculous to me. Trademarking your camp name, and then using that to try to control speech sounds just wrong to me. If parents are really getting the wrong idea about a camp by reading what a 12 year old has to say about it on myspace, the problem is in the parents listening to a 12 year old on myspace, not the 12 year old being a 12 year old.
I don't happen to agree with the analyst that the format war won't be a nightmare. But maybe I'm wrong.
So, the best test I can come up with is asking early adopters if they plan on buying either player, or if a dual format player if it were available. Slashdot tends to have a lot of early adopters, so how about it? Is anyone chomping at the bit for these things, or will the format war and the "good enough" state of current DVDs relegate this product to the likes of Laserdisc and Sony Minidisc?
Does anyone know what these calculations are trying to determine? In essence, what's the central problem to determining the reliability of old nuclear weapons? I would have thought they're doing simulations of detonation of these aged weapons, but the article talks about using molybdenum, which isn't a fissile material.
Why are employees sending work emails from a home account? Offer them a HTTPS webmail server to deal with those cases.
There's plenty of small businesses that can't afford a HTTPS webmail server, or even an authenticated SMTP server. It's not that uncommon for these businesses to have people working from home, so there's a legitimate need to have the from: address be the business address, even though the email wasn't sent from the business, or one of the businesses computers.
Is that "forgery"? Frankly I don't think so, but maybe the hardass who wrote the original "automatic death sentence" post thinks it is.
You sound like you're making some very large assumptions about what's actually triggering the spam filters at hotmail. What makes you think it's your domain, and not the crappy MTA you're using? Spammers often use non-standard MTAs that anti-spam programs have learned to identify through header analysis. Have you tested sending mail from a standard mailer like sendmail or postfix to a hotmail account? You obviously need to confirm what's actually causing hotmail to tag your mail as spam and stop making assumptions.
The article thinks it's a glowing thing because it costs >$100.... without any comparisons to others-- even the higher priced ones.
Maybe because the people the device is aimed at have no interest in something that costs $5000 and up. Why compare this thing to something that you'll never use? When I'm looking for an economy car I don't want comparisons to a $50,000 bus. The comparisons should be toward the tool that people who might buy this thing currently use. That's either nothing (guessing the problem is the microwave) or really crappy tools like looking at the S/N ratio output from a wi-fi card. It would appear that this is the first tool in it's class, so there's nothing to compare it to. Asking for comparisons to a tool in a completely different class really misses the point. That's my point-- citing it on price rather than functionality. It has basal functionality-- and apparently no more.
I read the article too, and I didn't see "it's only $100!!!" written 50 times in a row. They gave you the basics of what it could do, that is give a fourier transform of the signal levels, computer averages, monitor for a set amount of time, display the data with different time-domain graphs, etc. Try to understand that it's not going to solve the same problems that your $5000+ analyzer is going to do, it's designed to solve different problems much cheaper. It's like you're critisizing a bicycle for not being a porche. For people that can't afford a porsche, the invention of a bicycle is far better than walking long distances.
Did you really miss the point of the original poster? The comparisons to $5000 devices are irrelevent, since the people buying this thing can't possibly afford a $5000 device. What you should be comparing too is having no spectrum analyzer at all. If you go into some small business and notice a lot of interferrence on channel 1, move them to channel 6. If turn on the old microwave and see a huge amount of noise across the spectrum, tell them to buy a new microwave that generates less interferrence.
Doing that with no equipment other than the old "run the laptop and see if you get packet loss, or look at the s/n ratio" is the real comparison here. This tool would appear to completely beat the pants off that kind of tool, especially for only $100. Your reply reminds me of the people who laughed at the micro-computers because they couldn't solve the problems that mainframes were handling. Try to remove yourself from the problems that mega-corp-X has at industrial-site-X with the multiple node wi-fi connected network, and insert small organization Y that's getting strange wi-fi connectivity problems on their single AP network.
Do you really think anyone is dumb enough to think that this $100 device is going to do everything a $5000 device does? You seem to think there's some big deception going on here. I think it's pretty obvious that this thing is aimed at the low end of the market of people who just want to see where interference is coming from rather than operating totally blind.
I know that a $50,000 Cessna isn't going to be the same as a 100 million dollar 747, and I'm not fooled into thinking this when someone talks about how much cheaper the Cessna is. The whole point of emphasizing the price is that there's finally a tool that's affordable that can tell you what's going on in the 2.4ghz spectrum.
Another poster has already given a quite good answer as to address your criticism, but I'll give a simpler one. Take my same example, but this time encode it with an 8bit ascii code. b is buy, s is sell. You go through the same exercise and throw away all the nonsense like 0,&,^,c (because the attacker knows it's all nonsense, and knows even that it's a buy or sell, and also the encoding used) and you'll wind up with exactly two possible answers, b or s. Which one is it?
The point is that the set of possible answers you're left with when you eliminate what you know to be gibberish (in this example a b or s) are all contained in the set of answers you'll get when brute forcing through the keyspace. In other words, all answers you can imagine that make sense are in your set of possible messages. Thus no information at all can be revealed through trying to brute force a one-time-pad.
Is there any possible way to "break" a one time pad other than brute force with a lot of luck?
It's actually impossible to break a one time pade with brute force and an infinite amount of luck. A trivial example of a one time pad would be sending someone a single bit. Let's say you want to talk to your stock broker about buying or selling a pre-arranged amount of a certain stock. A plaintext of 1 means buy, 0 means sell. You randomly pick a 1 or a 0 by a coin toss (this is the pad). You then send the pad to your stock broker via some secure channel, and tell him to xor the cryptotext you send him with the pad. Decision time comes, and let's say you decide to buy the stock. You xor the 1 with your one-time-pad (let's say 0), and send off the result of 1 to the broker. The broker does an xor of 1 (the cryptotext) and 0 (the pad) and obtains 1, which means buy.
Now let's say there's an attacker that thinks they can brute force the key. He doesn't know the pad, so he uses brute force and tries both possible keys, 1 and 0. On doing this he gets both a 1 and a 0, which means buy and sell. Which key was the right one? It's impossible to know. This is a simple result, but it illustrates how you can send a single bit perfectly securely. Once you can send one bit securely just repeat the procedure for all the other bits you wish to send.
This also illustrates why OTP's are only secure if you use them once. Let's say you use the same pad more than one time, and the attacker is monitoring if the transaction was actually buy or sell after your broker buys or sells the stock (assume the information is useless once you buy/sell). From this the attacker could determine your pad quite easily, and decrypt all future communications to your broker. If you had chosen a new pad randomly each time then analysis of what each pad was after-the-fact would be useless, since past pads have no impact on future pads.
I guess I wouldn't call that an accident. Michaelson-Morley expected to confirm the existance of the aether, but calling the experiment an accident isn't really accurate. It was certainly unexpected, but they definitely were trying to measure the earths movement through the aether.
Based on Canada's census info (so this isn't a random sample, this is literally reporting for every working adult in Canada), men in nursing tend to make more money, even though it's a female dominated field.
Raw statistics prove nothing. How do we know that women don't tend to take more leaves of abscence to raise children? Maybe men tend to be more apt to want to apply for positions of authority. If it's choice and preference that causes men to make more money in nursing (on average) then where's the problem? Your friends explanation is interesting, but really proves nothing.
180 entries and no women? How sad is that?
I don't think it's sad. You presume that this is an indicator of inequality and descrimination. I think it's more an indicator of the inherent gender differences. Women tend to like jobs where there's more people contact. Programming is mostly a solitary career without people contact. What's sad is true discrimination and bias.
Many men don't go into nursing because they're afraid it will make them seem less manly. Many women don't go into tech because they're afraid they'll be in a socially/emotionally desolate nerdspace. If things can be done to reduce the social anxiety that is keeping people away from jobs they'd otherwise be highly capable of doing, then that's a good thing.
And again, why does everthing have to be equal? I'm talking about choice and opportunity, not making the world the same for everyone. You talk about anxiety like it's a social ill. If men don't want to go into nursing because of some belief they have, that's their choice. The same can be said of women going into programming. Equal doesn't mean everyone being the same.
Simple fact: there are vastly more women and minorities in the workplace now than there were before affirmative action and forced equal access to education. It works. It's not flawless, and it's not a cure-all, but it has produced results.
Correlation never implies causation. You have absolutely no evidence that affirmative action has anything to do with more women and minorities in the workplace. The far more likely explanation is that the culture has changed (more women want to work) and there's just more minorities.
Business is a mean world. The people he "crushed" knew that, or they wouldn't be in the business world. Bill Gates is certainly a fierce competitor, and definitely abused his monopoly power. But let's reserve the venom for people who've actually done criminal acts like the Enron boys, or maybe even the pharmeceutical companies who've endangered peoples lives, or wanted to fight 3rd world countries from copying AIDS drugs. Or we could talk about companies like United Fruit who sucessfully controlled entire countries as banna republics. Or how about oil company execs who've polluted untold amounts of land while drilling and pumping for oil?
No, I think you really need some perspective on the true evil that a company can do before you start talking about how Bill Gates has some deserved bad reputation.
Why does everything have to be balanced? Obviously there shouldn't be extra barriers for one sex over the other, but I have a problem with the attitude that all professions need an equal amount of each sex. Do men that go into nursing get a preference because there's more women than men? (An honest question). There seems to be this hypothesis that bias can be eliminated by giving the group that's not equally represented a preference. But we seem to ignore the idea that the hypothesis has never really been shown to be true. I guess I believe in equal opportunities and equal treatment, but I don't believe in more than equal.
I've never been a big believer that bias can be cured by more bias. Affirmative action only leads to people thinking that a miss-represented group of people were only hired because of affirmative action. That kind of defeats the whole purpose. The article brings up issues like women not having same-sex role models. What I think the problem is that we feel the need to have to have a same sex role model. Why can't a Finnish woman look at Linus Torvalds as a role model? A woman from Finland probbably has more in common with him than me, a man born and raised in the US. If you ask me, that's the root of sexism. Trying to fix it with some patchwork of giving a few extra slots to women really won't do much of anything except maybe make some people at Gnome feel a bit better about themselves. If they want to do it, great, but don't try to tell me they're helping solve the problem, because they ain't.
I remember Dragons Lair, and I also remember it wasn't very fun. The attraction was purely eye-candy. That was pretty cool back in 1983 when Pac-Man and Asteroids were king. I'm sure the game will have some niche appeal, but try to understand that times have changed. Eye candy games are a dime a dozen these days and people actually demand playability. Name me a successfull game released in the last 5 years that had poor playability, but excellent eye-candy.
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I guess I don't understand why companies putting a lot of money into something will automatically translate into the public plunking down money and buying it. Iridium sunk TONS of money into satelite based cell phones, but yet they went bankrupt. Sony sunk a ton of cash into betamax, but it tanked.
I also don't buy into the content availability argument. It's just not true that "if you make it available, people will buy it". That's a terrible terrible mistake for any company to assume. Minidiscs had quite a bit of content available, but they sunk. 8-track tapes had an enormous amount of content, but when was the last time you saw one of those?
The majority of people will only adopt a new technology if they see a real benefit from it over the old technology, or if there's a minimal price difference. The former isn't really true in my estimation, and the latter isn't going to happen for years to come.
I guess I don't understand your criticism and how it relates to the article. It seems to me that the article is talking about the same critcisms I've heard about ST that've existed for years. That is namely that ST doesn't have testable predictions, and isn't falsifiable. I don't know anything about ST beyond the simple descriptions I've read (vibrating strings, extra dimensions, etc), buy I fail to see how a deeper understanding of ST would address these criticisms. The criticisms are about whether ST is even science, not taking on ST directly.
Having no predictions is fine, maybe it still needs work and maybe someone will be smart enough to coax some testable predictions from it. But the effect of this is too many resources are devoted to something that's extremely speculative. The articles you linked to seem to only be saying "listen, ignore all the problems of whether it's science or not, it's the best thing we've got". I guess my response to that is, is it better than nothing? That is, in the abscence of ST would work be directed to finding other, better theories rather than concentrating on ST, which from what I've heard is so difficult that few people really even understand it.
I think it's very premature to say String Theory will never make any predictions.
Well, it's been more than 20 years, and still no testable predictions. When will ST be mature and it's clear it's time to throw in the towel and abandon ST? It seems to me if ST is so hard that we haven't made any headway to even theorize a way to prove/disprove it in 20+ years time, it's really time to treat it like a red herring and find a theory that's easier for us humans to deal with. This is really the main point of the article. It kind of reminds me of alchemy. 400 years ago there were a lot of people working on turning lead into gold, and no one was making any progress. Perhaps it's best to pursue other interests because it's just too hard. Actually in many ways it's worse than alchemy, since alchemists actually learned things about chemistry. I've yet to hear anything that ST has produced of scientific value. Long after alchemy was abandoned we discovered atomic theory, and the structure of the atom. In 1980 someone actually succeeded in turning lead into gold through atomic decay, though it was microscopic quantities and I believe the radioactive gold turned back into lead.
I suppose at some point someone will come up with a better way to unite quantum mechanics and general relativity, and ST will go the way of luminiferous aether
Huh. I had assumed the unreliability came from increased impurities in the plutonium do to natural decay and spontaneus fision, not radiation affecting the surrounding electronics, explosives, tamper, etc.
So I'd say Chomping clearly wins, though Champing would certainly be considered correct english.
OTA TV broadcasts, cable and satellite have decided that SD is not good enough. WM9 and Quicktime have decided that SD is not good enough.
But have consumers decided that SDTV isn't good enough? I don't see many people buying HDTVs. There's some, but really SDTV is fine for the price HDTVs are going for. DVD is even better resolution than SDTV, so people are really settling for less quality than DVD can offer.
There's so much HD content available already that eventually, >50% of people will buy an HDTV.
It hasn't happened yet, and really I don't see many average consumers clamoring for HDTV. Hell, I know a lot of people that put up with crappy reception on normal old analog sets that don't even bother to buy a $20 antenna. Believe it or not people aren't as quality conscious as you are. It's hard enough to get people to realize that pan-and-scan movies lose a lot from letterboxed movies. Expecting them to care about HDTV over SDTV when they don't care about pan-and-scan is a huge leap.
I would agree if you're talking about posting the video online while still at camp. But it's the parents responsibility to control the little terrors at home, and that's the FAR more likely place where the posting to MySpace will happen.
Right now I'm sure there's a lot of parents that would never suspect their perfect little terror would do such a thing. But I think that kind of thing will change when the first a million dollar lawsuit is upheld against a negligent parent whose kid posted a harassing video/picture of another kid online. Basically if you send your kid away with a video or still camera it's your responsibility as a parent to make sure the kid doesn't use it to harass some other kid. The only difference now is that the internet multiplies the potential power of one kids harassment by a few million.
Camps trying to control this kind of thing through legal means and trademark will never work.
That's certainly a solution, but there's a lot of small businesses that're using Exchange or similar on-site email. IMAP/pop/SMTP doesn't provide the same functionality as Exchange. Even if it did, transitioning isn't free and certainly wouldn't be warranted just to solve the non-problem of employees changing the from: header on their home computer.
So in other words, summer camps don't want parents to look at some kids account of his camp experience on myspace about making out with a girl, and then freaking out that it's all one big den of sexual experimentation.
The whole thing sounds ridiculous to me. Trademarking your camp name, and then using that to try to control speech sounds just wrong to me. If parents are really getting the wrong idea about a camp by reading what a 12 year old has to say about it on myspace, the problem is in the parents listening to a 12 year old on myspace, not the 12 year old being a 12 year old.
I don't happen to agree with the analyst that the format war won't be a nightmare. But maybe I'm wrong.
So, the best test I can come up with is asking early adopters if they plan on buying either player, or if a dual format player if it were available. Slashdot tends to have a lot of early adopters, so how about it? Is anyone chomping at the bit for these things, or will the format war and the "good enough" state of current DVDs relegate this product to the likes of Laserdisc and Sony Minidisc?
Does anyone know what these calculations are trying to determine? In essence, what's the central problem to determining the reliability of old nuclear weapons? I would have thought they're doing simulations of detonation of these aged weapons, but the article talks about using molybdenum, which isn't a fissile material.
Why are employees sending work emails from a home account? Offer them a HTTPS webmail server to deal with those cases.
There's plenty of small businesses that can't afford a HTTPS webmail server, or even an authenticated SMTP server. It's not that uncommon for these businesses to have people working from home, so there's a legitimate need to have the from: address be the business address, even though the email wasn't sent from the business, or one of the businesses computers.
Is that "forgery"? Frankly I don't think so, but maybe the hardass who wrote the original "automatic death sentence" post thinks it is.
You sound like you're making some very large assumptions about what's actually triggering the spam filters at hotmail. What makes you think it's your domain, and not the crappy MTA you're using? Spammers often use non-standard MTAs that anti-spam programs have learned to identify through header analysis. Have you tested sending mail from a standard mailer like sendmail or postfix to a hotmail account? You obviously need to confirm what's actually causing hotmail to tag your mail as spam and stop making assumptions.
The article thinks it's a glowing thing because it costs >$100.... without any comparisons to others-- even the higher priced ones.
Maybe because the people the device is aimed at have no interest in something that costs $5000 and up. Why compare this thing to something that you'll never use? When I'm looking for an economy car I don't want comparisons to a $50,000 bus. The comparisons should be toward the tool that people who might buy this thing currently use. That's either nothing (guessing the problem is the microwave) or really crappy tools like looking at the S/N ratio output from a wi-fi card. It would appear that this is the first tool in it's class, so there's nothing to compare it to. Asking for comparisons to a tool in a completely different class really misses the point.
That's my point-- citing it on price rather than functionality. It has basal functionality-- and apparently no more.
I read the article too, and I didn't see "it's only $100!!!" written 50 times in a row. They gave you the basics of what it could do, that is give a fourier transform of the signal levels, computer averages, monitor for a set amount of time, display the data with different time-domain graphs, etc. Try to understand that it's not going to solve the same problems that your $5000+ analyzer is going to do, it's designed to solve different problems much cheaper. It's like you're critisizing a bicycle for not being a porche. For people that can't afford a porsche, the invention of a bicycle is far better than walking long distances.
Did you really miss the point of the original poster? The comparisons to $5000 devices are irrelevent, since the people buying this thing can't possibly afford a $5000 device. What you should be comparing too is having no spectrum analyzer at all. If you go into some small business and notice a lot of interferrence on channel 1, move them to channel 6. If turn on the old microwave and see a huge amount of noise across the spectrum, tell them to buy a new microwave that generates less interferrence.
Doing that with no equipment other than the old "run the laptop and see if you get packet loss, or look at the s/n ratio" is the real comparison here. This tool would appear to completely beat the pants off that kind of tool, especially for only $100. Your reply reminds me of the people who laughed at the micro-computers because they couldn't solve the problems that mainframes were handling. Try to remove yourself from the problems that mega-corp-X has at industrial-site-X with the multiple node wi-fi connected network, and insert small organization Y that's getting strange wi-fi connectivity problems on their single AP network.
Do you really think anyone is dumb enough to think that this $100 device is going to do everything a $5000 device does? You seem to think there's some big deception going on here. I think it's pretty obvious that this thing is aimed at the low end of the market of people who just want to see where interference is coming from rather than operating totally blind.
I know that a $50,000 Cessna isn't going to be the same as a 100 million dollar 747, and I'm not fooled into thinking this when someone talks about how much cheaper the Cessna is. The whole point of emphasizing the price is that there's finally a tool that's affordable that can tell you what's going on in the 2.4ghz spectrum.
Another poster has already given a quite good answer as to address your criticism, but I'll give a simpler one. Take my same example, but this time encode it with an 8bit ascii code. b is buy, s is sell. You go through the same exercise and throw away all the nonsense like 0,&,^,c (because the attacker knows it's all nonsense, and knows even that it's a buy or sell, and also the encoding used) and you'll wind up with exactly two possible answers, b or s. Which one is it?
The point is that the set of possible answers you're left with when you eliminate what you know to be gibberish (in this example a b or s) are all contained in the set of answers you'll get when brute forcing through the keyspace. In other words, all answers you can imagine that make sense are in your set of possible messages. Thus no information at all can be revealed through trying to brute force a one-time-pad.
Is there any possible way to "break" a one time pad other than brute force with a lot of luck?
It's actually impossible to break a one time pade with brute force and an infinite amount of luck. A trivial example of a one time pad would be sending someone a single bit. Let's say you want to talk to your stock broker about buying or selling a pre-arranged amount of a certain stock. A plaintext of 1 means buy, 0 means sell. You randomly pick a 1 or a 0 by a coin toss (this is the pad). You then send the pad to your stock broker via some secure channel, and tell him to xor the cryptotext you send him with the pad. Decision time comes, and let's say you decide to buy the stock. You xor the 1 with your one-time-pad (let's say 0), and send off the result of 1 to the broker. The broker does an xor of 1 (the cryptotext) and 0 (the pad) and obtains 1, which means buy.
Now let's say there's an attacker that thinks they can brute force the key. He doesn't know the pad, so he uses brute force and tries both possible keys, 1 and 0. On doing this he gets both a 1 and a 0, which means buy and sell. Which key was the right one? It's impossible to know. This is a simple result, but it illustrates how you can send a single bit perfectly securely. Once you can send one bit securely just repeat the procedure for all the other bits you wish to send.
This also illustrates why OTP's are only secure if you use them once. Let's say you use the same pad more than one time, and the attacker is monitoring if the transaction was actually buy or sell after your broker buys or sells the stock (assume the information is useless once you buy/sell). From this the attacker could determine your pad quite easily, and decrypt all future communications to your broker. If you had chosen a new pad randomly each time then analysis of what each pad was after-the-fact would be useless, since past pads have no impact on future pads.
I guess I wouldn't call that an accident. Michaelson-Morley expected to confirm the existance of the aether, but calling the experiment an accident isn't really accurate. It was certainly unexpected, but they definitely were trying to measure the earths movement through the aether.
Based on Canada's census info (so this isn't a random sample, this is literally reporting for every working adult in Canada), men in nursing tend to make more money, even though it's a female dominated field.
Raw statistics prove nothing. How do we know that women don't tend to take more leaves of abscence to raise children? Maybe men tend to be more apt to want to apply for positions of authority. If it's choice and preference that causes men to make more money in nursing (on average) then where's the problem? Your friends explanation is interesting, but really proves nothing.
180 entries and no women? How sad is that?
I don't think it's sad. You presume that this is an indicator of inequality and descrimination. I think it's more an indicator of the inherent gender differences. Women tend to like jobs where there's more people contact. Programming is mostly a solitary career without people contact. What's sad is true discrimination and bias.
Many men don't go into nursing because they're afraid it will make them seem less manly. Many women don't go into tech because they're afraid they'll be in a socially/emotionally desolate nerdspace. If things can be done to reduce the social anxiety that is keeping people away from jobs they'd otherwise be highly capable of doing, then that's a good thing.
And again, why does everthing have to be equal? I'm talking about choice and opportunity, not making the world the same for everyone. You talk about anxiety like it's a social ill. If men don't want to go into nursing because of some belief they have, that's their choice. The same can be said of women going into programming. Equal doesn't mean everyone being the same.
Simple fact: there are vastly more women and minorities in the workplace now than there were before affirmative action and forced equal access to education. It works. It's not flawless, and it's not a cure-all, but it has produced results.
Correlation never implies causation. You have absolutely no evidence that affirmative action has anything to do with more women and minorities in the workplace. The far more likely explanation is that the culture has changed (more women want to work) and there's just more minorities.
Business is a mean world. The people he "crushed" knew that, or they wouldn't be in the business world. Bill Gates is certainly a fierce competitor, and definitely abused his monopoly power. But let's reserve the venom for people who've actually done criminal acts like the Enron boys, or maybe even the pharmeceutical companies who've endangered peoples lives, or wanted to fight 3rd world countries from copying AIDS drugs. Or we could talk about companies like United Fruit who sucessfully controlled entire countries as banna republics. Or how about oil company execs who've polluted untold amounts of land while drilling and pumping for oil?
No, I think you really need some perspective on the true evil that a company can do before you start talking about how Bill Gates has some deserved bad reputation.
Why does everything have to be balanced? Obviously there shouldn't be extra barriers for one sex over the other, but I have a problem with the attitude that all professions need an equal amount of each sex. Do men that go into nursing get a preference because there's more women than men? (An honest question). There seems to be this hypothesis that bias can be eliminated by giving the group that's not equally represented a preference. But we seem to ignore the idea that the hypothesis has never really been shown to be true. I guess I believe in equal opportunities and equal treatment, but I don't believe in more than equal.
I've never been a big believer that bias can be cured by more bias. Affirmative action only leads to people thinking that a miss-represented group of people were only hired because of affirmative action. That kind of defeats the whole purpose. The article brings up issues like women not having same-sex role models. What I think the problem is that we feel the need to have to have a same sex role model. Why can't a Finnish woman look at Linus Torvalds as a role model? A woman from Finland probbably has more in common with him than me, a man born and raised in the US. If you ask me, that's the root of sexism. Trying to fix it with some patchwork of giving a few extra slots to women really won't do much of anything except maybe make some people at Gnome feel a bit better about themselves. If they want to do it, great, but don't try to tell me they're helping solve the problem, because they ain't.
I remember Dragons Lair, and I also remember it wasn't very fun. The attraction was purely eye-candy. That was pretty cool back in 1983 when Pac-Man and Asteroids were king. I'm sure the game will have some niche appeal, but try to understand that times have changed. Eye candy games are a dime a dozen these days and people actually demand playability. Name me a successfull game released in the last 5 years that had poor playability, but excellent eye-candy.