There's no mathematical proof, but consider this: a lot of problems have been shown to be NP complete. That is, if they can be solved quickly (in polynomial time), every NP problem can also be solved quickly (in polynomial time).
Some of these problems would make you a very, very rich person if you came up with a way to solve them quickly.
"Please note that you cannot submit a whole site to FreeCache as in http://freecache.org/http://www.rocklobsters.com/ This will not work as only index.html will be cached. You have to prefix every item that you want to have cached seperately."
As I understand it, Freecache refuses to cache small files anyway; I think the minimum was 5Mb.
Yes, it does have to be higher... since by definition it will be orbiting at the speed of rotation of the earth, anything lower than geostationary orbit is going too slowly and will tend to fall back; anything higher is going too quickly and will tend to move away from the earth.
The idea is to have enough mass higher than geostationary orbit that this pull supports the rest of the structure.
At the very least, what the trojan was... then we could all look up how it installs itself, and maybe let the firefox guys know there's a vulnerability.
I imagine they'd also be interested if you could give them a page that's circumventing the popup blocker.
Actually, it's even easier than that. All a terrorist has to do to communicate securely is buy a cheap pre-pay mobile phone. Computer security and encryption are basically meaningless next to real-world methods of avoiding detection.
The whole idea of being able to intercept any form of communication is ludicrous...
OTPs are next to useless compared to public/private key systems... the fact that they're unbreakable means nothing next to the requirement that you must have a secure channel for the key. Even with a quantum-based secure channel... why not just use that to send the message in plaintext, if it's secure?
Whereas public/private key systems allow you to securely send data without any prior agreements beyond those necessary to establish identity. The main disadvantage is that each system might conceivably become breakable at some point in the future...
If that worries you, I would suggest sending a few gigabytes of encrypted data every day, most of it junk. They'll run out of storage space sooner or later:-).
I got incredibly annoyed by their frankly illegal rule changes, including the switch to forcing you to use their download manager... I was one of the ones helping people find ways around it.
Now, though, they've seen the light... you can download by straight URLs if you want. Added to this the fact that you can now subscribe for a month at a time, instead of a full year, and I'm back to being a fan.
Nothing like as good value as they worse in terms of sheer volume, but having to actually listen to stuff before you download it isn't so bad...
Er. That would apply if the crime was comitted against somebody else.
If a crime is comitted against you, you're under no obligation to report it. I don't think you can be an accessory to a crime against yourself, for some odd reason.
You seem to be conveniently sidestepping the real issue by pointing out that the FCC is in charge. Well, yes... but that doesn't make them automatically right.
There's a real problem with that analogy. Cars cannot, given the current state of technology, be safe when used by incompetent people. Computers could be.
Since you seem to like arguing by analogy, I'll do one too. Suppose the most popular brand of cellphones was made in such a way that if you happened to connect up the battery incorrectly, they'd explode and kill anyone in the vicinity.
By your reasoning, that would mean you shouldn't be allowed a cellphone unless you can prove you can connect the battery up right. By my reaoning, it's the cellphone makers who are at fault.
That approach, while fine twenty years ago, isn't at all realistic today. Today PCs are sold as something which is easy to use and useful for everyone. And they should be. The fact that they aren't is the problem of the people who designed/implemented things badly in the first place.
Given that all most people want a PC for is web browsing and email, why the f*ck haven't Microsoft come up with an OS which can do that, and just that, without any security risks at all? This puzzles me somewhat.
Regardless, the problem mostly lies with the laughable state of Windows, not with the users. Sure, they could be more careful -- but on a fresh Windows install you need to be more than careful, you need to be damn good to keep it secure.
That means you can get 56kbits of information over a phone line. QED.
Actually it's not that simple because you can only send 56kbits in one direction due to the data loss involved in analog-to-digital conversion... but the comparison isn't an exact one anyway. Happy now?
Because audio over the phone is like (roughly) 56kbits uncompressed. It's optimised for the frequencies associated with speech, but it's still a lousy way to send audio.
Compare a 56kbit wav to a 56kbit mp3 and you'll hear a huge difference...
That doesn't solve the problem, though, because deciding whether something violates the patent remains a lengthy legal process. The mere existence of the patent is enough to discourage research in the area.
Hmm. Are you a programmer? If so, I'm surprised...
Patents work for medicine, they don't work for software. A software patent is by definition a patent on a process, not a tangible result. The problem comes when you consider the scope of the patent.
Does the patent cover the same process with, say, one step added? Well, it has to, otherwise people could get around it easily. Similarly it has to cover the same process with maybe one or two steps removed, or swapped around. So what you get is a patent which is too broad, preventing people from addressing the same problem in even remotely the same way.
Let's say people had started patenting algorithms since the 1950s. It's almost too horrible to think of. Let's see, what would have made a good patent... binary trees, linked lists, B-trees, heaps, hash tables... oops, all your memory storage possibilities have gone. Better wait 20 years if you want to use a sensible data structure without paying royalties.
Let's see... quicksort, heap sort, merge sort... why not insertion sort and shell sort, too. Now you can't sort things without paying royalties, either.
Line drawing algorithms -- those weren't trivial to develop, either. So now you can't actually draw straight lines efficiently without paying royalties.
I know, how about compiler compilers, LR parsers, and so forth? Then nobody can actually program at all. I suppose that would solve the problem completely.
Codec and encryption patents are only sensible because a) you have to use exactly the same codec or encryption as the other person, so the scope of the patent can be narrow b) it's a really bad idea to be too restrictive about use of your wonderful new codec or ecryption scheme.
Software patents in general are a real menace, and I doubt you'll convince many programmers otherwise...
The way to defend against it is obvious... persuade enough people to do something which looks like it might be using a camcorder, but isn't. After they've argued with a few people they'll stop doing it.
Quantum computing will never be useful in graphics... because each qubit only ever results in a single bit of information. Even with an unthinkably powerful 1000 qubit computer, one computation is going to result in at most 1000 bits of image.
Quantum computing is useful when you have problems which are very hard even for short answers... like the travelling salesperson problem.
You can read the BBC article here... the project was late nineties, early 00's... cost far more than it should have done... and didn't work when finally brought online. It was also financial software from Oracle.
The compsci lot was never involved -- why would they be? It's not even remotely the same job.
The article puts the losses at 9 million GBP but I've heard much higher figures quoted. Strangely enough it was covered in some detail in the Software Engineering lectures at Cambridge:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Unrestricted VBR mp3s for 20c/track, if you like what they've got, it's great.
If you only like music the RIAA tells you is good, don't bother...
It's not a monopoly because there are alternatives to iPods... plenty of them, in fact.
This way may not be great for consumers... but it's entirely possible that if Apple played nice with Microsoft, they'd be crushed.
There's no mathematical proof, but consider this: a lot of problems have been shown to be NP complete. That is, if they can be solved quickly (in polynomial time), every NP problem can also be solved quickly (in polynomial time).
Some of these problems would make you a very, very rich person if you came up with a way to solve them quickly.
Nobody has.
That's enough evidence for every-day use, IMO.
Er... no... from the site:
"Please note that you cannot submit a whole site to FreeCache as in http://freecache.org/http://www.rocklobsters.com/ This will not work as only index.html will be cached. You have to prefix every item that you want to have cached seperately."
As I understand it, Freecache refuses to cache small files anyway; I think the minimum was 5Mb.
Yes, it does have to be higher... since by definition it will be orbiting at the speed of rotation of the earth, anything lower than geostationary orbit is going too slowly and will tend to fall back; anything higher is going too quickly and will tend to move away from the earth.
The idea is to have enough mass higher than geostationary orbit that this pull supports the rest of the structure.
Maybe you could be a bit more specific?
At the very least, what the trojan was... then we could all look up how it installs itself, and maybe let the firefox guys know there's a vulnerability.
I imagine they'd also be interested if you could give them a page that's circumventing the popup blocker.
Actually, it's even easier than that. All a terrorist has to do to communicate securely is buy a cheap pre-pay mobile phone. Computer security and encryption are basically meaningless next to real-world methods of avoiding detection.
The whole idea of being able to intercept any form of communication is ludicrous...
OTPs are next to useless compared to public/private key systems... the fact that they're unbreakable means nothing next to the requirement that you must have a secure channel for the key. Even with a quantum-based secure channel... why not just use that to send the message in plaintext, if it's secure?
Whereas public/private key systems allow you to securely send data without any prior agreements beyond those necessary to establish identity. The main disadvantage is that each system might conceivably become breakable at some point in the future...
If that worries you, I would suggest sending a few gigabytes of encrypted data every day, most of it junk. They'll run out of storage space sooner or later :-).
Yeah, I was there during that period.
I got incredibly annoyed by their frankly illegal rule changes, including the switch to forcing you to use their download manager... I was one of the ones helping people find ways around it.
Now, though, they've seen the light... you can download by straight URLs if you want. Added to this the fact that you can now subscribe for a month at a time, instead of a full year, and I'm back to being a fan.
Nothing like as good value as they worse in terms of sheer volume, but having to actually listen to stuff before you download it isn't so bad...
Since they mention EMusic specifically... here's the EMusic TMBG page. Nine albums for download as high-quality VBR MP3s. Not a DRM in sight...
(To explain my sig... EMusic went through a period of severely sucking. They're back to being a pretty good site IMHO, worth a look).
Er. That would apply if the crime was comitted against somebody else.
If a crime is comitted against you, you're under no obligation to report it. I don't think you can be an accessory to a crime against yourself, for some odd reason.
You seem to be conveniently sidestepping the real issue by pointing out that the FCC is in charge. Well, yes... but that doesn't make them automatically right.
There's a real problem with that analogy. Cars cannot, given the current state of technology, be safe when used by incompetent people. Computers could be.
Since you seem to like arguing by analogy, I'll do one too. Suppose the most popular brand of cellphones was made in such a way that if you happened to connect up the battery incorrectly, they'd explode and kill anyone in the vicinity.
By your reasoning, that would mean you shouldn't be allowed a cellphone unless you can prove you can connect the battery up right. By my reaoning, it's the cellphone makers who are at fault.
That approach, while fine twenty years ago, isn't at all realistic today. Today PCs are sold as something which is easy to use and useful for everyone. And they should be. The fact that they aren't is the problem of the people who designed/implemented things badly in the first place.
Given that all most people want a PC for is web browsing and email, why the f*ck haven't Microsoft come up with an OS which can do that, and just that, without any security risks at all? This puzzles me somewhat.
Regardless, the problem mostly lies with the laughable state of Windows, not with the users. Sure, they could be more careful -- but on a fresh Windows install you need to be more than careful, you need to be damn good to keep it secure.
Better do it. I lost a whole lot of data by using parted then messing with the data on the partitions without rebooting first.
Besides that, the worst I've done is break keyboards by spilling things on them.
Ever heard of a 56kbit modem?
That means you can get 56kbits of information over a phone line. QED.
Actually it's not that simple because you can only send 56kbits in one direction due to the data loss involved in analog-to-digital conversion... but the comparison isn't an exact one anyway. Happy now?
Because audio over the phone is like (roughly) 56kbits uncompressed. It's optimised for the frequencies associated with speech, but it's still a lousy way to send audio.
Compare a 56kbit wav to a 56kbit mp3 and you'll hear a huge difference...
That doesn't solve the problem, though, because deciding whether something violates the patent remains a lengthy legal process. The mere existence of the patent is enough to discourage research in the area.
Hmm. Are you a programmer? If so, I'm surprised...
Patents work for medicine, they don't work for software. A software patent is by definition a patent on a process, not a tangible result. The problem comes when you consider the scope of the patent.
Does the patent cover the same process with, say, one step added? Well, it has to, otherwise people could get around it easily. Similarly it has to cover the same process with maybe one or two steps removed, or swapped around. So what you get is a patent which is too broad, preventing people from addressing the same problem in even remotely the same way.
Let's say people had started patenting algorithms since the 1950s. It's almost too horrible to think of. Let's see, what would have made a good patent... binary trees, linked lists, B-trees, heaps, hash tables... oops, all your memory storage possibilities have gone. Better wait 20 years if you want to use a sensible data structure without paying royalties.
Let's see... quicksort, heap sort, merge sort... why not insertion sort and shell sort, too. Now you can't sort things without paying royalties, either.
Line drawing algorithms -- those weren't trivial to develop, either. So now you can't actually draw straight lines efficiently without paying royalties.
I know, how about compiler compilers, LR parsers, and so forth? Then nobody can actually program at all. I suppose that would solve the problem completely.
Codec and encryption patents are only sensible because a) you have to use exactly the same codec or encryption as the other person, so the scope of the patent can be narrow b) it's a really bad idea to be too restrictive about use of your wonderful new codec or ecryption scheme.
Software patents in general are a real menace, and I doubt you'll convince many programmers otherwise...
The way to defend against it is obvious... persuade enough people to do something which looks like it might be using a camcorder, but isn't. After they've argued with a few people they'll stop doing it.
Probably.
Quantum computing will never be useful in graphics... because each qubit only ever results in a single bit of information. Even with an unthinkably powerful 1000 qubit computer, one computation is going to result in at most 1000 bits of image.
Quantum computing is useful when you have problems which are very hard even for short answers... like the travelling salesperson problem.
That's exactly what I thought, in fact...
You can read the BBC article here... the project was late nineties, early 00's... cost far more than it should have done... and didn't work when finally brought online. It was also financial software from Oracle.
The compsci lot was never involved -- why would they be? It's not even remotely the same job.
The article puts the losses at 9 million GBP but I've heard much higher figures quoted. Strangely enough it was covered in some detail in the Software Engineering lectures at Cambridge :-)
It's not an eclipse because the sun isn't blocked out completely. Whereas transit is perfectly sensible, since venus appears to move across the sun...
It seems like features disappear and nothing is added. I just finished compiling KDE, it's time I gave it another try...
This saddens me, I've been a Gnome fan for a long time... but the whole .Xmodmap fiasco has me fairly annoyed right now.